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5 PREMODERN BORDER LANDSCAPES UNDER BORDER PRINCIPALITIES Akha responses to political domination have been migration or flight and occasionally submission, although their egalitarian ideology resists this. Under conditions of semiautonomy, they have been able to produce their own spaces in the hills, including the establishment of villages ,households,fields,andotherintrasocietalhierarchies,allof which rely on the carrying out of Akha ancestral practices. DEBORAH TOOKER, “Putting the Mandala in its Place” THE GREAT HIMALAYAN RANGE STRETCHES FROM WEST TO EAST ACROSS central Asia, massively dividing China from Pakistan, India, and Nepal. At its eastern edge, the Himalaya loses elevation and bends southward, forming steep north-south ridges through much of Yunnan Province, northeastern Burma, and northern Thailand. Major rivers originating in Tibet— the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Salween—descend rapidly through these mountains in Yunnan, cutting deep valleys along their paths. Indeed, at one point in northwestern Yunnan, these three parallel rivers are separated by only 75 kilometers in a narrow mountain band, before they fan out to the East China, South China, and Andaman seas. The rough terrain created by these north-south ridges has for millennia been home to numerous peoples, mentioned in documents from as early as the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) in China (Armijo-Hussein 1996:104). As people slowly migrated in search of fertile forest sites or to escape violence , they were channeled by the ridges south into Burma and later into what is now northern Thailand. The area is sometimes referred to as part of mountainous mainland Southeast Asia, designating a geographic unit that extends across contiguous parts of China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. While the low valleys in this region are mainly tropical, the higher slopesandridgesaresubtropicalduetotheirelevation.Peoplewhocallthemselves Akha generally live at 1,000 meters and above, although state building and economic development have pushed some Akha villages to lower sites, particularly in China and Thailand. Until recent decades, Akha were not aware that they inhabited China, Burma, or Thailand. Althoughconsideredbythecentertoberemote,villagers’livelihoodshave been, for them, at the center of an active and meaningful world that reaches temporally back for fifty-five to sixty-five generations, to the first Akha, and spatially and socially into the markets and politics of surrounding valleys and beyond. Until the 1950s, those politics concerned small border polities rather than nation-states. Until very recently, Akha in the Chinese and Thai border hamlets of Xianfeng and Akhapu have used, and to some extent continue to use, shifting cultivation to produce grain and vegetables, in concert with other land uses. By its nature, shifting cultivation entails fairly rapid changes in the landscape as forests are cleared for fields, fields are cultivated for one or two years, and then allowed to regenerate into forests Villagers’ experience of shifting cultivation has contributed to their knowledge of the plasticity of the landscape. To produce their livelihoods, over time Akha farmers open plots across their land area and then allow themtoregenerateintotrees,sometimeswithenrichmentplantingsof perennials (Xu et al. 1995:80). Fields at diªerent elevations may have separate rice varieties as well as distinct combinations of vegetables intercropped with the grain. Depending on household labor, changes in weather, and infestations of pests, Akha farmers can open fields of varying size in diªerent micro sites. While aware of the length of fallow time needed to restore fertility to cultivated fields, Akha can also vary the length of fallows depending on the natural fertility of the site and on changing production demands. This successive use of various sites for somewhat diªerent purposes enables Akha to envision the landscape as an extensive setting with multiple possible trajectories for future use. In addition to cultivating upland rice in swiddens, Akha in Xianfeng and Akhapu also manage wet-rice fields, raise large numbers of livestock, hunt wild game, and collect myriad kinds of wild fruits, vegetables, and herbs in surrounding fields and forests. Like shifting cultivators elsewhere, Akha base their livelihoods on a composite of activities PREMODERN BORDER LANDSCAPES 120 that allow them to shift labor allocation as required by subsistence needs and taxation. If one field or one crop fails, households almost always have other sources for grain and vegetables. What is the knowledge form, or conceptual understanding of the landscape , that underlies risk-averse, composite land-use practices with long time horizons?Inadditiontoanintimateknowledgeof micrositesacrossthelandscape (spatial knowledge), Akha have an understanding of the plasticity of land cover over time (temporal knowledge). These two aspects, spatial and temporal, enable villagers to adapt quickly to changes as well...

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