CLANK. Clank. Clank. In lieu of a hammer, Hpa Kha Pa used a machete to nail a sign onto the side of a tree. The sign, once part of a biscuit tin, read, “Protected Forest: It is prohibited to eat or kill any living creature.”

It was the middle of the monsoon season up in the mountainous Mutraw District of southeast Myanmar, toward the end of my fieldwork there, in August 2017. I was invited to accompany Hpa Kha Pa and two other men from a small nearby village as they went about conserving a patch of deep forest. All the men were wearing traditional striped tunics, out of respect to the ancestors who resided there, they told me. Yet Wee Daw, a slightly built fellow who never appeared entirely comfortable in his own skin, had paired his tunic with a baseball cap inexplicably bearing the word Fuck. Giant trees towered over us, and we had to talk loudly to be heard over the din of a thousand trilling insects.

This patch of forest was known as the loh or ta lay (the dwelling place of the dead; see figure 1). The men explained to me how when a person dies, their shade (k’la) travels to this area and takes up residence. Traipsing through the thick undergrowth, we stumbled over broken objects, left in neat piles here and there: a ripped umbrella sheltering a knife without a handle and several smashed alcohol jugs as well as three sticks driven into the earth, with a filthy piece of striped fabric draped over them, tarpaulin-like. Hpa Kha Pa, who was filming everything on his mobile phone, told me that these objects belonged to local residents who had passed away. They were conveyed here and purposefully destroyed because, in the dwelling place of the dead, everything is koh kee (backward, inverted), so what is broken is whole and the dead are still living. In their realm, the structure of cloth-draped sticks was someone’s home, and this whole stretch of forest, including the small stream that runs through it, was “their place.” They possessed this forest both in the sense that they haunted it and in the sense that it belonged to them.

We were gathered here on this particular dark and rainy August afternoon to attempt to protect the forest once and for all. For many years, local people feared that outsiders might not realize the objects left here belong to the dead and take them home. Such acts risked provoking the ire of these dearly departed. People also worried that the plethora of species that called this patch of thick forest home were being over-fished and over-hunted. Following several failed experiments in conservation—attempting to get local authorities to recognize this area as a community forest, even calling in Buddhist monks from Thailand to ordain the trees there in order to protect them—they decided to take matters into their own hands. In addition to hanging signs, they also prayed and made libations to the spectral owners of this area, entreating them to protect the animals, plants, and items that belonged to the dead. Following this intervention, all the villagers I spoke to agreed that this patch of forest was safe from harm—at least for the time being.

I first met these three men nine months earlier, at a so-called consultation meeting in Mutraw’s administrative center Deh Bu Noh. During this meeting we learned that a wide-ranging Indigenous-led conservation project was afoot. This project, called the Salween Peace Park, aimed to support and build on Indigenous efforts to protect patches of forest, like those carried out in the loh, to create a sprawling protected area. Projects such as the Salween Peace Park that experimented with different modes and scales of conservation across Myanmar’s southeasterly highlands were increasingly becoming intertwined with long-standing struggles for autonomy and peacebuilding efforts. While the men in the forest that day did not see this particular effort to protect the loh as explicitly tied to the peace park—and, in fact, sometimes voiced reservations about the project—their actions, and the intricately layered understanding of landscapes and specters that animated them, were emblematic of the spirit behind the Salween Peace Park and other similar experiments.

These divergent efforts to protect the environment in southeast Myanmar occurred during a period of unprecedented hope in a nation long wracked by civil war. Between 2011 and 2021, Myanmar entered a faltering process of transition to democracy. Rolling ceasefires were signed between armed groups across the country, and in 2015, free elections were held for the first time in decades. Notwithstanding an overwhelming and pervasive skepticism as to the real intentions of these shifts—especially among Indigenous communities—this moment of transition elicited a flurry of radical experiments in alternative modes of conservation, governance, and sovereignty. Many of these endeavors worked to repossess highly contested landscapes upended by conflict.¹ This flurry of activity is significant not only for understanding the region more deeply but also for contemplating novel methods of peacebuilding and Indigenous sovereignty in war zones.

In this book I explore how, on multiple scales—from highly localized ad hoc solutions to transnational struggles—Indigenous people have drawn on understandings of possessing landscapes as a negotiation with spectral owners in order to not only conserve ecologies but also strive for greater autonomy, pushing back against state encroachment and capitalist predation. I begin exploring these radical experiments in conservation and autonomy in southeast Myanmar by delving into Indigenous practices and cosmologies of possessing landscapes, arguing that they be approached as alternative modes of both ownership and sovereignty. I then trace how these practices and cosmologies of possession were negotiated, translated, and rescaled to transform contested and conflictual landscapes into large-scale Indigenous-run protected areas. I examine how the playful and improvisational spirit of local experiments in environmental protection and self-determination were rescaled into conservation projects envisioning federal futures of transnational significance. In this manner, Indigenous-run protected areas became gardens for growing and prefiguring radical alternatives to armed conflict and top-down conservation. In the process, I posit that the playful experimentation with Indigenous sovereignty underpinning them has the potential to unsettle not only established notions of conservation but also self-determination and peacebuilding in southeast Myanmar and beyond.

The path to these findings was far from unerring—littered with detours and dead ends along the way. My attention was first drawn to the highlands of southeast Myanmar, and the radical experiments with conservation and sovereignty that were taking place there, as I was about to embark on an initial phase of multi-sited fieldwork, starting off in upstate New York in 2016, where I was to spend three months among former refugees who had been resettled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from the sprawling refugee camps along the Thailand-Myanmar border. This fieldwork would build on previous research I had conducted in and around one of these camps in 2013. I was interested in how translocal entanglements and remittances played into ecological and political landscapes in the war zones of southeast Myanmar.

Around this time, I first became aware of these experiments in conservation and sovereignty through a press release announcing the Salween Peace Park’s arrival onto the world stage. The press release opens by asking the reader rhetorically, “Can a battlefield be turned into an indigenous-run protected area for scores of endangered species like tiger, gibbons and wild cattle?” and immediately answers emphatically, “Yes it can.”² It proceeds to state the key aspirations of the peace park: “to end and avoid violent conflict; to protect the environment; to ensure the preservation of ethnic cultural resources; and to help post-conflict communities recover and rebuild.” It then quotes a local military leader from the revolutionary movement the Karen National Union (KNU), poignantly concluding that “with the Salween Peace Park, we can survive as a nation.” This press release captivated my interest, refusing to let it go. When I stepped out into the field, its promises of radically different approaches to both revolutionary politics and conservation continued to haunt me. I was not sure whether or how it related to my current work but felt compelled to learn more.

After returning from upstate New York, I set out on the second phase of fieldwork to trace flows of cash, knowledge, and affect back to remittance-receiving communities in the Myanmar-Thai borderlands. Here I swiftly learned that people were far less preoccupied with their translocal entanglements with kin and kith abroad than they were with the ever more pressing threats of dispossession by transnational organizations and the Tatmadaw (the Myanmar state military-cum-military state). At the very heart of the protracted cycles of armed conflict in southeast Myanmar lay differing, overlapping, and often conflicting perspectives on and claims over how land was and could be owned and controlled.

The most pertinent questions on people’s lips pertained to how they might resolve growing conflicts over the landscapes they lived in and sustained themselves with. These questions brought my mind back to the description I had read of the Salween Peace Park’s assertion that conservation and preservation could help communities “survive and rebuild” after conflict. Gradually, I began contemplating taking my research in a new direction. I contacted and struck up a conversation with the Indigenous and ecological activists behind the Salween Peace Park to learn more about how they approached issues of conflicting claims on and rights to land in southeast Myanmar. From our ongoing conversations, I started to grasp how the activists, in partnership with both local communities and the KNU, intended to demonstrate one way in which both self-determination and peacebuilding might be achieved in practice. At this point it is important to note that in day-to-day life, understandings of who was considered an “activist” were highly fluid and situational. While the majority of people developing the peace park were professionals, working full-time for the activist organization Karen Environmental and Social Action Network, many had their roots in Indigenous subsistence farming communities (something I explore in more detail in chapter 6). Likewise, as I dwell on a little longer in chapters 4 and 5, upland rotational cultivators were on occasion drawn into activism.

These KESAN activists were, and still are, in the process of transforming 6,747 km2 (slightly larger than Brunei and a little under half the size of East Timor) of highly contested terrain in southeast Myanmar into an Indigenous-run conservation zone (see map 1).³ As the first flyer of the Salween Peace Park proclaims, they were carving out a place for “all living things sharing peace.” To achieve these goals, Indigenous practices and modes of dwelling, as well as small-scale efforts to protect ecologies, were translated and rescaled into both government and conservation policy. My curiosity piqued, I decided to move away from a focus on diasporic entanglements to concentrate on struggles over land, conservation, and sovereignty, focusing on the mountainous Mutraw District where the Salween Peace Park was being enacted.

Together with the activists, we settled on one village to act as a base for my fieldwork—“where many of Indigenous practices are still strong,” as Doh K’Oh, one of the activists, put it. Given my initial frustrated attempts at multi-sited fieldwork, the physical restraints imposed on my movement by the monsoon season, and continued threats of warfare, I decided to stick to one particular area in the Mutraw highlands along the Salween River. As such, I spent nearly eight months (from January to September 2017) in and around the village I call Ta K’Thwee Duh, or Misty Village. The village sits high atop the Bu Thoe ridge that, at 1,200 meters above sea level, towers over the Salween River in the east (200 meters above sea level) while lying close to a KNU-built road (which I discuss in more detail in chapters 2 and 3).

While the village is nestled in an area ridden with armed conflict, which the Tatmadaw referred to as an insurgent “black zone” and “free fire zone” until the ceasefire of 2012 (KHRG 2009; Smith 1999), much of the heavy fighting passed around the village. The residents of Ta K’Thwee Duh and the other villages across this ridgetop were overwhelmingly subsistence farmers, sustaining themselves and their families primarily though swidden/shifting cultivation. The highlands along the Salween River are, however, far from uniformly of high altitude and instead divided into valleys and hills. As I shall demonstrate, topographic differences had significant effects on the political landscape of the Mutraw District. Capital from development and infrastructural projects, be they of KNU or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), tended to “jump over” the Bu Thoe ridge and remain in the regional centers that were often found at lower elevations.

From the vantage point of this one village, I could begin exploring vexed, overlapping, and highly indeterminate perspectives on how landscapes were and could be possessed, and highly localized ad hoc attempts to protect ecologies, in a region that was slowly becoming incorporated into the Salween Peace Park. Woven into this more classic anthropological fieldwork are my ongoing conversations with central figures from within Indigenous ecological activist groups, mostly based in Chiang Mai in Thailand, along with conversations with other activists, military figures, and local academics—periodically shifting back and forth between the highlands of southeast Myanmar and Chiang Mai. This work was supplemented with desk research on archival sources and analysis of policy documents such as land laws and charters and, to a lesser degree, my initial fieldwork in upstate New York.

LANDSCAPES OF POSSESSION AND REPOSSESSION

Spending time in Ta K’Thwee Duh, I learned how the Indigenous people regularly treated landscapes as possessed in the double and entangled senses of the word: as occupied or haunted by unseen more-than-human presences and as owned by these presences. Not only the loh, but all lands and waters were understood as, ultimately, borrowed by humans from their spectral owners, to be returned at a later date. Here I use the term spectral to denote something whose presence, while sensed, was never quite seen, understood to be just off the visual spectrum, yet felt in the effects they have on people’s lives.⁴ By spectral I allude not simply to “ghosts” that go bump in the night, but rather to all unseen yet powerful presences that can hold dominion over a certain area.

Part 1 of this book, “Possession,” focuses on the area around Ta K’Thwee Duh and on Indigenous practices and cosmologies of possession and power. Chapter 1 delves deeper into the notion of “possessed landscapes,” while chapters 2 and 3 explore the implications of this notion on regimes of ownership and sovereignty, respectively. Part 2, “Dispossession/Repossession,” tacks back and forth across the border, delving deeper into growing threats of dispossession and the way various activists/Indigenous people experimented with these alternative modes of ownership and sovereignty to repossess their landscapes. Chapter 4 traces processes of dispossession in southeast Myanmar and the ways Indigenous practices were being pragmatically translated into burgeoning countermovements, while chapter 5 analyzes in situ struggles to reterritorialize the Mutraw hills as a mode of alter-politics. The sixth and final chapter then focuses on the Salween Peace Park itself, exploring how by rescaling these struggles into a large-scale protected area, the activists behind it were prefiguring alternative, more peaceful, futures.

Throughout, I take Indigenous practices, cosmologies, and concepts of possession seriously. I treat notions and practices of living together with humans and more-than-humans alike—what I describe as conviviality—as situated and radically alternative regimes of ownership and sovereignty: radically alternative in the sense that they present another way forward, beyond hegemonic regimes of individual ownership, state sovereignty, and extractivism that had left Myanmar bogged down in intractable conflict for decades. To paraphrase Saidiya Hartman (2019, xvii), the wild idea that animates this book is that these activists/Indigenous people are radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and tirelessly never failed to consider that the world might be otherwise.

Much like the Indigenous people and activists themselves, I attempt to hold in focus the two meanings of possession: the cosmological sense of the landscapes as occupied or haunted by more-than-human beings and the political-ecological sense of control and ownership of contested landscapes. The title of this book plays on these entwined and contested connotations of possessed. In combining these different senses of possession, the Indigenous experiments with conservation and sovereignty I describe emerge as highly sophisticated ways of looking anew at the protracted political impasse in southeast Myanmar. They gesture toward and prefigure radically new approaches to securing peace and protecting biodiversity. At the same time, as the quote from the KNU general suggests, these experiments also continue seven decades of struggle for Indigenous autonomy. Furthermore, in speaking of possessed landscapes, I take landscapes as “a starting point” in order to study the “structural synchronicities between ecology, capital, and the human and more-than-human-histories” (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019, 186). And following Munira Khayyat, I find that thinking through landscapes helps to “ethnographically grasp war’s continuing presence in the warp and weft of living” (2022, 27). As I show, in southeast Myanmar everyday life, conflict, conservation, and revolution have become increasingly interwoven.

PERSPECTIVES AND POSITIONS

Three overarching and overlapping themes emerge out of my understanding of possession and run throughout this book: violent contact zones; spectral subjects and sovereignties; and experiments in translation, scale, and autonomy. While, for the sake of clarity, I divide these into three separate streams, they are intricately entwined.

Violent Contact Zones

Over the years pathbreaking work has been carried out in highland areas of Southeast Asia such as those in southeast Myanmar. In this body of scholarship, upland spaces are understood in relation to galactic polities and the geo-bodies of nation-states (Tambiah 1976; Winichakul 1994) and grasped in terms such as borderworlds, non-state spaces, or (capitalist) frontiers (Li 2014a; Sadan 2013; Scott 2009; Tsing 2005). This book brings such work into dialogue with the notion of contact zones. It ethnographically examines both historical and day-to-day encounters along the Salween and how such encounters have shaped and continue to shape landscapes. In drawing on the work of Mary Louise Pratt (1991, 2008) and James Clifford (1997), this book explores how these highlands are not only sites of domination but also of continuing relations, shot through with experimentation, improvisation, negotiation, and co-option. These are ongoing “contact histories” and “stories of struggle” that are disruptive, where power imbalances are not resolved but endure into the future (Clifford 1997, 193). Furthermore, contact zones are not only sites of violence and struggle but also of intimacy, desire, and dependency (Faier 2009; Yeoh and Willis 2005; Wilson 2019), where negotiation takes place between humans and more-than-humans alike (Haraway 2007; see also Govindrajan 2018).

Beginning in chapter 1, I show how practices and cosmologies along the Salween River were always interwoven with histories of violence, leaving them constantly unsettled and unsettling. Armed conflict undoes and refigures people’s relations with one another, with their landscapes, and with the more-than-human world, remaking not only societies and ecologies but also the cosmos itself (cf. Ruiz-Serna 2023). Practices and cosmologies were constantly coming unstuck and open to renegotiation—in the grips of “continuous birth” (Ingold 2011, 68). Contact zones are “relational ensembles sustained through processes of cultural borrowing, appropriation and translation—multidirectional processes” (Clifford 2003, 34). Yet, in the midst of these processes of renegotiation, I found that many histories and practices endured, passed down through the generations. I attempt to grasp them less as hybrid (Latour 1993) or plural (McConnachie 2014)—which would suggest the finished products of these processes—but more as ongoing, unsettled, and highly flexible.

Spectral Subjects and Sovereignties

As I have already hinted, people in the highlands of Mutraw regularly treated their landscapes as teeming with more-than-human life, both biotic—from microbes to elephants—and spectral. In deploying the term spectral, I lean on its other ramifying connotations, to attempt to draw out a sense of these unseen more-than-humans as perpetually ineffable and indeterminate, almost impossible to pin down (cf. Bubandt 2017, 125). I explore how people could never be certain of their identity. People could only intuit these beings by sensing their presence on their own bodies, in dreams, and in their effects on everyday life by way of active experimentation.

In taking this perspective, in chapter 1, I bring it into conversation with scholarship on the ways in which, in many places around the world, both animals and specters are regularly treated as fellow persons, with whom humans were continually engaged in social relations (Chao 2022; Descola 2013; Kimmerer [2013] 2020). Much akin to other groups of Indigenous peoples across the globe, the residents of the Mutraw highlands constantly strove to ray daw (make friends)—that is to say, make and maintain good relations with one another and their environments (cf. Govindrajan 2018; TallBear 2019; Wildcat 2013). I gloss these processes, as mentioned above, as conviviality, or living with and living well with others (Büscher and Fletcher 2020; Illich [1973] 1975).

One corollary of landscapes busy with spectral persons, which I explore in depth in chapter 2, was that the human residents regularly spoke of the land they lived and farmed on as hee loh (borrowed) from its “real” spectral owners, intimating a logic of custodianship. This became particularly evident in the case of specters referred to as k’sah, or “owners,” said to own certain trees, lakes, the lands around a village, or even all land and waterways.

I conceptualize the continual striving for conviviality between humans, animals, plants, and specters by describing these highlands as possessed landscapes, in the dual and entangled sense mentioned previously: of unseen persons both occupying and haunting landscapes as well as controlling and owning them. Returning to the notion of contact zones, in this book I understand possessed landscapes as naturalcultural or “more-than-human contact zones” (Haraway 2007; Isaacs and Otruba 2019) between the human and the spectral realms, where people are perpetually negotiating with specters: avoiding certain areas where they are said to reside; strictly observing ta du ta htu, or “taboos,” so as not to vex them; and conducting lu ta that, while literally meaning “to feed,” entails making offerings, propitiating, and entreating them.

To this end, in chapter 2, I argue that practices and cosmologies of possessed landscapes delineate alternative modes of both ownership and sovereignty. Chapter 3 explores how along the lower reaches of the Salween River, the Myanmar government remained distant, such that the KNU acted as a de facto state, with its own state departments and laws. However, at higher elevations, such as along the Bu Thoe ridge, its sovereignty also grew threadbare. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to square the ethnography I had collected with common portrayals of such highland areas as pockets of “anarchy” (Gibson and Sillander 2011; Scott 2009). Insofar as the term anarchy comes from the Greek for “no ruler” (Morris 2014, 62) or “without government” (Barclay 1998, 8–10), it was not so much the case that sovereignty was lacking but rather that sovereignty was held in spectral hands. I describe this mode of politics as “spectral sovereignty.”

Experiments in Translation, Scale, and Autonomy

Riffing off Kevin Woods’s (2011) notion of “ceasefire capitalism,” I describe the startling uptick in violence and dispossession that shadowed the 2012 ceasefire agreements (see also Aung 2018; Barbesgaard 2019; Woods 2019) as a form of ceasefire territorialization. As I show, the Tatmadaw continued its counterinsurgency against villagers in these highlands—only now visited upon them by other means, through expanding economic and religious spheres. In response, growing ensembles of Indigenous people, activists, and armed revolutionary groups began pushing back against these new threats of dispossession by experimenting with Indigenous modes of conservation and autonomy.

In chapter 4, I delve into how these ensembles of villagers-cum-activists were enacting this pushback through pragmatic translations of Indigenous politics of possession. They were experimenting with translating local practices and cosmologies into “customary territories” and conservation zones and creating “counter-maps” (Peluso 1995; see also Chao 2022, 51–73). In this manner, they were able to begin repelling encroachments onto their lands from both the Myanmar state and actors from within the KNU state. Chapter 5 goes on to explore how Indigenous people in the Mutraw hills were increasingly experimenting with spectral sovereignty as a way to protect their landscapes from dispossession, creating ad hoc conservation areas and pockets of autonomy. I follow Ghassan Hage (2015) in describing these actions as alter-politics that gesture toward radically different ways of being enmeshed in the world. Furthermore, I draw on the notion of “symbiotic events” (Stengers 2011, 60) to show how these experiments with Indigenous conservation, in creating tiny pockets of autonomy, were not only clashing with but also intermittently becoming aligned with the KNU’s long struggle for greater self-determination. I end this book by showing how KESAN was building on these fleeting moments of alignment to compose the Salween Peace Park.

In the final chapter, I show how the activists from KESAN experimented with rescaling Indigenous practices of possessed landscapes, tirelessly laboring to adapt small-scale in situ practices in the Mutraw hills so as to make them legible (Scott 1998) on the scale of national and transnational politics. They also worked top-down, lobbying to create laws and policies, clearing a space within the KNU’s legal landscape where such alternative modes of ownership and sovereignty could take root (Hong 2017). By working across scales, they were playfully “messing” with scale to suit the situation at hand, unsettling and subverting both geographical and political levels of action in the process. In this manner, they prefigured alternative futures that upended established notions of conservation and revolution (cf. Krøijer 2010; Maeckelbergh 2009).

The Salween Peace Park, I argue, is thus a form of “liberation conservation,” in which the demand to create an Indigenous-run protected area is deeply wedded to the demand for self-determination. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of how I approached these themes in my fieldwork, let me first contextualize this book with an abridged history of chronic conflict in highland southeast Myanmar, which I braid together with Indigenous histories.

HISTORIES OF CONTACT, WAR, AND REVOLUTION

The borderlands along the lower Salween River are steeped in deep histories of contact and violent conflict. Upland areas oscillated between sites of violent territorial tussles and largely autonomous buffer zones between successive city-states and empires for hundreds, if not thousands, of years (Gravers 1999; Scott 2009; South 2008). Located at the interstices of nation-states and of human and more-than-human realms, I follow Pratt (2008, 7–8) in describing this area as a contact zone where “cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” The “contact history” perhaps most pertinent to the current political predicaments along the Salween River, which I focus on here, followed the colonization of this area by the British Empire. As I show in chapter 1, people still live in and with the ruins of this particular historical conjuncture.

In the mid-nineteenth century, following the Second Anglo-Burmese War, the lower Salween highlands were forcibly annexed to British India and officially designated as a “frontier area.” Following this designation, the newly minted Salween District was placed under indirect rule, with day-to-day governance left to “tribal chieftains” (Furnivall 1960, 12). Described in British colonial records as a “wilderness of mountains” (Burma Gazetteer 1910, 1), the Salween District covered most of modern-day Northern Karen State, bordered by the Thaton (Doo Tha Htoo) District to the south, the Toungoo (Ta-Oo) Division and the Karenni State to the north, and Thailand to the east. By some accounts, this area, particularly the area now known as the Mutraw District, has never been brought fully under centralized state rule and continues to be largely autonomous from the Myanmar state to this day (Jolliffe 2016, 9). The creation of these frontier zones and the resulting “indirect” governance were, however, part of what Mikael Gravers describes as a colonial “political and economic policy of divide and rule” to segregate certain groups and make them more governable (1999, 30–31).⁵ This “indirect” rule was by no means tantamount to people being left to their own devices, isolated from the rest of Burma (proper). On the contrary, the classification of these highlands as a frontier initiated a massive intensification of (violent) contact—first with missionaries and venture capitalists and steadily with the colonial state in the guise of the forestry department.

The majority of the people living in the Mutraw highlands refer to themselves and their language as Pwakanyaw, literally meaning “human” or “humankind.” As Violet Cho suggests, this term denotes “human becoming” (2023, 17n1) as a process rather than a fixed identity. Consequently, throughout this book, I refer to my interlocutors as Pwakanyaw in accord with the practices of the people themselves and the scholars who write about them (Cho 2014, 2023; Trakansuphakon 2006). Following the intensification of contact between Pwakanyaw (and other Karenic-language speakers across Burma) with colonial and missionary practices and discourses under British rule, this identification began to shift. Increasingly, these dispersed and heterogeneous peoples began to speak of themselves as belonging to a wider group, denoted by the exonym “Karen.”

This notion of shared “Karen-ness” was initially articulated as daw k’lu, or “all the tribes” (Fujimura 2020, 321–22; Christie 2000), by missionaries and missionary-educated Pwakanyaw intellectuals such as Dr. T. Thanbyah, who studied theology in upstate New York. Consequently, missionaries and churches were, and continue to be, pivotal in the Karen movement (Christie 2000; Gravers 2007; Horstmann 2011a). Yet cases of missionary appropriation and co-option are rarely so simple, nor are those being preached to so passive: Proselytizing is a multidirectional process (cf. Clifford 2003, 34). As the notion of a separate “Karen People” began to take root across colonial Burma, reinforced by the growing power of Karen church groups, it was accompanied by a crescendo of calls for a corresponding homeland in which these people could reside. This new homeland, a “Karen Country” originally located in what is now known as the Tanintharyi Region of southern Myanmar (San C. Po 1928, 79), was later christened Kawthoolei. This name may be translated as either “the land of the thoo lei flower,” a kind of crêpe ginger that my interlocutors explained indicates soil fertility, or “the earth burned black,” intimating that the land is well suited for swidden cultivation—which involves clearing areas of forest for farming with the help of controlled burning (Gravers 2007, 245).

By 1881, the Karen National Association (KNA) was established. The KNA then began to flesh out and amplify calls for Karen nationhood, a place for “all the tribes” to live together. While vague assurances of Karen nationhood were made by colonial authorities throughout their reign, no provisions were made for an autonomous Karen homeland when Burma gained its independence in 1948, following several years under Japanese occupation during World War II (Walton 2008, 896–97). During the occupation, communities along the Salween River overwhelmingly sided with the British colonists, becoming embroiled in a bloody guerrilla war against both the Japanese Empire and their allies, the Burma Independence Army (BIA). This guerrilla war and the resulting violent reprisals visited on the civilian population cost countless lives and displaced whole villages (South 2008, 22–23).

When many of the central figures (the “thirty comrades”) behind the BIA such as Aung San (Aung San Suu Kyi’s father) and Ne Win (who later became the country’s dictator) quickly took leadership positions (as prime minister and chief of staff of the armed forces, respectively) in the newly independent Union of Burma, many Karen were understandably wary. The KNA and three other Karen organizations joined forces in 1947 to form the KNU, and following a series of reprisal attacks that turned into intercommunal violence between Karen and Burman villages in 1948, the KNU went underground. An armed wing of the KNU, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), was formed, and revolution was officially declared on January 31, 1949.

This revolutionary war was, however, slow to reach up into the Mutraw highlands. As many of the villagers who were alive at this time attested to me, the 1950s were a period of relative calm, punctuated by sporadic armed clashes between the KNU and the Tatmadaw. After the original heart of the revolution, the Irrawaddy Delta in southwestern Burma, fell to the resurgent Tatmadaw, by the mid-1950s these still largely autonomous “frontier areas” in Mutraw became the new “nucleus” of the Karen struggle (Furnivall 1960, 105–6; Lintner 2015). The situation changed dramatically in the mid-1960s when the county’s ascendant dictator General Ne Win (who, as noted, was one of the “thirty comrades”) began to enact a counterinsurgency program to “liquidate the insurgents” (Smith 1999, 258), known as pya ley pya, or the “four cuts.”

The aim of this counterinsurgency program was to “cut” the four main links between the revolution and their civilian bases: food, funds, intelligence, and recruits (Smith 1999, 258). This was to be carried out by dispossessing villages and resettling them out of reach of the revolutionary movements. In one fell swoop, upland communities in much of southeast Myanmar became “black zones” of “hard-core” insurgency. The Tatmadaw were then given carte blanche to use any means necessary to remove the civilian population and transform an area into a “white zone” or “peace area.” While sustained fighting never quite reached the top of the Bu Thoe ridge (where I conducted the lion’s share of my research), many of the villagers’ kin and kith living closer to the Salween River witnessed this counterinsurgency firsthand. One specific example, which I detail in chapter 4, occurred in the area of Thee Mu Hta, a short distance from Ta K’Thwee Duh and where many of the villagers’ kin resided.

After a drawn-out battle, the Tatmadaw wrested control of Thee Mu Hta, and this hamlet and former KNLA base was declared a white zone.⁶ The Tatmadaw then began making regular visits to the nearest village of Dweh Kee Duh, demanding taxes and insisting that the residents relocate to the newly established so-called peace area. My neighbor’s oldest brother, Hpu Htoo, who still lived in Dweh Kee Duh, explained that when the villagers refused, the Tatmadaw burned their rice fields and their granaries to the ground to intimidate them into moving. Martin Smith has shown that this was the case throughout Burma; in the “four cuts” campaign, “there [was] no such thing as an innocent or neutral villager. Every community must fight, flee or join the Tatmadaw” (1999, 260). All villagers living in “black zones” were classified as potential KNLA combatants or collaborators and thus legitimate targets. In the wake of this strategy, villagers all along the Salween faced shoot-on-sight orders, and their homes and fields were regularly plundered and razed to the ground, with the remains littered with landmines in scorched earth tactics (KHRG 2009, 2012)—giving new meaning to the translation of the shared Karen homeland of Kawthoolei as “earth burned black.” These tactics were intended to force civilians to flee from such black zones where the KNU/KNLA were most active, either across the border or to newly established white zones/peace areas that acted much like the “strategic hamlets” the United States employed in Laos and Vietnam, insulated from the revolution (Smith 1999). I learned that, while many of the original residents of the area around Dweh Kee Duh had fled to the refugee camps across the river in Thailand, the KNLA, who retained a strong presence in this area, were able to eventually push the Tatmadaw back to their barracks and surround them with landmines hemming them in.

In the wake of these brutal counterinsurgency tactics, hundreds of thousands of civilians, much like the residents of Dweh Kee Duh, were forced to flee to the refugee camps in Thailand from the 1980s onward. Unable to return home, a whole new generation came into contact not only with more missionaries but also with a wide array of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) that provided education and training steeped in notions of human and Indigenous rights and ecological sustainability. While a ceasefire was brokered between the KNU and the Tatmadaw in 2012, armed conflict and dispossession did not abate; as outlined in chapter 4, the fighting simply became more insidious. Increasingly, under the pretext of so-called development and conservation, the Tatmadaw were remobilizing in ceasefire areas to “secure” such projects, effectively dispossessing civilians and establishing control over earlier KNU territories (Woods 2011, 2019).

In the wake of this wave of mass dispossession, a new generation of revolutionaries was emerging. This new generation carried on their forebears’ struggle for self-determination but by other means—moving away from armed insurgency to edge ever closer to Indigenous and ecological activism, as evidenced by the Salween Peace Park (I explore this project in detail in chapter 6). This, however, is but one way of narrating this history. The Indigenous people of these highlands had their own particular manner of telling this story, which is often left out of “official” accounts.

Indigenous Histories

Along the Salween River, people often spoke of themselves and their practices as Moh La Pa Lah, “people who feed and follow the practices of their ancestors” (cf. Buadaeng 2003), or Thoo Hkoh. While the literal translation of Thoo Hkoh is “black heads,” American missionary Jonathan Wade defines this term aptly as “worldly people, unbelievers” (1896, 1291). When I asked elders in Ta K’Thwee Duh to help me get a better impression of Indigenous/Thoo Hkoh histories of these highlands, they were prone to telling one of two types of tales: those of events within living memory, such as World War II and the end of colonialism, which some of the eldest villagers had lived through, or those of cosmogony, on how the universe came into being. As noted earlier, these histories were continually coming unstuck and being reshaped in the face of decades of armed conflict. What follows is an abbreviated version of the way Hpee Thoo, one of oldest women in Ta K’Thwee Duh, narrated this tale to me:

In the beginning there was only wind, sky, and water. In the water there lived one fish, and in the sky one bird, a htoe hklu (a Drongo bird of the Dicrurus genus). On the water there was a tiny clod of earth the size of a large seed. Out of this clod of earth grew a banyan tree, forming a tiny island.

On this island lived Mu Khah with her daughter (who is never named).⁷ However, because neither of them had the ability to create anything new, the world remained in this state for a long time, just wind, sky, and water. This and the inhabitants of this tiny island, one fish and one bird.

But one day, while her daughter was playing by this vast and endless ocean, stirring up the water with her hand, she created eddies that fermented the surface so that it began to foam and bubble. All of a sudden, one of the bubbles burst and a little boy appeared out of it. She took the boy to her mother, who named him Y’wa, meaning “to flow like water.”

As this boy grew older, he began to realize that, unlike Mu Khah and her daughter, he was possessed with ta thoo ta pgho: the potency or power of creation. This potency allowed him to create new matter, to build on this desolate world. So one day, while Mu Khah and her daughter were distracted,⁸ he drafted the bird and the fish to help him smuggle tiny clods of earth from under the banyan tree and transplant them to another area. From these tiny clods, they slowly created the first landmass. [In some iterations there was a termite nest in the Banyan tree and these insects also helped Y’wa with this task.] Eventually, Y’wa, together with these animals, created all the earth that humans, animals, and specters alike reside upon. Later Y’wa folded the earth to create the hills and valleys that form the landscapes of the earth as we now know it. Upon forming the landscape, Y’wa set to work populating it by creating all the other animals and the humans that now exist. The two first humans he fashioned were a woman and a man, Naw Eh Oo and Saw Ah Dah.

After spending some time with his creations, Y’wa eventually decided to leave the earth to reside in Mu Hkoh (the sky, heaven, or firmament), never to be seen or heard from again. Upon leaving, he took most of the ta thoo ta pgho, the potency to create new matter, with him. However, he left a few deposits, littered in the landscape, in places he had touched, in a few exceptional beings such as k’sah (his “emissaries”), and a tiny fraction in the bodies of all male and female flora and fauna so they might also create new life. He no longer intervenes in earthly affairs, and the ta thoo ta pgho he left behind is finite, slowly waning for each generation that passes.

In these tales the history of creation is not abstract but rather embedded in specific contours of the landscape (cf. Hau‘ofa 2008). As such, histories are never inert. They continued on in the deposits of ta thoo ta pgho, of “potency,” that Y’wa left behind in places he had touched (I address these points more thoroughly in chapter 1). Yet this potency, this power of creation, could not be accessed directly. While Y’wa was revered as a kind of demiurge, in day-to-day matters one had to pray to, propitiate, and beseech his k’loo (ambassadors or emissaries), the k’sah. I delve deeper into who these emissaries are and their effects on everyday life and politics in chapter 3. However, their potency was also waning.

Through this Indigenous lens, the arrival of the white foreigner in the form of missionaries in the early 1800s, and some years later colonialists, was regularly grasped via the tale of a returning pu dee wah, or “younger white brother.” This tale is perhaps one of the most well-documented Indigenous histories among Pwakanyaw, residing in both Myanmar and Thailand (see Cheesman 2002; Hayami 2004; Marshall 1922; Renard 2003; South 2008). I was regaled with these tales on numerous occasions throughout my stay in these highlands and was regularly referred to as pu dee wah.

In broad brushstrokes, these tales detail how, at some undisclosed point after creation, there were three human brothers. These three brothers were to become the main groups of humanity: the oldest brother is the ancestor of all Pwakanyaw (here, in the sense of all Karenic-language speaking groups); the middle brother is the ancestor of all dark-skinned peoples; and the youngest brother, pu dee wah, is the ancestor of all light-skinned peoples. When Y’wa came to collect these first humans, the oldest brother, the ancestor of the Pwakanyaw, was away working in his rice field and they left without him. Later he lost his “golden book” of knowledge given to him by Y’wa, or it was stolen by his youngest brother. The oldest brother then found himself orphaned, alone, and with no written language. Eventually, he migrated to the Mutraw highlands along the Salween, being the first human to step foot here, and his progeny are the current Pwakanyaw residents.⁹ It is prophesized that pu dee wah, the younger white brother, would one day come back and return his older brother’s golden book, along with their lost knowledge.

In this framework, goh la wah, or white foreigners, be they missionaries or anthropologists, are frequently seen as this returning sibling and spoken of as obligated to help their long-suffering older brother. As one visiting elder insisted to me, the eyes of those goh la wah who do not help their older brother will turn khah (pale), implying they will become blind. This tale has been the subject of much heated academic debate since the 1970s (Hayami 2004; Keyes [1977] 1995, 2003; Rajah 1990; Renard 2003). Eschewing early missionary notions that these tales add credence to the proposition that Pwakanyaw are “fallen” Christians, these tales are regularly taken to be the result of the machinations of Christianized elites who have rewritten and co-opted histories to entrench their own political dominance. More recently, however, researchers have begun foregrounding the syncretic aspects of these oral histories to argue that they evidence an Indigenous mode of dealing with alterity.

Anthropologist Yoko Hayami argues that these stories illustrate an Indigenous regime of causality and temporality, where events are apprehended ex post facto, after the fact, as a premonition or a prophesy (2004, 29). In this manner, inexplicable events and alterity—whether in the form of pale-faced missionaries preaching the gospel or of visiting anthropologists—are drawn into existing narrative schemes and histories to contextualize them and give them meaning. Events, and indeed history itself, are understood not in a unilineal temporal sequence but rather in a far more circular and ad hoc manner: ex post facto. Histories are constantly reworked in relation to pressing current events.

These oral histories might be best understood as an Indigenous archive of the past, as “contact histories” that are constantly reworked. Indigenous histories are littered with fragments and remains of Christian tales. The names of the first two humans, Naw Eh Oo and Saw Ah Dah, are strikingly similar to that of the biblical figures Eve and Adam, and men who actively defined themselves as Thoo Hkoh or Bah Hpaw (a syncretic form of Buddhism) regularly referred to finding their wife as “getting my rib back.” In the next section, I elaborate how we might grasp these pliable and often playful histories and practices.

TOWARD A PLAYFUL MORE-THAN-HUMAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY

When approaching contexts in which people struggle over access and control of their landscapes, it is important to carefully balance political analysis with taking Indigenous cosmologies seriously. On the one hand, if one focuses too intently on Indigenous cosmologies, one risks becoming analytically blinded to the constant multiscalar struggles over power and ownership underpinning them (Bessire and Bond 2014; Hornborg 2017b; Vigh and Sausdal 2014). Such political struggles over possession lie at the very heart of this book. Yet if one focuses too doggedly on political struggles for power and possession, one risks treating the land as a set of extractable resources and eclipsing awareness of the interdependence of human and more-than-human lives (cf. Escobar 1999; Karlsson 2018)—a perspective at the heart of both Indigenous experiments with conservation and my research. In trying to understand politically complex places such as the highlands along the lower Salween River, and practices such as those of possessed landscapes, this fine balance can be exceedingly difficult to achieve.

When I began conducting fieldwork in the Mutraw highlands, I was determined to earnestly engage with both politics and Indigenous cosmologies. But I quickly noticed the ways in which the residents themselves were, in certain circumstances, less than deadly serious. People regularly engaged in highly indeterminate, pragmatic, and, at times, playful relations with histories and with the world. Beyond easy binaries, the politics of possession were constantly (re)negotiated in the grip of “worldly” encounters (Tsing 2005, 1). Here, the old missionary translation of the descriptor Thoo Hkoh as “worldly people” and “unbelievers,” whether intended or not, becomes immensely apt.

As Cho (2023) stresses is the case in the Christian Pwakanyaw communities she studies, the notion of “belief” cannot be understood independently from the practices/actions that animate it: Belief (tana, in Pwakanyaw) and action (tama) are intimately entangled. Stretching this understanding a little, I argue that what is at stake has less to do with belief (in the traditional sense of the word) in these more-than-human actors than their “power to work” (James 1907, 58)—their effect on the world.

In this manner, I suggest a methodological move toward a more playful more-than-human political ecology that is engaged and critical—taking both cosmologies and politics seriously, while remaining agnostic to both. I deploy the word playful here to emphasize the manner in which my interlocutors often spoke and acted: with a certain twinkle in the eye, suggesting both lightheartedness and a willingness to experiment with different roles and practices. Fittingly, Donna Haraway describes the constant oscillation inherent in contact zones between efforts to conserve a relational order and efforts to hash out new modes of relating as a form of play, where “play breaks the rules to make something else happen” (2007, 238). However, this is not to say that such play was frivolous or flippant; rather, it was playing seriously.

Taking Both Cosmologies and Politics Seriously

People’s day-to-day practices along the Salween River—particularly, their relations to the environment as possessed by biotic and spectral more-than-human actors, from tigers to ancestors—are usually gathered under the rubric of “animism,” or as one specific iteration of the mode of “hierarchical” animism prevalent in Southeast Asia (Århem 2016; see also Sahlins 2014). In this book, however, I do not tackle thorny issues of religion head-on. While I touch on the topic obliquely in chapters 4 and 5, a deep dive into the blisteringly complex and highly vexed nature of religion in southeast Myanmar is beyond the remit of this particular book. There is already a plethora of scholars who do a sterling job of describing and analyzing religion among Karenic-language-speaking groups across Myanmar and Thailand (see Buadaeng 2003; Chambers 2024; Cole 2020; Gravers 2007; Hayami 2004; Horstmann 2011b). Accordingly, I treat practices and cosmologies labeled as Thoo Hkoh/Moh La Pa Lah as “more a sensibility, tendency, or style of engaging with the world and the beings or things that populate it” (Swancutt 2019) and as “orientations” (Bielo 2015). These practices are an aesthetic and a way of being enmeshed with the world.

In previous studies from Myanmar, practices and histories similar to those discussed in this book are regularly categorized under the rubric of nats, and their interferences in human lives and politics are grasped as part of “supernatural belief systems” (Leach 1954; Spiro [1967] 1996). Thus, in Burma and beyond, “supernatural beliefs” are commonly understood as, in Edmund Leach’s words, “in the last analysis, nothing more than ways of describing the formal relationships that exist between real persons and real groups” (1954, 182)—that is to say, metaphorical representations of real events, which should be properly understood as symbolic (see also Willerslev 2007, 182).

A tendency remains in contemporary political anthropological accounts to pay respect to such “beliefs,” insofar as this respect does not undermine the “critical realism” in which scientific writing and politics are grounded (Graeber 2015; Hornborg 2017a, 2017b). A similar critical realism undergirding most forms of political ecology “starts from the premise that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it and that its very independence means that human knowledge is not itself reality, but a representation of it” (Neumann 2005, 9–10). A corollary of this critical realism in both political ecological and many political anthropological accounts alike is that, in the last analysis, tigers, mountains, and most of what we name “nature” more generally should be treated as inert resources to be managed by human political action (Peluso and Watts 2001; Sikor and Lund 2010). In such theoretical schools, spectral persons are reduced to “beliefs”—as opposed to “how the world is, as a matter of empirical fact, constituted” (Good 1993, 9; see also Apter 2017, 293). Implicit in the notion of belief is the tacit premise that, in opposition to “fact,” belief is essentially a “logical error” (Favret-Saada 1980, 5n2). But what happens when we do not take a point of departure in the notion of belief?

In this book I join the growing chorus of critical voices who have begun questioning the grounding of both political anthropology and political ecology more generally in a critical realism. Political ecology approaches often translate Indigenous peoples’ own histories and practices, hedged in the inextricable entanglement of human and more-than-human, into beliefs or representations of the “actual” struggles over control of natural resources (Escobar 1999; Karlsson 2018, 22; see also Chao 2022; B. R. Middleton 2015, 563).

Perhaps one of the most prominent voices pushing back against such approaches is Marisol de la Cadena, who attempts to bring Indigenous worlds and political accounts together in her work among Quechua people in the Peruvian Andes. She argues that belief does not necessarily mediate the relations between humans and various unseen more-than-humans (2015, 26). It was not so much, as she shows, that people “believe” in what they termed tirakuna, or “Earth Beings”—who bear a strong resemblance to the kaw k’sah (spectral sovereigns) I discuss in detail in chapter 3—as it was that an Earth Being “is, period” (2015, 26), enacted in everyday practices of being/becoming together.

De la Cadena’s argument bears a striking resemblance to Benedict Anderson’s ideas on power in Java as “concrete, homogeneous, constant in total quality, and without inherent moral implications … Power is” (1990, 22–23). Earth Beings, like power in Java and “potency” in Southeast Asia more generally (Chua et al. 2012; Errington 2012), are not something mediated and cannot be questioned directly but rather are hypostatized as part and parcel of people’s everyday reality. De la Cadena strives to “take seriously (perhaps literally) the presence in politics of those actors, which, being other than human, the dominant disciplines assigned either to nature (where they were to be known by science) or to the metaphysical and symbolic fields of knowledge” (2010, 336). In hypostatizing more-than-humans and taking their presence in politics on their own terms, de la Cadena attempts to marry research into Indigenous worlds with political anthropology by evoking Isabelle Stengers’s ([1997] 2010) notion of cosmopolitics.

This work follows a growing tradition in anthropology attempting to go beyond merely respecting and representing others’ realities and instead to take them seriously. Such a move opens up the possibility for Indigenous concepts and realities to unsettle and challenge our own preconceived suppositions. This approach has been variously described as “theory/practice of the permanent decolonization of thought” (Viveiros de Castro 2014, 40) and a “politics of ontology” (Holbraad et al. 2014). In this move, the political and critical imaginary of anthropology is shifted from investigating struggles over power and ownership toward allowing Indigenous practice to critique our own (theoretical) presuppositions (cf. Hage 2015).

I draw inspiration from these powerful critiques of approaches that would attempt to reduce Indigenous practices and cosmologies to beliefs and subordinate them as representation of paramount (“more real”) reality—while keeping in mind important concerns that have been raised toward such modes of critiques as either a continuation of colonialism or as a way of twisting in situ struggles for decolonization into mere metaphor (Todd 2016; Tuck and Yang 2012; see also Mehtta 2022). Along these lines, I attempt to take the ways people related to their environments, and their practices and politics of possession, on their own terms. This move to take Indigenous practices on their own terms, however, bears with it the corresponding threat of flattening social worlds and the politics at play in the shaping of what “is” (Bessire and Bond 2014; Vigh and Sausdal 2014, 63)—which, in turn, threatens to obfuscate people’s perpetual indeterminacy as to how to respond to constantly shifting political, economic, and ecological terrains.

Throughout this book I argue that, in the context of chronic armed conflict along the Salween River, Thoo Hkoh (so-called animist) practices were constantly interwoven with interminable cycles of armed violence and upheaval. Between spectral and indeterminate phenomena that may or may not be present and equally unpredictable patterns of insurgency, counterinsurgency, and dispossession, people were left to tinker with different ways of responding to and negotiating with these ever-shifting and unsettled terrains of war (cf. Pedersen 2011, 4–9). War reverberates through the web of both human and more-than-human entanglements, acting as a force capable not only of destroying relational worlds and the practices tied to them but also of generating them anew (Khayyat 2022; Ruiz-Serna 2023). Thus, taking Indigenous practices (overly) seriously, or even literally, threatens to miss the mark and flatten the complexity of people’s lives. In response I draw out the persistent sense of indeterminacy and doubt and foreground the distinct playfulness, in the sense of both levity and of experimentation, of people’s relations with the world.

Taking Doubt Seriously

To paraphrase de la Cadena’s statement on Earth Beings, for the women and men living along the Salween River, more-than-humans such as the kaw k’sah, the spectral owners of the area around a village, were—full stop. Unless, of course, they were not.

In the Mutraw District, I learned that sometimes a mountain was the seat of a kaw k’sah, and the appearance of a tiger was a harbinger that the kaw k’sah had become vexed by human moral transgression. In these instances, the mountain and the tiger were deeply entangled in day-to-day politics. At other times, however, a tiger was just a large cat, and a mountain was just a pile of rocks. Each time a tiger was spotted, it was not immediately taken to be the kaw k’sah or its emissary. Rather, only after careful observation and discussion of the effects it had on their lives was its presence discerned or denied.

In chapter 1, I follow Tim Ingold (building on the work of Alfred Irving Hallowell) in showing how, while landscapes always had the potentiality to be animate and to be possessed by unseen more-than-humans, “the crucial test is experience” (Ingold 2000, 96–97), in people’s pragmatic engagements with them. Michael Lambek describes this as a “pragmatic dimension” in which, when traversing possessed landscapes, people are less preoccupied with ontological questions as to “which of these spirits exist” than with “which of them has power to influence my life now?” (1996, 247). To this end, histories and practices were not so much ancient as adaptive, often grasped ex post facto (Hayami 2004, 29), after the fact. Like specters, they were indeterminate and constantly negotiated, selectively co-opted according to the situation at hand. It is only through such “worldly encounters” that, for example, a tiger could be known to be the emissary of a kaw k’sah or just a tiger. I return to these points in the epilogue to this book.

This pragmatic engagement with the world resonates with Cho’s work on Christian Pwakanyaw communities in Myanmar and the Andaman Islands. Pragmatism and ambiguity are, as she notes, a common strategy for survival and progress (2023, 113). Illustratively, in Pwakanyaw the term tana (belief) is derived from the verb na, which refers to the process of becoming conscious that something is real, while tama (actions) is derived from the verb mar, referring to “work”—intimating that things only become true though their actions in the world (57–58). Thus, belief among Pwakanyaw communities is “relational, fluid and constantly shifting” (59). In a similar vein, among Thoo Hkoh communities in the Mutraw highlands, when they talked of spectral persons, they tended to speak of their relations to them in terms of tana.

Tellingly, while tana can be rendered as “belief,” it has closer connotations with “faith, confidence, trust” in something or someone (Wade 1896, 716). People used the word tama when talking not only of their faith or confidence in the potency of unseen more-than-humans to have effects on their lives, but also of the political efficacy of their political leaders in the KNU. In everyday conversations it was often opined that people felt a lack of tana, as in faith or confidence in certain political leaders, on account of experiencing them as corrupt or ineffective. In this way, tana, bound as it is to action, bears little resemblance to the way belief has come to be known through enlightenment thinking (Apter 2017; Good 1993). Lacking tana in their leaders implied less that they doubted their existence than that they did not hold trust or confidence in the leaders’ capacity to have an effect on their lives. From this perspective one can assess the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of a particular entity without having to believe in it, in the sense of taking a stance on its ontological status.

Consequently, in my analysis I am less concerned with uncovering whether a particular phenomenon actually exists than with observing its “power to work”—that is to say, understanding its practical effects on people’s lives. As such, reality is constantly in the making, born through lived experiences with the world. This pragmatic and worldly approach is akin to the more phenomenological work of both Ingold (2000, 2006, 2011) and Michael Jackson. As Jackson states, “The world is never something finished … the world is always in the making” (1996, 4) and never quite settled. What is true, I found, is often what works in any given situation, what emerges in practical engagements and encounters with the world.

Taking a cue from multispecies studies, this book aims to “hold open a question of who—and what—is taken to exist and of how certain modes of existence are (and are not) made to count” (Dooren et al. 2016, 16). In this manner, a space is left for the possibility of unseen more-than-humans to have political effects on human lives. When such practices played out in constantly shifting political landscapes, they sometimes introduced more, not less, indeterminacy into the picture; spectral interventions led to a great deal of speculation “precisely because” they themselves generated indeterminacy in previously settled explanations and meanings (Bubandt 2014, 42).

Following these lines, throughout this book I strive toward a more-than-human political ecology: a method that is deeply inspired by the indeterminate, pragmatic, and playful manner in which the residents of these highlands constantly juggled and negotiated both the cosmological and political (ecological) entailments of living in possessed landscapes. This method gestures toward a way of conducting fieldwork that takes politics and cosmologies seriously and maintains a playful relation to both while also taking doubt into account. I attempt to turn method into play—and always to play seriously across the possessed landscapes of southeast Myanmar.