Modern day Burma is made up of 135 tribes. The Burmans inhabit the central plains. The Mon introduced Buddhism and their state is on eastern coastal Burma. The Shan migrated to Burma from Yunnan province in China and inhabit the northeastern state. The Naga originated from Tibet. The Arakanese have ties with Bangladesh and are being persecuted in Burma for the last 200 years. Upland areas are inhabited by hilltribes of which the Karen are the most numerous.
The Karen National Union (KNU) has been in armed opposition to the government since 1948, one of the world's longest running armed conflicts. The guerrilla warfare has led the military junta to send out an ultimatum in 1991: if any guerrilla action is taking place in a village they wipe out the village. Some analysts say that much of Burma's oil, mineral, timber, jade and opium wealth is in the tribal territories. The smuggling base has given the Karen insurgents a strong base. Half of Karen live in Thailand, the other half in Burma. They are the largest minority in Burma. 20% has been converted to Christianity.
The Karen National Union (KNU) has been in armed opposition to the government since 1948, one of the world's longest running armed conflicts. The guerrilla warfare has led the military junta to send out an ultimatum in 1991: if any guerrilla action is taking place in a village they wipe out the village. Some analysts say that much of Burma's oil, mineral, timber, jade and opium wealth is in the tribal territories. The smuggling base has given the Karen insurgents a strong base. Half of Karen live in Thailand, the other half in Burma. They are the largest minority in Burma. 20% has been converted to Christianity.
"In the mountains of Northern Thailand there is a village. It is the home of people who have wandered through the mountains of southern China, Burma, Laos and Thailand for hundreds of years. Their language and dress is that of their tribe, their homeland is the mountains, their allegiance is to their headman, and their greatest fear is of the evil spirits that lurk in the jungle, and the waters and even in the rice fields.
"The village sits close to the crest of a hill. The houses are low and modest, merging with the contours of the land, the roofs of cogon grass thatch and bamboo walls hardly distinguishable from the packed earth trails and cleared ground that surround them. It might belong to any of the tribes who live in these parts, for although each group is now quite unrelated to any of the others, they share a simple lifestyle. It seems a peaceful place.
"All their talk these days is of towns with houses taller than the tallest trees in the jungle, of how hard i is to learn the new language - and of new kinds of clothes.
"Why should a farmer grow a hundredweight of some crop and walk five days to the nearest market when he can earn the same money selling one pocketful of opium to the eager traders who come regularly to the village?
"There is always more land and always more trees, and if you do not cut and burn the trees and the undergrowth, the crops will never grow well.
"The village has been settled here 14 years now, so it is time to go. The trek has always been an exciting time too, with everyone from toddler to grandfather gathering their few belongings and setting off together, crossing streams and mountain passes, to the new site that the headman and the elders have chosen. Then the forest is cleared, houses built, crops planted - and it is back to smoking pipes.
"They have to eat all the food crops they grown and have none left over to sell, and now that virgin land is so scarce and cultivated land is exhausted, opium is becoming an unreliable source of cash. Selling crafts seems to offer a good way out, at least temporarily. The young men want transistor radios and guns, the girls want silver for jewelry and for their dowries.
"The village can't move on, the way it used to. There are already villages in every promising spot, a lot of streams are now dry, even in the rainy season, lowlanders are starting to move into the foothills..."
Hilltribe people do not have a strong feeling for their homes, as evidenced by the fact that no hilltribe language has separate words for house and home. All houses within the same tribe look pretty much alike, and decoration is generally limited to bundles of herbs drying over the hearth. For tribespeople, the whole village is home. When a tribesman says he is homesick, he means that he misses the ambience of his village, with the children playing in the streets and his family around him. (From the Hands of the Hills, Margaret Campbell 1981)
In a typical home, there is a lot of space around the house in which the 'ambience' can take place. In the refugee camps, "it is like fifty villages are crammed into one,” says one young camp dweller. Yet she is describing leafy Mae Ra Ma Luang, the garden-heavy camp Karen black humourists call ‘Club Med’ or ‘the heaven of the border.’ A few hundred kilometres south in the treeless camp the jokers call ‘hell,’ houses are a metre apart. Even so, someone recently found room to manoeuvre. An elevated overhead three-storey ‘bridge room’ has been spotted recently connecting two rickety houses over one of Tham Hin’s tiny alleys. The joke: ‘See, for the Karen, the only way is up.’ (...) Life in the refugee camp is increasingly difficult as the years roll on, says a co-leader of Tham Hin camp. “The lack of privacy leads to social instability. Living in these conditions, people are affected psychologically, especially when they consider their future. A refugee is a refugee. Even if they say we have rights, in practice it is very different to being a real human being." (Between Worlds: Twenty Years on the Border, TBBC Jack Dunford 2004)
Estrangement from traditional community was a large theme in Marx's early work.
"The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation ... The individual will reach total consciousness as a social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken. This will be translated concretely into the reconquering of one's true nature through liberated labor, and the expression of one's own human condition through culture and art." (Che Guevara, Marxist revolutionary)
"The village sits close to the crest of a hill. The houses are low and modest, merging with the contours of the land, the roofs of cogon grass thatch and bamboo walls hardly distinguishable from the packed earth trails and cleared ground that surround them. It might belong to any of the tribes who live in these parts, for although each group is now quite unrelated to any of the others, they share a simple lifestyle. It seems a peaceful place.
"All their talk these days is of towns with houses taller than the tallest trees in the jungle, of how hard i is to learn the new language - and of new kinds of clothes.
"Why should a farmer grow a hundredweight of some crop and walk five days to the nearest market when he can earn the same money selling one pocketful of opium to the eager traders who come regularly to the village?
"There is always more land and always more trees, and if you do not cut and burn the trees and the undergrowth, the crops will never grow well.
"The village has been settled here 14 years now, so it is time to go. The trek has always been an exciting time too, with everyone from toddler to grandfather gathering their few belongings and setting off together, crossing streams and mountain passes, to the new site that the headman and the elders have chosen. Then the forest is cleared, houses built, crops planted - and it is back to smoking pipes.
"They have to eat all the food crops they grown and have none left over to sell, and now that virgin land is so scarce and cultivated land is exhausted, opium is becoming an unreliable source of cash. Selling crafts seems to offer a good way out, at least temporarily. The young men want transistor radios and guns, the girls want silver for jewelry and for their dowries.
"The village can't move on, the way it used to. There are already villages in every promising spot, a lot of streams are now dry, even in the rainy season, lowlanders are starting to move into the foothills..."
Hilltribe people do not have a strong feeling for their homes, as evidenced by the fact that no hilltribe language has separate words for house and home. All houses within the same tribe look pretty much alike, and decoration is generally limited to bundles of herbs drying over the hearth. For tribespeople, the whole village is home. When a tribesman says he is homesick, he means that he misses the ambience of his village, with the children playing in the streets and his family around him. (From the Hands of the Hills, Margaret Campbell 1981)
In a typical home, there is a lot of space around the house in which the 'ambience' can take place. In the refugee camps, "it is like fifty villages are crammed into one,” says one young camp dweller. Yet she is describing leafy Mae Ra Ma Luang, the garden-heavy camp Karen black humourists call ‘Club Med’ or ‘the heaven of the border.’ A few hundred kilometres south in the treeless camp the jokers call ‘hell,’ houses are a metre apart. Even so, someone recently found room to manoeuvre. An elevated overhead three-storey ‘bridge room’ has been spotted recently connecting two rickety houses over one of Tham Hin’s tiny alleys. The joke: ‘See, for the Karen, the only way is up.’ (...) Life in the refugee camp is increasingly difficult as the years roll on, says a co-leader of Tham Hin camp. “The lack of privacy leads to social instability. Living in these conditions, people are affected psychologically, especially when they consider their future. A refugee is a refugee. Even if they say we have rights, in practice it is very different to being a real human being." (Between Worlds: Twenty Years on the Border, TBBC Jack Dunford 2004)
Estrangement from traditional community was a large theme in Marx's early work.
"The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation ... The individual will reach total consciousness as a social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken. This will be translated concretely into the reconquering of one's true nature through liberated labor, and the expression of one's own human condition through culture and art." (Che Guevara, Marxist revolutionary)
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