merit and the millennium: routine and crisis in the ritual lives of the lahu peopleby anthony r....

Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of the Lahu People byAnthony R. WalkerReview by: James A. MatisoffJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 124, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 2004), pp. 167-172Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132188 .

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Reviews of Books 167

chosen for their thematic content, are less than gems of craftsmanship. Nonetheless, I found myself exasperated by Yang's approach, especially since it occasionally leads him astray. Consider, for exam-

ple, his translation of a couplet by Sima Guang (p. 143): "You put it by the sitting mat, / With expressions of purity constantly on your countenance" / J The second line literallyX 2 The second line literally reads "A pure wind always is on your face." Since pure objects emitting a pure qi is a well-worn clich6, surely this is what Sima Guang intends. Yang, however, takes the "pure wind" to be literally "on" the face, so he switches the reading to be "expressions of purity." Were his habits of paraphrasing not so

deeply ingrained, Yang might have reread and rethought the line, particularly since the different read-

ings have no impact on the point he makes through the poem. Readings where Yang distorts the sense of the line, fortunately, are few, and the poems are largely reliable in a "general" way, since that is all

Yang needs them to be. Still, I would be unhappy if my students emulated Yang's approach. In sum, although presenting a large number of rarely seen poems has its own virtue, I think this would have been a better book if Yang had weeded out the many only incidentally relevant poems and put more effort into revising the translations of the poems that remained.

Yang Xiaoshan's Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song Poetry is only half the book that its title advertises, but that half is still a worthy accomplishment and can serve as a resource for further research. The fact that it focuses so strongly on poetry is a virtue, but in perhaps a more important way, it also is a missed opportunity. In the "Postscript," Yang distances himself from the central question that-whether he wishes it or not-underlies any study that seeks to make a connection between poetry and larger cultural processes. He notes, "It is difficult and dangerous to posit any larger sociohistorical causes or forces directly responsible for this poetic phenomenon [i.e., the prominence of the theme of the urban private garden in mid-Tang poetry], and I have been very cautious and tentative in suggesting any possible connection between literary representations and social reality .. ." (p. 251). Yet, without an assumption about causal connections of some sort, the justi- fication for using poetry as the focus of a thematic study about social and cultural-rather than poetic- issues simply collapses. Yang does offer a few generalizations through which he links the poetry to the culture, but they are modest, brief, and seemingly more inspired by the generic requirements of a mono-

graphic study than by personal interest. I hope that future literary scholars will take up the challenge to

fully explore the conceptual issues that would be needed to truly complete the worthy project set out in Yang's book.

MICHAEL A. FULLER UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of the Lahu People. By ANTHONY R. WALKER. New Delhi: HINDUSTAN PUBLISHING CORPORATION, 2003. Pp. xxxi + 907 + plates, maps, figures. $55.

This massive work must surely rank as the best treatment of the spiritual life of any minority people of Southeast Asia. Although the book's chief focus is on Lahu religious beliefs and practices, Walker

emphasizes that these can only be appreciated in the context of Lahu history and society in general, subjects on which his thirty-six years of research have made him the world's leading authority.

The Lahu people, now estimated to number some 700,000, live in scattered mountain villages widely distributed over China's Yunnan province and Burma's Shan state, with smaller communities in Northern Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. This wide geographical spread has so far protected their

language from endangerment, despite the growing influence of the coterritorial majority cultures, es-

pecially Chinese and Tai. The Lahu language belongs to the Central Loloish (= Yi) branch of the Lolo- Burmese subgroup of the vast Tibeto-Burman family which, together with Chinese, constitutes the Sino-Tibetan linguistic stock. Despite a proliferation of ethnolinguistic names for divisions of the Lahu

people, the most important cleavage is between "Black Lahu" (= Lahu Na) and "Yellow Lahu" (= Lahu



168 Journal of the American Oriental Society 124.1 (2004)

Shi). The Black Lahu group is much larger and more prestigious, and comprises several subdivisions

including "Red" Lahu (= Lahu Nyi), the group among whom Walker lived for four years in Northern Thailand, from 1966 to 1970. The least-known Lahu branch is Kucong, spoken in eastern Yunnan and

adjacent areas of Vietnam (pp. 66-69). The Lahu, like other Southeast Asian hillfolk, have traditionally lived by the labor-intensive prac-

tice of "slash-and-burn" or swidden agriculture, though this way of life is increasingly threatened, and is already virtually obsolete in Thailand. Lahu society is egalitarian, notably with respect to gender: the female Creator of the Earth (Na-law or Ai-ma) was more diligent than the male Creator of the Sky (Ca-law or G'uisha), which has resulted in a large earth and a small sky, so that G'uisha was obliged to squeeze up the earth, producing its mountains and valleys (pp. 163-65); the Female New Year celebrations are one day longer than (and precede) the Male New Year (pp. 415-28); marriage is uxorilocal, with the son-in-law obliged to work in his father-in-law's fields for several years before he can set up his own household (p. 41). Lahu villages are theoretically under the jurisdiction of a headman, although his powers are very limited, and any household disagreeing with his decisions can simply pull up stakes and move elsewhere.

Merit and the Millennium is divided into three major parts, of unequal length. Part I ("A Lahu Vil-

lage in Northern Thailand and its Socio-Historical Matrices," pp. 1-108) sets the stage by describing in colorful detail the daily round of activities in the Red Lahu village where Walker began his research.' He then proceeds to a historical and geographical treatment of the Lahu people as a whole, emphasiz- ing their tradition of fierce autonomy despite the cultural and political pressure from Tai and Chinese under which they have always lived. Part II ("The Diverse Strands of Lahu Supernatural Ideas and Ritual Practices," pp. 111-547) is the heart of the book, a brilliant dissection of the various elements- animistic, theistic, Confucian, and Buddhist-that have interwoven to form the Lahu world of religious ideas. Part III ("The Christian Experience: Cultural Continuities and Discontinuities," pp. 551-738) is a thoughtful and balanced account of the impact of missionary Christianity on the Lahu mind.

Walker vividly brings home the syncretistic nature of East and Southeast Asian religion in general. Alongside their devout Buddhism, the Tai are just as "animistic" as the Lahu, taking care not to offend

locality spirits (p. 132), and setting up spirit-altars in their homes and backyards (p. 139). The Japanese see no contradiction between their Shinto weddings and Buddhist funerals. In China (but not in Thai-

land) Lahu animism is mixed with ancestor worship (pp. 138-39). Lahu Buddhist ceremonies in China

may simultaneously involve chanting sutras and praying to the Dragon King for rain (p. 357). The roughly carved wooden posts known as kaw-mo-taweh are conventionally interpreted as the indestruc- tible white stone posts in the heaven of the creator-god G'uisha (p. 364), but anybody can see that they are phallic in origin. The animist custom of pouring water on the ground when inviting the spirits of dead parents to a feast (chaw suh aw ca ve) is a borrowing from a Tai Buddhist ritual complex, which in turn is derived from a Brahmanical Indic source (p. 205).2 The sensible thing is to hedge one's bets and incorporate into one's own belief system whatever religious ideas are in the air. From a linguistic point of view, it is revealing to see how the same Lahu term has acquired different increments of

meaning, according to the particular conceptual framework in which it occurs. The word aw-bon (< Shan, ult. < Pali puiffia < Skt. punya 'happiness resulting from meritorious action') is used in Buddhist contexts to refer to 'good karma' or 'merit'; in animist tradition it has been adopted to mean 'boon to be sought from G'uisha or a lesser spirit'; while the Christian Lahu have reinterpreted it as 'divine grace; blessings from God'. In ordinary contexts (both for animists and Christians) the word

simply means 'good luck; advantage'; but Christian missionaries have also encouraged a neologistic

1. We must, however, wait until chapter eight ("The Cycles of Year and of Life: The Routine of a World View," pp. 415-594) for an account of the rites and ceremonies connected with the broader cycles of the year and of one's lifespan. Walker admits that chapter eight comes as a "sidestep from the main progression of my treatment of Lahu ontologic ideas," but he has to include this richly detailed material someplace, and to understand it fully one has to have absorbed the previous chapters on Lahu religious life.

2. Walker is also an authority on the Toda, a famously conservative group from the Nilgiri Hills of India (see Walker 1986, 1998), and is thus highly sensitive to the Indic elements in Lahu religion. As he puts it, "The legacy of Mother India spreads wide and deep through the Asian continent" (p. 205).




sense of 'thanks for a favor received', so that aw-bon ui ja ("the favor is very great") is now the closest Lahu equivalent to "Thank you very much."3 As the polysemy of this term implies, there is no clear distinction in traditional Lahu society between the secular and the sacred (p. 122). Curiously the same might be said for the fundamentalist versions of the three "Abrahamic religions," Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Walker analyzes the key concepts of Lahu animism (souls and spirits) with precision and finesse, discussing the panoply of rituals and practices they entail from a broad comparative viewpoint. Drawing his data from sources both historical and contemporary, he traces the regional similarities and differences among such complex rites as making merit (aw-bon te ve), soul-recall (aw-ha khu ve), spirit-propitiation (ne cay ve), and spirit-exorcism (ne g'a ve, ne jaw ve), according to whether they are (or were) performed in Burma, China, or Thailand. He describes the various "ritual specialists" who

perform these rites, most of them doubtless with sincere intent, but sometimes descending into char-

latanry, like the she-pa, ritual extractors of "foreign objects" said to be lodged in the body of a sick

person (pp. 173-79), or into malevolence, like the practitioners of sorcery or black magic, who spe- cialize in unleashing harmful spirits against another person (ne pi pfuh da ve: pp. 290-307).

Coexisting more or less comfortably with this animist conceptual framework is a belief in a supreme Creator who stands far above the nature spirits, called G'uisha.4 While many other Southeast Asian

peoples share such a belief, this being is usually thought to have no interest in or influence on human affairs. With the Lahu it is different: there have traditionally been temples where this Creator was wor- shipped (ch. 7). In one of his most provocative analyses, Walker ascribes this to "a powerful Maha- yana Buddhist movement that began among the Lahu in the late 1700's," which "was able to conflate traditional notions of G'uisha with Mahayana ideas of transcendental Buddhahood" (p. 161). Further- more, this Mahayana-influenced background, along with a kind of native Lahu messianism (see ch. 9), largely paved the way for the considerable success of Christianity since the early twentieth century, as "missionaries added a Semitic gloss to an already much-changed idea of G'uisha."

Most of the rest of the book is devoted to a discussion of the influence of Buddhism and Chris- tianity on the substratum of traditional Lahu beliefs. Particularly fascinating is chapter six ("Mahayana Buddhism in the Lahu Mountains," pp. 310-61). Here Walker had to do considerable scholarly detec- tive work with Chinese sources in order to distinguish facts from legends. Sometime during the second half of the seventeenth century, it is reasonable to believe, a disgruntled Ming official known as Monk

Yang Deyuan sought to foment revolt against the Qing usurpers by establishing a Buddhist monastic

complex at Nancha in the north of Lancang county in Yunnan, where he had moved from a remote frontier area near Dali known as Jizu Shan (Mt. Chickenfoot). He undertook missionary work among the local minorities, especially the Lahu and the Wa, whom he greatly impressed with his sanctity and radical politics, to the point where the Lahu identified him as a manifestation of the Buddha and/or of their indigenous creator-deity G'uisha (p. 313). Nancha later became the focus of Lahu opposition to imperial rule.

Recent research suggests that the Mahayana Buddhism brought to the Lahu was the esoteric or "tantric" strain especially associated with Tibet, attaching much emphasis to the primacy of the guru- disciple relationship, by which charismatic masters impart special religious and political skills to a select company of disciples (p. 326).5 As it happens, this notion fit right in with the apparently indigenous Lahu tendency toward millenarism or messianism (ch. 9: "Lahu Messiahs and the Search for

Utopia," pp. 505-47). It has been a recurrent theme in Lahu history for "mountain man's messiahs"

3. See Matisoff 1988: 186-87. The Lahu previously did not give formulaic linguistic expression to feelings of gratitude.

4. For the etymology of this name, which seems to derive from a Proto-Tibeto-Burman verb "to be," see Mat- isoff 1985.

5. The Lahu (and their close Mon-Khmer symbionts, the Wa) were also under the influence of Hinayana (Ther- avada) Buddhism, since that was the variety practiced by their Tai overlords in Yunnan. This influence has only in- creased in the Lahu settlements of the Shan state and Thailand. The bimonthly ceremonies connected with shi-nyi ("precept days") in Walker's Red Lahu village correspond closely to the two most important Tai wan-sin or wan- phra, observed at the time of the new moon and full moon (pp. 401, 543).




to arise, declaring themselves to be manifestations of G'uisha's divinity, convincing their followers of their miraculous healing and protective powers, and preaching the need for reform of social conduct and ritual behavior in order to realize a "new world" of equality, especially with their longtime rulers: Han, Tai, and, for a half-century in Burma, British as well (p. 514).6

After his decades of research on the history of Lahu religious ideas, Walker has come to a profound understanding of the "many layers of cultural significance" represented by the haw-yeh or village temple to G'uisha that stood so prominently in his original Red Lahu village of study in Northern Thailand (described in loving detail in ch. 7: "Temple Worship: The Cult of the Creator-Divinity," pp. 362-413). Walker agrees with the unanimous opinion of modem Chinese scholars who identify the

temple-based dimension of modem Lahu ritual practice with Buddhism (p. 413): ". . . it is precisely the historical accident of this people's exposure to Mahayana Buddhism-resulting in the canonically untenable but very real identification of G'uisha with Buddha Shakyamuni-that has provided the Lahu with a notion of immanent divinity so remarkably at odds with the nebulous conceptions of transcen- dent creator-gods that are commonplace among Southeast Asian peoples" (pp. 350, 361). Although the institutional trappings of Buddhism, including the fofang (Buddha-houses) and their foye (Buddhist abbots), were wiped out during the ten years of "pacification" during the reign of Guangxu (1875- 1908), village temples and their caretakers survived. As these became more isolated from centers of

Mahayanist orthodoxy, the Buddhist heritage of the temples "became less and less obvious, while their specifically Lahu, G'uisha-centered, character became ever more pronounced" (p. 361).

Chapters ten ("Christian Proselytism in the Lahu Mountains," pp. 551-628) and eleven ("The Con- solidation of Christianity among the Lahu-speaking Peoples," pp. 629-738) present an evenhanded treatment of the impact of missionary Christianity on the Lahu. While he is respectful of the positive contributions of the missionaries, Walker does not mince words in criticizing the accounts they have written of their own activities: "The missionary literature, although defective in its presentation of the details of everyday life and thought of Lahu Christians and, from an anthropological perspective, overly weighted in favor of the activities and the personalities of the missionaries themselves (not to mention, in some case, huge doses of Christian dogmatics), may still, with careful reading, render valuable sociological insights" (p. 627). And again: "I can fully appreciate why many in the anthropological fraternity find the missionary literature tiresomely judgmental, full of self-conceit, and frustratingly superficial in many areas of the traditional socio-cultural life of the 'bemissioned' people ....

At present there are probably more than 60,000 Lahu Christians, or something near ten percent of the entire Lahu population. This figure now reaches thirty percent for the Lahu of Thailand, where in fact the first Lahu were converted by Presbyterian missionaries in the early 1890s. The focus of missionary activity then shifted to Burma, spearheaded by the Baptists, who succeeded in performing mass conversions in 1904-6;7 and finally reached Yunnan a little later (pp. 593ff.).8 Only much later (from 1954) were the moribund Christian communities of Thailand reinforced by new arrivals from Burma.9

The reasons for the considerable success of Christianity among the Lahu are many (p. 577). The

pre-existing concept of the creator-god G'uisha, who had already become an object of worship under the influence of Mahayana Buddhism, was easily identified with the God of the Bible. ". .. I see Chris-

tianity's success among the Lahu (and some 'Lahuized' Wa as well) as due in large part to a series of historical events, more or less unique to the Lahu ... among the peoples of their corner of southwest China. First, the rise of a militant and syncretistic Buddhism in the Lahu mountains, the consequent

6. Such messianic movements have popped up until very recently in several parts of the Lahu settlement area: in Yunnan (1976); in Burma, led by the so-called maw-na g'uisha (gibbon god), beginning in 1973; and in the Wiangpapao area of Thailand in the 1980s.

7. "Burma, including now both Kengtung State and the Wa states to the NW, has proved itself the most fertile ground (at least until quite recently) for both the spread and the institutionalization of the Christian religion among the Lahu people" (p. 647).

8. The suppression of Buddhism in Yunnan after the Lahu revolt of 1905 left the field open for Christian missionaries (p. 598).

9. My own chief village of study (from 1965-66) was the Black Lahu Christian village of Huey Tat (pp. 632- 34, 721) in the Mae Taeng district of northern Thailand near the town of Chiangdao, inhabited by such recent arrivals from Burma. The dialect of this village was the basis for my Lahu grammar (1973) and dictionary (1988).




suppression of the Lahu people by the might of the imperial Chinese and their Republican successors, and, finally, the Lahu people's search for a new messiah to replace their defeated foye of the past" (p. 628). Although World War II was a big blow to missionary activity, as was the advent of communism in China, the situation of Lahu Christians in present-day China has improved somewhat, since many local Chinese officials have come to regard Christianity as a useful intermediate stage between feudal superstition and atheistic communism (p. 713).

It is undeniable that the missionaries have made significant contributions to the quality of life for Lahu Christians, especially in the fields of education and literacy, health and hygiene, as well as in terms of economic development. 10 At the same time it is legitimate to wonder how clear the theolog- ical underpinnings of Christianity are to the Lahu mind. Many Lahu converts in Burma believed that the pioneering missionary William Young was Jesus himself (p. 581). Others thought they would attain

physical immortality if they converted, only to turn with ferocity on the missionaries when a fellow convert died (p. 649). Lucifer is thought by many to be the chief of the animist spirits (ne) (p. 630). Subtle doctrines like the Trinity have been especially hard for the villagers to understand (p. 712). It is especially unfortunate that interdenominational disputes and rivalries among Christian groups have been transplanted to the alien soil of Southeast Asia, e.g., between Presbyterians and Baptists (p. 581), or between Protestants and Catholics."I

Walker traces with some sympathy the change in emphasis from the meaningless mass conversions in Burma in the early twentieth century (pp. 608-9), which were so superficial that the new converts often "reverted" to their traditional religion, to the more recent concern for ongoing pastoral care, the

nurturing and solidifying of the Christian communities already established (pp. 648ff.). Under relatively benign political conditions, a "subtle interweaving of Christian and traditional elements" can flourish, as in the Christmas celebrations in Lahu villages of Northern Thailand (pp. 642-45).

The physical appearance of this book is extraordinarily attractive. It is enlivened by over seventy plates of photographs, as well as by a wealth of explanatory maps and figures. Especially valuable are the three word-lists which appear as appendices: the glossaries of Lahu words (pp. 739-52), of Chi- nese characters (pp. 753-67), and of words in Thai script (pp. 768-70). It is interesting to see what characters are used to transliterate Lahu words in the various Chinese sources. Pinpointing the exact Tai origin of a loan into Lahu is sometimes tricky, as in the case of paw-hku 'chief ritual practitioner in a temple of G'uisha', where the first syllable obviously means 'father' (Siamese ph53), but the second syllable could plausibly be derived either from khun 'lord' or khruu 'teacher'.12

The enormous "Bibliography" (pp. 771-842) is a tribute to the depth of Walker's scholarship. One has the impression that he has absorbed every scrap of material, published or unpublished, ever produced about the Lahu people. His exhaustive mining of Chinese sources was ingeniously accomplished with the help of a succession of Chinese graduate students, who translated these works orally while Walker took notes and asked questions (p. xiv). Walker's own publications on Lahu since 1969 number nearly sixty (pp. 797-801). Rounding out the volume are two excellent indexes (pp. 843-907).

No review would be complete without some critical comments, however trivial. Lahu words in the text are cited in the Baptist orthography, a wise choice since it is the most widely used, although un- fortunately burdened with cumbersome and easily confusable tone-marks. There are a fair number of tonal typos (some, but not all, corrected in the appended glossary of Lahu words), but these should

10. These economic benefits include the introduction of superior strains of plants and domestic animals, and the marketing of native arts and crafts.

11. The first Lahu Catholic converts were made in Burma; Catholic penetration into Yunnan followed shortly afterward, in the mid-1930s, but the religion has been subject to severe Chinese persecution from about 1937, and not a single Roman Catholic Lahu remains in Yunnan. In Thailand, Catholicism has made inroads especially among the Yellow Lahu, to the point where it might someday become the principal cultural badge of this group. Catholic missionaries have devised their own writing system for Lahu (rather more esthetically pleasing than the Baptist system), and have produced a considerable body of religious (and some secular) literature using it.

A bone of contention which I observed during my visit to northern Thailand in Nov. 2003 involved the birth- control programs instituted by certain Baptist missionaries, which were bitterly opposed by the Catholic priests.

12. After some hesitation, Walker opts for the second etymology (p. 388), with which I now agree, although I inadvertently offered both possibilities in my dictionary (Matisoff 1988: p. 372 vs. p. 858).




bother few readers.13 The only serious typesetting error (actually corrected in a list of errata included with the book) occurs in the discussion of Lahu phonology, where several phonetic symbols have been

garbled, rendering a passage incomprehensible (pp. xxix-xxx). The second syllable of tan-ngaweh 'iron arch on altar of G'uisha' is not etymologized (p. 368), but I now think it might mean 'silver' borrowed elsewhere from Tai as ngeu, as in thi-ngeu-thi-kha 'silver and gold altar' (the spirits are frequently "lied to" about the quality of the offerings made to them). Two different animal species, the common giant squirrel (fa-thaw) and the Burmese striped tree squirrel (fa-ti-shi) are mistakenly given the same Latin name (Ratufa affinis) (p. 493); the latter is really Tamiops mcclellandii. The literal translation given for the expression ca-suh aw ca ve 'to celebrate the New Rice Festival' (p. 454) is not quite right; instead of 'eating the new rice' it means 'eating (ca ve) cooked-rice (aw) from the new paddy (ca-suh)'. Walker makes liberal use of "[sic]" when using quoted material, bothering even to correct the spelling of words like thru and tho (short for through (p. 590) and though (p. 677) in missionary circular letters). Once this backfires, when he quotes the phrase "equivalent of the Thai term phu [sic] yai ban" (village headman); actually the aspiration is correct in the syllable phu, and it is Walker who should be "sic'ed" for transcribing the word as "pu yai ban" twice on the same page (p. 46).

Walker's style is refreshingly free of technical anthropological jargon. He has no theoretical axe to grind,14 and is aware that this lays him open to the charge of having produced "mere ethnography" (p. 734). But as he cogently points out, "There is, of course, no such phenomenon as 'mere ethnography', as any student quickly discovers by comparing the different genres of writing about peoples and cultures that are generated, for example, by differently-trained professional anthropologists, Western colonial officers, Christian evangelists, world travelers, journalists and Communist Party ideologues. All of these genres have been of fundamental importance to my own work on the Lahu-speaking peoples, and none of them-any more than this book-is 'mere ethnography'." Linguists can certainly identify with this sort of issue. In the heyday of generative grammar, "theoretical" linguists (many of whom knew no language but English) looked down with great disdain on the "butterfly collectors" who did "mere fieldwork" on exotic languages.

Walker's love for the Lahu people, to whom he has devoted most of his scholarly life, shines forth on every page. His tone is respectful throughout. One senses that he feels that animism is no more

"primitive" than any other religion (pp. 113ff.). The enduring value of books like this is that they illus- trate our common responses to the grim realities of the human condition. What is the difference between praying for a cure to a saint or to the lightning spirit? Besides being of profound interest to students of comparative religion, this book provides a priceless snapshot of the Lahu world up to the end of the twentieth century, a way of life now undergoing radical changes, many for the worse. As a work of pure ethnography, Merit and the Millennium is already the clearest and most exhaustive study yet produced for any Southeast Asian ethnic group. Yet Walker tells us that he still has "a huge amount" of material in his files, on topics like "complex courting procedures" (p. 414).

REFERENCES

Matisoff, James A. 1973. The Grammar of Lahu. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. . 1985. "God and the Sino-Tibetan copula, with some good news concerning selected Tibeto-

Burman rhymes." Journal of Asian and African Studies 29: 1-8 1. . 1988. The Dictionary of Lahu. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

Walker, Anthony R. 1986. The Toda of South India: A New Look. Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corp. . 1998. Between Tradition and Modernity, and other Essays on the Toda of South India.

Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corp.

JAMES A. MATISOFF

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

13. In this review Lahu tone-marks have been omitted entirely. 14. He cannot resist a couple of wry remarks about terms like "etic," which he considers part of the "less-than-

elegant jargon of American cultural anthropology" (pp. 124, 132).



merit and the millennium: routine and crisis in the ritual lives of the lahu peopleby anthony r....

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