RETURNING to the opening vignette of chapter 2, this chapter delves deeper into the implication of the roadbuilding project on politics and sovereignty. Since longer than anyone can remember, the Myanmar state has remained distant in the Mutraw hills. While the Karen National Union acted as the de facto state, it, too, struggled to extend its influence there, becoming threadbare along the Bu Thoe ridge. This road was the KNU’s first large infrastructure project to reach this elevation. In people’s day-to-day lives, the state was only felt faintly. What is more, there was a dearth of local human actors and institutions vested with the de facto power and authority to push back against the KNU state, who were building this road.

These highlands, however, did not quite fit the descriptor of “non-state spaces” or pockets of anarchy, as similar small-scale societies at the edges of states in Southeast Asia tend to be described (Gibson and Sillander 2011; Scott 2009). The term anarchy, derived from the Greek word an-arkhos, is commonly approximated to “no ruler” (Morris 2014, 62) or “without government” (Barclay 1998, 8–10). Yet, along the Bu Thoe ridge, rulers and sovereignty at large were not so much absent as they were spectral. As opposed to the Myanmar and KNU (revolutionary) states, the spectral world regularly intervened in human affairs, having palpable, yet unseen, effects on local politics, rooted in people’s past embodied experiences of living in possessed landscapes (cf. Govindrajan 2022; Thomas and Masco 2023).

I speak of this mode of politics as spectral sovereignty. Strikingly egalitarian relations between villagers were hedged in wider notions of the paramount political authority and sovereignty of spectral presences. Residual local political sway was largely derived from negotiating power—that is to say, the power to negotiate and the negotiation of the power of distant others. I end this chapter by exploring how these Indigenous practices and cosmologies unsettle many hegemonic notions of sovereignty, gesturing toward alternate modes of politics that, as I explore further in subsequent chapters, other movements were tapping into.

AT THE FRAYED EDGES OF STATE SOVEREIGNTY

One striking facet of the tale of road construction along the Bu Thoe ridge was that, as has long been the case in these highlands, the Myanmar state remained largely distant. As noted in the introduction, the period in which I conducted my fieldwork, from 2016 to 2017, was bookended geographically and temporally by conflicts arising from the Tatmadaw-led roadbuilding projects. To the southeast, in September 2016, just months before I began my fieldwork, conflict flared up around an access road to the contested Hatgyi hydroelectric dam (Bright 2019, 79–80; Karen Rivers Watch 2016). Then, from March 2018, sporadic armed clashes erupted around the construction of a road that also aimed to concatenate military bases (albeit Tatmadaw ones), to the northwest in Ler Mu Plaw, a day’s hike away (Moo and O’Connor 2018; Nyein 2020). The construction of the “car road” along the Bu Thoe ridge seven years prior to my arrival, described in chapter 2, was however a purely KNU project. The Tatmadaw and the Myanmar state were only implicated in its construction insofar as the road was a part of the KNU’s defense strategy to keep them at bay.

The relative absence of the Myanmar state followed the pattern I have illustrated previously, of conflict and state conquest tending to simply pass through these wind-swept uplands, on the way to more strategically significant areas. This pattern, in turn, followed deep histories of the wider Salween District. The Mutraw hills were treated by precolonial and colonial government alike as a frontier area, under indirect rule through strategic alliances with local “tribal chieftains,” never brought fully under centralized state control (Furnivall 1960, 12; Jolliffe 2016, 9). During my fieldwork I found that, in much the same way, the greatest presence of the Myanmar state in the areas around Ta K’Thwee Duh was a Tatmadaw military encampment some two- or three-hours’ hike away, down along the banks of the Salween River. In people’s day-to-day lives, especially since the ceasefire in 2012, the Tatmadaw’s presence was largely only felt in the patchy military-owned Myanma Posts and Telecommunications mobile network coverage that emanated from this base, which could be caught at a few spots along the ridge (when the wind was not blowing too strongly). Indeed, nearly all trade was conducted in Thai baht; Myanmar kyat notes were either refused outright or accepted begrudgingly at unfavorable exchange rates. Moreover, the vast majority of items sold in the small tea shops along the Bu Thoe ridge were imported from Thailand by the fleet of long-tail boats that plied the Salween day and night, then freighted up the mountainside along the span of the “car road” and beyond by motorbikes. The cars and motorbikes negotiating this crumbling and constantly shifting road also drove or rode on the lefthand side. “It’s just like Thailand,” people would exclaim each time I veered over to the righthand side of the road when I rode a motorbike up there. One consequence of the protracted armed conflict was that there were few passable roads to the markets inside Myanmar, constraining the flow not only of goods but also of people coming from Central Myanmar. Burmese-speaking people who were not Tatmadaw soldiers only made it up there on a handful of occasions that people could recall. When they did, they were often met with considerable trepidation, suspicion, and sometimes outright violence.

Consequently, people felt the sovereignty of the Myanmar state largely through its faint effects: in rumors of the movements of Tatmadaw troops on the ground, the roar of fighter planes and helicopters overhead, and the traces left in its wake, of scorched earth and landmines underfoot—and patchy mobile coverage. However, as the events following the KNU attempts to construct a road along the Bu Thoe ridge demonstrated, where the sovereignty of the Myanmar state contracted, rather than pockets of non-state space opening up in its stead (Scott 2009, 60–61; see also Rajah 1990, 120; South 2008, 38–39), the sovereignty of the KNU expanded.

From its very formation as the Karen National Association in 1881, this so-called non-state armed group (NSAG), much like its sister movements such as the Kachin Independence Organisation in the north and the New Mon State Party in the south, not only struggled against the Burmese state but also struggled to attain greater self-determination. The KNU has long strived to establish the autonomous Karen State of Kawthoolei. To this end, in many of the so-called liberated areas under its control along these highlands, the KNU acted as the local state. This was not, however, without a significant degree of overlapping and contestation (Harrisson 2021; Harrisson and Kyed 2019; South 2018). The presence of the KNU was most profoundly felt in the larger villages in the foothills and valleys, such as the administrative center of the Mutraw District, Deh Bu Noh, and the seat of the local village tract close to the Salween River. Here, the KNU had not only cornered the “markets of protection” (Shah 2013, 489), in the form of the Karen National Liberation Army and police force (as many violent groups, from mafias to “rebels,” excel at); they were also often the sole providers of care, education, justice, and transportation in these areas. The KNU had its own schools, clinics, and courthouses, with state departments dedicated to forestry, mining, and education—along with all the accompanying bureaucracy. As one young judge in Deh Bu Noh explained to me, they even have a special “witchcraft law” governing the use of magic and would soon have their own prisons. The road itself was commissioned by the Department of Transportation and Communication of the KNU, and all motorbikes that traversed it were required to pay road tax each year—proof of which must be clearly displayed at all times and subject to inspection at each checkpoint along the road.

In this light, the KNU is commonly described as a NSAG (Kyed and Gravers 2014) and its control over its liberated areas as an example of so-called rebel governance (Brenner 2019; Loong 2025). Grasping the KNU as “rebels” helps foreground how they not only seek to create new socio-political orders by use of, or threat of, armed violence but also provide vital services such as health, education, and justice systems (Kasfir 2015; Mampilly 2011). I would argue, however, that “rebel governance” fails to capture the full extent of what the KNU have attained in their liberated areas. The KNU governance apparatus is modeled, at least in part, on the former colonial system and has its own flag (that flew above the school at Ta K’Thwee Duh), national anthem (which the school children sang each morning), and complex governance structures. In its liberated areas, the KNU has accrued most of the accoutrements of what would usually be associated with a modern nation-state. Mutraw and the other liberated areas form Kawthoolei, the territorialized nation-state that the KNU has struggled to attain for over seventy years. Moreover, and pivotal here, people working for the KNU and its affiliates strongly rejected the labels of “rebels” and “insurgents,” preferring to see themselves as revolutionaries (for more on this, see chapter 6). Accordingly, I refer to the KNU as a (revolutionary) state. After all, for the past seventy years, they were the closest that most people in the Mutraw hills had come to experiencing a state.

The process of building a road along the Bu Thoe ridge, however, brought to light how the highlands were themselves divided into hills and valleys. And, much like its historical predecessors, the KNU state also struggled to expand into the higher elevations of the Mutraw hills. Much like in other upland areas of the Southeast Asian massif, this difficulty could, in part, be accounted for by the “friction of terrain” of the steep slopes and dense forests of this area and KNU’s lack of “distance-demolishing” technologies to surmount this friction (Scott 2009). While the villagers had planted the KNU’s rising sun flag in the soil at the top of the village, the large infrastructural project to build the road was the first time the KNU had managed to establish themselves firmly along this ridge, beyond small outcrops of basic military infrastructure. As one Indigenous activist lamented to me, capital from development and infrastructural projects, be they KNU or NGO led, had a habit of “jumping over the mountain” and ending up on either side in the lower elevations. Consequently, the majority of the primary schools and clinics along this ridge were funded by a spattering of cross-border, often Christian faith-based, organizations with only loose ties to the Karen Education and Culture Department and Karen Department of Health and Welfare branches of the KNU government. Their main offices and activities remained in the settlements at lower altitudes.

In this light, the KNU state resembles Indigenous modes of governance that Stanley Tambiah (1976) describes as galactic polities, possessing a mandala-like cosmological topography (see also South 2008, 2, 38–39). Akin to the precolonial Burmese and Thai states that once ruled over this area, the KNU’s sovereignty radiated outward from its centers of power at lower elevations, slowly losing strength toward the periphery. Tambiah describes this as analogous to a “field of radiation of light or heat from a source,” modulated by pulsating alliances (1976, 123; see also Anderson 1990). This description resonates with Thongchai Winichakul’s (1994) observation that “premodern” states in Southeast Asia lacked defined boundaries and that sovereignties overlapped prior to colonialism. In view of this it becomes clear that villages such as Ta K’Thwee Duh sat at the interstices between the KNU and the Myanmar/Thai state where, rather than a power vacuum, a space opened: a contact zone for continual encounters with and negotiation of power and sovereignty.

Most villagers living along the Bu Thoe ridge whom I had a chance to talk with spoke warmly about this kah kleh, or “car road.” Indeed, a large proportion of them, including Hpu Hkee, had helped with its construction. While many protested the particular route it was projected to take, few disagreed with the road itself in principle.¹ Far from attempting to constantly evade the state, on the whole people desired and welcomed more KNU involvement in their area, despite holding deep reservations. Many hoped that a closer connection with the KNU would allow them to make claims on it and “construct [more] desirable forms” of dependency (Ferguson, “Declarations,” 2013, 237). This aligns with Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox’s (2015, 1–17) work, in which they show how roads as “public works” come to matter: provoking conflicts and negotiations over ownership as well as becoming entangled with desires for connectivity and prosperity. In this manner, struggles over the path of this particular road were indicative not of wholescale rejection of the KNU’s sovereignty but rather part and parcel of people’s processes of negotiating with it. Where the KNU’s influence became threadbare not only did alternating modes of ownership emerge but also of sovereignty. In the following pages, I take a closer look at the key human actors and institutions involved in the political process in and around Ta K’Thwee Duh—the kaw, the headman, the ceremonial leader, and the elders, as well as the role of moral sentiments—before moving on to demonstrate the central role of the sovereignty of the spectral realm in day-to-day life.

KAW POLITICS: NEGOTIATING POWER

Throughout upland southeast Myanmar, as touched on in chapter 2, the basic unit, or perhaps more precisely patch, of political governance (with a few exceptions) was the kaw (which were clearly demarcated; see figure 6). Each main village in a kaw elected a person to represent them, known as the tha waw tha pgha, or the “old heart of the village.” In English this person is more commonly referred to as the headman. The headman and vice-headman were elected by popular vote once every four years in a meeting that gathered all the inhabitants of this area to cast their vote by a show of hands. In Ta K’Thwee Duh, the headman had always been a man, and the holder during my research there, during most of 2017, was a Baptist man called Hpa Thoo.² In Ta K’Twee Duh Kaw the largest sub-village/hamlet also had its own sub-headman, while the elected headman and vice-headman of the main village remained the key figures in most political matters.

The “Old Heart of the Village”

Initially I was convinced that the headman was a key political actor and that the headman office played a central role in the delegation of land within each kaw. During the period between January and February, when people select which swidden patch (hku) they will cultivate for the coming agricultural season, the villagers regularly visit the headman to discuss it with him. Talking to Naw Ghaw (the woman who dreamt of an overflowing spring at the top of Ta Bu Kyoh) one chilly February morning, I learned that her husband had just returned from paying a visit to the headman of a neighboring kaw. She explained that, since he was considering cultivating there this agricultural season, his first port of call had been the headman’s house, to broach the subject of borrowing land in their kaw.

To learn more about the role of the headman in the division of land, I began spending time with Ta K’Thwee Duh’s headman, Hpa Thoo, a reserved and laconic man who usually only opened his mouth (especially after his tongue had been loosened by a little rice wine) to playfully tease people. Through our stilted conversations I learned that, while people often came to him when they were deciding which land they would cultivate that season, in his words, “I have no authority to make decisions or give orders in such matters.” He was, however, required by the KNU to keep a ledger of where each person farmed each year to facilitate the collection of taxes, which was also conducted in this lull in agricultural activities. The reason people visited the village headman’s home during this period was not to obtain his permission but rather to take a look at the ledger (or get someone who could read to look for them). The ledger helped people get both a better overview as to where others were planning on cultivating this season and to whom they must ask for permission to clear a certain fallow over which they did not hold primary usufruct ownership. Thus, while people consulted him for information, the headman had little if any influence on how land was actually cultivated and shared. In a way, he and his home acted more as a hub from which negotiations over land use could begin. As he so pointedly put it, “People just discuss it between themselves and decide like that.” As I came to understand, in most cases, the headman’s political power stretched little beyond his authority to call the villagers to meetings on certain subjects and make decisions via consensus.

Inevitably, the headman called meetings, to be held in his house, at the behest of others. At these meetings, the people in attendance discussed the matter brought forward between themselves, listening to different sides of the subject at hand, before there was a show of hands to attempt to come to a consensus decision. If no consensus could be reached, in most cases, no action was taken. The headman and his house, in many ways, acted as a forum for facilitating negotiations. Spending more time with Hpa Thoo, I learned that his elected role as headman largely revolved around administrative duties such as calling meetings, helping people find out where they should go to request permission to cultivate a certain area, or relaying orders from the KNU (cf. Boutry et al. 2017, 64; Huard 2019, in Upper Burma; Karlsson 2011, 242–43, in Northeast India). He also acted as the village representative at KNU and Salween Peace Park meetings, returning home to report back what he had been told. Indeed, much of the headman’s duties centered on him acting as an intermediary between the KNU and his fellow villagers.

Official orders from the KNU and their armed wing, the KNLA, were usually conveyed to the village in the form of a written request addressed to the village headman, delivered by motorcycle courier. In most cases, this was a signed letter from the commander of the local KNLA encampment formally requesting that the villagers provide corvée labor. The headman’s job was to collect villagers for such labor, which during peace time largely consisted of portering supplies between KNLA camps (less often now that the camps were connected by road) and assisting with the rebuilding of KNLA bases after the monsoon season. At times of heightened conflict, villagers were occasionally drafted into serving as guides and even to bear arms.

The collection of taxes to the KNU also went through the headman’s house, collected each February, after the harvest, by the village tract leader (again, always a man in this area) and his entourage. The amount of land each household cultivated the previous year was recorded in the ledger in the headman’s home and tax paid per acre, as either a portion of the rice harvested or a cash equivalent. Those few households with paddy fields were levied an additional fixed amount each year, regardless of whether or not they had actually cultivated this field the previous season. On his yearly visit to collect taxes, the KNU village tract leader and his entourage, including the captain in charge of the KNLA detachment for this village tract, also collected new conscripts. As villagers (often ruefully) explained to me, each household was obliged to “give one son to the KNLA” as a soldier who would serve “for life” and one child to serve for just one year.

As these examples illustrated, while these villagers had relatively warm relations with the KNU, contact was both sporadic—KNU officials rarely visiting and communicating largely through letters—and entrenched in hierarchy. Once again, the headman’s political position was mainly that of an intermediary between the villagers and the KNU. As Stéphen Huard notes is the case in Central Myanmar, “Being a village headman was a matter of craftmanship and political navigation” (2019, 20). The headman’s job consisted largely of hosting KNU officials each February, showing them the ledger, and calling a meeting when taxes were collected. As Hpu Gay, who served as headman for over ten years, explained, if a household was not able or willing to pay, the headman often acted as an arbitrator between them and KNU/KNLA officials to attempt to resolve such impasses. The headman himself was thus neither vested with the authority to demand that the villagers carry out an order, nor did he have the capacity to coerce them to do so. As such, while relations outward, toward the KNU, could at times be strikingly hierarchical, relations inward between villagers remained largely horizontal.

The role of headman is, in part, a vestige of colonial rule. Maxime Boutry et al. (2017, 52–53) show that the figure of the village headman, as we see him today, emerged through the Village Act (1887), shortly after colonization. This law aimed to break up former administrative structures by emphasizing the village (rather than the kaw) as a political territorial unit and by tying the headman to the collection of a “household tax” (Taylor 2009, 82; see also Huard 2019, 173–87). In many ways, it appears that the KNU inherited this administrative system in which the village acted as the smallest unit of governance in the KNU system, at least up until their new land law was passed in 2015 (re)introducing the kaw system (see chapter 6).

These yearly visits from the village tract leader, the local KNLA captain, and their entourages to collect taxes and soldiers were, as I have shown, some of the few times villagers felt the KNU state on their skin. The village tract leader would rarely be seen again until the time of the next harvest, unless some unforeseen event drew him back. I found that, up along the Bu Thoe ridge, the KNU and even the KNLA had surprisingly little presence in people’s day-to-day lives. Soldiers would occasionally visit the village but, more often than not, arrived in civilian clothes for weddings and other ceremonies, to chat, drink, and sometimes flirt (largely unsuccessfully) with the local single women. As I show in the next section, while the KNU’s lowland-based governance and judiciary branch were often invoked as a threat to people suspected of theft and the like, they were rarely, if ever, actually drawn upon in everyday governance. The headman kept out of most day-to-day affairs and held little political clout beyond his ability to negotiate with the distant powers of the KNU. This could be discerned most clearly in the roadbuilding project that opens chapter 2, for which he only played a bit part, simply collecting labor from the villagers to help build the road.

Given these rather unenviable tasks—assisting the collection of taxes, conscripts, and labor—few villagers relished the prospect of becoming the headman. Hpu Gay told me how the current headman had attempted to quit on three separate occasions, and the village elders had been drafted in each time to persuade him to stay on. The other villagers told me how, in a myriad of subtle ways, they had attempted to evade being chosen each time there was an election for a new headman. However, most accepted that, once this decision was made, there was nothing they could do about it; at some point it would be “my turn,” they reasoned. Albeit, as Hpa Kha Pa confided in me, when his turn came around six years ago, his formidable wife was furious and did not speak to him for two days.

The “Owner of the Water and Land”

In addition to the headman, the htee hpoe kaw k’sah/hee hkoh htee, the hereditary “owner” of each kaw, was the only other political office I was able to identify in my time along this stretch of the lower Salween River. If the headman was the head of the village, then the htee hpoe kaw k’sah was the head of the kaw. However, much like the headman, also always a man, his political authority was largely rooted in his ability to negotiate, in his case with the surrounding spectral powers. His power was ceremonial in both senses of the word.

The title of htee hpoe kaw k’sah (literally, the owner of the water and land) was passed down patrilineally from the founding lineage, descended from the first family that settled in this area. As was the case in the process of establishing primary usufruct ownership over swidden patches (hku), the htee hpoe kaw k’sah’s ancestors were the first humans to make a covenant with the spectral owners of the area around Ta K’Thwee Duh. This ancestor made a pact not only with the local spectral persons but also directly with the kaw k’sah, “the owner of the earth”—that is to say, the owner/lord (k’sah) of this entire kaw. It was in this sense that this living descendant was known as the hereditary “owner of the water and land” (htee hpoe kaw k’sah) of this kaw, having inherited usufruct ownership over this entire delineated area from its overall spectral owner. This relation is commonly known as a “founder’s cult” and is a widespread phenomenon across Southeast Asia. In this covenant with the spectral owners of the earth, “in return for regular offering, the spirit/s ensure the fertility of the land in the form of bountiful crops” (Kammerer and Tannenbaum 2003, 3). As a result of this relation, the position of htee hpoe kaw k’sah implied that he was charged with leading negotiations with the spectral owner of this area.³

The htee hpoe kaw k’sah of Ta K’Thwee Duh, however, also patiently explained to me that he had little de facto power or authority. His father, a middle child, inherited the title only after his older brother, the only child instructed by their father in all the correct rites and practices, had suddenly absconded to Thailand. As a result, the “generation had been lost” and much of the knowledge of how to execute the duties of a htee hpoe kaw k’sah had been lost with him. “I cannot do anything,” he repeatedly replied to my questions. Indeed, as Hpu Waw, the village elder with a repurposed Japanese rifle, told me, people tend to refer to him as hee hkoh htee, meaning the house or village head. Hpu Waw emphasized that calling him the htee hpoe kaw k’sah might be construed as mocking his lack of abilities as a hereditary leader. That said, most referred to the hee hkoh htee simply by his teknonym Hpaw Htoo Pa: as the father (pa) of Hpaw Htoo (his first-born child). Hpu Waw continued that the reasons the villagers encouraged Hpaw Htoo Pa to continue as hee hkoh htee were mostly practical. They noticed that as long as there was a hee hkoh htee holding the generation, they received considerably more baskets of rice come harvest time. As such, his main duties, like his ancestors before him, revolved around being the first to conduct the lu ta (offering, but literally, feeding) to the spectral owners of the fields, which were connected to each agricultural cycle. For example, it was prohibited to begin propitiating the spectral owners of one’s swidden patch before the hee hkoh htee. It was his duty as the direct descendant of the first settlers to open and facilitate smooth communication and negotiations with the local spectral population of the kaw.

Conversely, in neighboring Pa Nuh Duh Kaw, the htee hpoe kaw k’sah had been effectively driven out for being too demanding, despite having similarly diminished duties. Speaking to the brother of Pa Nuh Duh Kaw’s former htee hpoe kaw k’sah, I learned that the amount of rice villagers harvest each season stands in direct relation to how little the htee hpoe kaw k’sah harvests. Therefore, as the villagers in Pa Nuh Duh Kaw received bumper crops year after year, and htee hpoe kaw k’sah’s household eked out a meager existence, it was expected that the villagers would share a small portion of their bounty with the htee hpoe kaw k’sah’s family to compensate for their necessary losses. This rice was given in recognition of his position in the village, with none of the usual reciprocal bonds attached. And yet, his brother explained with a sigh, “people in Pa Nuh Duh grew complacent, complaining increasingly loudly.” Often in the presence of htee hpoe kaw k’sah or his family, they would grumble that “they should spend more time working their fields and not beg for rice from the other households each season,” his brother remembers. The htee hpoe kaw k’sah tried to explain the situation, that this was how it has always worked, but these laments were ignored. So eventually he also left for Thailand in shame. Soon after his departure, the village suffered one of the worst harvests in living memory. The villagers reasoned that this must be due to the displeasure of the spectral owners of the kaw that their intermediary had been driven out. But alas, by this point it was too late to call him back. If a htee hpoe kaw k’sah leaves the kaw for a prolonged period, the brother explained, “he is forbidden from returning.”

As I traveled through the area, I found this tale from Pa Nuh Duh was indicative of the status of htee hpoe kaw k’sah/hee hkoh htee all along this stretch of the lower Salween River. Whether this was the result of the protracted conflict, the creeping proselytizing of Christian and Buddhist missionaries, or common tropes that things were always better/more powerful in the past was difficult to ascertain. But there was a clear tendency, even in areas that still had a full htee hpoe kaw k’sah, for this ceremonial leader to lack de facto power, political or otherwise, and to regularly be disparaged by the people. It seems that, while it was widely accepted that the specters had broad powers over the human realm, and asymmetrical/hierarchical relations to them were taken as a given, humans who made similar demands of food in return for bountiful harvest were treated with a great deal of disdain.

Just as the headman acted as an intermediary between the villagers and the (distant) KNU, the hee hkoh htee acted as an intermediary between the villagers and the (largely unseen) spectral realm, charged with making and maintaining good relations. Indeed, upon closer inspection, both the headman and hee hkoh htee/htee hpoe kaw k’sah bear a striking resemblance to the notion of a “powerless chief” (Clastres 1987, 29), with little de facto power and authority and very unwilling to take on more. In most situations, political responsibility was spread reasonably evenly among the residents of these highlands. Relations between villagers remained largely symmetrical and egalitarian, albeit strongly gendered. I found that quotidian life, in lieu of specific leader figures or institutions, was guided by a strong sense of morality and obligation, mediated through the village elders.

Sharp Teeth, Rough Tongues, and Moral Hearts

The KNU state judiciary system was highly elaborate and, from what I could ascertain, reasonably effective in the lowlands. Yet, as I have stressed, it became threadbare at higher elevations, struggling to have enduring effects on and be felt in the day-to-day lives of people in out-of-the-way places such as Ta K’Thwee Duh. The few political positions that existed were largely ceremonial, and the little de facto political power they possessed was derived from their virtuosity in negotiating with powerful external forces. This led me to ponder: What happens when a person does something that is considered morally reprehensible or socially unacceptable?

When I posed this question to villagers in Ta K’Thwee Duh, time and time again, they replied that they try to deal with social, political, and moral problems in situ. Despite threats that a certain person would be reported to the KNU judiciary, the police, or the KNLA should it not be possible to solve an impasse in the village, I was unable to uncover a single account of this actually happening in practice. The inhabitants here repeatedly and actively attempted to avoid the interference of the KNU justice division.

Much of the research on the political workings of everyday justice in pockets of Myanmar where the central state remains distant tends to foreground the plurality or hybridity of forms of governance and justice, highlighting how the rule of the central state, armed groups such as the KNU, and “customary” practices are imbricated (Harrisson 2021; Kyed 2020; McConnachie 2014; South 2018). However, while certainly the case in the lowland areas along the Salween and Yunzalin Rivers, up on the Bu Thoe ridge I found that justice commonly began and ended within the limits of each kaw. When an accusation was made, such as of petty theft, if it could not be resolved through the mediation of fellow villagers, more often than not it was left to fester or peter out by itself. This became particularly evident when I began discussing such matters with one of the female elders, Hpee Luh, who had served as the local representative for the Karen Women’s Organisation (KWO) for many years. Having lost numerous children during childbirth, a husband who was rarely home, and a large extended family to support, she was intimately acquainted with the struggles many women face.

The KWO is an important arm of the KNU state and has been working to attain gender equality in Karen communities since its formation in 1949, the same year the KNU was founded. When I asked Hpee Luh what the role of the local KWO representative entailed, however, she quickly retorted that it entailed very little indeed. As she stressed, “It mostly involves regularly going to meetings held in [the regional center] and not a lot more.” But these days she was getting too old to walk so far, and besides, as she noted, “being the KWO representative doesn’t count for much in the village.” She went on to detail how, while this position did not allow her to call meetings and open discussions, like the headman, she was still regularly called upon to help mediate certain problems. These problems ranged from incest to gender-based violence to petty theft and everything in between. As such, she often worked in parallel with the headman, as a more informal channel.

Gently patting the bottom of one of the many grandchildren she shared her household with, until he fell sound asleep curled up on her lap, Hpee Luh went on to explain that, when a large problem arose in the village or kaw area, the headman was quickly consulted and a meeting called in his house. In broad brushstrokes: in the case of theft, for example, at this meeting the accused was compelled to confess their guilt to the aggrieved parties, with the other assembled villagers acting as witnesses. If the person confessed, with no stipulation made for an apology, the case was considered resolved. Should the accused either refuse to admit their guilt, but have no way to unequivocally prove their innocence, and/or continue to steal after the meeting, the usual practice was to systematically ostracize them and sometimes evoke the threat of exile. One concrete example Hpee Luh gave to demonstrate how these processes worked pertained to a young woman I knew well, Naw Maw Htaw.

Some years earlier, Naw Maw Htaw made a k’ma (a mistake)—specifically, she engaged in sex with a man outside of wedlock—which was a grave offense in this area. As touched on in the introduction, a tiger usually appeared or was heard roaring near the village following such an act of impropriety. The tiger was widely interpreted as a sign that the kaw k’sah, the spectral “owner of the kaw,” had been angered by this “mistake.” Steps were then quickly taken to placate and propitiate the kaw k’sah before her anger overflowed, inflicting disaster on the village, by attempting to make amends and repair the relationships between humans and specters (I return to this in the next section). However, in this particular case, Hpee Luh told me, “a tiger was neither seen nor heard afterward.” The man involved took this as a sign that he had done no wrong and refused to accept responsibility by marrying Naw Maw Htaw. This led to an impasse and was the cause of much concern in the village. Despite Hpee Luh’s repeated attempts to broker a compromise, the man would not budge, and, in the end, both were labeled pgha mee hoo, which translates as “people with a name heard/known,” meaning people of ill repute. Yet, while the man had little trouble finding a wife a few years later, Naw Maw Htaw had incredible difficulty finding a suitor in the village. So difficult, in fact, that she and her mother beseeched me several times to help her find a goh lah wa, or “white foreigner” husband. In the end, she met a man living in Karenni State, several days’ hike away, who was unaware of the poor status of her name in Ta K’Thwee Duh.

Elders such as Hpee Luh were often called upon to help resolve these kinds of issues, leading them to sometimes be known as pgha meh ay play thweh, or “people with sharp teeth and rough tongues.” It was said that the ability of elders to deh (speak) with sharp teeth and tough tongues—that is to say, their accrued experiences and adroit speech—on many occasions positioned them as mediators, much like the headman and the ceremonial leader (cf. de la Cadena 2015, 45–46; Clastres 1987, 151–55). This was part of their negotiating power.

When the intercession of the elders did not have the desired effect, forms of a public shaming acted both as a punishment and a deterrent—albeit often directed more at controlling women’s bodies than perturbing would-be thieves. In part, they resembled what has been defined as “moral coercion” (Clastres 1987, 22–23; see also Radcliffe-Brown 1952), which stands in contrast to the physical coercion relied upon by states, through violence and threats thereof. Morality is commonly used to explain such so-called anarchic solidarity among small-scale societies with subsistence economies across Southeast Asia (Gibson and Sillander 2011). The highly egalitarian practices of the Batek of Malaysia, for example, have been grasped as a consequence of their strong sense of “moral community” (Endicott 2011). While this was far from the whole picture, morality as a form of non-coercive power figured centrally in the day-to-day lives of many of the women and men living along the Bu Thoe ridge. This became particularly evident in the way that social life was often patterned by mutual aid. One example of this aid could be seen in the building and maintaining of houses.

Once every two to three years, each household had to replace the roof of their house. Commonly at these elevations along the lower Salween River, roofing tiles were made of a kind of palm leaf, known locally as loh lah. Since this was far too big of a job to be undertaken within the household alone, rice wine and beer were brewed, predominantly by women of the household, before kin and neighbors were invited over to drink, eat, and help replace the tiles. People then worked, drank, chatted, and joked until the roof was complete and/or the food and alcohol were exhausted. This labor was deeply gendered, the men perching in the rafters of the house and affixing the tiles with moistened thin strips of bamboo while the women remained on the ground handing the tiles up to them. Each time I joined in, I was inevitably placed with the women, as they feared I might fall. A similar pattern repeated itself when it was time to build a house, plant/transplant rice, and harvest it. Each instance was initiated by the hosting household who invited people to come to the area where the house would be built, or to their field where the rice needed to be (trans)planted or harvested, to help them with tasks too large to complete alone. All those invited had a strong obligation to attend; sometimes nearly the whole village joined in to help out on a particularly large field. The host, in turn, was obligated to feed the helpers, once or twice depending on the task, and keep their cups brimming with alcohol. As such, before a house could be built, a field planted, or the rice harvested, the hosting household—that is to say, the women of the household—had to brew a large batch of alcohol and prepare enough food to feed all those who came to help.

While the food and drink provided was often talked of as a form of payment for the services rendered, such assistance always incurred k’mah, or a debt. While I was attempting to help Hpa Kha Pa (Hpee Luh’s son) plant his hku (swidden field) with rice, he explained to me that, “if one of the other households sends three members for a day to help me plant my hku, I have to send three members of my household to help when it is their turn to plant.” Failing to reciprocate incurs a k’ma that one must pay back later. Indeed, as he added, another term for a person of ill repute is pgha mee k’mah, or “a person whose name has incurred a debt.” As David Graeber noted is the case globally, there was a deeply ingrained moral sense that “one has to pay one’s debts,” and a heavy feeling of shame and distrust haunted those who did not (2012, 2–19). These continual reciprocal acts of mutual aid between households bound them more tightly together, acting like “the movement of the hook that serves to bind together the various sections of the straw roofing so as to make one single roof” (Mauss [1925] 2002, 27), as so evocatively phrased in a New Caledonian saying.

All along the Bu Thoe ridge, I found that the Myanmar state and, to an extent, the KNU state struggled to have a substantial effect on people’s everyday lives and make their presence felt. In their stead, relations between the people were remarkably horizontal. There were few political offices or institutions, and those that existed were vested with little de facto political power. Day-to-day affairs were often shaped by mutual aid, and notions of shame, morality, and debt were mediated by the elders. However, as the events surrounding the construction of the “car road” indicated, while day-to-day relations between the residents of these highlands were overwhelmingly horizontal, this never quite added up to a form of anarchy in the sense discussed above of “no ruler.” The ruler was not absent but spectral. While rarely if ever seen, spectral sovereigns were commonly felt in and had a significant effect on people’s bodies and their everyday lives—often to a greater extent than their this-worldly counterparts.

KINGS AND QUEENS, UNSEEN

Throughout this book I have argued that landscapes in the Mutraw hills were teeming with unseen persons, many of whom were spoken of as the k’sah, or “owners,” of particular parcels of land. In this final section, I take a step back to explore how these “owners” acted as kings and queens, unseen: spectral sovereigns. By focusing on one of the most revered and potent of all specters, the kaw k’sah, the overall owner of each kaw, I examine some of the ways Indigenous understandings and practices can unsettle hegemonic concepts of ownership and sovereignty.

Looping back to the furor surrounding the initial construction of the “car road,” in much the same manner as when a person falls ill, the villagers’ first reaction to the encroachment of the road onto village lands was to appeal to human forms of expertise, power, and authority. Their knee-jerk reaction was to appeal directly to the relevant KNU representatives to plead their case and to entreat them to adjust the path of the road, away from the seat of the kaw k’sah. The villagers only relented upon reaching the limits of the authority of their human institutions to affect the path of the road. Rather than giving up or leaving it to fate, as the highly charismatic elder Hpu Hkee phrased it, they “put it in the hands of the kaw k’sah,” leaving it up to the spectral, and ultimate, owner of the kaw to decide. The kaw k’sah then intervened, affecting the body of the road’s foreman, making him deadly ill. This interruption and intervention in turn effected political change. Its intervention led the road to be rerouted and spurred efforts to cool tensions between the villages by sharing a large pig: repairing relationships between humans and between the human and spectral realms.

The kaw k’sah acted as the sovereign of this particular kaw. Or, more precisely, the sovereignty of the kaw k’sah over Ta K’Thwee Duh Kaw continually interrupted and encompassed human forms of sovereignty. In contrast to the sporadic, and oftentimes incoherent, sovereignty of the KNU state, the kaw k’sah had powerfully felt effects on people’s everyday lives. While talking to the elder and my close neighbor Hpu Gay about how the kaw k’sah has intervened in the road construction, he replied that “this is why we sometimes call her our naw pa mu [queen].” Delving deeper still, I learned that the kaw k’sah of Ta Bu Kyoh, the owner of the entirety of this particular kaw, was a spectral person known as Naw Ghoo Hsaw; oral histories spoke of her as an unmarried woman who always wore the white tunic of young maidens and spinsters, with a patch over one eye.

Each kaw was the dominion of a different k’sah, each with their own “queen” or “king” with their own biographies. In Thoo K’Bee Duh, the other side of Y’wa Ma Htu Lay, toward the Salween River, for example, the kaw k’sah was a female specter who was said to be very tightfisted. Tales described how she rode on the backs of wild boar, which were her domestic animals, and swept into the villagers’ rice fields at night to take their grain. As it transpired, certain animals such as the tigers and wild boar in each kaw were directly owned by the kaw k’sah, who kept them as her or his domestic animals. Hunters often commented that the wild boar they shot and wounded regularly fled toward the top of Ta Bu Kyoh, never to be found again. This led some to speculate that the kaw k’sah had a ta hsah hee (hospital) up there to heal her animals.

Similarly, as I touched upon earlier, in most cases in which a couple made a k’ma, a “mistake,” by engaging in premarital sex, it was the kaw k’sah who intervened, forcing them to rectify the situation. In situations where justice is absent or deferred, as Radhika Govindrajan notes, it is often experienced as a prolonged haunting such that “the pursuit of justice is a spectral project” (2022, 39). Accordingly, justice in the Mutraw hills could often only be achieved through the intercession of the spectral rulers of the land who, like the revenant of a beloved cow Govindrajan discusses, were felt with a certainty “rooted in past embodied experiences of haunting” (46). For people in these highlands, the felt immediacy of regular interventions by the kaw k’sah was deeply rooted in their day-to-day experiences of negotiating possessed landscapes.

The kaw k’sah first announced a k’ma to the other villagers by sending a tiger—or perhaps by herself taking the form of a tiger—and making its presence known by roaring distantly or by appearing close to the village. Soon after the arrival of the tiger, if nothing was done to address this k’ma, it was said that the earth became koh (hot, having a high temperature). As Hpu Gay explained to me, this growing warmth was not the kaw k’sah becoming angry, but rather the earth becoming gripped by a fever, causing the humans and their livestock and crops to be susceptible to illness (both physical and mental) and even death if not treated quickly. The only way to break the fever and rectify the situation was for the couple to marry and make ta hku, meaning an offering or reparation but literally connoting a “cooling” (Hayami 1993; Paul 2018, 69), directly to the kaw k’sah. Justice was substantiated through the straightening out and repairing of relationships not only between people but also with the spectral realm (cf. Govindrajan 2022).

In Ta K’Thwee Duh the kaw k’sah only accepted a ta hku of a mature buffalo, killed and butchered at the top of the village so the blood “cooled” the earth as it trickled down the hill past all the houses. The buffalo meat was first shared with the kaw k’sah, then with all the villagers not directly related to the couple, to also “cool” relations between the human inhabitants, not unlike the pig shared by the villagers following the KNU agreeing to redirect the road around Ta Bu Kyoh. In most other kaw, the kaw k’sah demanded the offering of buffalo, but some preferred a large pig or even a brace of chickens. Different kaw had different ta du ta htu, or “taboos,” as their spectral sovereigns had different tastes and appetites.

In cases where other significant ta du ta htu were breached, it was inevitably the local kaw k’sah who intervened and forced people to rectify the “mistake” or face terrible consequences. This intervention usually involved the kaw k’sah making people temporarily lose their minds, causing catastrophic crop failures, or sending its wild boars and tigers to plague the area. In one tale, of a man in a neighboring village who had repeatedly fornicated with a goat, the kaw k’sah became so enraged that the whole mountain, which was its domain, began to tilt. The mountain then threatened to collapse, wiping out the entire village. Only after the goat copulator (and possibly also the goat) was exiled far from the village did the mountain cease tilting; disaster was averted. To this day, this particular mountain top remains crooked, and the village was eventually relocated to a safer location. In a tale from another neighboring kaw, one man attempted to expand his own swidden patch by claiming the land of several of his fellow villagers. The kaw k’sah then unleashed floods and devastation in response to this man’s refusal to respect strict ta du ta htu against taking land without permission and to his fellow villagers’ inability to intervene and make sufficient reparations, mirroring Naw Ghaw and other villagers’ dreams as the “car road” inched closer.

As such, while the Myanmar and KNU states remained distant in day-to-day life, in many real senses, the kaw k’sah acted as otherworldly rulers. They dictated laws and meted out punishment to those living under their dominion who did not abide by them, acting as unseen queens and kings. As opposed to the state, their sovereignty was acutely felt on people’s skin and deeply marked local politics.

Unsettling Sovereignty

Tales of specters acting as sovereigns are by no means new. Spectral persons referred to as “owners” can be found all across Southeast Asia, from Central Myanmar in the north to the Maluku Islands of Indonesia in the far south (Århem 2016; Kammerer and Tannenbaum 2003; Pannell 2007). In F. K. Lehman’s words, specters are regularly grasped as “the original and ultimate owners having dominion over the face of the land” (2003, 16). Likewise, kaw k’sah and other spectral persons among Pwakanyaw groups in both Myanmar and Thailand are consistently rendered as “lords” in English. Resisting the pernicious impulse to reduce such cosmologies, practices, and indeed the felt immediacies of spectral ownership and sovereignty to mere “cultural beliefs,” in this book I move to take them seriously, as de facto alternative modes of politics that can unsettle seemingly neutral academic descriptors of governance such as sovereignty.

When studying Indigenous practices, researchers tend to look “for ‘culture,’ instead of sovereignty,” as if their sovereignty had already been extinguished, as Audra Simpson (2014, 20) argues is the case in studies of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Likewise, academic work on sovereignty regularly foregrounds what it looks like, doggedly fixated on the nation-state and notions of control, obscuring the ways it is actually lived and enacted in everyday practice, or what sovereignty feels like (Masco and Thomas 2023). In part, this is predicated on hegemonic understandings of sovereignty as the preserve of the nation-state, and before that of human kings and queens (Agamben 1998; Hobbes 1651; see also Bishara 2017; Hansen and Stepputat 2006). The effects of such academic practices can be seen clearly in how communities located at the interstices between nation-states are consistently defined negatively, by what they are not: as “zones of no sovereignty” (Scott 2009, 60–61), or the sovereignty that emerges in these spaces as somehow “fractured” or “mutated” forms of state sovereignty (Hansen 2006; Ong, Neoliberalism, 2006)—as though sovereignty in its pure, undiluted, and unbroken sense without a prefix is the preserve of the nation-state alone (Ong, Stalemate, 2023, 8).

Taking Indigenous modes of sovereignty seriously allows for what Yarimar Bonilla (2017) describes as the “unsettling” of hegemonic notions of sovereignty, not so much sweeping them away as bringing them fundamentally into question and exploring their alternatives. The workings of the spectral sovereigns were “acts of productive disruption” that “call on people to reimagine an alternative present and future” (Govindrajan 2022, 39). Thus, I follow Simpson in arguing that these tales of unseen queens and kings suggest that “there is more than one political show in town” (2014, 10–11). Peering closer, we often find that sovereignty exists within sovereignty, like ownership, in nesting forms (Simpson 2014).

Up in the Mutraw hills, however, it was not so much that Indigenous sovereignty was nesting in the KNU state’s patchy, intermittently felt sovereignty over this area. Rather, sovereignty was ultimately held “in the hands of the kaw k’sah,” who regularly intervened in political life. Such non-state spectral rulers “have a grip over ordinary life” all across Asia (Mehtta 2022, 590). Megnaa Mehtta shows how, even among the seemingly most egalitarian societies one can imagine, everyday life is, in the final instance, ruled over and nesting in the hands of what, following Marshall Sahlins, she terms “cosmic polities.” As Sahlins himself shrewdly remarks, “there are kingly beings in heaven even where there are no chiefs on earth” (2017, 91). Similarly, largely symmetrical and egalitarian relations between people living in Ta K’Thwee Duh—where few if any persons or institutions were vested with de facto power or authority—rested in and were dependent upon encompassing relations to the spectral sovereigns.

People’s relations to the spectral realm were highly hierarchical, with the kaw k’sah often treated as queens and kings of the realm. This asymmetry points to the manner in which humans remain dependent upon the life-giving power of the spectral realm. As I show in the introduction to this book, Indigenous histories tell of how, when the great creator Y’wa departed from the human realm, he left the remaining and waning ta thoo tha pgho—that is, the potency of creation—in the hands of his emissaries, the k’sah. Humans were thus left to constantly negotiate with the spectral realm over the land they live on and live off, which they can never hope to own fully. Once again, these highlands might be best grasped as more-than-human contact zones, where different modes of sovereignty meet and grapple with one another.

Marcel Mauss pointed out already in the 1920s that “one of the first groups of beings with which men had to enter into contract, and who, by definition, were there to make a contract with them, were above all the spirits of the dead and of the gods. Indeed, it is they who are the true owners of the things and possessions of this world” ([1925] 2002, 20). I return to these points in later chapters, where I argue that spectral sovereignty gestures toward an alternative mode of politics, or “alter-politics” (Hage 2015), and unsettles many established notions of sovereignty and politics at large. In part 2 of this book, I shift focus back across the border to Thailand to explore how burgeoning ensembles of farmers and activists, such as those behind the Salween Peace Park, were starting to translate and rescale these Indigenous modes of ownership and sovereignty to push back against dispossession and to continue the struggle for greater autonomy in southeast Myanmar.