The Akha-Network
(an essay about communication networks and information transfer in traditional oral Akha culture)

The path is forking in front of the bomb crater. To the right, the way continues to the river Mekong, which draws the borderline between Myanmar and Laos. I follow the path to the left, steeply uphill and through heavy growth until suddenly I reach the top of the mountain and climb out of the jungle. The panorama of the softly curved mountains covered with opaque woods appears milky-overexposed and I can recognize the village I am heading to on the opposite slope.

The Akha are a people of about 2,5 million. They do not inhabit a defined territory, but live scattered across Thailand, Myanmar, China, Vientnam and Laos. There they are cultivating the difficult inaccessible and loamy highlands. I had been on my on my feet for nine hours and still had not arrived at Chaperkeun, the Akha village in the Laotian part of the Golden Triangle, which I was invited to visit. While tiredly stumbling along the narrow path, which was the only visible connection between the lowland and highland villages, I started imagining how the network of Akha hamlets, the decentralized structure of their settling, as well as the meaninglessness of national borders to them, resembled some characteristics of the internet.

Un Ma, the first spirit, gave an alphabet to all people. He presented the Akha tribe with a water buffaloes hide on which letters were written. This hide was difficult to keep. If it got moist it swelled easily. If it was stored in the house, rats ate it. So the Akha people ate the lettered hide, saying that it was better for them to keep their knowledge inside. This is why the Akha tribe does not have any letters, but its people do have a splendid memory. (in> Takato Kanomi, People of Myth, Japan 1991, p 317)

While the Ancient Egyptians dismissed King Thamus¹ warning of introducing writing, -that it would bring forgetfulness and dummy wisdom to society - (Plato, Phaedrus 427-347 B.C.), the Akha do not use any writing until today. However they know an extensive oral literature. Floating in my thoughts, I kept playing with the internet-comparision. The countless legends, songs and wisdoms of the Akha comment on all aspects of life, such as history, nature, morals, love, death, and the codes of living together. (...) The common characteristic between their oral literature, passed forward by memorizing, and online literature, is their status inbetween written and spoken word...

There are a sum of circumstances - the missing script, the impassable locations of the villages, the missing of infrastructure such as transport, electricity, classic schoolsystem, being devided across five (more or less politically totalitarian) nations, - which make me wonder how the Akha kept their collective memory? How did they keep alive the extensive literature, which represents the experience of their ancesters to draw from?

The Other Theatre

In an ironic way the bomb crater at the path fork, covered by creepers, is reminds of times, in which this seemingly untouched landscape, the mountainous north of Laos, served as operational area for state-of-the-art (data-collection and -transfer) technologies.

These activities were running under the cover name The Other Theatre, which stood for nothing less than The Secret War which the USA was leading against Pathet Lao, the Laotian national movement, which had its origins in the 30ies, opposing the French foreign rule influenced by communist Viethminh.

The previous history of the Other Theatre: Since Laos had gained independence, a (quite) unstable coalition government included the left party from the beginning. When it was in the offin that the leftists¹ popularity and power grew, a conference was held Geneva (1961) in order to prevent Laos from becoming the next playground of the superpowers. This resulted in Laos getting neutral status, which outruled the presence of any foreign military forces within its borders. The following coalition government soon got as paralysed by disagreements as the previous one. Pathet Lao felt threatened and retreated into its homelands, the north, were the unaccessible mountains garanteed a safe operation base. The only settlements in this scarcely populated area is those of diverse mountain peoples, among which are also the Akha. One of the young Akha men who joined the leftists was Axang Laoli. Today he is the only Akha in Laos holding a high political position: he is the Interior Minister.

The key question of the US-American war strategists was how to controll the movements of the Œenemy¹, which were taking place either under the protecting cover of the dense leaveroof or of darkness, without involving an American military presence. Therefore technologies were developed and applied, which took on the challenge of the jungle, of the monsun thunderstorms, and of the nocturnal obscurity, as well as the Treaty of Geneva. They were designed to wrest information from the ground and to forward it simultanously to the operation headquarter, as described for example in Paul Virilio¹s ³Krieg und Kino²: There were the accoustic and seismographic detectors hidden along the supply routes, which the guerrilla were running along the borders (the socalled McNamara line). Out of remote controlled airplanes infrared photographie and thermographology was conducted for nightvision and -recognition of hostile movements. The data was transmitted directly to the US base in Thailand, where the computergenerated pictures got analysed. Finally exact time and geographic coordinates were sent to the bomber pilots, which were supposed to hit the enemy immidiately.

Besides the above mentioned natural advantages the Pathet Lao were exploiting, the fact that their resistence was based on the decentralized structure of the mountain villages - be it resources, temporary shelter or storage - meant that the elemination of one base didnot destabilise them. However the saturation boming had the sad sideeffect to bring Laos into the Guinness Book of Records - as the (until recently) most heavily bombed nation on earth (on a per capita basis).

Akha-zang

I arrive in time at the village to take part in celebrations which were in full force by the evening.The second day of the Swing Festival finishes with feast and dancing. While I am sipping the never ending flow of welcome- rice-whisky, the shamane sings for hours and hours along the rythms of gong and bamboo poles.

The shamane, Atu, had been assisting his uncle for decades, who was the shamane of the village before him. They had also visited other villages at certain occasions such as funerals or weddings, in order to recite together and memorize the archaic texts, until Atu managed to repeat them word by word on his own. Each generation is taking over the wisdom of the ancesters through their cultural specialists (headman, shaman, silversmith,...). Although the oral literature is as extensive as let's say the Bible, if recited in a village in Shan State or North Vietnam you will always hear the exact same version, although these villages might not have been in contact for hundreds of years. ...

The mnemonics of the Akha reminded me on the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. There he describes a society, where the regime forbids the ownership of books. Aside in the deep woods, opposition members found the settlement of the Œbook people¹: Each of them gives himself the name of the book the person brought along in order to save it, learning it by heart, word by word, as they have to destroy the book afterwards to be safe. This way they conserve the content as a Œliving book¹ for a better future, in which they believe. Akha-zang offers also a method to define who belongs to their ethnic group. When two Akha men meet the first time, they eventually recitate their genealogy of about 70 generations. It always starts with Sumi-o, the mythical founder, but after the fifth generation the lines start splitting into the branches of an immense ancester-tree, and this way they find out how they are exactly related to each other, creating the space of context around each other.

The mission

The first who 'returned' a written alphabet to the Akha were the missionaries, but they traded it against the souls of those who wanted to attain it. Ignoring the overlapping of the religious aspect of Akha-zang with all the other aspects of live, they were teaching only those who were willing to use their literacy to study the Bible afterwards and turn their backs to their ancesters wisdom.

In Laos the goverment is just about to introduce primary schools in Akha villages. The teachers are mostly of other ethnic origin, Laotian or Thai or Hmong, and most are not able to speak Akha at all,and the children don¹t understand the Laotian, which they are taught to read and write during the first two years. Some NGOs in Thailand, where the situation is similar, started to teach the Akha to write in their own language. As all five nations, where Akha are settling, boast different national scripts, NGOs are suggesting the use of Latin letters, as this would be a neutral solution. So far, the Laotian Ministry of Educational Affairs refused to accept this. When bringing literacy to the 68 ethnic groups (UNESCO meeting in Vientiane 1996) of the country (which is half of the population), they want to introduce nationalism to the tribal societies. But as the budget for education is not sufficiant to cover the need of primary schools, the idea of Akha writing disappears into the distance.

One can guess that newspapers or mail will certainly not become a daily information media in the near future if ever, not only because of the Akha¹s illiteracy, but also because data which needs to travel physically (as a piece of paper) is virtually not deliverable to their remote villages, which are between two hours and two days walking distance even from the nearest market place.

During the Cold War, when the CIA was desperate to send messages to its undercover agents in the mountains, it faced the same problem and established radio transmitters,later on, one of these transmitters, located in Chiang Mai (North Thailand) got converted into a radio station which broadcasts programmes in minority languages, among which an hour of Akha is programmed daily. Radio relates well to the tradion of an oral culture and is their most important media now, building a link between the Akha across national borders. The battery-run transistor radio brings entertainment, songs, and stories into the households. The popular songs of the Akha band 'Ado' spread quicker than the old songs of the grand parents. Maybe the history of information transfer will happen the converted way: streaming video via satelite- connections and solarpowered hardware, before tv, newspapers, even writing and roads ever reach the villages.

Manu Luksch 1997

[bibliography about Peoples of the Golden Triangle
bibliography about Secret War in Lao PDR
sources about Akha culture: thanks to Leo Alting von Geusau]

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