NOTES

1.   On the one hand, in referring to landscapes along the Mutraw highlands as “contested,” I am simply pointing to the manner in which various armed actors made competing claims upon them. Chiefly, the Myanmar state/Tatmadaw and the KNU/KNLA. On the other hand, by evoking the term contested landscapes, I elude to the way in which, as Barbara Bender notes, “the study landscape is much more than an academic exercise—it is about the complexity of people’s lives, historical contingency, contestation, motion and change” ([2001] 2020, 2). Accordingly, beyond territorial claims, landscapes are also the site of contesting cosmological claims, such as those over the “visible and invisible, the animate and the inanimate” (Yeh and Coggins 2014, 204).

2.   Karen Environmental and Social Action Research (KESAN), press release, May 26, 2016, https://kesan.asia/press-released-battlefields-to-refuge-the-salween-peace-park-in-burmas-karen-state/.

3.   During the period in which I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork (2016–17), the Salween Peace Park covered 5,485 km², but was expanded to 6,747 km² in 2021. I use the most recent figure to foreground the fact that this work is still ongoing, despite the current conflict. I return to this point in the epilogue to this book.

4.   This said, the border between the biotic and the spectral was often far from clear-cut. The suffix -khah denotes both hungry specters, such as ta mu khah, as well as other hard-to-see things, such as insects like htee khah, a kind of water-dwelling insect. Something similar existed in the English language in Elizabethan times, when, for Shakespeare at least, “bug” was once also a synonym for ghosts (MacNeal 2017, 9ff.). I return to this point in the epilogue to this book.

5.   These policies tied in to the colonial model of a “plural society,” in which different groups lived side by side but separate, only meeting in the marketplace (Furnivall 1948, 304), sharing a striking resemblance to later models of liberal peace (Paris 2004).

6.   Indicative of the continued symbolic importance of Thee Mu Hta, it was the first Tatmadaw base to be retaken by the KNLA when full-blown war returned to this area in March 2021 (Myanmar Now 2021).

7.   As a consequence, this tree was often referred to as Mu Khah Hklur, or the Mu Khah Banyan.

8.   While I later heard other tales that spoke of Y’wa’s mother, people consistently insist that this mother figure was neither Mu Khah nor her daughter.

9.   As I demonstrate in chapter 1, however, this story became more layered and considerably more complex as I delved deeper. I found that other stories tell of how the original inhabitants of the highlands came to a landscape that was already possessed, not only by various spectral presences but also by a semi-mythical group called the K’wa.

1.   This kind of colonial nostalgia is common across highland areas of what was once British India (Karlsson 2017).

2.   The suffix -kaw following the name of a village denotes the lands surrounding and belonging to this settlement. I return to the term kaw, and deal with it in much greater detail, in chapters 2 and 3.

3.   As I show in chapter 3, this phenomenon stretches far beyond Southeast Asia.

4.   This is a common feature among swidden-cultivating peoples from the Amazonas (Butt Colson 1973; Viegas 2016) to South and Southeast Asia (Karlsson 2011; Li 2014a). I return to this point in chapter 2.

5.   As we see here, in day-to-day terms people often spoke of a tree, a rock, a mountain, a pond, or a swath of land as having a k’la (a spirit), a nah htee (tutelary spirit/nat), or some other spectral presence who was spoken of as its k’sah, its owner. It is this emic practice that I gloss as possession/possessed to capture the entwined senses of both haunting and owning.

1.   Occasionally it is also used as a prefix. Northern Thailand is known as Kaw Kyaw Teh.

2.   In the north of the Salween Peace Park, there was a kaw called Kaw They Ghoo that consisted of several village clusters. This “federal kaw,” as they called it, came about due to one man, Saw Thay Ghoo, exchanging several golden drums for the right to these lands/kaw, which he then named after himself. Yet this, from what I can ascertain, was the exception that proves the rule (Paul, personal communication, March 13, 2017; for more details, see Paul 2018).

3.   Her husband—the man with a rude word embossed on his baseball cap, introduced in the opening vignette of this book—was unfortunately also one of the most accomplished rice wine consumers (together with his friend Hpa Kha Pa), such that Naw Daw rarely profited from this enterprise.

1.   One elder did relay to me his concerns that the cargo the road brought with it, such as T-shirts, instant noodles, and digital technologies, threatened to corrupt the youth and lead them to abandon traditional practices and eventually the village. These comments were, however, largely scoffed at by his fellow villagers.

2.   During my research in the refugee camps in Thailand in 2013, I learned this was not always the case in all areas of southeast Myanmar. One woman from a village downstream of the Salween, near Hpa-An City, told me how her mother was the village headman when she was a child. This area was under dual KNU/Tatmadaw control at the time, and the Tatmadaw soldiers would regularly beat the headman when he could not meet their (often unreasonable) demands. Reasoning that the soldiers might go easier on a woman, the villagers voted in her mother.

3.   I was never able to glean a clear answer as to why this title could only be inherited patrilineally, to the oldest or youngest son of the current holder, while all other forms of inheritance were traced bilaterally. In part this may be due to how, as I show above, only men could inherit the rites associated with making and maintaining relations with the spectral owners. However, the htee hpoe kaw k’sah himself, and elders I consulted, were adamant that this title could not “skip a generation” and be inherited by the eldest son of the current holder’s daughter. It could only be passed from father to son, regularly leading the htee hpoe kaw k’sah generation to “be lost.”

1.   These accusations largely stemmed from the contentious KNU election held in 2012, right before the initial ceasefire was signed. They were further fueled by a flurry of unsubstantiated claims that the KNU chairman received 2 million USD in bribes from the Euro-Burma Office (Naing 2016).

2.   As it so happened, the headmaster was the only person who actually obeyed these orders. Everyone else, not unreasonably, surmised that given their almost total absence from day-to-day life, these commanders would never be able to enforce such an order. The villagers continued to invite me to their fields as they wished, with no fear of being reprimanded.

3.   Fascinatingly, people used the phrase ta thoo ta pgho to describe not only potent/powerful places but also, as in situations such as this, areas where potential “valuable things” might be hidden, such as gold. This led to many productive misunderstandings.

4.   I would like to extend an extra thanks to Nick Cheesman for assistance translating this sign from Burmese to English.

5.   The conference sessions were named after the first Panglong Conference held in February 1947. At this conference various ethnic minority leaders met and agreed to join the Union of Burma, effectively paving the way for independence the following year.

6.   I return to this point in the following section.

7.   This argument bears a striking resemblance to the one made by James Ferguson in his book The Anti-Politics Machine (1994), which was similarly inspired by Michel Foucault’s “governmentality lectures” (2003). Ferguson posits that, much like the “peace trap” described above, political realities are commonly translated into “technical” issues to be solved by development professionals, all the while strengthening the state’s presence in the area (see also Li 2007).

8.   This animosity toward swidden cultivation echoes findings across the border, as well as those further afield (Forsyth and Walker 2008; Karlsson 2011; Peluso and Vandergeest 2011).

9.   In Ta K’Thwee Duh village, the umbilical cords of neonates were placed inside a bamboo tube and affixed to one particular vibrant tree that grew at the top of the village. Akin to an umbilical cord forest, this one tree served the purpose of keeping the children’s k’la strong and vibrant (like the tree), protecting them from malevolent spectral presences.

10.   The notion of translations has accumulated a great deal of theoretical baggage since Benjamin. It has become central to science and technology studies and actor-network theory (Callon 1984; Star and Griesemer 1989) and more recently to studies affiliated with the so-called ontological turn (de la Cadena 2015; Viveiros de Castro 2004b).

1.   In Buddhism this practice is known as Upodatha. During certain phases of the moon, not only monks but also laypeople observe the five precepts, including abstaining from killing living beings and from becoming intoxicated.

2.   As I demonstrate in chapter 4, this was the monk embroiled both in the incident in Thee Mu Hta and in the DKBA’s split from the KNU in 1997.

3.   Slightly confusingly, a natural clearing along the top of the Bu Thoe ridge, some fifteen minutes’ walk from Ta K’Thwee Duh, was said to be flat because it was at this spot in which the Ta Htee Ta Daw K’sah wrestled with Y’wa. Similarly, a mountain in the neighboring district was then said to be Y’wa’s bust that petrified after he was killed.

4.   While meaning literally “nature,” nay suh connotes all the contents of the earth that were not made by man, such as the land, the sea, the air, the animals, the fish, and the plants.

1.   So-called non-state armed groups (NSAGs) such as the KNU were regularly referred to by the Tatmadaw as “insurgents” and “rebels” and their revolutions as “insurgencies.” This categorization was often treated as synonymous with “terrorist” and was long used as a justification for the Tatmadaw’s brutal “four cuts” counterinsurgency. Indeed, as Martin Smith (1999, 259) notes, the Tatmadaw long referred to the armed opposition groups as “bandits” and “extremists” and thus did not accord them with political status. More recently, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and Arakan Army (AA) were variously labeled as “extremist terrorists” and “insurgents” by the Tatmadaw in order to justify a pattern of targeting civilians that a UN fact-finding mission described as amounting to “genocidal intent” (OHCHR 2020).

2.   These categories of protected areas used by the IUCN are now obsolete but can still be found archived here: https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/biodiversity/protected-areas/facts-and-figures/IUCN-management-categories.

3.   This point elicits a whole host of questions around the “rights of nature” and debates as to whether spectral or “non-secular” beings can and should be written into law. For a comprehensive review of the central debates around more-than-human law and justice, please consult Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey’s The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022).

4.   I found a broad consensus among the activists, Indigenous people, and academics alike in regard to this point.

5.   See https://knuhq.org/en/about/background, archived from the original on January 19, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20241217172418/https://knuhq.org/en/about/background.

6.   This source is now defunct, but see https://web.archive.org/web/20180711023854/https://www.iucn.org/theme/protected-areas/about/protected-areas-categories/category-v-protected-landscapeseascape.

7.   These three principles were first laid out in a briefer, the revised version of which can be downloaded here: https://kesan.asia/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Salween-Peace-Park-briefer-Eng-Oct-2019-revised.pdf.

8.   In KNLA company, he regularly claimed that the second in command of the KNLA and de facto leader of the Mutraw District, Baw Kyaw Heh, first came up with the idea after visiting the Salawin National Park on the Thai side of the river. In this telling, Baw Kyaw Heh then tasked KESAN with realizing his vision.

9.   For more information about this conference, see https://whc.unesco.org/fr/actualites/1601.

10.   Similarly, the Tatmadaw placed the blame for a flare-up of conflict in 2020 on the western edges of the Salween Peace Park squarely on the KNU, who they said was unable to “look at the bigger picture,” all while the Tatmadaw continued to conduct an unauthorized widening of a military road between two of their army camps in KNU country, in clear violation of the NCA agreement (Weng 2020).

11.   Accounts such as Doh K’Oh’s, of mass displacements and treatment of all civilians in “black zones” as possible combatants, have been meticulously documented over the years by the Karen Human Rights Group (see KHRG 2000, 2010).

12.   In a fascinating twist of fate, following the coup in 2021, history repeated itself. As peaceful protests turned increasingly bloody, urban youth, activists, and the exile government once more returned to the border, receiving shelter and training from established armed groups such as the KNLA.

13.   Foucault inverted Clausewitz’s famous adage that war is the continuation of politics by other means to argue that politics is the continuation of war by other means.

1.   As people were fond of explaining, just like humans, tigers prefer to take the dusty road rather than traipse through the often overgrown forest paths.