218th
Meeting – Tuesday, January 29th 2002
"From finding
a treasure in a poor village to the setting up of an
Akha Educational System"
A
talk by Leo A. von Geusau
A summary of
Leo’s talk
I came to Thailand
in 1977 to conduct fieldwork studies on Akha language and culture. Two
obstacles that I initially encountered were that I was discouraged by
the Thai
authorities who, for whatever reasons, did not want me to pursue these
studies,
and the Akha taboo against allowing their teachers - phima - to share
their memorized
texts with outsiders. This taboo made it very difficult for me to find
a
village that would allow me to stay and talk with their teacher. To
overcome
this obstacle, I made a bike tour through 10 villages until I at last
came to
Ban Ayo Mai, a small, very poor village, where the village leader,
Pacelo, was
willing to break the taboo and teach me Akha language and culture. In
the two
years that I spent studying with Pacelo, I discovered that despite the
obvious
problems associated with poverty and malnutrition in the village, the
Akha
people maintained an intricate system of rules and regulations that
controlled
social order and a wealth of traditional ecological, agricultural,
moral and
accurate historical knowledge. The name given to this complex corpus of
culture
is 'zang', to be translated as
'Customary Law'. Zang is orally transferred in lengthy texts from one
generation to the next by 'cultural specialists'. The most important of
these
specialists is the phima or reciter, who has to study for 10-15 years
with a
master phima in order memorize the lengthy texts; which must be
memorized
literally in order to prevent cosmic irregularities. The texts are
extremely
poetic and descriptive and often use the Taoist type of oppositions.
The reason that
Abaw Pacelo had decided to break the taboo and pass these
texts on to an outsider was that he foresaw a time, in the not too
distant
future, when the younger generation would go to school and learn from
books. If
the traditional Akha educational texts were to continue to be passed on
to
future generations then the system of oral transfer had to be converted
into a
written system and stored as 'hard-copy' in books and other forms of
modern
communication media, rather than in the memory banks of the phima. It
had to be
accepted that an inevitable cultural casualty of this transfer process
would be
the loss of the almost computer-like exactness of the zang teaching
master's
memory. Following the first breaking of the taboo a movement soon
developed to
'save what can be saved' before the older generation dies and takes
their
libraries of text memories to the grave with them. Several phimas
offered to
have their texts taped and ceremonies photographed, which has resulted
in the
establishment of an Akha archive of around 800 audiotapes, several
hundred
videos and thousands of still photos. These texts and images of
ceremonies were
not given to us anthropologists and linguists to be used only in our
individual
academic pursuits; perhaps never again to see the light of day, but in
order
that we should write them down in a form that could be used to produce
educational material for future generations of Akha. Although our
organisations, related to MPCDE/SEAMP (South-East Asian Mountain
Peoples'
Culture and Development Educational Foundation) started to write down some of the
texts, it was not until 1966 that we from MPCDE/SEAMP-HRI, Chiang Mai
had a
chance to start to systematically copy texts from tapes. We have now
produced
10 manuscripts in 'Archaic Akha Texts' on various subjects of
'traditional
knowledge'. The Chinese government, using language exercise books
written in an
adapted form of an internationally recognizable script, is now
developing an
Akha educational system. An "Archaic Akha Text Manual" about the
"Life-cycle of people, animals and plants." is almost ready for
printing. In the mean time Akha
language and culture teachers are being trained. In the villages and
amongst
Akha students there is great interest in this modernized Akha
Educational
System. It's taken nearly three decades but now the dreams of my first
teachers
are beginning to become reality.
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