My view of religion is essentially similar to that of Geertz’s, referred to earlier. While religion may be a matter of belief and a system which provides a moral order for the Palokhi Karen themselves, it is for all that a system of symbolic representations. It is thus made up of cultural categories, concepts and ideas. Accordingly, whatever else religion may involve, it also consists of conceptual associations which represent some underlying schemata of cognition or, in other words, models. While I would not claim that there is, necessarily, a single cognitive model in Palokhi Karen religion, an important aspect of my argument consists in demonstrating that there is, at least, a dominant (or primary) model. This, I call a “procreative model of society” in the religion of the Palokhi Karen. As I attempt to show, the procreative model of society in Palokhi is based on a very fundamental difference, namely, the difference between male and female. This is a model which is identifiable in symbolic representations in the domain of kinship and marriage. It is also to be found in agrarian rites: two key swidden rituals are also based on this fundamental difference between male and female and their conjunction.

Furthermore, I suggest that there are other identifiable models and their significance can only be understood in terms of the dominant model. For example, I attempt to show that the linguistic system of sex and gender differentiation in Palokhi contains an essential distinction between non-fecundable and fecundable human females. This is related to the system of kin terms and a naming system, both of which mark out the conjugal bond and the continuity of generations. The cultural significance of these systems (or the models in these systems) lies in their relation to the dominant model.

Religion, however, has its behavioural aspects. One of these is, of course, ritual. I therefore take ritual to be the expressive, practical activity characteristic of religion. However, I do not necessarily accept that ritual is behaviour or activity which only takes place in a context which would be conventionally recognised as “religious”. This is a view that is by no means new in anthropology. Leach (1964:12-3), for instance, has suggested that actions may be placed on a continuum with the purely technical at one extreme and the highly sacred at the other, and that most actions would fall in between with their significance being drawn partly upon both. It is a view of behaviour which has considerable utility because it enlarges the analytical base on which meaningful interpretations may be made.

To give one example, which is an important one in the ethnography of the Palokhi Karen, consider eating. The consumption of food is, at one level, a technical act in the sense that it serves the function of nutrition. On the other hand, it is at other levels, a highly symbolic act involving commensalism in ritual situations. Indeed, it would appear that this very basic human activity is employed (as it is with many other societies) to express symbolically the nature of social relations in domestic social organisation, community organisation, as well as various ritual relationships. Depending on context, one important feature of eating as a ritual act is that it may be “transformative” in Kapferer’s sense (1979:3–19), as well as being “constitutive” as I call it.

Between the strictly functional and the highly symbolic, eating is also part of day-to-day domestic activity in the sense of a non-reflective routine. Nevertheless, it occurs in situations which are very much social and domestic. It is part of my argument that at this level of routine activity, eating and commensalism is also symbolic; it is a practical ritual in which the principal aspect is the “constitutive”.

There is one further aspect to ritual which I wish to touch on briefly. In Palokhi, ritual activity involves both verbal and non-verbal performances often in conjunction. Thus, by ritual I also mean those aspects of behaviour (in “religious” contexts) in which the use of language is a “performative” in Austin’s sense (1962) and as Tambiah (1968, 1979) has elucidated it.

I also argue that in terms of the more general relationship between economy, social organisation and the social and cultural order of the Palokhi Karen, their dependence on external sources for rice represents a paradox. This dependence does not significantly alter the social cultural order which provides the Palokhi Karen with their particular sense of identity. On the contrary, it helps to sustain this order; it enables the community to meet its subsistence requirements, but because they have an on-going system of subsistence agriculture which is intimately linked to their religion, the reality of the social and cultural order in Palokhi remains undisturbed. The reason for this lies in what we might call the “unassailable” character of their cultural ideology — at least as it has remained up to the present time.

At the heart of the maintenance of their social and cultural order is this cultural ideology, built up of symbolic representations, which links agricultural production to social processes. As a working definition, which forms part of the interpretative framework on which my argument is based, I take cultural ideology to be the structured relations between symbolic representations, social organisation and agricultural production in Palokhi.

The concept of “cultural ideology”, as I use it, ultimately comes from Althusser’s treatment of ideology. Ideology, according to Althusser,

The important aspect of Althusser’s definition, as I see it, is the attention it gives to ideology as a “relation between relations” and the distinction between the relations in the objective (“real”) conditions of existence and these relations as they are thought (“imaginary”) and experienced (“lived”).^[11] It is not a simple distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. Rather, ideology is the “second degree” relation between the relations which are established in thought, and as they are lived, about objective conditions.

Thus, in the case of Palokhi Karen religion the cognitive models which I depict are, as I would call it, first degree relations established in thought. It is the relations between models, however, that constitute a cultural ideology. To take one example, there is in Palokhi a dominant “procreative model of society”, as I call it, which exists in the domain of social organisation and the domain of agriculture. It is the relation between them (or the extension of the model from society to cultivation) which constitutes part of the cultural ideology in Palokhi.

Following Yao (1983:22), I do not make a distinction between “ideology” (conventionally understood in its “political” sense) and “cultural ideology”. The reason is that “ideology” is, as Yao observes, by its very nature “cultural” because it is constituted by culture. ^[12] Nevertheless, I find it convenient on occasion to use the term “ideology” as it is conventionally understood. I use the term in this sense to describe, for example, the way in which the headman and elders in Palokhi are impelled to “enforce” certain marriage rules (see below). The different senses in which I use the term will be apparent from their contexts.

Here, I wish to deal very briefly with what I termed the “unassailable” character of the cultural ideology in Palokhi up to the present time. By this, I do not mean to imply that the ideology is incapable of change but, rather, that given the particular configuration of “objective conditions” in the history of the Palokhi Karen, the cultural ideology has not only remained the same but has been extended to include certain changes in these conditions. One important example, which I shall not be able to discuss in any detail later because of limitations of space, is the cycle of wet-rice agricultural rituals in Palokhi. The Palokhi Karen have not only adopted wet-rice agriculture from the Northern Thai, but they have also adopted some Northern Thai agricultural rituals as well. Nevertheless, both have been subsumed within an existing form of social organisation and agricultural production, namely swidden cultivation, and a cycle of swidden rites. In other words, the pre-existing system of agriculture has exerted a “priority” which has enabled the Palokhi Karen to include wet-rice agriculture and accompanying Northern Thai agricultural rituals within their ideological system without any substantial change in the system.

An important part of my argument also rests on showing that the perpetuation of the cultural ideology in Palokhi depends on the performance of various rituals at domestic and communal levels, and a concern with the continuity of ritual relationships. Central to this is the role of the headman of the community and other males in senior generations who are the religious functionaries in all important communal rituals, including marriage ceremonies. Their role may otherwise be described as the ritual management of reproduction in younger generations and agricultural production in Palokhi. In this respect, Palokhi resembles a great many other societies in which age and sex act as natural principles of social differentiation (La Fontaine 1978). In Palokhi, however, the role of the headman and males in senior generations is best understood in the following terms: as religious functionaries whose positions are defined according to these principles, these men are the managers of the “symbolic capital” of the community.

The nature of headmanship and the position of males in senior generations cannot be usefully considered in terms of “political leadership” or “political organisation”. It is best considered in terms of the exercise of moral and jural authority. If, however, “political” is taken in the sense of “acting to influence the actions of others” then, to take the example of the enforcement of marriage rules, it may be regarded as such. It is important to realise that, in this particular sense, the “political” aspect of authority in Palokhi is that the headman and older men act to influence others on the basis of the “moods and motivations” generated by the symbolic system rather than the cultural ideology itself. To this extent their actions would be “ideological” as conventionally understood. It is, however, in these kinds of actions, including their officiation of important rituals — in short, the management of the “symbolic capital” of the community — that the system of symbolic representations is regenerated and the cultural ideology perpetuated.

It is, therefore, through these relationships between agriculture, religion, social organisation, the authority of males in older generations and their central role in the religious life of the community, that the cultural ideology of the Palokhi Karen is perpetuated in highly symbolic, as well as “practical”, ritual activity. It is the reproduction of this ideological system, in these ways, that enables the Palokhi Karen to maintain their distinctive identity. For, it pre-empts the emergence of significantly different ways of seeing things which could conceivably lead the Palokhi Karen to view themselves as being anything other than what they regard themselves to be.

The argument is presented in the following chapters through a close examination and analysis of a series of data from Palokhi.

I begin, in Chapter II, with a description of Palokhi’s history as a settlement and an examination of the institution of headmanship. This entails an examination of Palokhi Karen ideas about what it means to be a community, the importance of continuity in the ritual relationship between the headman and the tutelary spirit of the domain (the “Lord of the Water, Lord of the Land”). I also introduce the concepts of “heat” and “cooling” which are important in Palokhi Karen ideas about harmony in the on-going existence of the village as a community.

In Chapter III, I discuss kinship and domestic social organisation in order to draw out the ideology of kinship and marriage as a central aspect of the cultural ideology of the Palokhi Karen. The chapter is essentially concerned with an explication of a “procreative model of society” in Palokhi. This requires an extensive examination of kinship terminology, the system for naming individuals, the system of sex and gender differentiation, and dress and colour symbolism. It also entails a further analysis of the concepts of “heat” and “cooling” and the role of the headman and village elders in the maintenance of the symbolic and ideological significance of marriage. Following from this, I discuss the sociology of household formation and fission, relating the ideology of kinship to social organisation in Palokhi.

Chapter IV is concerned with rather more general issues in Palokhi social organisation, namely, the role of kinship in relation to patterns of household production and consumption. Here, I also explore the symbolic aspects of the consumption of food which are related to the ideology of kinship and the household as the basic unit of production and consumption in Palokhi. The symbolism of eating is integral to the representation of social relations in the routine consumption of food as well as in ritual contexts which include domestic rites and agricultural rituals.

Chapter V is mainly given to a consideration of the subsistence economy of the Palokhi Karen. In this chapter, I discuss in some detail swidden and wet-rice cultivation in order to show the extent to which agricultural cultivation fails to meet the consumption requirements of the Palokhi Karen. This is followed by a description of the ways in which rice deficits are made up in the cash sector. Overall, the chapter attempts to show how the Palokhi Karen are integrated into a larger socio-economic environment and how they utilise it according to their own needs. The chapter, however, also contains a discussion of an important aspect of the sociology of agricultural cultivation: the crucial role of men in the ownership and inheritance of wet-rice fields which, I argue, is an important aspect of the relationship between social organisation and agriculture. As such, it forms an integral part of the cultural ideology of the Palokhi Karen.

I further explore the cultural ideology of the Palokhi Karen in relation to agriculture in Chapter VI through an examination of the cycle of swidden rites in Palokhi which are integral to the religious life of the Palokhi Karen. In this chapter, I describe and analyse several key rituals. Among the many symbolic representations contained in these rituals, perhaps the most significant for an understanding of the cultural ideology of the Palokhi Karen are the ritual practices associated with “heat” and “cooling” and certain symbolic expressions related to marriage and commensalism. This chapter, thus, sets out the “procreative model of society”, discussed earlier in Chapter III, in the context of swidden cultivation.

In the final chapter, I draw together the main threads of the argument contained in my examination of the ethnographic data from Palokhi and return to a consideration of cultural identity and its maintenance in Palokhi. I discuss this in relation to the ethnic identity of the Palokhi Karen and examine the general implications for an understanding of Karen ethnic identity with reference to other Christian and Buddhist Karen groups.