Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of the Lahu People.

• Author: Matisoff, James A.
• Position: Book Review

Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of the Lahu People. By ANTHONY R. WALKER. New Delhi: HINDUSTAN PUBLISHING CORPORATION, 2003. Pp. xxxi + 907 + plates, maps, figures. $55.

This massive work must surely rank as the best treatment of the spiritual life of any minority people of Southeast Asia. Although the book's chief focus is on Lahu religious beliefs and practices, Walker emphasizes that these can only be appreciated in the context of Lahu history and society in general, subjects on which his thirty-six years of research have made him the world's leading authority.

The Lahu people, now estimated to number some 700,000, live in scattered mountain villages widely distributed over China's Yunnan province and Burma's Shan state, with smaller communities in Northern Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. This wide geographical spread has so far protected their language from endangerment, despite the growing influence of the coterritorial majority cultures, especially Chinese and Tai. The Lahu language belongs to the Central Loloish (= Yi) branch of the Lolo-Burmese subgroup of the vast Tibeto-Burman family which, together with Chinese, constitutes the Sino-Tibetan linguistic stock. Despite a proliferation of ethnolinguistic names for divisions of the Lahu people, the most important cleavage is between "Black Lahu" (= Lahu Na) and "Yellow Lahu" (= Lahu Shi). The Black Lahu group is much larger and more prestigious, and comprises several subdivisions including "Red" Lahu (= Lahu Nyi), the group among whom Walker lived for four years in Northern Thailand, from 1966 to 1970. The least-known Lahu branch is Kucong, spoken in eastern Yunnan and adjacent areas of Vietnam (pp. 66-69).

The Lahu, like other Southeast Asian hillfolk, have traditionally lived by the labor-intensive practice of "slash-and-burn" or swidden agriculture, though this way of life is increasingly threatened, and is already virtually obsolete in Thailand. Lahu society is egalitarian, notably with respect to gender: the female Creator of the Earth (Na-law or Ai-ma) was more diligent than the male Creator of the Sky (Ca-law or G'uisha), which has resulted in a large earth and a small sky, so that G'uisha was obliged to squeeze up the earth, producing its mountains and valleys (pp. 163-65); the Female New Year celebrations are one day longer than (and precede) the Male New Year (pp. 415-28); marriage is uxorilocal, with the son-in-law obliged to work in his father-in-law's fields for several years before he can set up his own household (p. 41). Lahu villages are theoretically under the jurisdiction of a headman, although his powers are very limited, and any household disagreeing with his decisions can simply pull up stakes and move elsewhere.

Merit and the Millennium is divided into three major parts, of unequal length. Part I ("A Lahu Village in Northern Thailand and its Socio-Historical Matrices," pp. 1-108) sets the stage by describing in colorful detail the daily round of activities in the Red Lahu village where Walker began his research. (1) He then proceeds to a historical and geographical treatment of the Lahu people as a whole, emphasizing their tradition of fierce autonomy despite the cultural and political pressure from Tai and Chinese under which they have always lived. Part II ("The Diverse Strands of Lahu Supernatural Ideas and Ritual Practices," pp. 111-547) is the heart of the book, a brilliant dissection of the various elements--animistic, theistic, Confucian, and Buddhist--that have interwoven to form the Lahu world of religious ideas. Part III ("The Christian Experience: Cultural Continuities and Discontinuities," pp. 551-738) is a thoughtful and balanced account of the impact of missionary Christianity on the Lahu mind.

Walker vividly brings home the syncretistic nature of East and Southeast Asian religion in general. Alongside their devout Buddhism, the Tai are just as "animistic" as the Lahu, taking care not to offend locality spirits (p. 132), and setting up spirit-altars in their homes and backyards (p. 139). The Japanese see no contradiction between their Shinto weddings and Buddhist funerals. In China (but not in Thailand) Lahu animism is mixed with ancestor worship (pp. 138-39). Lahu Buddhist ceremonies in China may simultaneously involve chanting sutras and praying to the Dragon King for rain (p. 357). The roughly carved wooden posts known as kaw-mo-taweh are conventionally interpreted as the indestructible white stone posts in the heaven of the creator-god G'uisha (p. 364), but anybody can see that they are phallic in origin. The animist custom of pouring water on the ground when inviting the spirits of dead parents to a feast (chaw suh aw ca ve) is a borrowing from a Tai Buddhist ritual complex, which in turn is derived from a Brahmanical Indic source (p. 205). (2) The sensible thing is to hedge one's bets and incorporate into one's own belief system whatever religious ideas are in the air. From a linguistic point of view, it is revealing to see how the same Lahu term has acquired different increments of meaning, according to the particular conceptual framework in which it occurs. The word aw-bon (

Walker analyzes the key concepts of Lahu animism (souls and spirits) with precision and finesse, discussing the panoply of rituals and practices they entail from a broad comparative viewpoint. Drawing his data from sources both historical and contemporary, he traces the regional similarities and...