Space and the Production of Cultural Difference among the Akha Prior to Globalization
Channeling the Flow of Life
Deborah Tooker
9789089643254
344 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
Based on the author’s extensive fieldwork among the Akha people prior to full nation-state integration, this illuminating study critically re-examines assumptions about space, power, and the politics of identity, so often based on modern, western contexts. Tooker explores the active role that spatial practices (and their indigenous link to a ‘life force’) have played in maintaining cultural autonomy in an historically migratory, multiethnic context. Space and the Production of Cultural Difference Among the Akha Prior to Globalization: Channeling the Flow of Life expands current debates about power relations in the region from a mostly political and economic framework into the domains of ritual, cosmology, and indigenous meaning and social systems.
Author Bio
Deborah E. Tooker is Chair of Anthropology, Criminology and Sociology and Director of the Anthropology Program at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, as well as Faculty Associate in Research at Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program.
