with appendix
Sergey Marlenovich Gabbasov
Proofreader Елена Александровна Еркина
© Sergey Marlenovich Gabbasov, 2020
ISBN 978-5-4498-1505-7
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
FOREWORD
Whom we imagine when talk about hunter-gatherer? A dark-skin small man almost without any clothes, with a spear or bow and arrows. His family live in a deep rainforest or in an endless savannah, they make a fire by drilling, live a nomadic life and know nothing about agriculture and pastoralism. It is enough for a standard person who is ready to forget everything that doesn’t concern with his everyday job. But if you read this book – you are not such a person.
We also know that their lifestyle is the most ancient and 90% of all human beings who ever lived on our beautiful planet (~80 000 000 000 individuals) were hunter-gatherers (Lee & DeVore 1968). It is the most effective, most harmonized and ecological way of connection between humans as biological specie and all the nature itself. Living as a hunter and gatherer, human don’t opposite themselves to the nature by a constant fighting in a constant process of production food by keeping cattle (making pastures, killing predators, overgrazing) or agriculture (slash-and-burn cultivation, deforestation, invasion of plants). Every anthropologist who is interested in hunter-gatherers knows such iconic peoples as Hadza of Tanzania, Baka of South-East Cameroon and Mbuti of North-East DRC, Bushmen of South Africa and Kubu of Sumatra, about Andamanese and Indigenous Australians.
But at the same time there are several peoples who are always very far from the mainstream anthropology. They seem to be classical agriculturalists who live normal sedentary life.
Sometimes it is almost impossible to be sure about some concrete ethnic group – are they real hunters and gatherers or just have some elements of occasional foraging (and such elements may be non-indigenous). People of Zanzibar archipelago go to forage wild fruits and berries, fallen coconuts and many kinds of seafood at a low-tide at a regular basis – the resources of islands and surrounding waters are limited and strongly depend on the weather season and ocean streams. But at the same time most of them involved in farming, fishing and trade – traditional occupations of this archipelago for many centuries. Still it is hard to classify such peoples as Veddahs of Sri Lanka and Mikea of Madagascar. Meanwhile such peoples as Birhor of Central India and Chepang of Central Nepal aren’t connected with living traditions of hunting and gathering. But exactly these peoples go to forage and even sometimes hunt small game more often than such “classical” hunter-gatherers as Veddahs. There are extremely few studies about the origins of the Mlabri and about their hunting and gathering traditions. Less can be found about Ahikuntikas people (it is good if you just heard about them).
By writing of this book I tried to use a powerful basement of previous studies since XIX century till modern days and build a little (but comfortable I suppose) house, entering which a wanderer can find some answers. In this book we will try to make a short overlook on some of such people who live around Indian Ocean – from Northern Thailand to South Madagascar, from Sri Lanka to Himalaya. We will point islands and coasts, mountains and savannahs. And everywhere we will meet them – hunter-gatherers who remain hidden. So, let our journey begins!
I want to thank those people who always help me on the path of my life – my beloved wife Elena Erkina, my darling mother Tatiana Khromova and my dearest father Marlen Gabbasov. Thank you for everything!
SPIRITS OF THE YELLOW LEAVES
Mlabri are an important people, one of the few remaining cases of mongoloid hunters who hunt using spears, rather than bows and arrows or blowpipes. Documentary records made by local Buddhist priests inform that Mlabri offered honey, rattan, wax and other forest products to the kings as tribute every year (Bernatzik 1938).
Most studies about the Mlabri prior to the 1970’s described them as a nomadic group living in the jungle, with some contact with outsiders such as exchanging forest resources for tools and rice (Bernatzik 1951; Nimmanahaeminda and Hartland-Swan 1962; Seidenfaden 1919; Young 1961; Wanadorn 1926). Studies after the 70’s began to mention a transition in the patterns of exchange – not only for bartered goods, but also labor was exchange for goods, especially for food (Trier 1992; Pookajorn 1992).
The Siamese elite in Bangkok attitude to the Mlabri as “khon pa” and considered them completely different from the Thai (“khonthai”). The “khon pa” are defined as “early men” or “old humankind” (“khonderm”) who are still living in the jungle (Pookajorn 1985). Other ethnic groups, such as the Lawa, the Yang (Karen), the Khmu, as well as the Hmong or the Lahu, are sometimes also included in this classification (Na Nan 2007). For the Mlabri, the term “phi pa” (“forest spirits”) was sometimes used and referred to their lack of permanent settlements. All these peoples, especially the nomadic Mlabri, were of little interest to the Kingdom of Thailand until the 1970’s (Na Nan 2016).
Thai exonym to the Mlabri is “Phi Tong Luang” (lit. “spirits of the yellow leaves”). According to the Thai perspective, this nomadic group would move to another places whenever the banana leaves (“tong”) covering the roofs of their shelters turned yellow (“luang”) and it was said that they could move as quickly as if they were spirits (“phi”) (Kerr 1924).
Their endonym – Mlabri – consists of two words: “Mla” means “people” and “bri” is “forest”. The term “Yumbri” with the same meaning was in use in the past times (Nimmanahaeminda 1963). Diffloth put Mlabri and Yumbri in two different branches of the Mon-Khmer subdivision: Mlabri to Paluangic and Yumbri to Khmuic (Diffloth 1973). Bernatzik also separated Mlabri and Yumbri (Bernatzik & Bernatzik 1958), but Rischel assumed that they were varieties of the same language (Rischel 1995).
The Mlabri were also called “Phi Pa” (“forest spitits”) or “Khon Pa” (“forest people”) in Thai and “Mang Koo” in Hmong. The Laotian know them as “Kha Tuang Luang”. They usually call themselves “mlaq” (“human beigns”) and “mlaq briq”, but they are better known to the general Thai people as “phi tong lueang” (“spirits of the yellow leaves”): “spirits” is an allusion to their hiding in the forest to avoid to contact with outsiders, and “yellow leaves” refer to the fact that they abandon their windscreens when the palm or banana leaves they are made of turned yellow (Bernatzik 1951; Surin 1992). Later, the attitude of the State changed, and the Mlabri, as many other upland ethnic groups, were classified as “chao kao” or “hill tribes” (Rischel 1995).
The Mlabri speak an Austro-Asiatic language belonging to the Khmuic branch of the Mon-Khmer language family. Some scholars (Boeles 1963; Flatz 1963; Nimmanahaeminda 1963; Chazée 2001) refer to the Mlabri as “Mrabri”. However, Danish linguist Jørgen Rischel, who researched the Mlabri language in Thailand and Laos in the late 1980’s, argues that, from a linguistic perspective, “the alleged ethnonym Mrabri is simply phonetically erroneous” (Rischel 2000).
The origin of the Mlabri is still debated: Proto-Mongoloid (Bernatzik 1951), Paleo-Mongoloid (Flatz 1963) or Austroloid (Trier 1981). A genetic study conducted by Hiroki Oota suggests that the Mlabri descend from a very small founder group that split 500—800 years ago from an agricultural community and later reverted to a hunting-gathering subsistence mode (Oota et al. 2005). This would imply that they have not always been hunter-gatherers but what Endicott calls “re-specialized foragers” (Endicott 1999).
Mlabri firstly appeared in Thailand in Chaiyaphum, Loei and Chiangrai (Seidenfaden 1919). Many scholars argue that the Mlabri residing in Thailand today migrated in the early 20th century from the Lao province Sayaburi bordering the Thailand province Nan (Bernatzik 1951; Boeles 1963; Trier 2008). Some scholars declare that a few Mlabri still live in Laos: in 2000, 28 individuals according to Chazée (Chazée 2001), 40 individuals according to Schliesinger (Schliesinger 2003). There could also be a few Mlabri living in Myanmar