Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Guido Sprenger (
) is Junior Professor of Social Anthropology in the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Münster, Germany.
Respected male household heads of the Rmeet (Lamet), an upland ethnic group of northern Laos, occasionally perform rituals in order to obtain ranked titles. These titles originally stemmed from lowland polities such as the Sipsòng Panna, Luang Prabang, or Nan, stratified societies in which they structured a hierarchy of officials and noblemen. Although these polities have now been absorbed into modern nation-states, the titles are still alive among some uplanders. Yet in the process of adoption, the Rmeet have altered the nature of the hierarchy they express. While titles formerly were conferred by kings or high-ranking officials, Rmeet ritual demands wife-givers, the relatives of a man's wife or mother, to perform this task. Often in the context of healing rituals, Rmeet approach these affines to bestow a title on them as part of an exchange of gifts. In Rmeet ideology, wife-givers are superior to wife-takers. They are the source of health and fertility of both humans and rice fields. Yet these wife-giving hierarchies do not form a pyramidal structure that integrates the entire society. Everybody has both wife-givers and wife-takers, and thus everybody is at once in a superior and an inferior position to other families (houses).
Thus, two contradictory types of hierarchy meet in Rmeet title-giving: a transitive hierarchy, in which the superiors of my superiors are also my superiors, exemplified by lowland principalities and signified by ranked titles; and an intransitive hierarchy, in which my superiors' superiors are not necessarily superior to me and might even be my inferiors--for example, when my wife-givers' wife-givers are my wife-takers. Transitive hierarchies have a top and a bottom, whereas intransitive ones do not (Parkin 1990). The question is, how do these two types of hierarchy relate in the present case? What does this tell us about communications between upland and lowland societies in Southeast Asia, and between predominantly "egalitarian" structures and predominantly "stratified" ones?
These questions have pervaded the study of highland Southeast Asia ever since Edmund Leach published his Political Systems of Highland Burma ([1954] 2001; see also Kirsch 1973; Lehman 1967; Robinne and Sadan 2007;...