Political Systems of Highland Burma

A Study of Kachin Social Structure

E. R. Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000324617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The main body of the book is concerned with the theme that empirical political behaviour among the Kachin is a compromise response to the polarised political doctrines of gumsa and gumlao.. Nearly one-third of this book consists of Chapter V entitiled 'The Structural Categories of Kachin Gumsa Society'. It is concerned with the interpretation of a series of verbal concepts and their interconnections. This long chapter is placed between a relatively short account of a particular Kachin community directly observed (Chapter IV) and a series of chapters (VI, VII, VIII) containing secondhand ethnographic and historical evidence.

PART I
THE PROBLEM AND ITS SETTING

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

This book is concerned with the Kachin and Shan population of North-East Burma, but it is also Intended to provide a contribution to anthropological theory. It is not intended as an ethnographic description. Most of the ethnographic facts to which I refer have been previously recorded in print. Any originality is not therefore to be found in the facts with which I deal, but in the interpretation of the facts.

The population with which we are concerned is that which occupies the area marked kachin on Map 1 and shown in large scale on Map 2. This population speaks a number of different languages and dialects, and there are wide differences of culture between one part of the area and another. Nevertheless, it is usual to refer to the whole of this population under the two heads Shan and Kachin. In this book I shall refer to the whole region as the Kachin Hills Area.

At a crude level of generalisation Shans occupy the river valleys where they cultivate rice in irrigated fields; they are a relatively sophisticated people with a culture somewhat resembling that of the Burmese. The Kachins on the other hand occupy the hills where they cultivate rice mainly by the slash and burn techniques of shifting cultivation. The literature throughout the past century has almost always treated these Kachins as if they were primitive and warlike savages, so far removed from the Shans in appearance, language and general culture that they must be regarded as of quite different racial origin.¹

¹ e.g. Malcom (1837); Eickstedt (1944).

That being so, it is quite within the normal conventions of anthropology that monographs about Kachins should ignore the Shans and monographs about Shans should ignore the Kachins. Nevertheless Kachins and Shans are almost everywhere close neighbours and in the ordinary affairs of life they are much mixed up together.

Consider, for example, the following piece of documentation. It is part of the verbatim record of the evidence of a witness at a confidential Court of Enquiry held in the Northern Shan States in 1930.²

² Harvey and Barton (1930), p. 81.

'Name of witness: Hpaka Lung Hseng

Race: Lahtawng Kachin (Pawyam, Pseudo-Shan)

Age: 79

Religion: Zawti Buddhist

Lives at: Man Hkawng, Mong Hko

Born at: Pao Mo, Mong Hko

Occupation: Retired headman

Father: Ma La, sometime Duwa of Pao Mo

When I was a boy some 70 years ago, the (Shan) Regent Sao Hkam Hseng who then reigned In Mong Mao sent a relative of his, Nga Hkam by name, to negotiate an alliance with the Kachins of Mong Hko. After a while Nga Hkam settled down in Pao Mo and later he exchanged names with my ancestor Hko Tso Li and my grandfather Ma Naw, then Duwas of Pao Mo; after that we became Shans and Buddhists and prospered greatly and, as members of the Hkam clan, whenever we went to Mong Mao we stayed with the Regent, conversely in Mong Hko our house was theirs. . . .'

It appears that this witness considered that for the past 70 years or so all his family have been simultaneously Kachins and Shans. As a Kachin the witness was a member of the Pawyam lineage of the Lahtaw(ng) clan. As a Shan he was a Buddhist, and a member of the Hkam clan, the royal house of Mong Mao State.

Furthermore Mong Mao—the well-known Shan state of that name in Chinese territory—is treated here as being a political entity of the same kind and much the same status as Mong Hko, which in the eyes of British administrators of 1930 was no more than a Kachin administrative 'circle' in North Hsenwi State.

Data of this kind cannot readily be fitted into any ethno' graphic scheme which, on linguistic grounds, places Kachins and Shans in different 'racial' categories.

The problem, however, is not simply one of sorting out Kachins from Shans; there iis also the difficulty of sorting out Kachins from one another. The literature discriminates between several varieties of Kachin. Some of these subcategories are primarily linguistic, as when Jinghpaw-speaking Kachins are distinguished from Atsi, Maru, Lisu, Nung, etc.; others are mainly territorial, as when the Assam Singpho are distinguished from the Burma Jinghpaw, or the Hkahku of the Upper Mali Hka area (Triangle) from the Gauri, East of Bhamo. But the general tendency has been to minimise the significance of these distinctions and to argue that the essentials of Kachin culture are uniform throughout the Kachin Hills Area.³ Books with such titles as The Kachin Tribes of Burma; The Kachins, their Religion and Mythology, The Kachins, their Customs and Traditions; Beitrag zur Ethnologie der Chingpaw (Kachin) von Ober-Burma⁴ refer by implication to all Kachins wherever they may be found, that is to a population of some 300,000 persons thinly scattered over an area of some 50,000 square miles.⁵

³ e.g. Hanson (1913), p. 13.

⁴ Carrapiett (1929); Gilhodes (1922); Hanson (1913); Wehrli (1904).

⁵ See Appendix V.

It is not part of my immediate problem to consider how far such generalisations about the uniformity of Kachin culture are in fact justifiable; my interest lies rather in the problem of how far it can be maintained that a single type of social structure prevails throughout the Kachin area. Is it legitimate to think of Kachin society as being organised throughout according to one particular set of principles or does this rather vague category Kachin Include a number of different forms of social organisation?

Before we can attempt to investigate this question we must first be quite clear as to what is meant by continuity and change with regard to social systems. Under what circumstances can we say of two neighbouring societies A and B that 'these two societies have fundamentally different social structures' while as between two other societies C and D we may argue that 'in these two societies the social structure is essentially the same'?

Throughout the remainder of this opening chapter my concern is to explain the theoretical standpoint from which I approach this fundamental issue.

The argument in brief is as follows. Social anthropologists who, following Radcliffe-Brown, use the concept of social structure as a category in terms of which to compare one society with another, in fact presuppose that the societies with which they deal exist throughout time in stable equilibrium. Is it then possible to describe at all, by means of ordinary sociological categories, societies which are not assumed to be in stable equilibrium?

My conclusion is that while conceptual models of society are necessarily models of equilibrium systems, real societies can never be in equilibrium. The discrepancy is related to the fact that when social structures are expressed in cultural form, the representation is imprecise compared with that given by the exact categories which the sociologist, qua scientist, would like to employ. I hold that these inconsistencies in the logic of ritual expression are always necessary for the proper functioning of any social system.

Most of my book is a development of this theme. I hold that social structure in practical situations (as contrasted with the sociologist's abstract model) consists of a set of ideas about the distribution of power between persons and groups of persons. Individuals can and do hold contradictory and inconsistent ideas about this system. They are able to do this without embarrassment because of the form in which their ideas are expressed. The form is cultural form; the expression is ritual expression. The latter part of this introductory chapter is an elaboration of this portentous remark.

But first to get back to social structure and unit societies.

Social Structure

At one level of abstraction we may discuss social structure simply in terms of the principles of organisation that unite the component parts of the system. At this level the form of the structure can be considered quite independently of the cultural content.⁶ A knowledge of the form of society among the Gilyak hunters of Eastern Siberia⁷ and among the Nuer pastoralists of the Sudan⁸ helps me to understand the form of Kachin society despite the fact that the latter for the most part are shifting cultivators inhabiting dense monsoon rain forest.

⁶ cf. Fortes (1949), pp. 54-60.

⁷ Lévi-Strauss (1949), Chapter XVIII.

⁸ Evans-Pritchard (1940).

At this level of abstraction it is not difficult to distinguish one formal pattern from another. The structures which the anthropologist describes are models which exist only as logical constructions in his own mind. What is much more difficult is to relate such abstraction to the data of empirical field work. How can we really be sure that one particular formal model fits the facts better than any other possible model?

Real societies exist in time and space. The demographic, ecological, economic and external political situation does not build up into a fixed environment, but into a constantly changing environment. Every real society is a process in time. The changes that result from this process may usefully be thought of under two heads.⁹ Firstly, there are those which are consistent with a continuity of the existing formal order. For example, when a chief dies and is replaced by his son, or when a lineage segments and we have two lineages where formerly there was only one, the changes are part of the process of continuity. There is no change in the formal structure. Secondly, there are changes which do reflect alterations in the formal structure. If, for example, it can be shown that in a particular locality, over a period of time, a political system composed of equalitarian lineage segments is replaced by a ranked hierarchy of feudal type, we can speak of a change in the formal social structure.

⁹ cf. Fortes, op. cit., pp. 54-5.

When, in this book, I refer to changes of social structure, I always mean changes of this latter kind.

Unit Societies

In the context of the Kachin Hills Area the concept of 'a society' presents many difficulties which will become increasingly apparent in the course of the next few chapters. For the time being I will follow Radcliffe-Brown's unsatisfactory advice and interpret 'a society' as meaning 'any convenient locality'.¹⁰

¹⁰ Radcliffe-Brown (1940).

Alternatively, I ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Introductory Note to the 1964 Reprint
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Maps
• Diagrams
• PART I. THE PROBLEM AND ITS SETTING
• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. THE ECOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF KACHIN SOCIETY
• III. THE CATEGORIES SHAN AND KACHIN AND THEIR SUB-DIVISIONS
• PART II. THE STRUCTURE OF KACHIN GUMSA SOCIETY
• IV. HPALANG—AN UNSTABLE KACHIN GUMSA COMMUNITY
• V. THE STRUCTURAL CATEGORIES OF KACHIN GUMSA SOCIETY
• PART III. STRUCTURAL VARIABILITY
• VI. GUMLAO AND GUMSA
• VII. GUMSA AND SHAN
• VIII. THE EVIDENCE FROM KACHIN HISTORY
• IX. MYTH AS A JUSTIFICATION FOR FACTION AND SOCIAL CHANGE
• X. CONCLUSION
• APPENDICES
• II. The Hpalang Feud as Officially Reported
• III. The Nature of Kachin 'Slavery'
• IV. Jinghpaw Kinship Terminology
• V. Estimate of 'Shan' and 'Kachin' Population in the Kachin Hills Area
• VI. Rainfall: Annual Precipitation in Inches
• VII. A Note on the Qualifications of the Author
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX