Week 3 – The cultural identity of techniques: rigidity and flexibility in ancestral customs transmission among the Akha of highland Laos
This early draft was authored by Giulio Ongaro.
This is still a very tentative first draft. I took part in the project because the Akha – a group of swidden farmers in highland Laos whom I lived with for 18 months in 2015-2016 – display patterns of cultural transmission that are well-known to be remarkably rigid for a non-literate society. Hence, I thought that, in light of the aims of the project, it might be interesting to explore the reasons for this rigidity and explore how flexibility plays out within it. The first part of this draft is an introduction to the ethnographic context, whereas the remaining three parts contain sketches of arguments that I hope to expand in the next version. I look forward to hearing your suggestions as to what aspects of the material below are worth elaborating further.
A short introduction to Akha traditional society and customs
Migratory farmers of Tibeto-Burman language origin, the Akha crossed the Mekong to settle villages on the Lao hills sometime in the 19th century, after a long southward journey from China. Their migratory trajectory led them into the confines of five nation-states. Beside Laos, they currently live in northern Thailand, in the Yunnan province in China, in the Shan state of Myanmar, and in the north-western tip of Vietnam – numbering some 750,000 in total, 113,00 of which live in Laos (Wang, 2013:20). The huge swath of highlands they have occupied has the geopolitical peculiarity of having been, historically, out of the reach of governments. Its remoteness impeded major lowland power centres from exerting full control over highlanders, effectively allowing the creation of politically autonomous zones, and the proliferation of distinct ethnic identities. In Laos alone, Akha villages are interspersed with Hmong, Lahu, Iu Mien, Phunoy, Lolo, Khmu and Lamet communities, among others. With a few exceptions, these highland societies stand out for being very different, both in terms of culture and modes of subsistence, from the politically dominant lowlanders. To this day, driving from a lowland Lao town towards the highlands means entering a strikingly different cultural universe. People of the plains like the Lao have had a state, permanent agriculture, a writing system, and Buddhism. Highlanders have lived in condition of statelessness (until very recently, at least), shifting cultivation, orality, and animism: they practice a mixture of spirit cults and ancestors worship. As Scott (2009) argued in his ‘anarchist history of Southeast Asia’, people like the Akha decided to live in such remote and places to escape the burdens of the lowland state – bureaucracy, slavery, warfare, etc. – and its people, by whom they were regarded as savages.
Parallel to this process of rejection, the Akha have consolidated over the centuries a strikingly elaborate complex of customs – rituals, material techniques, social norms, dressing codes, artefacts, etc. – that has served as the basis for their identity in such a context of power inequality (Geusau, 2000; Tooker, 2012). Throughout their history, they have placed high value in the conservation of this tradition, faithfully passing down oral codes and texts from generation to generation. In fact, one can witness very similar practices – e.g. house building, ritual, hunting techniques – in Akha communities far away from one another that have been separated for centuries. Many anthropologists who have studied the Akha consider this as a great example of rigid cultural transmission. In recent decades, Akha living in Thailand and China have largely abandoned their traditional customs. In Thailand this was mostly due to the work of foreign missionaries in the 1990s. In China, customs were eradicated even earlier by the Cultural Revolution. In socialist Laos, however, change has been occurring at a much slower pace, due to the long isolation from outside influences and a ban on religious proselytization. Here, customs are still held firmly in place by the power accorded to the ancestors – where I conducted fieldwork, Akha still see themselves as the contemporary bearers of an imposing and identity-defining tradition, handed down through the centuries by a long line of forefathers.
To give a sense both of the Akha attachment to ancestral tradition and their rigid pattern of cultural transmission, I shall briefly mention the case of Akha genealogies. Every adult male in a traditional Akha village, which is patrilineal and patrilocal, must memorise his genealogy up to the apical ancestor SmrMirOr. These genealogies can include up to 60 generations, spanning about 1500 years. As linguists and anthropologists realised, Akha communities separated for centuries share the initial nodes of these genealogies. Linguist Pascal Boucherie remarked:
“The fact that all […] Akha subgroups are bound by genealogical links is absolutely remarkable, if one considers the geographical distance that separates different groups of population. For instance, Akha of Thailand and Piyo subgroups, though they are for the most part ignorant of their reciprocal existence and have no contact at all, use the same common list of 20 initial ancestors names in their genealogies, with the exception of minor phonological differences. In two communities separated by more than 500km of mountainous country, we have recorded a list of initial thirty-odd nodes at a genealogical distance of 25 generations. […] It has been frequently argued that among oral societies, genealogical lists of ancestors are too easily manipulated for them to carry any significant historical meaning (for instance: Leach, 1954). The great similarity of Akha initial nodes of ancestors […] demonstrates on the contrary that a very ancient memory can remain unchanged through centuries despite migration, geographical isolation and linguistic changes.”
Alongside the rigidity of their transmission, an important aspect that typifies Akha customs is their holistic nature, the fact that they pervade many different social spheres – religion, law, kinship, economy, agriculture, healthcare, etc. – down to the most practical techniques of everyday life. Geusau (1983) described Akha ‘customs’ as “religion, way of life, customs, etiquette and ceremonies”, adding that “it is hard to say where rite and ceremony begin and ‘etiquette’ ends, since a clear distinction between ‘normal’ life and formalized behaviour does not exist” (1978:3). They comprises prescriptions and proscriptions that coordinate practical activities as varied as building houses (e.g. how many rungs to fit on a ladder), hunting (e.g. how to kill game), eating (e.g. how to hold a bamboo teacup in ceremonies), sleeping (e.g. the direction one should sleep), and working in the fields (e.g. how to hold a sickle), and all complex non-calendric and calendric rituals that punctuate the Akha yearly cycle. They also include a rich body of oral stories, myths, proverbs, and ritual and shamanic texts, possibly comparable, as to breath and complexity, to codexes like the Vedas or the Old Testament, themselves oral before they were written down.
Because of the pervasive nature of customs – the fact that they influence even very daily practical activities – a wide range of Akha material techniques are unintelligible from a purely utilitarian point of view. Why, for instance, do Akha spend so much time levelling the ground when building their house on stilts while they could much more easily just dig holes for the main posts? Why don’t they decapitate their game when this would make meat preparation and cooking speedier? Why don’t they perform manual work close to the ground when their back faces the sun? To answer questions of this kind – which were not only posed by myself but also by occasional Lao visitors to the village – it is necessary to examine the overall symbolic principles that organise customs and Akha daily life.
Cultural schemas
I find it useful, in doing so, to revive the idea of ‘cultural schema’, which Strauss and Quinn (1988) define as a socially shared network of strongly connected cognitive elements that motivate action and interpretation of the world. Such schemas among the Akha (and many other people) take the form of binary oppositions, the most important of which is that between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. This principle is most saliently instantiated in the construction of the Akha village. Every Akha village in highland Laos is made of a close cluster of houses, spread on a slope, encircled by a belt of forest that sets it apart from fields, other villages and other types of forest, namely the ‘outside’ world. Even with growing deforestation, at least a thin rim of bush is kept around the village. The village, thus structured, guarantees some protection from external forces like wild animals, foreigners and evil spirits. Its ‘inside’ is perceived as a safeguarding, positive domain, seen as the fount of ‘blessing’, which, if rightly channelled by way of ritual, counters the negative forces impinging from the outside. Much of Akha ritual life perpetuates the separation between these two domains, closing off the intimate haven of the village from the threats of the outside world.
The opposition between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is reproduced within the village at the level of the household (every house must have a boundary that is ritually reinforced periodically) where it further intersects with the opposition between ‘men and ‘women’. Akha houses are windowless, hence quite dark, rectangular chambers, internally arranged in a quadripartite order: widthwise, they are divided by the main floorbeam, which marks the separating point between the ‘living’ side, where eating, cooking and working take place, and a slightly raised ‘sleeping side’; lengthwise, they are divided by a partitioning wall which evenly separates a ‘male side’ from a ‘female side’, with elders sleeping closer to the partition. The hearth, where women cook rice and other food, is located at the far end of the female side. The ancestral altar, the place where Akha perform 12 sacrifices per year, is also located on the female side. In such a strongly patrilineal society, one might expect to find the ancestral section in the male side of the house. Instead, it is located on the female side because the male/female binary is juxtaposed to the outside/inside binary: being the major source of blessing and protection, the ancestral section represents quintessential ‘insidedness’. Women, by virtue of cooking rice and their association with fertility, are also associated with the ‘inside’, in opposition to men, whose distinctive activity is hunting, an ‘outside’ occupation. Unsurprisingly, hunting rituals are performed on the male side.
House building is also coordinated by the opposition between ‘above’ and ‘below’. Initially built on the ground by newly married couples, houses are elevated on stilts after a period of time, keeping with a gerontocratic principle central to Akha culture that associated age and importance with ‘aboveness’. Accordingly, ancestors are ‘above’ their descendants (the ancestral altar hangs from the top rafter) as elders are ‘above’ younger people, both in terms of importance and spatial coding. For instance, it is forbidden for a young person to reach for something that lies on a shelf above the head of an elder, let alone drop it. Like the inside/outside dichotomy, the above/below dichotomy is very salient and takes many forms. It guides gender relations, to the effect that man must be above and woman below, a rule that (reportedly) is most prominently realised in sexual intercourse. It is also instantiated at the household level – e.g. the attic is off-limits to everyone except the house owners – where it intersects with the other salient distinction of humans versus animals: humans must be above, animals below. In the same way that outside animals cannot enter the village, inside animals cannot climb on top of roofs. Seeing a pig, dog, chicken, or goat climbing the roof is an ominous event that signals a deficiency of blessing for the household. Customs command that the reckless animal is killed, and its meat distributed evenly among all villagers with the exception of the animal’s owner.
The abovementioned dichotomies also intersect with the dichotomy between ‘steep’ and ‘level’. Levelness is associated with stability and ‘insidedness’, and slopes with danger and ‘outsidedness’. It is for this reason that it is necessary to level the ground before building a new house and it’s not possible to merely dig holes for the main posts (this answers one of the questions above), in the same way that it is important for rituals and other significant social activities to take place on level ground and not on a slope. This matrix of binary opposites is further interwoven with the distinctions between day and night, wet and dry season (some activities can only take place at specific time of the day and year) and with many minor others:
| outside | : | inside |
| man | : | woman |
| above | : | below |
| hunting | : | agriculture |
| steep | : | level |
| night | : | day |
| wild animals | : | domesticated animals |
| wet season | : | dry season |
| spirits | : | humans |
In addition, there are a number of principles that fall outside this matrix but are nevertheless important symbolic coordinators of practical activities. One of this is the significance placed on physical integrity: Akha never decapitate a sacrificial animal when this is alive (and for a brief period after its death), in the same way that they do not medically amputate limbs on a living human being and kill deformed babies at birth (e.g. hare-lipped, polydactyl) because they are considered rejects. To answer the final question I posed above, Akha do not perform manual work close to the ground when their back faces the sun because they see the shadow as an extension of one’s soul – disturbing or piercing it with objects would thus amount to self-affliction.
This brief account should give an idea of the pervasiveness of these cultural schemas, which are internalised by every Akha individual as they grow up in the community, and which run deep enough in the culture to seep into people’s bodily habitus and daily techniques.
Public knowledge and secret knowledge
In the future draft of this chapter I will present detailed cases of how these cultural schemas organise practical techniques in the domains of agriculture, hunting, and shamanism. Drawing from ethnographies on Akha communities living in other times and places, I will highlight the inter-cultural similarities (and therefore the rigidity in transmission) of such symbolic principles. Considering the changes that customs have undergone in the face of the new political and economic circumstances of the last few decades, I will show that flexibility in practicing new versions of customs play out within the symbolic parameters set of these core, and rigid, cultural schemas.
This will be a standard, if somewhat old-fashioned, symbolic anthropological analysis. What’s interesting to point out for the purpose of the project is that that rigidity in cultural transmission only applies to the techniques coordinated by above-mentioned cultural schemas, which, as I indicated, are public knowledge (even shamanism draws from the same well of traditional myths, oral texts and customs that define Akha as a group, and is not esoteric). This knowledge is shared by all members of an Akha community and is identity-defining: practicing Akha customs, and following these schemas, is what makes you Akha. Not all techniques one sees in an Akha village are public knowledge, however. There is a set of techniques whose knowledge is kept private and esoteric, and that play no role in defining ethnic identity. The transmission of this knowledge, contrary to that of Akha customs, is remarkably flexible.
The best example is that of herbal medicine, which I studied in detail during my fieldwork. Interestingly for a society that nurtures a robust shamanic tradition, herbal medicine among the Akha is unrelated to spirits and to the profession of shamanism. Herbalists only provide relief for aches and pains such as fractures, burns, cuts, stings, bruises, animal bites, and so on, which are non-spiritual in nature. General ethnobotanical knowledge is very widespread in the community. By interacting with the forest on a daily basis, Akha people from an early age quickly build up a huge knowledge of arboreal species, whose vastness usually surprises anthropologists brought up in urban places. And yet, how to pick these plants and mix them in a way to produce powerful medicine is expertise that belongs to a very few in the community. This domain of knowledge is shrouded in secrecy, and it is precisely on secrecy that the effectiveness of medicinal plants is said to depend. It is only passed on to one’s son or daughter (typically, herbalists are female) or to a non-related person in exchange of money (giving it away for free is thought to dimmish its efficacy). Transmission, however, is far from rigid. Apprentices quickly learn to experiment with new mixtures and keep those that they find effective and discard those that are not. Moreover, they sometimes source healing plants from dreams. One herbalist, for instance, told me that she is often visited in her dreams by an old man who whispers the name of a new medicinal plant into her ear. Upon waking up, she rushes into the forest to collect it. During my fieldwork, I paid four herbalists the necessary amount of money to have a solid baseline for comparing their herbal pharmacopoeias. Unsurprisingly, I found that the percentage of shared medicinal plants was very low, each herbalist treasuring their own very idiosyncratic arsenal of herbal treatments.[1] It is, indeed, impossible to talk about an ‘Akha pharmacopoeia’ at all because there is nothing specifically Akha about it. Akha themselves, while talking (almost incessantly) about ‘Akha customs’, never use the expression ‘Akha medicinal plants’.
On the whole, public, identity-defining techniques – i.e. ‘Akha customs’ – are characterised by rigid transmission; esoteric techniques are characterised by a high degree of flexibility.
The significance of culture in cultural transmission
To understand why customs are characterised by rigid transmission we must look once again at the geopolitical context of the Akha. Deborah Tooker (2012), who lived among the Akha of Thailand in the early 1980s before globalisation, argues that the shared practice of customs has been fundamental in forging their sense of collective identity and that this has been highly empowering in a context of unequal power relations with the lowlands. She argues that the very character of Akha customs – especially its emphasis on the inside/outside distinction and the attachment to ancestral tradition – has furthered this sense of empowerment. The correct adherence to ancestral rules enables Akha to tap into the ancestors blessing radiating from the inside and to prevent threatening outside forces from draining it. It is a system of customs, in short, that maps on the unequal political context in which Akha find themselves and helps perpetuating their identity. The value placed on the continuity of ancestral rules should partly be explained in light of the socio-political circumstances in which Akha have been immersed in for most of their history.
By the same token, Akha have not assimilated (until very recently) certain cultural traits and techniques from other groups (especially lowland groups) which would have destabilised their ancestral customs, and accordingly, their identity. Perhaps the most significant of these techniques is writing. As Scott argues (2009), the upland peoples of Southeast Asia have preferred to adhere to their rich oral tradition and reject writing because the latter was associated with bureaucracy and the state, which they wanted to evade and avoid. The Akha myth about literacy is quite telling in regards. It recounts how Akha used to possess writing inscribed onto a buffalo’s skin, before a hungry man ate the entire buffalo, losing writing forever. Thus, Scott and other anthropologists have suggested that Akha should not be consider a pre- but post-literate society; not the survivals of an early phase of history but deliberate runaways from many of the achievements that lowland civilization pride themselves with.
This Akha material should evoke Mauss (2006) argument that the most interesting question to ask with regards to the transmission of techniques is not why certain techniques spread, but why some do not. Mauss argued that this had to do with the very nature of culture. In his book, he surveyed a number of dramatic cases of non-transmission of even very practical technologies across the ethnographic record. He found, for instance, that Algokians in Alaska refuse to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite their being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats; Inuit, similarly, refuse to adopt Algonkian snowshoes. Since almost any existing technique has always been available to almost anyone, he concluded that cultures are based conscious refusal (Mauss in Graeber, 2013:2).
In my next draft I will expand and elaborate on some of these ideas. On the whole, I will use the Akha material to show the extent to which the transmission of techniques, and the rigidity and flexibility thereof, can be mediated by cultural values and identity.
[1] The low level of medicinal knowledge transmission, both intra-group and inter-group, appears to be a general trait of the region at large. Pake (1986), working on the Hmong, found that herbalists do not share their knowledge of plants with one another. Dubost (2011) surveyed the medicinal plants used by Lue, Hmong and Lamet communities living in close contact with each other to find that only a meagre 23% were commonly shared, most of which, it turned out, were used for completely different ailment.Bibliography
Boucherie, P. 1993. ‘The Genealogical Patronymic Linkage System of Akha and Hani’. Paper presented at the First International Conference on Hani Culture. Gejiu, Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China. February 28 – March 5.
Dubost, J. M. 2014. Medicinal Plants Used in Nam Kan National Park: An Ethnobotanic Survey in Hmong, Lue and Lamet Communities. Laos: Gibbon Experience Project.
Geusau, L. A. Von 1983. Dialectics of Akhazan: the interiorizations of a perennial minority group. In Highlanders of Thailand, edited by J. McKinnon & W. Bhruksasri, 241–279. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Graeber, D. (2013). Culture as creative refusal. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 31(2), 1-19.
Mauss, M. (2006) Techniques, Technologies, and Civilizations (ed. N. Schlanger). London: Berghan Books.
Pake, C. V. 1987. Medicinal ethnobotany of Hmong refugees in Thailand. Journal of Ethnobiology 7, 13–26.
Scott, J. C. 2009. The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven London: Yale University Press.
Strauss, C. & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning (Vol. 9). Cambridge University Press.
Tooker, D. E. 2012. Space and the production of cultural difference among the Akha prior to globalization: channeling the flow of life. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Wang, J. 2013. Sacred and contested landscapes: Dynamics of natural resource management by Akha people in Xishuangbanna, Southwest China. PhD Thesis, UC Riverside.
13 Comments
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Dan Sperber 21 September 2020 (18:09)
Extraneous and intrinsic factors of rigidity and flexibility
Many thanks to Giulio for this fascinating sketch of Akha customs. The contrast between this ethnographic work and the experimental work presented in the two earlier contributions is huge! So is our challenge of exploring the mutual relevance of such different approaches. Here are a few remarks on some ways in which Giulio’s work may be relevant to our common theme “Flexibility and rigidity in the use and transmission of techniques.”
To begin with, this sketch provides a necessary reminder for experimentalists of what to anthropologists is obvious and essential: all human actions and interactions occur in, and contribute to a dense cultural environment, and the uses and transmission of techniques are no exception. This is an aspect of things which is left out of lab experiments, with the caveat that the lab itself is a cultural environment part of the wider culture to which participants belong and which they do not leave at the door. This issue has already been evoked in Rita’s and Giulio’s comments to the fist paper (by James, Arianna, and Luke) and in Luke’s and James’ replies, and it is sure to come up again.
A more specific point illustrated by Giulio’s paper is that there may be general cultural attitudes to cultural transmission and practices which, in the Akha case, strongly favours rigidity in all domains of public activity (and even in private activity such a sexual intercourse). This kind of general attitude to cultural rigidity itself, then, may favour rigidity in the use and transmission of technique for reasons that have nothing to do with optimizing their efficiency. Such extraneous factors of rigidity must be distinguished from intrinsic factors also weighing for rigidity. Of course, there may across different cultures and practices extraneous and intrinsic factors favouring flexibility rather than rigidity. There is also the possibility that, in given cases, these extraneous and intrinsic factors converge or, on the contrary, conflict.
How does all this affect the use and transmission of Akha techniques in, for instance, house building? I mean: how does this affect the house builders tools and technical actions themselves rather than their goal of building a house with a very precise and fixed, highly ‘meaningful’ plan?
Another fascinating point illustrated here by the case of herbal medicine, is that there may be highly valued cultural know-hows that, because they are kept private and esoteric, may in fact have quite unstable contents and very-low-fidelity transmission. Of course, in this case, lack of rigidity does not affect efficacy, which, I assume, as in herbal medicine generally, is anyhow limited and relies in good part on the placebo effect. Is this variability in herbal medicine acknowledged among the Akha, or is it, on the contrary, denied?
I hope that, in developing his paper, Giulio will discuss the impact of this general attitude to cultural rigidity on the use and transmission actual Akha techniques. Isn’t there a level of technical detail that escapes this kind of rigidity and where considerations of efficiency determine how flexibly things are done and transmitted?
Valentine Roux 23 September 2020 (17:06)
Favorable social conditions to technological stability
Thank you Giulio for your article. At the end, you raise the fascinating question of why certain techniques do not spread, in other words, why the stability of technical traditions and under what conditions. I use the word stability on purpose, avoiding the word rigidity which I reserve for the description of skills at the individual level. I use the word stability to describe technical traditions that exist over a long period of time. With respect to the social conditions that are favorable to technological stability, and thus the non-adoption of new and effective technical traits, I would like to draw your attention to some hypotheses about the role of social interactions between distinct groups using different techniques (Roux et al. 2017; Flache 2018).
Flache, Andreas. 2018. « Between monoculture and cultural polarization: agent-based models of the interplay of social influence and cultural diversity ». Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 25 (4): 996–1023.
Roux, V., B. Bril, Jessie Cauliez, A.L Goujon, Catherine Lara, Geoffroy Saulieu de, et Etienne Zangato. 2017. « Persisting Technological Boundaries: Social Interactions, Cognitive Correlations and Polarization ». Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 48 (4): 320‑35.
Helena Miton 24 September 2020 (19:25)
Does cultural identity impact all techniques equally?
Many thanks to Giulio for this essay. If I understood you correctly, you suggest that mostly public (rather than secret) knowledge has an identity-defining property. Am I correct in understanding that, in a 2 x 2 possibilities of secret/public x identity-defining/not-identity-defining, your account suggests that mostly the two combinations secret x non-identity-defining and the public x identity-defining would be the most populated? Do you have an intuition or hypothesis on what determines which techniques end up being part of public knowledge, and which ones remain more secret or idiosyncratic?
In a more tangential question, can you see any evidence that identity-defining techniques become more important (and maybe more rigidly transmitted) in times at which cultural identity is more threatened (e.g., fluctuations in the political context)?
Finally, another interesting aspect for me is which kind of reasons sometimes appear in justifying adopting a technique over another. Just for pleasure, let me share a similar nugget of such a justification, on the different ways of holding a bridle’s reins (the author, James Fillis, although an English man, was trained in the French way, which he praises there as it “is the best”): https://books.google.com/books?id=Rxbg9ljy9rcC&lpg=PA72&dq=rein%20holding%20french%20vs%20english&pg=PA72#v=onepage&q&f=false
Giulio Ongaro 26 September 2020 (19:44)
Extraneous and intrinsic factors of rigidity and flexibility: a reply to Dan
Thank you, Dan, for this thoughtful comment. The distinction between extraneous and intrinsic factors seems very important, though I think that in the context of this paper it can take at least two forms. For instance, the cultural attitude to rigidity – which you suggest is an extraneous factor relative to the intrinsic, culture-independent factors that favour rigidity – could also be considered an intrinsic (or, better, ‘internal’) factor relative to extraneous (or ‘external’) factors of changing socio-economic circumstances that affect the Akha from the outside. I will need to analytically clarify these distinctions at the outset.
You are right to point out that all these factors can variably converge or conflict in favouring rigidity. The case of house building is telling in regard. For example, Akha tradition (extraneous, internal factor) originally prescribed that Akha house floors must be made of split bamboo, which Akha collect from the forest and easily flatten and turn into floor. Over the last five years, the availability of chainsaws from the lowland market (extraneous, external) has made the possibility of making timber board from big trees in the forest. The efficacy of timber boards (intrinsic) is much greater: they are more comfortable to walk on, they are more stable, and they last for many years, unlike split bamboo, which needs to be replaced almost yearly. Akha eventually adopted the timber board, but only after collectively deliberating (extraneous, internal) that this constitutes an accepted practice (it took some time before the dilemma posed by this novelty was resolved). However, not all Akha households can afford chainsaws (intrinsic?, internal) and there are Lao forestry rules that restrain the cutting of big trees (extraneous, external). As a result, there are now some houses built with timber boards and some that are built with split bamboo (incidentally, this has also exacerbated intra-village inequality). Accordingly, there is higher flexibility in the practice.
I think you are right in suggesting that the flexibility in herbal medicine knowledge transmission has little to do with efficacy. I should add that the curative properties of the (probably few) efficacious herbal remedies – e.g. opium, betel, ginger – are public knowledge. It is possible that there are other effective herbs within the secret and different vast repertoires of Akha herbalists, but it’s unlikely. One of the lessons learnt in ethnopharmacology in the last fifty years is that failure of bioassays usually turns out to be very high; not many medicinal herbs and plants are discovered to contain pharmacologically active substances for the ailments they are purported to treat. It’s is safe to assume that the ‘placebo effect’ does much of the work here.
As for your last question – Isn’t there a level of technical detail that escapes this kind of rigidity and where considerations of efficiency determine how flexibly things are done and transmitted? – in the next draft I will specify which kinds of techniques are coordinated by the ‘cultural schemas’ that I mentioned and which kinds of techniques are not, and explain the reasons why (I hint at some of these reasons in the reply to Helena’s comment below).
Giulio Ongaro 26 September 2020 (19:46)
Favorable social conditions to technological stability: a reply to Valentine
These references look very pertinent. The distinction between ‘stability’ and ‘rigidity’ seems significant, and one which I should reflect on further. Also, engaging with this literature will make the draft more relevant to the other empirical works in the project, which is the challenge that Dan pointed out in his comment. I’m going to read them, many thanks.
Giulio Ongaro 26 September 2020 (19:48)
Does cultural identity impact all techniques equally?: a reply to Helena
That’s right. In a 2 x 2 scenario, the secret/non-identity-defining and public/identity-defining combinations are the most popular, though it would probably be more meaningful to express these combinations as public/rigid transmission vs secret/flexible transmission. I say this (and here I answer your second question) because the identity-defining techniques need to be public techniques almost by necessity. Since they identify Akha from other ethnic groups, they must be conspicuous. The best example of this is clothing: all traditional Akha dress alike with visibly striking outfits: men wear black culottes, elaborately woven shirts and a red turban; women wear thigh leggings, a mini skirt, an equally elaborate shirt and a heavy silver headdress. An anthropologist who worked with the Akha in the past remarked that Akha ‘dress in flags’ since these outfits are unambiguous statements of difference. This preoccupation with the rigidity of customs can also turn inward (e.g. rules about sexual intercourse), but it’s clear that its primary function is to be a public marker of ethnic identity.
The question of whether identity-defining techniques are more important in times in which cultural identity is more threatened is a tricky one to answer. I suspect the answer will need to explore all the different ways in which cultural identity can be threatened. I can certainly say that identity-defining techniques become very important when people’s existence (rather than simply cultural identity) is threatened. For centuries, highlanders like the Akha have been subjected to continuous raids, enslavement, conscription efforts, etc. from lowland states. While highland remoteness offered some defence, their collective effort to forge an ethnic identity was a powerful tool of social and political stance-taking, and empowered them throughout.
Thanks a lot for your questions, and for sharing this amusing passage on holding a bridle’s reins.
Dan Sperber 27 September 2020 (00:34)
Extraenous/intrinsic is not the same as external/internal
Thanks, Giulio, for your interesting answer. I pursue the exchange because I fear I may not have expressed myself clearly enough and I may have caused a misunderstanding regarding extraneous and intrinsic factors in technical practices. By intrinsic factor, I meant a constraint justified by practical efficiency in the pursuit of a technical goal. By extraneous factor, I meant a constraint justified by considerations irrelevant to practical efficiency.
To use a toy example: a recipe for a bechamel sauce may call for constant stirring in order to avoid the formation of lumps. Stirring is indeed an effective way to achieve this goal, and this constraints obeys an internal factor in the sense I intended. A rule that the stirring movement should be done clockwise and not counter-clockwise, on the other hand, would, I assume, not contribute to practical efficiency and would presumably obey an extraneous factor. Both factors could well be cultural: stirring constantly in order to avoid lumps may correspond to a strong cultural preference, and so can performing circular movements of any kind, technical or not, in a clockwise manner (a preference I encountered among the Dorze of Ethiopia).
So, this distinction among tactors affecting a technical practice between extraneous and intrinsic ones is quite distinct from the other important distinction (which you illustrate in your reply) between factors that are internal or external to the culture itself.
Giulio Ongaro 27 September 2020 (16:16)
Extraenous/intrinsic is not the same as external/internal
Thanks, Dan. Sorry I might have unnecessarily muddled things in my reply. I only meant to point out the terminological similarity between intrinsic/extraneous and internal/external, and the fact that both sets of factors can variably conflict or converge in favouring rigidity. As you indicated, these dichotomies are clearly distinct. I’ll make sure to clarify all the meanings of these terms at the outset in the final draft.
James Strachan 29 September 2020 (15:12)
Cross-modal correspondences
Thank you, Giulio, for this interesting post. Of particular interest is the set of dichotomies that you describe — the schematic worldview that defines the Akha identity. Schema are of course well established concepts within the social psychology literature, but what strikes us particularly in your description is how these relate to cross-modal correspondences. Such correspondences have been studied in cognitive psychology (the most famous of which is probably the bouba-kiki effect, where certain speech sounds are non-arbitrarily linked with shape features, but many other associations are widely established in the literature – see Spence & Deroy, 2013), which show that stimuli presented with congruent associations (e.g. big objects and low pitches) are processed more easily than incongruent associations (small objects and low pitches). This parallel leads us to two points: one question and one observation.
Cross modal correspondences are often exploited in sports to provide more precise feedback when learning a particular technique. One study by Effenberg et al. (2016) demonstrated that sonifying an expert rowers movements by mapping the force of their movements onto the pitch of a continuous sound (i.e. the more force applied to the oar the higher pitched the sound) allowed novices to more effectively learn from the demonstration, compared to demonstrations in which movements were not sonified. The authors suggested that sonification of the experts movements allowed novices to build a richer multimodal representation of the observed action, allowing them to exploit natural crossmodal correspondences in order to better compare their performances to that of the model. Our question is whether you notice any evidence of this kind of phenomenon in your observations, where learners (either independently or with the assistance of others) use associations between these pre-existing correspondences to structure the development of new skills and techniques?
That these associations are culturally learned is not surprising — the SNARC effect is a cross-modal mapping between space and numbers where low and high numbers are associated with different sides of space (low/left vs. high/right, typically among Western participants), but this mapping is reversed in Lebanese mono-literate Arabic readers (Zebian, 2005) and rotated in Taiwanese readers reading Chinese numerals (i.e. the association was top-to-bottom rather than left-to-right; Hung, Hung, Tzeng, & Wu, 2008; see Göbel, Shaki, & Fischer, 2011, for a review). Indeed, there are several dichotomous associations that you describe that may be explained by exposure to the physical ecology (above = steep = outside) while others are clearly imposed by the cultural context (inside = woman = agriculture).
What makes this schema of correspondences interesting is how you describe this as the basis of Akha identity. To over-simplify your rich explanation, learning to become an Akha adult is about learning this set of cross-modal correspondences, which can then be used to guide future behaviour. With this, you need never have seen a goat on a roof before to know, when you first see one, that this is a punishable taboo, because domesticated animals = below, and this situation is incompatible. This is a dimension that is missing from a lot of laboratory experimental work on social learning.
The tight control of experimental research allows the researchers to dictate many features of the social learning interaction, including the to-be-learned behaviour. This can lead us to focus on instances where what is to be learned is the behaviour that the participant sees, rather than the underlying schema that makes such behaviour possible. This is less of a problem in developmental research on natural pedagogy, where a key element is examining how learners interpret information as global vs. specific depending on how it is transmitted, but to our knowledge even this approach does not examine the sort of situation you describe, where a big part of learning is about acquiring an associative mapping between concepts that can structure later actions and is publicly shared by members of the population, without ever being behaviourally expressed in its entirety.
As we mention, there is a lot of work in experimental cognitive psychology about cross-modal correspondences. Your post has alerted us to the open possibilities for drawing on this largely asocial work to offer new tools for understanding and examining social learning in the lab.
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References
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Spence, C., & Deroy, O. (2013). How automatic are crossmodal correspondences?. Consciousness and cognition, 22(1), 245-260.
Effenberg, A. O., Fehse, U., Schmitz, G., Krueger, B., & Mechling, H. (2016). Movement sonification: effects on motor learning beyond rhythmic adjustments. Frontiers in neuroscience, 10, 219.
Zebian, S. (2005). Linkages between number concepts, spatial thinking, and directionality of writing: The SNARC effect and the REVERSE SNARC effect in English and Arabic monoliterates, biliterates, and illiterate Arabic speakers. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5(1-2), 165-190.
Hung, Y. , Hung, D.L. , Tzeng, O.J.- L. , & Wu, D. (2008). Flexible spatial mapping of different notations of numbers in Chinese readers. Cognition, 106, 1441-1450.
Göbel, S. M., Shaki, S., & Fischer, M. H. (2011). The cultural number line: a review of cultural and linguistic influences on the development of number processing. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42(4), 543-565.
Mathieu Charbonneau 2 October 2020 (11:48)
Flexibility in use, novel circumstances, and regulative norms
Thank you Giulio for your very stimulating draft.
I would like to ask you a question that links with Valentine and Blandine’s draft. They define flexibility as “the capacity to cope with variable circumstances, with unexpected variation and to find a solution in any situation.” (their first comment). There are at least two key points in this understanding. First, it focuses on the use of a technique, whereas your focus is more on the social transmission of techniques. Second, their use-understanding of flexibility involves that, in order to observe flexible technical behavior, we need to have variable circumstances within which the technique is used and from there see if the users adapt the technique to the context, or not.
I was wondering what observations you have of such form of flexibility. One way to examine this form of flexibility for the identity-defining dichotomies you report would be to see how the Akha react (adapt) to novel situations in which a few or several of these dichotomies conflict with one another, with the conflict serving as the novel situation. For instance, suppose a domesticated (vs. wild) animal runs away from its enclosure (flat) into the hills (steep) during the wet (vs. dry) season. Who’s to go out and track (hunt?) it and bring it back? Male or female? Does it make a difference if the animal ran up or downhill? (please excuse the ethnographical naïveté of my example, the point is, of course, more general). How would the Akha react in those circumstances? (if you don’t know, what is your informed guess about how they would react)
In these ‘conflicting’ case scenarios, there may be no obvious solution as to who’s to go and find the animal (more generally, how the tension between the different dichotomies ought to be resolved). Do the Akha have existing regulative norms to solve these issues? One possibility is that they have precedents on which to solve analogous situations (e.g, memorial ones, mythological ones, etc.). Another kind of regulative norm dealing with such conflicts would be to adopt a hierarchical system of which some dichotomies prevail onto others. For instance, I read you as suggesting that there is, to some extent at least, some hierarchy in how the difference dichotomies prevail over one another.
Insidedness/outsidedness prevails and defines what is to be associated to male and female, not the other way around: “The ancestral altar, the place where Akha perform 12 sacrifices per year, is also located on the female side. In such a strongly patrilineal society, one might expect to find the ancestral section in the male side of the house. Instead, it is located on the female side because the male/female binary is juxtaposed to the outside/inside binary: being the major source of blessing and protection, the ancestral section represents quintessential ‘insidedness’.” And I’m sure there are many more such possible norms or means to solve these conflicts, some more flexible, others more rigid, that could exist.
Do Akha have such well-defined regulative norms that allow them to solve these conflicts in a systematic way? If so, to what extent? And if not, how do they deal with such conflicts?
Giulio Ongaro 5 October 2020 (23:59)
Cross-modal correspondences: a reply to James
Thank you for this very helpful comment, and for the introduction to an area of cognitive psychology I know little about. I’ll take a close look at the cross-modal correspondences literature and the references you mention as they seem pertinent. The suggestion that Akha learners use cross-modal correspondences to learn and become Akha is intriguing, though I should stress that these are indeed mostly imposed by the cultural context rather than emerging from the physical features of the environment (to use Dan Sperber’s language above, they are imposed by extraneous rather than intrinsic factors). Even the correspondences between above/steep/outside, though mapping onto the physical environment, are primarily cultural (neighbouring ethnic groups living in the same environment do not entertain these symbolic dichotomies, or don’t do so to the same degree). They are schema that primarily coordinate Akha social rules and ethical behaviour, which, however, are so pervasive and entrenched that they seep into more everyday practical techniques. Your comment seems to inquire about the extent to which they do so. I will explore this in detail in the contexts of shamanism, house building and agriculture in the final draft, and will pay attention to the potential role of cross-modal correspondences. The learning of shamanic practice in particular, multisensorial as it is, seems to make abundant use of it.
It is certainly the case that schema help making sense of novel events. For instance, a cow once happened to get stuck in a V-shaped tree in the forest while reaching for some berries on top of that tree. Nobody in the village had ever witnessed this event before, but because the forest is an ‘outside’ domain populated by spirits, and cows are ‘inside’ animals, this was considered an anomaly: the cow had to be killed on the spot. Its meat, deemed impure for the owner of the cow, was distributed equally among all the other households, but was eaten outside the house, in the yard, because considered polluted by outside matter.
Thank you also for your reply to my last comment on your post, which was very exhaustive.
Giulio Ongaro 6 October 2020 (00:01)
Flexibility in use, novel circumstances, and regulative norms: a reply to Mathieu
Thank you, Mathieu. I have just read Valentine and Blandine’s draft (which I found very interesting and may comment later on). If I understand correctly, what I call ‘flexibility’ in my draft is ‘variability’ in theirs (for the sake of keeping terminological coherence throughout the project, I don’t mind changing my terms).
I think you are right in saying that to examine flexibility in their sense (not ‘variability’) in the context of the cultural schemas I outlined it’s worth investigating how Akha deal with novel events and/or anomalies. This point has also been raised by James, so I’m copying here an anecdote I posted in response to his comment above:
A cow once happened to get stuck in a V-shaped tree in the forest while reaching for some berries on top of that tree. Nobody in the village had ever witnessed such an event before, but because the forest is an ‘outside’ domain populated by spirits, and cows are ‘inside’ animals, this was considered an anomaly: the cow had to be killed on the spot. Its meat, deemed impure for the owner of the cow, was distributed equally among all the other households, but was eaten outside the house, in the yard, because considered polluted by outside matter.
Cultural schemas, in short, can act as a template for guiding behaviour and dealing with novelties (I have many more such cases I can illustrate). You are right in intuiting that in order to do so effectively, there must be a hierarchy between dichotomies (the outside/inside dichotomy is by far the most salient). This doesn’t mean that conflict and incoherence never arise. Although a well-established hierarchy of dichotomies exists, the correct practice of Akha customs is endlessly and enthusiastically debated by elders. When uncertain circumstances arise, they reach a decision on what to do through consensus. If consensus is not reached (as I once witnessed in the event of an important funeral), then the ‘traditional village owner’ has the final word. This is the person in charge of overseeing the right practice of all customs and is symbolically responsible for the health of the community.
Pooja Venkatesh 12 October 2020 (16:46)
Public- private distinctions in the use of herbal medicine
Thank you for this thought provoking draft, Giulio!
It gave me a chance to also reflect on my fieldwork with practitioners of traditional medicine in Karnataka, India. Based primarily in a central town where a network of healers has been established (in the absence of state legitimacy), I followed a family generational practice (where the learner—and now primary practitioner—apprenticed alongside his father in seeing patients) and a training program (that primarily works on classical Ayurvedic recipes). While at first glance, I expected the latter to be rigid in its approach, the prevailing secrecy around traditional medicine encourages healers to improvise from a standardized recipe, and their experience therefore valued much higher than the recipe itself. The training was also an interesting site to explore the public- private conflict, not just because secrecy is a defining feature in the transmission of healing, but because one of the ways of facilitating legitimacy is through networks and trainings, which re-structures affective relationships that motivate practice while still maintain the primacy of the family. The emphasis on family generational practice is more so in Karnataka (relative to, say, Kerala or Tamil Nadu).
Your observations on the binary oppositions that define the Akha and the flexibility in learning herbal medicine were very interesting to think with. I was curious about everyday herbal preparations (in cooking, agriculture) among the community and their bearing on expertise: If, in the (private) sphere of specialization, one open to select few, flexibility is honed and encouraged, does the rigidity of everyday (public) practices maintain or unmake secrecy? Does secrecy reify or contest public knowledge?
I was also curious about how you see privacy defined vis-à-vis the allied relationships that build healing: for example, in how community members (and external clients perhaps?) choose and approach the healer for treatment. In what ways does their search connect herbal medicine with other avenues of treatment? Does the healer- client relationship allow for what is public, in the form of customs, for example, to be redefined in the privacy of the interaction?