IN mid-September 2017, I made my way to the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network’s main office one last time. I was there to say my goodbyes and give a short debriefing on my findings before heading home. On the basement floor, I found Doh K’Oh and the others hunched over their computers. After some small talk, catching up on one another’s lives, I began detailing the eight months I had spent in the Mutraw hills by describing one of the experiences that had stuck with me the most. I explained how I was struck by the way people in these highlands often treated their landscapes as not simply alive, but possessed by spectral persons such as kaw k’sah, or “owners of the earth,” and how they constantly negotiated and “made friends” with landscapes and the specters who possessed them, with tigers often acting as moral guardians to the kaw k’sah.

I began hearing tales about tigers even before I stepped foot in the village. When people in the regional center of Deh Bu Noh, where I first visited to clear my paperwork at the local KNU office, heard I would be staying along the Bu Thoe ridge that towers above this tiny town, the first thing they told me was “Watch out for tigers!” I anticipated that these comments would lead to stories of bloodthirsty beasts preying on livestock and human flesh, or even of tigers as metaphors for marauding Myanmar Army soldiers with whom Karen soldiers still occasionally clashed. Instead, they proceeded to speak of how tigers usually appear whenever somebody makes a k’ma, punctuating this claim with squeals of laughter. While (as I have shown) k’ma literally means “a mistake”—that is to say, a breach of taboo—what they were referring to was k’ma poe mu poe hkwa, or “a girl and boy mistake,” implying a breach of the taboo against premarital sex. In this instance, they were less concerned about the endangered big cat, or saying something about over seventy years of armed conflict, than with playfully ribbing me about traveling with a young unmarried female field assistant, Naw Paw.

Arriving in the village, I found that the human residents still shared this ridge with at least three baw thoe—that is, tigers. During my second week, I was shown fresh pugmarks of a female and her cub along the dusty road that cuts along the top of this ridge (see figure 9).¹ To the west of the road was the rocky forest of Way Pgha, where tigers often rested as they prowled around these uplands. Tiger sightings along this ridge regularly provoked less fear for the safety of children and livestock than contemplation and discussion as to why a tiger had appeared in this specific place at this specific time. Each appearance was shrouded in speculation and doubt. While it was first reasoned that these tigers appeared on the road beside the village in relation to my arrival, the leading consensus was that it was actually related to the three Thai monks who (as described in chapter 5) attempted to build a small pagoda on the highest peak in this area, Ta Bu Kyoh, just before I arrived. As one elder, Hpu Gay, who lived in the house opposite my own, explained, this was most likely the work of the kaw k’sah. He told me how the kaw k’sah would often send one of her tigers, her “livestock,” to prowl the edges of the village when people made k’ma, only relenting when the k’ma had been addressed.

The tiger was the first warning, heralding the great misfortune the kaw k’sah would soon pile upon on the people. Shortly afterward the land would start becoming koh, “hot” and feverish, affecting the crops, livestock, and humans in the area. The arrival of a tiger was thus followed by a flurry of negotiations, attempting to propitiate, placate, and plead with the kaw k’sah to “cool” down relations again and return peace and conviviality to the area.

It was decidedly uncertain as to whether these moral tigers, who made their presence known after breaches of taboo, were the same animals that conservationists are deeply concerned about (as in Pantera tigris corbetti, or Indochinese tigers). In an attempt to clear this up, I asked a group of elders whether the tigers that villagers accidentally caught in their htu, or “death-fall traps,” in their fields and those caught in conservationists’ camera traps were the kaw k’sah, her emissaries, or simply run-of-the-mill tigers. After a small pause to think, they usually equivocated, not committing to a definite answer one way or another.

In the following months, I learned that, on at least one occasion, tigers were not heard, nor their traces seen, following a case of premarital sex (such as that of Naw Maw Htaw, whom we meet in chapter 3). When, sometime later, several of the soldiers at a nearby Karen National Liberation Army checkpoint reported that they caught a fleeting glimpse of a large male tiger, the villagers brushed off any significance of its appearance at this particular place and time. Indeed, as other elders attested, when they were young, tigers regularly entered the village and took their livestock. Sometimes tigers were the kaw k’sah’s emissary, sometimes her physical manifestation, but more often than not, a tiger was just a tiger. While in some cases the appearance of a tiger had profound political effects, such as rerouting roads and preventing the construction of religious monuments, in other cases they were simply mentioned in passing, as one might mention seeing a villager from the neighboring area. These differing perspectives were far from settled and constantly shifting.

When I finished telling this tale to Doh K’Oh, he blurted out incredulously, “But you don’t really believe it, right?” This question gave me pause to ponder: Do people in the Mutraw hills have to believe in these practices for them to have deep-reaching effects on their lives and politics?

* * *

This conversation with Doh K’Oh at the end of my fieldwork brings us full circle, back to where this book began, in questions on how to grasp such “worldly” practices (Tsing 2005): practices in which the line between inert and animate, the spectral and the biotic, and between the profound and the banal was indeterminate and constantly redrawn in relation to the situation at hand. In exploring these vexed questions, established notions of ownership and sovereignty become unsettled and subverted.

To address these questions and attempt to gather up the different threads I weave throughout this book, I return to the tagline of the Salween Peace Park: “All living things sharing peace.” I begin by exploring “all living things,” delving deeper into how I approached working with people who practice Thoo Hkoh/ Moh La Pa Lah (animist/ancestral ways). Through this exploration I show how such approaches might help us better understand the shifting relations between people, politics, environments, and other unseen more-than-humans. I then move on to the second half of the tagline: “sharing peace.” Here I tentatively sketch out how experiments in conservation and autonomy in the Mutraw hills might inform radical alternatives to top-down protected areas and armed conflict in Myanmar and beyond.

“ALL LIVING THINGS”

Over the course of my fieldwork in the Mutraw hills, and particularly when I attempted to sum it up to Doh K’Oh, I found that the line between specters, mountains, and tigers was less than clear, constantly being redrawn. As I argue in the introduction, in some instances a mountain was the seat of the kaw k’sah and a tiger its worldly emissary, but in others a mountain was just a rock formation and a tiger was just a big cat. How a set of pugmarks in the sand was understood shifted from case to case.

Returning to the discussions I open this book with, much of the work on people broadly categorized under the rubric of animist has circled around the question of what is, or should be, considered alive. As I have shown, the two most common approaches to broaching this issue have been, in broad brushstrokes, (1) to parcel out these practices and cosmologies as “belief systems” or “worldviews” that are metaphorical representations of real events (Evans-Pritchard 1976; Hornborg 2017a, 2017b; Leach 1954; Spiro [1967] 1996) or (2) to take these practices and cosmologies seriously, hypostatized as part and parcel of people’s everyday reality as radically (read, ontologically) different worlds (de la Cadena 2015; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Latour 2005).

My modest intervention into these highly vexed debates has been to take a different tack. Taking a lead from my interlocutors, my focus has been less on what is and what actually exists and more on what works—that is, on what has an effect on people’s everyday lives. I found that people were less enamored (at least far less than most anthropologists) with questions pertaining to whether unseen more-than-humans really existed than they were attentive to the effects they had on people’s day-to-day lives, their traces, and how they could respond to and negotiate with these beings. In doing so, I have taken my interlocutors’ own practices and cosmological sensibilities, along with their uncertainties and doubts, seriously.

I describe this methodological orientation as a move toward a playful “more-than-human political ecology” that gives equal attention to both people’s deep entanglements with ecologies and to the political underpinnings of these entanglements. In focusing on the interface of these imperatives, I found that people’s relations with ecologies were continually made and unmade, leading to a great deal of indeterminacy and doubt. As Rita Astuti (2017) points out, the people we work with seem to contradict themselves and change their minds on a regular basis. To address the muddle that can result from such contradictions, in this book I have taken a similar approach to that of Astuti in striving to “take people seriously”—constantly emphasizing the ways people’s relations with the world are riddled with indeterminacy and doubt and shot through with a distinct playfulness in the sense of both levity and of experimentation.

To better grapple with these issues, I have drawn on, and tweaked slightly, Violet Cho’s (2023) understanding of belief (tana) as inseparable from and animated by practice/action (tama). She found that the Christian communities she studied were infused with a strong sense of pragmatism, drawn together not simply through their shared belief in God but also through shared action—such as prayer and caring for and protecting one another. Such actions were necessary to face down the “calamitous effects of colonialism and post-colonial states,” as she puts it so vividly (46). Tana entails not only belief but also trust and confidence and derives its power from tama, or the capacity to act on and have an effect on the world. Thus, people only believed (tana) in the animacy of any given thing after discerning its actions (tama) on their lives and bodies and only trusted/had confidence (tana) in any given mode of sovereignty after discerning its capacity to have an effect (tama) on local politics.

In tacking toward a more-than-human political ecology, I attempted to better grasp shifting entanglements between spectral persons and politics by holding open questions as to what exists and what is alive and what is not (cf. Dooren et al. 2016). Indeed, as philosopher Simon Critchley notes, “if we are doing politics, we cannot and should not pin our hopes on any ontology … politics is the disruption of the ontological domain” (2007, 105). In this manner, especially in the context of chronic conflict, not only is the line defining what is alive constantly redrawn, but so is the line between different forms of life: for example, spectral and biotic. As I have shown, war spills beyond everyday life into the cosmos itself, perpetually making and unmaking them both (cf. Ruiz-Serna 2023, 3). Accordingly, I play with the manifold connotations of the term spectral in this book: in the sense of ineffable, indeterminate, and labile and to denote something/someone whose presence is often sensed but never quite seen—understood to be just off the visual spectrum.

The multifaceted connotations of specters become clearer in how the suffix -khah in Pwakanyaw can denote both spectral persons, such as ta mu khah, and other hard-to-see things, such as insects. The term bu khah, for example, usually refers to the tiny green/yellow insects that feed on rice seedlings, but it is also used to refer to bacterial infections of rice. As such, insects, bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms were regularly grasped similarly as spectral, in the sense of being just off the visual spectrum (cf. Herrera 2018), and thus could only be discerned through the traces they left and the effects they had on human lives, bodies, and crops. Returning to the vignette above, I found that tigers were often treated in a similar fashion.

While the older villagers often told tales of having tangled with tigers in their youth, many of the younger generation’s only glimpses of tigers were of those caught in traps and long dead. For the vast majority of the people residing in these highlands, the presence of tigers, like that of specters, could never be discerned directly but rather through the traces they left: pugmarks imprinted on the dusty road, scat left along a small jungle path, or the sound of their roar heard distantly. As Amitav Ghosh notes, there remains an “irreducible element of mystery” and “uncanniness” (2016, 30) surrounding tigers. In everyday life people did not always distinguish between tigers and specters since, in most instances, both could only be discerned in the traces they left and the effects they had on their lives. To an extent, the Myanmar state itself had a similar spectral quality, often only discerned in its effects, its traces: in the whirling propellers of drones heard overhead or felt surging through rumors of Tatmadaw spies moving among them.

Consequently, drawing on this method might help better grasp the shifting entanglements not only between politics and specters but also more widely between people, states, and other things that are difficult to perceive, such as tigers, insects, bacteria, and viruses. This move implies drawing on a more pragmatic approach (Cho 2023; Lambek 1996). Rather than spilling endless amounts of ink on whether such entities actually exist, attention is trained on sensing and experimenting with the traces and imprints they leave and the effects that they have on people’s everyday lives and politics (Tsing, Swanson et al. 2017). In this sense, a more-than-human political ecology takes seriously both people’s doubts and what is significant to them, “what is at stake” and what “really matters,” in Arthur Kleinman’s (1997, 327, 315) phrasing.

Throughout, I have argued that, attending to the continually shifting line between the inert and the animate, and between spectral and biotic life, affords us the ability to perceive alternative modes of ownership and sovereignty: modes of politics that might generatively unsettle the current political impasse of intractable armed conflict in southeast Myanmar and perhaps beyond. By translating and rescaling Indigenous practices and cosmologies, the radical experiments in conservation and autonomy I examine in this book offered a radical alternative to the “unproductive and endless oppositions” (Hage 2015, 62) of armed conflict in the highlands along the Salween River by attempting to transform these former battle zones into spaces for “all living things sharing peace.”

“SHARING PEACE”

Delving deeper into Indigenous practices and cosmologies, I have shown how these highlands might be best grasped as actually existing spaces of autonomy—an autonomy rooted in deep interdependencies. Human sovereignty and local politics in these highlands were largely concerned with asymmetrical negotiation with the spectral owners of the earth and in maneuvering oneself into what James Ferguson terms as more “desirable forms” (2013, 237) of dependence. Thus, a mode of politics emerged that was predicated on making and maintaining “good relations” (TallBear 2019; see also Wildcat 2013) with the spectral realm and other humans, through feasting and drinking together: of “making friends,” as people often put it. These highlands were a contact zone, not only of violence and asymmetrical relations of power but also of relations of conviviality and care. I end this book by offering a tentative sketch of how these findings relate to wider debates and ongoing efforts to protect biodiversity and mitigate conflict in and also far beyond Myanmar.

In exploring how largely asymmetrical relations between people and the relative autonomy of these highlands were dependent on and nesting in encompassing hierarchical relations to the spectral realm, these findings speak to a growing interest in understanding sovereignty globally as “a process of contingent negotiation” (Martin 2014, 343; see also Kirksey 2012; Rutherford 2012). I follow Andrew Ong’s argument that the kind of sovereignty and autonomy generated by Indigenous practices and in situ experiments with conservation can be best understood as relational: “enacted through engaging with the ‘outside’ by creating intermittent, oscillating political relations” (2023, 8). Spectral sovereignty and the ways it was drawn on, translated, and rescaled to create pockets of Indigenous autonomy highlighted how it was always relational, entangled and interdependent, defined by encounter and interaction (Ong, Stalemate, 2023, 12; see also W. Brown 2010). These practices, and the ways they were translated and rescaled, were then prefigurative, figuring the future in the here and now (cf. Krøijer 2010; Maeckelbergh 2009).

The various experiments in conservation and autonomy that I examine in this book were not “just an idea,” as the activist Ta Thoo so modestly claimed; they were more than simply a plan or a possibility. They were actively figuring a radically alternative way of protecting biodiversity and striving for greater autonomy in landscapes upended by war. By 2020, the practices underpinning the Salween Peace Park that wove together the KNU’s state politics and spectral sovereignty were starting to travel and take root in other areas of Myanmar. They were also starting to gain recognition and acclaim far beyond the borders of this nation-state.

In southern Myanmar, where, as I describe in chapter 4, an ensemble of activists and farmers were pushing back against threats of “green territoriality” (Woods 2019), several different movements began linking up into the so-called Tanawthari Landscape of Life. Taking its cue from the Salween Peace Park, this large-scale conservation project was similarly sewing together seven Indigenous territories to form an “Indigenous Conserved Landscape, a symbol of the symbiotic relationship between nature and humans, and a proposal for future peace, environmental protection, food sovereignty, and self-determination” (CAT 2020, 10). Indeed, as the director of KESAN, who was part of the alliance of activists behind this project, summed it up, “Conservation of small areas will not work. Indigenous peoples conserve their territories through a landscape approach by seeing the interconnections through the landscape—we have seen this through the example of the Salween Peace Park. Now it is time for governments, international organisations, businesses and the UN to learn from indigenous people” (ICCAs 2023). This seemed to indeed be the case, and right up until the coup of February 2021, global organizations were starting to take notice.

On September 29, 2020, the Salween Peace Park received the Equator Prize from the United Nations Development Programme in recognition of their “outstanding community efforts to reduce poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity … laying the foundation for a global movement of local successes that are collectively making a contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” (Equator Initiative 2020). Two months on, in November 2020, the director of KESAN was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, spoken of as the Green Nobel, for his work on the Salween Peace Park.

In this light, the Salween Peace Park might be grasped in the context of growing globe-spanning movements that Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher (2020) describe as the conservation revolution. For these authors, “a revolution in conservation is brewing” that is moving beyond “people versus park” disputes to embrace radical alternative approaches (1). The Indigenous-run protected area along the Salween River resonated strongly with the radical alternative Büscher and Fletcher put forward of “convivial conservation,” which rejects both nature-people dichotomies and capitalist economic systems that demand continual growth. Beyond modes of conservation that attempt to turn the environment into “nature capital” and “environmental services,” convivial conservation points to the need to find better ways “to ‘con vivire,’ live with (the rest of) nature” (9–10). Yet, while these authors discuss these “radical alternatives” in order to forward a “scientifically grounded, political platform and paradigm” (12), the Salween Peace Park was a concrete and situated example of an actually existing radical alternative to both conservation and peacebuilding. As such, following the establishment of this peace park offers us a window on how revolution in conservation might be achieved in practice in Myanmar and, indeed, far beyond. All this building momentum and hope, however, was interrupted just two short months after the Salween Peace Park was awarded these prizes.

Apocalypse, Again!

At the crack of dawn on February 1, 2021, armored vehicles trundled into the state capital of Nay Pyi Daw, heralding the latest military coup and the return to protracted armed conflict. Many seasoned researchers and commentators, myself included, were shocked by this turn of events, fearing all the gains that had been made in the transitional decade (2011–21) would come to nought. But glancing back I realized that my interlocutors had been warning me about this moment, time and time again. The current coup was, after all, far from the first time they had experienced such an apocalyptic event. In fact, in that same conversation with Doh K’Oh, I shared another experience from my time in the Mutraw hills that had left a deep impression on me, of how people regularly prophesized that all-out war would return in 2020.

During my second to last week in Ta K’Thwee Duh, I went to visit one of the village elders I had grown particularly close to, Hpu Waw. He greeted me, telling me morosely, “This may be the last time we get to chat. I have to take a trip out of the village soon, and fear you will not be around when I get back.” Then he brightened up, adding, “But then again, maybe next time I see you will be in Yu Wah Duh.” As it transpired, he remained deeply distrustful as to my real intentions, even after all these months. He assumed that, upon leaving the village, I would join the Chinese prospectors who were planning to survey neighboring Yu Wah Duh Kaw for minerals (mentioned in chapter 4). Quickly noticing my growing agitation toward this line of conversation (one we had followed many times before), he pivoted to telling me how he thought that conflicts over resources and land would be the spark that ignites the next cycle of armed conflict in Myanmar.

Like many of the highlanders I had spoken to in the last few months, he held the view that the year 2020 would mark the return of war to the Mutraw hills. He told me that “it was already foreseen by the [now long dead] oracle Wee Hta Baw Mu.” In these prophetic visions, the first thing Wee Hta Baw Mu predicted was that, in the lead-up of the return of apocalyptic war “along Bu Thoe ridge, the only footprints to be seen will be the pugmarks of tigers and leopards.” This prophesy Hpu Waw claimed “has already been fulfilled as people now ride motorbikes and wear flip-flops. Human footprints are rarely seen along the path at the top of this mountain now.” This also intimated that people would begin to forget Thoo Hkoh ways and begin breaking many ta du ta htu (taboos), vexing the specters and provoking them to send their tigers. The second prophecy was that “the pigs will come and dig up the ground.” He elaborated that this, too, has been fulfilled since “the pigs in this prophecy are the people and machinery that came to dig up the soil to create the road and to excavate the ground searching for valuable minerals.” With all these things coming to pass, the final prediction of apocalyptic war returning was imminent, he explained.

While 2020 also figured in his telling of this prophecy, when I asked why exactly it would happen in that year, he backtracked a little, insisting that “we can, of course, never know such things with any real certainty. It might still not happen.” Again, this tale was shot through with doubt. And yet he remained convinced that the war was looming. When talking of what would happen when this war finally arrives, he narrated a series of events that appeared to be purloined directly from the stories of the Rapture in the last book of the Bible (remembering that Hpu Waw strongly identified as Thoo Hkoh). As he told it, when this war comes, the great demiurge Y’wa will “come and separate the rice seed from the husk,” again adapting the tale by drawing on metaphors rooted in people’s everyday life. “Y’wa will bring his winnowing tray to winnow away the bad people from the good,” he explained, swapping out biblical images of separating the sheep from the lambs with local notions of the rice seed and husk.

Hpu Waw concluded this tale by explaining that Wee Hta Baw Mu’s final prediction was that there would be three outbreaks of war and the third instance would be the most intense, taking on apocalyptic proportions. Prior to 2012, there were already two outbreaks of conflict, so if the ceasefire did not hold, the next would be the third and final war, when Y’wa would start winnowing. He added, however, that none of this was a foregone conclusion. It could still be averted. Others told of how this catastrophic third wave of war would usher in a period of unprecedented peace. They pointed to how Pwakanyaw of these highlands had lived through multiple apocalypses and were still there. War was like a revenant that kept returning but that could still be negotiated with, to continue to eke out an existence. Speaking to the activists from KESAN following the coup, I found that KESAN saw the situation similarly—as apocalypse, again!

In the teeth of the violent conflict that has roiled nearly every corner of Myanmar, as almost all international collaboration has dried up, these radical and pragmatic experiments in conservation and autonomy are ongoing. In 2022, the Salween Peace Park expanded from 5,485 km² to 6,747 km². Moreover, KESAN continues to organize a general assembly each year, inviting people from all the villages incorporated into this protected area to vote for a new leader and plot and plan a new future in these treacherous times. At the 5th General Assembly from December 18–20, 2023, one of the governing committee members commented, “The Burma military attacks us with airstrikes. Of course, our people live in fear every day. Nevertheless, to successfully implement our many tasks, and to achieve the three goals of our Salween Peace Park, we will not back down. We have to work harder so that the whole world will recognise our park” (KESAN 2024).

The Indigenous people of these highlands, like Indigenous peoples around the world, were no strangers to catastrophe. They had already lived through the “calamitous effects of colonialism and post-colonial states,” as Cho (2023, 46) puts it. In this light, the various experiments in conservation and sovereignty that I explore in this book might be seen as their way of preparing for the next apocalypse and paving the way for what comes after it. By word and by deed these radical Indigenous thinkers were living proof that “another world is possible.” Only time will tell what that world might look like.