Materialising Exile: Material Culture and Embodied Experience among Karenni Refugees in Thailand 9781845456405, 1845456408

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1 Materialising Exile and Karenni Refugees: An Introduction
2 In-Between: Being a Karenni Refugee
3 Inside/Outside: Refugee Journeys
4 Remembering, Forgetting and Imagining the Pre-Exile Past
5 Coping and (Re)constructing ‘Home’ in Displacement
6 Materialising Home and Exile
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MATERIALISING EXILE

STUDIES IN FORCED MIGRATION General Editors: Roger Zetter and Eva Lotta Hedman, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford Volume 1 A Tamil Asylum Diaspora: Sri Lankan Migration, Settlement and Politics in Switzerland Christopher McDowell

Volume 12 Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey Edited by Renée Hirschon

Volume 2 Understanding Impoverishment: The Consequences of Developmentinduced Displacement Edited by Christopher McDowell

Volume 13 Refugees and the Transformation of Societies: Agency, Policies, Ethics and Politics Edited by Philomena Essed, Georg Frerks and Joke Schrijvers

Volume 3 Losing Place: Refugee Populations and Rural Transformations in East Africa Johnathan B. Bascom Volume 4 The End of the Refugee Cycle? Refugee Repatriation and Reconstruction Edited by Richard Black and Khalid Koser Volume 5 Engendering Forced Migration: Theory and Practice Edited by Doreen Indra Volume 6 Refugee Policy in Sudan, 1967–1984 Ahmed Karadawi Volume 7 Psychosocial Wellness of Refugees: Issues in Qualitative and Quantitative Research Edited by Frederick L. Ahearn, Jr. Volume 8 Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania Marc Sommers Volume 9 Whatever Happened to Asylum in Britain? A Tale of Two Walls Louise Pirouet Volume 10 Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development Edited by Dawn Chatty and Marcus Colchester Volume 11 Tibetans in Nepal: The Dynamics of International Assistance among a Community in Exile Anne Frechette

Volume 14 Children and Youth on the Front Line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement Edited by Jo Boyden and Joanna de Berry Volume 15 Religion and Nation: Iranian Local and Transnational Networks in Britain Kathryn Spellman Volume 16 Children of Palestine Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East Dawn Chatty and Gillian Lewando Hundt Volume 17 Rights in Exile: Janus-faced Humanitarianism Guglielmo Verdirame and Barbara Harrell-Bond Volume 18 Development-induced Displacement: Problems, Policies and People Edited by Chris de Wet Volume 19 Transnational Nomads: How Somalis Cope with Refugee Life in the Dadaab Camps of Kenya Cindy Horst Volume 20 New Regionalism and Asylum Seekers: Challenges Ahead Susan Kneebone and Felicity Rawlings-Sanei Volume 21 (Re)constructing Armenia in Lebanon and Syria: Ethno-cultural Diversity and the State in the Aftermath of a Refugee Crisis Nicola Migliorino

Volume 22 ‘Brothers’ or Others? Muslim Arab Sudanese in Egypt Anita H. Fábos Volume 23 Materialising Exile: Material Culture and Embodied Experience among Karenni Refugees in Thailand Sandra H. Dudley Volume 24 Not Born a Refugee Woman: Contesting Identities, Rethinking Practices Edited by Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed, Nazilla Khanlou and Helene Moussa Volume 25 Years of Conflict: Adolescence, Political Violence and Displacement Edited by Jason Hart Volume 26 Remaking Home: Reconstructing Life, Place and Identity in Rome and Amsterdam Maja Korac Volume 27 Materialising Exile: Material Culture and Embodied Experience among the Karenni Refugees in Thailand Sandra H. Dudley Volume 28 The Early Morning Phone Call: Somali Refugees’ Remittances Anna Lindley Volume 29 Deterritorialized Youth: Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the Middle East Edited by Dawn Chatty Volume 30 Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life Simon Turner Volume 31 Zimbabwe’s New Diaspora: Displacement and the Cultural Politics of Survival Edited by JoAnn McGregor and Ranka Primorac

Materialising Exile

MATERIAL CULTURE AND EMBODIED EXPERIENCE AMONG KARENNI REFUGEES IN THAILAND

Sandra H. Dudley

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Dudley text4:Dudley text

2/19/10

10:16 AM

Page iv

First published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2010 Sandra H. Dudley All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-640-5 hardback

For Harriet and Frederick, in memory of my inspirational father Robert Douglas Dudley 1942–2002 This phenomenal world is full of natural devastation and obstacles. (KRNRC 1974/1997)

… the ache that remains … (Rivers 1987: 125)

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Preface

x

Acknowledgements

xv

Abbreviations

xvi

1 Materialising Exile and Karenni Refugees: An Introduction The Sensoriality and Materiality of Exile Continuity with Past Times and Places Being at Home, Being in Place The Karenni Materialising Exile: Refugee Studies, Material Culture Studies and Beyond

1 2 6 8 11 24 27 28 33 43

2 In-Between: Being a Karenni Refugee Burmese Refugees in Thailand The Karenni Camps Being a Refugee: Self-Perceptions Material Forms, Bodies and Sense Experience in Being a Refugee Coping With Life in the Camps: Habit and Consuming Time Liminality

53 57 61

3 Inside/Outside: Refugee Journeys Journeys to and from the Camps Cross-Border Movement and Knowledge Forms of Knowledge and Emotional Response Memory and Feeling in Journey Narratives

67 67 72 76 78

viii | Contents

Journeying as Normal Landscape, Senses, Bodies and Things

82 85

4 Remembering, Forgetting and Imagining the Pre-Exile Past 91 Dress and Connections with the Past 91 Dïy-küw and Thoughts of Home 106 Moving Beyond Rupture 119 5 Coping and (Re)constructing ‘Home’ in Displacement Wider Contexts and Influences … and T-Shirts Objects, Landscapes, Bodies: Metaphors and Foils for Experience Making Things, Making Place, Making Self Becoming ‘At Home’ in Exile

125 125

6 Materialising Home and Exile Conceptions of Home Continuity and Change Exilic Objects and Bodies Feeling Right With and In the World

155 155 159 161 164

Bibliography

167

Index

185

128 143 150

List of Figures

1.1

Map of Karenni (Kayah) State.

15

1.2

Map of Burma (Myanmar).

20

2.1

Map of the Thai-Burma border.

28

2.2

Mock repatriation by Thai soldiers of Karenni refugees from the former Karenni Camp 5 (now Site 2), 1996.

35

A view of part of the former Karenni Camp 5 (now Karenni Site 2) in 1996.

37

Traditionally dressed and recently arrived Kayah women, pounding rice in the former Karenni Camp 2 (now Site 1) in 1996.

97

2.3 4.1

Preparing dïy-küw parcels in the former Karenni Camp 5 (Site 2) in 1996.

107

Dïy-küw dancers in the former Karenni Camp 5 (Site 2) in 1996.

109

Dïy-küw musicians playing the goblet drum and the gong, Karenni Camp 5 (Site 2), 1996.

109

A young male ka-thow-bòw dancer in Karenni Camp 2 (now Site 1) in 1998.

131

An unwell Kayah woman with chicken blood and feathers applied to her back as part of a curative ritual.

132

5.3

The ka-thow-bòw flag as used in the Karenni refugee camps.

135

5.4

A large number of chicken femurs tied in offering around the ka-thow-bòw pole, Karenni Camp 2 (Site 1), 1998. 136

5.5

Naw Elizabeth weaving a skirt-cloth on a continuous warp back-strap loom, underneath her house, Karenni Camp 5 (Site 2), 1997.

4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2

146

Preface

This book is about the role of materiality and aesthetics in the experience of forced displacement. The book focuses on Karenni refugees living in camps in northwest Thailand. The Karenni are a heterogeneous group from the east of Burma, some of whom are involved in a struggle for independence. I use ‘Burma’ in preference to ‘Myanmar’ both because the former name is likely to be more familiar to most readers, and because it is preferred by my informants and others in opposition to the current regime in Rangoon. The Burmese background to this book is one of conflict ongoing since Burma’s independence from Britain in 1948. This conflict includes a continuing struggle for democracy, internationally well known since the brutal quelling by the military regime of pro-democracy demonstrations in 1988 and the failed, monk-led Saffron Revolution in 2007. The ethnic insurgencies also ongoing since 1948, of which the Karenni are a part, are less familiar to many abroad; less commonly understood too is the uniqueness of the position of the exiled political leadership of the refugees who people the pages in this book, that their state is already independent and currently illegally occupied by an alien aggressor. The chapters that follow are based on initial field research conducted from 1996 to 1997, and follow-up research continued in the field and by ongoing communications up to the present. In the late 1990s, most of my research was based in one particular Karenni refugee camp, in which I lived; I also worked in other Karenni camps. Yet I did not travel to Thailand intending to work with the Karenni. Although I knew of them, I had assumed working with them would be impracticable and in any case my main ethnographic interests at that time lay in Burman culture, not ethnic minorities. When I arrived in Thailand, however, it became increasingly clear that the most exciting and challenging research for me would indeed involve working with the Karenni. The rich complexity and diversity of their population (something that with my previously limited knowledge I had not appreciated), the relatively little exposure they had then had to researchers and the uniqueness of their political stance towards the Burmese regime, were all factors which, especially in proportion to the relatively small size of their refugee population, seemed to make the Karenni an ideal group with which to work. Furthermore, it seemed

Preface | xi

somehow just, given the relative lack of attention they had at that time received in comparison to the more numerous Karen and the small but high profile numbers of post-1988 Burman refugees. Thus, though it took me just three and a half short weeks to travel from Bangkok to Chiang Mai to Mae Hong Son, visiting en route all the relief agency workers, academics and others whom I wanted to meet, in that time the trajectory of my future research entirely changed. On first arriving in Mae Hong Son I went to see Abel Tweed, then Foreign Minister of the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP; a selfstyled government-in-exile), himself based in the town rather than in the refugee camps. I explained I was an anthropologist and that if he would permit it, I would like to learn about how Karenni refugees live. After an initially dismissive response, not so much to me as to my academic discipline (which I think he may have mistaken for archaeology) – ‘What the hell do you want to come here for? I thought anthropologists all went to the Middle East’ – he agreed that I might visit the southernmost of the Karenni camps. I first travelled to that camp in an old, Karenni owned truck, full of rice, sixteen refugees and me. The journey usually took about three hours: the first on a mountainous, mostly metalled road, and the remaining two on a twisting mud track through increasingly thick jungle. That early rainy season day, however, it took seven, with innumerable instances of breaking down and getting stuck in the mud. After it grew dark and we had been in the jungle for sometime, in my naiveté and tired confusion I had even begun to imagine that the hundreds of fireflies I could see all around us were really the torches of Burmese soldiers. By the time we arrived at nearly midnight, I had been fortunate enough to begin what was to become one of my closest and most valuable friendships, with fellowpassenger Paw Wah, then Secretary of the Karenni National Women’s Organisation (KNWO). My first few days in the camp were spent in her house, and my initial reactions to the Karenni were so positive in large part because of her warmth and hospitality. Yet everyone else I met was also welcoming and concerned about how I might cope with living in a refugee camp in the jungle; the irony that it was I rather than they who had chosen to be there and who could leave at any time, of course made this generosity of spirit all the more discomforting. As the months passed, and as my familiarity with life in the Karenni camps grew, so the questions to which I tried to find answers changed and developed. Initially my principal objectives were merely to settle in and try to learn something of what it means to be both Karenni and a Karenni forced migrant. I had expected to find a reasonably clearly defined population about whom I could write a straightforward refugee camp ethnography, but I did not. Instead, I found myself confused about who was or was not ‘Karenni’, struggling to understand the relationships

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between a bewildering array of languages, religions, socio-economic backgrounds, levels of education and political aspirations. As time progressed, I began to realise the complexity and mutability not only of ‘Karenni-ness’ but also of the refugee experience itself, and the deliberate and myriad efforts of some sectors of the Karenni refugee population to shape and change both. I have written elsewhere about the extraordinary diversity contained within ‘Karenni-ness’ and the Karenni nationalist agenda promulgated in the camps (Dudley 2000a, 2002b, 2007). This book deals instead with the complex and subtle ways in which Karenni refugees cope with and seek to ameliorate their displacement and its implications for their sense of who they are and whence they have come. It makes clear that far from being passive victims of circumstance, Karenni refugees are active in making the best they can of their situation. During my main period of camp based research, I had my own typical, small bamboo house in the southernmost camp, raised on stilts and thatched with leaves, built for me by the camp’s high school students. I shared this house with two female Karenni school students, Beh Meh and Mary, who proved invaluable not only as informal research assistants and advisers but also as supportive and fun friends. In addition, I spent periods of time staying in the other main Karenni camps and was asked by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to conduct urgent ethnographic research with newly arrived, ‘traditional’ Kayah refugees in the northernmost camp. Throughout my research, I rarely met any attitude but generosity and willingness to assist. I was lucky enough to forge lasting friendships and good working relationships with different sectors of the Karenni refugee community and with IRC staff. My research methods were qualitative, and prioritised participant observation. I utilised Burmese and English: Burmese is first language for almost none of the people with whom I lived, but the diversity of different first languages means Burmese is used as a lingua franca (albeit one with problematic political associations) and many people speak it fluently; additionally, many of the more educated refugees speak at least some English. However, some refugees cannot speak either language and occasionally I was forced to rely on translators. My daily routine was structured around my work teaching English in the camp’s high school. Occasionally this seemed a distraction from my field research but mostly it contributed directly to it, enabling me to form strong bonds with a diverse group of people and providing me with a ready made role within the community. I felt less easy, however, about the relatively high social status that being a teacher conferred on me and which altered the dynamics of several relationships. Indeed, my position within the social organisation of the camp was complex, and changed over time and depending upon with whom I was interacting. I always

Preface | xiii

had at least two hats, as teacher and as researcher, although often I would find myself wearing more, sometimes as advisor on various administrative and political matters, sometimes editor of political letters and funding proposals, sometimes a point of contact with relief and development agencies, frequently a source of general information concerning the outside world, and for a period, a commissioner and purchasing collector of contemporary textiles for two UK museums.1 It was impossible for me to obtain any firsthand data inside Karenni State. This is not necessarily unusual in work with refugees. Nonetheless, it is a methodological – and representational – issue: it was by definition not possible for me to ascertain directly the physical and social conditions whence my displaced informants had come. Does such a lack of firsthand data from places of origin necessarily compromise what can be said about refugees? It is sometimes argued that life in a refugee camp is in a sense a life in suspension, caught in a liminal time and place, focused on the past and the future but not the present, an ethnography of which is thus inherently limited and partial.2 Yet in my experience refugee camp life is also a rich pageant in itself, worthy of serious ethnographic enquiry both as a way of life and in terms of its marginal relationship to the places whence informants came and those where they have sought refuge. Throughout this book, I have tried to privilege refugees’ own perspectives. Nonetheless, the fact that remains that by trying to ‘do anthropology’ one puts oneself in the position of attempting to represent and interpret other people’s lives. Doing it at all means telling stories that are not mine to tell. I am fortunate that my informants were not only happy that I was going to tell such stories on their behalf, but that they went out of their way to make sure I had enough information to do so. Inevitably, however, this raises questions about how the Karenni chose to represent themselves and to influence the direction of my anthropological gaze, and about how this is represented by me. As Appadurai has put it ‘the problem of voice is a problem of multiplicity as well as a problem of representation. How many voices are concealed beneath the generalizations of reported speech in much ethnography? And how many voices clamor [sic] beneath the enquiries and interests of the single ethnographer?’ (Appadurai 1988: 16; see also Zetter’s warning against over-generalising the experience of refugees [1988: 102]). At times, the ethnographic descriptions of the pages that follow do indeed appear generalising – yet importantly, this was precisely how the Karenni sort to present and rationalise their own diversity of ethnicity, experience and other factors. Out of deep respect for the Karenni, I have tried to remain true to them as my friends while presenting an honest picture of things as I saw them. Any faults in this attempt, however, are the result of my misunderstanding rather than of the way in which the Karenni represented themselves to me.

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The sensitivity of the political and humanitarian situation within which the subjects of this book live, has led me to change the names of almost all Karenni individuals referred to herein, with the exception of members of the KNPP executive, whose names are already in the public domain.

Notes 1. 2.

The Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. E.g. Wendy James, personal communication 1997.

Acknowledgements

I owe an enormous amount of gratitude for the warmth, friendship and unfailing patience of the Karenni refugees I have come to know. I have to thank in particular Beh Meh and Mary, my most valued companions; Paw Wah, my first Karenni friend; Saw Eh Gay and his family, who treated me as one of their own; all my teacher colleagues, especially Mariano, who made me laugh until I cried; all the students of 1996–7’s 9th and 10th standards and Post-Ten; those who were so hospitable in other camps and villages; Saw Ka Htoo at the Foreign Office, whose friendship is as durable as his patience; and Saya-gyi Teddy Buri, whose friendly criticisms have been indispensable. I am extremely grateful too to the KNPP executive and camp committees for not only permitting but also facilitating my research; in particular, Abel Tweed, Rimond Htoo, Khu U Reh, Hte Buphe and Aung Than Lay. All but the last six names have been changed – but they will know who they are. Others in Thailand to whom I am grateful include Claire Whieldon, Edith Bowles, Kerry Demusz, Susan Menzies, Christina Fink, Chrissie Gittins, Gabrielle Schaumberger, all at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Sally Thompson, Lyndal Barry, Pippa Curwen, Women’s Education for Advancement and Empowerment (WEAVE), Dr Supang Chantavanich, and all at the Karenni Student Development Programme (KSDP). For the grants and research time that have made this book possible, I am indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the University of Leicester’s special study leave scheme, Jesus College Oxford, the Emslie Horniman and RAI/Sutasoma funds of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Peter Lienhardt Memorial Fund, Cha Fund and the Board of Graduate Studies at the University of Oxford, and the Evans Fund at the University of Cambridge. I am also appreciative of discussion with Nick Allen, the late Michael Aris, Marcus Banks, Donna Guest, Clare Harris, Tania Kaiser, Howard Morphy, Alison Petch, Patricia Sloane-White, Martin Smith, Andrew Turton and colleagues and students in the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Thanks too go to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for this book, and to Jim Roberts for help with the maps. And I am forever grateful for the enduring love and support of my family, especially Simon Gill.

Abbreviations

ASEAN BBC BPP CCSDPT COERR IDP INGO IRC IWDC JRS KNPLF KNPP KNU KNWO LDC MOI NGO NLD PF PPAT PV SLORC SPDC TBBC UN UNHCR WEAVE

Association of South East Asian Nations Burma Border Consortium (in 2004 became the TBBC) Border Patrol Police Co-ordinating Committee for Services to Displaced Persons in Thailand Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees Internally Displaced Person International Non–Governmental Organisation International Rescue Committee Indigenous Women’s Development Centre Jesuit Refugee Service Karenni National People’s Liberation Front Karenni National Progressive Party Karen National Union Karenni National Women’s Organisation Least Developed Country status Ministry of the Interior Non-Governmental Organisation National League for Democracy Plasmodium Falciparum Planned Parent Association of Thailand Plasmodium Vivax State Law and Order Restoration Council State Peace and Development Council Thai-Burma Border Consortium (formerly the BBC) United Nations United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Women’s Education for Advancement and Empowerment

1 Materialising Exile and Karenni Refugees: An Introduction

This book explores the intrinsically cultural experience of forced migration through a focus on objects, places, sensory perception and conceptions of time and space. It asks what it feels like to be a refugee (c.f. Stoller 1989: 8) – what it feels like to be not a passive victim of circumstance, but an active agent busily engaged in daily life and in making sense and the best of the world as it is. It asks too what it means to feel ‘at home’, to feel that all is right with one’s world – and looks not only at ways in which refugees work towards producing this feeling, but also at how we might theorise these processes by drawing upon aesthetics and other theory not usually associated with studies of forced migration. Becoming displaced by definition changes one’s relationships with the material world to which we belong: the world of places, things and other people. It is, thus, my aim to sidestep the usual focus in studies of forced migration on either the causes of displacement and protection of refugees or the social, cognitive and practical ways in which refugees interact with their displaced world. Instead, I address the material, visual, spatial and embodied aspects of the fundamentally cultural processes through which refugees make meaning out of the social and physical rupture of forced migration. Focusing on the highly diverse Karenni refugee population living in camps on the Thai-Burma border, with whom I have worked since 1996, I reach into exploration of the displaced material world itself, and the embodied, sensory ways in which it is engaged and arouses feeling. This book presents both a unique approach to understanding forced migration and a new extension of contemporary material and sensorial culture theory in anthropology, cultural studies and beyond. In its focus on the Karenni, the book also makes a novel contribution to studies of Burmese conflict, displacement and its impacts: I concentrate not on

2 | Materialising Exile

political, economic and humanitarian cause and effect, but on the more microscopic scale of human, cultural experience and adaptation. The book is located across a very extensive disciplinary span, drawing influence not only from refugee studies, anthropological material culture theory and Burma scholarship, but also from aesthetics, phenomenology and beyond. In this introductory chapter, I outline some of the book’s fundamental premises and contexts, including the sensoriality, materiality and continuity of exile and of home (all of which are of course explored and substantiated in later chapters), and introduce the Karenni and their Burmese context.

The Sensoriality and Materiality of Exile1 How do a forced migrant’s culturally conditioned body and mind sense, interpret and act upon the physical experiences of displacement, journeying, arrival and dwelling in a border refugee camp? In what ways do the bodily senses connect with and determine memories and imagination of the past home left behind, and how does this influence the ways in which refugees seek to create a sense of home and place in the camp in their new location? What particular material objects and aspects of the physical environment (if any) are important in these processes, and to which of the body’s senses do they particularly connect? Emphases on questions such as these, and in general a material and sensorial cultural approach, have not yet been properly applied to the study of forced migration. Yet evidence from other contexts indicates that emphasising the material world of which people are a part, the senses, the embodied nature of experience, and the way in which all of these may contribute to feeling at ease or at home, is essential to a holistic understanding of how any human group makes sense – and the best – of its lot.

The Importance of the Material World, Feeling and Aesthetics Why is an analytical emphasis on the material world important? Outside studies informed by theories of material, visual and sensorial culture, a material focus is not widespread in analyses of any human groups, displaced or not – though it is certainly well established as an approach. Physical objects are an abundant and fundamental, though oft taken-forgranted aspect of the world within which we live. Yet to read much social scientific analysis one could be forgiven for assuming human beings act as disembodied, unextended minds interacting in an empty vacuum, rather than as animated physical bodies engaging with each other, with the environment and with material objects. Nonetheless, considerable material culture studies scholarship since the late twentieth century has

Materialising Exile and Karenni Refugees: An Introduction | 3

demonstrated that objects – including landscape and the human body – are active participants in social life and change. This emphasis on the material – which has influenced disciplines ranging from anthropology and archaeology, through human geography and history, to management and organisational studies – constitutes ‘a new form, rather than subject, of enquiry’ (Geismar and Horst 2004: 5), aiming not to replace investigation of the social and cultural, but to recognise their mutual embeddedness with the material. More recently still, some useful attention has been paid to theorising the actual materiality of objects (Pietz 1985, Howes 2006) – the thing’s physical characteristics and sensory qualities – and how this is experienced. Our senses and our physical positions and movements in space determine how we encounter and interpret the world around us, and in turn those senses and physical positions and movements are culturally constituted (Howes 2006). How all of us, refugees included, read the world, make the world and live in the world, relates both to our individual bodily experience and our personal, social and cultural backgrounds. It is now increasingly understood that our sensory perception and the interpretations we make of our sense-data are culturally and historically situated. Much of this recent work on the embodied nature of cultural experience has been influenced by phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty (e.g. 2005), Heidegger (e.g. 1962) and Husserl (e.g. 1964), emphasising that culture, identity and views lie not only in person-person relations but also in relationships between persons and things. People, things, sensory experience and ideas are, in other words, not separate but all mutually intertwined (c.f. Rodaway 1994). Framing the question of what it feels like to be a refugee, as will become clear later in the book, raises the spectre of two different kinds of ‘feelings’: the physical senses and the emotions, which are intrinsically linked and historically and culturally situated. Like the physical senses, emotions too are beginning to be a significant subject of critical enquiry associated with materiality (e.g. Wulff 2007), not least precisely because of their intimate connection with sensation. Some contemporary writers (e.g. Gibbs 2002) have returned to earlier distinctions (Tomkins 1962–1992) between ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’, emphasising the physiological and social co-bases of the latter and its inextricability from the materiality of the socially constructed body. Emotion, affect and sensation all form a significant part of the refugee experiences discussed in these pages. Emotion, affect and sensation also all come together in my conception and application of ‘aesthetics’ to the Karenni experience of forced migration. I use aesthetics not in the often conventional terms of judgements of taste regarding art or beauty, but in its wider meaning of inter-linked sensory and emotional experience and preference. This is, as

4 | Materialising Exile

I will return to later, essentially about the contribution of our senseimpressions and associated ideas of the world around us to a feeling of rightness, or wellbeing – something important for all human beings and, perhaps, part not only of how we order things but of how they order us (c.f. Miller 2007: 171). Feeling right with the world is also something which is arguably a central component in feeling ‘at home’ – an important issue for refugees and in this book, and one to which I shall return.

Sensory Exile in the Field As an anthropologist in the field, I too experienced a form of displacement, albeit a voluntary one. Intriguingly, sensory and sensual components of such an exile are still surprisingly little addressed (a notable and excellent exception being Stoller 1989). Yet when one begins to recall experiences in the field, it is often if not always a sense of it – tastes, sounds, bodily sensations, smells, and of course sights – that comes to mind first. And if we pause to reflect upon that often fleeting sensory recall before moving swiftly on – as we usually do – to cogitate, analyse and write, the specifics of what is recollected are somehow felt again, albeit this time within the imagination rather than literally within the feet or the mouth or other appropriate part of the body. As I have written this book, for example, inevitably I have thought a great deal about my own experience in the field – and if I pause to notice it, before I even begin selfconsciously to reflect upon and theorise my field data, all my memories of refugee camp life are wrapped up in how it felt, for me, to be there. It is of course crucial that my or any other researcher’s own sensory matrices do not unconsciously structure those with which the subject community is imputed – just because, say, sound is of particular significance in an anthropologist’s memories of his or her time in the field, it does not necessarily follow that it is of the same level of importance in how members of the community order and interpret their world. Interestingly, however, as I later outline it is for the Karenni, for me the sensual domain of eating is especially significant in my field recollections. Discussing his own experiences, Stoller has much to say about food, for example telling a tale about his own sensual disgust, provoked in the field by a deliberately badly cooked sauce (1989). The sense of taste is, as Stoller demonstrates, important and complex in its own right, rich with cultural meanings. But eating is so much more of a multi-layered sensorial experience than one involving taste alone. My own field memories of food and its associations are at once immediate, powerful, frequently still strongly physical in manifestation and sometimes poignant. I still clearly recall – and actually, greedily, still salivate at – both the tastes and smells of fish paste and ground soya bean cakes cooked with chilli. These favourite food items of mine during my

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time in the camps, have lingered long in my sensorial memory vaults. But so too have the connected sensations of touch, bodily movement, and internal responses to the food: when I break down my memories of mealtimes in the camps, be they situated in my or another’s house, I realise that as well as visual pictures in my mind of what the cooking and dining areas looked like, and in addition to recollections of tastes and smells, the other, still integral components of those memories involve the physical feelings of walking barefooted over the springy, uneven bamboo planks of the suspended floor to the low table, of sitting – sometimes slightly uncomfortably after a few minutes had passed – on the floor to eat, of feeling the pleasant breeze blowing gently through the house wall onto my face as I perspired from the heat of both the day and the chilli, of the wetness and different textures of the rice and sauces on my fingers and thumb as I tried to learn to eat with my hand, and of the warmth in my throat and stomach as the spicy food went down. All this has stayed in my memory and can be rekindled – and refelt – almost as if it were being directly experienced all over again. This would clearly be so even had I worked with a non-displaced group of people. In research with refugees, however, there is a double exilic layer, with the subject community’s displacement deepening the anthropologist’s own exile in the field. Indeed, while sensory experience in the refugee camps was generally not so ‘other’ for the Karenni refugees as it was for me, we had some commonality in undergoing a kind of sensual exile from the familiar past. My situation was clearly incomparable with theirs – I had not experienced the horrors they had, and I could leave at any time – but none of us was really ‘at home’, including in the culinary terms that turned out to be of mutual importance. But did my conceptualisation of exile have anything more in common with theirs? Or does such a comparison risk oversimplifying, even trivialising the refugee experience? The physical and conceptual journeying and the transcending of national, cultural and metaphorical boundaries that characterise anthropological fieldwork are well understood (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997). The anthropologist’s ‘strong trope of movement, of migrancy’ (Wilding 2007: 334) arguably also has additional implications for anthropological interpretations of forced displacement; indeed, Wilding develops this theme in the related context of transnationalism (2007). She argues that the traditional ethnographic approach ‘privilege[s] a certain worldview’ and has had ‘a problematic effect on the understandings that are developed about the lives of the people being researched’ because the individual anthropologist’s emphasis tends to reflect the researcher’s own concerns and circumstances rather than necessarily those of the research subjects (2007: 332–333). Part of the problem, she suggests, is that the ethnographer is unable to escape the traditional conception of fieldwork in which ‘the field’ is a fixed,

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singular place, and thus they ‘continue to seek to place their research’ (ibid.: 336) while contradictorily and simultaneously focusing not on the places per se but on the migration of an idea, commodity or relationship (ibid.: 337). The researcher, in other words, according to Wilding remains unable ultimately to see the world in a way other than one still informed by their, rather than their informants’, basic premises – and here, this means seeing culture as still emplaced, even when it is displaced and mobile, as it is for refugees and transnational migrants. Yet this assessment of the researcher as unable to attain the right viewpoint upon displacement because of his or her own background in a rooted, emplaced world, is, I suggest, too simple – and ultimately, it risks failing to hear the voice of the displaced subject even more than the approach it critiques. Like Malkki’s attempt to demolish the pertinence to refugees of the global framework of nation-states (1995a), it ignores the extent to which the displaced themselves may still conceive of themselves within the terms of the framework being dismissed by the analyst. Refugees may be displaced, but – as this book demonstrates – they may nonetheless work hard to maintain conceptual, metaphorical and physical relationships with place, with the result that their experience is exilic but still somehow emplaced. That far at least, my own experience in the field is indeed analogous with the Karenni refugee experience. Importantly too, the physical feeling of bodily sensations were for me as much as for the Karenni essentially inseparable from the other kind of ‘feeling’, which we commonly gloss as emotion and affective response. Indeed, when we remember a physical sensation we tend also to recall emotions associated with the same situation or action. In turn, these emotions are closely linked to values we attribute to them – in a broad sense, to an aesthetics of experience (c.f. Coote 1992). This is true for my personal memories of field experiences; it is equally true of the experiences of refugees. Focusing and reflecting back upon the physical and emotional experiences, and aesthetics, of the subjects of research – upon their pains, pleasures and rationalisations thereof – enables ‘a fuller view of what is at stake for people in everyday life’ (Lutz and White 1986: 431; emphasis original). These interlinkages between the physical world, refugees’ bodily senses, emotion, memory and aesthetics, underpin and run throughout this book.

Continuity with Past Times and Places As will become clear, an important component in feeling right with the world is, for Karenni refugees, a sense of continuity with the predisplacement past. Indeed, a key argument of this book is that far from displacement causing a sudden break between the displaced on the one

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hand and their culturally constituted personal and communal histories and ways of seeing the world on the other, in fact forced migrants work hard and creatively to preserve a feeling of connection with real and imagined pasts and with whom they perceive and wish themselves to be. Forced migrants face, because of their very refugee-ness, a particular problem. Displacement is a cultural experience that requires those who undergo it to seek not only to understand the displacement process and its associated trauma per se, but, perhaps more importantly, also to make sense of everyday life within their new refugee existence. As Muecke identifies, ‘the experience of the … refugee is profoundly cultural because it compels refugees … to resolve what Max Weber ([1915/1958]) identified as the problem of meaning, the need to affirm “the ultimate explicableness of experience”’ (1987: 274). Of course, seeing social life as the continual negotiation of meaning is hardly an original perspective; nor is it relevant only to refugees. In displacement, however, there is an added spatial and temporal obstacle to giving life meaning: refugees by definition find themselves in a new, strange place, which differs from where they were in the past. In order to live as ‘normally’ as possible and find meaning within it, as this book makes clear refugees such as the Karenni seek to make the new place as familiar, as like the old, as possible. In doing so, they are attempting to connect two zones disconnected in space (the refugee camp ‘here’ and the pre-exile ‘there’) and two eras separated in time (the displaced ‘now’ and the pre-migration ‘then’). Bringing about this connection there is, as we shall see, a continual imaginative and cognitive movement between the camps and places of origin, the present and the past. Indeed, for Karenni refugees, who still fervently hope they may one day be able to return to Karenni State in Burma, this movement concerns the future too: even in these times of resettlement (Chapter 2), past places of origin are also conceived, idealistically, as future points of return. In Chapters 3 and 4 in particular, I discuss different components of Karenni refugees’ conceptions of, and relationships with, the past. Memory in its myriad forms – and as both process and product – is clearly central to how the past is in some way maintained for all people, displaced or not. As Chapter 5 illustrates, however, in displaced settings only certain manifestations of memory are optimal or possible: engagements through continuing relationships with land on which generations before have also lived, for example, are clearly unfeasible for refugees. Memory is of increasing interest to scholars in the humanities and social sciences generally. As a trope in contrast to ‘history’, memory concerns not so much the literal truth of the past as ‘the subjective ways that the past is recalled, memorialized, and used to construct the present’ (Holtzman 2006: 363). The means by which refugees recall, memorise and utilise the past are, as this book demonstrates, integral to the continuity of

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their sense of self and of group identity. Yet as Holtzman points out, care needs to be taken in exploring such individual and communal representations of the past: ‘the multiple readings and affective ambivalence that often characterize even a single individual’s reading of the past, much less social renderings of it’ are not necessarily all about the same thing since, in reality, ‘ambivalences and dissonances are … deeply fundamental to the fabric and texture of memory’ (ibid.). I discuss in this book a number of contradictory and ambiguous representations and uses of the past. I also demonstrate the extent to which memories and imaginings of the past are grounded in the embodied, sensory nature of experience in the material world. The interlinkage of memory and the senses is well established in the biological sciences, and has also been addressed in one or two notable ethnographic explorations (e.g. Serematakis 1994). Memories may be strongly flavoured with mental impressions of a visual (pictorial), tactile, aural, olfactory or gustatory kind. Indeed, it is the extent to which memory and the senses are interlinked that renders their active recollection a bodily experience in its own right. As Seremetakis puts it, memory and the senses are so interlinked that ‘[t]here is no such thing as one moment of perception and then another of memory, representation or objectification. Mnemonic processes are intertwined with the sensory order in such a manner as to render each perception a reperception’ (1994: 9). The act of remembering, in other words, always occurs in and/or through the body, and in the present: this is, as we shall see, an important theoretical point, especially in displaced settings.

Being at Home, Being in Place Much previous literature concerned with refugees simply assumed that becoming a refugee by definition entails losing a cultural identity (e.g. Shawcross 1989, Stein 1981). Later critiques of such a conventional nonrefugee view of refugees (e.g. Malkki 1995a) point out that our sense of the tragedy of displacement obscures the lived meanings displacement has for those actually affected by it. We are, so this more recent argument goes, blinded by the calamity of forced migration to the meaning and power extracted by refugees from the in-between social world they inhabit, because of the influence on our perceptions of the globally dominant frameworks of nation states, settled living and associated assumptions about the rootedness, boundedness and territorialized nature of culture (Clifford 1997, Malkki 1995a). Our own rootedness, in other words, allegedly can prevent us from seeing the meaning that exists in forcibly displaced life. To an extent, this is true – at least in earlier approaches to refugees.

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Malkki and Clifford are right to warn us against assuming that displacement means the rupture or loss of culture. Where they risk misleading us, however, is in paying insufficient attention to the fact that most displaced people also hold strongly embedded assumptions about the rootedness – indeed, the emplacement – of culture. The argument that ‘[t]o be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it – to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly’, and that it is ‘in particular places [that] … culture [can] take root’ (Casey 1996: 34), is not restricted to outside analysts blinkered by their own fixity in space: it is also the view of most of those who are forcibly displaced. As this book clearly shows, forced migrants like the Karenni themselves feel the loss of – and yearn for – a sense of emplacement. Indeed, as my research demonstrates it is this that becomes a particular focus or motivation for various different strategies that refugees may utilise in coping with their experience. Emphasising as Malkki rightly does that displacement involves important and complex lived meanings, should not be synonymous with critiquing suppositions about the spatial and conceptual location of culture: if the refugees under analysis also hold such suppositions, then they are suppositions fundamental to understanding life and meaning in that displaced context. For refugees, the sensory and ambivalent processes of remembering and imagining the pre-exile past traverse not only temporal distances but spatial ones, too. These spatial and temporal aspects together concern what I gloss as the notion of ‘home’. I do not conceive of ‘home’ as necessarily a physically defined place (though it may be), nor simply somewhere ‘one feels most safe and at ease’ as Malkki describes it (1995b: 509), but as somewhere that people feel is an intrinsic part of them, of who and what they perceive themselves to be. To an extent, for refugees ‘home’ clearly lies in the past and somewhere other than the refugee camp – i.e. at both a temporal and a spatial remove from present circumstance (Chapters 3 and 4); yet as Chapter 5 demonstrates, a crucial part of how refugees cope with displacement is precisely by also seeking to make ‘home’ in the present, in the camp. It may indeed be unhelpful for the anthropologist to idealise the worlds that refugees have left behind (Malkki 1995b on Geiger 1993), but refugees themselves often not only idealise these worlds as ‘home’ (c.f. Buijs 1993) but also attempt to continue elements of them, and to negotiate the contrastive juxtapositions between here/there and now/then, in displacement. This book shows that attempting to ‘feel at home’, whatever that may mean in practice, is a fundamental aspect of coping with forced displacement – it is an attempt both to make sense of the removal from a familiar place and to make the present ‘here’ more bearable. It is therefore surprising that ‘home’ is a subject so relatively

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little explored in extant studies of refugees (though there are some notable exceptions, such as Graham and Khosravi 1997, Habib 1996, Hammond 2004, Peck 1995). One approach to thinking about the construction of a sense of being ‘at home’ – in refugee contexts or otherwise – is to draw, as I do later in this book and as, for example, Turton does (2005), on the expanding anthropological, geographical and archaeological literature that theorises and problematises ‘place’. Certainly, as I have already pointed out ‘home’ need not primarily be about a fixed locus; nonetheless, at home or not ‘we do always find ourselves in places’ (Casey 1996: 17). Karenni refugees for example, came from a place (whether or not they construed it as ‘home’), and the camp wherein they currently live is also a place. Connections between the two, be they physical (such as in the journeys to and fro of some individuals; see Chapter 3) or conceptual, are important – yet in much of the literature on forced migration they are absent. Poignantly, of course, no matter how hard refugees try to maintain connections with these pre-displacement worlds, if like the Karenni they are mostly unable physically to return or communicate with people there, over time the two increasingly diverge. Indeed, as Hammond has demonstrated this can itself prove a compelling argument against the case for repatriation (2004). How, then, might my particular focus on the sensory and the material, enhance understandings of the ways in which refugees seek to feel ‘at home’ in displacement? I discuss place primarily in relation to the sensory, embodied aspects of how it is made, experienced and remembered. A premise of the book, and a point substantiated by the research, is that places, perceptions of them, journeys between them, are all constructed through the medium of the body. This mutual interlinkage between the emplacement of sensation and the sensory and sensual nature of living in a place, is a fundamental and inescapable fact of all human life, akin to what Merleau-Ponty terms the ‘primordial depth’ of how we experience the world through our bodies (1962: 254–67, cited in Casey 1996: 17). Contemporary theories of place and of material and sensorial culture, particularly those influenced by phenomenological philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger in his seminal essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1971), help to illuminate the mutually constitutive and embedded linkages between people and landscape. The cultural construction of landscape, place or home is not simply comprised of the cognitive inscription of pre-existing surfaces with human stories and ideals; rather – and as we shall see in Chapter 5 – it is a process in which people and the physical world mutually, and perpetually, shape each other spatially, topographically, bodily, conceptually, socially and culturally (c.f. Ingold 2000a). But if landscape ‘is constituted as an enduring record of … the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and … left there

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something of themselves’, what record is there for refugees? Where is that sense of continuity and memory for the displaced, if the act of perceiving and acting in the landscape is by its nature ‘an act of remembrance’ (Ingold 1993: 152)? Where is the feeling of permanence and stability for refugees, if life can no longer be ‘lived amidst that which was made before’ (Meinig 1979: 44, cited in Ingold 1993: 154)? What are the implications for remembering the past and feeling at home, of no longer living in the landscape – the place – that formed the location of the past and constituted an essential and dynamic component of pre-exile life? These questions are amongst the central points of some of the chapters that follow. First, however, it is necessary to have an understanding of the background and contexts of the displaced Karenni subjects of this book.

The Karenni With the exception of F.K. Lehman’s field research conducted inside Karenni State several decades previously (Lehman 1967), before my own field research barely any anthropological work had previously been conducted with the Karenni.2 Long-term research such as I was able to conduct in the camps in the 1990s is now unfeasible, but some other recent work has been done with Karenni refugees (e.g. Kubo 2004, 2006; Vogler 2006, 2007). In general, however, there remains a relative absence of both information and analysis on the Karenni, perhaps largely because of their relatively small population and the relative inaccessibility of their traditional areas of habitation and, since the late 1990s, refugee camps. The Karenni seem traditionally have been regarded as marginal in a number of ways and like some other groups in this area of Southeast Asia and perhaps particularly from Burma, they have been both little researched and poorly understood (c.f. Ayabe 1996, Smith 1995). The Karenni comprise a highly diverse, heterogenous refugee population, varied in a wide range of ways and concentrated into confined refugee camp spaces by the distillation process that is forced migration. Indeed, if displacement is the most obvious element of life in the Karenni camps, diversity is the characteristic to strike the newly arrived outsider most clearly. So who are the Karenni? From what kind of place have they fled? What are the local and wider regional factors – political, humanitarian, historical – that have contributed to Karenni displacement? During my first period of field research, Karenni refugees were organised under a self-styled government-in-exile formed by the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP).3 However, as I outline in Chapter 2, the extent of the KNPP’s direct control over the running of the camps has changed significantly since the late 1990s. The KNPP has remained

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committed to armed opposition to the Burmese regime, and holds that Karenni State is a sovereign nation illegally occupied by the Burmese since Burma’s and Karenni State’s respective gaining of independence (as they would put it) from the British in 1948.4 The KNPP maintain that Karenni State has always been technically independent, and therefore regard themselves as fighting an international rather than a civil war – a distinction that for them is an important point of principle. Amongst the Karenni refugee population more widely, there is a mixture of sympathy and agreement with the KNPP’s position, understanding of it but a sense that in practice Karenni State is and must be part of Burma, and ignorance of and/or apathy towards both the position and its wider political context. Indeed, this variation in political perspective is but one facet of a polyphonic diversity.

Ethnicity, Language and ‘Imagined Communities’ The Karenni belong, ethno-linguistically, to the wider Karenic family. They are nonetheless politically and historically distinct from (albeit often intimately involved with) the much more numerous, equally Karenic, Karen groups further south. The Karenni comprise members of various ethno-linguistic sub-groups whose residence is normally concentrated in an area they refer to in English as ‘Karenni State’ or, more frequently and in any language, simply as ‘Karenni’. All the refugees with whom I have worked refer to themselves as ‘Karenni’, using it as an umbrella term covering around a dozen self-distinguishing but related sub-groups, principal amongst which are the Kayah (also known as ‘Karenni’, in a narrower sense of the latter), Kayaw, Paku Karen and various Kayan clusters. Each sub-group has its own mother tongue, with Burmese used in the refugee camps as the main lingua franca between those who cannot understand each other’s first languages. Precisely how many sub-groups there are, what they are called, and how they are related to one another, however, is impossible to specify concretely: classifications vary with the ethnicity and geographical origin of the informant, and groups are ambiguous and the boundaries between them fluid. The term ‘Karenni’ is itself inherently ambiguous, its meaning complex, diverse and fluctuating, variously defined in terms of ethnicity, territoriality and history, and ultimately dependent upon to whom one talks, where and when. Part of the background to this is the contestation of ‘Karenni’ inside Karenni State and Burma. In 1951, ‘Karenni State’ was renamed ‘Kayah State’ by the Burmese government, part of Rangoon’s attempts to reduce the large scale Karen insurgency based in Karen State (Kawthoolei) to the south. This insurgency embroils within it members of related Karenic ethnic groups indigenous to Karenni State and parts of Southern Shan State, and is documented elsewhere (see especially Smith 1991/1999; see

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also Crozier 1994 on southwestern Karenni State). Not one of my informants in the refugee camps, politically aware or not, ever spoke of ‘Kayah State’. Of course, to ignore the 1951 name change is not just to oppose Rangoon but also to reject the use of the name of just one of the area’s ethnic groups to denote the area as a whole. It is precisely because ‘Karenni’ is a term indigenous to none of the groups it incorporates, that it can be appropriated by all of them, as I have discussed at length elsewhere (Dudley 2000a). Here, it is sufficient to recognise that ‘Karenni’ is simultaneously a specific ethnic referent for people who call themselves Kayah and a fluid, ethno-political umbrella term now appropriated by people of various different sub-groups, including but not restricted to the Kayah; the latter is the sense in which ‘Karenni’ is used in this book. Diversity amongst the Karenni refugee population is not, as I have already indicated, restricted to ethnicity alone. Educational background, for example, varies widely, with political, religious and educational leaders likely to have had more formal education than other members of the population. On reaching the camps many Karenni, especially those from the Shadaw area, have had no formal education at all; conversely most male leaders have at least completed high school and a number are university graduates in subjects ranging from mathematics and engineering, through medicine and psychology, to theology and fine art. Mariano, headmaster of the southernmost camp’s high school during my field research, almost completed his Master’s degree (in mathematics) at Rangoon University and Saw Eh Gay, formerly Deputy Minister for Education in the KNPP administration has a degree in engineering from Rangoon’s prestigious Institute of Technology. Most of the population, however, falls somewhere between the two extremes, with some experience of school education though not necessarily as far as high school. Generally, adult women not young or long-staying enough to have been educated in the camps tend to have left school earlier and are less likely to speak Burmese and English than their male counterparts (CCSDPT 1995: 31; see also Hodaian 1998). Class is also significant. Contrary to the majority of the refugee population, senior leaders are unlikely to have come straight from a background of subsistence farming in a rural area of Karenni State: they may well have had parents who were/are subsistence farmers and they may continue to describe themselves as farmers, but in reality inside Karenni State these leaders were often educated, politically active, and possibly also in a specialised occupation (there are former schoolteachers, mining engineers, doctors and civil servants). They often have at some time been based in an urban centre too, perhaps only later moving to a KNPP controlled rural area in order to participate in political and/or military opposition activities and eventually, when these KNPP controlled areas were lost to the Burmese army, crossing the border into Thailand.

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Being a Karenni refugee thus incorporates a fluid intersection of a number of ethnic, cultural, political and other identities. The concentration in confined spaces of people widely diverse in their ethnolinguistic affiliations, political awareness and sympathies, religion and educational and socio-economic backgrounds, has been responded to in an ongoing, exilic formulation of pan-Karenni-ness in the camps. This complex political and cultural process is not the subject of this book (see instead Dudley 2000a, 2007), but it does form an important part of the backdrop to these pages. The (re-) formulation in exile of what it means to be Karenni is an important and perhaps inevitable negotiation of identity amongst the concentrated diversity displacement has brought about. As I have shown elsewhere (ibid.), and theorists of nationalism such as Gellner (1983) and Anderson (1991) have argued in other contexts, crucial factors in this process are power, education, language and culture. The process is dominated by some sectors of the refugee population more than by others, and is associated with an increasingly self-conscious awareness of the international political currency of having an ‘identity’ in the first place (c.f. Handler and Linnekin 1984). Karenni-ness is also negotiated in close conjunction with a changeable nationalist agenda on the part of the political elite (Dudley 2000a, 2002b); the result is that for the Karenni as for others, national consciousness develops and is controlled unevenly among social groups (c.f. Hobsbawm 1990). Importantly, though, because of displacement this shared sense of community involves not only simple nationhood in Anderson’s sense, with its implicit dependence on territory, but a more ambiguous ‘production of conceptions of peoplehood’ which need not necessarily be rooted in place (Fox 1990: 2). In the Karenni refugee camps, as elsewhere, the formation of this new sense of a wider shared identity is dependent too on the revitalisation, reinforcement, appropriation and occasionally invention of ‘tradition’, especially in the context of ritual (Dudley 2000a, 2000b; c.f. Handler and Linnekin 1984, Hobsbawm 1983). A continual process of reworking/renegotiation (Macdonald 1997), thus brings about a new idea of pan-Karenni-ness, a shared identity and community – initially imagined (cf. Anderson 1991) but increasingly, for some sectors of the refugee population at least, real (Dudley 2000a). It is, however, an evolving pan-Karenni-ness that is continually challenged by the population’s diversity in tradition, history, religion, levels of education and so on. There are also occasional glimpses of resentment and rivalry between groups, with tensions and conflicts stemming from the challenges of diversity and from imbalances of power and political consciousness in the population. Some of the different Karenni groups now sharing crowded refugee camps were in the not-soremote past little more than neighbours or distant relatives; i.e. there is some degree of shared history, and often shared language and/or other

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cultural traits, but the idea of all the groups being members of one community is relatively recent and shaped more by some groups than others (the most dominant drawn mainly from the longer-staying, relatively well-educated, Christian, politically conscious sectors of the refugee population).

Origins: Karenni State

Figure 1.1. Map of Karenni (Kayah) State. Showing main rivers, principal towns and relative locations of refugee camps in Thailand in 1997.

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So what is the nature of the place wherein Karenni refugees originate? Karenni State is the smallest ethnic state in Burma. The distance from the state capital, Loikaw, to the Thai border is about 180 kilometres. Most of the state is mountainous, with ranges running north-south and thus, with the major, north-south Salween River, compromising the ease of east-west travel – a particular issue for forced migrants, especially in the rainy season. At around 1,000 metres above sea level, even the plains are relatively high, with mountains ranging to almost 1,700 metres. The monsoon lasts roughly from May/June to September, during which time travel and communications are made more difficult. Estimates of the total population vary greatly, up to a figure of around 350,000 given by the KNPP. This is probably a significant overestimate, and a relatively recent UNICEF approximation gives a population of 207,357 and a population density of 17.6 per square kilometre (1998, cited in BERG 2000). Birth rates in 1991 were stated by the Burmese Ministry of Health to be 45.6 per 1,000, significantly more than the national average of 28.4 per 1,000 (ibid.). The 1983 Burmese census estimates that 74 per cent of the state’s population live in rural areas and 24 per cent in urban areas (ibid.). According to Lehman (1967: 8), ‘roughly three-quarters of the population live outside the plains’, with the latter traditionally inhabited by Shan and some Kayah. My informants made clear, however, that since Lehman’s field research more Kayan, Kayah and other villages have moved down to the plains from their traditional hill locations – sometimes voluntarily, sometimes enforced by the authorities. Villages (but not towns) in Karenni State tend to be ethnically defined, so that according to my informants there are Kayah villages, Manu villages, Paku Karen villages, Kayan villages, and so on. There is little extant ethnography of traditional social systems, including kinship and marriage patterns.5 For most people, the economy is still essentially one of subsistence. Traditionally, hill villages have been permanent settlement areas, utilising shifting cultivation methods to grow ‘dry’ rice and other crops (Lehman 1967). The state’s main exports to the rest of Burma are tin and tungsten from the mines at Mawchi, and to Thailand include migrant labour, agricultural goods and, most importantly, teak. Cross border exports are now controlled by government forces and ceasefire groups, passing through Thailand’s Border Control Gate 14 (BP14) on Karenni State’s southeastern border. Teak has been of major historical significance since before the British annexation of Burma (Renard 1987, Scott and Hardiman 1901; see also Brunner 1999), and has played a crucial role in determining patterns of power and conflict as various parties have increasingly battled for its control over more than 150 years. Some awareness of circumstances inside Karenni State is important in understanding the context whence Karenni refugees come.6 Humanitarian conditions are agreed by all sources to be dire, even by Burma’s generally

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low standards (BERG 2000; c.f. Lee et al. 2006). Nutrition statuses, for example, are poor and in 2000 a BERG study based on upper arm measurements estimated the rate of malnutrition of children under 5 years old in parts of Karenni State to be 55.3 per cent (2000: 84). Health statuses are also apparently poor (see Beyrer 1999, Smith 1996), although reliable data are few. As part of Burma, Karenni State theoretically receives Rangoon’s financial support for healthcare, etc. In practice, however, here as elsewhere levels of provision are low, not least because much of the state is not under full government control (BERG 2000; Smith 1991/1999). In areas of ambiguous control to which it is possible for antigovernment personnel to get access, limited emergency medical provision is provided by mobile medical teams from the Thai side of the border, mostly to the large numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) hiding in jungle areas. The single biggest cause of both morbidity and mortality is malaria, of which the state has Burma’s highest rates.7 By 1996, the area had a malaria morbidity rate of 454 per 1,000 and a malaria mortality rate of 183 per 100,000 (VBDC 1997, cited in BERG 2000). Education provision in Karenni State is also poor even when compared to all other areas of Burma, with relatively few schools and even fewer properly trained teachers in the state system (some additional facilities are provided by Christian seminaries – institutions attended by a number of the better educated amongst my informants). Primary and high school completion rates are very low (BERG 2000: 89) and there are no tertiary level educational facilities, the nearest university being at Taunggyi in Shan State. Furthermore as in all other areas of Burma, ethnic language teaching is not sanctioned in state schools, being restricted to Christian Sunday schools and Buddhist monasteries (Bowles 1999). This is not the place for an extended analysis of the politico-military situation in Karenni State.8 It is important to note, however, that the KNPP which forms the dominant elite in the Karenni refugee camps is part of a wider context of conflict: the situation is not one of simple opposition between a nationalist group and a national government. There are many armed groups as well as the KNPP and the Burmese Army (tatmadaw) vying for control of territory, resources and people inside Karenni State. There are pro-Rangoon, pro-national consolidation forces; nationalist, separatist forces; and various small militias on all sides.9 Conflict has become a way of life in many areas of the state and resultant internal displacement is, as in other areas of Burma, a major problem. Estimates of the number of IDPs in Karenni State range as high as 81,000 (Saw Yan Naing 2007). By far the largest combat group in terms of fire- and man-power is the tatmadaw, parts of which have been in Karenni State since 1948. Indeed, in Karenni State as in Karen State and northern Rakhine State, the tatmadaw’s role has been characterized as that of a ‘dominant and oppressive

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occupying’ authority (Callahan 2007: xiv; emphasis original).10 The next most significant group is probably still the KNPP, both in terms of the size of its demographic power base and because it remains the only major group in Karenni State not to have an ongoing ceasefire agreement. Its large constituency in refugee camps in Thailand provides it with a semblance of legitimacy, at least in the eyes of many refugees and those who provide them with assistance. Indeed, it has been argued that in the 1990s at least the international provision of humanitarian aid to the KNPP and other groups via their bases in Thai refugee camps served to entrench these groups’ roles in ongoing conflict in Burma’s Karenni, Karen and Mon States (M. Smith, personal communication 1999; see also BERG 2000). Humanitarian aid, it is claimed, effectively serves both to perpetuate and even to legitimise inter-group conflict in this and other areas (c.f. Moore 1993) – though such a critique does not in itself, of course, solve the problem of how else people with no homes or means of subsistence may be helped to live. Up to the 1980s and to some extent into the early 1990s, Thailand benefited from the military buffer and trading roles that were at that time played by border groups such as the KNPP (Smith 1991, 1999; Rüland 2001). These groups were seen by the Thais as hinterland insulation not only from the activities of communist guerrillas, but also from the opium warlords of, especially, Shan State. Karen and Karenni groups traditionally have not grown or used opium although it has sometimes been suggested that a few farmers in Karen and Karenni States are increasingly reliant on opium as a cash crop – a suggestion to which the KNPP and others react angrily.11 For the KNPP, the particular border position it has occupied helped it in the past to generate revenue through the levying of taxes on illicit crossborder trade of various goods, especially timber. The KNPP did reach a ceasefire agreement with the SLORC in 1995, but this broke down after only three months. In the renewed fighting shortly thereafter, the KNPP lost control of much of its territory on the eastern side of the Salween and thus of most of the cross border trade (a loss which was of great advantage to the Thai military and Thai logging companies; c.f. Rüland 2001: 138). As a result, the KNPP’s finances were significantly and negatively impacted. Since 1995, there have been further attempts to broker ceasefires. In the late 1990s and early 2000s especially, it seemed that the failure of these discussions together with some of the KNPP’s other actions had altered the perspectives both of many inside Karenni State and of outside observers. From around 1999 onwards, for example, on a number of occasions other observers commented to me that the KNPP was now a marginalised force of no more than minor militia significance inside Karenni State.12 The point of these observations was to highlight the

Materialising Exile and Karenni Refugees: An Introduction | 19

distortion in the literature that results from researchers mainly talking only to people in and from KNPP dominated areas: this is an appropriate caution, but of course an equally critical approach needs to be taken to the less pervasive evidence provided by informants who are members of or have been assisted by groups other than the KNPP, particularly as it is impossible for outside observers to travel throughout Karenni State verifying at firsthand the contemporary significance or otherwise of the KNPP or any other group. Most importantly, however, which military group is predominant is in reality irrelevant for large sectors of a population affected by entrenched patterns of conflict in which it does not, in the end, really matter whose side they take. As Ghosh observes, ‘neither [victory nor defeat] has any meaning in a circumstance of institutionalized war’ (1998: 98). For many people in conflict zones in Karenni State and elsewhere in Burma, life becomes or has been ‘simply a question of survival, i.e. the need to find ways to resolve the hardships of day-to-day living in the midst of war’ (Raw 2001: 159). Civilians inside Karenni State have become increasingly affected by conflict, through being themselves armed by one of the armed groups, and/or by being forcibly displaced or otherwise abused, and/or by literally being caught in the crossfire. Abuses by the tatmadaw are predominant and the best documented (e.g. AI 2002, BERG 2000, CIDKnP 1999, HRW 1997, HRW 2007). Nonetheless, abuse is not confined to the tatmadaw alone, and civilians are often at the mercy of rival warlords and their personal militias (c.f. BERG 2000). In turn, the complex web of tensions contributes to patterns of displacement. Some civilians become politically conscious and active, as a result having ultimately to leave their village base for Thailand. Others are forced to move not by ideology but by a gun, and yet others by economic necessity as it becomes impossible to eke out a subsistence living. Nonetheless, it is the Burmese government that remains the main cause of displacement, with many civilians forcibly moved en masse by the tatmadaw in an attempt to undermine support for other armed groups. BERG estimated that in the four years between 1996 and 2000 alone, for example, ‘at least 15% of [Karenni] state’s population [were] displaced for military purposes’ (2000: 97). Particular government campaigns or actions such as the enforced village relocations of 1996 or the more recent Salween dam project result in waves of renewed forced migration, either into Thailand or to areas within Karenni State controlled by the ceasefire group the Karenni National People’s Liberation Front (KNPLF).13

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Wider Burma Contexts Karenni refugees do not exist in isolation but as part of a wider Southeast Asian region – principally through their association with Burma. There is of course an immediate irony here, given the KNPP’s insistence on Karenni independence or separateness from Burma. Yet in reality, many people in the camps are far more pragmatic, expressing the view that a future political and humanitarian way forward for Karenni State would be practical only in terms of a wider Burmese solution. Indeed whatever their political stance, informants and texts alike concur in recognising that there has always been an intimate historical relation between Karenni State and Burma. I will briefly overview here the components of this Burmese context which are most relevant to Karenni refugees and to situating them more broadly; this book, however, is primarily concerned with ways in which refugees build a sense of home (whatever that may

Figure 1.2: Map of Burma (Myanmar). Showing states, divisions and neighbouring countries.

Materialising Exile and Karenni Refugees: An Introduction | 21

mean) in exile: it is not a study of Burmese or Karenni, state or refugee, politics and history – the other sources to which I refer serve the latter purpose far better than is appropriate in this volume with its more microscopic focus on the culture of exile. Burma has the largest land area of all the mainland Southeast Asian countries, and a population estimated at a little under 43 million (Gordon 2005). Burma’s people are highly diverse in ethnicity and mother-tongue: Ethnologue lists 108 living languages (ibid.). The ethnic majority consists of the Burmans.14 Other groups, however, are numerous, with many of their members living in Burman areas but most inhabiting areas in the geographical margins of the country. Burma gained independence from Britain in 1948, the whole country only having been annexed to the empire since 1886.15 Since 1962, despite various changes in leadership the government has been a military one, renaming itself the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in 1988 and the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) in 1997. The regime pursued a strict isolationist policy until 1989, when it rejoined the Non-Aligned movement (Silverstein 2001; though note that as Smith points out, the country remained relatively isolationist by comparison to wider international standards thereafter; Smith 2001). The government also mismanaged the economy, with the result that a country once known as the rice-bowl of Asia has held Least Developed Country (LDC) status since 1987 and has a thriving black market economy.16 There are shortages of food and poor healthcare availability, with poor humanitarian conditions ongoing (Beyrer 2007). Universities and high schools are frequently closed to minimise political unrest. Particularly since 1962, there have been recurrent periods of civil unrest in the central, lowland areas dominated by the Burman population. In 1988, widespread pro-democracy demonstrations involving especially students and Buddhist monks were brutally put down by the Burmese army, with 10,000 people said to have been killed (Smith 1991, 1999: 16; see also Anon. 1998, Carey 1997, Houtman 1999, Lintner 1989). A general election was held in 1990, and the National League for Democracy (NLD), with its famous figurehead Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory. However, the military government never agreed to hand over power. Further demonstrations, most especially the high profile but ultimately unsuccessful Saffron Revolution in 2007 (Aspden 2008, Rogers 2008), have continued to attract significant international attention and to demonstrate the lack of real influence held by the international community over Burma (Selth 2008).17 Since independence, there have also been numerous ongoing ethnic insurgencies (though the majority have now negotiated ceasefires). The political and historical (colonial and postcolonial) reasons for these insurgencies are highly complex and beyond the scope of this book (see

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instead Gravers 1993, Smith 1991, 1999, Taylor 1987). What matters here is that as a result of the insurgencies and related problems, large numbers of various non-Burman individuals have since 1984 in particular been seeking refuge in the countries bordering the areas of Burma whence they have fled. It is however important to emphasise that to label much of the conflict in Burma, including that in Karenni State, as simply ‘ethnic’, glosses over its complexity. ‘Ethnic conflict’ implies the source of conflict is ethnic difference itself. In reality, however, in Burma as elsewhere ‘it is never the mere differences of identity based on ethnic grounds that generate conflict, but the consequences of those differences in sharing power and the related distribution of resources and opportunities’ (Cohen and Deng 1998: 21). Furthermore, to talk simply of ‘ethnic conflict’ implies ethnic groups are clearly demarcated and masks the extent to which apparently clear boundaries of ethnic groups and their areas of habitation are in fact blurred and ambiguous. Nonetheless, groups from all parts of Burma do emphasise and manipulate notions of ethnicity for political gain. Burma therefore has two concurrent problems, attitudes to which are distinct. Informal networks facilitate nationwide and more global support for the pro-democracy effort. The situation concerning ethnic struggles has historically, however, been rather different. Inside Burma, for example, according to both Karenni and Burman refugee informants of mine who had lived in Rangoon or other central areas, inhabitants of nonethnic regions of the country are more likely to accept the state media’s representation of armed ethnic groups as savage bandits with no regard for law and no respect for life. The effectiveness of this kind of representation thus reinforces stereotypes and considerable racial prejudice on the part of Burmans (whatever their political orientation) against the ethnic groups (though it was clear during my field research that there is also considerable racism in the other direction). Internationally, meanwhile, awareness of ongoing struggles inside Burma is mostly focused on the fight for democracy (Dudley 2006). International awareness of ongoing human rights abuses in ethnic areas is reasonable, not least because such abuses as illegal detention, torture, rape, forced labour, forced relocation, and extra-judicial execution, are well documented amongst both Burman and non-Burman groups (e.g. AI 1988, 1992, 2007; HRW 2006; see also Smith 1994). Beyond human rights abuses documentation, however, there is a relative international ignorance of ethnic affairs – something which is a source of resentment amongst active members of ethnic opposition groups, including the Karenni. Their leaders, and politically aware youth, express a belief that it is because of their people’s geographical marginality, longer history of struggle, and, above all, relative lack of education that they find it difficult to convey their predicament to an international audience. They

Materialising Exile and Karenni Refugees: An Introduction | 23

are frustrated most particularly with not getting across their political aspirations to the international audience they think would be able to help them achieve their aims: the United Nations (UN), and national, especially Western, governments (particularly that of the UK, because of both the colonial history and the loyalty of the Karenni and other ethnic minorities to the Allies in the Second World War). On almost every occasion we spoke, senior Karenni leaders would, for example, ask what I could do to get the UK government to lobby the UN on their behalf – indeed even, in several leaders’ views, to fulfil their clear duty to send soldiers to expel the Burmese from Karenni State. Nonetheless, although the Karenni for example may have received relatively little attention by comparison to the pro-democracy movement or even the insurgency of the Karen, they have in turn had rather more publicity than other groups from other parts of Burma. Thailand, China, Bangladesh, India and Malaysia have all hosted – in a variety of ways – significant numbers of refugees and other migrants from Burma. It is only along the Thai border, however, that an extensive, long term and complex degree of involvement by international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and other agencies has developed. The resultant web of relationships between these organisations on the one hand, and refugee organisations on the other, has not only both enhanced and complicated the provision of humanitarian relief and collection of data within and just outside Burma’s eastern frontier, but also somewhat distorted the literature on and intervention in Burma’s myriad displacements, in favour of only the eastern part of the country (c.f. South 2006: 122). Burma has been since 1997 a member of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), an organisation that has long trumpeted the value of ‘constructive engagement’ with Burma rather than the various approaches to sanctions favoured by different Western countries (see variously Dudley 2006; Rüland 2001; Silverstein 2001; Steinberg 2001). This political context is beyond present concerns, suffice to say it does impact upon the subjects of this book: as Burma’s regional significance has grown and China’s influence on Burma and economic threat to its other neighbours have increased (Rüland 2001), so countries like Thailand and India have adapted their views and become increasingly friendly to Rangoon (Steinberg 2001: 49). As one result of this shift, and as I outline in Chapter 2, attitudes in Thailand and elsewhere towards Burma’s refugees have hardened. These changes have contributed not only to an objective increase in practical difficulties faced by refugees, but also, as is clear in their repeated statements to me from the late 1990s on, to their heightened anxiety about the future.

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Materialising Exile: Refugee Studies, Material Culture Studies and Beyond ‘…it [is] perhaps time that we [notice] again the sensuous immediacy of the objects we live, work and converse with, in which we routinely place our trust, which we love and hate, which bind us as much as we bind them.’ (Pels et al. 2002: 1) The emphasis of this book on the material and embodied aspects of displacement, constitutes an original and, I suggest, important approach to analysing what it means to be a refugee. Such analysis is fundamental not only to academic understandings of forced migration, but also to the cultivation of more practical insights into refugees’ culturally constituted community coping mechanisms: how displaced persons spend and conceive of their day, how they foster the growth of a sense of ‘home’ in exile, how they imagine and seek to maintain their connections with the pre-displacement past and how they address the cultural and personal stresses forced migration has produced, are, as this book demonstrates, all intrinsically grounded in the material world and embodied participation in it – integral components of dealing with displacement. Refugees are not passive victims of circumstance, but in fact show great determination and ingenuity in maintaining a sense of self and in making the best they can of their circumstances. Emphasising a material culture approach is an optimal way to place the interests and agency of the displaced at the heart of a cultural study of refugees. Studying facets of refugee life ranging from how people demarcate and practice within ritual space, to such everyday things as the wearing of clothes and eating of food, enables us to develop insight not only into how members of a particular refugee community perceive and interact with their world, but also – and contrary to the myth of displaced people’s dependency so often held by outsiders – into the extent and nature of their resourcefulness (c.f. Harrell-Bond 1986, Kibreab 1993). Equally, applying approaches and interpretive frameworks drawn from material and sensual culture theory to the study of forced migrants, has the potential to make a significant and novel contribution to current developments of the material culture theory in anthropology, cultural studies, archaeology and beyond. Major case studies of refugee or other exiled groups have not yet enhanced this area, yet clearly exploring embodied engagement with the material world in the shifting, troubled context of involuntary migration has the potential to augment existing ways of approaching human experience and material culture. Writing about the physical decay of abandoned former homesteads in the USA, DeSilvey writes that ‘processes … [which lead to] … the destruction of cultural memory traces on one register, contribute to the recovery of memory on another’ (2006: 318). Is there an analogy here with

Materialising Exile and Karenni Refugees: An Introduction | 25

displacement from former homes? The ownership of and habitation within familiar land may be lost, but as we shall see in the chapters that follow, memories and traces of it in contemporary everyday life are not; instead those memories, traces and impacts on practice are both manifested in and continually reshaped by ritual, social networks, clothing and so on. To understand such processes may yield much that is of wider interest than simply what it is to be a refugee (c.f. Black and Robinson 1993, Malkki 1995a).

Notes 1.

2.

Terminologically, I use ‘refugees’ and ‘in exile’ interchangeably – a usage which reflects the intersection of my research subjects’ own multiple conceptions of their status or position, and the perspectives of outside agencies and observers. Nonetheless, in the literature the equivalence of this terminology is neither universal nor uncontroversial. Malkki, for example, following Said (1984) writes that ‘[i]nto the contrast between “refugees” and those “in exile” is built a whole history of differences, not only of race, class, world region and historical era but of different people’s very different entanglements with the state and international bureaucracies that characterise the national order of things’ (1995b: 513). However, while this book makes a significant contribution to wider studies of refugees, it seeks to avoid essentialising or generalising ‘exile’, ‘the refugee’ or ‘the refugee experience’ and instead emphasises the ways in which the Karenni characterise themselves. There are some loosely anthropological texts (e.g. Anatriello’s articles and monograph [1950, 1957, 1976], Rastorfer’s papers [e.g. 1994], Emmons 1966, Nai Chanda Gandasena 1923). There is also some linguistic work with the Kayah and other Karenni groups (e.g. Henderson 1997, Solnit 1997; see also Luce 1959), and Renard’s historical work on the borders of Karenni State (1987), but otherwise there is a paucity of literature that focuses mainly or solely on the Karenni. They are addressed to varying degrees in Richardson’s notes of his journeys begun in 1829 (e.g. India Office 1869), in works of political science and geography that generally address the situation in Burma and on the border (e.g. Grundy-Warr and Wong Siew Yin 2002, Grundy-Warr and Dean 2003, Silverstein 1980, Smith 1991, 1999, Taylor 1987), and in some historical and colonial-era literature (e.g. O’Riley 1862, Po 1928, Scott 1911, etc.). Otherwise, beyond mainly politico-historical articles by Karenni and Burmese authors (e.g. Byuha Khin 2000, Sao Wunna 1948), they crop up very occasionally in publications such as Crozier’s memoirs of managing the Mawchii mines (1994) or Boucaud and Boucaud’s adventure tales (1992), and tangentially in work dealing mainly with other Karenic groups (including those in Thailand). Works dealing with other Karenic groups include: Andersen 1980, 1981, BERG 1998, Fink 1994, Hackett 1952, Hamilton 1976, Hinton 1969, Iijima 1965, Kunstadter 1986, Lehman 1979, MacMahon 1876, Madha 1980, Marshall 1922, 1997, Mason 1868, Mischung 1984, Rajah 1986 and 1990, Smeaton 1887, Young 1962. Note however that most research done on any Karenic peoples since the Second

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

World War has been done in Thailand rather than Burma. Exceptions include Hackett 1953, Jones 1961 and Lehman 1967. I do not discuss KNPP structures or history in this volume. For more on this, see Dudley 2000a, Smith 1991, 1999. For more on issues in the independence of Karenni State and other ethnic states, the Panglong Agreement, and relevant pre-independence history, see Renard 1987, Smith 1991, 1999, KPG nd, Dudley 2000a, Lehman 1967. Lehman describes the Kayah kinship system as cognatic (1967: 42 passim.). Other sources describe non-Kayah Karenic peoples as reckoning kinship bilaterally although with an emphasis on matrilineal ties especially in ritual (Lebar et al. 1964; Walker 1975). Lehman states that for the Kayah there are no particular prescribed marriage rules (ibid.: 49), although most Karenic groups traditionally have been strongly endogamous. For fuller, outsider accounts of aspects of the history, politics and the humanitarian situation, see BERG 2000, Lee et al. 2006, Lehman 1967, Renard 1987, Sao Saimong Mongrai 1965, Smith 1991, 1999. Plasmodium falciparum (PF) and plasmodium vivax (PV) are both endemic. PF is now quinine- and partially mefloquine-resistant. Inside Karenni State, adequate drug supplies are unavailable. For more longitudinal histories of Karenni conflict patterns, see BERG 2000, Lehman 1967, Rastorfer 1994, Renard 1987, Scott and Hardiman 1900, Smith 1991, 1999. On the Karenni National People’s Liberation Front (KNPLF), for example, and other rival groups operating in Karenni State, including descriptions of splits from the KNPP, see Smith 1991, 1999 and BERG 2000. Useful explorations of the tatmadaw in Burma include Aung Myoe 1998, Callahan 1999, 2004 and Selth 2002. E.g. KNPP 2000, a response to a Bangkok Post article (19 April 2000) that suggested Karenni refugees had been paid to sell opium. E.g. V. Bamforth, S. O’Connell and M. Smith, personal communications 1999–2000. On the impacts of the 1996 campaign and separately of the dam in Karenni State, see ABSDF 1997, Dudley 1997, Vicary 2003, KDRG 2006, HRW 2007. See also Lang 2002 (particularly Chapter 3) and South 2007 for more on the relationships between conflict and forced migration patterns. ‘Burmese’ denotes a category of citizenship, applicable regardless of ethnic origin, whereas ‘Burman’ refers to the specific ethnic group which comprises the majority population in the central, lowland areas around Rangoon and Mandalay. On colonialism and/or the struggle for independence in Burma, see Bless 1990, Crosthwaite 1912/1968, Furnivall 1948, Harvey 1946, Tinker 1983. On ethnic resistance, see Ghosh 1999. For a wider Southeast Asian perspective on nationalism and cultural revivalism, see Kuhnt-Saptodewo et al. 1997. For more on the Burmese economy since 1988, see Collignon 2001, Steinberg 2001. The Saffron Revolution was of major significance in recent Burmese political history. Nonetheless, its impact on the Karenni refugee subjects of this particular book was minimal – hence it does not receive detailed attention here. See instead the references given in the text, and news reports such as AFP 2007, BBC 2007, Financial Times 2007, Kessler 2007, Mydans 2007.

2 In-Between: Being a Karenni Refugee

Why am I here? … If you destroy the bird’s nest, he will rebuild again or look for another place. If you hit the fool dog, he will bite you. If the Burma country was peaceful, we would live in our land and not come here. Now I am here. This land is the border between Thailand [and] Burma. [For] the foreigners [who] come here … it’s like the countryside or village. But [for us] sometimes it is like hell. Why? Sometimes we hear bad and terrible message…Sometimes we hear about the Thai. Sometimes the Burmese. It is a big problem for us. Because we live between their lands. From an essay by Saul (Karenni 10th standard high school student, Site 2, 1997)

In what circumstances do refugees live in Thailand? What is life like in the Karenni camps? How do Karenni refugees see themselves? How do selfperceptions shape, and in turn become shaped by, the experiences rendered by living in the camps? Before this book can proceed with its main concern of the materiality and bodily experience of lived meanings in forced migration, it is necessary to explore who the Karenni are and the nature and contexts of their displacement. This chapter looks at aspects of refugee-ness and the refugee camps themselves, and at how they have been and are experienced. It begins by outlining the situation of refugees in Thailand, before going on to describe the Karenni camps in particular. The chapter then considers the shifts through which people come to perceive themselves as refugees, examining this changing self-perception in relation to both the embodied experience of life in the physical spaces of the camps and the liminal, in between zone Saul describes. I discuss differences in how both newly arrived and longer staying refugees have seen themselves at different times, consider the role of memory and expand upon Davis’s notion of a bond of suffering (1992). In particular, I suggest that, painful though it is, being reminded of one’s

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own and one’s kin’s suffering helps to perpetuate a sense of continuity, despite the rupture with the past that forced displacement has wrought. I then consider the impact on refugee self-perceptions of specific incidents and of international agencies. The chapter then introduces the role of material and visual forms, such as dress and food – foreshadowing some of the book’s later discussions. In its final parts, the chapter then examines the importance of activity and habit in coping with life in displacement, before considering the nature of the ever shifting, temporal and spatial liminality so well articulated by Saul.

Burmese Refugees in Thailand

Figure 2.1: Map of the ThaiBurma border. Showing relative positions of refugee camps in 2006 (after TBBC http://www.tbbc.org/camps /camps.htm, accessed 6/6/06)

In-Between: Being a Karenni Refugee | 29

This section outlines the circumstances in which Burmese refugees reside in Thailand. It provides a context only for the main parts of this book: readers seeking more detailed discussions of the changing conditions for refugees in Thailand or internally displaced persons in Burma, would find Lang 2002, South 2007 and TBBC 2007 particularly useful. This section briefly reviews issues of demography, protection, Thai and other agency involvement, assistance and management, and other outside contacts. Karenni refugees officially numbered around 23,000 in late 2007, part of a total population of almost 140,000 refugees from Burma living in camps strung along the Thai side of the Thai-Burma border (Fig. 2.1).1 The majority of the total encamped Burmese refugee population are Karen, falling under the political umbrella of the Karen National Union (KNU). After the repatriation of Mon refugees to Burma in early 1996, the Karenni became the second largest self-contained grouping left in camps in Thailand, though their numbers still fall a long way short of those of the Karen. Thailand also hosts large numbers of illegal immigrants from Burma, with estimates ranging from 1.2–1.5 million (IRIN 2008) to 2 million (ILO 2002: 28). These immigrants work in domestic environments and in the sex, construction and manufacturing industries (e.g. Punpuing et al. 2006), and are responsible for producing the vast majority of the approximate 6 per cent of Thailand’s GDP produced by foreign workers (IRIN 2008). The dividing line between ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘refugee’ (or ‘temporarily displaced person’, as the Thai government calls Karenni and Karen forced migrants) is often blurred – in many cases resting only on ethnicity and/or place of origin and/or existing connections in Thailand, so that if one is ‘Karen’ or ‘Karenni’ one is more likely to end up in a refugee camp than those Lahu or Akha migrants who may have left Burma for similar reasons but find themselves having to work and live illegally. The UNHCR estimates that amongst the Burmese illegal immigrants in Thailand, about 200,000 Shan, plus 50,000 of various other ethnicities, fit the category ‘refugees and asylum seekers’ – adding these figures to the numbers of refugees living in camps, produces an estimated total of 396,700 Burmese refugees and asylum seekers in Thailand (USCRI 2008). Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees or to that Convention’s 1967 Protocol, although under customary international law the Thai government still has an obligation of non-refoulement.2 At the time of my initial long term field research, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had no mandate to work with refugees in any of the border camps. Equally, in the Karenni camps at least, the Thai authorities had relatively little involvement in the day-to-day running of the camps. Since 1998, however, the situation has changed significantly. The Thai government formally requested UNHCR involvement in that year, and

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the UNHCR has taken on a role specifically focused on protection. The Royal Thai Government’s Ministry of the Interior (MOI) also now has more direct control over the running of all camps, with a local MOI district officer (Palat) assigned as Camp Commander for each camp. Residents of the Thai-Burma border camps were formerly regarded by UNHCR as prima facie refugees – that is, considered en masse to be people displaced from their homes by conflict and regarded as ‘refugees’ at a group level – and not formally, individually registered. Now, however, all are registered. In addition, the UNHCR has been undertaking ‘the world’s largest refugee resettlement programme’, with over 20,000 individuals whose claims to individual refugee status have been verified, having departed from the border sites for third countries by the end of 2007 (Pagonis 2007). Indeed, given that the political and humanitarian situation inside Burma makes return there infeasible for almost all, resettlement appears to be the only currently viable alternative to a situation which has come to be ‘protracted and one of prolonged encampment’ (UNHCR 2006: 2). Life within the camps is increasingly problematic – hardly surprising given that large numbers of refugees have now lived there for twenty or more years and, since the late 1990s especially, have been generally unable to move outside the camps at all. This ‘prolonged confinement … has created a host of social, psychological and protection problems’ (ibid.). A number of agencies have recognised and are variously seeking to address the increased mental health, social and legal needs that have arisen as a result (see, for example, UN News Centre 2006). Confinement has become much stricter since the late 1990s, and it is now impossible to travel outside the camps for work. At the same time, refugees have been aware for some years now of the increasingly less sympathetic Thai attitudes than those to which they were previously accustomed. Such attitudes as those evidenced by the repeated Thai statements around 2000 about wishing to repatriate all the refugees currently on its soil (e.g. AFP 2000, HRW 1998 and 2000, The Nation 1999), can contribute as strongly to poor refugee morale as can practical constraints. More recently, the standard of refugee protection in Thailand has continued to deteriorate, with ongoing incidents of refoulement and prevented entry (HRW 2008, USCRI 2008). The agencies and individual representatives of the Thai state with whom refugees are likely to have most contact, are those of the MOI and local Muang (district) authorities, the Forestry Department, the Thai army, the Border Patrol Police (BPP) and regular local police. Before the changes in 1998 and later, relations with local Thai communities also were significant for their potential to affect refugees’ freedom of movement, and in a few cases to provide an opportunity to earn money outside the camps and the possibility of access to local resources. Indeed, though

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rivalries and other tensions could make relationships difficult, on individual bases such local relationships were often good, with occasional inter marriages and other inter church contacts, and even, in 1996–7, the leasing by the then KNPP Prime Minister, Aung Than Lay, of a rice field from local villagers. At the time of writing, refugees may not seek employment outside the camps – although UNHCR has recently urged the Thai authorities to consider permitting this (Shah Paung 2007). Refugees receive food, medical assistance and other aid from mostly foreign (i.e. not Thai) agencies. Coordination between agencies is structured around monthly meetings of the Coordinating Committee for Services to Displaced Persons in Thailand (CCSDPT), held in Bangkok. The CCSDPT is concerned with all displaced persons in Thailand, not just those on the Burmese border. Under the general CCSDPT umbrella is the more specific Thai-Burma Border Consortium (TBBC; prior to 2004, known as the Burma Border Consortium [BBC]).3 Karenni refugee camps now receive food aid (rice, yellow beans or fish paste, salt, chilli, vegetable oil) and other items (e.g. blankets, mosquito nets and cooking pans) from the TBBC; health and sanitation assistance from the International Rescue Committee (IRC); 4 protection from the UNHCR; educational materials, training and support from the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) and Women’s Education for Advancement and Empowerment (WEAVE); and additional help from the Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees (COERR), Handicap International and the Planned Parent Association of Thailand (PPAT). Of these agencies, only UNHCR, COERR and PPAT were absent in 1996–7. Nonetheless, despite the range of involved agencies during my resident field research in the camps, the profile amongst refugees of the TBBC and other organisations was low by comparison to that of IRC – visits of other agencies were relatively sporadic and IRC often transported items to the camps on their behalf; as a result, IRC came to be seen by most camp residents as sole provider (and thus also to receive most of the blame when things went wrong). Agency representatives and the Palats and their teams alike, formally liaise with the refugee community in each camp through the Refugee Committee (an elected body that represents the refugee population) and the Camp Committee (the principal management body for the day-to-day running of the camp, also elected from the refugee community). In the Karenni case, memberships of both levels of committee in the past were usually determined by the KNPP. Now, however, while the dominance of both the KNPP and the KNU over their respective refugee and camp committees may remain to a significant degree, the increased size of the camp populations and the stronger presence on the border of a wide range of international agencies has at least necessitated a greater responsiveness to the real diversity of the refugee populations and their needs (c.f. South 2006: 103). This is a result both of the waning political,

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economic and military power of the KNPP and KNU, and the simultaneous rise within the border populations of a more elaborate civil society comprised of numerous local, refugee students’, youth’s, workers’, environmental, human rights and women’s groups.5 These groups represent a shift to greater and more democratic participation by sectors of the ethnic refugee communities which were not formerly adequately represented. In turn, their existence has led to the KNPP and KNU reflecting more critically on the extent of their own democratic practices (c.f. South 2006). Prior to the far greater restrictions placed on movement from the late 1990s, other than agency representatives, camps were visited to a variable degree by members of other refugee organisations (KNU and other politico-military parties, together with the increasing number of other groups) and outside individuals and organisations delivering various kinds of training. The latter providers ranged from individuals from Europe or north America who had stumbled by accident across the Karen or Karenni while backpacking in Thailand and ended up teaching in the camps for periods of a few days to several years, through occasional evangelists and increasingly organised Church groups (such as the UKbased Borderlines), to students who fled Burma during the prodemocracy uprisings in 1988. Some camps – and thus some sectors of the refugee population – were exposed to this kind of external contact more than others; the southernmost Karenni camp, for example, because of its relative remoteness and security was the site of many political meetings and training courses (e.g. teacher training, computer use, environmental awareness, music, art) alike. Residents of this camp, whether or not they participated in the actual events, were thus far more used to seeing both non-Karenni Burmese and foreigners than were refugees elsewhere. Such external contact had complex and uneven effects on refugee perspectives (including improved relations between ethnic groups and Burman refugees; for other influences see Dudley 2007) and has notably diminished since 1998. Nonetheless, other forms of contact beyond the camps have, for a few refugees at least, increased over the past decade or more. One such form comprises the opportunities for a small but increased number of younger refugees with good English language and computer skills to work outside the camps as members of relief agency staff. A small number of other, mainly male refugees undertake the high-risk task of working with various refugee- and outsider-coordinated groups providing cross-border food and medical relief (and occasionally educational and other capacitybuilding assistance) to IDPs inside Burma, often in areas of active conflict.

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The Karenni Camps What is the nature of the Karenni refugee camps, and in what ways do the Karenni conceive of those camps and of themselves in displacement? This section reviews the history, origins and complex demographics of Karenni refugees in Thailand – including the so-called ‘Long-neck’ villages. It then goes on to review the histories of and differences (and tensions) between specific Karenni camps, before describing aspects of the living conditions and lifestyle in the camps. Some political leaders and more entrepreneurially inclined Karenni have been in Thailand for forty years or more. The first significant numbers of Karenni people, however, came to Thailand in 1989; many of these were members of the political and social elite. Indeed, the revolutionary committee of the KNPP left its last headquarters inside Karenni State in 1989 after losing a major battle to the Burmese. They went, with other party members and families, to Huay Phu Keng where the first Karenni refugee camp was set up. The Karenni refugees’ original core was thus highly politically aware and involved in the KNPP, sharing a particular set of nationalist aspirations with pan-Karenni application. Subsequent refugees, in contrast, have often been relatively apolitical, uneducated and from remote areas. In June 1996 and onwards, for example, a group of ethnically Kayah refugees from the particularly remote area around Shadaw in central Karenni State (see fig. 1.1), began to arrive in the northernmost camp as a result of ‘village relocations’ violently enforced by the tatmadaw. What was the purpose of these village relocations? For some years, the Burmese army has periodically and forcibly moved the populations of villages in certain areas to larger villages or towns, in an attempt to undermine village based support for armed opposition groups. This policy has been followed in many areas of Burma. In 1996, a new wave of relocations was enforced not only in Karenni State but also in Shan State and Karen State. In Karenni State, the main target areas were the southwest, around Mawchii, and the area between Shadaw and Ywathit, between the Pon and Salween Rivers. Around 100 villages were ‘relocated’ in the ShadawYwathit area alone. Villagers were ordered to leave, and their villages – including rice stores and animals – were destroyed. This is well documented in, e.g., AI 1999, Chapman 1999, Green November 32 1996 and KHRG 1999; Lang 2002 and South 2007 have more general discussion of the relationship between conflict patterns and displacement in Burma. Unlike pre-existing members of the refugee population, at least at first these new arrivals had little or no conception of the KNPP’s nationalist ideals or of a pan-Karenni identity (c.f. Dudley 2000a). They also appeared far more ‘traditional’ than their Karenni cousins already in the camps, particularly in religion and female dress. Aspects of both are discussed in

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later chapters, but it is important to emphasise here that this characterisation of the new arrivals as ‘traditional’ is that of both the preexisting refugee community and also, after a short period in the camps, the new arrivals themselves – and although what was meant by ‘traditional’ varied both in content and in the values attached to it, it was central to the dynamics between the new arrivals and their longer staying cousins (Dudley 2002b). ‘Traditional’ became a dynamic, constructed and contested notion within the refugee community, with important implications not only for ongoing negotiations of what it means to be Karenni (ibid., 2000a, 2000b; c.f. Hobsbawm 1983), but also, as later chapters of this book explore, for creating a sense of home and continuity with the pre-exile past. By 1997, after my first year of field research (and largely as a result of the new arrivals from the Shadaw area), Karenni refugee numbers had almost doubled to nearly 12,000; a decade later, they had effectively doubled again. This fourfold increase in eleven years coincided with countrywide changes in the situation of Burmese refugees in Thailand, as already described. Also significant during this period were the stepped mergers of what were, in early 1996, five (formerly six) Karenni camps, into just two sites: Ban Mae Surin or Site 2 (formerly Karenni Camp 5 and incorporating also the populations of the old camps 4 and 6) and Ban Mai Nai Soi or Site 1 (formerly Karenni Camp 2, including also refugees from the old camps 1 and 3). Site 1 is by far the largest, with around 18,000 residents across three sections (Ban Tractor, Ban Kwai and Nai Soi) that reflect the formerly three separate camps.6 There is a KNPP ‘Foreign Office’ in Mae Hong Son, and a few other houses in and around the same town, lived in by Karenni who have been able to obtain longer term permits of stay. Furthermore, there are the so-called ‘Long-neck’ villages. Indeed, until 2006 the Karenni refugees specifically considered that they retained in the so-called ‘Long-neck’7 women one important asset in dealing with local Thai authorities. The ‘Long-necks’ are a major source of revenue to Mae Hong Son province in particular and to Thailand in general. Pictures of these women, who wear coiled brass neck rings giving the appearance of an elongated neck, appear on promotional material advertising tourism to Thailand and in guide books.8 They are used as symbols of the rich cultural diversity that can be experienced by trekking to Thailand’s ‘hill-tribe’ villages. Yet they are not Thai at all, but refugee Kayan (Padaung), one of the ethnic groups of which the Karenni population is comprised. They do not have Thai identity cards or citizenship, yet are probably the single most important group of people in the promotion of Thailand’s lucrative tourism industry. Their apparent exoticness has a high value attached to it – as a commodity for sale to tourists, it comprises the main source of income for Mae Hong Son province. Nonetheless, the issues and relationships involved are complex,

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and the KNPP and the women’s families themselves have also, in the past at least, done financially well out of tourism. The ‘Long-neck’ villages and their population are in many ways distinct from the three main refugee camps and this book does not focus on them. Yet they are an important part of the wider Karenni refugee context, not least because the presence of ‘Long-neck’ women and the existence of special villages for them has probably had the single most significant effect on non-specialist, passing outsiders’ understanding – or misunderstanding – of the Kayan specifically and/or the Karenni in general. Ghosh writes that ‘in effect tourism has transformed these camps, with their tragic histories of oppression, displacement, and misery, into counterfeits of timeless rural simplicity – waxwork versions of the very past that their inhabitants have irretrievably lost. Karenni fighters returning from their battles on the front lines become, as it were, mirrors in which their visitors can discover an imagined Asian innocence’ (1998: 94) and, one might add, exotic primitivism. The Long-neck villages, with their single main streets up and down which the bussed-in tourists parade with their cameras, have been not infrequently likened to a ‘zoo’ (e.g. The Rough Guide to Thailand, Anon. 1995). Thai attitudes and actions regarding the Karenni refugees have now sufficiently deteriorated that in 2006 the Mae Hong Son provincial authorities began a process of moving all

Figure 2.2: Mock repatriation by Thai soldiers of Karenni refugees from the former Karenni Camp 5 (now Site 2), 1996. Photograph by Saw Eh Gay.

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residents of the ‘Long-neck’ villages against their will to one new site (Nga Ngai 2006). In addition, there are repeated allegations that the Thai authorities refuse to allow neck ring-wearing Kayan women who have been accepted for resettlement in third countries through the UNHCR programme, to leave the country (e.g. Asian Pacific Post 2007). This type of treatment of the Kayan villages is one of the reasons given by USCRI for describing Thailand as one of the worst countries for treatment of refugees (Ashayagachat 2008). Ten years previously, politically conscious Karenni individuals already talked often of the politics and pragmatics of changing Thai attitudes. Refugees and relief agencies alike try consciously to take account of these and of Thai cultural needs in their largely obliging relationships with Thai authorities and local residents. One of the more bizarre examples of this which I witnessed in the late 1990s, was the staging by Thai soldiers of a mock forced repatriation of Karenni refugees from the southernmost camp (fig. 2.2). The soldiers stood with semi-automatic rifles, watching as the refugees – carrying only empty bags and baskets – pretended to evacuate the camp. The whole thing was videotaped, apparently so that the Thai army could send the pictures to Bangkok in order to keep officialdom happy in the knowledge that Thai authorities did indeed properly control the rebels seeking refuge on their soil – despite the fact that the pictures could not have conveyed any of this with convincing authenticity: refugees and soldiers alike are smiling, secure in the knowledge that the repatriation is not real; furthermore, if one knows the territory it is clear that the refugees are in fact not going home but walking east, farther into Thailand.

Differences Between the Camps Karenni refugees refer to camps by the official number or unofficial name interchangeably. Unofficial camp names are of three different linguistic origins – Thai, Kayah and Karen. In some cases refugees and non-refugees alike use one name, while in others different groups may use a different name for the same camp or part of a camp. Site 2, for example, is called by refugees, Thais, and relief agency workers alike, ‘Mae Surin’ (Thai; the name for the river in whose valley the camp lies). The upper part of Site 1, on the other hand, while officially known as ‘Ban Tractor’ (Thai; literally, the place where the tractor lives) in the late 1990s was called by most of its residents ‘Daw Kraw Leh’ (Kayah; the name of a village in Karenni State whence a number of refugees originate); and the old Camp 6 was referred to as ‘Bohn Yeh Hta’ (Karen; the name of a previous refugee camp further south, whence most residents of Camp 6 had come). In these multilingual references to the network of temporary homes that the camps comprise, a name in one language, such as ‘Mae Surin’, is

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effortlessly incorporated into conversation in other tongues – be they Kayah, Karen, Burmese or English. As an example of switching between a number of languages in a single conversation, this is insignificant (such switching being an almost constant feature of Karenni social interaction, outside that involving only Kayah speakers). As an attempt to domesticate the refugee camp, however, it is important. Referring to a camp by number, especially if it is the camp in which one lives, reinforces its camp, rather than its village, character. Numbers are formal, and less resonant of ‘home’; they make clear the camps are temporary settlements of displaced people. Choosing to use a name, on the other hand, personalises and domesticates the camp and articulates it as more of a place to live rather than just somewhere to be in limbo. My main period of residential, long term fieldwork was based in what is now Site 2, southwest of Mae Hong Son in remote jungle. Indeed, the remoteness of this place is one of several marked differences between Sites 1 and 2. Site 2 has always been more secure and has never been attacked (although it has occasionally been considered to be at significant risk, most recently in 2008 [USCRI 2008]). Site 1 and adjacent areas, in contrast, are near a Burmese army base just across the border and were shelled in 1997 (with a fatality) and 1998. In addition, as well as being far smaller Site 2 has historically been relatively more affluent and lower in population density (fig. 2.3).

Figure 2.3: A view of part of the former Karenni Camp 5 (now Karenni Site 2) in 1996. Photograph by Sandra Dudley.

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Less positively, Site 2’s location in denser jungle and along a river means it has a significantly higher rate of malaria morbidity; it is also, especially in rainy season when even four-wheel-drive trucks are sometimes unable to cross the river to travel in and out, a sometimes dangerously long way from the nearest hospital in Mae Hong Son. This remoteness was responsible for at least one death during my residence – a young mother who died of postpartum haemorrhage before reaching hospital, during the difficult travelling conditions of the rainy season. The site in which displacement is lived out thus has physical, conceptual and other impacts, whether through personal tragedy or simply, sometimes, as a cover term for loss and restriction: for the Karenni, ‘the jungle’ becomes such a shorthand, as in a senior Karenni teacher’s comments at a school party where we drank rice beer, sang songs and ate duck soup – ‘even in the jungle, with nothing, they try so hard to make a celebration’.9 There is also a difference in ethnic balance between the two sites, with Site 1 being majority Kayah (though with some other Karenic and Shan minorities), and Site 2 having a large Paku and Sgaw Karen minority who at 30 per cent are second in size only to Kayah and the other Karenic groups combined (and in 1996–7 were the majority). Overall, Site 2 has always had a broader ethnic spread and a greater percentage of relatively well educated residents. It also, until the year 2000, had the only high school of the Karenni camps. KNPP leaders are relatively evenly distributed between each site, although in the late 1990s at least there were a slightly greater number of senior leaders living in Site 2, not least because of its greater security. The ethnicity and religion of these leaders tended then to follow general patterns in the populations of the two sites: Site 2 was formerly a mainly Baptist camp with significant Roman Catholic and Buddhist minorities (and now has probably similar numbers of Catholics and Baptists), whereas Site 1 has always had notable numbers of Buddhists and practitioners of traditional religion living together with a large Catholic majority. There are also a few families belonging to other Christian denominations, including Anglican and Seventh Day Adventist. The dominance of Christianity amongst the displaced Karenni and other ethnic minorities obviously contrasts with the nationally dominant religion of Buddhism in both Burma and Thailand; c.f. Tapp on the Hmong: ‘the adoption of Christianity increases the conceptual distance between members of ethnic minorities and the states to which they belong’ (1989a: 85). In the 1990s prior to the more systematised refugee registration and camp management now in place, there were sometimes tensions between the different Karenni camps. In particular, people in what is now Site 1 resented what they saw as the more southern area’s greater access to resources. Foreign teachers, for example, at least until 1997 tended to end up in the latter, not least because of the greater security and less interaction with Thai authorities afforded by its remoteness – hence the practical

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possibility of foreigners living there, despite official Thai prohibition. On the other hand, during the same period alcohol – both fermented rice ‘beer’ and distilled rice ‘whisky’ – was far more easily available in Site 1. There was said to be less strict enforcement of the prohibition on distillation, together with apparently more liberal attitudes to the consumption of alcohol by comparison to the stricter Baptists of Site 2 where, at non-festival times of the year, alcohol was often very difficult to come by indeed. This, together with the more crowded conditions, contributed to a greater incidence of antisocial and criminal behaviour in Site 1. Inter-camp differences have sometimes been the focus of specific activity on the part of particular groups of refugees. In 1996, for example, when large numbers of ‘traditional’ Kayah refugees began arriving in the old Camp 2, the Karenni Roman Catholic Association, the main officials of which were based in Huay Phu Keng and the former Camps 3 and 5, held a meeting to plan missionary activity amongst the new arrivals. This evangelising would be carried out by members of the longer-staying Karenni refugee population with the objective of converting as many of the new arrivals as possible to Christianity.10 Such missionary zeal had its humanitarian motives as well as religious ones: it was argued, for example, that to become Christian would enable the new arrivals to acquire other generally ‘desirable’ traits, such as being educated and, for women, being more appropriately dressed (see Chapter 4). Indeed, it was a humanitarian urge that prompted another activity aimed at the new arrivals, albeit this time secular: one of the first clothing distributions made to new arrivals in 1996 consisted of clothing donated not by some foreign charity but by residents of Site 2. This says much about relative degrees of affluence (although much of the clothing donated would in turn originally have been received in donations from outside sources). The donation also demonstrates the impact made on the rest of the Karenni population of the sheer numbers of new refugees suddenly arriving in 1996, and the degree of concern and bond of suffering felt by members of the pre-existing refugee population – something I return to later. The journey to Site 1 from Mae Hong Son is a relatively straightforward one, whereas that to Site 2, while scenic, can be gruelling. The remote, densely wooded river valley in which Site 2 lies struck me as beautiful – and it was so regarded by the refugees living there, too. Site 2 is intersected at least six times by the meandering river, so that walking within or between any of its sections along the dirt track that runs from one end of the camp to the other, necessitates crossing the river on foot (no mean feat in rainy season) or on one of several bamboo bridges. Traversing Site 1, in contrast, is impeded by both its size and by the very steep hill that forms part of it. Both sites are now clearly demarcated by Thai military checkpoints, and the once leaky camp boundaries are more or less effectively sealed.

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Life in the Camps Both sites have nurseries and schools, and ‘boarders’ for school students without parents or other close kin with whom they can live in the camp. They also have churches (Baptist and Roman Catholic), Buddhist monasteries and ka-thow-bòw sites important to traditional religious practice. Other ‘public’ structures include clinics, locked stores (for rice and other rations), ‘guest houses’ and a weaving centre. The logical centre of Site 2 when I resided there was the school yard (shared at that time by primary, middle and high school students), around which were also the nursery school, Baptist church and camp store. Close to this centre were located the houses of many of the camp and KNPP leaders – houses easily distinguished from those of ordinary residents because of their generally bigger size and, in a few cases, hardwood rather than bamboo floors and even, on occasion, concrete hard standing for vehicles. Material accoutrements within houses – especially electronic items – also provided clear evidence of status differences. Almost all buildings in the camps are stilted, with wooden corner posts, bamboo walls and floors, and leaf thatch roofs; structures are commonly held together with ties made of thin bamboo strips. Each house has a cooking area, sometimes at ground level adjoining rather than within the main house, sometimes inside the house on a raised bamboo floor with an inset mud hearth and smoke escaping through the thatch; most refugees cook on fire using an earthenware, bucket shaped ‘cooker’ covered on the outside by flattened, recycled metal cans. Every house uses an outside, ceramic latrine (often shared with other houses); some houses in Site 2 also have a screened off bathing area, occasionally even with water piped to it from the surrounding hilltops – most in Site 2, however, have to carry water from, or wash in, the river, while in Site 1 washing is done at, or with water carried from, communal standpipes. Officially, refugees may not cut down trees, catch fish by using explosives (the use of ordnance to blow large numbers of fish out of the river is practised by the Thai army as well as by the Karenni and others), distil alcoholic spirits or shoot animals (though during my fieldwork refugees periodically successfully hunted and ate bear, deer, porcupine, wild boar, monkeys and bats). The imposition of discipline and the use of punishment for more domestic and social crimes and misdemeanours, during my fieldwork were controlled by the Karenni themselves. Since the coming of UNHCR to the border however, together with a general rise in violent and other crime as a side-effect of the now seriously protracted and confined refugee situation, outside agencies are involved in both building refugee capacity to develop their own justice systems and in calling upon, where necessary for serious crime, the Thai legal system. In theory during the

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pre-UNHCR period (though I never heard of it actually happening), perpetrators of all but the most minor offences would be tried in front of one or both of the two men designated by the KNPP as judges. In practice, however, minor transgressions were dealt with by the Karenni camp commander. Camp authorities were usually most concerned with anyone breaking the 9pm curfew and with preventing drunkenness and similarly minor offences, and would occasionally impose brief imprisonment and/or temporary withholding of rations as punishment for such crimes. The curfew in particular was taken very seriously and policed by the Karenni themselves. Many of the Karenni refugees I knew made their living through specific roles in their camp community, such as politician, soldier, teacher, driver or clinic worker. They received salaries on top of their standard rations, variously paid by the KNPP or by outside agencies. The majority of the population makes a living as it can, however, including by the sale to other refugees and outside agencies of homemade items such as textiles and baskets, or by doing building and other work for better off members of the community. Refugees are not allowed by the Thai authorities to farm. However, some have small plots of vegetables around their houses (growing climbing ‘tiger beans’, squashes, aubergines, etc.), and a number also keep chickens, ducks and/or a pig or two (in the late 1990s obtained under an IRC scheme whereby refugees paid back the initial cost of the animal at slaughter time). One or two also had ponds in which they reared catfish for food. The camps also have a number of banana and papaya trees. The jungle provides bamboo shoots and other vegetables, firewood and housing materials. Education is accorded a very high value in the camps, with school and community leaders seeking to ensure that all young people attend school until they are 18. The school curriculum is a much modified version of that in Burmese schools. It includes mathematics, general science, history, geography and three languages (only two are taught in Burmese schools): English is taught at all levels, with Karenni (Kayah) and Burmese taught at junior and middle school levels only.11 Textbooks and other resources are insufficient, though each school complex has a library and large numbers of textbooks are photocopied by the KNPP’s Education Department. Furthermore, some textbooks are written by the Karenni specifically for use in the camps – these include basic level English textbooks for first and second standards, Karenni textbooks and a book on the history of Karenni State written by the KNPP (available in English and Burmese). The value of education is reinforced in many ways. In 1997, for example, the congregation of the Baptist church in the southernmost Karenni camp clubbed together to buy 200 baht-worth of candles to give to Saul, a tenth standard student. Saul was widely recognised as a very able and hard-working student, but it was also well known that his family

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were especially poor and did not have enough money to buy candles to enable him to study in the evenings. The congregation’s charity was sincerely meant and done without fuss, but in being done at all it also reinforced publicly and communally the emphasis placed by the Karenni elite on the importance of formal education. Saul himself often threatened to stop his studies in order to support his widowed mother and younger sister. Yet by presenting him with candles for studying, and in the forceful verbal encouragement they gave him, the Baptists congregation – prominent members of which were also members of the KNPP elite – were pressing home the message that he should on no account give up school. The use of history textbooks authored by the KNPP (particularly KRNRC 1974), is one way in which the education system presents an ongoing opportunity for the promulgation amongst the camp populations of the KNPP’s nationalist position (I discuss this at length elsewhere; Dudley 2000a, 2007). The teaching of history and the Karenni language, the use of the Karenni national song12 and flag, and the central involvement of schoolchildren in national days, are all opportunities for the repeated reemphasis of the existence of Karenni as a nation. They permit the reinforcement to a prime constituency of youth, of the legitimacy of the politico-military objective of independence. Schools thus comprise a space within which nationalist principles and senses of Karenni-ness are put into practice, propagated and reinforced amongst a captive, immediate, target audience. As A Ma, a tenth standard student, put it: I was born in Loikaw [but before I came here] I didn’t know I’m Karenni … I never heard about the Karenni. I know it as the Kayah. I never learned the history of the Kayah [but] I have some knowledge of Burmese history … Only when we arrived here we have learned about the history of the Karenni and are proud of being a Karenni. (Extract from an essay, January 1997). Civil society in the Karenni refugee camps in the 1990s especially, revolved almost entirely around the education system and community organisations (for detailed descriptions, see Dudley 2000a). Officially, there is limited or no involvement of the KNPP in other organisations, but in reality many were founded at the behest of the KNPP or with the support of foreign assistance organisations, or both. The Karenni National Women’s Organisation (KNWO), for example, was set up in 1993 with the encouragement of the now defunct Indigenous Women’s Development Centre (IWDC), an expatriate, Chiang Mai-based non-governmental organisation, one of whose main objectives was to facilitate the setting up of nursery schools on the Karenni and other border camps. Much of IWDC’s work was taken over in the later 1990s by WEAVE, who had an explicit aim of providing facilities for the care and education of young

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children while their mothers took part in income generation projects (mainly weaving). The KNWO executive’s view was that these projects enabled women to feel they were helping their people. However, most of these KNWO committee members were wives or daughters of senior KNPP leaders (c.f. Hodaian 1997), and their description of the KNWO as inclusive was not shared by many other women in the camp populations. Telecommunications are limited. Nonetheless, at least two senior leaders in what is now Site 2, in the late 1990s had TVs and video recorders: with no satellite dish they were unable to watch television (the hills make terrestrial reception very poor), but they did hold regular public video viewings. A number of refugees have shortwave transistor radios and listened to broadcasts in Burmese and English from Burma, the BBC World Service, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. By 1997 there was also a good computer in Site 2 as a result of external funding, but then no access to email (although the Foreign Office in Mae Hong Son did have email facilities at that time). There were no telephone facilities in the camps. Indeed, there was no means of two-way communication with any part of the outside world except by foot, truck (although often not in rainy season), or, for Karenni soldiers only, radio to their peers. Ten years later, however, a still small number of refugees had mobile phones and internet access.

Being a Refugee: Self-Perceptions This section explores how Karenni refugees see themselves – do they, for example, see themselves as refugees at all? I outline differences in how newly arrived and longer staying refugees have seen themselves at different times, and discuss ways in which they have influenced each other. This leads into a consideration of memory and an extension of Davis’s notion of a bond of suffering (1992) in reflecting on how, painful though it may be, being reminded of one’s own and one’s kin’s suffering also serves to maintain a sense of personal and communal continuity in the face of the rupture displacement has caused. I then consider the impact on refugee self-perceptions of specific incidents in the camps, and of international agencies and other outsiders. How being a refugee is thought of and characterised, varies with the individual refugee and their particular circumstances. For example, the Shadaw-area Kayah refugees forcibly displaced en masse from 1996, couch their descriptions of displacement in terms which are generally more passive than those utilised by individuals at the other, more politically aware end of the continuum. In 1996 and 1997, all the adult Shadaw-area Kayah to whom I spoke, male and female alike, talked of feeling utterly helpless, of hating being dependent on aid but at the same time being grateful for its availability. Most of all, they articulated how much they

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missed their villages, farms and way of life – and they conveyed powerfully the extent of their grief at it all having been violently taken away from them. Older women especially spoke at length about the impossibility, now they were displaced, of continuing to produce their traditional textiles, whereas men – particularly community leaders such as Shah Reh – were most troubled by the difficulties they foresaw in trying to continue to practise traditional festivals. On the other hand, in the late 1990s period just before the arrival of these new refugees from the Shadaw area, many longer staying refugees would insist that they were not really refugees at all. This was especially true of politically aware young men, especially members of the Post-Ten class like Htay Reh, whose nationalist convictions had been strengthened by time spent in the camps’ education system and/or the Karenni Army (Dudley 2000a). ‘We are not refugees. We are revolutionaries’, they would repeatedly protest, usually in English and in response to my conversational use of the English word ‘refugee’.13 It was an insistence that reflected an acutely felt point of difference: for these young men, ‘refugee’ implied a relatively helpless, impotent, passive and directionless state standing in marked contrast to the politically motivated, active and striving frame within which they pictured themselves. But this insistence on a refugee/revolutionary dichotomy was made before the forced relocations in the Shadaw area began and before the resultant new Kayah refugees had begun to arrive in Site 1. When the new refugees did start turning up in large numbers, my young, political friends in Site 2 grew increasingly anxious on the new refugees’ behalf. The more they heard about the forced relocations, the awful conditions in the ‘relocation centres’ to which the Burmese army had sent people and the distressed physical and emotional states in which people were arriving in Thailand, the more upset they became. Indeed, they became angry too, and desperate to get to Site 1 to help the new arrivals in some way. Furthermore, they began to criticise, to each other and to me but not in wider circles and never directly, their elders and political leaders. Some even said that perhaps the Karenni army should negotiate a ceasefire with the Burmese, in order to stop the terrible suffering that was being inflicted on Karenni people. That there was obvious anxiety at all was itself a striking contrast with these young people’s attitudes of only a few months previously. They clearly had, and repeatedly expressed, a strong sense of sympathy with the new arrivals. They talked of sharing a sense of affinity with the newcomers, not only as Karenni but also as refugees. Sympathy and affinity were of course also articulated amongst the older members of the longer staying refugee population, but it is that felt by younger people, which is particularly illustrative of the fragility of the refugee/revolutionary dichotomy. For them especially, sympathy at the

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new arrivals’ plight seemed to make obvious a common bond in which suffering played a central part (cf. Davis 1992). This notion of shared suffering was closely tied to Karenni rationalisation of their current situation: suffering both explained and legitimised their, and the newcomers’, refugee existence. For Site 2’s youth especially, the arrival of so many new and obviously traumatised refugees reinforced their own sense of refugee-ness. It did this partly by reemphasising that behind the revolutionary rhetoric lies a reality of human suffering inside Karenni State. But it did it too by reinforcing feelings of helplessness and frustration at not being able to do anything about the awful things that had happened to the new arrivals. Such frustration was not the sole preserve of young people, but for them it was made more acute by their relative lack of political power or voice in running both the camps and the political struggle itself. Indeed, in some ways the severity of the situation inside Karenni State after May 1996 and the visible embodiment of it in the camps by the new arrivals became a focus point for young people’s frustration – albeit restrained – at their relative lack of enfranchisement. Whether or not a Karenni sees himself or herself primarily as a refugee, what that means, and how passive or active s/he feels, is changeable. It is in part determined by differences in personal displacement history and degrees of political awareness. But it depends too upon the length of time spent in the camps, and upon perceptions of the current situation ‘inside’: as I have described, within a few months of the first new, Shadaw-area arrivals in Site 1, it was evident that longer stayers’ self-perceptions were in flux. Similarly, the self-perceptions of recent arrivals also changed: when they first came, they talked predominantly in terms of a prompt return to their villages and their farms. They could not contemplate their residence in the refugee camp as anything other than a brief sojourn to temporary safety. This was hardly surprising in the immediate aftermath of violently enforced relocation. People were experiencing a mixture of shock and intense grief, coupled with an acute shortage of space, building materials, blankets, cooking pots and food. They were also anxious about whether or not it would be possible for them to carry out their annual rituals in the camps. By 1997, however, this anxious sense of transience had begun to be replaced by a ‘might as well make the most of it’ approach closer to that of the longer staying community. The availability of education and healthcare were cited as positive aspects of being in a refugee camp, and, most importantly of all, the ka-thow-bòw and dïy-küw festivals were indeed celebrated (Chapters 4 and 5). Refugees’ self-perceptions and attitudes not only differ amongst the refugee population at any single moment, but may also differ within a single population sector at different moments. On my return to Site 2 in

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April 1998, it seemed that over the two-year period since the arrival of most new Kayah refugees there had been a noticeable and perhaps predictable improvement in the feelings they had about being refugees. Also by 1998, however, it seemed that amongst the longer stayers, and especially amongst young people, there had been a significant shift from active determination to passive resignation. And by 2006, things were very different again, with the increased social problems and levels of individual resignation unfortunately predictable in a long term refugee population. Memory, imagination and the passage of time play an important part in these continual shifts in self-perception. When a major worsening in the situation inside Karenni State results in a new and ongoing wave of clearly traumatised refugees as in 1996, for example, the bonds of suffering that result are partly communal and derived from empathic and socialised responses to other Karenni experiences (the kind of bond identified by Davis 1992). Importantly, they are also personal and temporal, by which I mean they tie individuals not only to each other but also to their own past selves. That is to say, the distress felt and articulated to each other by longer staying refugees in response to the violent upheaval just experienced by the new arrivals from the Shadaw area, was not just precipitated by empathy and a sense of ethnic kinship. It also arose because the new arrivals and the stories that circulated of what they had recently been through, triggered for many, first generation, longer staying refugees memories of similar experiences they had undergone themselves longer ago. Older refugees in Site 2, for example, began to tell me more of their own dislocation stories, unprompted, within conversations that had begun around the topic of the new arrivals. And for second generation refugees brought up on tales of Burmese oppression, the imagined, as opposed to remembered, experiences were still powerful enough to elicit a strong emotional reaction. As Davis characterises the bond of suffering, there is indeed a temporal component to it: ‘… however people categorise it, the experience of war, famine, and plague is continuous with ordinary social experience; people place it in social memory and incorporate it with their accumulated culture’ (Davis 1992: 152; emphasis original). However, unlike Davis’s invocation of temporality, mine concentrates not on the past’s contribution through social memory to present cultural forms and practices, but on the role of memory in the continuity of a sense of whom one is – as a Karenni and as an individual – through time. Hearing about the awful, recent experiences of the new refugees, and empathically observing the physical, social and emotional effects of those experiences, then, for pre-existing members of the refugee population not only triggered a sense of shared history and ethnicity (as per Davis’s model), but also unmasked a series of painful personal memories and/or imagined past experiences.

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Those remembered and imagined pasts may either be personal to an individual refugee, or built up in his or her mind from the experiences of parents, siblings or others. William, for example, son of a senior KNPP official, had been born in exile in Thailand but reared on tales of his parents’ own early flight to Thailand, as well as on more general aspects of Karenni politics. He had, in other words, no firsthand memories of his own of abuse by the Burmese army inside Karenni State, or of the forced migration journey. Nonetheless, for him and other young people like him, and yet others who did indeed personally recall such experiences, whether firsthand memories, secondhand imaginings, or a mixture of the two predominated, did not matter. Either way, the effect was to refresh part – and a particularly acute part at that – of what maintained William’s and others’ senses of who they are through time. It reminded William’s parents of their past experiences and their affective states during those experiences, as a result reminding them of who they then were – and who they were and are mattered also to William’s sense of who he is. For William or his parents to relive those past events and feelings, even if, as for William, vicariously through the connection of others’ more recent troubles to yet others’ earlier suffering, connects the person with their past selves. This process is troubling to the individual, but also useful: it reminds each refugee of their continuity through time, despite the ruptures with the past caused by forced displacement and physical hardship. William’s parents’ very recollection of their own past trauma, triggered by close proximity to people who have only just gone through a similar set of experiences, was painful but also a way to recall oneself in the past. The memory and repeated experience or observation of Karenni suffering thus becomes the ‘glue’ that adheres present and past selves: a painful but crucial mechanism akin to Proust’s treatment of suffering as ‘a way of unifying [one’s] existence and creating, or re-creating, an identity’, part of ‘an experiential continuum … the ache that remains after the initial disappointment, the anguish that endures after the illusion has vanished … [and] affective proof of the continuity of our selves’ (Rivers 1987: 125). Painful it may be, but this Proustian process of continued identityconstruction through suffering, is of tremendous importance to someone who has lost connections to the past (such as a continued way of life as a farmer) through forced displacement. The periodic re-emergence of past events through present triggers of the memory and the imagination, maintains a link, real or imaginary or both, with past selves in such a way as to perpetuate the idea of personal (and communal) continuity through space and time – the notion, in other words, of a durable, sustainable identity without which one would not continue to exist as one is (c.f. Parfit 1979).

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The Impacts on Refugee Self-Perception of Particular Events Refugee self-perceptions and attitudes can also be affected, across all sectors of the population, by specific incidents. On one occasion in the late 1990s, for example, the Thai army visited the southernmost Karenni refugee camp. In itself, this is not unusual. This visit, however, was not typical. Between 150 and 200 soldiers arrived over the course of a few hours. They included not only regulars from the army’s 35th Brigade, but also volunteers from the Mae Hong Son and Mae Sariang areas. Their stated purpose was to search for weapons. The groups that arrived first (mostly consisting of regular soldiers) were polite, and took only weapons, Karenni army uniforms, and other military paraphernalia. Subsequent groups comprising regulars and volunteers, however, were increasingly rude and aggressive, on occasion threatening refugees with firearms. Some were drunk. They looted houses, stripping them and people of cash and personal possessions such as jewellery, watches, etc. There was also some wilful destruction of property. Furthermore, they seemed to target the houses of community and political leaders for especially bad treatment. The commander of this operation the next day then called a meeting of camp residents, and informed them that the Thai army had befriended the Burmese army, that the refugees were very lucky to be able to stay in Thailand at all, that they would only be permitted to do so in future if they obeyed Thai law and kept no weapons on Thai soil, that if anyone wished to return to Burma the Thai army would be only too pleased to escort them (unsurprisingly, there were no volunteers!), and that no one would be permitted to travel in or out of the camp before 6am and after 6pm. The effects of this incident were complex. There was a widespread belief amongst the refugees that the reason this had happened at all, must be some new teak logging deal secretly struck between the Thais and the Burmese. In its immediate aftermath, there was an increase across the entire camp population in levels of anxiety regarding both possible attack by the Burmese army and potential refoulement, now that the Thais had disarmed the camp and rendered it unable to defend itself. The refoulement fears were particularly understandable in view of the forced repatriation further south of approximately 900 Karen males a week previously, and of about 3000 Karen men, women and children on the two days following the Karenni camp raid – both incidents were widely reported by the BBC, Voice of America and others, and protested against at a high level by the USA, European Union and Amnesty International; the Thai Government, however, officially denied them. There was a widespread belief in the camp that the meeting known to have been held between Thai and Burmese soldiers at the border the day after the raid, had concerned precisely the attack and refoulement possibilities. There

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were also rumours that, because some of the soldiers who had taken part in the raid could speak Burmese, they in fact were Burmese. This was treated with scepticism by senior members of the Karenni community: many volunteer soldiers in the raiding group were from ethnic minorities in northern Thailand – men in possession of Thai Hilltribe ID cards, but, as a result of the fluidity of movement of different groups (Shan, various Karenic groups, Lahu, etc.) across the border in this area, able to speak Burmese. Whether true or not, such rumours reflected the extent of fear that the raid had engendered: if Burmese soldiers could raid a refugee camp with the Thai army, what might happen next? There was also real shock across the camp community at the sheer scale and violence of what had happened, especially amongst senior members of the community such as the then KNPP General Secretary Rimond Htoo and Prime Minister Aung Than Lay. The Thai authorities had not previously behaved like this, and the KNPP leadership had clearly thought of themselves as having a reasonably comfortable relationship with the Thais. They had assumed that this relationship, even if it did not protect them from occasional unpleasantness, would at least ensure that they would receive advanced warning from ‘friends’ of a planned major incident. When I went to see Rimond Htoo the following day, he was depressed and subdued as I had never seen him before, looking like a man who had just been slapped across the face. ‘I thought Thailand was a polite country’, he said miserably, ‘I never thought they’d do something like this.’ This was in sharp contrast to his bullish assertion of a few months previously that ‘if other countries were like Thailand, noone would surrender!’14 Similarly, only a few weeks earlier the camp committee had assured IRC that while they were uncertain about the long term future, in general they felt secure and content. Such difficulty in believing that the Thais could have done something like this, was characteristic of the effect the incident had in making the refugee/revolutionary distinction all the more acute. Shock, fear and anxiety had enhanced feelings of vulnerability and lack of control. Brutal Thai assertions of authority had engendered powerlessness and insecurity that reminded camp residents of their compromised status, of the very fact that they are refugees, stateless and inferior. Yet the Thai soldiers’ behaviour also provoked much anger around the camp. While there was an acceptance of a Thai entitlement to lay down rules about the possession of firearms, there was also not only resentment at the confiscation of large quantities of weapons and ordnance (mostly M16 automatic rifles, hand grenades and landmines) but fury too at the unacceptable way in which the raid had been carried out. Worst of all was telling the Karenni in the post-raid meeting that the Thai army was now ‘SLORC’s brother’. This caused much bitterness, made all the worse for the impossibility of its direct expression to the Thais. Young people

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expressed this bitterness to each other, to me, and to other outsiders, in the form of general frustration at their leaders’ apparent impotence in the face of this abuse. ‘They should do something, but they are simple people’ was a standard refrain. Yet, coexistent with fear, anxiety and anger, there was a strong sense of determination and self-control. The high school students, for example, now seemed even more determined to do well in their imminent end-of-year examinations, and people continued to work and conduct daily life as usual, (although there was a drop in the numbers of people walking up the mountains early in the morning to collect leaves for roof thatch, for fear of bumping into Thai soldiers). Nevertheless, the incident did generate increased anxiety that impacted upon previously held, more optimistic views of the future. When in this changed atmosphere I happened to reiterate to Paw Wah my frequent promise to come back and visit in subsequent years, she was uncharacteristically pessimistic: ‘but we don’t know about our future and where we will be – maybe we will all be sent back to our country, maybe we will all be killed. We don’t know.’ No one knew how long the Thai soldiers would be staying in their nearby, newly set up camp on the border, or what they planned to do next. Various theories abounded, and there was much optimistic joking around the camp about the inability of the Thais to cope with a long period in the jungle, especially once the rainy season came. In fact, most of the Thai soldiers left the area soon after this 1997 incident, leaving a small group manning a checkpoint outside the camp. This group began to make leaving and entering the camp more difficult, for refugees and outsiders alike. Later, a second checkpoint was set up nearer the main road that the track from the camp eventually joins. By the following year, soldiers on the second checkpoint were making access to and from the camp exceedingly problematic and for a while were insisting on extortive per capita payments before they would allow Karenni trucks to pass in either direction. In retrospect from 1998 onwards, it became clear that the 1997 raid had been a pivotal moment after which both the camp residents’ actual situation in relation to the Thais, and their perceptions of themselves as powerless, changed for the worse. By 2006, it was very clear that the shift in the balance between feeling like a refugee and feeling like a revolutionary that was already tangible in 1997 and 1998, had firmly concretised – indeed, it appeared to have done so by around 2000. This is an important change that seems to have enhanced refugees’ sense of being outside both Thailand and Karenni State. Since the actions of the Thai army that day in 1997, following as they did on the distressing heels of the new arrivals from the Shadaw-area, there has been no doubt about the unequal nature of the relationship between the refugees and the Thai authorities. The resultant sense of impotence seemed swiftly to wipe away any ideas those such as Rimond Htoo may once have had about

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being in a good, secure position that happened to be on the edge of Thailand. Instead, as all those I spoke to, political leaders, young people and middle aged women alike, made clear, they were left in no doubt about their true outsider status. Furthermore, the presence of greater numbers of Burmese troops along the border and their apparent friendship with their Thai opposite numbers, combined with the spate of forced village relocations and general tales of renewed abuses inside Karenni State, in 1997 and 2007 alike reinforced feelings of being outside there too, powerless in relation to what was happening to friends and family inside. Distress from difficult experiences also spreads beyond the individuals directly affected into the community more widely. In the autumn of 1996, for example, four Karenni soldiers were killed while escorting new refugees from the Shadaw area to the northern Karenni camp. This was widely regarded as a shocking loss: certainly, Karenni soldiers have and continue periodically to die, but for four to be lost simultaneously, and while not actively fighting, was unusual. Linked to this communal sense of distress, ever since the late 1990s, there has seemed to be an increasing degree of fatalism and/or a heavier reliance on religion. After the 1997 raid, for example, my young student friends were increasingly likely to shrug off my questions about the future with the suggestion that there was nothing to do but pray. An older friend, Saw Eh Gay, said he thought in difficult times like these, it was clear that only fifty per cent of the population actively believed in ‘the struggle’, while the other fifty per cent yielded to God or fate. Senior KNPP official Khu U Reh, said simply that there was nothing but uncertainty, and it was awful. There was an increase in wistful conversations between Karenni friends about missing home, and more explicit expressions of fear about what was happening to people inside Karenni State. By 1998, several of my previously ardently revolutionary young friends said they had begun to wonder what on earth the point was, when increasingly it seemed to them there would be no recognisable Karenni State to which to return: villages had been moved and burned, people were dead, there were greater numbers of Burmans moving into the area, and it was believed that Tatmadaw officers were encouraging and even bribing their men to marry or rape Karenni women. There was also a greater climate of paranoia and mistrust, with increased concern about both the presence of spies and the possibility of attack. Set against the backdrop of an actual attack on the northernmost Karenni refugee camp and on some of the Karen camps further south, and rumours that the Thai army had received intelligence that the southernmost Karenni camp was at risk of imminent attack, this concern was understandable. These last rumours alone, coupled with letters received in the northernmost camp in 1997 purporting to be from the Burmese Army and informing refugees that if they did not return to

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Burma by a certain date they would be attacked and killed, would have been enough to generate fear, without the other prevailing circumstances as well. It was an anxious time, although in conversation any suggestions of fear would often be dismissed.15

The Impacts on Refugee Self-Perceptions of International Agencies Notwithstanding the waning influence of the KNPP and the increasing number of international agencies involved in the camps in the first decade of the twenty-first century, INGOs also have significant impact on refugee self-perceptions.16 In the 1990s in particular, the KNPP was assisted in the maintenance of its fiction of a functioning ‘government’ by outside agencies. IRC, for example, would discuss plans for new projects not only with the camp committees, but also with Yo Shi Yah (KNPP Minister for Health and Education), Khu U Reh (Minister of Information) and others in their capacities as KNPP officials with specific remits. From a Karenni refugee perspective, discussing plans with these individuals reaffirmed their positions as KNPP minister with a particular portfolio. The discussions took place in private in the individuals’ homes, but were public in their existence: that is, most refugees knew by seeing them when IRC came to the camp, and observed where in the camps their trucks and personnel went. In Site 2 while I lived there, IRC trucks rarely parked anywhere other than outside the clinic or the houses of the Camp Commander, Yo Shi Yah, or other Karenni leaders. This very physical location of an IRC truck and its associated personnel, the witnessing of it by most camp residents, and the extreme unlikelihood that IRC staff would ever drive specifically to the house of an ‘ordinary’ refugee in order to hold discussions with them, ensured that those whom IRC did visit were clearly marked out as important. The leadership role those individuals held, was reinforced by IRC’s very visible recognition of it. IRC understandably regarded its strategy of going through KNPP channels in this way as both a matter of courtesy and an appropriate way in which to begin effective implementation of projects. Nonetheless, it was a strategy which not only went along with, but also served to shore up, KNPP ‘governmental’ structures.17 INGOs such as IRC are for most refugees the only points of direct, potentially personal contact with a wider, outside world. Furthermore, they are generally seen and interacted with inside the camps – that is, they stand for an outside world that for most refugees is otherwise unknown. Visiting agency staff and occasionally donors, and in the 1990s other outsiders such as English teachers, journalists, religious groups and occasional researchers, are for most refugees transient and ephemeral beings: they come and go between the refugee camp and another, unfamiliar realm. Meanwhile, most refugees themselves stay put, unable to move freely. For them, the outside world largely is foreigners who come

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to the camp and are perceived simultaneously as actual or potential sources of help and as fleeting symbols of another, richer, stranger world. It does not take long for the various comings and goings of such foreigners to be taken for granted, and while many refugees expressed anxieties to me about having to accept help, dependency is a real concern. Furthermore, in the course of providing assistance many organisations unwittingly and perhaps unavoidably reinforce the sense of displacement and all it entails. Many agencies, for example, are unwilling to provide funding to assist IDPs inside Karenni State, on the grounds that such assistance could not be accurately evaluated.18 To be told that one may not have funds for projects inside Karenni State because the money’s destination and use cannot be confirmed by the provider, while understandable in terms of INGO accounting from a refugee perspective makes one feel distrusted. This reinforces the distinction between ‘home’/‘inside’ on the one hand and refugee camps on the other. It also reinforces Karenni refugee perceptions of themselves as beholden and subordinate to donors.

Material Forms, Bodies and Sense Experience in Being a Refugee As we have seen, increasing anxieties and a heightened sense of marginalisation also have a positive effect, in that they help to bring about connections amongst Karenni refugees through a bond of shared suffering in the past and present. Material and visual forms play significant roles in these processes, marking and strengthening both connection and difference within and between groups. Indeed, this is a principle theme of the entire book. In this section, I introduce two particularly significant areas: dress, and food. The reader should be aware, however, that neither is fully explored here, and both are returned to later. First, I explore ways in which women’s clothing is implicated in refugee relations with significant others, particular Thai authorities – this links back to questions of refugee self-perceptions and is theorised in relation to sensory experience and memory. I then outline some other, dominant characteristics of how Karenni sensory experience is culturally constituted – which senses are dominant in the Karenni refugee ‘sensescape’, and with what implications in exile? Why does this matter? Of especial importance here, are food and the senses associated with it.

Dress and Bodies Assumptions made by certain non-Karenni observers of Karenni refugee women’s clothing can be negative, problematic and a direct reminder and

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reinforcement of the Karenni’s dislocated state. If, for example, in the late 1990s when travelling beyond the camps was easier than it is now, refugee women wore their habitual skirt-cloths (whatever their particular colours and decorative details may be) when visiting Thai towns and villages, to Thai eyes they were marked out as ‘Burmese’.19 They and any men with them were therefore at risk of arrest on suspicion of being illegal immigrants, even if they held valid day travel permits. Furthermore, on top of the risk of harassment and arrest, there was an uncomfortable irony in being lumped together with other ‘Burmese’ people because of the wearing of skirt-cloths: that is, while Karenni women’s dress certainly distinguishes them from Thais, it blurs rather than reinforces boundaries between them and other ‘Burmese’ groups, including groups they may consider to be their enemy. These are boundaries that the Karenni prefer to keep distinct, and almost all Karenni dislike being described as ‘Burmese’, whether the ascription is intended in an ethnic or a national sense. In this displaced context, then, a direct function of the Karenni’s preferred forms of female dress was to exacerbate existing problems and anxieties; to avoid this, when ‘going to Thailand’ women usually chose long, loose trousers or universal style skirts reaching to below the knee. With twelve other Karenni refugees on a truck to Mae Hong Son, Bellay Htoo was arrested and imprisoned for six days by Thai police in 1997, largely as a result of her and the seven other women in the party ‘going to Thailand’ in their skirt-cloths and thus visually standing out as different – and vulnerable. The visual aspects of dress as a material form, are one of the most important reasons for (female) dress’s significance in Karenni refugees’ experience. Bellay Htoo’s experience taught her not to repeat the experience if she could help it, by ensuring that she temporarily changed her dress when next ‘going to Thailand’. This fleeting change of style is, for Bellay and the other Karenni women who have learned – through direct experience or through hearing of others’ – to do the same, a physical transformation of themselves that recognises the visuality and communicative power of dress, and its resulting ‘co-agency … in producing particular identities’ (Woodward 2002: 352). Clearly, it is the visual characteristics of particular dress forms that constitute the most immediate and direct stimulus to other actors (be they Thais or be they other, differently dressed, Karenni refugees – see Chapter 4) and to those actors’ interpretations and subsequent responses to the wearers and those associated with them. Yet I want to argue too that the significance of dress in Karenni refugee perception and experience goes well beyond its visual aspects alone. The very associations Karenni refugees quickly learn to make between mistreatment when outside the camps and women wearing their habitual skirt-cloths, for example, become fundamentally and inextricably entangled with the fluid meanings and values attributed to this form of dress. But dress is not only

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associated with and representative of particular experiences and subsequent memories of, say, being arrested; it is fundamentally constitutive of them. When Bellay Htoo subsequently saw and touched the particular skirt-cloth she had worn when she was arrested, it brought back to her particular feelings: she recalled, and was troubled all over again, by the fear, shame and anxiety of that day and the subsequent short period of incarceration. The visual and haptic stimuli of that cloth together triggered a synaesthetic re-experiencing of emotions (such as fear and shame) and physical sensations (such as those connected with anxiety) associated with the arrest. Experiences such as being arrested by the local police are undergone bodily as well as cognitively and emotionally. It is hardly original to theorise the arrest of refugees – and, in the late 1990s, usually the release within a few days on payment of a ‘release fee’ by the KNPP or other source or several thousand Baht – as a subjugation not only of Karenni subjectivities but of weaker, physical bodies by stronger bodies imposing power (c.f. Nietzsche 1974; Foucault 1979). The experience of detention is physical and corporeal – the arrested person’s body is subject to another’s will, and as a result experiences a new and discomforting physical environment (prison, and associated changes in habitual hygiene, eating and sleeping practices). In turn, and for Karenni women especially, the corporeality of this experience is, I argue, inextricable from dress, the material form most intimately associated with bodies. As well as being the stimulus that leads to arrest, dress is also one of the most problematic, practical and personal issues for the individual during their stay in prison: the incarcerated woman has only the single skirt-cloth in which she stands as her skirt, her modesty provider when washing, her nightdress, her blanket and possibly also her menstrual protection; because she has only this cloth, she cannot wash or change it. This produces a very physical experience of being the victim of another’s exercise of power, inextricable from the wearing of a habitual form of dress for Karenni women. Like other sorts of experience discussed earlier in this chapter, this reflects back upon Karenni subjectivities and self-perceptions: it ensures that refugees’ sense of relative helplessness or powerlessness, and of being outside, not at home, is heavily reinforced. The transformation of displaced Karenni into refugees, stateless and suspended in time and space, is secured. This experience of being a refugee is fundamentally physical, and in the Karenni case at least while dress is not the only significant factor it is one from which we can learn much – and to which we shall return later in the book. Dress’s intimate relationship with the body means that in certain situations it both determines what happens to that body (e.g. arrest by Thai authorities) and itself becomes a component of a fundamentally embodied set of experiences and memories.

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The Sensory Significance of Food In all human societies, some embodied experiences and memories, such as upsetting personal hygiene experiences while in a Thai prison cell, are kept private. Others are credited with more public and explicit meanings. Which forms of embodied sense experience are likely to be private, and which public, for the Karenni as for any other group is largely culturally determined. Food, taste and the associated tactile, olfactory and visual aspects of eating, for example, for the Karenni are of tremendous importance, not only in specific relation to being in exile but as key components in social life, in significant myths and rituals (c.f. Chapter 4), in traditional approaches to health and illness (Dudley 1997, 2000a), and in general conversation. Indeed, we could go so far as to suggest that the dominant Karenni sensescape (c.f. Classen 1993) is primarily a gustatory one, with the associated dominant technoscapes being agricultural and culinary: the frequent reminiscences about food back home automatically tend to include mention of particular food types that cannot be grown (such as red corn), hunted (various wild game) or, therefore, cooked and consumed in the refugee setting. Closely connected is the sensation and notion of satiety: for the Karenni as for numerous other peoples from Burma and beyond, the usual greeting when meeting a friend or acquaintance is not ‘how are you?’ but ‘have you eaten yet?’ Indeed, in literal terms, whichever language is used the greeting is ‘have you finished your rice yet?’ This is the normal form of address in any setting, not only in displacement; in the refugee camps it takes on, from an outsider’s perspective at least, a particular additional poignancy – ration provision ensures that refugees are unlikely to go hungry from lack of rice in the camps, but a combination of poverty and restricted mobility ensures that many go short of both protein (and other necessary nutrients) and enjoyable and flavourful variety. Bamboo shoot ‘curry’ for example, is for many people and for many months often the only significant – and increasingly monotonous – accompaniment to the thrice daily rice meal; this is a very frequent topic of conversation and humour. Similarly, when Karenni refugees describe particular past celebrations or outline the general characteristics of traditional festivals, it is the food and drink that come first, with great enjoyment taken in the listing of celebratory food such as pork and potato curry, duck and potato curry, mohingya (noodles, egg and fish) and so on. Culinary matters also come into discussions of the limitations and possibilities of forced displacement in the jungle camps (including the interesting tastes of different species such as frog, monkey, bear and various birds and fish), and descriptions of ethnic differences (Karenni groups, for example, traditionally cook without oil). In the case of food (and unlike in other areas), Karenni sense impressions – be they gustatory, visual or olfactory – are, in Stewart’s terms (2005: 60),

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distinctly public. They are formed and reformed in a distinctly social context, too, given the importance of commensality – not only in sharing a table but also in taking small helpings (a spoonful at a time) of ‘curry’ from shared bowls, and indeed in sharing a sensual experience. In talking of the frequently restrictive and boring nature of their refugee camp diets, and in simultaneously and wistfully reminiscing and fantasising about past diets ‘inside’, Karenni refugees set up a very deliberate and important contrast between food before and in exile – an example, perhaps, of how ‘in talking of an object’s qualities … we form an object’s qualities’ (ibid.; emphasis added). The Karenni also, as refugees rather than other migrants able to move more freely in their destination countries, are acutely conscious of their relative helplessness in seeking to produce, in the camps, the ‘sensorial landscape’ (Law 2005: 227) they would like and which would make them feel more at home. Indeed, food, tastes and associated sense experience are, like dress and ritual and other forms (c.f. Chapter 4), utilised as a key way of both representing and actually shaping ongoing ideas about differences between ‘home’ and camp, there and here, then and now. Food here is indeed an ‘entangled object’ (Law 2005, after Thomas 1991, Crang 1996; see also Graham and Khosravi 1997). Yet, to stop our analysis at this point leaves us with a portrayal of a largely passive, helpless and poignant process in which we see little or no agency on the part of refugees to ‘make’ home in displacement. We return to this theme more generally in Chapter 5, but it is worth emphasising here that in relation to both food and dress, far from being passive victims Karenni refugees are in fact actively engaged in a continual process of reestablishing and to an extent reshaping the sensorial landscapes associated with their notions of Karenni-ness. That this happens primarily within the restricted space of the refugee camps and in a state of tension with the Thai and other dominant norms and strictures that impinge on the camps, still renders those camps ‘contested site[s] of aesthetic/sensorial culture’ (Law 2005: 226), even though Karenni refugees do not have the freedom of movement and choice enjoyed by, for example, Law’s Filipino workers in Hong Kong.

Coping With Life in the Camps: Habit and Consuming Time The struggle to make – or, more accurately, to resolve – meaning out of the confusion and frustration that displacement creates, has amongst other things a greatly positive, practical aspect: it takes up time, one thing that refugees have in relative abundance. In this section, I introduce some of the ways in which daily life in the camps is important to both individuals and the social group. In particular, I outline the positive opportunities

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Karenni refugees identify in the camps and the pragmatic approach they take to being displaced. I go on to highlight the social and personal functions of habit and of practice in everyday refugee camp life, showing how being busy can serve not only the social structure, but also individual abilities to cope with displacement. These are all issues returned to more deeply and in different ways throughout the book; here, aspects of them are introduced. The camps are busy, ‘real’ places where people live and interact. For Karenni refugees with a specialised role, especially school teachers, life is exceedingly busy and there is little time to be bored. For others, there are always gathering and other chores to be done. Women may weave, and some men spend time making baskets or mats for sale. Leisure and social activities, other than the ubiquitous informal visiting and regular celebrations such as weddings and birthdays, tend either to involve sport (particularly volleyball) or occasional evening ‘stage-shows’. For the latter, in the late 1990s in Site 2 a son of one of the most senior leaders had an electric guitar and bass guitar, drum set, microphones and amplifiers; his band performed backing music for those who felt like getting on stage to sing. Indeed, music is a popular form of recreation in more humble and informal ways too, with young men especially trying to borrow classical guitars from the few who own them, for evening singsongs. Nonetheless, in the late 1990s in particular, before the involvement of UNCHR and any formal plans for return or resettlement, there were no certainties. And by 2006, the anxieties and competition generated by the possibilities for resettlement had simply led to a new form of uncertainty. It is a limbo-like situation that one might imagine would engender apathy and inactivity – and, for some, it does; yet for very many others, it does not. Certainly, the limbo produces wistfulness and other emotional responses: prompted and unprompted all the refugees I know, young or old, educated or not, would, for example, not infrequently describe out loud the wish that they could go home. Similarly, adults with extensive memories of village life, especially those with less education, would also talk longingly and often about wanting to be able to farm again; and from 2006, younger and more educated people in particular discussed their desire to go to a third country. Nevertheless, life in the camps is for many people reasonably tolerable, and there is palpable determination to make the most of the time. This is a pragmatic approach, epitomised by Georges, a schoolteacher, who on several occasions said to me ‘I have to be happy here, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do anything’. Refugees across all sectors of the population frequently cite advantages of being in the camps rather than Karenni State villages, adding that while of course they would rather be at home there are elements of refugee life that they appreciate, such as free medical care, increased interaction with foreigners, easier access through Thai markets

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to consumer goods, greater freedom in accessing information via such vehicles as the BBC World Service and so on. Most important of all is education, which by the mid to late 1990s had become perhaps the single most significant driving force within the camps.20 Almost all refugees at that time talked often about when they might return to a free Karenni State, but at the same time they would also emphasise that in the meantime they or their children should make the most of the situation they are in, where they have educational opportunities that are limited but still better than those unavailable to many if not most back home. This embracing of educational opportunity as a positive aspect of refugee camp life was found not only among the young people who directly benefited; nor was it restricted to parents with relative high levels of educational attainment of their own; it was common to all Karenni refugees to whom I spoke – including, within a few months of inhabiting Site 1, uneducated, new arrivals from the Shadaw-area. The positive elements of camp life all variously take up some of the time refugees have to fill. All those involved in education, for example, in term time are busy with lessons, preparation and marking, examinations etc. Schoolteachers are very difficult to pin down outside vacations, simply because they have so much to do. The headmaster of the Site 1 High School in 1996–7, Mariano, was particularly known for his rushing about and high levels of stress, and though ten years older, now a father and in a more senior post by 2006, still had not changed: like all other refugees, he rises at around 5am, but unlike others, frequently works until 11pm or even midnight. He is held in high regard, principally because of his reputation as an intelligent and zealous worker (and party goer!). Such hard work and the high value placed on it, is found too amongst those who work in the clinics, amongst political and other community leaders, and amongst those in various specialised jobs, such as drivers, religious ministers, soldiers, etc. Social institutions such as education, and the nature of the relationships within and between it and other camp institutions (such as religion, KNPP political structures, camp administration and the clinics) can be interpreted as one highly effective way in which the camp as a whole is given the structure of a working community. This is partly a matter of providing structure in the sense of a social framework within which life operates. Education and other social institutions also help to define and maintain social structure and position. Furthermore, they are concerned with making provision for an unknown, but hopefully postexile, future. Busying oneself in the service of camp-based institutions and practices is thus an important part of making the camp function as a real, forward-looking community rather than a mere spectre of life as it should be, trapped in the moment. Education and other aspects of camp life have a further, immediate, quotidian function too, however – one which permeates too into

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individual, as well as the community’s, daily ways of life. For both individuals and the group, the social institutions such as education, and their insatiable demand for people to work to keep them functioning, also provide a way of structuring and coping with life in the camps. Working hard is not only admired as a positive character trait, but is also a constructive way in which to fill time that inside Karenni State might be filled with farming and other daily tasks. Displacement is thus made more bearable through keeping busy and working for a particular purpose. Indeed, the refugees I knew who were most depressed about their displacement, were those who were least busy because they had no work commitments outside the home: Naw Elizabeth, for example, a highly educated woman with a husband senior in the KNPP hierarchy and several bright children doing very well at school, sat at home and became very low about the refugee state they were all in, in marked contrast to her busy family who, while they cared, had little time to brood. For the busy, the work itself becomes habitual; and it is habit which can act so effectively as a coping – indeed, avoidance – mechanism not only in the face of one’s own pain and suffering prior to and while being a refugee, but also in dealing with the suffering distressingly recounted by others such as newly arrived refugees. ‘[H]abit’, as Beckett claims, ‘is a great deadener’ (Vladimir in Beckett 1954: 58; quoted in Rivers 1987). This is a Proustian process as much as is the importance of suffering to memory and identity discussed above: it is a process in which habit ‘is an anodyne, an analgesic, something which seals us off from [the] reality [of] suffering’ (Rivers 1987: 122). Habit and being busy are also, of course, about action or practice. This practice structures daily life. It gives meaning to that daily life, too: the actions concerned with being a teacher, for example, ensure the person carrying them out has a sense of purpose, rank and value as a teacher. Clearly this is true in any context, displaced or otherwise, but in the refugee setting it is of especial significance in providing a mechanism for finding meaning and direction in a daily life that is not what one was previously conditioned to expect. This dynamic relationship between practice and meaning allows the individuals as well as the community involved, to construct a sense of identity and of purpose. This is of interest to any attempt to understand the refugee experience both because it is part of a (here, effective) coping strategy and, importantly, because it is part of a process whereby what it means to be a Karenni refugee is continually shaped and reshaped by the refugees themselves. Practice is, in other words, a means by which refugees can exercise power and agency over their own sense of purpose, direction and self. This is an ‘intersubjective’ process in the sense used by Munn when discussing ‘the relation between the category of action (practices) and that of the experiencing subject, that is, “the acting self”’ (1986: 14). Munn’s real

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interest in this practice-subject dynamic, as ours here, is the ways in which practice forms ‘self-other relations and the constructions of self or aspects of self that are entailed in these relations’ (ibid.; emphasis original). This formation of self and self-other relations is a continually ongoing, neverending process. It is an intersubjective continuum important in any social setting, but of especial significance in a refugee camp context, where the opportunity and ability to bring it about it has tremendous power in rendering an otherwise suspended life, meaningful and real.

Liminality Attempts to keep life ‘real’ notwithstanding, and as Saul’s description at the beginning of this chapter makes clear, Karenni refugees do have a perception of themselves as in some way liminal. In this last part of the chapter, I reflect on this notion of liminality in the context of the wider literature on refugees and others and in relation to Karenni self-perceptions. It is not original to claim that the concept of liminality has validity in refugee contexts. Malkki’s argument (1995a) that refugees are perceived as marginal in a ‘national order of things’ that seems natural and ancient but is actually very recent, and her application to the refugee state of notions of liminality, classification and pollution as found in the writings of van Gennep (1960), Douglas (1966) and Turner (1967), is by now well known (see also Benoist and Voutira 1994: 14). Politically, refugees are marginal to a globally dominant system of nation-states that Malkki describes as a ‘hegemonic topography’ (1995a: 5; see also Anderson 1991, Benmayor and Skotnes 1994), and find themselves in transnational spaces.21 For some refugees, including the Karenni, the paradox is that while neither the origin nor host countries want them, in the midst of the liminal space in which they find themselves elements within their own community are busy trying to forge the machinery of a nation-state, albeit nominal and de-territorialised (c.f. Dudley 2000a). This is the same irony identified by Malkki: the Hutu refugees about whom she writes, because of their refugee-ness, are marginal to a hegemonic system of nation-states yet spend much of their time forging their identity in national terms (1995a). Yet for a researcher to critique the dominance of the nation-state ideological framework is in itself an ideological statement that may have little relevance to the perspective of refugees who, like most of the rest of the non-academic world, actually adhere to the idea of the predominance of the nation in global politics. A more pragmatic approach explicitly privileges the ongoing currency of the nation-state in identity politics, including the politics of indigenous, insurgent and refugee groups. As Wilson and Donnan put it, ‘lost in the crush of much contemporary social science is one simple fact – the new politics of identity is in large part

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[still] determined by the old structure of the state’ (1998: 2). Refugees’ perspectives are unlikely to be influenced by historicised notions of nation-states as recent phenomena (e.g. Anderson 1991, Gellner 1983), but rather by the simple reality of current and recently past nation-states and their interrelationships. In other words, just as they may actually share others’ assumptions about the rootedness of culture (see Chapter 1), so too refugees may see the national order of things as ‘normal’ and themselves as ‘an aberration of categories, a zone of pollution’ (Malkki 1995a: 4 after Douglas 1966). Refugees are the inhabitants of political, cultural, social and, often, geographical interstices. Indeed, they may have been so since before their forced migration. Many refugee communities, including the Karenni, become displaced precisely because of their previous marginality in the context of a particular national or regional political discourse. Such a discourse may have labelled the now displaced groups as dangerous, savage or ignorant, as well as politically unacceptable. In the process, it may have placed these undesirable groups at a conceptual as well as topographical distance from ‘the centre’ over a long period of time (c.f. Tsing 1993). In turn, any analysis of the liminality inherent in displacement is limited if it fails to situate that liminality in relation to how things may have been prior to displacement. There is an analogy here with other studies of small, marginal groups living in relatively inaccessible areas on the edges of nation-states, such as the Meratus of Indonesia and the effects on them of recent inroads made into their territory and lives by outsiders: ‘[t]he dominant frameworks for understanding [such] recent encroachments … ignore long histories of marginality to posit conditions of “before” versus “after” – of pristine isolation, on the one hand, and rapid cultural destruction or modernization, on the other’ (Tsing 1993: 7). For refugees as much as for small-scale populations like the Meratus, we need to avoid juxtaposing the upheaval of the present with an incorrectly stable picture of the past; while displacement is indeed a major upheaval, it does not necessarily bring the first disruption to what was almost certainly not a smooth, untroubled pre-existence. However, as I implied at the beginning of this chapter, quite what liminality means in a particular refugee context may be both fluid and multiple. Certainly, Malkki’s sense of being between (nation) states, applies to Karenni refugees. They are physically and mostly politically not a part of the state of Burma, and the state of Karenni is merely an aspiration in political terms. Furthermore, it is evident through their experiences and their perceptions that Karenni refugees neither consider themselves nor are considered by their Thai hosts to be part of the state of Thailand – indeed, this is clear not only from physical restriction and arrest, but also from observations made by Karenni individuals about

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such issues as differences between themselves on the one hand and ‘Thai Karen’ and ‘Thai Karenni’ communities on the other. Paw Wah, for example, insisted that the photographs I showed her of Burmese Karen women’s tunics, collected in the nineteenth century and now part of various museum collections, must in fact be Thai Karen, as it was in her opinion the latter groups, rather than those from Burma, who would decorate their tunics with Job’s tears seeds. In fact, there are two inaccuracies in her conviction about these tunics: firstly, Karen groups in the very southern parts of Burma, particularly Pwo Karen, have utilised Job’s tears in recent years; secondly, many of the groups that were resident in Burma at the time of the tunics’ collection, have since moved eastwards into Thailand. Accuracy or inaccuracy is irrelevant, however: what matters is that Paw Wah draws a distinction between Karenic groups on the basis of state affiliation. Rajah, working with Thai Karen, found a similar pattern: ‘it is not uncommon to come across observations by Karen in Thailand that the Karen in Burma are different in, for example, their marriage customs, agricultural rites, and so on. In this sense … the very existence of Thailand and Burma as states … impinges upon Karen consciousness of identity’ (1990: 118). Ironically for the refugees, of course, the state affiliation on which such distinctions are based, is an affiliation from which they do not presently benefit and to which they remain marginal. Another manifestation of liminality comprises Karenni refugees’ perceptions of themselves as arriving and living in an in-between space. Movement across the border, as we shall see in Chapter 3, helps to maintain connections, real and imagined, between communities on both sides of it; but it also reinforces refugees’ sense of existing in a marginal world that is neither Karenni State nor Thailand proper. Yet at the same time, by virtue of it being simultaneously inhabited by Karenni people and constrained by Thai regulations and largesse, this world is both Karenni and Thai. Indeed, on the level of daily activity, it is predominantly Karenni; Thai-ness becomes significant only when refugees are reminded of overall Thai authority. Language is important in how Karenni articulate and in some ways shape their circumstance. The tropes of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – in English, as well as in Burmese and mother tongue equivalents – are in widespread use by Karenni refugees as a general means of distinguishing between two geographical areas: all Karenni refugees commonly refer to Karenni State as ‘inside’ and by implication now perceive themselves as being ‘outside’ (c.f. Turton’s mention of the Mursi’s use of ‘outside’; 2005: 265). ‘Inside’ is by far the more common as an explicit referent; ‘outside’ is used less frequently, and is usually only an implicit opposition. Both terms may simply be used as location-specifiers when talking about another main subject, such as family members or friends still living in Karenni State. At least as

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frequently, however, they describe the main subject of conversation. Most usually, this will be a discussion of the current humanitarian or political situation in Karenni State – ‘inside’ – often couched in sadness, a sense of impotence, or anger. Young men especially, often explicitly connect this sense of impotence and of not being able to do anything to improve things ‘inside’, to being in a geographically marginal position ‘outside’. But ‘outside’ in another sense can also refer to Thailand.22 Karenni ‘inside/outside’ distinctions thus concern being physically inside or outside Karenni State or, occasionally, Thailand. They do not replicate Bhabha’s ‘outside/inside’ reference to being a member or not of a nation (1995:4). Nonetheless, like the generalised nation of which Bhabha writes, the boundary at which Karenni (insiders in Bhabha’s sense) differentiate themselves and are differentiated from non-Karenni (outsiders in Bhabha’s sense) is actually an ‘in-between’ space, through and in which ‘the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated’ (ibid.). Furthermore, this is an important in-between space for the negotiation not only of what it means to be Karenni but also, from other perspectives and in other moments, of what it means to be Burmese/non-Burmese and even Thai/non-Thai. Thus while the Karenni ‘inside/outside’ formulation is intended to indicate two opposed spatial categories in Karenni imaginations of the relationship between ‘there’ and ‘here’, its echoes of Bhabha’s construct have interesting resonance with other aspects of what – and where – it means to be Karenni. I discuss these aspects of Karenni identity formation in displacement, elsewhere (Dudley 2000a, 2002b, 2007). Suffice to say here, these sorts of speech constructions are one way in which refugees convey a sense of liminality, of being in a marginal zone that is neither here nor there, in neither Karenni State nor Thailand proper. This sense of being outside both Karenni State and Thailand proper, of being in between, is intrinsic to Karenni refugees’ self-image, as well as being part of the imagination of the refugee camps and their positions in space. Karenni refugees perceive themselves not only as geographically liminal, but also as liminal in a more directly Turner-esque sense of being between social realms, in the phase between separation from one world and reincorporation into another (Turner 1967 and 1969; see also van Gennep 1960). Before 1998, the Karenni had not had direct involvement with UNHCR in Thailand and had neither been practically able to formulate nor have had imposed upon them definite plans for repatriation or resettlement. In that sense the world into which they might eventually be ‘reincorporated’ – into which they might move – was unknowable. Indeed, for most individuals and for the community as a whole, the future remained unknowable even as the UNHCR resettlement programme was underway in 2006: a few knew by then that they were to be resettled to a particular third country, but this was still a small minority, with the remainder of the refugee population still unsure either

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of whether they would ever be resettled at all (and if so, where) or of whether there would ever be a return to Karenni State. Nevertheless, even with an unknowable future there was always, and remains, a strong sense that things cannot remain indefinitely as they are – a sense, in other words, that however long it might last in practice the current situation is an in between world, a suspension of something else, a transition period, a liminal phase. This is a liminal phase constituted by the refugee camps. In Chapter 5, the book will return to aspects of how life in the camps is conceptualised and constructed. Before that, however, I examine some of the ways in which Karenni refugees remember, imagine and seek to maintain an active connection with their immediate and more distant, pre-exile pasts – something which will, interestingly, problematise the notion of the camps as liminal.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

Thai-Burma Border Consortium (TBBC) 2007, http://www.tbbc.org/camps /2007–11–nov-map-tbbc-unhcr.pdf, accessed 28/12/07. The exact number for refugees in the two Karenni sites at this date is 23,161, around 13 per cent of the total Burmese refugee population of 139,754. The figures I give here are those the TBBC quotes for the number of refugees to whom it is providing food – and are slightly larger than the UNHCR’s figures (given in the same document) for registered refugees. The UNHCR figures do not include new arrivals. The TBBC figures include all persons in the camp and exclude any individuals who are temporarily or permanently absent. See Chimni 2000 and Goodwin-Gill 1983 for further discussion of refugees in law. For more on the functioning of the TBBC, see their website, http://www.tbbc.org, accessed 3 October 2008. For insight into the IRC’s earlier work with the Karenni, see Demusz 1997 and SIPA 1997. Discussion of Karenni examples of such groups is beyond the scope of this volume. See instead Dudley 2000a, Hodaian 1997. The old camp numbers generally correlated with camp positions along a north-to-south trajectory. For more on camp moves in the mid-1990s, see Demusz 1997. Potted histories of Site 1and Site 2 are also given on the TBBC website: http://www.tbbc.org/camps/mhs.htm, accessed 3/1/08. The English term ‘Long-neck’ is used ubiquitously in Thai tourist material, by the women themselves and by other Karenni. An interesting comparison is with the Mursi women in southern Ethiopia who wear large discs in their lower lips (Turton 2004). For general discussion of the use of such stereotypical images of people in the promotion of tourism – as cultural markers, scenery, entertainers, seducers – see Dann 1996. See also Cohen 1993. Saw Eh Gay, personal communication, January 1997.

66 | Materialising Exile 10. I have no up-to-date figures indicating the rate of success of this mission. In early 1997, Alexander, one of the lay leaders of the Karenni Roman Catholic community, claimed that there had been ‘a few’ conversions thus far. Anecdotal evidence and observation would suggest that the rate of conversion has not been high. 11. The Kayah language taught is in the Kyebogyi dialect. Other Karenni groups, however, especially speakers of other Kayah dialects and Karen speakers, complain that it is too difficult. 12. The national song was composed in 1977 around the time of the KNPP’s Fourth Congress, and has versions in Karenni (Kayah) and (Paku) Karen, the latter for use around Mawchii, in District 2 of Karenni State (personal communication, Khu U Reh, 1997). In the camps, I only ever heard the Karenni version. 13. On the meanings and implications of outsider labels applied generally to refugees, see Zetter 1991. 14. This was in reference to the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), which had earlier brokered a cease-fire with the Burmese regime. A number of Kachin refugees had previously fled to Yunnan province in China, where things were much more difficult than in the camps in Thailand. 15. Often of course, such dismissal was intended at least in part to make me feel better. I did have some concerns about the immediate security situation in 1997 particularly, and for a while the risk was deemed serious enough to keep to hand every night a small bag ready packed with passport, field diaries and films (c.f. Barakat and Ellis 1996). In fact, the southern camp in which I lived was not attacked. 16. I discuss this in greater detail elsewhere; see Dudley 2000a. 17. One 1990s IRC attempt to work more directly with ‘ordinary’ refugees is described in Dudley 2000a. 18. Christina Fink, personal communication, 2000. 19. Although they themselves often wear such cloths at home, most Thais find the public wearing of skirt-cloths offensive; in Burma, by contrast, they are still widely worn. 20. I discuss education at considerable length elsewhere; Dudley 2000a, 2007. 21. The transnational, liminal spaces occupied by refugees, including the Karenni, are often on or adjacent to international borders. Some of the work on borders has attempted to reconceptualise them ‘as zones of cross-cutting social networks’ (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995), and has emphasised the value of refocusing analysis on these zones, suggesting that thereby can be acquired greater insight into more general anthropological areas of enquiry (Alvarez 1995), including nationalism and ethnicity (Urciuoli 1995). For more specific material on the Thai-Burma border, see Rajah 1990 and Wilson and Hanks 1985. 22. Interestingly, when some refugees – especially shopkeepers in pursuit of goods such as Karen textiles – occasionally make journeys to the Karen refugee camps further south along the border, this is never referred to as ‘going to Thailand’, but is instead described as ‘going to Kawthoolei’. Kawthoolei is the Karen name for Karen State in Burma, and this epithet is used by refugees even where the destination is Karen refugee camps on the Thai side of the border.

3 Inside/Outside: Refugee Journeys

When the Burmese army … come we ran with dog, pig and goat. We ran very quickly. …I went over the mountains and through the valley. … I carried rice with all sorts. The most difficult journey. Sometimes I really despaired. Saw John, extract from a tenth standard essay, January 1997 Individual and shared experiences, encounters and reasons for flight, are diverse and, as we shall see, mutable in how they are recollected. What is the nature of these diverse experiences? How, why and in what circumstances are they recalled, retold and recast? In what ways do these recollections and reformulations influence how refugees see themselves in relation to the people and places left behind in Karenni State? This chapter looks at the processes by which individuals have become refugees, and at the different reasons for flight. It examines how first generation migrants remember, imaginatively reconstruct, represent and feel about both the people and places left behind and the physical journeys that led from Karenni State to the border camps. The chapter also situates journeying in historical and mythological context, demonstrating that while traumatic, Karenni forced migration is, from one perspective, part of a wider continuum. I conclude the chapter by raising questions about the potentially synaesthetic nature of remembering and imagining the preexile past – questions which foreshadow the later parts of this book.

Journeys to and from the Camps This section explores the different ways in which, and reasons why, Karenni refugees come to the camps. The two geographical areas of Karenni State and the refugee camps are beginning and end points of a journey, the making of which is the most physical, tangible element in the process of becoming a refugee. Yet this journey through extended space is often not a single one between village and camp nor, at the moment of

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departing the village, was the camp necessarily the intended destination. As will become clear, in the process of becoming a refugee cause and intention – and subsequent representations or retellings thereof – vary as much as do the journeys themselves. Some people did indeed leave their villages with the express intention of arriving in a refugee camp in Thailand and were successful in doing so at the end of a single period of travel. However, for most the camps are simply the current endpoint of a journey that may have begun a long time ago, perhaps with the intention of ultimately arriving at another destination altogether. In addition, at different moments the porosity of the border and its surrounding terrain has varied, in some periods allowing considerable cross border movement in both directions.1

Coming to the Camps: Different Journeys There are many sorts of journey to the camps. One thing they all have in common is that they were made mostly or, usually, entirely on foot, and were physically arduous and fraught with risk. The terrain to be crossed is mountainous, mostly jungle-covered, and, depending upon the point of departure in Karenni State, traversed by a number of rivers (see fig. 1.1). The Salween River in particular is wide and dangerous, especially in rainy season, and refugees usually have access only to small wooden boats in which to cross it. Furthermore, journeys often cannot take the shortest possible route, as it is necessary to avoid roving battalions of Burmese soldiers. Journey times from anywhere west of the Salween range from four to seven days. Refugees who came to Thailand in the late 1990s from villages in the Shadaw area between the Pon and Salween rivers, walked all the way, while many travelling in the same period from further west, such as from villages around Mawchii, managed to get a lift in a car or bus as far as the Bawlake area. The main sorts of journey include those made straight from village to camp, those interrupted in between village and camp by a spell (often long) of displacement inside Karenni State, and those made from village to camp to camp (often moving camp several times, and of course also often preceded by a period of internal displacement). Some refugees came directly and deliberately from their villages to one of the camps, while other migrants may have left their villages some years prior to crossing the border into Thailand. Many of the post-1996 refugees from the Shadaw-area, for example, came straight from their destroyed villages to the northernmost Karenni camp in 1996, while others from the same area came later – either after hiding in the jungle or after having escaped from the ‘Relocation Centre’ in Shadaw.2 Over ten years later, new refugees from this part of Karenni State continued to arrive in the same camp, some having spent more than a decade in mobile temporary settlements in the jungle, Relocation Centre, or both.

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Why did different groups displaced by the same wave of forced village relocations, make different decisions in the immediate aftermath of the violent upheaval they experienced? Some, such as the villagers of Draw Kraw Aw, came straight to the refugee camp en masse, leaving behind them (and grieving greatly for) those too elderly, ill or disabled to travel the route. Others from different settlements, like Su Reh and his family, came later – joining in the camp relatives and some fellow villagers already there, and leaving behind many others who chose to continue living as IDPs in hiding in the jungle. All these refugees were brought to the camps by a combination of factors, including a variety of community and kinship ties, and reaching desperation point with the difficulty of trying to survive inside Karenni State. Which of these factors tipped the balance, however, varied for different individuals and families. For some, decisions were made by headmen for villages as a whole, often after sending some men like Klaw Reh on a reconnaissance of both the route and the camp itself: these men then reported back to their villages, a decision was made to go, and whole communities travelled to Thailand together. For others like Su Reh, closer kinship ties, rather than village connections, provided the ultimate motivation in deciding where and when to flee: he had relatives whom he knew had already moved to the camp, and the increasing intolerability of life in hiding in the jungle led him and his family eventually to decide to join their kin in Thailand. For yet others, such as Baw Meh and her small children, the primary stimulus was hunger and sickness, making any further stay in the jungle impossible: in their case, life as IDPs became not just very difficult, but imminently life threatening. In many cases – including those of both Su Reh and the Draw Kraw Aw villagers – prior knowledge of conditions in the camps, and of the humanitarian assistance and education provided therein, was an important factor in making the final decision to go to Thailand. Preexisting networks kept alive through occasional contact with individuals visiting Karenni State from the camps (mostly, but not only, Karenni soldiers), together with reconnaissance of the camps by men like Klaw Reh, provided this knowledge of refugee life in Thailand. For some, though – Baw Meh among them – prior information apparently did not extend beyond a vague awareness of the refugee camps’ existence; Baw Meh’s family and many other refugees in this category were sought out in their jungle hideaways by Karenni soldiers and other Karenni providers of emergency relief to IDPs, and through this assistance became aware of the camps and the opportunities for a better life there. Karenni soldiers then escorted those IDPs who chose to go, to the camps. Amongst the longer staying, wider refugee community, beyond the Shadaw-area arrivals, there are families who have moved not from an immediately prior residence in Karenni State, but from other refugee camps – Karenni and non-Karenni – on the Thai side of the border. Site 2,

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for example, now houses Mary and her aunt and uncle, and five hundred other Paku Karen ex-residents of the old Karenni Camp 6 (disbanded by the Thai authorities in March 1997) and around three hundred Kayah exresidents of the old Karenni Camp 4 (disbanded in June 1998). The same site also includes in its population several hundred Paku Karen who arrived there in 1998, having been previously resident in a Karen (not Karenni) refugee camp further south. Many of these refugees had already moved camp a number of times prior to even these changes: for some, Site 2 is the third, fourth or even fifth refugee camp in which they have lived.

Reasons for Coming to the Camps Why have Karenni forced migrants come to Thailand? Not all Karenni refugees see the journeys by which they became refugees, and themselves in relation to those journeys, in the same way. They differ in how they perceive both their actual experiences of displacement, and themselves in relation to that past upheaval. These differences stem from the assorted reasons for initial displacement inside Karenni State, the degree to which individuals are aware of Karenni nationalist aspirations, and corresponding levels of involvement in political and military activism. In associations between political consciousness and the experience and rationalisation of displacement, individuals lie somewhere along a continuum that runs from central figures in the KNPP, to post-village relocation Kayah arrivals in 1996 onwards. Without exception, every Karenni refugee explains their displacement in terms of Burmese army activity inside Karenni State. Those at the more politically conscious end of the continuum, however, couch this in more active terms. Paw Wah and her senior ranking KNPP husband, for example, explicitly recognise that to an extent their original internal displacement was a consequence of their political conviction and activity and thus, in part, a personal choice. That does not mean they and others like them did not suffer – they certainly did – but the suffering and abuse which resulted in their internal displacement (several times) and eventual flight into Thailand, built up cumulatively over time, finally reaching a point at which it became unbearable. The accumulated distress and difficulty caused by trying to live in Karenni State, then merged with an active choice to move with the first wave of Karenni refugees to Thailand in order to set up a politically active community in a safer environment: it was, in other words, both a personal decision through which family life could become more secure and comfortable, and part of a wider resolution made by the KNPP political elite to move their political powerbase into what, at that time, would be a position of greater flexibility and possibility. For this early group of refugees, it was a decision made after many years of both internal displacement and politico-military activism; it was also an informed choice,

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made in conjunction with a number of other members of the KNPP elite and, in those early years, as a result of some considerable negotiation about prospective conditions with the Thai authorities and foreign aid providers. Paw Wah and other early refugees had experienced considerable hardships and violence, but they were not distraught and impotent arrivals at the end of a flight made as a rapid response to a sudden military campaign or natural disaster. For them, initially at least, seeking refuge in Thailand was an opportunity to expand and extend political and military activity from a new and more stable base. Indeed, until the KNPP and KNU lost control of border trade routes in the late 1990s, it was a secure and comfortable option. For later Kayah arrivals coming straight from the Shadaw area villages to a Karenni refugee camp, on the other hand, enforced relocation concentrated suffering into a particularly intense, single moment. There was little element of choice, and it was impossible to remain at home. When these Kayah arrived in the northern refugee camp, it was impossible not to be struck by the differences between them and their fellow Karenni already in the camps: with the exception of some men, almost all of the new arrivals had little if any awareness of the KNPP and its political ideology and agenda, for example. This is an acute difference: the decision of new arrivals to go to the camps, to become refugees, was not directly connected to or motivated by any political ideology, but was instead simply a rapid response to an intolerable moment. Indeed, there was little element of decision making in their displacement at all: ‘choice’, of a kind, as we have already seen arose only in deciding whether to flee straight to the camp or to go into hiding inside Karenni State. As the nature of the journey(s) to the refugee camps varies, then, so too do the precise reasons for making the journey. But these reasons do not only entail what has happened in the past at the hands of the Burmese army. Reacting to past experience implies an essentially negative intention: the need to get away from something. The reasons for making the journey to Thailand, however, also involve a positive intention and a complex set of expectations that ameliorate some of the negative imperative to take flight. For those who before leaving Karenni State were already committed to the KNPP, for example, while it was sad to have to leave one’s home being in the camps has provided the opportunity of deeper involvement in working for the cause. For others, particularly members of small Christian groups such as the Seventh Day Adventists, there was the hope of more freedom to practise their religion. For some, there was also the possibility or at least hope of earning a better living in Thailand (particularly for the ‘Long-neck’ Kayan women and their families). A few, mostly young men, like James and Moonshine, ended up in the camps as a result of an initial decision to run away from home to join and fight with the KNPP soldiers. Childhood friends from the same village, James and Moonshine were about fourteen years old at the time, and while

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they later explained their decision to me solely in terms of ideological conviction, one would speculate that perhaps boredom and the desire for adventure contributed just as much to their motivation. In addition, their desire to join the KNPP, as opposed say to the Karenni National People’s Liberation Front (KNPLF), for example, depended not only on ideology but also upon which group happened to be most active, visible and sympathetically viewed in their particular area of Karenni State (c.f. Smith 1999, BERG 2000). In any case, to their great chagrin, when they found some Karenni soldiers and explained their desire to join them, their youth meant that they were instead escorted to Karenni Site 2 and sent to school. Perhaps the most significant factor drawing people to the camps has been the belief that children would receive in the camps an education superior to that available in Karenni State. Indeed, in the 1990s especially a number of adolescents and young adults came directly from their villages to Thailand, alone, with the principal aim of attending high school and/or the limited further education (‘Post-Ten’) available in the camps. These students were usually guided and accompanied during their journey by Karenni soldiers.

Cross-Border Movement and Knowledge The chapter now turns to consider the nature and implications of the movements of people and information in both directions between Karenni State and the border refugee camps. Education as an incentive to come to the refugee camps in the late 1990s at least, is significant not only for what it then implied about the education system in the camps versus that inside Karenni State, but also for its demonstration of how far many of those inside Karenni State already knew about life in exile. Saw Eh Lah and Eh Ka Lu Taw, for example, two students who came directly from their villages in the Mawchii area in 1996–7, said that long before leaving home they had heard positive tales about educational opportunities, especially those then pertaining in the southernmost camp. In particular, they had heard stories about the presence of ‘English’ English teachers,3 and about Post-Ten, the innovative post high school programme running since 1995. They and others had also heard, before leaving Karenni State, of the locations of camps, the identities of some of those living in them, and what conditions were like. Such information reaches those inside Karenni State from various sources, particularly Karenni soldiers and others who regularly move back and forth visiting villages, providing assistance, using guerrilla tactics against the Burmese army, and escorting people to and from the camps. It comes too from former camp residents who later return to live in Karenni State, and from Karenni State based individuals who make brief visits to the camps.

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A different possible vehicle for the distribution inside Karenni State of information concerning life in the camps is constituted by spies (Dudley 2000a). In Site 2 in early 1997, for example, there was an increase in the background level of anxiety surrounding issues of political and physical security – with impacts such as a tightening of the usual curfew enforcement – as a result of the apparent identification of a spy in the period immediately after a major KNPP convention in the camp. All one could ascertain was that a spy had been identified and was no longer around. No one seemed to know where he had come from, and while some suspected he had come ‘across the border’, others said he had come from Mae Hong Son – as Mariano put it, ‘there are many ways [to get here], and there are many SLORC spies in Mae Hong Son’. Depending upon whom one asked, in other words, the spy may have entered the camp from Burma or from Thailand. Both possibilities suggest anxiety about the lack of impermeability of both the physical, bounded space of the camp and its community, and the lack of total security surrounding Karenni political structures and their machinations. The possibility of permeability and insecurity was in this case both enhanced and reduced by the fact that the spy was a stranger – that a stranger had been able to get in, implied security problems, but that he was not an existing member of the community was in some way reassuring. Spies aside, flows of information are also important in reverse, of course, in equipping refugees with knowledge about contemporary life inside Karenni State. Indeed, political leaders in the refugee community can specifically seek and utilise such information as part of the structures of nationhood which they seek to create. Some middle-ranking KNPP members, for example, have the rank of a District Commander, referring to the districts into which Karenni State is divided. Now that territorial control of the state has been lost on the battlefield, such roles can be little more than titular privileges. Dhu Reh, for example, ‘Commander of District Two’, in practice cannot actually administer District 2 (the area around Mawchii) – it is far away and under SPDC control. He can do little except coordinate the delivery of assistance to IDPs and the collection and dissemination of as much military and humanitarian information as possible, in and concerning they are a nominally under his control. Such information is sourced mainly by Karenni soldiers; Dhu Reh does not make the long and dangerous journey himself. Nonetheless, the accumulation of information pertaining to District 2 remains his responsibility, and indeed enhances his status in the camps as District Commander. The cross border movement that brings the information can, then, be temporary or permanent, in either direction. Camp residents, for example, may return home for good for various reasons: because they are missing their family too much, because they are too frustrated by the strictures of refugee camp life, or because they are ordered to return by their parents or other authority figure. Rebecca and Buri, two teachers in

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the southern camp during the late 1990s, returned voluntarily because they wished to marry, and wanted their families to know about and participate in their wedding. Klu Reh, a student in his twenties with expensive tastes in clothes and alcohol, also returned voluntarily at that time, in his case because he was fed up with the camp life he found boring and restrictive. Conversely, Saw Eh Lah returned unhappily and only after his father had sent a Baptist pastor to collect him (his father was unhappy about Saw Eh Lah completing his education in the camp; he wanted his son to go to university in Burma, which necessitated completing the final year of school in Burma rather than on the border). Ironically Saw Eh Lah, the only one in these examples not to return voluntarily, was apparently also the only one not to be arrested by the Burmese authorities on return. The pastor who came for Saw Eh Lah is an example of someone making a brief sojourn to the camps. Other transitory journeys were, as we have already seen, made in 1996 by a number of Kayah men from the Shadaw area, to confirm the location and acceptability as a place of refuge of the northernmost Karenni camp. They then returned to Karenni State to collect their families – at that time living in the jungle as IDPs – and bring them to the border. The entire process entailed three five-day, dangerous and difficult walks in close succession, in the rainy season (the hardest time to travel). In 1995, during the brief ceasefire between the Tatmadaw and the KNPP, many people made the journey between villages and camps in both directions. They did so to visit friends and family in either locale. There was no mass movement back home from the camps. However, the ceasefire was short-lived and with the resumption of hostilities some individuals were trapped, unable to complete their return journey home. Maung Nyi, for example, himself actually Karen-Burmese and not Karenni at all, had journeyed to one of the border camps during the ceasefire at the suggestion of an uncle, in order to assist with the temporary provision of mathematics teaching. Unfortunately, however, the breaking of the ceasefire made it impossible for him to go back. Since then, he has benefited from a Post-Ten education and is now a fulltime schoolteacher in the camps. Others move back and forth quite frequently, at significant personal risk. Pah Lee Klaw, for example, during the late 1990s travelled with Karenni soldiers to District 2 at least twice, with the objectives of documenting destroyed villages and interviewing villagers after the mid1996 enforced relocations. His photographs showed burnt villages in the Mawchi area and people leaving villages carrying belongings. He also had images of bamboo houses built in the Mawchi ‘relocation centre’ and pictures of temporary shelters in the jungle to which many villagers had fled.4 And since 2000 in particular, with the increasing difficulties faced by

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new refugees attempting to get over the border and into the camps, an increasing number of Karenni men are regularly travelling into Karenni State for periods of several months at a time, in order to provide emergency food, shelter and medical assistance to the many people living in appalling conditions as IDPs in the jungle. While they are there, they also provide basic medical and survival training to selected individuals, and some elementary educational materials. Given the environmental conditions and the need to evade the Burmese army, this is valuable but dangerous work, and causes considerable anxiety for the wives and families of those involved. The border has at various moments had very differing degrees of permeability. During the ceasefire period there was extensive movement in both directions, and subsequent to that in the late 1990s there was still considerable, though increasingly more difficult travelling. Even in the currently much more restrictive period with its far greater control over movement by the Thai and Burmese militaries, there is still some traffic, mainly in the forms of new refugees coming from the inside and longstanding refugees going in the other direction in order to assist IDPs. The latter epitomise the small number of people who personally blur the categories of insider and outsider. Most refugees, once they have journeyed across the border and arrived in the camps, remain just that: ‘refugees’. They are no longer Karenni State insiders, in the sense that they no longer have a physical presence on that side of the border and they are either unwilling or unable or both to move back and forth. Simultaneously, they are certainly not Thai insiders either. On the other hand, the small numbers who do journey back and forth in some ways remain, through their repeated travelling inside and their continuing intimate knowledge of the physical realties in certain areas, insiders as well as being legitimate outsiders if, as is the case with soldiers and IDP assistors, their main residence and/or family is on the Thai side of the border. Ongoing cross-border movement provides a direct (for the travellers) and indirect (for other refugees) ongoing sense of being a part of, or at least connected to, life ‘inside’. Yet at the same time the risks and restrictions inherent in such journeying also reinforce perceptions of Karenni State as a land under occupation, not presently open to free travel for Karenni people as it should be. These perceptions are in turn strengthened by the fact that the ‘safe’ place of return from cross-border journeys is not ‘home’ inside Karenni State, but the refugee camps in their limbo between Karenni State and Thailand proper. Importantly, the paradoxical combination entailed in these journeys, of ongoing connection on the one hand and reinforcement of occupation and restriction on the other, is evident not only to those actually making the journeys. It is felt too by others resident in the camp whose friends or family members travel into Karenni State on military or other business. In other words, all refugees are cognisant of the

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dangers and restrictions in travelling inside Karenni State and, by extension, of the implications both for their current status as refugees and for the status of Karenni State itself. This reinforces their sense of themselves as a people presently unable to live at ‘home’ because of wrongs committed against them, and their appreciation of the irony inherent in being a refugee – the camp is a safer place than ‘home’.

Forms of Knowledge and Emotional Response What sorts of cross-border knowledge circulate? And in what ways, if at all, do they engender or represent feeling about people and places left inside Karenni State? This section outlines the forms of narrative used to recount information about those on the other side of the border, and discusses the reasons for the depersonalised, communal idiom in which it is expressed. Knowledge pertaining to life inside Karenni State and circulated in the camps is generally of two kinds: firstly, there is personal information concerning, for example, births, marriages or deaths amongst family and friends who have remained inside Karenni State; secondly, there is general information relating to military activity, village relocations and other humanitarian issues. In reality, the boundary between these sorts of information is blurred, so that information pertaining to one’s family and friends is part of more general knowledge about what is happening to villages in a certain area, for example. What begins as anxiety about family members often shades into a generalised concern over a humanitarian problem. Naw Sarah, a student whose much loved parents remain in her village inside Karenni State, exemplifies the generalised way in which people tend to verbalise anxieties that stem from news they receive about events inside Karenni State: I would like to tell you news about my village. They have many problem[s] … because … SPDC came in the village and shot the animals and catch porter5 … and also bully the villagers. Now SPDC came in the village again and were cruel to them and burned their houses and also barn. So they haven’t house and barn and no food. Now they are villagers staying in the jungle without house. They have many problem and many people are sick and a lot of people died because … they haven’t medicine … Extract from letter from Naw Sarah to me, 18 February 1999 I had previously talked many times to Naw Sarah about conditions in her village, and while it was always clear that her primary concern was for her family, her articulation of that concern was invariably couched in generalised village terms. This is a depersonalising narrative style

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common to almost all other Karenni to whom I spoke about their home villages and the family or friends from whom they were separated. Why are articulations of knowledge about life’s difficulties inside Karenni State presented in this generalising, relatively unemotional way? Is it, for example, a form of self-censorship generated by normative restrictions on free speech in the camps or the still influential past? That is, is it connected to a fear of informers and thus of putting at risk the individuals who might be spoken about if the narrative were more personal? When conversations are had in large groups or public spaces and with those amongst whom the speaker may feel less comfortable, this is indeed sometimes an element: it was, for example, particularly so in Site 2 for a nervous period after the apparent identification of the spy in 1997. But in private conversations with close friends and with me, reticence to speak of family members and one’s feelings seemed not to be wholly explained by anxieties about informers and possible deleterious real life effects on those about whom one spoke. Certainly, the legacy of former life in a dangerous place lacking in the rule of law, and the real concerns about spies in the camps, do not encourage openness: but the same individuals were utterly unconcerned to discuss privately with me and close friends their or, importantly, others’ political views on the KNPP’s strategy, for example, or on their or others’ secret loves. On both politics and love my interlocutors would request discretion, but any anxiety over a potential lack of secrecy did not inhibit the specificity of the conversation – a fact which, given it could still have had serious consequences for the speaker or others (especially in relation to subversive political views, for example) renders it unlikely that concern for confidentiality alone explains the generalised way in which people talk of their families and friends inside Karenni State. Might, then, the attempt to remove emotion and personal specificity from such conversations be explained instead, at least when I was involved in the discussion, by a desire to emphasise the wider suffering of the Karenni people, as part of conveying the Karenni situation to a broader, potentially international, audience? It is certainly crucial to the KNPP that their claim to independence be recognised, legitimised and supported by the international community – partly because of hopes that such support could further the cause, but also because of the possibility that international recognition could strengthen the KNPP and their agenda in the eyes of the Karenni people.6 The effect of this awareness of the potentials of an international audience was evident to me when I talked to people whom I did not know closely, just as it was when I encouraged high school students to write about their individual backgrounds, hopes and fears. In both situations, an element of personal experience would be combined with, and largely subsumed by, wider topics of Karenni history, politics and suffering in descriptions intended at

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least in part to be conveyed beyond the camps, by me. I am not suggesting that what was told to me was untrue, rather that within it individual suffering was subordinate to a particular communal and political perspective and agenda (this also demonstrated the effectiveness of the promulgation in the camps of a particular political perspective, as I discuss at length elsewhere [Dudley 2000a, 2007]). As a representative of the outside world encouraging people to talk to me about their experience of becoming and being a Karenni refugee, my own presence helped to reinforce a particular way of presenting personal histories and a greater consciousness of the potential international, political and humanitarian currency of a displaced past. Mistrust and international awareness together, however, still do not fully explain the generalising and depersonalised way in which even Karenni refugees to whom I was very close would talk about their villages of origin. The public display of strong emotions is not common amongst Karenni adults in any context, whether or not it concerns displacement and the pre-migration past. Naw Sarah’s tendency to widen out her concerns from family to village and beyond was common to many other of my friends too, and seemed in part at least, a device to avoid too powerful a flood of emotion; on the few occasions that Naw Sarah did restrict herself to talking about her parents, she would be overcome. This element at least of Karenni reticence, could be characterised as one idiomatic form of what Lutz and White (1986: 414) describe as ‘culturally constituted rhetorics of complaint’. Lutz and White cite Kleinman and Kleinman’s observations (1985) that, when talking about negative feelings, the Chinese tend to use a somatic idiom while Americans are more likely to use a psychological one. One might speculate on the cultural and even political reasons for differences between Chinese and American emotional idioms, but whatever the explanations of them, those idioms exist. For the Karenni, on the other hand, the principal idiom for communicating emotional distress, particularly that pertaining to displacement and the abuses that brought it about, is neither psychological (‘I feel sad’) nor somatic (‘I hurt here’), but communal (‘this hurts all of us’).

Memory and Feeling in Journey Narratives In what ways do Karenni refugees recall and retell the physical journeys by which they came to the camps? Where does memory end and imagination begin? And how, if at all, do refugees’ stories of their journeys to the camps articulate how they felt, at the time and now? Almost invariably, as we have seen, journeys to the camps were stressful and dangerous. Recollections of them may be painful not only because of

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the nature of the individual’s expedition to Thailand and the physical hardship they underwent directly, but also as a result of the trauma of witnessing others’ suffering and of leaving people behind.7 Sometimes, of course, the latter stayed voluntarily, but in other cases – particularly those of villages in the Shadaw area forcibly relocated from 1996 – there was no choice but to leave behind individuals who for various reasons were unlikely to make the sudden trip: We left our village because of the SLORC troops. We hid in the jungle for a while before we came here. It took us five days’ very difficult walk to get here from where we hid. We had to carry a lot of rice [to keep us going in the jungle] and so we couldn’t bring much else. It was steep and muddy. We left three deaf and blind people behind in our village, because they couldn’t walk – they can’t cook either, so maybe now they are dead. We still don’t feel safe even now we are here – there are 500 SLORC soldiers only half an hour’s easy walk from here. Translation of an account given to me in Kayah by Thu Reh, the newly arrived leader of a relocated village in the Shadaw area, 6 August 1996 To quote on the printed page this statement given to me by a man who had only arrived in the camp one week previously, does not convey the evident state of shock and anxiety he was in as he spoke. His feelings were clearly somatised as well as mental: they were affects rather than emotion alone, visible and tangible in the hunched shaking of his body and audible in the flat yet trembling, quiet voice in which he spoke. Grief from leaving others behind, even when those others stayed behind voluntarily, can also persist for many years. Mu Reh, for example, wept quietly as she told me about leaving her best friend behind in their village eleven years previously in 1985, when they both about ten years old: I cried and cried, and we drank a lot of kaunyee [rice beer]. I was happy before, with my friend. Mu Reh, personal communication, January 1997 After this parting, like many others Mu Reh and her family had a prolonged sojourn before they actually reached their existing base in Thailand: they first made a four day journey surreptitiously on foot and partially by truck to east of the Salween, where they lived in a new village until 1986 when it was attacked by the Burmese army; they then made their way across the border, subsequently spending four years wandering from place to place in Thailand before settling in one of the touristoriented ‘Long-neck’ villages – Mu Reh’s mother wears the neck-rings – in 1990. When Mu Reh recalls such past loss she is not so much

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remembering and representing what she felt at that time, as recalling a past event which in turn triggers the production of certain emotions and physical sensations to be felt or brought to the surface all over again in the present (c.f. Bennett 2005). Journeys to the camp, however simple or prolonged they were, are an experience first generation refugees rarely discuss spontaneously or easily. Even when I asked my English students to write essays about their experiences of coming to the camps, few actually addressed the physical journey as I had intended. Rather, they wrote politicised versions of their reasons for flight, experiences since arrival and hopes for an educated future. One of the few who did write about the journey, Saw John, did so in brief prose, as quoted at the beginning of this chapter: When the Burmese army … come we ran with dog, pig and goat. We ran very quickly. …I went over the mountains and through the valley. … I carried rice with all sorts. The most difficult journey. Sometimes I really despaired. … Saw John, extract from a tenth standard essay, January 1997 de Certeau claims that ‘[e]very story is a travel story – a spatial practice’ (1988: 115), and that it is space not time that should have primacy in narrative analysis. Yet when Karenni refugees tell their individual stories of how they came to be in exile in the camps, the literal travel story – the narrative of the physical journey through space to the camp – is either missed out altogether or just briefly outlined. It is left wholly subordinate to the personal tale of what led up to the forced migratory journey and, interwoven with this, a more generalised rationale of both the forced migration process and of life in the camps. In other words, in their personal narratives Karenni refugees tend to focus on the pre-journey moment (or cumulative set of moments) that made life inside intolerable, and on the pros and cons, and making the best, of life in the refugee camp. Why is there a lack of apparent recollection of, or at least willingness to talk about, the physical journeys? Forced migration from Karenni State is a life changing process, like forced migration anywhere ‘dramatic and pivotal’, expected inevitably to shape a personal history, ‘marking the life’s fundamental turning point not only in a definite chronological window, but also spatially … associating [it] … with the trauma of leaving a certain place’ (Burrell 2006: 146; see also Skultans 1998). Yet the spatially and temporally defined transition phase, the physical journey itself, is rarely discussed by the Karenni. This is a phenomenon with some similarity to Burrell’s findings in interviewing Poles deported to Siberia in 1940: she observes a distinct ‘divergence in the narratives between the detailed descriptions of the initial stages of deportation [what happened before the actual journeys] and the much shorter accounts of the journeys

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[themselves]’ (2006: 146). The Poles’ narratives, she suggests, do not reflect proportionately on each phase of the process, but focus instead on certain key memories and the feelings associated with them (ibid.). Superficially, this tendency to focus on key memories and associated emotions, appears to be shared by Karenni testimonies. On closer inspection, however unlike the Poles’ stories, Karenni narratives do not focus on particular, spatio-temporally defined moments significant to the individual’s life history. Rather, Karenni narrators concentrate on aspects of the story that can most easily be generalised and aligned with wider Karenni experiences and political perspectives. That is, not only do Karenni narratives include little if any detailed description of the journey to Thailand, so too do they incorporate little specific detail of individual pre-journey experiences such as violent actions by the Burmese army. Certainly, Burmese army violence has been a widespread pre-flight experience and its forms tend to be similar whatever the village of origin; nonetheless, specific descriptions are lost in favour of generalised accounts that are often, once in the camp, explicitly tied to political aspirations. There are many reasons for this generalising narrative form. To an extent, they may appear to be explained by the presumed audience: to focus on the positive aspects of residing in internationally recognised and assisted camps, on nationalist aspirations and on such future hopes as increasing educational opportunity and attainment, may have a clear purpose when the audience includes foreigners. It does not, however, fully explain why the stories are so generalised. Painful personal experiences can, for example, often add, rather than lessen, power to such stories when they are told to real or imagined international audiences – yet they are not utilised in this way. Furthermore, the generalising tendency is still present even when an audience deemed to have ‘international’ potential is not – or at least, when the only international listener is a long familiar researcher merely listening passively to a Karenni conversation. Why, then, the generalising narrative? Agency in attempting to appeal to international audiences notwithstanding, it is genuinely painful to talk about personal experiences and journeys. What is more, feeling pain can precipitate the display of negative emotion, something not common or encouraged in public amongst the Karenni, as we have already seen. The process of generalisation, on the other hand, can ameliorate or counteract the trauma of personal experience: it is a narrative device that allows the teller to place some emotional distance between him- or herself and the story, firstly to minimise the recollection of pain, secondly to reduce the chances of embarrassment in front of a relative stranger, and thirdly to articulate the parts of their life history with which they feel at ease. In part too, a communal idiom is used – here as frequently in other Karenni conversations – both to replace the more difficult personal one and,

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importantly, to tie the individual strongly in to the community and its cause. This generalising strategy is combined with an emphasis on the positive aspects of the present and the future. Just as Burrell’s Polish informants highlighted ‘the sense of safety associated with time spent in the Polish civilian camps after the release from Siberia’ (ibid.: 150), so my Karenni interlocutors concentrate as much as if not more than on the traumatic past, on what for them are the benefits of the present and their best hopes for future. Of course, the Karenni are still in the relative immediacy of their forced displacement, whereas Burrell’s Poles were talking about events that had happened decades before; nonetheless, an emphasis on the positive aspects of displacement, and on the future, is very marked. This is so when Karenni talk to each other, as well as to foreigners: a way of ‘talking up’ present circumstance, perhaps, for both political and personal benefit.

Journeying as Normal Karenni journeying to and from the camps, as we have seen, has numerous forms and implications. It is important to recognise, however, that all Karenni travels are part of a wider context of journeying and of movement. Historically, the Thai-Burma border area and the Southeast Asian region more generally have been the setting for movements of peoples on large and small scales over a very long period. There is little or no consensus amongst migration historians about why, when and precisely from where Karenic and other peoples migrated south into the area that falls mainly within what is now Burma, but such migrations certainly did occur in one form or another (SarDesai 1994: 10). Movements of people in search of more hospitable, peaceful or less pressured lands have continued – indeed, Scott (1998) has argued that in this part of Asia, particularly but not only Burma, such movements have involved an escape by some people into the hills, running from the pressures of state making in the agricultural lowlands (for other perspectives on relationships between resources and the state, c.f. Keyes 1979, Leach 1954, Lieberman 1978). Added to these ongoing flows, have been the streams of migrant labour and refugees. Economic migrant movements have occurred throughout the historical period at various times, but in the modern era began in earnest in the mid-late nineteenth century with the large migrations into mainland Southeast Asia of Chinese and Indian labourers, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats (in the case of Indian civil servants moving into Burma to work within the colonial administration; Kaur 2004). Forced migrations, in contrast, have been a significant issue primarily only since the second half of the twentieth century (globally, see Zolberg and Benda 2001; on Southeast Asia in particular, see Hedman 2006,

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Hitchcox 1990, Long 1993, Reynell 1989). It is only in recent decades that economic and forced migrations combined have reached their highest levels in the region, largely as a result of dramatic economic, cultural and political changes (IOM 2006). It is within this wider geographical and historical context, however problematic may be its histories (c.f. Fink 1994), that recent Karenni refugee journeying should be located. Some of this historical context is familiar to many Karenni refugees. More important from a Karenni perspective, however, are mythological contexts. Journeying is both a theme intrinsic to the lives of individual Karenni refugees, and prominent in many Karenni myths. The first part of the story told at the close of the annual dïy-küw festival is an example, as this English translation of the version originally told in both Kayah and Burmese at the 1996 festival in the southern Karenni camp, demonstrates: A long time ago, there were two brothers. The elder one was Chinese, and the younger one was Karenni. They decided to migrate south from Mongolia, following the Salween river downstream. Eventually, they reached the Salween delta, and they were hungry, so they set about catching prawns.8 They cooked their catches separately. The Karenni brother thought that the prawns turning a red colour meant that they weren’t yet properly cooked, so he was afraid to eat them, and kept cooking them for days and days.9 The older brother, meanwhile, had finished eating his prawns, and decided to go back up north. The younger brother said he’d follow when his own prawns were cooked. The older brother said ‘alright, I’ll set off now, and cut down banana trees as I go, so that you know which way I’ve gone and can follow me without getting lost’. Eventually, the younger brother realised that his prawns must be properly cooked, and he ate them. Then he set off in pursuit of his brother. Unfortunately, however, banana trees grow very quickly and by this time they had already grown back, so the younger brother had great problems following his older brother.10 At Demawsoe,11 he finally gave up the journey, and decided to stay were he was… The story then goes on to recount how the Karenni were united in their new homeland in fighting a common enemy, and it is the latter theme which provides the contemporary, nationalistic rationale for the dïy-küw festival (see Dudley 2000a and 2000b). What is of interest here, however, is firstly that this migration part of the myth emphasises journeying, secondly that it is an important cultural narrative with some form of which all Karenni are familiar, and thirdly that it is a story generally shared by other Karenic peoples too.

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How much does this mythical journey south from central Asia have a basis in historical reality? Lehman argues that much of the dïy-küw myth has been influenced by official, ‘mistaken’ history in Burma and Thailand, and that this version in which there is a reference to China is a recent phenomenon which seeks to make the dïy-küw story fit with some outsiders’ historical interpretations of Karenni origins – i.e. to fit with the idea that the Karenni came from Central Asia – in an attempt to ‘claim historicity [and thus international legitimacy] for their legend’ (personal communication, 2000). This may be so, but I would take issue with the claim that ‘before the last decade or so no Kayah-li had ever heard of such a historical theory [that the Tibeto-Burma speaking people came from China-Mongolia and migrated southward]’ (ibid.). See, for example, Colquhoun’s reiteration in 1885 of a ‘Red Karen’ story that they were ‘part of a Chinese force who overslept themselves, and were left behind by the main body’ (1885: 62). More recently, Karenni publications of at least the last quarter of the twentieth century reiterate this historical theory (e.g. KRNRC 1974). Issues of historical truth are in any case largely irrelevant for the present purposes. The Karenni with whom I listened to the myth as it is now told, were not concerned with its historical accuracy.12 They interpreted and reiterated the myth in terms not of origins per se but – via a story that happens to be about mythical origins – of shared cultural forms which tie together Karenni people in ritual practice and contain within their symbolic apparatus ways of imagining and representing aspects of Karenni-ness. In part, as I discuss elsewhere (Dudley 2000a), this is about creating and asserting a politicised sense of pan-Karenni unity. It is also about identifying and expressing some of the perceived characteristics of what, for the Karenni, Karenni-ness is – characteristics which, in the dïyküw myth, include self-deprecating humour, and journeying. Indeed, the solely Karenni journeying in the myth – i.e. after the older, Chinese brother has gone – happens because of being lost and not at home. The new home that is finally settled upon around Demawsoe is chosen not for any particular attribute, but simply because the Karenni traveller felt he could not or need not continue any further. Belonging, in this story, is not rooted in Demawsoe or any other particular place, but instead is about a shared mythical history and the characteristics it embodies, to which journeying and the associated lack of fixity in extended space are integral. This form of belonging, as we shall see later in this book, takes on especial significance in the present displaced setting. Historical and mythological contexts, together with individual experiences of multiple flights over time, all contribute to the notion amongst Karenni refugees that journeying is not unusual – indeed, that it is something ‘normal’ both for them and for others. That is not to say that Karenni refugees consider their forced displacement to be normal, but there is nonetheless an impression that the movement of persons in space, either

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temporarily or permanently, is neither uncommon nor necessarily undermining of people’s sense of who they are. Indeed, beyond their own, Karenni experiences, refugees can see and hear this for themselves on a daily basis: in becoming a refugee in the border camps, individuals come into contact with a number of persons, organisations and sources of information that show the extent to which other people’s lives are also embedded in the process of journeying. There are the reports listened to avidly on the BBC World Service, for example, that talk of conflict and refugees in other parts of the world. And, of course, there are those who come to the camps: Thai officials and soldiers, NGO workers, English teachers, tourists, even anthropologists. All of these have made a journey, of varying distance and duration, to get to the camps. Camp residents take this for granted, and yet at the same time they find it fascinating. I lost count not only of the number of times I was asked how many hours and miles I was from home, but also of how often I heard it asked of others. By definition, all those present in the camps at any particular moment, have at different times and in different ways undergone some kind of journey to get there. The facts that not all of these journeys began in Karenni State or elsewhere in Burma and that not all of them were made on foot, together with stories of situations elsewhere in the world, act as powerful reminders to the refugees both of their refugeeness and difference (they are the only ones in the camps who cannot easily leave) and of their location in a wider, global context and their sameness (they are not the only refugees, or indeed, travellers, in the world). What is more, with UNHCR’s resettlement programme running from 2006 and resulting in some refugees travelling to north America, Australasia and northern Europe (e.g. see KSDP 2006), the range of journeys undertaken by Karenni is expanding still further. Journeying to become a refugee, then, as we have seen is part of a continuum which includes journeying as a normal part of life (c.f. Davis’s analogous argument that pain is normal, part of normal social experience; 1992: 152). Clearly, the journeys by which people reach the camps in Thailand are often very traumatic, but the act of journeying itself is not necessarily an unusual one.

Landscape, Senses, Bodies and Things As any journey progresses across extended space, those making it pass through, sensorially experience and play a transient part in shifting landscapes. This is an aspect of the essentially synaesthetic process that each journey represents: all the body’s senses detect, interpret and assess the impact and aesthetic value (broadly defined; Coote 1992; Gosden 1999: 150) of aspects of the physical surroundings through which they pass and in which they begin and end. These aspects are perceived through all types of sensation – visual, aural, olfactory, haptic, gustatory,

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proprioceptive and kinetic. Topographical and other physical changes over the course of any journey mean that one’s bodily sensations do not remain the same throughout. In Karenni forced migrations, a much greater average height above sea level in places of origin inside Karenni State when compared to the locations of the refugee camps, for example, means that there is an easily observable shift in environmental temperatures and in dominant plant species. Both these factors are frequently referred to when first generation refugees discuss differences between the refugee camps and their places of origin – the difference in plant species, for example, is a common source of concern when a new pole needs to be cut for the ka-thow-bòw festival (see Chapter 4) or when the relatively few women who still dye cotton with plant pigments cannot locate the species they are accustomed to using for a particular colour. As later parts of this book make clear, such refugee observations contribute to a multi-sensorial geography which intellectually frames Karenni physical experiences. Yet landscape and environmental changes observable during the physical journey to the camp – as opposed to differences between camp and place of origin – are, as with other aspects of journeys, rarely remarked upon. Why? We have already seen that there are few personal, emotional associations articulated in narratives about becoming a refugee. There are also few somatic associations. The depersonalised and relatively abstract forms in the stories of forced migration itself effectively distance the teller not only from emotional pain but also from physical recollection – including remembrance of physical pain. Events that preceded the journey to the camps, and the journeys themselves, were intensely physical, multi-sensory experiences. Abuses by and fleeing from the Burmese army had definite effects on the bodies of individual Karenni – ranging from rape, through assault and injury, hunger and illness, to the most common experiences of feeling intense fear and having physically to exert oneself to flee and ultimately to make it to Thailand. Of course, individual histories and experiences have varied greatly, but the bodily sensation of fear and the physical arduousness of travelling to the refugee camps are effectively universal amongst first generation refugees. Yet they are almost never voluntarily recalled verbally and discussed in detail. Instead, the physical aspects of the experience of forced migration are glossed over, referred to only in generalised references to the difficult terrain – mountains, forests, rivers, rain, mud – and to the physical difficulties of walking long distances over such terrain, often while suffering significant ill health – especially malaria and dysentery. Indeed, the principal exception to the exclusion of personal bodily associations in journey narratives is reference to physical suffering caused by malaria. Malaria looms so large in life inside Karenni State and in the border camps that it becomes something of a leitmotif in conversations not

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only about becoming a refugee but also about being one, particularly in the way in which perceptions of relative risk of malaria morbidity and mortality in different locations – and, ultimately, the difference in comfort and ease felt in different places – are characterised. Many village histories, for example (especially those of upland Kayan villages), are told by the former villagers with an emphasis on the movement of the settlement to a hill area from a lowland area near water, and the volunteered explanation that the move was made because so many people previously died of the malaria that bred there. Equally, if an individual wishes to emphasise the dangers inside Karenni State and/or the positive side of being in the camps, he or she may point out that when people have returned to the area of Karenni State in question, they have suffered a great deal with malaria. Conversely, (and of course the same individual may at different times take either approach) refugees feeling more despondent about being in the border camps talk readily about the greater incidence of malaria morbidity on the border, or at least in the particularly badly affected southernmost camp. And the same theme is used to compare camps, so that many of those living in a northern camp, for example, will explain that they dislike Site 2 because of its higher malaria risk and despite its relatively bigger houses and greater amounts of space – the higher malaria risk is real, but it is also a convenient shorthand that avoids making explicit the other things refugees may dislike about Site 2, such as its physical remoteness, the long and uncomfortable journey to get there, its reputation as relatively boring and restrictive (for young men in particular) because of the greater difficulty of obtaining alcohol there, and – in the 1990s an issue for many of the Site 1 Kayah majority – the then dominance in Site 2 of Karen groups and language. Beyond malaria, then, journeys and the corporeal experience of them are little discussed by comparison to the differences between the journey’s beginning and endpoints. Little discussed too, as we have seen, are physical characteristics of the environments journeyed through. Yet if we were to employ a phenomenological approach to understanding refugee experiences and recollections of journeys, we would take the view that like any other human actor the forced migrant does not simply move through a passive physical environment, in the process observing and evaluating, through the senses, its various attributes. Rather, by inhabiting the world, he or she makes and is made by the world.13 In this view, the body is central to perception, and both things and persons are constituted by their mutual interaction. Focusing on embodied living in the world is in this approach the fundamental building block of understanding both the world itself and the persons and communities living in it. Yet where does such a heuristic leave forced migrants (or, for that matter, other sorts of migrants)? It is not so difficult to imagine the mutually constitutive relationship that exists between migrants and landscape in their place of destination or in their

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place of origin: in both cases, there is a significant period of time in which persons and communities exist and function within and as part of a particular environment; in the process, people and environment continually shape each other (See Chapter 5). But can this model apply to the relationship between migrants and the landscapes through which they pass en route, often very briefly? At first sight, it seems difficult to accept that in such fleeting, transient contact people and environment can be mutually constitutive in the same way as they are over longer periods. Certainly, through sense perception of changing topography, botanical species, physical arduousness etc., the landscape journeyed through has influence, if only briefly, upon the travellers. But how, in such an evanescent relationship, can the migrants be seen as shaping the landscape? Firstly and physically, however fleeting it may be their passage through the landscape still leaves physical traces of some sort and, while travelling, the refugees seek to live in and from that land. Secondly and conceptually, as a result of their sensory experience of the landscape through which they trek, they form a view of what that land is. There is therefore the potential for a somatically grounded memory of the terrain travelled through – though the degree to which that memory is actually foregrounded and recalled is, in most cases, minimal. The relationships between physical experience, the material environment and memory are complex – and, as we shall see, involve imagining as much as remembering the past, particularly the past that came before forced migration. If Ingold, in his development of a phenomenological approach into his dwelling perspective, is correct in arguing that memory and knowledge essentially subsist ‘in practical activities themselves, including activities of speaking’ (2000a: 147), it is hardly surprising that Karenni and other refugees discuss at length their memories of the pre-exile past and, more recently, of refugee life, but by contrast have little to say about the journeys that came in between. Inside Karenni State and in the refugee camps, life is lived in a full and practical sense (albeit different in each setting) over time; on the journeys, however, physical interaction with the environment is fleeting and mobile, limiting the extent of knowledge and later memory. If memory is essentially formed by interactions over time between bodies, spaces and things in the past, we will, as the next chapter shows, learn a great deal about what it is to be a refugee from the ways in which forced migrants recall, remember and reconstruct aspects of their pre-displacement life.

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Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

Karenni refugees also physically travel, to greater and lesser extents, once in displacement in Thailand. In the late 1990s, when it was still generally possible for refugees to travel from the northern camp nexus to the southern camp, such journeys were a relatively common experience amongst the refugee population, especially the young who moved between locations for education purposes. In the early years of the twenty-first century, this refugee movement is far more difficult. The Relocation Centre at Shadaw, like others at Ywathit and Mawchii, in the 1990s was described by its former residents as a small, fenced area of land within which relocated villagers are ordered by armed guards to remain. The Mawchii centre at least is also said to have been land-mined around its perimeter. Furthermore, former residents of the Shadaw centre claimed to me and others (e.g. Green November 32 1996, Chapman 1999) that on two separate occasions their water supply was poisoned by Burmese soldiers, with the result that a number of residents died. IRC, meanwhile, suspected a typhoid or cholera outbreak in the Shadaw centre in 1996/7, which may or may not have explained the refugees’ fear of water poisoning and the subsequent illness amongst the centre’s population (K. Demusz, personal communication 1996). A decade later, in contrast, residents who had remained in the Relocation Centres had more access to state-provided resources than they would have had they left them for the jungle – and a result many were now choosing to stay (Ashley South, personal communication 2006). ‘English’ is used as a generic term of reference for any Caucasian. Significant in number and impact amongst his photographs were images of children, either posed with Karenni soldiers looking paternalistic or gathered in a formal group outside a school apparently still run by the KNPP. These images were particularly important in projecting a view of the KNPP as concerned with peaceable, humanitarian activities like education (opposing it to the portrayal of the SPDC as inhumane) and Karenni soldiers as decent implementers only of this civil KNPP mission (opposing the representation of Burmese soldiers as rapists and murderers). The photographs were shown to individuals such as myself in the context of talking about human rights, and the overall effect was powerful. Pah Lee Klaw described, for example, passing a house with only children in it, who cried hysterically when they saw strangers, because they were so frightened by all the awful things they had seen. He talked of people in District 2 as having nothing, no education and no medicine. Importantly, this powerfully emotive type of description of objectively awful conditions is used not only to draw in foreigners like myself, but is also of central importance in convincing young people in the refugee camps of the need to serve their people. The Burmese army regularly forces villages to porter for it. Indeed, the KNPP periodically makes approaches to such bodies as the United Nations (Anon. 1993, KPG 1992), and the governments of the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada and Japan, requesting both recognition of their claim to independence and assistance in achieving it.

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Cultural studies of trauma are not addressed here, but are of real importance to the theorising of aspects of forced migration; e.g. Bennett 2005, Caruth 1996, Huyssen 2003. These cultural studies augment culturalist theories of trauma in studies of war and displacement (e.g. Bubandt 2008) and Pupavac’s critique of the Anglo-American emphasis on therapeutic approaches in which war trauma is seen as an example of emotional dysfunction rather than as on a continuum with normal social experience (2004). The latter perspective is somewhat analogous to Davis’s arguments about suffering (1992). 8. Or lobsters, or other kind of shellfish, depending on informant. 9. At this point, Karenni listeners laugh. A central theme of the story being Karenni daftness (especially in comparison to a non-Karenni group) is common to many Karenni myths, and is always a source of head-shaking and amusement. 10. Up to this point, the story is similar to other Karenic myths, such as the Sgaw Karen story of Toh Meh Pah, retold by Falla (1991: 11–12). Toh Meh Pah (‘Boar’s Tusk’) is the older brother. He migrates south with his younger brother, and when they reach a river they sit down to eat. They cook water snails and roselle (hibiscus) and, as in the Karenni story, they do not think that the snails are cooked (they believe the roselle juice to be snail blood). In the Sgaw Karen story, the older brother goes off out of impatience, not because he has realised the snails are cooked. Subsequently, some passing Chinese, laughing, explain to the younger brother that his snails are cooked. But by the time he has eaten them and set off to follow his older brother the banana trees have grown back again, and the younger brother cannot follow. (As Falla points out, there is a confusing inconsistency in this version of the story, as Toh Meh Pah, the older brother, disappears, despite the fact that the Karen say they are descended from him. In the version re-told by MacMahon [1876], however, this problem does not arise as like the Karenni myth it is the Chinese who go ahead). In any event, travelling elder and younger brothers are common themes in Karenic myths. 11. Now a town in Karenni State, near the present-day capital of Loikaw. 12. C.f. Tapp on the Hmong: ‘… it does not matter whether or not the Hmong have adopted their practice of geomancy and many other cultural elements from the Chinese. Ethnographically, what matters is how the Hmong define their own ethnicity with reference to their own sense of the past …’ (1989b: 179). 13. See Heidegger 1962, Merleau-Ponty 2005.

4 Remembering, Forgetting and Imagining the Pre-Exile Past

[T]here is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience Bergson 1988: 3 This chapter examines how and for what purpose refugees remember, imagine and seek to maintain some sort of continuity with the more distant, pre-flight past. The chapter explores the roles within these processes both of material objects with certain associations and of culturally constituted ways of sensing and interpreting them. In particular, the chapter focuses upon dress and an annual festival, examining the multiple and mutable meanings and values attributed to them by refugees and their especial significance in the experience of displacement. The interlinkages between the senses, the body, objects and memory are, as we shall see, both complex and integral to a feeling amongst Karenni refugees of continuity between their exiled present and their pre-exile past. Indeed, these connections could sometimes be said to form – or perform – the past, continually re-presenting and reshaping not only Karenni refugee historicity, but also ‘the historical as a sensory dimension’ (Seremetakis 1994: 3).

Dress and Connections with the Past Male and Female Dress: Differences in Form and Significance Female dress, as we shall see, takes on major significance in several different ways in the camps, becoming amongst other things a metaphor for loss and past violent upheaval. Male dress, on the other hand, takes on virtually none of this significance. Men and boys in the camps wear skirtcloths, shorts, wide Shan-style pants crossed over and tied at the top (and usually black), or universal-style trousers such as jeans.1 Men’s skirt-cloths

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are sold in the camps and in Thai markets, and in contrast to women’s cloths are rarely if ever woven by Karenni women in the camps. Skirtcloths are worn by a wide age range as everyday male wear in the camps, whereas Shan-style pants are mostly restricted to older men, and are the least popular nether garment – although black Shan-style pants are worn by young men as part of their formal outfits for the important dïy-küw and ka-thow-bòw festivals. With the exception of these festivals, and of some men who do occasionally wear button-through cotton shirts, almost all longer-staying male and female refugees alike (i.e. excluding later Kayah arrivals, of whom more below) of whatever ethnic group and in any of the camps, habitually wear t-shirts with their lower garment of choice. Post-pubescent girls and women have far less choice than do men of what to wear with their t-shirts, and almost all invariably wear skirtcloths. It is considered highly improper and unfeminine for sexually mature women and girls amongst the longer-staying population in the camps to show any leg above mid-calf level (it is totally unacceptable for women to wear shorts), to show any of the chest area (except when breastfeeding), or to go without a bra (except when bathing). Even for women to wear loose fitting trousers is greatly disapproved of by many, especially older men. European-style skirts reaching to below the knee are sometimes worn, but they are usually considered suitable only for prepubescent girls – a restriction that has more to do with a perception that such skirts are frivolous and childish than with any idea that they somehow breach moral codes. Female dress generally, however, is an intrinsic part of a moral code in which women’s bodies are expected to be covert and passive. Female dress is also something on which all refugees of both sexes and from all sectors of the population have opinions, especially on what constitutes ‘traditional’ female dress; they do not, however, discuss male dress in this way. Male and female skirt-cloths are not the same: as well as incorporating different types of patterning in the fabric (stripes that run vertically down the legs, for example, would be highly unusual on a woman’s cloth), a woman’s cloth has a waistband stitched onto it. Furthermore, the two are worn differently: both constitute a long rectangle of fabric with its two shorter sides sewn together, so that the finished garment comprises a tube that has to be stepped into or pulled over the head (women should not pull theirs over the head); a man then grasps the extra fabric on both sides of his body and ties them in a knot at the front of his waist; a woman, in contrast, pulls all the extra fabric to one side of her body only, and then folds it back across her front, tucking the end in at the waist on the opposite side.

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Dress, Knowledge and the Past Information about types and characteristics of female dress and the textiles used in their production, and understanding of the distinctions between different ethnic groups’ women’s costumes, is treated by men and women as cultural knowledge worthy of preservation, enhancement and dissemination. An interesting and important exception to the contrasting insignificance of male dress, includes the occasional discussions I had – mainly with men – about clothing worn by Kayan, Kayaw, Kayah and other men in times past. This kind of clothing features not skirt-cloths but hand-woven short breeches or shorts, often decorated with extensive embroidery and/or small pompoms. In the late 1990s, I only knew of such items from older literary sources (e.g. Scott 1911, Marshall 1922), archive photographs and museum collections;2 furthermore, most Karenni men told me that few if any men wear this sort of clothing today, except perhaps for national festivals of the kind favoured by the Burmese military regime.3 By 2006, however, a few men were wearing contemporary versions recently made by a woman in Site 1. Now and in the 1990s, knowledge pertaining to these garments and, especially, to items of women’s dress, is highly valued. Paw Wah, for example, Secretary of the Karenni National Women’s Organisation (KNWO) in 1996 and a senior woman in the refugee community, was keen to show me photographs of men and women of her own group, the Kayan Kang-Ngan (Yinbaw), wearing what she described (in English) as their ‘traditional’ clothing. The women’s clothing consisted of a dark green or black short, knee-length skirt-cloth with fine white or yellow stripes and longer than that worn by traditionally dressed Kayah women (see below), but still a good deal shorter than a conventional skirt-cloth worn now by other women in the camps; a similarly coloured cloak; a black breastcloth; a necklace of old silver coins; black head-cloths decorated with blue and orange pompoms at the front; variously coloured threads and/or feathers hanging from the ears; white fabric belts wrapped twice around the waist and tied in front, the red, tasselled ends hanging at least to knee level; and large numbers of lacquered cotton knee rings. The men in the photograph wore black or dark green knee length shorts decorated all over with multicoloured tassels, two or three knee rings, a white shirt and a white head-cloth tied in a turban and decorated around the brow with multicoloured pompoms. Paw Wah’s enthusiasm extended too to what she considered to be the authentic form of other Karenic clothing styles. Such attention to what is or is not authentically ‘traditional’ is shared by many, particularly older women. This is partly as a result of a genuine personal interest (many older women are competent and prolific weavers). It is due too to the value placed on the ownership or control of information about traditional

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dress, particularly by senior female members of the community. This information is clearly and self-consciously identified, articulated and represented as cultural knowledge, possession of and authority over which is a desirable currency and marker of status and power within the community. As a result, clothing is connected with social standing not only directly (through such attributes as quality and condition), but also indirectly through knowledge of important dress forms. The material objects that are items of dress, and the ideas held about them, for senior women stabilise their sense of themselves by demonstrating ‘power … and place in the social hierarchy’, one of the ways in which, according to Csikszmentmihalyi, objects participate in human life (1993: 23). This particular set of cultural knowledge is especially associated with past, pre-exile practices: it concerns styles of dressing which in some instances are continued similarly in the refugee camps but in many others are not. This connection with the past permits the simultaneous reinforcement of ideas of the past and of cultural authority – that is, an aura of superior social standing and understanding of cultural forms in the present is enhanced by knowledge of past forms including dress, and, at the same time, authority over cultural knowledge and its concentration on past forms is a key way in which the importance of the past is maintained. This much is perhaps unsurprising in most social settings. In a refugee context, however, the relationship between status and authority on the one hand and claims to knowledge of the cultural past on the other, takes on a renewed significance. The status and power lent by claims to authoritative knowledge of the past and cultural forms rooted therein, is enhanced by the extra fragility and importance accorded to that past by forced removal from its geographical base. At the same time, those who claim authoritative knowledge of aspects of that past are able, through perpetuating ‘authentic’ recollections and reenactments of it, to keep it alive – and, of course, in doing so to reinforce their own status and power. This maintenance of a real or imagined connection with the pre-exile past, in this instance with specific reference to clothing forms made and worn in the past and sometimes continued into the refugee present, is a process in which objects – albeit frequently in visual (photographic) and reconstructed mental forms rather than necessarily physical ones, as with the Yinbaw clothing example – ‘reveal the continuity of the self through time, by providing foci of involvement in the present, [and] mementoes and souvenirs of the past’, a second way in which Csikszentmihalyi claims objects function in daily life (ibid.). The objects involved – such as Paw Wah’s photographs, items of dress themselves, and the mental images verbally externalised by Paw Wah and others in order to exemplify ‘authentic’ forms – do indeed constitute ‘mementoes and souvenirs’. These physical and mental forms are objects of memory,

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objects which ‘both inscribe and are inscribed by … memories of self and personhood’ (Parkin 1999: 304). Again, this is hardly unique to a refugee context – but in such a setting objects are particularly powerful and dynamic in forming and, in the repeated re-articulation and subtle shifting of their characteristics and significances, re-forming connections with the pre-exile past. In so doing, of course, like any memento they come to represent both aspects of that past and continuity with it, ‘through their association with stories, dreams and the transmission of skills and status’ (Parkin 1999: 313). Cognitive and imaginary connections with the past and with past places, materialised, visualised and articulated through dress, are of course important too when considering the forms of clothing actually worn in the present by significant numbers of people within the camps. Most women amongst the longer staying refugee population wear the ubiquitous, commercially produced, machine printed batik style skirtcloths. As these printed cloths are widely available throughout Southeast Asia, refugees are – funds permitting – easily able to acquire new ones when necessary or desired, either in Mae Hong Son market or the camp shops. This ready access to garments already familiar for first-generation refugees before flight to Thailand, provides a degree of reassuring continuity with a past, pre-exile way of life. Familiarity and comfort allow day-to-day life to be conducted with relative physical ease and without being overly conscious of bodily raiment. At the same time, however, continuity with the past through dress is made not only visually obvious but also corporeally intimate. The wearing of the familiar skirt-cloth is at once deeply physical, performative and habitual. The particular way in which such a garment drapes the body and clings to the buttocks, the relatively short stepped walk (deemed elegant and graceful by the Karenni) it dictates, the multifunctional possibilities of the cloth (as skirt, as modesty protector when washing, as part-vessel for transporting gathered fruits, as [when unworn] baby-carrier, and so on) and perhaps especially the repeated and often very frequent unfolding and refolding of the cloth, all permit the continued performance of something that was also fundamental to quotidian life in the pre-exile past. The temporally extended familiarity of this style of dress, and its physical intimacy with the wearer, thus make it central to a body-memory in which the material interactions between cloth and corpus now continue a long-standing pattern with a past that extends back to well before the moment of forced displacement. It is not just that wearing this style of skirt-cloth in exile reminds refugees reassuringly of the past and thus enables a mental and affective sense of continuity with that past; it is also not just that memory of interactions between cloth and body in the past shape interactions in the present. Beyond both of these processes is another, in which refugees are

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not only reminded of and reassured by the past, but also continually perform it, perpetually (re-)creating the past in the present. Such performance is itself a form of active memory, or memory as action: through wearing certain clothes and in the bodily comportments and actions they dictate, a way of being in the past is repeatedly remembered – indeed, (re-)produced – in a physical, embodied way in the present. This active memory is what Connerton calls ‘habit-memory’ (1989) which does not bring the past into the present qua the past, but instead performs or acts it. There are echoes too with Ingold’s argument that ‘it is through the activity of remembering that memories are forged’ and that a ‘way of life [is] not just an object of memory, represented and passed down in oral tradition, but also a practice of remembering’ (2000a: 148, emphasis original). Time as constituted in certain fundamental, everyday cultural practices such as wearing familiar clothes, is thus for Karenni refugees not linear but circular; what spatial discontinuity has disrupted, temporal and bodily continuities maintain, in this case through a ‘lived garment … [that offers] a very particular and multi-sensory means of being in the world’ (Allerton 2007: 25, emphasis original). The particularity and its embodied nature, and their retro-extension into a pre-exile past, are clearly of especial significance in the Karenni’s present displaced context. Of course, the particular familiar garment concerned here wraps the lower half of the female body, a physical component viewed by the Karenni as crucial for both biological and, consequentially, social reproduction. Such regenerative processes are of obvious significance to any community, but for a group in enforced exile they are especially important. Karenni conversations repeatedly refer to the need to have children; what is more, a woman’s progeny are deemed to belong to their father’s social group. Thus while the children of a Kayah woman and a Karen man, for example, may be bilingual and sometimes referred to as half-Kayah, half-Karen, they will generally be glossed as ‘Karen’. Similarly, foreign women who when it was still possible to do so visited and stayed in the refugee camps for a while, were often teased about the need to marry and have children with a Karenni man – not only to produce Karenni children, but also so as to ‘become Karenni’ herself. There is fear of the dilution of the Karenni population inside Karenni State, too, periodically stimulated by reports such as that which circulated in the late 1990s, claiming Burmese army officers inside Karenni State were encouraging their men to marry (at best) or rape Karenni women, with the express intention of giving them Burmese children.4 The procreative potential of the female, attempts to control and ‘own’ its products, and the close association of it with continuation of a particular form of clothing, then, are fundamentally and intimately connected to attempts to forge and fix cultural, personal and ethnic continuities with the pre-exile past.

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There is an added tension too in the importance of a garment associated so closely with a gendered part of the anatomy that is considered to be not only procreatively powerful, but also polluting and weakening (to men especially). On one level, ownership of the clothing and the part of the body associated with it, is clearly female. Indeed, looked at in conjunction with the particular role of women such as Paw Wah in presenting authoritative versions of traditional forms of dress, it could be argued that this is a feminised attempt to control constructions and continuities of the past. It perhaps should not, therefore, surprise us to encounter male-dominated attempts to control the forms of and values attributed to women’s clothing – indeed, we shall shortly encounter an example of just such an attempt.

Dress, the Past and Loss: ‘Traditional’ Kayah Clothing Ubiquitous printed skirt-cloths and Naw Paw Wah’s photographs of women inside Karenni state wearing traditional Yinbaw dress have therefore become both mementoes that stand for the past and active performances of aspects of that past. Another form of dress worn in the

Figure 4.1: Traditionally dressed and recently arrived Kayah women, pounding rice in the former Karenni Camp 2 (now Site 1) in 1996. Photograph by Richard Than Tha.

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camps, that of the women amongst the forcibly relocated Kayah who arrived in the camps from very remote areas of Karenni State in 1996 onwards, demonstrates particularly clearly this physical encapsulation of both the past per se and the psychological and cultural impacts of being forcibly separated from that past and its geographical setting. Traditional Kayah dress is in many ways very different to clothing worn by longer staying female refugees, whether Kayah or not. Nonetheless, once again this is a cultural form associated primarily with the feminine: admittedly, men amongst this new refugee population were more likely than longer staying male refugees to wear wide, Shan-style pants and less likely to wear jeans, but this seemed to reflect little other than relative spending power and availability of universal style clothing; there were otherwise not the same marked differences in male dress as there were with female clothing between the pre-existing and new refugee populations. Traditional Kayah women’s clothing consists of a short skirt-cloth, back-strap woven from home produced and naturally dyed cotton, coloured red or black and incorporating a variable number of yellow, blue or green decorative warp-stripes; a similarly produced and styled headcloth; and a black breast-cloth, the majority of which are made from purchased, ready-dyed, black, cotton or cotton/polyester fabric or, in a few cases, shiny black acetate (fig. 4.1).5 Other intrinsic elements of the overall form of dress include a fabric belt which, like the breast-cloth, is usually made from purchased fabric, in this case white and edged by the purchaser with a commercially produced zig-zag (rick-rack) binding in a contrasting colour such as red or yellow; large numbers of circular legrings made of black lacquered two- or four-ply cotton threads;6 a silver coin belt, sash or necklace (different women wear them in different ways), made up with old Thai silver coins or Victoria- or George V-era British India one-rupee pieces (the oldest I saw was an 1840 Victorian rupee); silver ear-ornaments comprising large earplugs with dangling pendants; and strings of glass beads, either very small or slightly larger, each string usually being of one colour (red, green, blue or yellow) and purchased ready-strung.7 This full dress is worn by married women and by unmarried, postpubescent girls. The process of becoming a wearer of full, ‘traditional’ dress is gradual, progressing with age. Baby girls start to wear one or two leg-rings at the age of about one year; gradually they wear more and more, the earlier rings being changed for rings with a greater diameter as the child’s legs grow. Girls’ ears are pierced at around the age of four years, often by a respected older female relative, such as the child’s grandmother, using a sharp piece of bamboo. Ear-piercing is an important transitional moment for a girl, and if they can afford it her parents may hold a celebratory party, where the guests will give a small amount of money to the family. By the time the child is nine or ten years of age, she

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is wearing leg-rings, a skirt-cloth, and strands of cotton through her pierced ears. At the age of eleven or twelve, she starts to wear a breastcloth. Once she is of marriageable age (around age fourteen upwards) the girl will – providing her family is not extremely poor – be wearing silver earplugs. Her first ear pendant may be a gift from her future husband, her acceptance of the gift indicating acceptance of his unspoken offer of marriage. It is in the wearing of this style of dress as much as in its physical attributes where lie some of the most important distinctions between this form of clothing and that worn by women amongst the pre-existing refugee population. The top end of the skirt-cloth often rests well below the waist, on the hips or even lower (not infrequently exposing the top of the buttocks), while its lower end covers the legs only as far as the lowermid thigh. At the same time, the breast-cloth, a simple rectangle of fabric which has one of its short sides tucked into the front of the skirt-cloth and the corners of the other short side tied either halter-style around the neck or around one shoulder, leaves the back and, when the women first arrived in the northern Karenni refugee camp, often one breast, uncovered. The otherwise exposed back – though not the breast – is covered by the head-cloth when it is worn, whether the cloth is tied on top of the head and hanging down the back or tied round the neck like a cloak. Clearly, the amount of female flesh left uncovered by traditional Kayah clothing leaves this style in mark contrast to other Karenni women’s dress in the camps. We shall return to this shortly, but there are other differences too. The fabric belt, for example, not only holds up the skirt-cloth but also functions as a purse, holding a wide array of objects such as betel chewing items, money, a knife, etc. This containment function is of great importance to these Kayah, amongst whom – and unlike other sectors of the Karenni population – there is no common practice of bag-making and wearing. Also important are the multiple leg-rings, which, worn as they are in large numbers around the tops of the calves, limit flexibility of the knee joint, enforce a particular sort of gait, and prevent women from sitting with their legs bent. The strings of coins, meanwhile, function as heirloom objects, but also remain highly sought after for purchase in order to make new belts, sashes or necklaces. Individual coins are expensive, and women told me that by the late 1990s they could only be obtained in villages and no longer found in shops in Loikaw. In 1996, an Edward VII rupee cost around K450 to buy in Karenni State; in terms of the real, black market value of the Burmese kyat at the time this was equivalent to approximately US$3 – a lot of money for subsistence farmers to pay for one coin. The most expensive and highly prized are George V rupees,8 apparently because of their high silver content. Coins are an obvious symbol of wealth, so it was interesting also to see one girl

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wearing a necklace consisting of silver coins interspersed with cowry shells, a rather more ancient currency. Indeed, the silver a woman wears is not only ornament and, often, heirloom, but also family wealth which the wearer is responsible for keeping safely and eventually for passing on to the next generation. This includes not only the strings of coins but also the silver ear-plugs and pendants: some women wear only ear plugs and one or two pendants, or an earplug and pendants in only one ear; this is usually directly related to the degree of their family’s wealth. The clothes and jewellery worn by a Kayah woman both contain and communicate her extended self, comprising a ‘super-skin’ (Allerton 2007) paradoxically both part of her body and adjunct to it (c.f. Harvey 2007), with which she signifies and reinforces, to herself as much as to the world around, her multiple identities as Kayah, as a woman of a particular age and marital status, and sometimes as a woman from a particular village.9 With the periodic exception of the head-cloth, the clothes are worn at all times, including at night. The newly arrived refugee women did not feel overly awkward wearing this style of dress in the camps, and several years after arrival the overwhelming majority continued to wear it. This dress is more than a storehouse and articulation of its wearer’s identity. It is of communal significance to Kayah women and men alike, and on first arrival in the camps especially was often discussed by them as being more beautiful and more comfortable than the clothing worn by other refugee women. Indeed, on arrival and still some years later female dress, together with farming and the annual ka-thow-bòw festival, was a major subject of conversation and a focus for tangible anxiety about the experience of displacement itself. Women and men alike expressed great distress about the women’s powerlessness – due to the inability to grow or buy cotton – to continue weaving and thus, when clothes needed replacing, to continue wearing traditional dress. Like the ubiquitous printed cloths for other members of the Karenni refugee population, for the Kayah refugees their traditional style of female dress is something familiar and thus, in the immediate aftermath of displacement, simultaneously physically, personally and socially reassuring. Furthermore, as something from and representative of the preexile past it is held on to increasingly strongly and self-consciously, especially when it becomes clear that other important components of village life such as subsistence farming, certain aspects of ritual practice and many of the social relations in which those actions were embedded, are impossible within the camps. Women’s dress both stands for the past and, in its visual and embodied continuity of an important aspect of that past into the present, is an important factor in trying to make the present more bearable and familiar. When formerly routine practices and social relations have been so suddenly and drastically disrupted and disturbed, Kayah women’s dress has, in a more poignant way but not unlike the

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everyday printed skirt-cloths worn by most other women, taken on the role described by Parkin as that of personal mementoes, serving as storehouses ‘of sentiment and cultural knowledge’ (1999: 317). Like the everyday skirt-cloths this is precisely because the objects in question comprise items of dress and have a highly somatic component to their significance: the ‘sentiment and cultural knowledge’ deposited in Kayah women’s clothing is intrinsically dependent upon the interaction of the objects with bodies, particularly procreatively potent female bodies, both now and as shaped by memories of clothing-body interactions in the preexile past. This increasing investment of female dress with important connections with the pre-exile past is not necessarily the same, however, as immediately characterising female dress as ‘traditional’, in the sense of how things have always been done. Nevertheless, within a short time of the new forced migrants’ arrival in the camps, both the pre-existing and new refugee communities had indeed come to regard this particular form of female dress as ‘traditional’. This characterisation was entirely theirs, not an externally applied view of mine – I fought hard to resist adopting an ‘aesthetic approach’ characterised by ‘value-laden dichotomies’ between ugly/beautiful, past/present, and so on (c.f. Tarlo 1996: 9), yet this was precisely the frame within which the Kayah arrivals increasingly pictured themselves. Immediately the new refugees arrived, their women’s clothing was the only tangible remaining sign of what and who they were and had been. In this new environment, it was also an obvious visual marker of difference between these Kayah and others – a difference that only became important after being displaced, as in the new arrivals’ former villages most if not all women dressed similarly and most villagers rarely if ever encountered Karenni women who dressed otherwise. Prior to displacement, in other words, the clothes simply comprised the way women dressed rather than a culturally valuable marker of difference. On arrival in the camps, however, this immediately changed, as the new refugees were suddenly exposed on an everyday basis to large numbers of long-skirt-cloth-clad women. The resultant self-consciousness and awareness of difference, combined with the attitudes and comments of pre-existing refugees (see below), produced an unprecedented rationalisation by the new arrivals of why their women dress as they do. People began to explain it in terms of ‘as things have always been done’, ‘as our mothers and grandmothers did before us’, and so on. This shift in self-perception and its presentation after becoming refugees, comprised a subtle but significant, increased cognitive focus on traditional dress as ‘culturally appropriate action’ (Toren 1988: 713), something that had ceased to be automatic and was now a deliberate and considered practice, represented as remaining the same in perpetuity (c.f. Durham 1995, Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). It was a raising of consciousness that has

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impacted not only on the Kayah’s experience of refugee-ness and on how they increasingly become aware of their place in a wider, Karenni ‘nation’, but also upon their own sense of ‘home’ in the pre-exile past and on their attempts to maintain connection with it. For refugees as for any other group, these connections have an important and obvious temporal component, in that they link the present with the past. For refugees and other migrants, however, they also have a significant spatial aspect – the pre-displacement past, after all, was somewhere else. Trying to create and maintain a sense of continuity with the past in such circumstances, then, is not just an exercise in remembering and imagining past events and lifestyles – it is also fundamentally about remembering the location of that past. Indeed, it is this intersection between temporal and spatial components which determines what ‘home’ means to a refugee. We will return to this temporal-spatial balance later in this chapter, suffice to say now that the enhanced significance of traditional Kayah dress once its wearers and their kin are in the camps is as much about connections to another place as to another time: dress not only helps the Kayah ‘to remember who [they] are’ and to construct ‘who [they] wish to be’ (Webster 2007), but also to construct – albeit partially and in the imagination – where they were and wish to be. Kayah female dress and its connections with the recent, pre-exile past are thus intrinsic to and highly important within the process of displacement. The encapsulation within this clothing of social relations, cultural knowledge and practices all originating in a past time and place is clear. That past place and the way of life there have been lost, and an acute sense of that loss is for these Kayah refugees itself also focused upon women’s dress. Indeed, this dress becomes a metaphor not only for the past itself but also for the loss of that past. In the process, it becomes a focus of grief about the past and anxiety about the future. This provokes nostalgia, in Serematakis’s sense of a longing to be able to travel backward through time and space to return to the lost, geographically removed past (Serematakis 1994). Such longing is of course in part an emotional process, but it is also fundamentally somatic. As an emotion, it is often sharp enough to seem physically tangible. What is more, the things lost, remembered and longed for are by definition inseparable from past embodied interactions – not least because some of the most important of those things include physical experiences and preferences concerning, for example, food, drink, houses and toilet habits. Moreover, the cultural form on which this longing becomes pinned and one of the few physical things from the past that has come into the displaced present, women’s clothing, is, as we have seen, only meaningful when wrapped around and in intimate connection with the female body.

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Dress, Tension and Conflict10 Traditional Kayah female dress is a style which, together with the attitudes of the women who wear it, is in noticeable contrast to the modest mode of female dress and associated moral strictures concerning women’s bodies amongst the longer-staying refugee population. On arrival in the camps, most of the new refugees had no experience of the world beyond their villages and immediately surrounding areas, and unlike in other parts of Karenni State there had been no Christian missionary activity in most of the villages. The women all arrived, as we have seen, with their traditional dress exposing thighs, backs and one breast. In sharp difference to the expected modesty and demureness of unmarried and even young married girls among the longer staying population, the new arrivals joked loudly and openly about sex and their bodies, saying, for example, that the reason their dress covered only one breast was that boyfriends were allowed one now but had to wait until marriage to get their hands on the other. At the same time, those among the pre-existing refugee population who from very soon after the new refugees began to arrive were planning to conduct Christian missionary work amongst them, frequently voiced their hopes that conversion might also bring the (in their view) beneficial side-effects of women changing to more modest dress and simultaneously practising more effective personal hygiene. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the stark contrasts to the pre-existing refugee community few of the recently arrived, traditionally dressed women appeared to feel stigmatised in the camps. Nonetheless, some individuals did encounter problems. In 1996, the year of the first arrivals of Kayah refugees, these problems were very limited and I met only three women who had stopped wearing traditional dress since arriving in the camp:11 one had changed when she gave birth in the camp clinic – she claimed to be more comfortable in traditional dress but was unsure whether she would go back to wearing it; another had changed temporarily because she wanted to wash her only set of traditional clothes (most women were unable to bring spare clothes with them when they fled into exile); and a third woman had changed after all her leg-rings had fallen off as a result of major weight loss during serious illness. This last case demonstrates well the literalness of the wider claims made by Kayah women and men alike that, with the exception of the head-cloth, the entire Kayah dress is always worn: if just one part of that dress is ever removed, even involuntarily (as with the post-illness loss of leg-rings), the woman removes her entire traditional dress. This principle could also be seen in the far greater number of women who had changed their dress by 1998,12 either permanently as a result – usually – of their only set of traditional clothes having fallen apart, or temporarily because the garments were being washed. All the women to whom I spoke who had changed dress,

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described themselves as unhappy in their new t-shirt and long skirt-cloth but said they felt they had had no choice. Nonetheless, while a number of women did indeed experience problems related to their style of dress, the overwhelming majority continued to wear such clothing and to invest it with increasingly selfconscious cultural value. Choosing (where possible) which form of dress to wear is an important and deliberate act in signifying belonging to and difference from particular groups within the overall community: as Tarlo puts it, ‘identities, like classifications themselves, may be multiple and conflicting … classification is about the dual processes of identification and differentiation, and choosing a type of clothing is one of the means whereby individuals participate in these processes’ (1996: 15). The type of dress chosen here is one which is categorised by new arrivals and longer staying refugees alike as ‘traditional’, although of course what they mean by and associate with that term varies. Furthermore, perception of this clothing as a representation of the ‘traditional’ or even the ‘primitive’, is not confined to the Karenni refugee community alone. For example, to a limited extent such Kayah dress is marketed as a tourism commodity by (Thai) trekking guides – there is little comparison of scale with the trips organised for tourists to visit the Kayan ‘Long-neck’ women, but a few posters in Mae Hong Son do advertise the possibility of seeing ‘Big-knee’ and ‘Big-ear’ women, by which they generally mean the Kayaw but sometimes also the Kayah.13 After the importance of the longer staying refugees’ views, however (see Dudley 2000a), it is the attitudes not of tour guides but of other outsiders such as NGO workers and Thai hospital staff that in the early years after arrival had significant impact. Some women ceased to wear traditional dress after illness and subsequent referral to Mae Hong Son hospital. While there were sometimes pragmatic reasons for this, more disturbing were women’s explanations that the ‘doctors in the hospital don’t like traditional dress’. Certainly, the lack of adequate breast coverage offended Thai cultural norms and provoked prejudice against the new refugees, reinforcing a perception of them as both exotic and primitive. Such attitudes were difficult for the new arrivals to comprehend and made them feel confused and unhappy, uncertain of why they were inadvertently causing such offence. At the same time the main relief agency, IRC, while it did not actively perpetuate negative attitudes towards traditional dress in the first year or two after the new refugees’ arrival neither fully realised the impact of these negative attitudes nor actively sought to contradict them. Indeed, in trying to address the conflict between traditional Kayah and Thai ideas of decent dress, IRC staff inadvertently exacerbated the women’s confusion: rather than trying to discuss the matter with the women and with Thai medical staff at Mae Hong Son hospital, they were silently complicit in a process whereby it was suggested to women being

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referred to hospital that for their own sake it would be easier if before leaving the camp they were to change into a t-shirt and skirt-cloth. This process was initiated not by NGO workers but by camp clinic staff, themselves members of the longer-staying, less traditional refugee population; nevertheless, IRC staff did not engage with such suggestions by the clinic staff with whom, at that time, they were working on a daily basis. Most of the women being driven to hospital by the IRC truck were in highly distressed states, not only because of their illnesses and recent experiences of violence and displacement but also because they found themselves in both a motor vehicle and a new sort of dress – the skirtcloth of which they found humiliatingly difficult to keep up – for the first time. Furthermore, parents told me that when children were sufficiently unwell as to necessitate hospital referral, refugee clinic workers and NGO staff alike strongly suggested that it would be easier for the father than the mother to accompany the child. This advice appeared to be aimed at diminishing potential offence to the Thai host community’s sensitivities and, while rational and practical on one level, was hardly effective in easing the discomfort – part, after all, of a difficult transition into refugee life – of the newly arrived refugees. The complex social world within which new Kayah refugees found themselves, then, and the conflicting attitudes they encountered towards their women’s style of dress, increased their feelings of vulnerability, confusion and awkwardness. The contrast between this stressful and uncertain present, and a pre-exile time in which the way one dressed was simply a quotidian given, contributed to enhancing the sense of loss of, and longing for, the past. Indeed, the central importance within this of traditional Kayah female dress served to magnify the significance and the self-reflective awareness of that very dress. Juxtaposed with the spatial and temporal rupture of forced displacement, this amplified conception and value of women’s clothing transformed it into something far more explicitly and self-consciously central to Kayah-ness and Kayah ideas of ‘home’ than it had previously been. Both this transformation and the processes which contributed to it are fundamentally corporeal. The full meaning of the clothing itself is only manifest when the clothing is worn on the body. Furthermore, the attempts by others to control and change what the newly arrived Kayah women wore, the views of longer staying refugees and Thais alike of Kayah dress and their association of it with an undesirable or challenging morality and female sexuality, and the contrary desires of the new arrivals to continue wearing their familiar clothing, are all ultimately inextricable from Kayah women’s bodies. There is a parallel here with the eighteenth century European programme of ‘manners’, an important component in which was ‘that meticulous disciplining of the body which converts morality to style, aestheticizing virtue and so deconstructing the opposition between the proper and the

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pleasurable’ (Eagleton 1992: 20). Seeking to control what is worn because of concerns about the amount of flesh exposed, and wanting to continue to wear something familiar and comfortable, are alike concerned with the literal embodiment of certain (if conflicting) values. This is not, however, the fixed embodiment of an outfit displayed in a museum case, statically representing particular identities and values; the living bodies concerned here continuously move, perpetually performing both values and the distant place and time with which they are perceived to have continuity. The performance – whether physically felt by the performer or viewed by the observer – and its associations are essentially elements of an aesthetic experience of exile: ‘feeling right’ in one’s clothes (c.f. Woodward 2005) or not feeling right about what one sees, arise alike from ‘the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces’ (Eagleton 1992: 19).

Dïy-küw and Thoughts of Home14 Embodied experience, aesthetics and performance are also key to understanding the significance in the camps of the annual dïy-küw festival. Dïy-küw is the ‘second major communal festival’ (Lehman 1967: 73) of the Karenni year and all except one of the ethnic groups represented in the refugee camps and considering themselves to be Karenni, have a tradition of celebrating it. ‘Dïy-küw’ as a phrase is linguistically Kayah, but is used in the camps by all the different ethnic groups. It literally means sticky (küw) rice (dïy), and refers both to the festival itself and to the parcels of sticky rice wrapped in wild sorghum leaves. The eating of these parcels is an important feature of the festival – they are triangular and tied into bundles of three, and said to symbolise Karenni unity by representing the three main Karenni State groups who traditionally practise dïy-küw (the Kayah, Kayan and Kayaw).15 Lehman says little about dïy-küw, consigning it to his appendix on the ceremonial and secular calendar. He mentions neither the dïy-küw story nor the mythical and historical significances of the dïy-küw rice parcels. Nevertheless, information given to him that dïy-küw is a festival held ‘when the work for the year is “half done”’, when ‘the paddy has begun to head … to celebrate the likelihood of a successful harvest and to give thanks for it’ (Lehman 1967: 73), echoes what my own Karenni informants said. The timing of the swelling of the paddy grain depends upon altitude, but is generally between mid August and late September. The poignant irony of this agricultural timing in a displaced context where people cannot grow paddy, was never referred to by my friends and acquaintances in the camps. They talked as they usually talked, their primary and permanent selves located in the milieu of paddy farmers not refugees. In this sense even those who had been in Thailand for seven

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years or more, and those who have no memories of paddy farming at all, treated displacement as just a temporary halt to regular activity. In the villages inside Karenni State (and in the northern refugee camp), the most auspicious time for the festival is usually determined by chicken bone divination conducted by an older man, although in the southern camp in the late 1990s there was apparently no one who knew how to do this and thus a committee was formed instead. The committee made its date selection pragmatically, partly taking into account (as is done in Karenni State villages) the staggering of the camps’ festivals so as to allow attendance at others’ celebrations, and partly ensuring that dïy-küw should not disturb the school week more than necessary (dïy-küw did not only concern the school students, of course, but the committee’s membership included the high school headmaster and the KNPP Minister for Education). There was huge excitement about the forthcoming festival. Younger people especially talked of it incessantly, anticipating that there would be much dancing, an abundance of wonderful sticky rice to eat and, of particular importance to the young men, much rice beer (kau’-jei; Burmese) to drink.16 What was more, they promised, the kau’-jei we would have would be far sweeter and stronger than the usual stuff, for it would be made not from the ordinary, NGO-supplied rice with its poor quality broken grains, but from the much sweeter and more glutinous sticky rice or at least from a mixture of the two. In the week immediately preceding dïy-küw there were many busy preparations in households around the

Figure 4.2: Preparing dïy-küw parcels in the former Karenni Camp 5 (Site 2) in 1996. Photograph by Sandra Dudley.

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camp, especially the making of dïy-küw parcels and kau’-jei (fig. 4.2). All trucks going in and out of the camp that week were doing so in order to bring back from Mae Hong Son market numerous sacks of sticky rice and extra supplies of other luxury goods such as biscuits and sugar. Some of these goods had been bought by the camp’s shop owners, but most was paid for and distributed by the KNPP. They later more than recouped this outlay in money given by householders to the dïy-küw dancers, but nonetheless it was an effective redistribution of resources, as those unable to afford their own sticky rice obtained some and those who could have bought their own made donations which covered the overall costs to the KNPP. Dïy-küw did not start with any particular, formalised moment. Rather, by lunchtime or so on the first of its three days, people began to go visiting on a large scale, drinking kau’-jei (and sometimes rice whisky – aje’), eating dïy-küw parcels, occasionally also being fed a special meal such as pork and green bean curry, and gradually reaching various stages of inebriation. Such visiting and indulgence were the essence of the festival for many refugees, especially adult men. It was not all that dïyküw entailed, however. Of central importance was the dancing from one end of the camp to the other, the ‘official’ version of which was done by high and middle school students, aged between about fifteen and twentythree, equally divided between male and female. They all wore what they described as ‘national’ Karenni dress: black Shan-style pants, white shirt and a pink head-cloth for the men, and long, red, striped, sarong-style skirt-cloth, pale pink or white short-sleeved blouse, red, striped cloak and white waist-cloth for the women (fig. 4.3).17 The dance started at the very last house at the camp’s furthest end (the end nearest the border and, therefore, to Karenni State). It was performed to the rhythmical, hypnotic, relentlessly alternating beats of two gongs accompanied by a pair of cymbals and a drum (fig. 4.4), and consisted of mimed actions representing the rice focused activities involved in an entire year, from the planting, tending and harvesting of paddy, through threshing and winnowing, to cooking and eating. The dancers had a significant entourage that included most of the camp’s young, unmarried schoolteachers, students not taking part in the dancing and miscellaneous followers; at each house at which the dancers stopped, some of the entourage would disappear into the house to eat and drink informally, it never seeming to matter whether or not the hosts were eating and drinking with them. There was a general atmosphere of bonhomie. On the final evening of dïy-küw, the school headmaster, other schoolteachers and numerous middle and high school students who had been the dïy-küw dancers crowded into a large house belonging to a community and army leader, for the dïy-küw ‘closing ceremony’.18 Gler Htoo, effectively head boy of the school, opened the meeting in Burmese, then introduced Saw

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Figure 4.3: Dïy-küw dancers in the former Karenni Camp 5 (Site 2) in 1996. Photograph by Sandra Dudley.

Figure 4.4: Dïy-küw musicians playing the goblet drum and the gong, Karenni Camp 5 (Site 2), 1996. Photograph by Sandra Dudley.

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Reh, a middle-school Kayah teacher who told the story of dïy-küw in Kayah, after which Thaw Reh, another student, repeated it in Burmese.

Reminiscence, Home and Liminality The dïy-küw story is characterised as a Karenni origin myth and has come to have particular significance in the emergent, pan-Karenni nationalism in the camps; I discuss it elsewhere (Dudley 2000a, 2000b). What matters for present purposes is the reminiscence that characterised the informal conversations which took place after the ceremony was officially closed. No one left at this point, but instead everyone drank strong, sweet Indianstyle tea (an abstemious contrast to the indulgences of the past forty-eight hours, but nonetheless a special drink for a special occasion) and chatted, initially at least about the two days that had passed. Students said how tired they were from all the dancing, Mariano laughed about how much rice whisky he had managed to consume, and everyone enthused about the sweetness of the rice beer and how fine it had been compared to what could be acquired during the rest of the year. As talk about the festival in the camp flowed people began increasingly to digress into discussions of dïy-küw in the villages, telling stories of certain practices in their own village of origin, asking questions of others, drawing comparisons between village and village, village and camp, and so on. It was widely agreed, for example, that it was regrettable that there had not been enough knowledgeable ‘old men’ to make a phü-diy-khrīy figure for the camp’s festival, this being both a symbol of part of the dïyküw story and a means of divination important in village-based dïy-küw practice. In the villages, a phü-diy-khrīy figure is made each year from cotton fabric wrapped over a woven bamboo frame. In some villages, inside its head is placed a red stone which, at the end of the festival, is removed by the headman and kept safe until the next year. The same stone is used every year, while a new phü-diy-khrīy is made each time. After dïyküw is over for the year, the phü-diy-khrīy, minus stone, is disposed of outside the village in a specially made wooden or bamboo ‘house’. When it leaves the village, any remaining bad spirits also leave. During the festival, the phü-diy-khrīy resides in one particular house which it chooses itself, indicating its choice in the same way as it answers yes- or no-type questions about the future, by rocking from side to side as it is held by two men (one young, and one old) and after being fed with a little kau’-jei or rice. It apparently has a distinct head, body, and mouth, and is about three feet tall (all information from Lee Reh, personal communication, 1997). Lehman has two pictures of a phü-diy-khrīy (1967: figs. 21 and 22, after page 83), which he translates as ‘Grandfather Rice Basket’. Yet even as people discussed this notable absence from the camp festival, they encountered and recalled and compared other aspects of

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village-based dïy-küw. Lee Reh and Saw Reh, for example, discovered as they wistfully reminisced what were to them some bizarre and amusing differences in certain dïy-küw practices in their respective villages of origin. In particular, Lee Reh recounted a game that was played with the phü-diy-khrīy figure in his village: The phü-diy-khrīy is hidden by some older men in the corner of the house where it has chosen to live for that year’s dïy-küw. They cover it with a mat. Children of the village must then pretend to be hunting dogs trying to sniff the phü-diy-khrīy out, moving about the village then eventually the phü-diy-khrīy’s chosen house on all fours, making barking noises. They are hunting the phü-diy-khrīy, and they pretend that the mat under which it lies is really a stone under which the phü-diy-khrīy is buried. They must dig the phü-diy-khrīy out, like dogs. Lee Reh was animated in his recounting of this activity, vividly demonstrating the children’s canine imitations and the excavating of the phü-diy-khrīy. Saw Reh found this story hilarious, tears of mirth streaming down his face as he listened. There was nothing like this, he insisted, in his own village of origin – geographically close though it is to Lee Reh’s. Indeed, the conversations after the end of the closing ceremony were not the first reminiscences I had heard during dïy-küw. Throughout the festival, all those who had clear, vivid memories of dïy-küw in their villages had talked about past celebrations and continually compared them with those in the camp. They emphasised that the festival lasts much longer in the villages (up to ten days) and that certain important elements such, as we have seen, as chicken bone divination and the phüdiy-khrīy, had been absent in the camp’s version. They explained wistfully, for example, how back in the villages dancers keep going for two days or more, often without sleeping, in order to dance for a significant length of time outside every house. In a number of villages too, it was said, various other activities go on. Gunfire, for example – impossible in the camps – is used in some places during dïy-küw to expel bad spirits from the village. In addition in some villages a bamboo, gunpowder-propelled rocket is constructed and fired, primarily for sport but also to aid the ridding of evil spirits; both men and women place bets on how far it will fly and where it will land. Talking about and perhaps idealising village dïy-küw practice was clearly important and, on one level, enjoyable for the refugees. In part it constituted a general reflection on past celebrations perhaps not unlike how people elsewhere may, for example, reminisce with feeling about Christmases past. The narration of memories of past dïy-küw festivals ensures that the present celebrations retain an anchorage in the past and provide a sense of continuity through time. Reminiscences such as Lee

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Reh’s and Saw Reh’s, permit an immediate reliving of the festival just completed in the camp and simultaneously juxtapose with it the revisiting of other, more temporally and spatially distant experiences of the same ritual. Of course, aspects of dïy-küw are but one element of village life that refugees talk about with friends who originate in the same or a nearby village and with those who do not; village-oriented conversation does, however, become more pronounced at festival time. Physical participation in the festival is associated with excitement, fun, plenty of gossip, drinking and a general atmosphere of bonhomie and misrule. But participation also necessitates an intense emotional involvement and reflection upon dïy-küw inside Karenni State. The piquancy and power of dïy-küw are enhanced by its sociality: dïy-küw is a communal festival and it is the sharing and comparison of memories and imaginings that intensify dïy-küw’s power to connect each contemporary Karenni refugee with the past. Nostalgia particularly is an important component of the affective associations of dïy-küw, as inherent in celebrants’ reminiscences is a longing for how things were – or are imagined to have been – in the past. Wistfulness, yearning and melancholy all suffuse refugees’ recollections and awareness of camp-village discrepancies in ritual practice, for example. Indeed the very process of sharing recollections is a sharp reminder of the reality of forced displacement, of the rupture between the exiled present and the domiciled past, and of the things that can no longer be done in the same way or the same place. One could argue that this is a special case of the representation of a mental state in the performative aspects of ritual: because the actors are refugees and the festival acts as a way of remembering life before displacement, and because that remembering produces feelings of longing and sadness as well as fun and bonhomie, in its repetition over subsequent days and years dïy-küw comes to stand not just for the past and for the Karenni people (Dudley 2000a), but also for the emotions (and associated physical sensations) themselves. Ritual practice has been described as ‘an unfolding, a sequence of movement with tensions, climaxes and directionality … [that] create[s] a ritual domain’ (Kondo 2005: 197). The unfolding of ritual practice as culturally appropriate action is, for all actors whether displaced or not, only meaningful because of its relationship to and apparent repetition of past sequences of actions. Dïyküw and the sociality and reminiscence embedded within it can be understood as creating a different sort of domain, one that has a particular fragility and poignancy in a displaced context but which nonetheless acts as an effective and affective channel back through both time and space to the pre-exile past. Being able to continue certain important ritual practices in the refugee camp – however compromised those practices might be – is thus

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fundamental to maintaining continuity with the pre-exile past. But beyond the practice of culturally appropriate ritual behaviour such as dancing and socialising, and beyond the narration of memories of preexile dïy-küw, what constitutes the stuff on which that continuity rests or provides the means to create and sustain it? Central to the answer is, I suggest, the embodied and multi-sensory nature of the experience and subsequent recollection of dïy-küw. The primacy of food and drink and of its pleasurable taste, for example, was clear in the pre-dïy-küw anticipation. It was also unavoidable once the festival got underway, in both enjoyment of the contemporary festival victuals and unfavourable comparison between them and pre-exile fare. Seeing, sharing, holding, unwrapping and tasting the bundles of three dïy-küw sticky rice parcels, for example, is about much more than simply recognising these objects and their symbolic associations. Initially through vision and touch (and hearing the music that accompanies the festival and one’s eating), and then like Proust’s madeleine biscuit through smell and taste,19 the little leaf parcels of food trigger the unpacking of layers of meaning accumulated from past experiences – direct and personal, or indirect and secondhand – of dïy-küw in exile and dïy-küw pre-exile. Indeed, smell and taste are central to recollection in dïy-küw. The sweetness and strength of the kau’-jei was both anticipated and savoured by most celebrants, yet also triggered memories and yearnings for the drink at dïy-küws past – the kau’-jei bore within it, in other words, ‘emotional and historical sedimentation that can provoke and ignite gestures, discourses and acts’ (Seremetakis 1994: 7). Georges, for example, after the end of the closing ceremony fell into his oft-repeated reverie about the incredibly strong red corn beer back in his village and his regular complaint that the rice beer here – even the better quality stuff available during dïy-küw – was far weaker and inferior in taste, smell and, importantly, inebriating effect. I had heard this reverie several times before and was to hear it many times thereafter – for Georges, drinking repeatedly triggered the recollection and description of ‘a mosaic of enmeshed memories, tastes, aromas’ rather like Aphrodite’s peach (ibid.: 2 passim.). Yet smell and taste alone do not fully explain the sensory – and sensual – matrix within which dïy-küw sets off longing and nostalgia. The fundamental significance of food and drink in this process – and in more everyday Karenni refugee life – is only partly connected to flavour and familiarity; it is also concerned with satiety, as we saw earlier in the book. Satiety is not here solely biological, but a culturally constituted notion made more acute by displacement, the fulfilment of which can approach the idealisation of how it felt in the past more nearly at festival time than during the rest of the refugee year. ‘Sensory values’, argues Classen, ‘not only frame a society’s experience, they express its ideals, its hopes and its fears’ (2005b: 161–2) – and for the Karenni the desire for the sensual

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satisfaction of taste and satiety is deeply rooted. The hunger at dïy-küw for sticky rice and kau’-jei is an appetite in Lupton’s sense of appetite as ‘an emotionally flavoured hunger’ (2005: 321). It is a ‘hunger that is in the memory, not in [the food]’ (Lust 1998: 175, quoted in Sutton 2005: 310), the satisfaction of which – or at least the aspiration to satisfy it – is central within an attempt to reintegrate and ‘recapture the totality’ of the disconnected past into the displaced present (Fernandez 1982: 9, cited in Sutton 2005: 306). Fullness, or the yearning for fullness, becomes interchangeable with what Sutton describes as ‘wholeness’, and the stomach as site for it and the food and drink that promise to provide it alike become a metaphor for and a location of memories of the pre-exile past. They do so both for the individual and for the group – the sociality not only of the dïy-küw festival and the associated eating and drinking but also of the memories and affective associations triggered by them construct a communal as well as a personal ‘wholeness’, in the sense of Fernandez’s ‘state of relatedness – a kind of conviviality of experience’ (1986: 191, cited in Sutton 2005: 306) in which an alienated past is reincorporated into an incomplete present. The sensual, material and practical components of dïy-küw, including ritual action, intensified social interaction, joyful and sensuous consumption of good and symbolic food and drink and nostalgic discourse throughout, thus together constitute the remembering and imagination of the pre-exile past to which dïy-küw is fundamental and which is so important in the aftermath of displacement. It is not, in other words, so much that one aspect of dïy-küw stimulates a separate process of remembering as that dïy-küw – as an embodied, multi-sensory practice and experience, and as a performance – is remembering. But it is more even than this: dïy-küw embodies ideas of the past in the present; and in doing so it confers a sense of continuity on refugee life. Reminiscing, eating, drinking and dancing during dïy-küw, perpetuate a historical trajectory that connects pre-displacement with now – or at least, they convey the feeling that there is a continuous path between the two periods, even though the reality for many individuals may be that they have no memories of their own of pre-exile life inside Karenni State. But whether the pre-migration time is remembered or imagined does not matter; it is the sense of temporal continuity that is important, on at least two distinct levels. In the realm of the individual, having a sense of a continuous track through time which despite the trauma of forced migration has not suffered a complete disjuncture between its earlier and more recent parts, locates the person at a point along the historical trajectory, reassuringly implying that the person at moment x, now, is the same as the person at moment y, in the past. The historical continuity between the two persons, a continuity of consciousness, is fundamental to a sense of personal identity (c.f. Burgin 1996, Husserl 1964, Parfit 1979).

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Furthermore in displacement, of course, it is not only the individual but the group too which feels acutely the threat to its integrity that is constituted by rupture and alienation from the past – thus historical continuity between socio-cultural identities then and now, albeit often imagined and revised (c.f. Dudley 2000a), is important too. The performance of ritual, eating of food and wearing of clothes with their roots in a reminisced-about pre-exile period thus all, as we have seen, work to reintegrate past and present, to draw and sustain mental, sensory and material associations between current and past practices in order to keep hold of what it means to be Karenni in the face of traumatic upheaval. It is, in other words, an attempt to make sense of and heal over disjuncture. Yet this is not a seamless cognitive and imaginative transition from pre-exile past to displaced present. There is ambiguity and paradox here, too. The very same rituals, food, tastes and associated sense experiences that are like dress utilised as a key way of both representing and shaping the resolution of differences between ‘home’ and camp, simultaneously constitute effective and painful reminders of the very disjunctures that cultural practice is seeking to ease. Cultural reassurance, in other words, is inseparable from the elements of the distress it seeks to soothe. Conceptual oppositions and ambiguities have been identified as fundamental components of ritual practice in general (e.g. Manning 1983, Turner 1969). In a refugee setting, however, I suggest that the tensions involved have a particular sharpness – and, ultimately, are irreconcilable because of the unavoidability of continual reminders of precisely what the ritual process is attempting to resolve. The feeling of continuity that is fundamental to having a sense of cohesive identity is in part derived from mementoes of the past, as we have seen. Clothing (especially women’s) and ritual performance and objects (including food) alike, take on the role of personal – and communal – mementoes that provide repositories ‘of sentiment and cultural knowledge’ (Parkin 1999: 317). It seems simplistic, however, to claim as Parkin does that such repositories ‘take the place of interpersonal relations’ in refugee contexts (ibid.): social relations are not as Parkin suggests ‘precluded’ in displacement, to be temporarily replaced by the storage (Parkin’s ‘reversible objectification’) of ‘social personhood’ in ‘mementoes of mind and matter’, including dance and ritual, material objects from pre-flight life, etc. (ibid.: 315). Certainly, social relations and social personhood are severely curtailed, but Karenni refugees at least – including the newly arrived Kayah – are creative and active in seeking to continue and where necessary adapt them. Curtailed (not precluded) social personhood is indeed stored in objects such as dress and ritual activity, but partially so and, most importantly, in a repeatedly-accessed and dynamic manner that is very far from the passive state of waiting to one day be ‘re-articulated (even re-created) as the bases of social activity’

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described by Parkin (ibid.: 315). The rearticulation, even recreation, is, in other words and as the newly arrived Kayah refugees demonstrate, not suspended for a while but continuous with, and in process from, the very moment of displacement. What is more, while objects do indeed store ‘sentiment and cultural knowledge’, they invariably – in displaced contexts or elsewhere – do not do so in the sense of freezing deposited ideas until a future time but in an ongoing, dynamic way in the context of a dialectical relationship with the people to whom they matter. Continuity with the past is not, for refugees, only concerned with time. Displacement clearly also implies a spatial distance from the pre-exile past, as well as a temporal one. Being and seeing oneself as a refugee entails a sense of not being at home, of not being in a place that is one’s own. Yet as we have seen Karenni refugees, through sensory experience, memory, nostalgia and practice, seek continually to grant the displaced present more of the familiar past – to feel, in other words, more ‘at home’. Karenni talk about dïy-küw celebrations past and present encompasses both the located, emplaced, spatially-defined past, and the temporal continuity of elements of – or embodied experience of activities in – that past place. That is, a sense of spatiotemporal continuity of place and of connection with it, is for Karenni refugees as important a part of what ‘home’ is as is the place itself. Nonetheless, precisely because they are refugees for the Karenni a complete sense of spatiotemporal continuity of place is an impossible goal: the camp, as we shall return to in Chapter 5, is perpetually becoming more like ‘home’, but will never quite be it. Instead, the camp is a liminal space; neither ‘home’ – Karenni State and its villages – nor Thailand and all that is has to offer. ‘Home’, then, is both temporally and spatially defined, and in part at least for Karenni refugees is fundamentally located in the past. What is more, that past is idealised. Buijs (1993: 3) writes that ‘part of the process of crossing physical and metaphysical boundaries for migrants and refugees is an investment in an idealised perception of the society of origin or homeland’. This idealised perception involves, as we have seen, memory, personal mementoes, ritual and attempts to continue or recreate something of the pre-flight way of life in exile (c.f. Parkin 1999). Nonetheless there is tension that coexists with the idealisation of the past, too. In Chapter 3, I demonstrated that conceptual and physical relationships between camp residents and ‘inside’, and limited cross-border movements, permit those directly involved to cultivate an ongoing sense of connection with life ‘inside’. Yet at the same time the risks and restrictions inherent in physically journeying back and forth reinforce perceptions of Karenni State as a land under occupation, not presently open to free travel for Karenni people as it should be. As we have seen, these perceptions are in turn strengthened by the fact that the ‘safe’ place of return from cross-border journeys is not ‘home’ inside Karenni State, but the refugee camps in their limbo between

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Karenni State and Thailand proper. Furthermore, the paradoxical combination entailed in these journeys, of ongoing connection on the one hand and reinforcement of occupation and restriction on the other, is evident not only to those actually making the journeys; it is felt too by others resident in the camp such that all refugees are cognisant of the dangers and restrictions in travelling inside Karenni State. This reinforces both their sense of themselves as a people presently unable to live at ‘home’ because of wrongs committed against them, and their appreciation of the irony inherent in being a refugee – i.e. that the camp is a safer place than their preferred ‘home’. Irony notwithstanding, ‘home’ remains defined in both spatial and temporary terms. Parkin wonders if ‘the notion of “home” and of “origin” [might] refer to many places and not one fixed locus, in a way perhaps similar to the undeniably contestable and yet fluid boundaries of ethnicity and even nationality’ (ibid.: 309). He cites as examples of ‘anthropological accounts that can easily dissolve [the] essentialization of people with place’ (ibid.: 311) his own work on the Giriama (1991) and Turton’s on the Mursi (1996), going on to emphasise further the mutability, fluidity and ambiguity of ‘home’ or ‘origin’ as ideal notions. Yet Karenni conceptions of ‘home’ and their conjoined emphases on villages of origin even when the villages are not real points of origin for many individuals at all, demonstrate that in contrast to Parkin’s claims they do still conceive of ‘home’ in spatial as well as temporal terms; specifically, they think of it as a bounded place set at both a historical and a geographical distance from another bounded place, the camp. In turn, they perceive and articulate their continued relationship to it in terms of the distance in time and space which lies between here and there, the camp and home. That is, while Parkin may be right that ‘home’ is not always a single fixed locus either in reality or in the imagination but rather a mutable and possibly multiple notion, nonetheless home is, for the Karenni at least, still conceived of in terms that are essentially spatially bounded, in that the relation between people and ‘home’ is partly conceived of in spatial terms. What lies between a refugee and ‘home’, real or imagined, is distance in both time and space, and thought of as such. Karenni refugees work hard to preserve a sense of continuity with ‘home’, and talking about village dïy-küw celebrations is an important part of this effort. But the value of reminiscence about festivals past extends beyond attempts to maintain temporal and spatial continuity. Also important, as we have seen, is the sociality of dïy-küw. Indeed for those with memories of pre-exile village life this is important in the context of the past that is being recollected, as well as in participation in dïy-küw in the displaced present. In dïy-küw reminiscence, individuals are remembering not only elements of their own lives in the past but also aspects of the corporate nature of the festival and of village life. Such dïy-

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küw talk reinforces individuals’ own senses of both the group they were a part of in the past and their relative positions in the network of relationships that holds the group together. It helps maintain a relatively unfractured sense both of who one is and of the group of which one was a part, in the context of spatial and temporal continuities with places of origin. Communal, spatial and temporal continuities, then, merge together and help to maintain a sense of connectedness with ‘home’ and a sense of continuing to do things that one did there. In the context of a celebration like dïy-küw, this serves to bring elements of the ‘inside’ into the ‘outside’ – or at least into the liminal margins between the two that could be said to constitute the world of the refugee camps. Those who organise and participate in dïy-küw, themselves currently outsiders in relation to Karenni State, thereby work to make ‘insiders’ out of themselves in their current liminality. Indeed, the liminality of the refugee state, produced by the displacement process as I discussed earlier in this book, could be argued actively to be reversed during the ritual period of a festival such as dïyküw. This is an interesting opposition to the classic anthropological conception of the liminal as a distinct state or phase passed through during a transformative ritual process (Turner 1967, 1969; van Gennep 1960): if the refugee state is essentially a prolonged liminal phase, then on certain levels at least the practice of traditional rituals within the refugee camp seems to facilitate a short-term departure from that liminality and – again, in the terms of classical ritual theory – a reincorporation into Karenni culture and society. The conventional interpretation of ritual as in some way lifting participants beyond everyday norms and into a betwixtand-between state, in other words, is effectively reversed in exile if ritual actually functions there temporarily to transport celebrants instead into a performance of something more akin to Karenni life than that which is experienced on a daily basis in the camps. This process in the camps also raises questions about what we mean by liminality in reference to refugees. As Dawson and Johnson (2001: 330) have pointed out, the classical conception of liminality as a particular though temporary state or phase, existing between ‘movement from one fixed state or place to another’, is perhaps not the best or most subtle way to conceptualise marginality. This view of ‘liminality’, they argue, merely affirms the fixity of the ‘states of being’ that it is presumed to lie between, rather than acknowledging the continually fluid and mutable nature of identity. Perhaps, they suggest, liminality is better seen not as what lies between but as ‘the awareness or realization of the betwixt and between’, a necessary element in wider processes of identity construction and of linking identity with place. Indeed, as Graham and Khosravi argue, such an awareness does not necessarily ‘always imply suffering; it can provide detachment, even vision and creativity – the poetics of exile’ (1997: 115). For

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the Karenni, this liminal state, the awareness and negotiation of beingbetween-worlds, is the general condition with which they live; at the same time, ritual – and traditional clothing and other cultural forms – are repeatedly utilised in attempts to counteract or subvert it (see also Chapter 5).

Moving Beyond Rupture The liminality we encountered earlier in the book, then, and which Karenni refugees enter as they make their physical journeys to the camps, indeed exists but is actually of a rather more complex form than may first appear. It is a potentially indefinite, yet transitional, awareness of being betwixt-and-between – and it is that very awareness which stimulates attempts to counteract the accompanying feelings of suspension and unreality, loss and rupture. Activities, conversations, modes of dress and the ways in which the past is represented verbally and otherwise in the camps, all coalesce into a concerted – and frequently highly self-conscious – attempt to heal over the painful rupture with the past. There is, essentially, a continual dialogical relationship maintained with that real and imagined time before coming into exile. Reminiscence and practice alike ensure that a part of the past colours contemporary experience – this is ‘event history’ in Munn’s terms, in which ‘relations between events are developed in the practice of everyday life through infusing experience in one place with the evocation of other events and other places’ (1990: 13, quoted in Rodman 1992: 644). This is a temporally defined dialectic, but as we have seen (and as Rodman [ibid.] points out when commenting on Munn) there is an equally important spatial part to the process: maintaining senses of connection with ‘inside’ while on the geographically distant ‘outside’, renders the ‘outside’ more bearable and simultaneously sustains – even recreates – what it means to be ‘Karenni’. Through various cultural forms Karenni refugees work hard to preserve – and sometimes create – a sense of continuity with the place that was and still is ‘home’, even when many actually have little or no memory of it. Interestingly, while feelings of alienation and rupture have been caused by physical journeys into exile, it is the continual imaginative and cognitive movements refugees make (between the refugee camps and places of origin, between the present, past and future) which actively and deliberately counteract those feelings. It is through such metaphorical journeys that refugees mediate the dialectical tensions in relationships between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, at the same time constructing past places of origin as mythical future points of return. This is an attempt – and actually a remarkably effective one – to solve the existential crisis that displacement might otherwise cause, a particularly acute form of the more general human problem Georges Poulet describes as ‘[h]ow to string

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together again the place where one is, the moment when one lives, to all the other moments and places that are scattered along a vast expanse’ (1987: 102). It is a process by which refugees shore up their sense of themselves – albeit a sense which, with truly Heracleitean connotations, is always relative to the other things that exist in juxtaposition to it at different moments and is thus always in flux (Plato 1987). For Karenni refugees no less than Proust and Heraclitus of Ephesus, the resolution of stressful oppositions is attempted through ongoing movement (physical or otherwise), change (voluntary or otherwise) and continual dialectic with what has gone before (c.f. Macksey 1987). Central to this continual dialectic is, as we have seen, embodied sensory experience. This experience is, for the most part, spatially extended and located within the body, so that somatic sensations of wearing clothes or of the tastes and satiety of dïy-küw are extended and ‘have a “position”’ (Scheler 2002: 222) – the weight of a Kayah woman’s string of coins across the chest or the familiar sensation of the top of her skirt-cloth wrapping her hips, the awareness of food on fingertips and possibly of touching others’ fingers when dipping into a communal bowl of food, the feeling of fullness in the stomach: are all corporeally positioned. We have seen that these extended physical sensations are intimately connected with affects – such as longing, sadness and loss – which comprise what Scheler would call non-extensive psychic phenomena, or feelings without a specific bodily location or repository and thus of a different order to bodily sensations. Yet in reality of course all these feelings, whether primarily physical or affective, spatially extended or not, are fused together in the person’s interpretation of their experience within their body. What is more, as Scheler puts it the ‘interwovenness … appear[s] in inner perception to an embodied being [and is] coordinated by this being to the sequence of its lived-body states and [is] in [its] appearance conditioned by these states’ (2002: 223). Sensations and perceptions do not, in other words, remain fixed in perpetuity, but change according to the experiences already and still being encountered by the person concerned. Feelings of longing triggered by the bodily located tasting of sweet kau’-jei, for example, do not stop with the interweaving of non-extended affect and extended physical sensations but continue to shape and re-shape perceptions of the past and emotions concerning it. All this happens, of course, in the physically bounded, spatially extended refugee camps: those camps, in other words, become a creative space, a form of active ‘contact zone’ (c.f. Clifford 1997) in which refugees forge ideational links between their real and imagined past, present and future selves. And yet … are these links really formed between past and present and future selves, or are they in fact manifestations of stretches of the ‘trail[s] along which life is lived’ and which, interwoven with each other, form a ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2006: 13; see also Deleuze and Guattari

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1983; Ingold 2003)? What matters is how Karenni refugees themselves choose to conceptualise and understand these links or trails – and indeed, their view is more akin to Ingold’s than to mine: they perceive themselves not as consciously making metaphorical and cognitive journeys in order to maintain connections with the real and imagined past (as I have characterised it), but as merely being on a more recent part of their branching life-trails, played out not on the background of a static world but as an integral part of an ever-changing, dynamic one. Ingold’s trails and meshworks, then, bear a closer resemblance to actual Karenni refugee perceptions of time and life’s flow from the past to the present than do my interpretations. Yet the model I have developed in this chapter has far more to say about the underlying value and meaning of Karenni actions and articulations in this area. Of course, it is vital to understand the way in which refugees perceive their own relationship with the past – to see things as they see them; but it is also essential to look beyond everyday perceptions and into the possible reasons for particular behaviours – and into their functionality in the face of the disruption forced displacement has wrought. As we have seen, the crux of this functionality is twofold, concerning both the amelioration (social, cultural, affective and practical) of upheaval and the (re-)creation of a sense of what it means to be Karenni. This is cultural aesthetics in Gosden’s terms; that is, a concerted attempt to find – or, for refugees, to regain – ‘a feeling of rightness about the world, enjoining correct styles of action and response’ (1999: 203). It is a feeling of rightness that as we have seen can only come about if it is possible to participate or perform in a fully embodied, multiply sensing manner that is already familiar from prior, culturally constituted sensory interchanges – which clearly presents particular challenges to ‘feeling right’ in a forcibly displaced context. In the process of seeking to ‘feel right’, as we have seen Karenni refugees utilise both ‘the dynamics of action ([e.g.]…giving and travelling) connecting persons and places’ and ‘certain crucial subjective aspects (or subjective “acts”) such as those of remembering’ (Munn 1986: 9) to determine the ongoing making of both their world and themselves. Integral to all of this are embodiment and materiality – not as in some way other or contrastive to the inner self in its identity-making flow, but in Ingold’s sense as a fundamental element in being part of an equally fluid world, sensory engagement with which operates in both directions. Importantly, of course, there is in all of this not only an orientation towards – and utilisation of – the past as we have discussed in this chapter, but also a clear concern both to ameliorate the present and to maximise what can be done for the future. There are many aspects to Karenni relationships with the present and future, a number of which I discuss elsewhere (e.g. Dudley 2000a, Dudley 2006), and some of which we will encounter in Chapter 5.

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Notes 1. ‘Universal-style’ is used here to describe the sorts of garments often referred to as ‘Western’. While there is validity in the historical reference of ‘Western’ to the initial use of denim clothing in the early USA, ‘universal-style’ is preferred here as it avoids implying that such items of clothing are new to or in some way exotic in Asian (and other) contexts. While it is of course true that Karenni, Thai and Burmese men would not once have worn jeans, for example, the adoption of such clothing is an insidious process rather than a sudden mass usage of another culture’s style of garb. In some ways, there is no more reason to describe jeans as ‘Western-style’ in a Southeast Asian context than in, say, a British one. 2. For example, there is a pair of Kayah shorts in the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, collected before 1893 by H.G.A. Leveson (accession number 1893.44.2). However, during an extensive research project examining collections of textiles from Karenni State and the rest of Burma now in museums throughout the UK and the USA, the shorts in the Pitt Rivers Museum were the only ones, Kayah or otherwise, that I ever came across. Their museum rarity reflects the historic remoteness of the area within which live the northern Karen or Karenni groups whose men wore such shorts, so that compared to the more southerly Karen groups or the more northerly Shan areas, there was relatively little visiting – and collecting – by both the colonial officers and the missionaries largely responsible for UK and US museum collections from Burma. 3. Diran’s sumptuous coffee table volume has images of Bre and Yinbaw men in such costume (1997: 133, 153). One is sceptical, however, about most of the men in his images actually dressing in this manner on an everyday basis. 4. Allegations of rape inside Karenni State regularly appear in official reports such as KHRG 1992, Petersen et al. 2000. The stories about enforced marriages are harder to corroborate but were of significant concern to Karenni refugees in 1997, based upon rumours picked up by those who had travelled inside the border. 5. A minority, in the camps notably cloths worn by women from the village of Daw Mi Ku, are hand woven in a burgundy-red cotton (produced using the same natural dyes as the matching skirt-cloth colour; see Dudley 2000a). 6. The loop of cotton is soaked in a bowl of ash and lacquer, producing a reasonably stiff, black ring. 7. All the women I met wore these strings as necklaces, although Lehman indicates that strings of glass beads are also sometimes worn around the waist and lower legs (1967: 67). 8. In Kengtung market in eastern Shan State, when I visited it in 1996, a George V rupee cost K520. In Kengtung, as in Karenni, there is a significant local market for these coins, as there local Akha women use them for their headdresses. 9. Women claim that there is no set or locally typical pattern for textile decoration or colour of skirt- and head-cloths, but in practice in some localities there do appear to be certain regular forms. For example, women from Daw Bolo but

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

from no other village represented in the camps, use turquoise thread in the weaving of their red skirt-cloths, using it to produce a thin and delicate, decorative warp-stripe. A few parts of this section appear in an earlier form in Dudley 1999 and Dudley 2002b. Note too that as well as the tensions outlined here, there were considerable and complex issues within the Karenni refugee population as a whole. I discuss these in detail elsewhere (e.g. Dudley 2000a). I did also talk with a group of recently arrived Roman Catholic Kayah women from the village of Daw He So, who had stopped wearing traditional dress a year previously at the time of their conversion to Christianity (Daw He So being one of the few villages in the Shadaw area to have been missionised). Their village priest had told them firstly that modern dress was better for washing, and secondly that traditional dress made them look ‘ugly, like soldiers’. However, the relatively small number of villages to have received missionaries ensured that this type of experience was unusual. The large holes left in the earlobes after years of wearing heavy silver earplugs, make it easy to identify women who formerly wore traditional dress. Kayaw groups are accessible to tourists, including particularly the small Kayaw community living with the ‘long-neck’ Kayan in the tourist village of Huay Sa Tow. Which communities of traditionally dressed Kayah women could now be visited, however, is less clear. Tourist access to the main Karenni camps was by the late 1990s virtually impossible. The old Camp 4 in the midto late 1990s used to be a viable destination for trekking groups, but even then in the search for ‘Big-knees’ tourists were more likely to visit Thai Kayah villages than Karenni refugee communities. The particular celebration of dïy-küw on which the discussion here is based, took place in the southernmost Karenni refugee camp in 1996. One Karenni group significant in the camps, the Paku Karen from southwest Karenni State and northern parts of Karen State, is left out of this trio. They do not have a tradition of celebrating either dïy-küw or ka-thow-bòw (Chapter 5); in the nationalist Karenni context of the refugee camps, however (including the southernmost camp where they are the numerically dominant group), they do participate in the festival (see Dudley 2000a for more on the political connotations of this). This Burmese word was the preferred term used by all I knew in the southern Karenni camp, whatever their ethnicity. This ‘national’ dress is essentially a transformation of the traditional Kayah dress discussed above. Its meanings are complex and contentious. See Dudley 2002b. ‘Closing ceremonies’, referred to as such in English, are common to most Karenni festivals and to most training courses held in the camps. The memories unleashed by the narrator’s tasting of a madeleine biscuit in the first volume of Marcle Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, are the most famous example of the literary exploration of involuntary memory and the passage of time for which Proust’s writing is so notable. The narrator does not experience the memories when he simply sees the madeleine – it is tasting it that brings back long buried experiences and feelings (Proust 1913: 48–51).

5 Coping and (Re)constructing ‘Home’ in Displacement

The previous two chapters have explored differing aspects of spatiotemporal experience through the recent to the more distant – and, often, imaginary – past. Now, we move forward to ‘the present’, looking more closely at quotidian life in the refugee camps and the range of meanings attributed to, and derived from, elements of it. This will entail exploring some of the ways in which Karenni refugees cope with and represent the stressful experiences they have undergone and continue to undergo, in the process looking at some of the everyday, civic and religious objects and processes that play significant parts in these experiences. In particular, this chapter is concerned with how refugees seek to feel ‘at home’ in the refugee camp and how they perceive and construct a sense of place there. How far are Karenni conceptions of place and of home dependent upon the elements of their sensescape – taste, smell, satiety – that I have already described? And how far are additional elements, including control, rhythm and routine, important in how Karenni refugees sense and make sense of place? This chapter explores these and other factors in the ‘[m]ultisensory conceptualization of place’ (Feld 2005: 182) in the refugee camps, and in the relationship to Karenni aesthetics and ‘feeling right’. As part of this, the chapter looks too at how objects, the process of making objects and embodied experience of both contribute to the personalisation and cultural appropriation of space in the refugee camp.

Wider Contexts and Influences … and T-Shirts The chapter focuses largely on material forms and processes within the refugee camps. However, it is important to contextualise this by reminding ourselves that the camps do not exist in isolation. Indeed, a very important effect of both the physical journey to the camps and the conceptual journey to becoming a refugee, is the widening of the interwoven webs within which individual and communal Karenni life is

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played out. Local Thai villagers, Thai authorities (including the military), international relief organisations, foreign teachers, activists and others – not to mention Karenni political elites or other sectors of the wider Karenni population with which particular refugees may not, predisplacement, have had notable contact – all are important components of the layered and intersecting worlds within which Karenni refugees dwell and act and which, of course, act upon them. This is not the place to discuss the worlds that extend far beyond the camps themselves and yet, to differing degrees, also reach (sometimes very long) fingers directly into camp life; I have explored them at length elsewhere on a more macro-level with regard to Burma generally (Dudley 2006), and with specific reference to Karenni refugees – both in relation to education and hopes and fears for the future (Dudley 2007) and with reference to post-displacement shifts in Karenni constructions and representations of identity (Dudley 2000a). Nonetheless, it is crucial to bear in mind their significance not only as wider contexts of the cultural dynamics discussed here but also as direct influences upon those dynamics. Indeed, these influences operate at so many levels and in so many complex and subtle ways at once, that they go far beyond issues pertaining to, for example, interactions with the Thai authorities and with representatives of NGOs providing rice and medicine. The vehicles of these influences are myriad, and include such apparently mundane items as magazines, videos and even t-shirts. Indeed, t-shirts are particularly interesting, not least in their contrast to the skirt-cloths discussed in Chapter 4. Skirt-cloths are oriented towards the past and ‘inside’; they were made by women in villages prior to exile and for some refugees at least, in their presence, visibility and production in the camps the cloths provide a sense of continuity with the past by triggering both specific memories and a vaguer feeling of maintaining some ‘traditional’ ways of doing things. T-shirts, on the other hand, tend to point towards a wider set of globally- and future-oriented networks. T-shirts are usually either obtained second-hand in camp-based clothing distributions of items from the bales of used clothing provided by relief agencies, or purchased new from Mae Hong Son market, camp shops, or itinerant Thai traders.1 Yet whether acquired second-hand or new, t-shirts are very much contemporary items of consumption, and even as part of the camp clothing distributions refugees exercise selection and choice in which particular garments they procure. T-shirts worn in the camps, like t-shirts worn anywhere, usually bear printed words and pictorial designs of various kinds. The predominant language for t-shirt texts is English, even though this is a language not well understood by the majority of the refugees. Indeed, there is often no obvious juncture between the individual and the text and images on their t-shirt. The main criterion on which any choice is usually based is the overall background

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colour of the t-shirt – although the degree of choice an individual actually has, depends primarily upon how the t-shirt is obtained. Clearly, those with the financial wherewithal to purchase clothing rather than rely on NGO distributions are able to make wider choices about the kind of garment with which they end up. Where such choice is possible, design and colour are both deemed important. For example, young men (and one or two young women) I knew showed a strong preference for t-shirts bearing the names of rock legends – especially heavy metal ones incorporating into their logos images of skulls, demonic faces, flames and so on. One might speculate as to why such designs were preferred but the real reasons are unclear; suffice to say that it is a taste that for some Karenni young people facilitates a sense of appropriation of and identification with ‘global’ icons. These universal-style t-shirts have nothing directly to do with the preexile past. Similarly anchored in the present is the subset of t-shirts designed and distributed by NGOs. Such locally specific items act as clear visual markers of individual roles and status. Karenni clinic staff, for example, often wear t-shirts produced and provided by IRC, which either generally advertise IRC or refer specifically to a particular realm of work such as maternal and child health. Wearing these t-shirts thus locates the individual within an area of expertise and experience that commands respect and accords a certain amount of social status – indeed, these particular t-shirts are a status symbol for those who wear them. Additionally, because IRC staff themselves also wear the same t-shirt designs, there is an affirmation of connections between the individual refugee and IRC field staff, be the latter US, Thai or other citizens. It is part of the process, in other words, by which individual refugees are drawn into a wider set of networks in ways that would not have been possible had they remained inside Karenni State. There is also a further subset of t-shirts with a rather different focus that does indeed seek explicitly to draw direct connections with the preexile past. These t-shirts are designed by refugee groups themselves. Students in the final year of high school in 1996, for example, were the producers and main wearers of a t-shirt protesting about the Burmese army’s burning and relocation of Karenni villages inside Karenni state. Certainly, these t-shirts were worn as a way of emphasising both sympathy with fellow Karenni (in this case, the former residents of the forcibly relocated villages) and connection with ‘inside’ and with the past. But they were also chosen as part of a self-conscious attempt to make and disseminate a political statement in the present about the situation inside part of Karenni State. Choosing and wearing a particular t-shirt is thus an aesthetic – and often an economic, political and social – act. It is also an example not only of how myriad outside influences permeate the camps and take on their

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own, Karenni-ised form there, but also of how, even if in a sometimes small way, influences travel in the other direction, too. Such interconnections are neither unidirectional nor straightforward; nonetheless, they are largely the context rather than the subject of this chapter, the main thrust of which is material cultural coping mechanisms and how Karenni refugees make spaces in the camp their own.

Objects, Landscapes, Bodies: Metaphors and Foils for Experience It is already clear from preceding chapters and even from a discussion of aesthetic factors in choice of t-shirts that Karenni refugees are far from passive victims of their displacement. Nonetheless, it remains the case that undergoing the process of forced migration itself, and subsequently living the restricted and restrictive life of a camp-based refugee, is at best frequently stressful, often distressing and sometimes almost unbearable. Acute distress is not a common affective state on an everyday basis; nonetheless, Karenni refugees are fully cognisant of – and reactive to – their refugee-ness and the myriad disadvantages and problems it brings (together, of course, with a few consciously perceived advantages, such as access to native English speakers for language learning). Disadvantages – and for that matter, advantages – of refugee-ness are often articulated as explicitly pertaining to practicalities, ranging from what one can eat through where one can travel to how one can earn one’s living; yet ultimately they are inseparable from more complex and subjective feelings. But it is not so much the emotions themselves – feeling sad, despondent or angry – that are instructive here, as the ways in which Karenni refugees seek either to deal with them or to modify and ameliorate the actual circumstances that produce them. Ritual, other cultural practices and indeed apparently ‘everyday’ activities all play an important role in coping with and making sense of displacement. They are fundamental in the communal dealing with painful memories of the forced migration process and with the multilayered, stressful, ongoing experience of being a refugee in a camp. The analysis of dïy-küw in Chapter 4 demonstrated specific ways in which memory and imagination of ‘inside’ are brought into the refugee camps outside Karenni State. We saw, in other words, how, once on the outside, Karenni refugees seek to maintain senses of connection with inside, working hard to preserve – or create – a sense of continuity with the place that was and still is ‘home’, even when many actually have little or no memory of it. In some ways, the other major annual festival which I discuss here, ka-thow-bòw, fulfils similar needs; it too plays an important role in creating and maintaining inside/outside continuities and

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discontinuities. Like dïy-küw, it also inevitably raises issues concerning ethnicity and the whole notion of ‘tradition’, and I discuss these issues at length elsewhere (Dudley 2000a). However, ka-thow-bòw can also be interpreted as part of a process aimed at rendering the ‘outside’ as bearable as possible, both by continuing aspects of the pre-exile past into the present (c.f. Chapter 4) and in terms of the cultural appropriation and construction of space – ultimately, making space ‘ours’ – in a displaced setting. Furthermore, this process can facilitate the indirect expression of tensions and anxieties, with objects, landscape and bodies coming to act as both metaphors and foils for the stressful, fragmented experiences of refugee-ness. Exploring ka-thow-bòw demonstrates that Karenni refugees themselves are key, physical components in a dynamic, material environment that is ultimately inseparable from Karenni culture as constituted and articulated in the camps. First, however, we need to have an awareness of what ka-thow-bòw is about, what is involved, and how – and with what problems and repercussions – it can be practised in a Karenni refugee camp.

Introducing Ka-thow-bòw I concentrate here on the festival as it was practised by Karenni refugees in one section of the northernmost camp in 1998; all the residents in this section were Kayah refugees who had arrived in or since 1996, having fled from Draw Kraw Aw or other villages in its immediate vicinity. This particular ka-thow-bòw celebration is an important case study as it was the first year in which recently arrived Kayah refugees had been able to practise the festival en masse, something which, given that the vast majority of them practised traditional religion alone and not Buddhism or Christianity and that they had come from the least accessible, least Christianised part of Karenni State, was of major significance. When the new Kayah refugees began to arrive they were in physically and psychologically distressed states – yet the two greatest anxieties on which they explicitly focused were not the Burmese Army, lack of food and cooking utensils on arrival, nor the appallingly high rates of dysentery and malaria amongst them, but firstly whether women would be able to continue to weave their traditional clothes (c.f. Chapter 4) and secondly whether the group as a whole would be able to continue to practise traditional annual rituals, most especially ka-thow-bòw. They feared greatly that now they were refugees they would have neither the necessary resources nor the space to continue either of these two forms of cultural practice that by their own evaluation held the greatest value. Because of all the anxiety and distress that had pervaded in 1996, then, I was delighted to return to the camp in 1998 for the ka-thow-bòw festival. Different sections now had separate ka-thow-bòw sites, and held their ka-

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thow-bòw festivals at different times. I was invited to attend the ka-thowbòw festival in Sections 5 and 6, an area that in 1996 had been designated the new residence of the first waves of new arrivals.2 For all Karenic Karenni groups except the Paku Karen, the annual kathow-bòw is the most important traditional festival of the year. Ka-thow-bòw poles, the erection and celebration of which is the central feature of the kathow-bòw festival, are – or at least until the 1960s, were – said to be ‘the most diagnostic feature of the village landscape’ inside Karenni State (Lehman 1967: 38). Like ‘dïy-küw’, ‘ka-thow-bòw’ is a phrase of Kayah linguistic origin, in this case describing the large pole that is the focus of the festival.3 Kathow-bòw was often described to me as the Karenni New Year festival, and certainly it takes place around the same time as the Buddhist New Year Water Festival in April. The festival falls towards the end of the long, hot, dry season, shortly before the start of the rains – a seasonal timing that explains one Karenni interpretation, repeated to me by several informants, of ka-thow-bòw as a rain-making festival. As with villages inside Karenni State, the specific timings of individual camp and section celebrations of kathow-bòw are staggered, in order that folk may attend each other’s festivals. The ka-thow-bòw festival is an essentially male affair – women, as I shall return to later, are far more marginal to ka-thow-bòw than they are to dïyküw. Ka-thow-bòw involves the collection (day one), preparation and erection (day two) of the ka-thow-bòw pole; and dancing, much visiting and the making of offerings (day three) – indeed other than at times of illness or other acute problems, ka-thow-bòw provides the main occasion on which non-Christian Karenni routinely make propitiatory offerings. The dance troupe of young men dances more or less continuously around the area, honouring each house in turn by dancing in front of it and being given drink and occasionally food by the residents. Some informants told me that in their villages of origin the dancers would also be sprinkled with water by women using leaves from a particular tree (Lee Reh and Saw Reh, personal communications, 1998). In the 1998 camp festival the dancers wore black, Shan-style pants and white shirts, over which as a cape they each wore a woman’s red, striped head-cloth and, in reverse (i.e. hanging down the back), a woman’s silver coin necklace (fig. 5.1). Only Beh Reh, the ka-thow-bòw leader, had an explanation for why these dancers wore women’s clothes and ornaments, which was that it helped to ensure good weather in the forthcoming year; everyone else said it was simply done because it had always been done, a standard form of response. The dance itself, done to the hypnotic alternating beats of two bronze gongs said to symbolise the sound of thunder and rain, comprises a rhythmic stepping from side to side interspersed with bowing forward; it was described to me as a rain dance. The most important offerings for ka-thow-bòw as for illness include sacrificed chickens. Indeed, traditional curative and ka-thow-bòw practices

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Figure 5.1: A young male kathow-bòw dancer in Karenni Camp 2 (now Site 1) in 1998. He wears a woman’s headcloth as a cloak, and a woman’s silver-coin necklace in reverse. Photograph by Sandra Dudley.

have much in common. When a person is ill, for example, chicken femurs will be used to divine the cause. A chicken is killed for the purpose and its femurs are removed before fine strands of bamboo are inserted into the small holes therein. Similar practices using chicken bones are traditionally followed by other Karenic – as well as other Southeast Asian – groups (e.g. Marshall 1922). The cause of illness that chicken bone divination can reveal is the location (perhaps a particular tree or rock) of the evil or mischievous spirit which has attacked the victim’s soul and thus caused the illness. I use the English word ‘soul’ loosely here: in fact, traditional Kayah metaphysics hold that each person has both a fundamental ‘soul’ which cannot itself die but which causes the death of the individual when it leaves the body, and lesser spiritual components (equivalent to Burmese lei-pya), which are the elements that can be temporarily taken by evil nature spirits – or simply by fear – thus causing illness. The ill person is then daubed with the chicken’s blood and stuck with feathers on the blood spots (often on a part of the body corresponding with the perceived

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Figure 5.2: An unwell Kayah woman with chicken blood and feathers applied to her back as part of a curative ritual. Photograph by Dr Jaime.

physical location of the illness or its primary symptoms; fig 5.2), and a small amount of cooked chicken meat and perhaps also rice is first offered to the spirit where it dwells before the rest is eaten by members of the family. Not dissimilarly, chicken femurs are used to divine the most auspicious days for the year’s ka-thow-bòw festival (and again during the festival, sometimes in addition to hard boiled eggs, to predict the nature of the year ahead); chicken blood and feathers are subsequently daubed onto the ka-thow-bòw pole (and femurs are often tied around it; fig. 5.3); and chicken meat (together with rice, vegetables, rice beer and, if possible, pork) are offered to the spirits by being placed on and around the pole. The significance of chickens for both ka-thow-bòw and for everyday curative practice is such that the difficulty in obtaining chickens in the refugee camps was one of several key concerns for newly arrived Kayah refugees in 1996. Displacement into the camps meant the availability of few or no chickens – and as a consequence, new refugees felt unable to deal in their own way with the high morbidity and mortality they and

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their loved ones were experiencing at the time (Dudley 1997; MacArthur, Dudley and Williams 2001). New arrivals explained these increased rates of ill health and death on several levels at once, including what they feared was their current inability to continue practising traditional rituals – indeed, ex-residents of some villages who had been hiding in the jungle for significant periods before coming to the camp, said they had not celebrated any annual festivals since 1994 or even 1993, a source of much distress. As the most important event in the ritual calendar, ka-thow-bòw is seen as the most effective of all at reducing illness and other problems. The purpose of ka-thow-bòw, it was emphasised repeatedly, is to bring everyone together, to apologise as a community for the past year’s wrongdoings and transgressions, and to ensure as a good a chance of success, health and happiness – communal and individual – as possible in the year to come. What is more, the worse a year has been for the community, the more important is the proper practice of ka-thow-bòw: a bad harvest, more illness than usual, and indeed forced displacement all indicate the need for both more appeasement for past wrongdoings and more propitiatory offerings to the spirits for a better year to come. Kathow-bòw in the camps is thus key to an ongoing sense of temporal continuity not only with the village-based past but also with the future. For new refugees such as those who arrived in 1996, the future could be thought about only in terms of a return to their villages – they could not bring themselves to conceive of their time in Camp 2 as anything other than a brief sojourn. Yet clearly the sense of transience that pertained at the time did not weaken the urge to practise ka-thow-bòw – rather, its necessity in ensuring the welfare of Kayah people and therefore, in this displaced setting, in ensuring their eventual, safe return to their villages, meant the demarcation of space for, and the celebration of, ka-thow-bòw became an even greater imperative. The physical focal point of this socially cohesive looking back and forward is the ka-thow-bòw pole itself. Indeed, many individuals who had been exposed to the sort of politicised, pan-Karenni ka-thow-bòw celebration that took place in Huay Phu Keng, described the pole as ‘standing for the Karenni people’ or as ‘holding the Karenni people’ (Dudley 2000a); this pan-Karenni emphasis on the meanings of the pole was not, however, shared by newly arrived Kayah celebrants. Anxieties in 1996 that ka-thow-bòw practice would not be possible in the camp were largely articulated in terms of practical factors, important amongst which was the need to fell and bring back to the camp a suitably tall tree to form the ritual pole. There was, for example, great concern about the inaccessibility of appropriately tall trees due to a combination of the dissimilarities between tree densities and species distributions around the camp and villages of origin, the official prohibition by the Thai authorities of the felling of large trees, and restrictions on movement around large

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tracts of the forest because of the presence in the area of both Thai and Burmese soldiers.

Appropriating and Enculturating Space The need for a suitable place to erect ka-thow-bòw poles was also fundamental to 1996 worries. On arrival, the Kayah refugees had all been allocated living areas by the Camp Committee. At first, these zones had seemed to the newcomers to be wholly inadequate: they had had no choice over the sites, space was limited, and the areas were crowded. Most of all, of course, these places were pointedly not ‘home’: territory was unfamiliar; movement was restricted; resources were limited; and others moving in and out of this new space were often of very unfamiliar appearance, speaking different languages, wearing different clothes and having different world views. In such a situation, anxieties about where to locate sacred ka-thow-bòw places not only demonstrated the importance of the ka-thow-bòw festival itself, but also became the focus of an urge to stamp this exilic space with a degree of familiarity. Identifying ritual places and initiating ka-thow-bòw practice therein would thus simultaneously provide a spatial feature that had existed in the villages of origin, permit a sense of temporal continuity with the pre-displacement past, and provide a means by which the refugees could feel they were not entirely impotent in the determination of their future. In 1996 what was to become known as Sections 5 and 6, an overcrowded and excessively muddy area of the northernmost camp, had been a place in which the new arrivals were not pleased to find themselves. Furthermore, the hilltop just above the area allocated for houses had been rumoured by pre-existing camp residents to be the dwelling place of evil spirits; indeed, it was partly for this reason that the area had not previously been occupied. However, within a year of their arrival (1998 was actually the second year in which the new refugees celebrated ka-thow-bòw in the camp), the new refugees had gone some way towards making the place feel like their own, principally by demarcating the hilltop as their new ka-thow-bòw site. They thereby simultaneously dealt with the evil spirits and enculturated the space so that it contained familiar features and facilitated a semblance of ritual continuity between village and camp. In doing so and in practising the festival itself, they also were able to resolve some of the tension created by their own experience of displacement and by the way in which, on first arrival especially, anxieties over traditional festivals and female dress had become metaphors for wider distress about the experience of displacement in general. In 1998 the new pole and the previous year’s, together with a smaller pole with an offering platform on top of it, were grouped together on the

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Figure 5.3: The ka-thow-bòw flag as used in the Karenni refugee camps. It consists of three broad stripes: white, to represent the purity of the village and the villagers; yellow, said to be good for the paddy harvest; and blue, good for health because the bad spirits that cause illness do not like blue. This tricolour banner is apparently used in the villages inside Karenni State as well, but the addition of a representation of a ka-thow-bòw pole on top of a globe is not seen there. Photograph by Sandra Dudley.

highest point of the hill.4, 5 At the lowest point of the site, on the periphery of the area and on the side of the hilltop furthest from the section’s houses, was a small shelter, simply constructed with a roof supported by posts. This shelter and the offering platforms were all constructed from bamboo.

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Underneath the rest-shelter, men prepared leaf-wrapped food parcels to use as offerings. Nearby, underneath the five-foot high offering table sat more men cutting up a dead pig. They had already filled two large bamboo vessels with pig’s blood, each of which was tied to one of the table’s supporting posts. Later, after the spirits to whom this blood was an offering had had an opportunity to partake of it, the men would drink this blood themselves. On top of the table were offerings of cooked rice and meat (pork and chicken) either wrapped in leaves or placed in bowls. In between the poles and the shelter was built an offering platform supported at a height of about five feet by four posts, into one of which was planted the ka-thow-bòw flag (fig. 5.3). The new ka-thow-bòw pole, painted white with lime solution, was taller than the previous year’s. Both it and the offering platform next to it were decorated with finely shaved bamboo pieces described as representing

Figure 5.4: A large number of chicken femurs tied in offering around the ka-thowbòw pole, Karenni Camp 2 (Site 1), 1998. Photograph by Sandra Dudley.

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leaves, stalks and sheaves of rice.6 At the top of the pole were representations of the sun and moon, also made of bamboo; they were said to symbolise ‘heaven’, home of ‘god’ (Kyaw Muh Riah; c.f. Lehman’s C¯o Phrja [1967: 38]). Hanging down from the top of the pole was a ‘ladder’ made of a strip of white fabric less than six inches in width, to which small bamboo ‘rungs’ had been attached in order to facilitate the descent of Kyaw Muh Riah and other spirits to eat and drink the offerings made to them during the festival.7 Attached to the bottom of the ladder were tassels and circles made of brightly coloured yarns, amongst which red and white predominated. Tied around the pole itself in a single ring, were hundreds of chicken femurs, placed there as offerings (fig. 5.4). As I stood watching the preparation of offerings and the general perambulations of a large number of men, two traditionally dressed women walked up the hill toward the site; the men stopped what they were doing in order to observe them. The women walked carefully in a clockwise direction around the edge of the ka-thow-bòw site rather than crossing over it, eventually stopping at a spot just below the brow of the hill at the side of the hilltop furthest from the houses below. One of the women, who looked very old and was described by the men as the ‘female ka-thow-bòw leader’, used a stick to dig a hole, into which she poured rice beer. She and her companion then solemnly walked back down to the ‘village’. She had, it was explained, made an offering on behalf of all the women and girls. One of my male companions who was not from the Shadaw-area, told me this was not a job invariably done by a woman – indeed, he implied that in his own village women would not have such a prominent role in ka-thow-bòw ‘except that very old women’ may occasionally do some of things normally done by men. Without further field data from inside Karenni State, it is impossible to know whether the relatively privileged role of women at this particular festival is a special characteristic of the villages represented in Sections 5 and 6, or to some extent a new phenomenon related to the context of displacement. For a short while after the women had gone offering preparations resumed, until the men suddenly gathered in a large crowd around the kathow-bòw pole itself. Each man held a bottle of rice beer, from which he poured a small amount of liquid onto the lower part of the pole as an offering before joining his peers in drinking, talking and laugh loudly, milling around and offering his bottle to everyone else to try; indeed, it was impossible to refuse the insistent requests to taste each new brew. The men subsequently daubed chicken blood onto the part of the pole below the ring of chicken femurs before sticking chicken feathers onto the same spots, a ritual action intended to ‘heal’ the sores of the community’s past year. They then embarked on a divinatory process, simultaneously knocking hard-boiled eggs against the pole while remaining serious and contemplative, eyes shut; once the eggs were peeled and the shells

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deposited as offerings at the base of the pole or on the adjacent offering platform, each man cut his egg in half and inspected and discussed what they saw – most agreed there were pleasing indications that they would return to their villages in about two years time. The preparations of small food offerings consisting of leaf parcels each containing a little cooked rice and pork, small portions of the hard boiled eggs previously used for divination, and a small piece of the various parts of a chicken, then continued before the men gathered once more by the pole, this time standing in a more or less orderly queue at the side furthest from the ‘village’. Beh Reh, their ka-thow-bòw leader, stood slightly apart, his head bowed and his lips moving silently as he offered apologies on behalf of the entire ‘village’ for misdemeanours and mistakes made in the past year. Only when he had finished and nodded did the men all rush forward to place their own offerings on the small platform adjacent to the pole, before themselves beginning to eat and to pass around a bowl for any financial donations those present may wish to make towards the costs of ka-thow-bòw. This description of the ritual’s activities makes evident that appropriating and enculturating space – making it theirs, turning it into some kind of home – is not confined simply to the pre-festival demarcation of a ka-thow-bòw site. The dynamic interaction during the festival between ka-thow-bòw celebrants and the ka-thow-bòw place also is fundamental to the inculcation of this exilic space with an aura of continuity with, and resonance of, the village. The various sacrifices made at the site during the festival reinforce the site’s validity as an area sacred to the section’s residents. By so doing, and by being made by many Kayah men at once, the offerings also create and assert the Kayah-ness of this relatively new place of residence. In other words, while these refugees still want very much to return to their villages, in the interim they seek to make their present dwelling place meaningful by adding to it attributes of ‘home’, accepting the need to live in it rather than simply eking out a survival there until the longed for return home. Ritual process is integral to this: acts such as the men’s chicken, pig, rice beer and egg sacrifices, and the old woman’s rice beer oblation on the side of the hill, reaffirm through embodied action the sacred and fundamental aspects of the relationship between people and where they live. In a village setting this is significant enough, but in the refugee camp the importance of these ritual activities is magnified still further in attempts to create a sense of the land belonging to people and vice versa. Place is thus, to paraphrase Casey (1996: 26), here a series of events more than it is a static and concrete thing (c.f. Ong 1969). Physical process and dynamic, embodied action, then, are important in the creation and reinforcement of belonging and place. So too are structural and functional aspects of the site itself and the specific actions

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through which people define and interact with them. The site is divided into sub-spaces with the area around the poles being the most sacred subspace of all. The fence that stands before the poles marks the edge of this area on the side nearest to the village and it is from around this fence that women, if anyone in their household becomes ill around the time of the festival, take stones, leaves, twigs, or other detritus to place under the sick person’s head at night in order to cure them. The creation of the ka-thowbòw site has thus not only made part of the new place of residence sacred, but has also made objects from sub-areas within it appropriate for the intimate process of healing. As most evil spirits implicated in illness are themselves associated with features of the landscape, such as rocks, trees, etc., illness and healing alike are thus both intimately related to landscape, the latter through offerings at the site where the responsible spirit dwells and through the taking of small natural objects deemed to have power associated with ka-thow-bòw from a part of the landscape into the home. The latter in particular is a process that, here through women, links the wellbeing of Kayah people to the wellbeing and Kayah-ness of their place of residence. The dynamic, embodied actions of women are also key to a structural aspect of ka-thow-bòw ritual by which the boundary of the sacred ka-thowbòw area is defined. The two women who offered rice beer by pouring it into a hole in the ground on the side of the ka-thow-bòw site farthest from the residential area, also in their journey to that offering point very deliberately marked out in the direction of their steps part of the site’s boundary. In any analysis of ka-thow-bòw ritual, be it situated in exile or not, we could follow van Gennep and draw attention to the importance of frontiers and borders between both the social positions and the topographical places involved in ceremonial practice (1960), emphasising the line that edges the sacred ka-thow-bòw site and becomes physically manifest only through the movements of the two women. We could argue that while women may not participate in the central ritual activities that take place around the pole itself, they act as boundary-keepers with a particular role in defining, maintaining and materialising the spatially extended threshold that divides sacred from profane. Men may move across the threshold in both directions, but while women may not it is they rather than men who preserve and represent through their actions the existence and importance of it. In ka-thow-bòw, as van Gennep puts it ‘to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world’ (1960: 20), and only Kayah men are able to do this; yet without the two women’s ka-thowbòw offering actions and the wider seeking by women of curative objects from the edge of the sacred site, the threshold would not be fully there. In other words, while men are central to the ritual action of ka-thow-bòw that action may only occur in place which is defined by a boundary physically and actively created, manifested and reinforced by women.

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In ka-thow-bòw ritual as it takes place in displacement, of course, there are additional layers to this analysis. Firstly, the half of the site’s perimeter which was walked along and marked with an offering at its furthest point by the two women was the western side – the part nearest to Karenni State.8 Yet clearly the boundary defined by the women’s steps was not immediately adjacent to Karenni State and the festival participants’ villages of origin; rather, in between lay spatial distance, extended across parts of the refugee camp and eastern Karenni State. As a consequence, there is a sense in which the women’s definition of the ka-thow-bòw site’s perimeter operates differently than it would do in the villages of origin, in that rather than distinguishing Kayah sacred and profane space from each other it divides Kayah space from non-Kayah space. Furthermore, the focus of the women’s physical actions on the Karenni State-side of the kathow-bòw site served dynamically to connect this Kayah space with the Kayah space back home. There are parallels here with the argument made in Chapter 4 that in some ways the transitions involved in ritual process in displacement are reversed, so that rather than a key part of the ritual comprising a liminal phase of removal from everyday norms, it constitutes instead an attempt at reincorporation into a pre-displacement way of life. In this way, the ka-thow-bòw site becomes a heterotopia (Rodman 1992: 651; see also Foucault 1986), exhibiting a metaphorical elasticity with its boundaries stretching beyond the women’s footsteps and back through space and time to the village. Two places, and the corresponding senses of emplacement held by the Kayah refugees, are thus linked – physically, actively, ritually, through memory and resonance and, as we discussed for dïy-küw in Chapter 4, through the continuing communality of the ritual activity. For ka-thow-bòw as for dïy-küw, the potency of these processes is rooted in both communality and in their experiential and embodied nature. ‘Place’, as Tuan writes, ‘is a center [sic] of meaning constructed by experience … [places] are strong visceral feelings’ (1975: 152, my emphasis; see also Feld 1996). The embodied experience inherent in the conception of and relationship to place has multiple sensory and affective dimensions which can combine to produce a sense of feeling right, of being at a home. Yet the full satisfaction of this aesthetic drive to rightness is perpetually thwarted in a refugee setting. The desire to be, ideally, elsewhere, and the topographic, ecological, demographic, legal and other factors that conspire to make the refugee camp never quite like home as one knew it in the past, mean the continual attempt to recreate a sense of being at home can never quite succeed. For refugees such as the Karenni, there are acute tensions not only between what Entrikin calls the ‘existential and naturalistic conceptions of place … a sense both of being “in a place” and “at a location”’ (1991: 134, cited in Rodman 1992: 642), but also within existential conceptions of place. That is, not only is a sense of rightness in

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place, of being at home, not synonymous with a sense of location (as at times is true for the non-displaced too), but for refugees there are also relative, layered and often conflicting senses of being contentedly emplaced. On one level, on a quotidian basis and especially for long-term refugees, there is indeed a sense of being ‘at home’ in the camps; even for this group, however, that home is both unsatisfactory and a priori compromised by the wish and struggle to be somewhere else. New landscape is, initially at least, interpreted in terms of the old and using familiar sensory mechanisms – and often the comparison is unfavourable; e.g. the new biotope is perceived as being poorer because of its lack of the familiar dyeing plants, wild fruits and animals, and so on. In certain actions such as ritual practice, as we saw for dïy-küw, there is the opportunity to overcome some of this longing and metaphorically at least to reconcile some of the existential tensions. For relatively new arrivals such as the Kayah refugees whose ka-thow-bòw practice we have been discussing, there has been less time over which to become familar with and to feel at home within the new surroundings and there is thus an even more acute feeling of displacement in an embodied and aesthetic sense. To not only appropriate part of the new landscape by enculturating it as a kathow-bòw site, but also to engage bodily with it through ritual practice similar to that formerly done ‘at home’, helps to overcome this even if only temporarily. Embodied ritual practice in this displaced context also serves to enhance and solemnise non-discursive knowledge of the refugees’ new place of abode. The men’s pre-festival walk into the jungle to identify and cut a suitable tree, their communal and physical work manually honing the pole and making its decorations, the male dancing and festival participation, the two women’s ceremonial walk up and around the perimeter of the summit of the ka-thow-bòw hill, the female acquisition of curative objects … all of these happen in place, physically engaging people with the landscape and vice versa. Certainly, in exile the landscape is unfamiliar by comparison to that which has been left behind, and as a result the landscape cannot directly comprise a form of remembering or a material repository of past time and the annual rhythm of Kayah life (c.f. Ingold 1993, Gosden 1999: 128). It is not the temporality embodied in the landscape wherein they find themselves but its current use-values that predominate in Kayah consciousness and narratives. Yet as time spent in this new place lengthens, and as cultural practice results in a continual increase in embodied knowledge of its topography etc., so it becomes to feel more like – but never quite reaches the goal of – ‘home’. Indeed, and as we will return to later, making home in displacement is a perpetual process of becoming. As we have seen, then, through the practice of culturally significant festivals such as ka-thow-bòw and dïy-küw Karenni refugees both

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physically enculturate a new place with features familiar in the past and simultaneously maintain a sense of continuity with life in the villagebased past. ‘People who enter the spirit of this festival … not only transform the appearance of [where they live]; their actual experience of [this place] differs from that at other times of year. For the duration of the festival, the world becomes a different sort of place’ (McGreevy 1990: 33). Indeed, one way to interpret this continuity is not in primarily temporal terms but as the retention of and re-engagement with a past place which now is based in memory and in certain moments and actions (particularly ritual practice): ‘just as to follow a path is to remember the way, so to engage in any practice is, at the same time, to remember how’ (and for refugees, one might add where) ‘it is done’ (Ingold 2000a: 147). Karenni refugees thereby construct, engage with and to differing degrees feel at home in two places at once: the refugee camp within which they are physically present, and the villages of origin to which they can metaphorically return in ritual and in the imagination. Their reflexive relations with place are thus ‘fragmented and multilocal’ (Rodman 1992: 646), albeit that for them multilocality means something other than actual, physical movement between places. As part of this fragmented and metaphorical multilocality, the demarcation and use of the ka-thow-bòw site is about more than simply inculcating present circumstances with familiar, home-like characteristics. Rather, constructing and subsequently perceiving and interacting with the site makes it possible to ‘carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past’ (Ingold 1993: 152–153). On one level this is not Ingold’s remembering through embodied action in the landscape as would occur in the villages, given that the topography and biosphere here are new; yet on another level it entails remembering more, and more poignantly too, given the physical rupture and spatial distance between the present and the past. Indeed, if as Ingold claims any ‘particular vista of past and future … is available from this moment and no other … it constitutes my present’ which in turn is ‘not marked off from a past that it has replaced or a future that will … replace it: it rather gathers the past and future into itself’ (Ingold 1993: 159, emphases original) then the displaced both have to work harder to maintain this ever-changing vista and need it particularly acutely. The particular significance of annual ritual in displacement (c.f. Tapp 1988) is in part due to its social characteristics and its role in maintaining a feeling of contiguity with the past. But it is also fundamentally about living in the present. The ongoing, cyclical nature of annual festivals such as ka-thow-bòw is part of living in and being part of a particular place. A place ‘does not … remain a place simply because it is tangible reality and was originally designed as a place. To remain a place it has to be lived in’

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(Tuan 1975: 165). Or conversely, to live somewhere is develop a sense of place in that locale (c.f. Agnew and Duncan 1989, Rodman 1992). Earlier in this book, Davis’s seminal article of 1992 was cited for its argument that pain is normal. We can usefully return to this here: referring to some now classic ethnographies9 that demonstrate the extent to which people seek to ‘preserve and repair their social world’ (ibid.: 156), Davis argues that pain is normal not only in experience and cause, but also ‘in the methods people adopt to cope with it’ (1992: 155; see also Das 2006). These methods include both the continuation, as far as is possible, of the humdrum machinations of everyday life, and the celebration of important festivals. In the process, places and persons are reciprocally constitutive, with senses of both continually coming ‘into being through praxis, not just narratives’ (Rodman 1992: 642). Dynamic, embodied and emplaced action ties people and their environment together, even when the environment is not their familiar or chosen one and when multiple places are identified with in different ways. This kind of action is, for refugees particularly, especially important in ritual practice. It is clear both that the activity is performative and that it is through the performance that people and place are not only intertwined but mutually constitutive. As it stands, such a claim is hardly unique – but to emphasise its significance in a displaced context is, as I have argued above, important. To examine the embodied, creative acts in which refugees participate in addition to ritual, as we now move on to do, is further revealing of the ways in which displaced persons continually and actively seek to shape their own senses of emplacement and identity.

Making Things, Making Place, Making Self Karenni refugees are clearly limited in the camps in the extent to which they are able to perform the creative and technological tasks that shaped pre-displacement life (be it in memory or in imagination). Most of the physical processes such as those involved in the agricultural cycle that shaped life inside Karenni State for the majority of the refugee population, for example, are impossible in the camps – as are the journeys to work and office-based labour previously undertaken by a more urbanised minority. Indeed, all the regular and more occasional bodily movements through space that were part of what made the past what it was, are now either no longer possible or significantly curtailed and changed. Nonetheless, creative action in the refugee camps is important both as practical adaptation of and to a new, alien environment, and as a mechanism for coping with the cultural and personal stress of displacement. While subsistence agriculture is no longer possible, for example, many refugees are able to grow a small number of vegetables such

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as beans, gourds and tomatoes inside the camps and, in a few cases, to farm catfish in small ponds. Gathering of freely available wild food is also possible on a limited scale, both of bananas and papayas from trees inside the parameters of the camp and, when Thai restrictions and the possibility of wandering permit, of bamboo shoots and other food (including hunted quarry such as birds, snakes, bats, small monkeys and bears) from the jungle beyond. Both gathering and growing of plant foods provide a sense of seasonality in work and diet which, while it pertains to a lesser degree than the pre-displacement norm, like festivals is still important in providing a sense of temporal rhythm. Such behaviour also serves the practical purpose of supplementing incomplete, agency-provided food rations and facilitates a sense of independence in both providing for oneself and in interacting with the environment of and around the camp. The importance for refugees of avoiding dependency – real and imagined – as far as possible, is well understood. It is accepted too that productive activity in refugee camps permits the establishment of a localised economy in which goods and services are exchanged to mutual benefit – such as when Saw Eh Gay received some bamboo strips, readycut for tying components of built structures, in return for castrating another household’s male piglets. Less acknowledged, however, is the way in which active, positive behaviour on the part of refugees also contributes to establishing a feeling of having at least some control over a new environment. Being able to grow even a small row of climbing beans or managing to gather a few wild plants, gives a modicum of input into adaptation and exploitation of the environment that, outside displaced contexts, is usually taken for granted. Such a sense of active involvement in and control over even a few aspects of the physical world within which one is located, unsurprisingly contributes to raising self-esteem and refugees’ views of their own role and degree of autonomy. Indeed, this is enhanced by the very fact of successfully gaining some active control over the environment in spite of both the obvious relative restrictiveness and strangeness of the locale in which they find themselves. Not only are refugees unable to practise subsistence agriculture and to gather and hunt as freely as they would like, but so, for example, they find that when they do manage to wander into the jungle, local terrain and ecology are often notably distinct from those with which they were previously familiar. The feel-good factor of establishing some active integration into the environment despite the social, political, economic and ecological restrictions and differences, thus exists in dynamic tension not only with a recurrent sense of relative powerlessness but also with the negative impacts of environmental difference. There is much that Karenni refugees do not only to impose some control over their environment in displacement, but also to make that environment as familiar as possible. One important component in this is

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the building of houses. Refugees build their own houses in the camps, using techniques, materials and – as far as the availability of material and space permits – styles which are all familiar inside Karenni State.10 Houses are constructed around a frame of thick bamboo poles (and/or, when rarely available, solid wooden poles) with flooring and external and internal walls made of flexible ‘planks’ of opened out and flattened bamboo. Roofing thatch is made from leaves sewn onto bamboo strips, the strips layered onto the roof poles. The house’s structural poles are buried in the ground, and all components of the house are fixed by being tied to each other with bamboo ‘string’ (metal screws and nails being unavailable or only obtainable by a few as an expensive purchase in a Thai market). Houses vary in size, height and complexity, with the simplest (such as that built for me) involving a simple step up from ground level and, at the other end of the scale, there being a small flight of several steps and/or a ladder to ascend. Even the humblest will include one or two walled-off sleeping areas and an open, public area (the size and style of which will vary with the size and status of house), together with a cooking area which may be either raised up within the main body of the stilted house or adjacent to it on ground level. Each house will also have or share a nearby latrine inside its own bamboo shelter (the porcelain latrines themselves being supplied by relief agencies). In the southern Karenni camp at the time I lived in it, some houses had their own screened off washing area, while others had access only to the river for this purpose. In the northern Karenni camp, washing – of both bodies and laundry – usually happens at communal points using water either from streams or standpipes. The main house building time falls in January as that is when bamboo is at its best for cutting, and in relatively easy years (in relation to military restrictions on movement through the neighbouring jungle, for example) this is a busy period, with the erection of many new buildings and extensions to current structures. The productive processes of everyday life may in some cases such as farming be impossible once in a refugee camp, but those which can continue are of real value. The artefacts they provide also permit an ongoing, bodily engagement with the material environment that has considerable familiarity for the majority of refugees with personal memories of life inside Karenni State – and is lost when, for example, individual forced migrants resettle in third countries or even simply spend time living in a Thai town. The movement and texture of the bamboo floors almost all houses have, for example, felt not only by the bare feet on which one enters the house but by the legs and buttocks as one sits (and indeed the entire body when one sleeps), has always been customary for all but the wealthiest Karenni refugees. Some productive activities are carried out only by a few specialist individuals who earn a living from crafts such as the male tasks of basket-

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weaving and blacksmithing. Other activities are more widespread. The female craft of textile weaving, for example, provides a means not only of producing clothing and bags for one’s family and way of generating income, but also for many women enables them to continue a habitual activity that is contiguous with their past lives. The requisite positioning of the body in relation to loom, the feel of the fibres in the fingers, the soft sound of the shuttle sliding back and forth … all are, for most of the women who weave in the camps, long familiar sensations. Production of most cloth made in the camps involves women sitting in or underneath their houses using continuous warp back-strap looms (fig. 5.5). Such back-strap weaving is also the predominant method used in villages inside Karenni State. Refugee weavers or their husbands generally make their own looms of bamboo, wood and usually a piece of recycled rice sacking for the back-strap itself. Older women well used to weaving prior to displacement complain that the looms in the camps are not as good, comfortable or long lasting as those in the villages, mainly because in the camps people have no cattle or other livestock from which to get hide to make a strong and comfortable back-strap.11 Yarn is purchased readydyed from Mae Hong Son market or camp shops (which in turn get all or most of their stock from Mae Hong Son market). With the exception of the Shadaw-area Kayah refugees, for most women this is little different from

Figure 5.5: Naw Elizabeth weaving a skirt-cloth on a continuous warp back-strap loom, underneath her house, Karenni Camp 5 (Site 2), 1997. Photograph by Sandra Dudley.

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village practice as they are not nowadays used to growing and preparing their own cotton inside Karenni State.12 Most women who weave in the camps are married women with families, who learned to weave as girls in their villages. For them, the physical activity of weaving is intrinsically bound up with their memories of ‘home’ and of everyday life and sensations there; being able to continue this activity in similar ways to how they have always done it, is very important. For women amongst the Shadaw-area Kayah, however, there has been a greater sense of rupture between post- and pre-displacement possibilities. On arrival all but the youngest of these women knew how to back-strap weave, and most were also accustomed to doing their own dyeing using natural plant pigments. In their villages of origin, women’s clothing was always homemade, even when the process of manufacture was limited to hemming a piece of purchased fabric in order to make a breast-cloth. Skirt- and head-cloths were invariably hand-woven, either by their prospective wearer or by one of her female relatives. Many of the women grew and spun their own cotton. Often this was the short-staple gossypium herbaceum cotton plant, although many women considered this to be too coarse for clothing and used it only for blankets, either growing or purchasing a finer, longer-staple variety for producing skirt- and headcloths.13 Growing cotton is clearly impossible in the refugee context, and acquiring undyed cotton yarn is both difficult and unaffordable for these women. Even when the latter is possible, the dyeing of the cotton to create some of the required soft hues is hampered by both restricted access to jungle plants and by the local lack of certain plant species on which women relied inside Karenni State. Producing black (various barks can be used), yellow (turmeric) and green (leaves of ‘tiger beans’ and other types of climbing legume) was considered by most women to be quite feasible in the refugee camp, as the necessary, familiar plant species are readily available. Red, however – the colour most important to the Kayah – was viewed as impossible to produce in the camp, whatever traditional method and plant dye was attempted, because of the unavailability of appropriate plant species in the vicinity. Furthermore, these weavers are unlikely to be able to afford, and are unused to, working with brightly coloured, chemically dyed yarns such as those used by women in the longer-staying refugee community. As a result, and in association with the importance to them of being able to continue to wear their traditional clothing (Chapter 4), there was considerable distress amongst this group about their inability to continue to weave once in the camp. On my first visit to the old Camp 2 in 1996, I did find two women weaving (one was making a beautiful, earthy-red head-cloth for her daughter, and the other an unbleached and undyed cotton blanket). Both these women had been able to bring a small supply of thread with them, but did not expect it to last long. Nonetheless, the very fact that they privileged cotton and their

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looms amongst the few things they were able to bring with them on the long, difficult, rainy season journey to the camp, says a great deal about the centrality of weaving to their lives. In part, weaving is of course important because of its end-products and their practical functions as clothing, blankets and bags. Just as the style and materials in which houses are built are familiar from the preexile past, so too are those in which textiles are produced in the camps. The value of house-building, weaving and other creative action in displacement lies thus in part in the provision, sight and use of familiar artefacts. Their significance lies partially too, as we have seen, in providing refugees with a modicum of control over, or at least adaptation to, a new and often frustrating environment. But the physical process of making textile and houses, and simply undertaking everyday cooking and other chores, is also of fundamental importance. The distress of newly arrived Shadaw-area Kayah women in the late 1990s, for example, did not pertain solely to the wish to continue wearing their traditional clothes; it directly related too to the desire to continue making them. Like farming, this is an occupation intrinsic to being Kayah and to the meaning of women’s lives. The process of weaving, like the process of farming, is as important to the integrity of Kayah culture as are its end-products. Weaving simultaneously is connected to what has been left behind and the painful nature of the leaving-behind process itself and, like traditional festivals, is one of the things refugees prioritise in their desire to make their current situation more familiar. It is both a symbol of the past and an important factor in trying to make the present more bearable and familiar. Doing it and seeing it being done alike allow refugees to recall and feel a sense of continuity with a familiar way of life that has been unwillingly left behind. It is thus unsurprising that weaving, its end-products and the wearing of those items were foregrounded in the new arrivals’ attempts to resolve or make more bearable their current situation. There is a real comfort drawn from the building of houses and other creative processes which are possible in the camp, because they ameliorate the boredom and anxiety of displacement, provide familiar artefacts and permit the repetition of physical actions familiar from the past. These repeated actions as much if not more than ritual and other occasional celebrations, enable the structuring of time, distraction, and sense of doing the best one can in difficult circumstances. They also allow the continued development and practise of valued skills.14 At the same time, the unconscious reassurance provided by manifesting embodied knowledge through moving and using one’s body in established ways, while hardly unique to refugees does have particular importance in displacement in providing another means of maintaining continuity with, and memory and imagination of, the pre-exile past. Such movements also, however, have a certain poignancy in exile because they cannot take place within an

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environment that has long been familiar as ‘home’: if we come to know a path and a place through moving along within it (Ingold 2000a), then refugees must both adjust to their abrupt removal from their familiar places and quickly come to know another. The ‘autopoetic process’ through which persons and things become what they are at any given moment and by which ‘the temporal rhythms of life are gradually built into the structural properties of things’ (Ingold 2000b: 61, my emphasis; see also Heidegger 1971), develops over – indeed, depends upon – time. For nondisplaced communities these processes and the mutually constitutive intermeshing of people, things and place have deep temporal and spatial roots from which the group has not been removed. For refugees, while the temporal roots and spatial roots persist they do so for an entire community in memory, imagination and ritual rather than through direct and physical continuity. Prior to exile, Karenni cultural aesthetics are, like others, ‘not purely a contracted or negotiated synchrony but … embedded in, and inherited from, an autonomous network of object relations and prior sensory exchanges. Performance therefore is elicited by externality and history as much as it may come from within’ (Seremetakis 1994: 6–7). Once in displacement, however, the direct and physical role of ‘externality’ is by definition disconnected or lost. Nevertheless, making and acting for Karenni refugees are still processes of growth (c.f. Heidegger 1971, Ingold 2000b) and even catharsis. In displacement and exile, these processes can play an important role in adjusting to the particularly pointed irregularity or loss of some of life’s rhythm. Indeed, being busy, be it in making things, teaching, building or cooking, is a key component in Karenni refugee coping mechanisms. Simultaneously, it dynamically and unavoidably connects people to their new environment and the modification of it. The links between landscape and people and their fundamental parts in and as cultural process (c.f. Ingold 1993, Hirsch 1995), do not end when displacement occurs – rather, they just become more complicated: preexile people-landscape connections continue in different, metaphorical and other indirect ways, and at the same time new associations begin. The memories, ideals and re-enactments through ritual of the former links, influence the formation of the new; and the strangeness and familiarity in the new environment affect conceptions of the old. Indeed, making things, cooking and all the other daily performative acts by which life is lived, simultaneously permit both ‘re-membering, re-thinking’ of the preexile past and ‘discovery’ of the present (Lloyd 2001: 151). And above all, of course, making and living are social – people do not do them in isolation but in ongoing interaction with each another.

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Becoming ‘At Home’ in Exile Earlier in the book, we encountered the reluctance of some Karenni to be called ‘refugee’. This is partly, at least, due to an unwillingness to yield to the word’s connotations of passivity and dependency. But it is also about something much more fundamental than worries about being dependent upon handouts from NGOs; rather, it concerns physical and conceptual aspects of relationships with both the territory of Karenni State and the space that is the refugee camps. To think of oneself primarily as a refugee for many Karenni connotes losing a sense of connection to one’s place of origin and the hope of eventual return to it;15 similarly, the very fact of being a forced migrant who has not chosen to be where one is, seems to render the place of refuge even less like ‘home’ than it already is. Instead, it is keeping up a sense of connection to places of origin – however ‘origin’ may be conceived – that makes displacement bearable. As we have seen, Karenni refugees work hard at this, for example through ritual practice. Karenni refugees also frequently ground their camp-based conversations and locate their relationships in the context of villages of origin, to the extent that even young people who were only small children when they left – indeed, even those who were born in Thailand and have never been to Karenni State – still position themselves and those with whom they interact against the backdrop of ‘home’ villages. Thus people frequently socialise most with others from – or apparently from – the same village, and I was often introduced to someone with the explanatory phrase ‘(s)he is from my village’, a qualifier intended to enable me to place the new person and to perceive the connection between the two individuals. Such a connection between persons has a spatial basis in a shared place of origin and distance there from; but, as we have already seen, it also has a temporal basis in a shared set of memories, knowledge and/or myths. Ideas of ‘home’, then, comprise not simply a point of origin, but a fluid notion tied to temporal as much as to spatial concepts. It is the view of ‘village’ and ‘home’, and the cognitive and imaginative connections between it and the person, that extend through time and space to tie a Karenni individual to the territory of Karenni. By extension, it ties a person to being Karenni. Making and possessing objects clearly contribute to the personalisation and cultural appropriation of space, as we have seen with the production of ka-thow-bòw ritual space and textiles for use as clothing. The creation and embodied experience of domestic space and of associated objects such as photograph albums and calendars for example, is also important. Many people possess photograph albums which include images both of friends and activities in the camp, and of persons and places significant in life before – or, at least, in memories of life before – displacement. The majority of pictures depict their artfully and often seductively posed subjects in front of

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scenic backdrops that may include mountains, rivers, flowers in bloom, and so on. Indeed, the composition of these scenes often echoes that of calendars with images of glamorous Burmese pop stars. Photographs and the verbal narratives they trigger are also significant in relation to the dead: albums devoted to a particular deceased person may include not only images of them when alive, but also after their death. In turn, the sharing with an audience of these linearly presented pictorial narratives of a life can trigger elaborate descriptions not only of the departed’s relationship to the narrator, but also of the funeral and manner of death. Mae Sie, for example, spent considerable time showing me his album concerning a dead friend who had been fatally injured by a landmine while serving as a KNPP soldier. With each new image as he leafed through the album, he explained and literally illustrated to me not only the life history and personal circumstances of his friend but also the grisly detail of the friend’s injuries and the nature of the funeral; as he did so, he touched and often unconsciously stroked the picture in question – bringing himself, and indirectly also me, ‘into bodily contact with the trace of the remembered’ (Edwards 1999: 228). The narrative, however, was thus far an essentially visual story, but then, as Mae Sie lingered over the last few photographs in the album which depicted his friend’s dead, bruised and swollen body, he digressed into a more multisensory, participatory rather than observational recollection of, especially, the sounds, activities, tastes and smells of the night before the funeral. Indeed, he so powerfully took off from the photograph album to convey the crying, drinking and drunkenness, coffin manufacture, cooking and eating, praying and gambling of the night’s vigil, that one could very easily imagine oneself there. Personal photographs, and culturally constituted ways of experiencing them, come both to stand for past personal and communal experience and to work to create connections with that past. In some cases, as with Mae Sie’s album, the central point of the experience is a lost relationship, which here happened to have been formed since displacement but is intrinsically – and for Mae Sie explicitly – connected to the politico-military framework of Karenni forced migration because of the way in which the friendship was lost. In other cases, photographs are primarily concerned with people, places and events that were significant in the pre-exile past inside Karenni State. The value of such artefacts is evident in both their very continued existence in the refugee camp and in the ways in which they are kept and utilised there.16 For example, individual photographs are often displayed on walls in intimate and focal points of people’s houses such as above the head-end of the sleeping area or behind the sitting area, while albums are kept in boxes with other precious and valuable items (including money) in the private, innermost area where one sleeps. Photographs are frequently engaged with in private or with friends and visitors, and utilised, as with Mae Sie’s album, as a springboard for remembering and retelling the past.

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Viewing photographs, then, inspires nostalgia, longing, reflection and jokes. Individual images ‘fill a void, a sense of absence’ (Chambers 2003: 103), as indeed do the individual artefacts as a whole with the frayed edges and finger marks that lend a sense of history and duration to both the material object and its associated memories. Albums, with their imposed linear, chronological ordering so as to tell a story, do the same in a more elaborate way. Photographs and other personal objects are thus an important vehicle for memory and a link to the past for Karenni refugees as much as they are for people elsewhere. They give, as Sontag writes, ‘an imaginary possession of [the] past’ (1977: 8, cited in Chambers 2003: 96), albeit one which is constructed and ‘unreal’. But in addition, they ‘help people take possession of a space in which they are insecure’ (1977: 9, ibid.). They make a world as well as – or perhaps actually instead of – representing one. What is more, they do this not through their content alone, but through their very materiality and the use-potential it provides. For refugees, photographs clearly do this in part at least by representing the pre-exile past in the displaced present. But this is not just an issue of temporal continuity or of countering a sense of rupture. Photographs and other significant artefacts are also a mechanism for enculturating a new environment – indeed, for colonising it (c.f. Appadurai 1996: 183). Certainly there is a temporal component to this, in that familiar things (just as familiar rituals and other activities) effectively render the present in some way continuous with the past. Yet precisely because that sense of continuity depends in part upon physical and material evidence of it in extended space, there is also a spatial element to the process. It is this spatial element – which we have also seen in relation to ritual practice – that justifies the conceptualisation of refugees’ home-making as a form of colonisation. Indeed, this applies not only to a spatially configured attempt to bring the past – and past places – into the present, but also to the nature of photographs taken in the camps. Personal images are often posed in ways that exactly echo pre-displacement styles, with highly stylised postures and scenic, natural backgrounds. This continuation of a particular style, and its location in the new environment of the refugee camp constitutes an attempt to connect with and domesticate ‘unfamiliar, alien space’ (Chambers 2003: 103). Furthermore, more recent photographs taken in the camps together with those that pre-date displacement comprise an overall visual narrative that, in imagination if not in shared practice, can reconnect ‘families and communities fragmented by geographical migration’ (ibid.: 105). Visual narratives, of course, as we have seen go only so far. Where they stop, recounting – even reliving – of fully embodied, multi-sensory experience continues. Sense perceptions and the recalling and re-experiencing of them are induced by material objects and locales. Indeed, Karenni refugees do seek as far as they are able ‘to emplace themselves through reproducing [the] sensory comforts of home’ (Howes 2005: 8).

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Notes 1. 2.

Parts of this section on t-shirts first appeared in Dudley 2002a. In 1998, across the Karenni refugee population as a whole there were three main sorts of locale within which ka-thow-bòw was celebrated: the two predominantly Kayah northern camps (for several reasons rather different from each other in both performance and interpretation of ka-thow-bòw), and the principally Kayan ‘Long-neck’ villages, particularly important amongst which was Huay Phu Keng. The festivals in each place had much in common but there were also very real differences. For further discussion of the more politicised aspects of ka-thow-bòw, particularly as practised in Huay Phu Keng, see Dudley 2000a. 3. Lehman refers to it as ‘iylùw pwe’ (1967: 70), a phrase meaning ‘pole’ (‘iylùw’; Kayah) ‘festival’ (‘pwe’; Burmese). This phrase, however, was not used by any of my informants. 4. The descriptions that follow of activities within the ka-thow-bòw site at the top of the hill are based on my own observations. At other Karenni ka-thow-bòw festivals such as that at Huay Phu Keng, as a woman I had not been allowed to go beyond the edge of the sacred area; here, however, both I and the Karenni women who accompanied me were made to feel welcome on the whole site, including around the pole itself. Nonetheless, it was noticeable that no Section 5 and 6 women went into this hilltop area. 5. The smaller pole is known as ka-thàn; it represents the first tree in most versions of the traditional Karenni creation story (various personal communications, 1998). 6. Here my information differs from Lehman’s (1967a: 80), whose informants told him that the ‘leaf-shaped objects cut out of bamboo ... are called kl¯o le (banyan leaves).’ He does mention that in Eastern Kayah kl¯o le refers to not banyan but paddy plants, although he does not elaborate on which species the pole’s decorations are supposed by the Eastern Kayah to depict. In any case, for the Shadaw-area Kayah (who are not Eastern Kayah), they certainly represent paddy rather than banyan leaves. 7. The description of this strip of white fabric as a ‘ladder’ for the spirits to descend, was not shared by Kayah observers who came from villages in areas other than those represented by the participants at this particular festival. Lee Reh, for example, told me that the spirits come down not the fabric but the pole itself, and that the fabric streamer (which is white to symbolise honesty) hangs to the ground so that when the wind blows it may sweep clean the ground around the base of the pole. He also told me that after ka-thow-bòw the streamer is taken down and used to wrap the phü-diy-khr¯ıy figure which is important in village dïy-küw practice later in the year (see Chapter 4; Lee Reh, personal communication, May 1998). 8. Traditionally, for the Kayah the west is also associated with death – this may or may not be incidental here. 9. Colson 1971, de Waal 1989, Firth 1959, Harrell-Bond 1986, Hirschon 1989, Loizos 1981. 10. Certainly, a few refugees would previously have been used to living in wooden rather than bamboo houses (because of relative wealth or an urban

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

origin), but generally the houses built in the camps have a pre-displacement familiarity to them. A few older women do have ox-hide back-straps for their looms, brought with them from the villages. Nonetheless, for a good number of villages such full-scale cotton and textile production was practised within the last few decades, even if it is no longer the norm. Naw Sarah, for example, a Paku woman born around 1950, said while they no longer grew, prepared and dyed their own cotton, women in her village of origin had done this within her adult lifetime. My informants estimated that the total amount of cotton required to produce one head-cloth, one skirt and one blanket, is 5 petha (a Burmese unit of weight; one petha equates to 1.66 kg). Other women estimated quantities in numbers of gossypium herbaceum plants, saying that one skirt-cloth requires three ‘big skeins’ of cotton, or 225 plants. For a general discussion of the variety of cotton plants used in Southeast Asia, see Fraser-Lu 1988. Skill, particularly in the form of significant technical prowess, is much admired by Karenni makers. Often, though, what is most admired is a skill not represented in the Karenni group – Karenni women weavers, for example, while often highly proficient in, say, supplementary weft decorative weaving techniques, do not usually utilise embroidery to decorate textiles; as a result, they are especially impressed by skilled embroidery such as that depicted in photographs I showed Karenni women of Akha textiles I had collected inside Burma. The Karenni women’s reactions to these pieces comprised sheer awe at the technical skill required to produce such finely stitched designs. This is not unique. C.f. Peteet (1995), for example, on Palestinian refugees refusing to accept the label ‘refugees’ because it would entail (i) losing acute awareness of the nature of their current existence, and (ii) abandoning the belief in a future return to a place intrinsic to their identity as Palestinians. Discussion of the relationships between memories, values and the positioning of photographs in the home is discussed in a different context (contemporary UK), in Drazin and Frohlich 2007.

6 Materialising Home and Exile

This book has considered the diversity of ways in which Karenni refugees conceptualise, represent, manipulate and engage with material objects, ritual and other cultural practice, metaphorical and literal extended space and landscape, the past and present, and their impacts on the experience of forced migration and vice versa. Clearly, Karenni refugees are not passive victims of circumstance but busy giving meaning to their displacement and seeking to make the best of their lot. Nonetheless, being displaced is difficult and brings with it a range of tensions; after all, ‘[t]o be in exile is to have been deprived of a land and the temporal rhythms of life appropriate to it’ (Graham and Khosravi 1997: 115). In this final chapter, I draw together some principal points made in preceding parts of the book and make some general comments about what might be called the materiality and aesthetics of home and exile. First, I discuss conceptions of home and its relation to memory, time and space; second, I summarise issues of continuity and change and their implications for thinking about time in refugee contexts; third, I survey the notion of exilic bodies and objects as a way of summarising aspects of the material culture and embodiment perspectives I have brought to the analysis of forced migration; and finally I review aspects of the aesthetics of displacement: how and why refugees seek to feel right with and in the world.

Conceptions of Home As we have seen, displaced life in a refugee camp is still essentially emplaced, in that the site in which it takes place has physical, conceptual and other impacts of various kinds. Indeed, refugees have little choice but to attempt to make the refugee camp into ‘home’. At the same time, they continue to think of the real or imagined pre-displacement sites of origin as ‘home’. ‘Home’ in the latter usage implies a degree of familiarity between people and place; it need not, however, involve as part of its defining criteria that other characteristic which many of us are fortunate enough also to be able to associate with ‘home’ – security. Indeed and as

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we have seen, it will still be described by refugees as ‘home’ even if prior to departure and now if they were to return, they would be less secure or safe there than in the refugee camp or other displaced setting. Some authors (e.g. Clifford 1997, Malkki 1995a) have been critical of what they see as the idealised form of ‘home’ used in ‘sedentarist’ approaches to studying refugees – in other words, the supposed, uncritical assumption by writers drawn from comfortable, settled communities that the pre-exile ‘home’ was better than the displaced present and is where one truly ‘belongs’. The critics of this sedentarist approach usually have two objections to the categorisation and idealisation of pre-migration ‘home’. Their first is essentially political (to talk of refugees wanting to ‘go back home’ is unfortunately to play into the hands of anti-migrant groups in the host countries). The second objection is apparently factual – the places whence refugees have come are often far from peaceful and safe, and in reality are not places to which one would wish to return; the critics of a ‘sedentarist’ view, in other words, define ‘home’ in terms of tranquillity, safety or ease – yet for refugees like the Karenni, what constitutes or defines ‘home’ is not necessarily defined in such terms at all. In practical terms, of course, security may have been a top priority in that past place – and indeed the lack of it may have been the very reason for flight; it is, however, a category mistake to assume a synonymity between it and what makes somewhere ‘home’.1 Malkki, for example, states that ‘if “home” is where one feels most safe and at ease, instead of some essentialized point on the map, then it is far from clear that returning where one fled from is the same thing as “going home”’ (1995b: 509). However, this is a circular argument which only holds true if intrinsic to what ‘home’ is, are indeed the elements of safety and security. Certainly, refugees like anyone else wish for wellbeing, freedom from danger and a degree of comfort – whether or not they had any of these in reality during their residence in the places whence they have fled. But at the same time they wish also for the familiar – and idealised – aspects of their way of life before displacement. Indeed, not only do they spend time reminiscing and longing for just that, they also – as we have seen in the preceding chapters – expend considerable effort trying both to recreate in exile aspects of that pre-displacement life and to maintain a sense of continuity with its past forms. Why would they do this if it were not important to them? And by what right do we outsiders claim that the life and place for which they long and/or which they seek to reestablish, do not really constitute ‘home’ (or even exist, in the forms in which they are imagined)? What matters for understanding the experience of refugees from their point of view, is that they do indeed think of pre-exile places as ‘home’. The precise formulations and modes of thinking and action they use to remember and imagine these places, and the particular strategies they employ to maintain connection with –

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and attempt to recreate – them, will depend upon a combination of specific cultural, political and circumstantial factors; nonetheless, the reality is that multiple ways of seeking and imagining a sense of being ‘at home’ as it was (or is thought to have been) in the past, are an essential part of coping with displacement and of maintaining an idea of personal and communal continuity through space and time. If it is not security, of what, then, does ‘home’ consist? To insist as I do that notions of ‘home’ and belonging are important to refugees is far from the same thing, as Malkki implies it is, with ‘readily link[ing]’ the ‘loss of homeland … [with] a presumed loss of cultural identity’. Certainly, much work on refugees – including authors critiqued by Malkki, e.g. Gold 1992, Hopkins and Donnelly 1993, Miserez 1988, Stein 1981 – has taken such a functionalist approach and, in the process, depicted refugees as passive and helpless, acculturated victims of their displacement. I have sought in this book both to avoid such a portrayal and to stress that while cultural identity may be undergoing continual change as a result of displacement, it is by no means lost. Yet homeland real or imagined certainly is lost for refugees, and as I explored in Chapter 5 this raises important questions if we accept a relational model wherein ‘it is in [a group’s] relationships with the land, in the very business of dwelling, that their history unfolds’ (Ingold 2000a: 139). We saw in different ways in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 that an important component in feeling ‘at home’ is the cultivation of senses of spatiotemporal continuity of place and of emplacement. Yet real, physical continuity of place is an impossible goal for refugees: the camp is not and never will be the place whence they have come. Furthermore, while through the considerable efforts of refugees and interactivity between place and people, objects and actions, the camp is in aspects at least perpetually becoming more like home as it is remembered and imagined, it will never quite be it. ‘Home’, then, is in the pre-exile past; but it is also continually coming into being – or a sense of it is continually being sought – in the displaced present. The process of making the refugee camp seem as much like home as possible has many components. Karenni refugees appropriate and domesticate space through the interlinking of actions and material forms. Partly through the processes of mundane quotidian life, partly through the performance of particular ritual activities and celebrations, and partly with the use of certain building construction and physical objects, the potentially alienated and alienating space of the refugee camp on Thai soil is, for the group and for individuals alike, made more Karenni. The very living of everyday life in displacement lends some degree of familiarity to the spaces and things with which Karenni persons interact – indeed, it is everyday activity in the camp, the dynamic process of dwelling there (in its Heideggerian sense of participating within a dynamic, generative place as opposed to acting against the neutral backdrop of ‘place’

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construed rather differently), which continually creates the familiar anew. Nonetheless, as I have said the familiar, and home, are never complete in this setting – they are always in process, always sought, but never wholly attained. They are in flux and always in the process of generation, always relative to something else, always relative to the past and to somewhere else; always where practical and political realities determine is the place one can both actually reside and feel ‘almost, but not quite, at home’ (Ahmed 1999: 331, cited in Zhang 2004: 104; my emphasis). Attempts by the forcibly displaced to maintain a sense of continuity with whence they have come, are described elsewhere in the literature (Colson 1971, Parkin 1999, Malkki 1995a, Hammond 2004). These authors and others treat such attempts – including similar activities to those I have described, such as ritual, making and the continuity of particular styles, and the use of personal objects – as ‘place-making practices’, and focus on ‘place as a product, rather than as a precondition of social activity’ (Turton 2005: 276).2 One might go further still, and conceptualise place (in its dynamic, perpetual state of becoming) as materialised social activity (c.f. Casey’s view that places are events; 1996). Rather than seeing place or territory as making culture, then (as Clifford, Malkki and others rightly criticise ‘rooted’ approaches for doing), cultural and social practice, and material culture, both make and are in turn made by place; indeed, the two halves of the equation are so fundamentally inseparable that they are in the end the same thing: place is not place without people, their embodied, social action and their things, and people, things and actions are neither physically nor socially complete without the material world of which they are a part. Intrinsic to seeking to preserve continuity with the pre-exile past, as we have seen in previous chapters, are memory and nostalgia – key components of what Zhang calls ‘the ambiguous mirror-space of recollection/reflection’ (2004: 110). For individual refugees, home may be idealised not only as a culturally whole past but also as the representation of a personal past where things were (or retrospectively look to have been) better: one was more youthful and had fewer responsibilities, etc.3 As will by this point in the book be abundantly clear, however, whether they are principally individual or cultural in orientation, recollections are ‘never only about “the past” as it was. The past is actively created in the attempt to remember it’ (Graham and Khosravi 1997: 128). But this is not all: the pre-displacement past, as this book has uniquely argued, is created not simply inside people’s heads and by their embodied actions, but through their physical objects, and domestic and ritual spaces. Inevitably too, as the time spent unable to return to the place of real or imagined origin increases and the physical possession of material things that originate in that past place (such as a finite supply of traditional Kayah clothing) declines, so the sentimentality and creativity of reflection on the past increases (c.f. Habib 1996). The result is that ‘a

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complex articulation of nostalgia and desire’ (Law 2005: 237), to which I have shown engagements between persons and objects to be intrinsic, produces the current idea of the past. It also brings about ways to feel as at home as possible in displacement. Indeed while both ‘memory’ and ‘home’ may appear to comprise ideas, processes and objects concerned with the past, in fact they constitute complex, embodied actions, experiences and things which belong and are continually being made in the present. Clearly, the generation of memory and a sense of home in forced migration depend upon and explicitly concern ideas of the pre-displacement past – but they do so through the unavoidable and continually formative filter of the present. At the same time, the sense of being at home operates in two different ways at once: refugees feel at home in the past of their memory or imagination, and simultaneously perpetually work towards feeling at home in the present. They are ‘at home’, differently, in both the past and the present – a metaphorical multilocality.

Continuity and Change Memories and/or imaginings of the past and a sense of continuity with it, provide both a sense of continuity of identity through time and space, and help new refugees cope with the immediacy of displacement. Amongst new arrivals in the northernmost camp in 1996, for example, those who could set up house near others from their own village were markedly happier than those who could not (Dudley 1997).4 In large part, of course, this was because they remained in close physical and social proximity with those they had known before being forcibly displaced: prior social bonds and familiar sets of knowledge and practice were thus more easily sustained. In addition, these refugees shared a particularly close bond of suffering through having undergone forcible relocation, and eventual journeys to Thailand, together. In Chapter 3, I pointed out the importance of adding a temporal component to Davis’s conception of a bond of suffering (1992), explaining that my emphasis lies not as Davis’s does on the past contributing through social memory to present cultural forms and practices, but on the role of memory in continuity of a sense of identity, of being Kayah or Karenni, and of sharing over time a bond of suffering with one’s own as well as others’ past selves. Indeed the temporal component of both personal identity and what it is to be a refugee, is at least as important as the spatial one; displacement and re-emplacement alike are, because of the dynamic nature of place, about temporal as much as spatial change. Human actions are experienced in time as well as in space; forced migration – and the making anew of place – is no exception.

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Life in the camps has conferred upon it a sense of both duration since and coevalness with (Ingold 1993: 168, after Fabian 1983) a former life. This temporal duality is for the Karenni a function of memory in the continuity of identity, together with the fundamentally spatial, placerooted and place-making actions of using and making things, ritual and everyday life, and the simultaneous importance of past places and engagement with present locations. ‘Duration’ implies a sense of historical continuity – a passing of time but the preservation or maintenance, albeit perhaps in changed form, of something longstanding and important – and it is clear that for Karenni refugees many things contribute to producing it. What is most important in duration is the temporal, not the spatial: a sense of continuity (whether real or imaginary) of culture and of the self through time; geographical movement from past locations is merely secondary and does not in itself remove the feeling that ‘now’ has continuity with the pre-exile ‘then’, that there is a trajectory through which one person or group has passed from point x in the past to point y in the present. ‘Coevalness’, on the other hand, for refugees is about a sense of shared identity with and existence in the same moment as, the still real places and people from which the displaced are now separated by physical distance; in this case, distance in time from the preexile past is unimportant – what matters for refugees is the spatial gap between ‘here’ and ‘there’, the camp and the villages whence they came. The covalencies of both duration and coevalness raise interesting notions about what happens, for the displaced if not for those who stay behind, at the moment of displacement. From a refugee perspective, it is as if the trajectory of life both divides to take separate directions (with refugees taking one metaphorical road and those who remain, the other) and doubles to move in parallel (with refugees remaining essentially the same people as those who stayed, living in the same time and as far as possible in the same way, in a different place). Time and space thus appear to become multiple in displacement. The extent of refugees’ agency in determining much about the meaning of their everyday lives in the camps is also evident in the simultaneous significance of both duration and coevalness in the multiple spatio-temporal characteristics of relationships with the pre-displacement past. Even in a situation as protracted and restrictive as the Karenni’s, refugees work hard to make life meaningful and, effectively, to author their own, continuing identities. Importantly, they do this by inverting the emphasis in some of the literature on place that ‘[p]laces gather’ things, ‘experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts’ (Casey 1996: 24). On the contrary, in a new, probably involuntarily selected place, the coalescence of places, ideas and things comes about largely through refugees’ own, very active, agency. Refugees have to (re-)impose anew, amidst new topography and natural history, the ‘ordered arrangement of

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things in a place’ and the boundaries that enculturate individuals. The innovativeness and sheer force of will required to bring this about, so amply evidenced by the Karenni’s interweaving of landscape, ritual, memory, food and dress, is extraordinary. Refugees must make place from scratch – a fact which adds poignancy and import to the more general claim that landscape is not a container ‘but a literal configuration in which the form of the place … joins up with the shapes of the things [and people] in it’ so that ‘[b]eing in a place is being in a configurative complex of things’ (Casey 1996: 25). Place is not, then, lost to encamped refugees – but it must be remade, conceptually and metaphorically as much as physically. Place – and some feeling of being at home in it – does exist in the camp; or rather, it coexists with, and is informed and shaped by, the memories and imagination of place and home before forced migration. The latter, pre-exile places neither disappear nor even become ‘phantasmagoric’ (Giddens 1990: 19, original emphasis removed) for refugees; rather, they transmute into different forms, are continued into the present through material things and embodied human action, and influence the making of place afresh.

Exilic Objects and Bodies Refugee camps then, are an active zone of contact between past, present and future memories, dreams, places, actions and objects. Within them, refugees create a meshwork of ideational links between their real and imagined past, present and future selves. Indeed, using the very notion of ‘meshwork’ – as opposed to ‘network’ – serves to remind us of the phenomenological perspective from which this book started and in which life consists not of fixed points (people, places, objects) that somehow get joined together but of the dynamic physical and metaphorical pathways along which it is lived (c.f. Ingold 2000a and 2000b). The pathways are essentially relations – which both constitute and are comprised of mutually entangled people and things. Spatiotemporal processes and connections are formed both through and between material things and embodied actions. In the process, ‘not only do the agents produce their world in a particular form, but they may also be seen as producing themselves or aspects of themselves’ (ibid.: 11). Material objects such as clothing, food, ritual items and photographs are, as we have seen, crucial within these processes, coming both to represent and act as a means of connection with the pre-displacement past. They simultaneously allow refugees to colonise or enculturate a new environment, and to remember – even re-enact – a former one. In this, refugees can be varyingly successful in overcoming the potential alienation of exile, ‘the feeling of being out of touch with one’s society, one’s environment and one’s

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cosmos – an isolated fragment in an indifferent universe’, as another kind of alienation brought about by contemporary consumer culture is described (Classen 2005a: 2). Indeed, many Karenni refugees are arguably very successful in overcoming their potential alienation, precisely because of the effectiveness of the material, ritual and bodily means discussed in this book. Sociality too, of course, is important – as are its bodily manifestations. Touching other members of one’s community in the familiar, non-sexual ways long established in Karenni culture, for example, maintains not only a connection with the past and the ways in which things were formerly done, but also – and literally – with each other in present circumstances. Karenni childcare and nursing habits, and the same-sex handholding and embracing that continues into young adulthood and beyond, sets up the ‘easy warm affectivity of a lifetime’ (Mead 1956: 41, cited in Synott 2005: 45) – and does so with comfort in a new and challenging situation. Exiled bodies, like exiled objects and practices, are not lost, alienated and acculturated but continuous with – and when necessary transformative of – the pre-displacement past. Information about past forms of culturally significant material objects and practices – as we have seen in relation to both dress and ritual – is treated as cultural knowledge, possession of and authority over which is a desirable currency and marker of status and power within the community. In a refugee context, the status and power lent by claims of authoritative knowledge of the past and of cultural forms rooted therein, is enhanced by the extra fragility and importance accorded to that past by forced removal from its geographical base. At the same time, those who claim authoritative knowledge of aspects of that past are able, through perpetuating ‘authentic’ recollections and re-enactments of it, to keep it alive – and, of course, in doing so to reinforce their own status and power. Such processes are not, however, only about the authority of certain individuals. They are as we have seen about the creation of a sense of identity and continuity for all Karenni refugees, through embodied engagements with objects and places and the memory and imagination those engagements produce. Each re-enactment of a particular practice, each donning of a familiar skirt-cloth, each eating of culturally comforting food, is both a commemorative and a sustaining act. As Seremetakis argues ‘[r]e-perception is the creation of memory through the interplay, witnessing, and cross-metaphorization of co-implicated sensory spheres. Memory … is a culturally mediated material practice that is activated by embodied acts and semantically dense objects’ (Seremetakis 1994: 9). The past is mediated in the imagination and as part of the process of nostalgic reflection and longing. Indeed, the importance to this process not only of narrative but also of material objects – dress, photographs, etc. – could even be said to ‘fetishize’ the pre-exile past (c.f. Naficy 1993: 127, cited in Graham and Khosravi 1997: 128). Objects are something to engage with in

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the present and simultaneously may be mementoes of the past (c.f. Csikszentmihalyi 1993, Parkin 1999). This is hardly unique to a refugee context – but in such a setting objects are particularly powerful and dynamic in forming and, in the repeated re-articulation and subtle shifting of their characteristics and significances, reforming connections with the pre-exile past. Objects can also become metaphors for loss and past violent upheaval; that is, a material form such as traditional women’s dress can become a metaphor both for the past itself and for the loss of that past. In the process, it can become a focus of grief about the past and anxiety about the future – as traditional Kayah women’s dress did for the new arrivals in the northernmost camp from 1996 onwards. It provokes too nostalgia, in Serematakis’s sense of a longing to be able to travel backward through time and space to return to the lost and geographically removed past (Serematakis 1994). What is more, the things lost, remembered and longed for are by definition inseparable from past embodied interactions – not least because some of the most important of those things include physical experiences and preferences concerning, for example, food, drink, houses and toilet and other intimate habits. The cultural form on which this longing becomes particularly tightly pinned and one of the few things from the past that has come into the displaced present, women’s clothing, is, as we have seen, only meaningful when wrapped around and in intimate connection with the female body. It is only when engaged with the embodied person, when performative, habitual and extended (c.f. Scheler 2002 and Chapter 4 in this volume), that dress, or food or ritual practice, acquire and demonstrate their particular significance and power. Yet in material culture theory this object-body engagement and its fundamental necessity for making objects ‘work’, is so often neglected: ‘theorists haul meaning from social institutions to material artifacts [sic] and then back again as if the dense and embodied communication between persons and things were only a quick exchange between surfaces’ (Seremetakis 1994: 134). Turton writes of the Mursi that in recent years ‘they have come to see themselves as occupying a peripheral or marginal place in the world’ a form of what, after Appadurai (1996), Turton describes as ‘localization’ and which is both brought about and characterised by ‘the experience … of becoming dependent on (in the sense of seeing as necessary to a satisfactory lifestyle) values, norms and technologies, the production of which is beyond the knowledge and control of one’s own community’ (Turton 2005: 271). To some extent, and as part of the wider sense of being part of a bigger world that displacement has brought, this feeling of marginality is true for and articulated by the Karenni too (c.f. Dudley 2007). It is intrinsically linked to the material world within and as part of which Karenni refugees live: spatial restriction, topographical and

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environmental differences from pre-displacement ‘home’, issues of diet and dress, desire and nostalgia for material objects old and new … all are central to the Karenni’s perception of themselves and their post-migration place in the world. Younger Karenni refugees especially are less conservative, more politically pragmatic and more outward-looking, materially as well as politically and socially, than their elders, not least because of their narrower experience of ‘inside’ and the greater number of outside influences upon them. As a result, there is to an extent a conflict between younger Karenni refugees’ need to get on with life in their present context, and their parents’ need to hold onto an essentialised cultural past that the young can only ‘ambivalently imagine and suspiciously narrate’ (Daniel and Knudsen 1995: 7). Memories of the past inevitably differ, as do experiences of the present and expectations of the future. But it is not only the younger generation who are keen to move forward and adapt to life now, and it is not only older generations who are concerned to maintain a sense of themselves in relation to the past and ‘tradition’. All refugees are involved to varying degrees in these processes. Nonetheless, it is young people who are particularly affected by the consumption of non-Karenni and non-Burmese objects and ideas that displacement into Thailand permits: consumption in its wider sense of being conscious of ‘living through objects and images not of one’s own creation’ (Miller 1995: 1; see also Appadurai 1986 and 1996, Bourdieu 1984). Daniel and Knudsen write of the importance for refugees of ‘establishing who one was’ (1995: 5). I would add that establishing who one was is also about establishing who one now is, a reshaping and shoring up of identity in displacement. The Karenni-ness that is forged and strengthened in the camps is specific to the camps. They provide a unique space in which ideas of what it means to be Karenni – including ideas about why displacement has happened, imaginations of ‘home’, and future aspirations – both can and must be reformulated. The reformulations come out of the needs of a population which, as we have seen, has no choice but to find strategies for dealing with the restrictions, boredom and fear brought about by the displacement process.

Feeling Right With and In the World Refugee strategies thus seek to make the best of the situation: to overcome boredom and restriction even to a very limited extent, to maintain a sense of self and community, to reconcile the past and the present, and to recreate a sense of place and of being at home. They are about, in short, working as effectively as circumstances allow in order to bring about a feeling of rightness with and in a world and historical trajectory that have

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not been particularly kind. Of especial importance to all this, as we have seen, are the embodied aesthetics and bodily sensations of wearing particular clothing and eating certain foods. A sense of place familiar in the past is both continued into and recreated in the present, including – indeed, especially – through such apparently mundane, quotidian tasks as dressing and eating. Cooking, weaving and wearing together actively serve to create, as far as is possible, a sense of rightness through ‘the taste[s], aroma[s] and texture[s] of home’ (Law 2005: 234). To an extent, these attempts by refugees to create a feeling of rightness can be construed as trying to overcome the liminality sometimes said to characterise the displaced state, as well as heal the rupture between past and present that forced migration has caused. Ritual, for example, as I described in Chapter 4 can subvert liminality. Yet analytical notions of liminality per se are problematic because they do not recognise the fluidity that characterises how people – displaced and non-displaced alike – actually live (although the territorial passage in van Gennep’s original formulation of the liminal phase does indeed seem to apply aptly to refugees). Liminality is best seen not as being in between fixed states but as a mutable process by which subjects become partially or wholly alienated in the short- or long-term from the worlds between which they find themselves. There is not so much a single rupture with the past state of being, as a movement – including disruption, healing, ambiguity and paradox – along a continuum of embodied experience which ranges in its physical or conceptual normality or pathology. Nonetheless, at a point where experience becomes particularly pathological – the moment, for example, of violently induced flight – rupture indeed characterises the reality of what is happening. All the focus in this book on refugee agency and their attempts to make the best of their lot notwithstanding, there are inevitably times – including during flight and, as the traditionally dressed Kayah demonstrate, on initial arrival in a refugee camp – when trauma, shock, bodily and/or sensory alteration and a sense of breakage predominate. Primarily, however, this book has addressed attempts by long-standing refugee communities to make the best of their situation and to feel as right with the world as they can. This is refugee aesthetics, where aesthetics is used in its overarching sense of rightness produced by an appropriate combination of sensory, cognitive and cultural conditions.5 So even the leitmotif of malaria discussed in Chapter 3, for example, becomes more than shorthand for variation in perception and evaluation of different places. Rather, it is a fundamental component in Karenni refugee aesthetics, in which memories of past suffering interlink with contemporary experiences and all are inseparable from the physical environment, from material objects and from embodied, multi-sensorial experience. My emphasis in this book on the material and on embodied experience of it, has been a means to try to understand the world as it is lived (as

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opposed to looked upon and manipulated by apparently objective actors standing somehow outside it) by refugees. This phenomenological approach contrasts strongly with the still too prevalent view of refugees as more passive victims than dynamic actors. It is a stance in which the exile of the encamped, forcibly displaced is materialised not only in their lived engagement with the material world of which they are a part, but also by the anthropologist. For the latter, to materialise exile, analogously with Wagner’s ‘visualise’ is to construct and to interpret ‘a mode, process or dimension of understanding, a strategy of comprehension or conceptualisation’ (2006: 55). Materialising refugees is thus a way of seeing and of trying to convey the emotional and bodily components of the displacement experience. It is an approach with interesting implications for the theorising of exile and of materiality, as I have explored. It is not, however, simply sterile theory but a new and illuminating approach to understanding more fully what it means to be a forced migrant. Paying attention to sensory experience of and engagement with the physical world allows more understanding of what it feels like to be a refugee and of how refugees draw upon their own inventiveness and resilience in feeling as right as they can in their displaced circumstances. This is an approach which can contribute not only to refugee and material culture studies, but also to more effective, sustainable, cooperative and sensitive relief and development work with refugee communities.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

‘Category mistake’ here refers not to an equivocation but to the Ryleian notion of a grammatical structure misleading one into unwarranted beliefs, including the belief in the existence of what are really nonexistent entities or connections (Ryle 1949). For a rather different perspective, see Kibreab’s rights-based conception of ‘territory’ and its relationship with identity (and, by extension, of ‘home’); 1999. The idealisation – and fictionalisation – of the past, and indeed in this case the future, is of course also important in ‘the myth of return’ that is significant for some refugee communities; e.g. Al-Rasheed 1994, Zetter 1999. This is a good example of the ultimate inseparability in a refugee context of ‘cultural’ and ‘welfare’ issues; c.f. Dudley 1999; see also Waldron 1988. ‘“Exile”’, writes Lisa Malkki, ‘connotes a readily aestheticizable realm, whereas the label “refugees” connotes a bureaucratic and international humanitarian realm’ (1995b: 513). Yet I do not use aesthetics in the sense that Malkki does: she is ascribing the term to the distance, isolation and aesthetic vision that exile may confer on individuals, such as writers (Said being the archetypal example).

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Index

A aesthetics, 1–3, 6, 85, 106, 121, 125, 127–28, 140, 149, 155, 165 See also wellbeing affect, 3, 6, 47–48, 71, 95, 112, 114, 120–21, 148 Akha, 29, 122, 154 Anderson, Benedict, 14 anthropologist in the field, 4–6 arrest of refugees, 54–55, 62, 74 Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 23 Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw, 21 Aung Thang Lay, 31, 49 B Bangladesh, 23 border trade and taxes, 18, 71 buildings in refugee camps, 40, 145, 148 Burma, 20–3, 30, 33, 38, 82 Burmese Army See Tatmadaw Burmese language, 12–3, 37, 41, 49, 63, 109–10 C camp clinics See health and illness ceasefires, 18, 21, 44, 74–75 China, 23, 84 Clifford, James, 9, 158 communications in the camps: email and internet, 43, mobile telephones, 43 See also media curative practices. See health and illness curfew in the camps, 41, 73 D Davis, John, 27, 43, 46, 85, 90, 143, 159 death, 38, 76, 131, 133, 151, 153

Demawsoe, 83–84 distress, 44, 46, 50–51, 70, 78, 100, 105, 115, 128–29, 133–34, 147–48 divination, 107, 110–11, 131, 138 dïy–küw, 45, 83–84, 92, 106–20, 128–30, 140–41, 153 dress, 105, 119, 161–64; breast–cloth, 93, 98–99; female, 39, 53–55, 92–106, 134, 163; head–cloth, 93, 98–100, 103, 108, 122, 130–31, 147, 154; male, 91–92, 108; shorts, 91–93, 122; skirt–cloths, 54–55, 66, 91–93, 95, 97–99, 101, 104–5, 108, 120, 122–23, 126, 146–47, 154, 162; tunics, 63 See also individual ethnic groups (Karen, Karenni, Kayah, Kayan) drink, 56, 110, 114; rice–beer (kau’–jei), 107–9, 113 E eating, 4–5, 24, 55–56, 83, 90, 108, 113–15, 128, 132, 138, 162, 165 education in the camps, 31, 41–42, 44–45, 59–60, 69, 72, 74–75; Post–Ten, 72; schools, 38–40, 42, 107 emotions, 3, 6, 46, 55, 58, 76–81, 86, 102, 112–14, 120, 128, 166 See also affect English language, 13, 32, 37, 41, 43–44, 63, 126 entertainment. See media F farming, 13, 18, 41, 47, 58, 60, 100, 106–7, 144–45, 148 food, 41, 56–57, 113–15, 144, 161–63, 165 See also eating, rice, taste G Gellner, Ernest, 14 Gosden, Chris, 121

186 | Materialising Exile H Hammond, Laura, 10 health and illness, 30–31, 45, 56, 86, 103–5, 130–35, 139; camp clinics, 40, 52, 59, 103, 105; curative practices, 130, 132, 139, 141; medicine, 126 home, 2–5, 8–11, 20, 24, 34, 37, 53–60, 75–77, 105, 110–19, 128, 134, 138–45, 150–52, 155–59 houses. See buildings Huay Phu Keng, 33, 39, 133 I illegal immigrants in Thailand, 29, 54 illness See health and illness India, 23 Ingold, Tim, 88, 96, 121, 142, inside/outside, 53, 63–64, 75, 116–19, 128, 164 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), 17, 32, 53, 69, 73–75 International Rescue Committee (IRC), 31, 41, 49, 52, 104–5, 127 J Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), 31 jewellery. See ornaments Job’s tears, 63 K Karen National Union (KNU), 29, 31–32, 71 Karen (the), 12, 18, 23, 29, 32, 48, 63, 66, 90, 96, 122; Paku Karen, 12, 16, 38, 70, 123, 130; Sgaw Karen, 38, 90 Karenni, 11–19, 43–46, 54, 64; dress, 108; soldiers, 43, 51, 69, 71–75, 89 See also refugee camps Karenni National People’s Liberation Front (KNPLF), 19, 72 Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), 11–13, 17–19, 31–35, 38, 40–43, 52, 77 Karenni National Women’s Organisation (KNWO), 42–43, 93

Karenni State, 15–19, 22–23, 26, 51, 53, 60, 68–76, 86–89, 96, 103, 116–17, 143 ka–thow–bòw, 128–42, 153 Kayah State See Karenni State Kayah (the), 12, 16, 26, 38–39; dress, 33, 97–106, 120, 139–41, 148 Kayan (the), 12, 16, 34–36, 87, 106, 123, 153; dress, 93 Khu U Reh, 51–52 L Lahu (the), 29, 49 land, landscape, 88, 128, 138–42, 149, 155, 157, 161 See also place leg–rings, 98–99, 103 Lehman, F. K., 11, 16, 84, 106, 110 liminality, 61–65, 118–19, 165 Loikaw, 16, 99 ‘Long–neck’. See Kayan M Mae Hong Son, 34, 38, 48, 54, 95, 104, 126, 146 malaria, 17, 38, 86–87, 129, 165 Malaysia, 23 Malkki, Liisa, 9, 25, 61, 156–58, 166 marginality See liminality materiality, 3, 152, 155, 166 Mawchii, 33, 68, 73, 89 media in the camps (radio, TV, video), 43 See also communications medicine See health and illness memory, 5–8, 11, 24, 46–47, 53, 60, 78, 88, 94–96, 114, 142–43, 148–52, 158–59 migrations, historical, 82–85 missionary activity, 39, 103, 122–23 Mon (the), 29 myth, 83–84, 90, 110, 150 N National League for Democracy (NLD), 21

Index | 187 O opium, 18, 26 ornaments, 100 outsiders in refugee camps, 38, 96, 126 P Padaung. See Kayan pain, 60, 81, 85–86, 143 Paku Karen. See Karen past (the), 71, 78–82, 88, 93–98, 100–2, 111–21, 126–29, 141–65 See also villages phenomenology, 2–3; Merleau–Ponty, Maurice, 3, 10; Heidegger, Martin, 3, 10, 149 photographs, 63, 74, 89, 93–94, 150–52, 160, 162 place, 7, 116–20, 125, 138–43, 149, 150 Pon river, 33, 68 Proust, Marcel, 120, 123 R Rajah, Ananda, 63 refoulement, 29–30, 38 refugee assistance, 18, 29, 31–32, 42, 53, 69 refugee camps (Karenni), 30–43 refugee population (Karenni), 29 See also Karenni, Internally Displaced Persons refugee protection, 1, 29–31 relocations, forced See village relocations repatriation, 10, 29, 36, 48, 64 resettlement, 7, 30, 36, 58, 64, 85 rice. See food Rimond Htoo, 49–50 ritual, 14, 84, 100, 112–19, 128, 134, 137–43, 149–50, 152, 157–65 S sacrifice. See ritual Saffron Revolution, 21, 26 Salween river, 16, 18–19, 33, 68, 79, 83 satiety, 56, 113–14, 120, 125 sensescape, 53, 56, 125 sensory experience, 3–5, 8–10, 86–91, 113–16, 120–21, 140–41, 149, 152, 162, 165–66

sensory qualities, 3 Sgaw Karen. See Karen Shadaw, 13, 33–34, 44, 51, 68, 79, 89, 123 Shan (the), 16, 29, 38, 49 Site 1, 34, 36–41, 44–45, 55, 87, 93 Site 2, 34–40, 43–46, 58, 69–70, 72–73, 77, 87 skirt–cloths. See dress spies, 51, 73, 77 State Law Order and Restoration Council (SLORC), 18, 21, 73, 79 See also State Peace and Development Council State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), 21, 73, 76, 89 See also State Law and Order Restoration Council Stoller, Paul, 4 suffering (bond of), 27–28, 39, 43–47, 53, 60, 77–79, 90, 159, 165 synaesthesia, 55, 67, 85 T taste, 4–5, 56–57, 113–15, 120, 151, 165 Tatmadaw, 17, 19, 33, 51, 74 textile production See weaving Thai army, 30, 36, 40, 48–51 Thai–Burma Border Committee (TBBC), 31 Thai Karen, 63 Thailand, 16, 18, 23, 29–38, 47–51, 54–64, 71–73 tourism, tourists, 34–35, 65, 79, 85, 104, 123 tradition, traditional, 14, 33–34, 92–93, 97–102, 104, 118, 126, 129–34, 164 tunics. See dress Turner, Victor, 64 Turton, David, 10, 63, 117, 163 U United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 29–31, 36, 40–41, 64–65, 85

188 | Materialising Exile V Van Gennep, Arnold, 139, 165 village relocations (forced), 19, 22, 33, 44–45, 51, 68–71, 74, 76, 89, 127, 159 villages, 44–45, 58, 68–79, 87, 99–103, 107, 110–13, 123, 129–42, 150–54

W weaving, 40, 43, 100, 123, 146–48, 154, 165 wellbeing, 4, 139, 156 Women’s Education for Advancement and Empowerment (WEAVE), 31, 42 Y Yinbaw. See Kayan Yo Shi Yah, 52 Ywathit, 33, 89