WALKING five minutes up the hill from the bottom of Ta K’Thwee Duh, which is built on a steep incline, past the school hall where the Karen flag flutters in the stiff breeze, and past women and children laden with woven bamboo baskets filled to the brim with firewood and foraged forest products slowly lumbering back home, one eventually comes upon the main road. The villagers referred to it as the kleh doh (big road) or the kah kleh (car road)—despite the fact that vehicles larger than a motorbike were only able to traverse this “car road” in the dry season, some five months of each year. This road, built by the Karen National Union, wended its way along the very top of the Bu Thoe ridge that demarcates the Salween and the Yunzalin River basins as they run side by side along this stretch. A three-meter-wide strip of stamped-down earth was carved out of this mountaintop by bulldozers and earthmovers some five years earlier and has to be harrowed out anew after each monsoon season, due to erosion. To the north, this ever-shifting dirt road drew the village into connection with a slightly larger village and a Karen National Liberation Army base and connected to a warren of motorbike trails leading to the rest of the district. Traveling south, it soon bifurcated, connecting the village to a tiny market town on the banks of the Salween in the east and to the regional center to the west.

The original main objective for building this road was tactical: to string together the various KNLA bases along the ridge and facilitate their resupply. This was the first, and to date only, large infrastructure project in the area, and, especially among the elders, it continued to generate a considerable amount of anxiety. The project began generating more than its fair share of contentions even before a single meter of earth had been cleared and stamped down. When the villagers were first informed about the construction plan, many held grave concerns upon learning that the road was projected to cut right through their kaw. The kaw is the village land or realm, often translated as their “ancestral” or “customary territories” (see map 1 in the introduction).

People realized that the construction threatened to segment their hku (swidden patches), to which the rights to cultivate are inherited. It was also projected to carve up an area that had been heavily planted with cardamom, a popular cash crop. Thus, the villagers grew increasingly anxious that the road might lead to conflicts over the control of land. One way they hoped to alleviate this was for the road constructors, contracted and led by the KNU, to buy them a large pig for the whole village to share together. They hoped a collective feast might dissipate some of the growing anxieties. It is not clear who actually forwarded this request to the road foreman, as the ritual leader, the hee hkoh htee, declined all such duties and neither he nor the headman of the village were vested in the necessary de facto political power to take such an action. Either way, the villagers were rather curtly informed by the road foreman that there were no funds for such frivolous things. Work on the road would progress as planned.

As this disquiet was building, and as road constructions began in earnest farther south, some of the villagers from Ta K’Thwee Duh went to labor on the road. Here they learned that it was projected to cut straight through a mountain in their kaw named Ta Bu Kyoh. This mountain, 1,300 meters above sea level, was known to be the seat of, or perhaps is, Naw Ghoo Hsaw: the kaw k’sah, “the owner of the earth” or “owner of the -kaw.” As such, this mountain was ritually and politically central to day-to-day life. Any disturbance of this area would surely illicit the wrath of the kaw k’sah, which could potentially be catastrophic—not only to the humans but also to all animals, plants, lands, and waters under her dominion. While people fretted greatly about what would happen, they lacked an apparent village leader who could convey their concerns to the relevant authorities in the KNU.

This incident came to a head when a young woman, Naw Ghaw, dreamt that a spring at the top of Ta Bu Kyoh overflowed, inundating the whole area. When she recalled this dream to her fellow villagers, they interpreted it as a terrible and foreboding omen. Following this, her father, Hpu Hkee, possessed with an idiosyncratically quavering yet booming voice, marched over to the road constructors to explain that the road could not be built there. But, once again, he was curtly told that it was too costly to redirect the road. With neither the authority nor the power to demand that the KNU desist, and with few other recourses left open to them, Hpu Hkee and several other elders turned to the kaw k’sah. They ascended Ta Bu Kyoh, as their ancestors had done before them, and entreated Naw Ghoo Hsaw that, should she agree that a road run through there, to let nothing bad happen. But, if she did not agree, then to let terrible misfortune befall all those who conspire to build this road through “her place.” Following on from this, they returned home and left it at that. “Nothing more could be done,” they told their fellow villagers; “we have put it in the hands of the kaw k’sah.” Many of them then returned to labor on the road as it slowly made its way north toward them.

Some unspecified time later, the foreman, who had repeatedly ignored the villagers’ requests, suddenly and mysteriously fell ill. Shortly afterward, he keeled over and died. Following these events, his replacement came to pay a personal visit to the village to hear their grievances; consequently, the road was redirected around Ta Bu Kyoh (see figure 4). Moreover, as each teller of this tale was eager to stress, the new foreman even asked the villagers what other demands they had. The elders in the villages told him that they also needed a pig to share with the village, but it need not be so large. As long as every villager could take one bite, it would suffice. A week later, they received a huge barrow that was more than ample to feed every single person in the village. A taut triumphant smile slowly crept over Hpu Hkee’s deeply wrinkled face each time he told this part. While there were numerous variations on this story, each narrator came to the same conclusion: It was through the intervention of the kaw k’sah that they had finally succeeded in their demands. The mountain had intervened in the realm of human life.

The furor elicited by the construction of the road along the Bu Thoe ridge brings several issues of possession and ownership, addressed in the previous chapter, into sharper relief. In this chapter, I further unpack these concepts and the relationship between them. I begin by digging into Indigenous notions of kaw and hku and explore why the villagers were so afraid that they would be segmented by the road. This exploration leads away from notions of common property, pushing me to instead consider alternative and alternating modes of ownership. I show that while people were regularly spoken of as the k’sah, or “owner,” of a certain patch of ground, this is perhaps best understood as a form of ephemeral ownership (cf. Empson and Bonilla 2019; Viegas 2016). When a person stopped cultivating a swidden patch and the jungle began reclaiming it, their rights to the lands waned. Rather than returning to undifferentiated jungle, ownership of a patch of land returned to the person or kin group who had first cleared this land, as its original owner. Pushing further, I describe how the human “owner” was spoken of locally in terms of hee loh (borrowing) the land from its true spectral owners, such as ta mu khah and kaw k’sah, who possessed it (in the twinned and entwined senses). To grasp these kinds of complex relations, I draw on notions of nesting hierarchies (Allen and Starr 1982; Simpson 2014; Volk 1995, 125–51) to demonstrate how one layer of ownership was often nesting in broader and more encompassing layers of ownership. I speak of “nesting,” rather than nested, hierarchies here to capture how ownership in the highlands along the Salween River was highly indeterminate and unsettled, subject to ongoing negotiations.

I then delve into the ways in which ephemeral ownership was increasingly stretched, almost to breaking point, by newer forms of agriculture. The relative permanence of orchards and wet rice cultivation was slowly transforming Indigenous practices, replacing them with individual ownership. The road, then, was one of a growing number of threats to these alternative and alternating modes of ownership. Returning to the notion of commons, I close by exploring the ways in which kaw were patchworks, where many different categories of land were stitched together to form a largely autonomous area, becoming itself a “patch” (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019).

KAW AND ALTERNATING REGIMES OF OWNERSHIP

In the events that unfolded following the construction of a “car road,” we are introduced to the terms hku, denoting the parcels of land used for swidden cultivation, and kaw, which I have until now followed local activists in translating as “customary territories.” These terms took center stage as tensions mounted around the roadbuilding project.

The villagers in Ta K’Thwee Duh fretted that as the road plowed through their kaw, it might potentially segment and throw into disarray the intricate system of inherited hku (swidden patches) and carefully negotiated patches of cash crops held by the different households, provoking conflicts over the use and control of land. As I shall show, notions of hku and kaw and the kaw k’sah were integral to the organization of day-to-day social life in these highlands and were intimately bound up with Indigenous regimes of possession. As the road drew closer, people were forced to renegotiate ownership and, as I show in chapter 3, sovereignty not only with the KNU but also with the spectral realm.

The suffix -kaw added to a place or group name in Pwakanyaw usually denotes a “delineated space or area,” such as a country (Wade 1896, 259). Burma/Myanmar, for example, is known as Kaw P’Yaw, “the land/territory of the Burmese.”¹ In these highlands the suffix -kaw also connotes the collectively held lands around each named village cluster (or, in one exceptional case, a cluster of different villages).² The area where I conducted the lion’s share of my fieldwork was commonly referred to as Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw, or the lands/territory of Misty Village. Each kaw is made up of hku patches belonging to the people living there and is integral to day-to-day affairs.

When I first arrived, people initially seemed to confirm my preconceived notions that all the kaw lands around the villages were a form of commons or “common property” (Robbins 2012, 51–54), that the land could not be individually owned, and that everyone had the right to cultivate. For example, Hpa Htwee—my unofficial guide and regular walking companion, who always wore a bomber jacket and baseball cap no matter the weather—would regularly comment that, if I were to settle down there, it would be no problem for me to find a patch of land I could clear in order to begin to farm and feed myself. As he often insisted, “it is no problem to get land from the people here.” These theoretical biases were encouraged further when I asked Naw Daw, one of the most prolific rice wine brewers in the village, if people or households could hold individual ownership of hku in this area.³ Her voice suddenly drained of its usual levity and her eyes fixed on mine, she replied pointedly, “There are some people who like to think they can, but this is not so.” Spending more time in this area, however, I found that, while it was indeed comparatively easy for people to find land to cultivate, this state of affairs was underpinned by highly complex and constantly negotiated ownership regimes.

Ephemeral and Nested Ownership

Upon closer inspection I found that the land and water in these highlands was held and controlled in far more intricate and complex ways than would be expected in accordance with “common property” theory. Indeed, rather than an absence of individual ownership, the region featured a blooming, buzzling coexistence of “alternative regimes of ownership” (Brightman et al. 2016; see also Huard 2020). As I demonstrate in chapter 1, this point became clearer to me as I traversed these highlands together with the villagers.

Once, while out walking along the “car road” with Naw Htoo, who was accompanying Naw Paw and I on this occasion, she brought our attention to the land that lay adjacent to both Hpu Noh Noh Deh (“the path that drinks your blood”) and the road. Turning to point, using the pipe tightly clenched between her teeth, to a rough and slightly overgrown patch of land, she told us, “These are Hpu Hkee’s hku”—his swidden patches, now in fallow. “The hku people feared would be divided by the road are in this area,” she continued. Upon asking her to elaborate what she meant when she spoke of these fallow fields as belonging to Hpu Hkee, she reiterated that “he is the k’sah [owner] of several swidden patches here.” My curiosity piqued, I asked her how this squared with Naw Daw’s statement that some “like to think” they own land, intimating that it does not really belong to them. To this Naw Htoo replied that, “while a patch of land may belong to one person, others are free to borrow it. To cultivate a particular hku that does not belong to you, you just have to ask the hku k’sah [swidden patch owner] first if you can borrow it.” She continued that, “If the owner is not using the land, and does not have any plans to use it this season, then they nearly always let others hee loh [borrow] it.” During this time, she added, the primary k’sah/owner forfeits all claims over the land, demanding neither rent nor any other form of recognition of ownership. The person borrowing the land, however, “cannot keep using it forever,” she made clear. Soon after they have finished cultivating the land, ownership reverts back to its primary “owner.”

An intricate, but far from unique, pattern of ownership and cultivation emerges here, in which the person actively cultivating the land becomes known as the k’sah, or owner, and the land is treated, in every practical sense, as his (cf. Huard 2020, in Central Myanmar; Karlsson 2011, 127–65, in Northeast India; and Viegas 2016, in the Brazilian Amazonas). I use the pronoun his here since only men were permitted to initiate the process of clearing an overgrown swidden patch. This was commonly explained to me as due to how “only men have the ta du ta htu,” the associated practices and prohibitions, inherited from their fathers, to clear land. As I demonstrate in chapter 1, ta du ta htu (taboos) were not to be taken lightly. Breaching them could have devastating consequences, both for oneself and one’s close kin.

When a man cleared a certain hku for rice cultivation, this land was thereafter spoken of as belonging to him. The sense of belonging implicated here was akin to what is usually described as usufruct ownership (Empson and Bonilla 2019): temporarily granting a person both access to land and the right to utilize what is grown on it (its “fruits”) while it remains, ultimately, owned by someone else. When all the rice was harvested and safely stored, cultivation switched to less soil- and water-intensive crops, such as chilies and aubergines (eggplant), for an additional two- to three-year period. However, as the shrubs and trees began to grow back and the vegetation became too dense to tend to and to harvest these secondary crops, the patch was left to return to forest again. In this manner, as traces of cultivation disappeared and the patch became overgrown, the former cultivator’s status as the owner likewise gradually ebbed away. This was similar to findings among other people practicing shifting cultivation/swidden farming, in which ownership has a temporal dimension, subject to forgetting. After a certain amount of time has elapsed, land eventually returns to the forest again, only to be cultivated later by someone else, in a cyclical manner (Butt Colson 1973; Viegas 2016). Similarly, in densely populated areas of Southeast Asia such as Singapore, a veritable army of people is conscripted to continually fight back against the creeping return of overgrowth, forests, and the onset of forgetting, so that the current human occupants can continue possessing this land (Comaroff and Ong 2016).

I grasp this as a mode of ephemeral ownership, resembling copyrights and patents in how it was “designated to expire” after a certain time (M. Brown 2004; see also Brightman et al. 2016, 23). In the Mutraw hills, however, while hku (swidden patches) appeared to return to the forest, they did not become undifferentiated and revert to commons. Rather, as they fell back into fallow, tenure defaulted to the primary usufruct owner once more. This ephemeral mode of ownership existed within other modes or layers of ownership, what Audra Simpson describes in a different context as “nested and embedded” (2014, 10–12).

Along these highlands ownership was layered upon ownership, where the ephemeral ownership of the current cultivator of a particular swidden patch was nesting in and subordinate to the encompassing tenure of the person they borrowed the patch from: tenure organized by “layer stacked upon stabilizing layer” (Volk 1995, 127). I grasp this relation by drawing on systems ecologist Tim Allen’s notion of a “nested hierarchy” (Allen and Starr 1982, 100) to capture the way each layer of ownership was nested in a higher order—not unlike Russian matryoshka or nesting dolls, or an image of concentric circles. Yet, as I have stressed throughout this book, relations in the Mutraw hills were indeterminate, unsettled, and constantly negotiated, partly as a vestige of intractable conflict. Accordingly, I follow Signe Howell (2002) in deploying the active verb form of nesting, rather than nested, to describe a constantly jostling hierarchical arrangement of ownership. A person’s tenure of a hku was always nesting in other modes of ownership. When ephemeral ownership waned following the harvest, as the primary jungle grew back, primary ownership rights waxed, dynamically. This raises the question of how a person attains the rights of primary ownership in the first place—that is to say, the person who one must seek out to ask permission to cultivate a particular patch of swidden, spoken of as hers or his.

While helping my neighbor, and Naw Htoo’s brother-in-law, Hpa Dee Pa to plant his hku (swidden field) on the startling steep hillside below Y’wa Ma Htu Lay, I constantly stumbled over the enormous stumps and fallen trees that remained scattered around this field. When I grumbled about this to Hpa Dee Pa after nearly falling for the umpteenth time, he explained to me that when they cleared this area, around a month ago, some of the trees that grew there were so massive that it had been exceedingly hard work. Being the only household (at this time) that owned a chainsaw, they were able to fell these towering trees. But soon after they found it impossible to either remove them by hand or burn them away. We were left to simply plant around them. When I, rather naively, inquired as to why the trees there had been so much larger than in any other hku I had visited, he explained that his family was the first, at least in living memory, to open this particular parcel of forest land for cultivation. As he let the warm sun soften his aching body—almost fully adorned with protective tattoos from his time as a soldier—in a break between planting, Hpa Dee Pa elaborated that, as the first person to clear this parcel of forest for cultivation, he had become its k’sah/owner.

At first glance, the hard work involved in opening up a parcel of forest for cultivation appeared to generate ownership, resonating with Lockean notions in which a person “mixes” a part of themselves with the land through their labor to turn it into their property (Locke [1689] 2003). Taking a step back, it becomes clearer that such processes are a common feature in Indigenous tenure systems not only in Myanmar but across South and Southeast Asia (Huard 2019, 2020; Karlsson 2011; Li 2014a). Yet, as Hpa Dee Pa hastened to add, this patch did not then become his individual property. Rather, it granted him primary usufruct ownership of this patch. That is to say, his labors allowed him and his kin to be first in line to clear this patch of secondary jungle, to grow crops on it and harvest them. Anyone wanting to use this land would have to get his family’s permission first.

Primary usufruct ownership was generated by dint of being the first human to make contact and create a covenant with the spectral owners of a place. To this end, tenure of any given swath of land remained ephemeral. Time and time again, I was told that human “owners” were in fact simply hee loh, or “borrowing” the land for a short time before giving it back to its paramount, spectral owner, and that there would be terrible consequences for anyone who attempted to keep it for themselves. In this manner, tenure systems in the Mutraw hills resembled those in other parts of the country.

In Central Myanmar, for example, while people can claim temporary ownership over a parcel of land, due to the persistent uncertainty as to who will own it in the future, people regularly assert that in fact “nobody owns the land” (Huard 2020). Thus, as Stéphen Huard concludes, “ownership is but momentary,” and the idea of stewardship (taking care, being in charge of) is tantamount to understanding land relations in Myanmar, rooted in moral and social obligations to others (2020, 110). Yet, while Huard focuses on the centrality of human kinship obligations, the ways in which people related to k’sah (spectral owners) in the Mutraw hills push us to accept that who/what obligates stretches far beyond other living humans (Despret and Meuret 2016).

While Hpa Dee Pa was reticent to divulge too many details as to how he actually went about making this covenant (remembering that the rites to do this were inherited ta du ta htu, i.e., taboos), he explained how there was no great difference from the rites to clear any other hku. He lu ta (fed/nourished) the spectral owners of this area with offerings of rice, curry, and betel nut, encouraging them to eat together while he beseeched them that he may borrow the land so he could feed his family, swearing to return it as soon as cultivation was over. That is to say, he exercised his obligations to the land’s spectral owner(s). Thus, it was through not only his physical labor but also his ritual labor that he now held primary usufruct ownership of this patch: to use and enjoy the fruits of something belonging to another. He owned the rites, passed down from his father, to make these covenants with the spectral realm, and through these he attained primary usufruct.

Primary usufruct ownership was commonly referred to simply as being the hku k’sah. Attained by the first person to make contact and make a covenant with the spectral owners of this parcel of land, rather than ownership slowly waning as cultivation ceased and the forest returned, ownership continued on even after the death, inherited by the original covenant-maker’s progeny (Hayami 2004, 153; Huard 2020; Lehman 2003). When Hpa Dee Pa eventually passes away, primary usufruct ownership over this patch of land will be passed down to his children. While the first person to clear the land had to be a man, who had inherited the rites involved in contacting and creating a covenant with the spectral owners of an area, inheritance was almost fully cognatic among Pwakanyaw groups in this area (I explore an exception to this in chapter 3). The descendants of the first covenant-maker, both female and male, had first rights of refusal to a given swidden patch, and ownership (in this restricted sense of primary usufruct) reverted back to them when it was not being actively cultivated. There were, however, ways to circumvent the temporal limitations of this ephemeral mode of ownership, such as by cultivating or building something more permanent than dry rice and chili plants.

Transformative Trees and Paddy Fields

Certain cultivated bamboo groves, household gardens, orchards (mostly of areca/betel nut), and even freestanding fruit trees such as the coconut palm that grew between Hpu Gay’s and my homes, were referred to in regular speech as belonging to a specific person. While many people hitched their way up the coconut palm to help themselves to its fruit, people continued to talk of it as belonging to Hpa Kha Pa, the man who led efforts to protect the loh. Moreover, as these more permanent plants and trees remained in the ground over several seasons, a person’s or household’s status as the k’sah or owner also continued and could be inherited by their descendants. Much of the cardamom planted by an enterprising villager in Hpu Noh Noh Deh Kleh some sixty years ago, for example, was inherited by his sons after his death. Indeed, as in many Indigenous tenure systems, the materiality of the crops that were planted was formative. The (relative) permanence of certain crops or agricultural infrastructure opened the door to more exclusive modes of private ownership (cf. Li 2014a).

While a shift to private land ownership would have far-ranging and potentially catastrophic effects, it was continuously held in check by the encompassing ownership of specters. In most cases, if a person asked for permission from the human k’sah, they were permitted to harvest a few coconuts, cut a stem of bamboo, or fill a rolled-up shirt with areca nuts for their families should they not have any themselves. Underlying these practices was a tacit understanding that there were limits to how much a person might borrow and that what they borrowed should not be sold on for a profit. Although spoken of as owned by one person or one household, these groves, gardens, orchards, and trees/palms fell awkwardly somewhere between exclusive private property, on the one hand, and the commons, on the other. While the material permanency of certain plants, palms, and trees allowed people to stretch and negotiate modes of ephemeral ownership, this never quite led to the alienation of the earth from its spectral owners.

The ephemeral ownership of a person cultivating a patch of land rested in the encompassing ownership of the direct descendant of the man who first made contact and made a covenant with the specter who possesses the area. In turn, this form of human ownership was nesting in and subordinate to encompassing spectral ownership. These various layers of ownership sketch out a nesting hierarchy that was in constant motion. Modes of ephemeral and nesting ownership had, however, slowly begun to shift over the last eight years with the growing popularity of terraced wet rice cultivation. The first blushes of these gradual changes could be discerned in the advent of exchanges of land that often preceded the establishment of terraced wet rice/paddy fields. Hpu Hka Hsoo—an elder, ritual expert, frequent wanderer, and Hpa Kha Pa’s father, who always sported a well-waxed mustache—was one of the first people in the area to adopt this form of agriculture, and his experiences were instructive of these transformations.

* * *

Seven or eight years ago, Hpu Hka Hsoo decided he would attempt to establish a paddy field, “like the ones I saw in my travels across Thailand,” as he put it. By his own estimate, he had inherited usufruct ownership rights over at least fifteen hku (swidden) patches in Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw from his parents. Yet, when he began searching for a suitable spot to establish a paddy field, he discovered that none of the hku he inherited were particularly well situated to this task. “They were either too far away from a water source, or on a slope that made it difficult to get water up to the top of the field.” As he continued to search for a suitable area, he found one hku that was perfect, nestled along the Bleh Mah Loh stream that runs along the foot of Y’wa Mah Htu Lay. “The problem was,” he told me, “this hku was not mine; nor did any of my kin own it.” But, not easily disheartened, Hpu Hka Hsoo hit upon a novel plan. With a glint in his eye, he explained that, “while there are strict ta du ta htu [taboos] against selling the rights to a hku, in the past people have swapped land, like for like.” Thus, he sought out the owner of this particular swidden patch along the Bleh Mah Loh stream and proposed a swap, exchanging the rights over this patch with the rights he held over a patch in another area of Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw. After a little persuading, the exchange was completed, and he was given access to the parcel of land along the Bleh Mah Loh stream. The back-breaking labor of carving the characteristic steps of a terraced wet rice field (see figure 5) and the channels to redirect water from the Bleh Mah Loh stream could begin.

Much like the material permanency of areca palms, the drastic reshaping of the earth entailed in the establishing of a field—in which rice could be cultivated year after year without a fallow period—produced a concurrent permanence in rights over this land. Planting trees and establishing a paddy field had the similar effect of stretching how long a single person or household could hold on to a certain parcel of land. Moreover, the growing influence of the KNU and of official documents lent this stretched form of ephemeral ownership an added sense of individuality and persistence.

Upon establishing a paddy field and beginning to actively use it to cultivate wet rice, the Kawthoolei Agricultural Department (KAD) of the KNU required a person to register this land, often via the village tract leader, and to apply for a land title. This KNU land title requires that one specific person be registered as the official owner of the field, effectively making it private property. As I explore in more depth in chapter 4, this was a tactic commonly deployed by the KNU state to make this area “assessable,” “legible,” and, importantly, taxable (cf. Scott 1998). Yet one corollary of this individualized land title was that it also made it possible, on paper at least, for land to be bought and sold.

Following Hpu Hka Hsoo’s initial success in establishing a paddy field along this stream, several other people set to work establishing their own terraced wet rice fields beside it. During my time in Ta K’Thwee Duh, by my reckoning, there were four paddy fields along this stream and another four to the west of the village (and two more that, due to a lack of funds, remained incomplete). In one of the paddy fields along the Bleh Mah Loh stream, the elderly man who held the land title over this field had recently moved to the regional center to be closer to his son who lived there. Since he moved, he rented out the field to Hpa Htwee, ostensibly to cover the taxes he was obligated to pay to the KNU for the land, whether he used it or not. However, at least as Hpa Htwee tells it, the title holder of this land only intended to rent out his paddy field in the short term. His long-term goal was to find someone who would be willing to buy the land from him—that is to say, buy the KNU land title, relieving him of the tax burden. Following this, Hpa Htwee visited me on several occasions to not so subtly suggest that I buy this field. I would then have somewhere to grow food and support myself when I returned, he reasoned. Moreover, out of brotherly love and not the obvious side benefits to him, of course, he promised to take care of it by cultivating the field while I was away.

While it had not quite happened yet, the growing popularity of permanent paddy fields was gradually making it possible to negotiate and in fact stretch and refigure local modes of ownership in ways that bore a closer resemblance to what could be described as private property. It is important to note, however, that the introduction of land titles does not necessarily always lead to the private ownership of land in the strict sense. In Central Myanmar, for instance, while land titling had been common practice since early colonial times, difference between who farms the land, who (momentarily) owns it, and who inherits it in the future continually militated against the adoption of a wholescale private property–based system (Huard 2020, 86). In the final section of this chapter, I shift focus to the other half of common dichotomous models of ownership: the commons.

UNCOMMON COMMONS AND KAW AS PATCHWORKS

The closest one came to a form of commons in these highlands was a handful of hku where usufruct ownership could not be handed on to the next generation and patches of land that were either unsuitable or too dangerous to cultivate, such as rocky outcrops, ponds, and ta thoo ta pgho/hsoo, or “potent/strong” places.

In rare cases in which a person died without direct kin to whom they could pass down the hku they held primary usufruct ownership of, these parcels of land were turned over to the commons. All people residing in Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw had the right to cultivate these lands. Much like other swidden patches, the person/family who cultivated it for a season could only hold it in the ephemeral mode, losing all claims as the land fell back into fallow/forest. In addition, there were several areas in the kaw that could not be cleared and cultivated due to the terrain, such as Way Pgha, a rocky and wild forest populated by a whole host of animals, such as tigers, sun bears, and hornbills (see chapter 5). Along with these areas, uncultivable due to the terrain, were the swaths of land that, as I demonstrate in chapter 1, could not be cultivated due to being already possessed, in both the political and cosmological senses. These lands were already possessed either by hsoo (powerful) specters, such as Hpu Noh Noh Deh, or by ta thoo ta pgho (the “potency of creation”)—such as the crest of peaks that make up Y’wa Ma Htu Lay. In a sense, these lands resembled what have been described as “common property” (Robbins 2012, 51–54); all residents of the kaw were free to collect firewood, forage, hunt, and even, as was the case in Hpu Noh Noh Deh, plant certain crops such as cardamom in these areas. Delving deeper, however, I found that the very status of this land as common to all humans residing in the vicinity was predicated on this land being, ultimately, possessed and owned by spectral persons.

Two modes of human ownership emerged here, both of which described a person as the k’sah, or “the owner,” of a certain demarcated area. One mode of human ownership was that of primary usufruct, and the other was that of ephemeral ownership, with the latter nesting in and subsumed under the former. As ephemeral ownership waned, the encompassing ownership of primary usufruct waxed. Both these modes of human ownership were, in turn, nesting in wider hierarchical relationships to the encompassing ownership of various spectral persons, who possessed and were the true owners of the landscapes along this stretch of the lower Salween River, acting as sovereigns over their own domains. I explore the implications of this form of ownership on sovereignty and politics more in chapter 3. Furthermore, the notion of spectral ownership points to what Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret call an “ecology of obligations” that makes people “capable of being better obligated to and obligated by other beings,” be they human or otherwise (2016, 27). Relations of obligation between humans were always enmeshed in their wider relations and obligations to the spectral persons they shared their landscapes with.

In light of what I have shown thus far, on one scale each kaw was a patchwork of different types of land, roughly stitched together. Kaw were patchworks composed of lands with identifiable human k’sah (in the sense of usufruct ownership), such as swidden patches, paddy fields, household plots, gardens, orchards, groves, and some trees; areas with identifiable spectral owners, such as those spoken of as hsoo (“strongly” possessed) or ta thoo ta pgho (“potent” places); and lands understood more diffusely as possessed by a whole host of indeterminate spectral persons, such as the surrounding forests, lakes, and rivers, which were often unsuitable for cultivation. In turn, at a larger scale, landscapes across the Mutraw hills were made up of a patchwork of kaw lands, themselves sewn together by mutual obligations of kinship, friendship, and exchange.

Kaw were thus not quite “units” of local governance, which suggests a certain uniformity, interchangeability, and scalability (Tsing 2012). Instead, they came closer to what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew Mathews, and Nils Bubandt (2019), borrowing and modifying ecological terminology, describe as “patches.” In this line of thinking, landscapes are composed of heterogeneous patches with a “uniqueness [that] is generated by [their] historical-ecological relations to other patches” (Bubandt et al. 2023, 19). Each kaw formed a patch that, while composed of heterogeneous elements, formed a delineated space with rather definite boundaries, implying notions of an inside and an outside (cf. Tsing, Deger et al. 2024, 35–38). This last point became clearer when conversation turned to questions as to who belonged to a specific kaw, hedged in notions of htoo lee hpoe, or “Indigenous.”

I found that certain people were understood to be (pgha) htoo lee hpoe. The activists based in Chiang Mai consistently translated htoo lee hpoe as synonymous with “Indigenous,” yet locally this term was used in the very restrictive sense of belonging to a particular kaw. Only a person who was htoo lee hpoe could hold and inherit swidden patches and be permitted to gather food/fuel and hunt there. Delving deeper, I learned that both a person and their parents/ancestors must be born within a particular kaw and continue to reside there to be considered htoo lee hpoe. Should a person move to another kaw after their birth, such as through marriage, they forfeited both the rights to “own” and to inherit land and had to request permission to cultivate in the kaw of their birth. A non–htoo lee hpoe person, who has married into the kaw (sometimes pejoratively called hsaw mee, or “wild jungle fowl”), much like a person who lives in a neighboring kaw, has to ask for permission to borrow a certain hku. Non–htoo lee hpoe people could only hold land in the sense of ephemeral ownership. The temporal constraints on this kind of human ownership allowed land to be shared with neighboring areas while arresting attempts to permanently annex a patch to make it their property, or part of their kaw. It was in this sense that Hpa Htwee could say that it would be easy for me to find land to cultivate should I move to Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw (also, as I later learned, hinting that I should marry a local woman, such as his daughter).

Each kaw formed a patch that was clearly demarcated, albeit verbally rather than by conventional maps. A particular rise in the path or prominent stone was used to mark their borders. Nearly all members of the community, young and old alike, could recognize these physical boundary markers. When in doubt one could always consult the village elders or a small scrap of paper kept at the headman’s house that, in lieu of a map, was a transcription of several of the village elders’ verbal demarcations. To this end, Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw shared continuous borders with its neighboring kaw, forming part of a sprawling patchwork of heterogeneous yet interlinked lands, which spread over much of the Mutraw District of southeast Myanmar.

Each kaw acted as a largely autonomous patch of political organization both transcending and binding together the different households, families, and even villages and sub-villages while remaining deeply connected to other scales of political organization. Each kaw had its own sets of ta du ta htu (taboos) that people were required to follow. All those residing in a specific kaw were woven tightly together by their shared status as pgha htoo lee hpoe and/or as people sharing a particular swath of agricultural, foraging, and hunting land. In effect, kaw were actually existing pockets of autonomy. I return to these points around patches and scale in chapter 6, where I take a closer look at the ways the Salween Peace Park was translating and rescaling these practices, tapping into this de facto autonomy.

Returning to the roadbuilding incident that opens this chapter, it becomes clear that many of the villagers’ concerns arose from understandable fears that, as the road scythed its way through the middle of the kaw, it might subdivide and complicate this delicate pattern of nesting ownership. Should one part of a hku be split off from the rest, bitter disputes over ownership would surely ensue. Tearing the fabric of these patchworks, in turn, threatened the integrity of this particular scale of political organization—that is to say, the kaw and its autonomy. As such, land possession practices related to kaw implied alternating modes of not only ownership but also sovereignty. Shifting focus from ownership to sovereignty elicits a battery of new questions: Who acts as the head of each kaw, organizing the division of lands such as hku among inhabitants? Who are the sovereigns of each kaw? Commonly, especially in political ecology (which, in part, guides this book), one attempts to answer such questions by looking for the key actors involved in political processes (Karlsson 2011; Li 2014a; Robbins 2012). However, as the vignette of the “car road” suggests, along the Bu Thoe ridge this was far from a straightforward matter.