IN this chapter, I delve deeper into the differing ways in which landscapes were possessed up in the highlands along the Salween River. I demonstrate how, while things, animals, and (historically) people could and often were owned, the landscape itself could never be fully held in human possession. As the above quote illustrates, the current residents of these highlands understood themselves as far from the first settlers of these lands; it was already owned by others. As a consequence, they spoke of the landscapes they lived and farmed on as hee loh, meaning “borrowed,” from the spectral presences with whom they coexisted. This emic term implies a mode of ownership that comes closer to custodianship.

To capture this perspective, I describe these highlands as possessed landscapes, deploying the word possessed in its dual and entangled senses. In this manner, I aim to tease out the ways landscapes were at once already occupied or haunted by spectral presences or persons such as ghosts, ancestors, and territorial spirits and also, ultimately, owned by these specters. I attempt to hold in focus both the cosmological sense of possessed as occupied or haunted and the political-ecological sense of the word as referring to multiscalar conflicts over control and ownership. To this end, the notion of possessed landscapes delineates alternative modes of ownership (that I explore further in chapter 2). I show how people’s relations to their landscapes were oriented less toward control and management of resources, instead demonstrating deep “contact histories” of co-presence and highly asymmetrical relations of power, as well as improvisation and negotiation between the human and the spectral realm—to varying degrees of success. What is more, as I touch on in the introduction to this book, landscapes act as starting points that “usher us into exuberantly more-than-human lifeworlds that are constituted and composed of heterogeneous rhythms” of life and of war (Khayyat 2022, 28). Landscapes, as I conceive them, are made up of the entangled lives of humans, other species, histories, and specters, each with conflicting claims on the earth.

I begin this chapter by showing how histories of the region are neither abstract nor inert. Remnants from the past continued to enact their ruination on the present, like revenants. Certain objects were possessed by, and extended the legacy of, violent histories. Moreover, histories were wedded to the landscapes in which they unfolded—landscapes that people traversed on a daily basis—as traces or “footsteps” left behind.

REMNANTS/REVENANTS

While I was initially concerned that the villagers might feel uncomfortable when I photographed and filmed them, it quickly became apparent that many relished the opportunity for a photoshoot, endlessly posing for the camera. Each time I returned to the village, my small house would soon become inundated with people wanting to see, comment on, and take home the latest photographs I had printed out for them. Some insisted that I print out photos with me in them, “to remember” as my elderly neighbor Hpu Gay put it.

On one occasion, when my intrepid partner at that time was visiting the village, Hpu Gay came by and asked us to visit his home for a photoshoot. With a severe stoop, and a rattling cough from decades of smoking hand-rolled cheroots, he walked straight through the door, sat down on the floor, soon after asking that we “take a photo together, so I have something to remember you by.” He had laid out some of their finest Pwakanyaw clothes he wanted us to pose in for the photo. As I rummaged through the intricately hand-woven tunics and sarongs, my fingers fell upon a pair of black trousers with a texture quite different from the coarse cotton of the others. They had the undeniable feel of silk. When I asked Hpu Gay what they were made of, I found that neither he nor my field assistant Naw Paw knew what silk was, even after my rather crude explanation of it as a thread that comes out of a certain worm’s bottom. After some back and forth, we ascertained that these trousers were hewn from a parachute left behind from one of the many airdrops the British Royal Air Force made over these hills during World War II. These airdrops involved soldiers, guns, and (according to all the elders I met who still remember the taste) rather stale rice and rancid meat. Indeed, those old enough to remember these times talked incessantly about the airdrops, with all the drama and intrigue they entailed—lighting signal fires and dodging Japanese soldiers. These trousers and tales of provisions falling from the sky, like the photographs I took, helped people “to remember”—in this case to remember violent colonial pasts and bold acts of resistance. Simultaneously, these tales led many to ponder aloud how it could be that all the grand promises made to them by the representatives of the British Empire, that after the war they would be granted autonomy and prosperity, had come to naught. I, too, was left to ponder: What would future generations make of the photographs I gifted the villagers?

Once I started noticing how certain objects were wedded to deep histories of contact, violence, colonialism, and broken promises, I discovered that the village and surrounding areas were awash with remnants from the past. Some days later, in Hpu Gay’s oldest son’s hut beside their family’s paddy field, he brought out a British rifle he had stashed away in the rafters to show me. Perhaps coming from one of the airdrops or a colonial soldier, it had been gifted to him by his maternal aunt. The bullets, he explained, were very hard to come by and prohibitively expensive, so the rifle was quite useless to them. He hoped to sell it but had no idea who would want to buy it.

While this British rifle just so happened to be the only intact one left, countless others that had been reworked and recycled circulated in these highlands. One sunny afternoon, for example, I found one of the village elders, Hpu Waw, in front of his home repairing his own hunting rifle, which had once belonged to a Japanese soldier. Squinting in the morning sunlight, his grave face in stark juxtaposition to the pink tartan hoody and yellow T-shirt with kissing penguins he wore that day, he explained that “usually the barrel is the only part of the original weapon that remains intact.” Like most others in the village, he had carved a new stock out of fresh wood and added a firing mechanism fashioned out of bits of metal and elastic bands to make an improvised matchlock musket. To shoot it, the barrel had to first be filled with homemade black powder and lead shot bought in the local market, then tamped down. Hpu Waw and others use these firearms for hunting all types of game, from small birds to muntjac and wild boar. These were also the only weapons they had at hand to defend themselves should the Myanmar Army return again.

Helmets left by Japanese soldiers as they beat a hasty retreat in 1945 also continued to litter the Mutraw highlands. Most people had reworked the remains of these army helmets, much like they did with British and Japanese rifles, adapting them to very practical means, while some people kept them intact in hopes of future profit. The former became particularly apparent one rainy morning when I visited the oldest woman in the area, Hpee Thoo. She was one of the few who could still remember how bad the British airdropped rice tasted. Upon arriving at her house in a satellite hamlet of Ta K’Thwee Duh, I found her outside feeding her chickens with a rather peculiar-looking receptacle. When I inquired as to what she was using to scatter the feed, she chirpily replied, with a surprised chuckle, “What this? Oh, it once belonged to a Japanese soldier” (see figure 2). Her father, Gwa Nee, from the founding lineage of the village and the first Christian convert, had joined the British to fight the Japanese. During this time, he had taken the helmet from an emaciated Japanese soldier as he fled across the border. When the tide of the war turned, the Japanese forces were scattered. Their soldiers were left to flee through unhospitable forests in these highlands for many weeks, discarding their arms and uniforms, eating pig swill to survive, and were repeatedly chased off by grandmothers brandishing brooms, as many of the elders gleefully recalled.

Remnants such as these were not treated as artifacts, preserved for posterity like museum pieces. Rather, they were constantly negotiated and reworked, turned into something useful to the present predicament. Hpee Thoo’s father’s Japanese army helmet, part of long histories of highly masculinized armed conflict, oppression, and resistance had been turned upside down, literally and symbolically, so that it could be used in the deeply feminized routine activity of rearing and nurturing chickens. As this vignette suggests, histories of contact and violence were not abstract stories but tangible, often strongly tied to everyday objects such as trousers, guns, and helmets. Through these remnants, the past continually returned to haunt the present, like a revenant, threatening to break into the future. Such histories possessed not only objects but also parts of the landscape itself.

These remnants of the past are akin to what Ann Stoler (2008, 2013) calls “imperial debris.” While reworked to become part of people’s everyday lives, through them imperial formations persist in material form, demonstrating “unfinished histories, not of a victimized past but of consequential histories of differential futures” (Stoler 2013, 11). As such they “occupy multiple historical tenses” and “selectively permeate the present” (Stoler 2008, 194–95). The remains of a British parachute, repurposed into a pair of trousers, were not only part of latent violent pasts but also part of potential futures, laden with peace and prosperity. In conversations around these repurposed objects, I was regularly struck by how many of the villagers would add that they sometimes wished the British would return and recolonize the area again.¹ Histories up along the Mutraw highlands were always ongoing, entangled, and interdependent with multiple (potential) pasts and futures.

Many thinkers have sought to grasp the ways in which physical remnants can “occupy multiple historical tenses.” Jacques Derrida (1994) invokes the first line of The Communist Manifesto, “a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism” (Marx and Engels [1848] 2008, 31), to exemplify how histories constantly haunt the present, bearing with them the latent potentiality to (violently) refigure the future. Following this provocation, other scholars have invoked metaphors of haunting and ghosts as a way to grasp the “uncanny” fashion in which “ruins of empire,” from bombed-out pagodas in Vietnam to unexploded ordinance in Laos, continue to trouble the present and point to possible futures (Schwenkel 2017; Stoler 2008; Zani 2019). It is fitting that the literal meaning of a revenant is “one who returns” (Derrida 1994, 2) since, through remnants such as the objects discussed above, these (often violent) pasts have a reiterative tendency.

However, as Heonik Kwon points out, Derrida’s ghosts are general and allegorical: abstract “collective phantoms” like communism (2008, 15). In this way, they remain steeped in dualistic metaphysical traditions, inherited from the enlightenment thinkers, that draw a sharp line between a narrowly defined “empirical” reality and constructions of the mind or imagination. For thinkers such as Derrida, ghosts are always disembodied, disjointed, and untimely—descriptively useful but belonging to the realm of allegory rather than “reality.” Kwon, by contrast, stresses how in Vietnam (as was the case in the Mutraw highlands) ghosts, “although belonging to a past era, [are] believed to continue to the present time in an empirical, rather than allegorical, way” (2008, 2). Ghosts are part of the patchwork of everyday life, intrinsic to people’s being and becoming in the world. Not unlike imperial debris, ghosts are always tangled up in humans’ quotidian existence; thus, they must be constantly negotiated with—a process Kwon describes as “transforming” them (103–32).

With this key distinction in mind, I argue that the remnants of colonialism and violent conflict in these highlands were far from abstract and free-floating “collective phantoms.” Rather, ghosts were the very real manifestation of violent histories, which needed to be continually wrestled with and transformed. Histories were commonly tied to specific objects such as guns, helmets, and clothes. It was through these “possessed” objects that the past continually returned to haunt the present and presage the future. Furthermore, histories possessed not only objects but also parcels of the land itself. This became most apparent in the ghostly presence of landmines in the landscape.

Landscapes Littered with Landmines

Both the Tatmadaw and the Karen National Union have extensively used landmines throughout the counterinsurgency, leaving the borderlands between Myanmar and Thailand in the 2010s as potentially one of the most landmine-littered places on earth (KHRG 2012; Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor 2013). Sustained armed conflict and military occupation, however, seemed to constantly skirt around Ta K’Thwee Duh village itself.² Speaking to people who had lived through the conflict, which had slowly abated since the ceasefire in 2012, I learned that despite many false alarms, Tatmadaw soldiers had only ever passed through the area around the village on a handful of occasions. Each time, these soldiers were en route to strategically more important areas. Despite this, there were still areas in which people dared not tread, due to a fear of landmines.

One such area was a swidden field, just on the border to the nearby area of Htee Khu Duh Kaw, beside the road, shortly before it branches off to the Salween River in the east and the administrative capital in the west. As many of the villagers—including the surprisingly unfazed current cultivator Wee Daw, the gentleman with the four-letter word embossed on his cap we met in the introduction—explained, the KNU had given chase to a small group of Tatmadaw soldiers through this area after sustained fighting close to the Salween River. As these soldiers fled, they laid around three landmines on and beside the path in this area to perturb their pursuers. One had seriously injured a KNU soldier pursuing them—a local boy who moved to the camps and is now in the United States—while the other scared the living daylights out of a villager some years later when it detonated as he was burning this swidden field. As Wee Daw rather casually reminded me, “that leaves one landmine unaccounted for to this day,” lurking somewhere under the earth there.

Landscapes littered with landmines, much like helmets and guns left over from colonial times, are also remnants of ongoing histories of counterinsurgency and imperialism. Landmines are very much an empirical entity yet also hold a particularly haunting quality. Each time the rains come, the earth becomes mud, unpredictably relocating these explosive devices. The remaining landmine could be anywhere or nowhere at all. Mines originate in violent pasts and persist unseen into the present—constantly threatening to, quite literally, cut the ground from under people’s feet in the present, portending terrible potential futures in indeterminate ways. However, as Eleana Kim shows is the case in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, while mines can act as “area-denial weapons,” people are “loath to let perfectly good land remain uncultivated” and often carry about their day-to-day livelihood activities regardless (Kim 2016, 177–78). In a war zone, as Khayyat reminds us, “navigation, habitation and domestication are creative everyday acts that reclaim a place” (2022, 127). As imperial debris, landmined landscapes are more than mere reminders, cues that jog memories of the past; they are part of people’s quotidian life, obstacles they must navigate on a daily basis (see also Arensen 2022; Zani 2019).

This landmine’s potential presence haunted, and indeed possessed, a large swath of land beside the road along the Bu Thoe ridge. It was not, however, only objects of violent pasts, of colonialism and counterinsurgency, that haunted the present landscapes. Nearly all histories and the spectral presences tied to them were embedded in the land and water. As Epeli Hau‘ofa argues, “We cannot read our histories without knowing how to read our landscape” (2008, 73). Oral histories are inextricably entangled with the landscape they unfold in “right there … in front of our very eyes” such that in traversing the terrain, “familiar features of our landscapes keep reminding us that the past is alive” (73). Landscapes are always layered, thick, and sometimes viscous with history. This was especially the case in stories surrounding the demiurge figure of Y’wa.

“Y’wa’s Deadfall Trap Rocks”

Very early on in my fieldwork I found that some the most vivid and captivating oral histories recounted to me were those elicited as we traversed particular landscapes. One of the first, and perhaps most recurrent and elaborated, oral histories I was told related to a chain of five prominent mountain peaks that abruptly jut skyward out of the forest floor. These five rock faces demarcate Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw not only from two of its neighboring kaw—that is to say, “customary territories” (I define kaw in more detail in chapter 2)—but also from the locally defined climatic zones. On the west side was Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw and k’nuh htee, or temperate montane evergreen forest, and the eastern front that faces the Salween was kaw bway hkoh, or warm mixed deciduous teak forest (Trakansuphakon 2006, 36). The first time my attention was called to this distinct mountain chain was by the headmaster of the local school and grandson of Gwa Nee (and thus Hpee Thoo’s nephew).

While walking north from the village, we stopped to catch our breath, drink some water, and smoke a cheroot. The headmaster pointed eastward to a set of jagged peaks, crowned with forests a deep shade of emerald, characteristic of primary forest. His face cracking into a knowing grin under a meticulously maintained mustache, he explained, “that formation is called Y’wa Ma Htu Lay.” Naw Paw, my field assistant, translated this for me as “Y’wa’s trap,” but the full translation of this place-name comes closer to “Y’wa’s Deadfall Trap Rocks.” In his characteristically engaged manner of storytelling, the headmaster then went on to explain that the name comes from how, in an undated, presumably mythical time, Y’wa created these five lay (steep rock faces). “After folding the landscape to create all the hills and valleys, Y’wa began building a trap big enough to capture a giant white elephant, to stop it from following him and stay among the humans in this area,” the headmaster told us. This trap’s design was a hugely scaled-up version of a type of (ma) htu, or deadfall trap. People place these traps at regular intervals along fences they build around their rice fields to protect them from marauding rats and even wild boar. Tracing the contours of the mountain chain with his fingers, the headmaster showed how each peak was to act like the bamboo pillars of the deadfall traps they use in their fields. With these traps, a third weighted length of bamboo is suspended between the pillars so when the trap is triggered, it falls on the animal, crushing or capturing it.

The headmaster continued, “Before Y’wa could complete his work, he was tempted away by Loo Seh Buh [i.e., Lucifer],” who is also known as Mu Kaw Lee, the great trickster. “Loo Seh Buh fooled Y’wa into believing that his mother was deadly sick and that he must attend to her immediately, before he could finish the fifth and final peak that would make the trap impassable. When the white elephant arrived in this area, it found it could simply walk around the uncompleted deadfall.” Upon grasping that Y’wa had attempted to trap it, the headmaster explained, the elephant flew into a rage, and traces of its anger can still be seen today. At one bend of the Bleh Mah Loh River that flows unhurriedly along the foot of this mountain, there are still two deep indents in the otherwise shallow riverbed. These deep pools are the elephant’s footprints, from when it stomped in fury. He then looked up and beamingly pronounced that because of this footprint, we know how big the elephant was. “Its foot was this big,” he exclaimed, stretching his arms out as far as they would go, before joining them together to form a large circle. Near the top of one of the peaks there are also two large holes in the rock, made by the white elephant’s tusks as it continued its rampage.

* * *

These five peaks were one of the various spots in the landscape that continued to be possessed with ta thoo ta pgho, with the potency or power left over from creation (as explained in the introduction). Ta thoo ta pgho was used interchangeably with hsoo (locally pronounced as choo), meaning “strong,” and indicated an area that could not be cleared for cultivation and exploitation (the K’wa queen’s burial mound was among these) or, in particularly “strong” areas, that people ought not pass through unless unavoidable. These “footprints” were continual traces of the divine forces of Y’wa that maintained a historical link with creation, imbuing places with their strength/potency. In this way, histories carried on into the present and possessed the surrounding landscapes.

On additional walks with people out and about around the village, I found that vast swaths of the landscape were possessed with potency. Y’wa Ma Htu Lay was, in fact, one of the few places that bore Y’wa’s name and held clear ties to stories of creation. Others, such as “the forest where Y’wa hid the teak trees,” an incongruous coppice of teak trees surrounded by evergreen forest toward the Yunzalin River in the west, and “where Y’wa wrestled,” a flat open pasture on the northern border of the kaw, evoked less elaborate and well-known stories. Areas such as Y’wa Ma Htu Lay were considered strong/potent on account of the past lying embedded as “footprints,” the tracks and traces that have survived into the present (cf. Gan et al. 2017, g5–g6). Countless other landscapes were strong (hsoo) due to being possessed not only by traces, ghosts of the past, but also by various other unseen but felt spectral persons. People in the Mutraw hills lived in landscapes possessed not only by the ghosts of histories that continued into the present but also by unseen spectral persons that did not always have such deep histories. Here the line between haunting stories and these empirical entities became messy and blurred. While some specters closely resembled the way (colonial and violent) histories continued on into the present, other presences came closer to what might be defined as people. As such, I think of them as neither ghosts nor spirits but rather as spectral presences or persons (a point I come back to later). Another such hsoo place was Hpu Noh Noh Deh: the name of a small path, the surrounding forest, and the spectral presence or person that possessed the area.

“THE PATH THAT DRINKS YOUR BLOOD”

The first time I heard the name Hpu Noh Noh Deh uttered was by my neighbor Naw Htoo, a woman my age, when she was visiting Naw Paw and me one dark night and we exchanged ghost stories. Naw Paw joked that she already looked the part, dressed as she was in the long formless white tunic of unmarried women, her raven black hair loose, and the burning embers of the small pipe she constantly tugged on intermittently illuminating her face. She began with the warning, “You should avoid traveling down this small path to the west of the village if possible. This place is hsoo and it can be dangerous to walk here, especially at night. It is Hpu Noh Noh Deh’s path.” She continued the story by telling us that the path is “the place” of a powerful ta mu khah (a genus of spectral persons) and, as Naw Paw hesitatingly translated, “he will drink your blood.” I learned that this blood drinking was commonly spoken of as aw loh, meaning to snatch and to consume a person’s k’la, her “soul or spirit” (each person possesses seven k’la, of which all but one are detachable and can periodically leave the body). When a person loses their k’la, they become weak and are susceptible to illness—if it is not returned, they may even die. This was especially dangerous for people who were already weak, such as those who were sick or pregnant.

When I asked Naw Htoo if she had experienced anything spooky along this path, she emphasized that, while others do walk there, she tried to avoid it whenever possible. My interest piqued, I inquired as to where this path was, to which she replied that it was close to several fallow fields belonging to a rather outspoken elder named Hpu Hkee. She went on to tell us how, once, when this elder was walking along the path carrying a bag of paddy home from his field, just as the dusk was gathering, he stopped to rest a while. Just then he heard a sound of chains jangling and the heavy footfall of an elephant. But no matter how much he strained his eyes, there was no elephant in sight. As the sounds edged closer, he slipped his heavy burden and ran all the way home. Indeed, as Naw Htoo elaborated, many people heard sounds in the treetops, or footsteps on the ground, but no matter how hard they looked, they saw nothing.

After hearing this tale, I wanted to experience for myself how it might feel to be in a hsoo area such as this. Alas, neither the villagers nor Naw Paw were willing to accompany me to this area when I was eventually able to pinpoint its exact location, close to the village. Later, as the agricultural season picked up again following the short winter hiatus, I learned that the quickest route to Hpu Hkee’s paddy field was along this very path. And as we grew closer, he invited us to accompany him to visit his field, taking the fastest route through Hpu Noh Noh Deh Kleh (kleh meaning “path”).

Hiking this path for the first time with Hpu Hkee, I was struck by the deepness of the greens in the forest we passed through, many of the trees towering over the forest floor (see figure 3). Hpu Hkee explained as we walked at a brisk pace that the forest was so rich there because nobody dared to clear it. Long ago, a young and vigorous man, not yet married, decided to clear a patch here, certain that due to his youth, strength, and lack of family he would not be affected. Soon after he had cleared the land, however, he fell ill and died. Hpu Hkee explained that many attempts had been made to placate this ta mu khah and urge it to move on, but all had ultimately failed. Like the specter of the K’wa queen, it was simply too strong. However, one enterprising villager began planting cardamom seeds there some sixty years ago. When he did not fall ill, many households followed suit, carefully planting this spice in the understory of the forest and then harvesting it as a cash crop, while leaving the trees for Hpu Noh Noh Deh. In this way, they created their own vibrant agro-forestry area.

From the tale of this particular ta mu khah, we see how this spectral presence or person was strongly felt though never quite perceived by human eyes. So strongly was its presence sensed that Hpu Noh Noh Deh was spoken of as possessing the path and the forest surrounding it, in the multiple senses of the English word possessing: both in the ways the spectral presence continued to haunt and control the earth and in the ways the path was spoken of as also belonging to the spectral presence. Hpu Noh Noh Deh was the k’sah, or “owner,” of the path and the surrounding forest, which was “his place.”

This is similar to the way another genus of spectral presence or persons, known variously as ta yoh or ta wee ta nah, could take up temporary residence in and afflict a human body, continually returning. Classically, these types of phenomena have been grasped as examples of “spirit possession,” in which a spectral person temporarily occupies and controls a human’s body (Brac de la Perrière 2015; Spiro [1967] 1996, 157–63; see also Bourguignon 1976, 5–7; Lambek 1981), the body becoming a site of interaction between the human and spectral realms (Lambek 1981, 9). Yet, as more recent studies have pointed out, the etymological origin of the word possess describes the occupation of a particular place, from the Latin potis, “power,” and sedere, “to sit in” (Crosson 2019, 546). This is also the main sense in which I have been using the word possessed thus far: to refer to the way in which a particular history or specter can “sit in,” haunt, or control a particular place.

As Naw Htoo explained, however, “it is Hpu Noh Noh Deh’s path,” and the whole area belonged to this specter. The ta mu khah residing here did not simply straddle the terrain, as a ta yoh/ta wee ta nah takes temporary residence in a body, but held territorial dominion over the landscape. Landscapes, much like bodies, are sites of interaction between the human and spectral realm, as well as their contesting claims over ownership of the earth.

The second sense of possessed thus speaks to political-ecological notions of access to and control over land (Peluso and Watts 2001; Sikor and Lund 2010). While histories leave “footsteps” and traces that continue on into the present and haunt the landscape, spectral presences or persons such as Hpu Noh Noh Deh often had blurrier historical moorings and more definite identities, with names and (as I show in chapter 3) biographies. All the same, their stories and their continual effects on human lives also possessed the landscape.

This sense of landscapes being haunted or possessed by unseen presences has historically been grasped as a form of animism (Tylor 1920, 426–29). In Burma/Myanmar, where the vast majority of people are Buddhist, this phenomenon has classically been glossed, at least by Western scholars, as part of a so-called supernaturalism belief system that accompanies Buddhism (Spiro [1967] 1996, 3). To this end, place-based presences such as ta mu khah, described variously as tutelary spirits (Aragon 2003, 127) and in Central Burma as nats, are commonly addressed as supernatural representations of the “real” natural landscapes (Spiro [1967] 1996; see also Allerton 2009, 236). Yet, as I argue in the introduction to this book, tales such as that of Hpu Noh Noh Deh often trouble and unsettle notions of belief. In grasping these practices as part of a belief system, it is tacitly implied that, in the final instance, they are unfounded due to being empirically unprovable.

Rather than reducing people’s practices and cosmologies to a belief system, I attempt to take seriously the significant effects these practices and cosmologies have on people’s day-to-day lives and politics—while remaining attentive to their own doubts and skepticism. Accordingly, I treat these practices more as an outlook, an orientation, or a sensibility (Swancutt 2019) through which people engage with and attempt to sense and make sense of their worlds. Moreover, as Daniel Ruiz-Serna stresses in his griping ethnography on armed violence in northeastern Colombia, “it is not only peoples and their cultures that are at stake when war strikes but also the cosmos itself” (2023, 3). Accordingly, I take the ways warfare fundamentally warps and remakes the spectral realm, over and over again, equally seriously.

To begin grappling with the ways such possessive specters played into the everyday lives of these highlanders, I draw on more recent studies that, taking their cue from Tim Ingold (2000, 189–93), trouble sharp distinctions between “cultural” and “natural” landscapes. This newer crop of studies approaches the ways in which lands and waters across Southeast Asia are commonly treated as possessed by a clamor of unseen more-than-human life by describing them as “spiritual” or “potent” landscapes that people traverse and negotiate on a daily basis (Allerton 2009, 2013; Guillou 2017). Rather than seeing them as “sacred” places set apart from the “profane,” they are treated as part and parcel of everyday life. Building on these findings, I earnestly engage with the manner in which place-based specters across Southeast Asia are commonly referred to as “owners” (see Forth 1998; Lehman 2003; Pannell 2007), as a way of unsettling and rethinking notions of ownership and the politics of possession.³

I further explore differing modes of ownership in the following chapter so shall only touch upon them here. But by spending time in the Mutraw highlands, I came to appreciate how people did not inherit a certain parcel of land used for swidden cultivation itself as much as they inherited usufruct ownership over it. While one particular patch of land might be referred to as so-and-so’s field, all the land and waters humans lived on and lived off were spoken of as simply hee loh (borrowed): lent from their spectral owners, the ta mu khah and k’sah, with the ardent promise to return them at a later date (I return to this notion of borrowing in chapter 2).⁴

Moreover, as touched on at the beginning of this chapter, the current inhabitants did not understand themselves as the first people to have settled here. Fragments of pottery and jewelry that people dug up from time to time (as well as tales of buried treasures) acted as constant reminders that when they first came to this area, it was already occupied and possessed. Oral histories tell of how they inherited the landscapes they now dwell in from a semi-mythical group, the K’wa (or Lawa), who were forced to flee across the Salween River many centuries ago, now occupying the area around Mae Sariang (in present-day Thailand; see Kauffmann 1971, 1977). These oral histories tell of how the K’wa, too, did not arrive to terra nullius. They arrived in a landscape that had been folded by Y’wa and was already possessed by a bustling crowd of spectral presences.

Thus, in possessed landscapes, people not only shared the land and water with a whole host of ghosts, territorial spirits, ancestors, and other unseen beings but also constantly negotiated with them to borrow the landscape for cultivation. As I touch on in the introduction, terms such as ghost and spirit map awkwardly onto how people related to these presences; the human inhabitants of these highlands were constantly engaged in efforts to make and maintain good relations with their spectral counterparts, to be good neighbors. To begin exploring this, I take a closer look at one particular class of spectral person, the ta mu khah, such as the one we met along the path in the vignette above.

“The Realm of That Which Is True”

Although Pwakanyaw/Sgaw Karen-English dictionaries tend to define ta mu khah as a spirit or a kind of ghost, other classes of spectral presences fit this description far better. Ta mu khah come closer to spectral persons, unseen entities with histories and homes whom people engage in social relations with. Take the notion of ghost, for example. Ghosts that arise from bad deaths are commonly referred to in Southeast Asia as “green ghosts” (Gan et al. 2017, 7; Thwe 2003), as opposed to ancestors who died more “natural deaths.” In the Mutraw hills, such green ghosts were commonly known as ta reh t’kah or teh preh. These vengeful revenants of humans continued to haunt the areas near to where they suffered their gruesome demise, such as the river they drowned in or the house in which they were murdered. Stories of how ta reh t’kah and teh preh cling to these places and “eat” (aw loh) the “souls” (k’la) of the living who carelessly pass through there abound. These presences were paralleled in remnants and traces in the landscape that extended (often violent) pasts into the present.

Some ta mu khah, such as Hpu Noh Noh Deh, resonate strongly with what have been termed as territorial or tutelary spirits and nats (Aragon 2003; Spiro [1967] 1996) tied to a specific spot on the landscape. That said, other ta mu khah were known, like their human counterparts, to roam far and wide from “their places,” throughout these hills. The corridors of thick primary forest that were maintained between each hku, or “swidden patch,” for example, while acting partly as a firebreak during the burning season, were often referred to as ta mu khah kleh, or “the ta mu khah’s pathways.” As villagers in Ta K’Thwee Duh explained to me, these paths (kleh) were maintained to allow spectral people to move easily from forest to forest. In linking different forests together to form vast networks, they allowed ta mu khah to roam freely across these highlands. Consequently, humans risked provoking the ire of itinerant ta mu khah should they attempt to clear these paths. Doing so may cause the ta mu khah to lose their bearing or become trapped in a certain section of the forest, unable to get home. As such, it was ta du ta htu, or “taboo/prohibited,” to remove the trees and attempt to cultivate in these pathways in any shape or form (cf. Trakansuphakon 2006, 39). As I shall address more thoroughly in chapters 2 and 3, other genus of specters such as nah htee, who possessed certain bodies of water, and k’sah, or “owners/lords,” came closer to the definition of territorial/tutelary spirits or nats. Such specters were said to be the k’sah, or the “owners,” of certain rocks, rivers, ponds, fields, a whole mountain, or even all the earth and water in the area.

Spending more time in these highlands, I heard countless oral histories that spoke of the ta mu khah’s origin, not as spirits or ghosts, but as former friends to the human inhabitants who continued to roam the hills, living in their own villages and engaging in some social relations with them. These oral histories told of how ta mu khah once lived together with humans and were even enmeshed in mutual aid networks, taking turns caring for each other’s children while the other went to work in their fields. These stories went on to expound how often, when it was the humans’ turn to care for the ta mu khah offspring, the human parents would regularly neglect and mistreat them. Upon learning of how the humans were treating their children, the ta mu khah parents responded by making their offspring imperceptible to humans, either by placing a magic leaf upon their faces or slapping them so hard that they became invisible (depending on who is telling the tale). Ever since, the ta mu khah have continued to live side by side with humans, with their own villages and their own livestock. Only now, humans can no longer see them. As Andrew Paul found during his research a day’s hike north of Ta K’Thwee Duh, ta mu khah are “humans’ friends and blood brothers” (2018, 76). By some accounts, due to this kinship bond, it was not the ta mu khah themselves that afflicted humans, but rather “their animals, such as pigs and dogs that bite humans” when they violated taboos (76). In and around Ta K’Twee Duh, however, while most people agreed that there was a kinship between humans and ta mu khah, they replied rather incredulously that, just like other specters, it was them and not their dogs that fed on (aw loh) humans.

Ta du ta htu (taboos), especially those connected to ta mu khah and other spectral presences, were not to be trifled with. Hpu Hkee, the outspoken elder, had experienced this firsthand. A few times each year, a person from a neighboring village would arrive to Ta K’Thwee Duh in the morning and announce that they had brought with them ta du ta pluh, a special taboo day. The following day the villagers would be prohibited from going to their fields, from weaving cotton, and from engaging in any form of work; indeed, the whole village would be forced to rest. Albeit, as one headstrong young mother, Hpa Kha Moh, pointed out to me on one such taboo day as she balanced an infant on each hip, “we women do not get any rest days.” When the taboo day passed, one of the villagers would travel to a neighboring village and bring “the ta du ta pluh to them.” Many years ago, when one of these traveling taboo days was announced in Ta K’Thwee Duh, Hpu Hkee decided that, since he was strong and healthy, he could simply ignore these ta du ta htu. The next morning, he rose early and worked as usual on his field. While Hpu Hkee himself was fit and strong at this time, his wife was heavily pregnant. Tragically, when she gave birth a short time later, the child was born with his anus fully fused together (known in medical terms as imperforate anus). The infant died a few days later. When people ignore the particular set of ta du ta htu related to ta du ta pluh, I was told, it was common for their children to have birth defects in which one of their bodily orifices was fused together. Here, we see how the person who breached a ta du ta htu was often spared and their close family was affected instead. In this manner, the person who breached the ta du ta htu may, in many cases, rectify their k’ma (mistake), or at least refrain from repeating it a second time. This was certainly the case with Hpu Hkee. He has since studiously observed each and every ta du ta htu, even those that seemed to contradict each other. As he saw it, it was better to be safe and give all ta du ta htu the same attention than to be sorry again.

Returning to the ta mu khah, in all these differing tales, akin to many other places in Southeast Asia, “human life is mirrored in the immanent realm of spirits” (Allerton 2013, 8), with a doubling of both human territoriality and hierarchy (Holt 2009, 44). As I have shown, like humans, ta mu khah had their own places, villages, children, and livestock. The specter who possessed the path beside the village was referred to as Hpu, or grandfather, implying that he both had and was kin.

Delving deeper into these tales and experiences from the Mutraw hills, I began noticing resonances with findings from starkly different contexts, among other Indigenous peoples commonly classified as “animist.” Among Amerindians in the Amazon basin, for example, both animals and spectral persons are understood as “ex-humans” (Viveiros de Castro 2004a, 465). This was a notion shared by many in the Mutraw hills, where it was only after a process of differentiation that these specters “disguised” themselves, becoming invisible to humans, such as by way of magical leaves or shapeshifting. Their invisibility in no way made them less persons. They maintained their own houses, villages, livestock, and particular proclivities, just like other people. These parallels become even more apparent in light of fragments of stories I heard of how snakes once lived among humans. In each case, after a critical event, these snakes “left the humans,” as people put it. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro points to something similar in how animals become “disguised by their ostensibly bestial forms” (2004a, 465). This form of anthropomorphism established a state of affairs in which unseen persons, and to an extent some non-human animals, were treated as conscious subjects, able to communicate with humans. Specters and some animals were addressed as people who were to be engaged in reciprocal relations of respect. In both these contexts, we find that relations with what we in the Euro-American context might call “nature” can take on the quality of what we would term “social relations” (Descola 2013, 8; Kimmerer [2013] 2020; Viveiros de Castro 2004a, 465). The focus was on making and maintaining “good” social relations with landscapes and the specters who possessed them (Govindrajan 2018; TallBear 2019; Wildcat 2013).

Consequently, as touched on earlier, I am reticent to describe specters as spirits. In most circumstances, specters were understood and treated as people—albeit those who could see but could not be seen directly, necessitating particular forms of mediated relation (I return to this point in a moment). Specters resided in an intersecting and imbricated realm to that of humans, known as ta taw ta loh kaw, which directly translated means the “land/realm of that which is true.” Similarly, one collective (albeit rarely used) name for all these different specters, including the shades of the dead such as ancestors, was simply ta taw ta loh, or “that which is true.” While living human beings could not perceive ta taw ta loh, or their homes and their livestock, ta taw ta loh had no issues seeing each other, or seeing humans.

Humans were only afforded brief glimpses of this realm, through the jangle of spectral chains in the dark, through the feeling of one’s k’la being snatched and consumed, or through metaphor-laden visions, in dreams and during spells of fever/mental illness. In dreams and hallucinations, for example, everything is hkoh hkee, or “backward,” implying that what they experienced in their visions was the exact opposite of their experiences in waking life. Moreover, as I explore in the final section of this chapter, technologies of divination, such as consulting chicken bones and strips of bamboo, allowed people to peer dimly, and often imperfectly, through the veil separating the spectral realm from our own. Otherwise, humans could only gain this point of view upon shedding their bodies when they die. This spectral asymmetry suggested a hierarchy of sorts, at least in perception, in which humans were only able to engage in lateral perception with the human realm, whereas “those who are true” are able to perceive both realms simultaneously.

I found, therefore, that a whole host of spectral people not only shared these highlands with humans but also possessed them in the double and entangled sense of the word. In the final section of this chapter, I explore how, in their day-to-day lives, people negotiated with these already possessed landscapes, peopled by unseen presences whom they had to first discern before communicating and appeasing them—constantly striving toward making and maintaining good relations.

NEGOTIATING (WITH) POSSESSED LANDSCAPES

While I was out walking with Hpa Htwee, who swiftly appointed himself as my local guide when I began fieldwork in Ta K’Thwee Duh, he gestured to a gnarled and ancient-looking banyan tree, commenting that it has a k’la, a spirit. In this way one can say that it has a k’sah (spectral owner), he added, who possesses it.⁵ Yet, when I asked him whether all trees were possessed by a k’la, rather than his usual quickfire manner of responding in a breathless stream of explication, he took a moment to mull it over. Finally, he responded, “No, but you can tell this one has a k’la as it has more than six khaw [ladders]”—that is to say, prop roots that reach down to the ground.

Hpa Htwee’s measured response bears a striking resemblance to ethnographic work among other Indigenous groups, where seemingly “inanimate” and “inert” objects such as stones are grammatically classed as animate. This linguistic quirk did not lead to a state akin to that imagined by vitalists (Bennett 2010) of the whole landscape being infused with life. Rather, as Ingold (drawing on the work of Alfred Irving Hallowell) notes, people often spoken of as “animist” do not “perceive stones in general, as animate, any more than we do. The crucial test is experience. Is there any personal testament available” (Ingold 2000, 96–97). In what follows I explore how, in a similar vein, along the Salween River, while all trees, stones, ponds, and other spots in the landscape had the potential to be animate, this could only be qualified through people’s experiences of their animacy. People in these highlands, as I argue in the introduction, engaged in highly indeterminate, pragmatic, and playful relations with the world around them, appearing less concerned with uncovering whether spectral persons actually existed as they were with the effects they had on day-to-day life.

When I asked similar questions to the elders in the village about the animacy of certain spots in the landscape, I received similarly qualified answers. These answers were often to the effect of “it depends.” The animacy or personhood of a rock, tree, stream, or any other feature on the terrain could not be given in advance. While each bears the latent potentiality to be alive, or even to be treated as a person, one must look intently for signs that would suggest this to be so. This deeply pragmatic and experience-based notion stands in contrast to more generic notions of potency in Southeast Asia as “manifested in every aspect of the natural world, in stones, trees, clouds and fire” (Errington 1990, 22).

Sometimes the process of discerning whether something was animate or an area was possessed was a quite straightforward affair. As I have shown, for a banyan tree one can often simply enumerate its prop roots. In contrast, to determine the animacy of rice, a rite that mirrored a funeral rite was occasionally conducted when it was harvested. This rite quite concretely tested whether the rice grain, or the cadaver, was still possessed by a k’la, or a “soul.” The k’la was led away to the afterlife, then ritual practitioners checked to make sure the ritual was successful. Threshed paddy was weighed before and after the rite. If it weighed less, it was concluded that the rite had succeeded and the k’la of the rice grain had now left. If not, then the rite was repeated and the result weighed again until the practitioners were certain the rice’s k’la had departed.

As these rites suggest, animacy and indeed personhood were asserted by dint of possessing (and being possessed by) a k’la or some form of spectral presence such as k’sah, or “owners.” However, in most cases, discerning whether rocks, trees, ponds, and other swaths of landscape were possessed and/or possess life was far less straightforward than enumerating roots or weighing rice.

In cases in which there were no preexisting oral histories of the activities of powerful spectral beings, the process for discerning which specific parts of the landscape were possessed was not a given and was a fraught and indeterminate affair. The process often began with a person sensing, through their body, the presence of a specter in a certain area in the landscape. While particularly strong or potent ta mu khah, such as the one possessing the path west of the village, made their presence known by sound, most were perceived by humans only through the effects they had on villagers’ bodies. After a person had stumbled upon “the place” of one particular spectral person, they often became weak and/or sick, physically or mentally. This was the specters feeding on their k’la. The ta mu khah of Hpu Noh Noh Deh did just this to the young man who attempted to cultivate there, causing him to become deadly sick. When humans floundered into the specters’ “area,” it was reasoned that spectral persons could become highly vexed and retaliate by afflicting the body of the interloper by way of aw loh, snatching and eating their k’la, and making them weak and sick.

The focus of this book, however, while partly phenomenological in its outlook, is less on how it might feel to lose and regain one’s soul (as done in exemplary fashion by Desjarlais 1992) than on the effects these encounters had on people’s lives and how they negotiated them. Upon experiencing the sensation of their k’la being snatched away or fed upon, I found that people attempted to hastily make amends with the offended specter. In understanding the specters as the owners of discrete areas of the landscape, the residents of the Mutraw hills were constantly engaged in efforts to make and maintain good relations with the spectral realm—“to make friends” as they commonly phrased it (I return to this phrase in chapter 5). As a result, people’s relations with the world around them was not based on management or mastery, but rather on negotiation with fellow beings who had specific capacities and needs. One clear example of this can be seen in the case of Lee Kyaw Hta’s daughter.

* * *

When Lee Kyaw Hta’s daughter fell ill, feeling weak and tired, the first thing her family did was to march her down to the small clinic nestled in a valley below the village. Here, they received a rather general diagnosis, a fistful of paracetamol tablets, and doctor’s orders that she should rest. Indeed, the tendency for this clinic to simply hand out paracetamols and then send people on their way had earned it the nickname “para-clinic.” After some weeks, when she did not recover after resting and taking the tablets, her father decided that her ailment might have a cause that biomedicine could not address.

He then went to consult another kind of expert, Lur Gay’s older brother Dee Klee, a slightly built man with a face dominated by a large and bushy mustache. Like his brother, Dee Klee had converted to Catholicism many years ago when he married. Despite this, he was well versed in most Thoo Hkoh rites and had trained under several Pwakanyaw ritual experts in Thailand to hone his skills further. After Dee Klee asked Lee Kyaw Hta a series of questions, it transpired that his daughter had been playing beside a small stream adjacent to the villages that might be possessed by a nah htee, a kind of tutelary spirit/nat. To make sure, Dee Klee conducted a su ta gah daw, a divination. In this case the divination was conducted with chicken thigh bones, but it can also be done with strips of bamboo or the stem of a certain plant. During this form of osteomancy, a question was asked and then the thigh bones were consulted to discern whether the omen was good—that is, a positive answer—or bad. In this manner they were able to quickly confirm that the stream was possessed by a nah htee. “The girl must have angered it by carelessly passing by, leading it to aw loh her and make her weak and tired,” Dee Klee surmised. Through a series of yes/no questions to the oracle, he ascertained that the nah htee required a chicken, a bottle of rice wine, cigars, betel nut, and a simple chicken curry dish before it would relinquish its hold over her.

When I caught up with them later, I found them beside the stream hard at work constructing a ta lu—literally, a place of nourishing or feeding. The ta lu took the form of a spirit house made of bamboo. The chicken Lee Kyaw Hta had with him in a small bamboo basket was summarily slaughtered, the blood spread over the ta lu, and the chicken cooked into a curry. When these preparations were complete, all the other items were placed inside the spirit house, a small plate was provided for the best morsels of chicken curry, and a cup with a straw for the alcohol was laid out. A short prayer was then incanted, with hands pressed together and fingers splayed out, entreating the nah htee to relinquish the girl’s k’la. People and animals passed uninterestedly by as these two men rather unceremoniously carried this out and ate the rest of the curry in silence. The men and the nah htee then ate together beside this small stream. Afterward, the ta lu was left untouched until it finally rotted or was knocked down by animals. Only time would tell if this would cure the girl, they explained. When I asked Lee Kyaw Hta how his daughter was doing some days later, he explained that the ritual had not worked, so they would try again, in another place, until she recovered. The last time I saw her, she was tearing around the village once more.

* * *

This episode of making contact and negotiating between the human and spectral realms was, in many ways, typical in these highlands. Negotiating possessed landscapes was a fraught business. What becomes apparent here is the “pragmatic dimension” (Lambek 1996, 247) of inhabiting such landscapes: the process of trying to constantly figure out how to maintain good relations with spectral beings. People were less preoccupied with ontological questions as to “which of these spirits exist” than with practical questions like “which of them has power to influence my life now?” (247). Spectral persons’ capacity to have an effect on human lives—the tama or action/work (Cho 2023) they have on the world, as felt in the body becoming weak and sick—was the paramount concern of the women and men I came to know in the Mutraw highlands. On stumbling upon such a specter, a process of highly mediated negotiation was enacted. Specters were regularly treated as conscious subjects able to communicate with humans and, as such, were addressed as people that could be engaged in reciprocal relations of respect. This was very much in evidence in the case of Lee Kyaw Hta’s daughter.

The encounter between the nah htee and Lee Kyaw Hta’s daughter took place in a more-than-human contact zone, involving both asymmetrical power relations, improvisation, and constant negotiation (Haraway 2007; Isaacs and Otruba 2019). Encounters with the landscape were characterized less by control or management of scarce “resources” than by an open-ended asymmetrical grappling and negotiation between the human and the spectral realms. In the case of Lee Kyaw Hta’s daughter, for example, the men did not attempt to turn the specter to their own needs, to co-opt it, or to transform it, as Kwon (2008) has shown was the case with ghosts of violent conflict in Vietnam. Instead, what followed was more like a negotiation, by way of propitiation, to attempt to straighten out relations between the human and spectral realms that had become strained as a result of the girl’s careless intrusion.

Hpu Waw once described the way in which a certain specter possessing a path or road aw loh (eats) a person’s k’la as “like putting the person’s k’la in prison.” When this happens, the specter demands not only alcohol and food but also some coins, as a fee or even a bribe to release the k’la again. This resonates with the ways in which, as Marisol de la Cadena shows, “offerings” among the Runakuna in Peru are locally referred to as a “payment” and echo acts of bribing judges (2015, 95). Following de la Cadena, I prefer to see these acts as relations not of co-option or transformation but of obligation and alliance, resembling what, as I discuss in more detail in chapter 2, Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret call an “ecology of obligations” (2016, 27). In each instance, lu ta involved feeding the spectral person in question to curry their favor. The ravenous spectral person was entreated to come and eat together with the humans. The two men in the vignette above ate together after first giving the best morsels of food to the nah htee as a way to “pay back” and to realign relations between the human and spectral realms.

As I argue in this chapter, the Mutraw highlands might best be described as a possessed landscape, where the lands and waters are not only haunted by spectral persons but also ultimately owned by them. A corollary of this was that people carefully negotiated landscapes, mindful that they might at any time disturb the “area” of a certain unseen, more-than-human person and constantly attempting to realign relations by way of feeding and eating together with them. These findings then illustrate a specific regime of ownership and of sovereignty that prevailed in these highlands. It is toward these alternative modes of ownership and sovereignty that I now turn in the next two chapters. In part 2, I go on to show how these practices and cosmologies were translated and rescaled into the Salween Peace Park.