Everyday Life in Southeast Asia

6 Marriage and Opium in a Lisu Village in Northern Thailand

6 Marriage and Opium in a Lisu Village in Northern Thailand Kathleen Gillogly Alema (Second Daughter) walked into the community center building of Revealed River Village one brightly hot December afternoon as I sat at a handplaned desk writing field notes. She slumped onto the hard bench across from me and leaned across the desk between us. She told me she envied me for being issara (the Thai word for “free”) and then announced to me: “My mother says I have to marry a boy with land, one outside of the village. I can’t marry my sweetheart because he has no land here.” Alema was about seventeen years old; I was a thirty-something American divorced woman being consulted about marriage by an upland minority “girl.” This interaction opened up a whole new perspective for me on how the end of the opium economy in northern Thailand had affected marriage, which is a key element in the reproduction of social structure. Cultures exist through the people who live in them; people “carry” culture ; it does not exist on its own. Therefore, we need to consider how this comes about. How do people become members of their own culture? An obvious answer is that children are enculturated or socialized through being raised by adults in their own culture—the language they learn, the social relationships they develop, the rituals they participate in, the work they learn to do—all teach children what is expected of them in their own culture . The culmination of this is, in many societies, marriage. Marriage marks a child’s entry into adulthood, a fact that is apparent in many mainland Southeast Asian languages’ marker of people as “girl” or “boy” for those who have not yet been married, regardless of age, and “woman” or “man” for those who are married. The wife and husband take on adult roles and responsibilities and will, as their parents before them, raise the next generation . That is, marriage is about social as well as biological reproduction. Marriage gives the children born of that marriage a social identity. Intergenerational wealth transfer from the parents’ household to the bride and groom is a core function of marriage as well, because access to economic resources is through the household. But cultures and societies do not just reproduce 80 / Kathleen Gillogly themselves, they also transform. The Lisu were an ideal people to study because of the profound changes that were taking place in their economic system. Concomitant were changes in the systems of kinship and marriage. My goal was to look at how social structure transforms in the face of dramatic economic change. In particular, I looked at how people strategized to achieve culturally constructed goals in the face of the end of the “opium economy,” and in their attempts to reproduce their ideal social structure brought about its transformation. background The Lisu are an ethnolinguistic group living throughout northern Thailand, northern Burma, and in southwest China near Tibet. In the early nineteenth century, conflict between local people and the Chinese Empire brought about ethnic-based unrest that disrupted the regional overland trade routes that were the lifeblood of survival for people living in this region. The increasing dominance of Western colonialism in East Asia destabilized the region as trade was refocused to sea ports and to Western goods. Onto this unsettled stage came opium. Opium was an excellent cash crop, well suited to the ecological conditions of the region, and easily marketable. This crop enabled a new adaptation to a relatively stable agricultural economy. It transformed the agricultural strategies of Lisu and many other upland peoples, such as the Hmong, Mien, Lahu, and Akha. This opium economy is correlated with significant migration southward as far as Thailand starting in the late nineteenth century. When anthropologists and other observers studied upland minority peoples of Southeast Asia, they were looking at people who were opium growers. This particular historically constituted ecosystem had a profound effect on Lisu social structure. the agroecosystem of the lisu Lisu life must be understood in the context of the physical environment in which the people lived. The Lisu, like many other people who live in the mountains of Southeast Asia, practiced a form of farming called swiddening or shifting cultivation. Swiddening uses little in the way of tools or capital inputs. Nutrient inputs come from the forest itself. Household heads selected fields on the basis of soil and vegetation qualities as well as the direction of slope, to ensure...