Palokhi agricultural rituals are, in the main, performed by individual households qua domestic groups wholly responsible for their own subsistence needs and a crucial aspect of this is the ritual ownership of swiddens as distinguished from general ownership in which all members of the household are regarded as owners of their swidden. Every household with a swidden has a ritual owner who may be any member of the family, and an officiant who is always the eldest male in the household, that is a father, a son or son-in-law. The two, therefore, are not necessarily the same person although in Palokhi it has generally been the case that the ritual owner has also been the ritual officiant.^[2] The fact that the ritual officiant is always a male (with the exception of one ritual which I discuss later) has to do, of course, with the domination of ritual life by men and their primary association with the cultivation of land. The ritual ownership of swiddens, however, is related to certain conceptions in the religion of the Palokhi Karen where the successful growth of the rice crop is identified with the health and well-being of the ritual owner who, in effect, represents the entire household.

The Palokhi Karen have a term which is a compound of two elements which make up a dyadic set that is most often found in healing (soul calling) prayers. The first element is tachu which means “strength” and the second element is takhle which means “speed” or “fleetness of foot”. Compounded, these two terms — tachu takhle — give us something like “good health” or “vitality”. The Palokhi Karen say that if the ritual owner of a swidden is constantly plagued by sickness and ill-health, then his “vitality descends” (lau tachu takhle) and that as a consequence of this, the crops in the swidden will likewise suffer. On the other hand, although there may be no overt indication of ill-health on the part of the ritual owner, but if the harvests from swiddens are consistently poor, this too is taken as a sign that the “vitality” of the ritual owner has waned. Thus, the state of harvests are symptomatic of the condition of the ritual owner. The rationale for the practice of having a ritual owner, therefore, is that the “vitality” of the ritual owner is supposed to ensure a good harvest.

Ritual owners are usually also ritual officiants, but when it is deemed that the “vitality” of the officiant and owner has waned, then it becomes necessary to nominate a new ritual owner in order to ensure that subsequent harvests will be plentiful. It sometimes happens, however, that old men who are still in good health but are nevertheless unable to perform all the tasks required in agricultural pursuits may then decide to nominate a new ritual owner as a precaution against poor harvests which might result from the slow decline in their powers and abilities. The nomination of a new owner is usually decided at the discretion of the oldest male in the household and his wife. Not infrequently, however, this decision or choice of a new ritual owner may be arrived at through divination with the help of one of the two ritual specialists in Palokhi, or a Northern Thai ritual expert (called a mau duu in Northern Thai) in the nearby Northern Thai village of Ban Thung Choa. The new owner may be anyone in the household, male or female, but in general not children who have yet to reach an age when they can regularly perform a full day’s work.^[3]

If the new owner is a son or son-in-law, he will be taught how to conduct all the different rituals and their accompanying prayers as and when they become necessary to perform, that is on an ad hoc basis. This, it may be noted, is essentially how ritual knowledge is transmitted in Palokhi. Instruction in these matters is not carried out in any formal manner. It is thus not unusual to find a son or son-in-law forgetting parts of the prayers that he has been taught when he conducts agricultural rites in the swidden. Very often, he will perform the ritual acts and recite whatever he may remember of the prayers while his father or father-in-law stands by prompting him, or even reciting the entire text of the prayer himself.

If the ritual owner is a woman, however, the procedures are somewhat different. If a wife or daughter is the new owner, she performs only the ritual acts in two rites: those entailed in collecting soil samples for divination in order to decide on the final choice of a swidden site, and the harvesting of the rice grown solely for ritual purposes called the “Old Mother Rice” (By Mo Pgha). She may also be required to plant the Old Mother Rice. This, and the harvest of ritual rice are not structured performances nor do they involve the recitation of prayers unlike the collection of the soil samples which is conducted under the supervision or guidance of the father or husband. It is only in these circumstances that a woman actually performs rites in the swidden. She does not say the prayers which accompany the collection of soil samples; these are recited by the male ritual officiant of the household. From this, it is clear that despite the fact that women may sometimes participate in swidden rituals, this occurs in narrowly circumscribed contexts, and it is men who run the ritual life of domestic groups especially in relation to agriculture.

There are two aspects of the ritual ownership of swiddens worth noting which are relevant to an understanding of the symbolic meanings contained in the rites which make up the ceremonial cycle in Palokhi.

First, notwithstanding the fact that men are preeminent in managing the ritual activities of domestic groups, household members regardless of sex may become ritual owners of swiddens. The substitutability of household members as candidates for the role of ritual owner points to the “homogenous” or solidary nature of domestic groups since one member is as good as another regardless of generation or sex which are criteria that are otherwise important in the organisation, formation and fissioning of domestic groups and ‘au’ ma xae. The practice of having a ritual owner itself indicates the close association between households, represented by the ritual owner, and the rice crop that they cultivate.

Second, although ritual owners may be seen to symbolise households or domestic groups in this particular sense, the relationship between ritual owners and the rice cultivated by their households is not merely a simple identification of person and crop; it is a metonymical relationship based on an implicit similarity and contiguity between what is best described as “life processes” in humans and rice evident in the perception that the successful growth of rice depends on the “vitality” of the ritual owner. Indeed, rice is in fact likened to humans in the number of souls that it is thought to possess, as held in common belief and explicitly expressed in certain agricultural ritual texts. It is not, however, attributed with “vitality” perhaps because it is not “animate” in the sense that humans (and animals) are. Nonetheless, its growth is spoken of as a “rising” (thau or thau ghe, “rising beautifully”) similar to the way in which men and women are thought to “rise” into adulthood, maturity and procreativity as in the expression for “marriage”, thau pgha. The verb thau, thus, expresses what are conceived of as processes of development in these two contexts, namely, the human and the agricultural, indicating a parallelism between the two.