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Enchanted Modernities
Ancestral Vitalizations in the Upper Mekong
Micah F. Morton
New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies
Alfred W. McCoy, Ian G. Baird, Katherine A. Bowie, and Anne Ruth Hansen, Series Editors
“With Enchanted Modernities, Morton provides us with the language we need to make sense of the fascinating global Indigenous moment we are witnessing today.”
—Oona Thommes Paredes, author of A Mountain of Difference: The Lumad in Early Colonial Mindanao
Examining the Akha’s reclamation of their collective ancestral identity
Enchanted Modernities tells the story of an Indigenous community’s work to decolonize and reclaim its collective ancestral identity. In this rich, theoretically informed ethnography, Micah F. Morton follows a transregional network of Indigenous Akha people from Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), China, and Laos as they spearhead a new movement for a pan-Akha identity. In the face of enormous historical and present-day colonialist pressures, this neotraditionalist movement has focused on revitalizing (or “vitalizing,” in Morton’s suggestive term) Akha ancestral ways, preventing ongoing conversion to Christianity, and facilitating return conversion to the ways of the Ancestors. Morton focuses especially on the community’s work to ensure their Ancestors live on and thus remain a dynamic part of their, and their descendants’, lives.
Although modernity and its colonial legacies are often portrayed as severing or at least attenuating people’s ancestral ties, Enchanted Modernities shows that those ties persist and, in fact, are on the rise. Akha and other Indigenous ancestral and animist resurgences are blossoming despite the paradigmatic Western framing of modernity as fundamentally at odds with Ancestors and, for that matter, kinship and even religion. Morton demonstrates that modernity and modernization proceed alongside the reproduction of new and old forms of enchantment.
Micah F. Morton is an assistant professor of anthropology at Northern Illinois University. A cultural anthropologist, he studies borders, state-minority relations, religion, and the global Indigenous peoples’ movement. His work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and elsewhere.
Praise
“A very important contribution to Southeast Asian ethnography, religious studies, and Indigenous social movement research. Drawing on extensive field research and unparalleled access to cosmopolitan Akha intellectuals, Morton explores, in clear and accessible terms, how the Akha people are building new networks and alliances in order to resist assimilation and revitalize their ancestral connections.”
—Nancy J. Eberhardt, author of Imagining the Course of Life: Self-Transformation in a Shan Buddhist Community
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. We Have Our Own Ghanr!
Chapter 2. Within the Village Gates
Chapter 3. Without a Gate
Chapter 4. Beyond the Village Gates
Conclusion: Bring It Back, Move It Forward
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
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Development in Spirit
Religious Transformation and Everyday Politics in Vietnam’s Highlands
Seb Rumsby |
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Larger images
February 2025
304 pp. 6 x 9
43 b/w illus.
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