The Telakhon Karen and the Karen Christian nationalists are somewhat extreme cases of how religious change may be seen to be associated with manifestly different forms of “being Karen”. They are recognisably different from each other, and from the Palokhi Karen. More difficult to identify would be the kinds of differences which may exist in Karen communities which undergo religious conversion (whether to Buddhism or Christianity) but with perhaps less pronounced organisational or political changes. Unfortunately, little has been written on such communities and they must remain as an area to be investigated. The Telakhon and the Karen nationalists nevertheless offer useful insights into the question of religious, cultural, and ethnic change if taken as examples of what is possible in the relationship between religion and identity.

There can be no doubt that however it is internally defined by the people themselves, both the Telakhon Karen and the Karen separatists regard themselves as being unequivocally Karen. In the same way, the Palokhi Karen consider themselves to be quite unambiguously Karen, though they refer to themselves in their dialect as pghakoe’njau or “human beings”. As I have already argued, whatever the criteria or “commonsense constructs” they may use to define their “Karen-ness”, the definition itself must be considered tautological. Accordingly, any actor definition of identity (whether we choose to call it cultural or ethnic) has limited, if any, value for a sociological analysis. Sociological definitions according to some “marker” or sets of “markers”, on the other hand, are I suggest not without their problems. While diacritica, such as language, may enable us to establish whether or not a group of people or a community may be taken as being of one ethnic group rather than another (say, Karen and Northern Thai), they become inadequate for the identification of intragroup differences, especially when these intragroup differences are of an order resembling that between larger groups. These intragroup differences are clearly exemplified by the Telakhon Karen, the Karen nationalists, and the Palokhi Karen.

This is easily seen in, for example, the use of Karen as a language (or, for that matter, dress or any other “symbol”) as a “marker” of identity. It is only a marker in a nominal sense regardless of whether or not it is taken as such by the Karen themselves. As I have tried to show, very particular kinds of cultural meanings are expressed through the use of Sgaw Karen in Palokhi in relation to their ritual and social life. It is extremely unlikely that these meanings are similar to those expressed in the use of Sgaw Karen among the Telakhon or the Karen nationalists. Indeed, I would argue that they are very different. The fact that Sgaw Karen is used by all three therefore says very little about what this might signify in terms of their identification as Karen. The central issue here, in other words, is a clearer sociological understanding of the role of language (rather than language per se) as it is employed by the Karen. The same may be said for Karen dress, as I have tried to show in the case of the Palokhi Karen.

One conclusion which I would therefore draw from this brief examination of the Telakhon and the Karen separatist movement, in relation to the argument in this study, is that in discussing what is similar and different among communities which claim a “Karen” identity, an analytical concept like “cultural ideology”, as I defined it earlier, has a certain utility. It makes it possible to identify what inter- and intragroup similarities and differences are without recourse to actor definitions of identity which would thereby implicitly restate a tautology at an analytical level; it also enables us to do so without recourse to some notion of “markers” of identity, the analytical status and applicability of which can only be relative. The concept of “ethnicity” as applied to the Karen in the contexts of religious change, however, raises precisely this problem, for if it is taken too far, it leaves us with a much too relativistic notion of ethnic identity in which the only irreducible element is the cultural distinctiveness of this identity. I would suggest that while the term “ethnicity” has its uses, the logic of its application must require us to examine more closely what is entailed by the notion of cultural distinctiveness, and to do so brings us back to culture. For analytical purposes, however, “culture” itself may be too general and it is here that something like “cultural ideology” may serve better.

In the case of the Palokhi Karen, the notion of a cultural ideology I believe enables us to grasp a great deal of what makes them distinctive not only in their own eyes, but in relation to other Christian or Buddhist Karen and, more generally, the Northern Thai as well. This cultural ideology is, as I have argued, best described as the structured relations between a “procreative model” of society and social processes, an integral part of which is a system of social classification based on the difference between male and female, cultural definitions of the relations between the two and the relationship between men and land, and a “model” of agricultural processes. The cultural ideology of the Palokhi Karen is “reproduced” in and through their religious system, a system which is dominated by men who play a crucial role in ritual life. In Palokhi, remaining distinctively Karen is a matter of cultural reproduction and the maintenance of identity.