THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

settlers was from a pattern of shifting agriculture to one of
intensified production in which rice cultivation played a central part.
Hodgson, one of the few 19th century Europeans to walk through the
eastern hi 1 ls, wrote:
The general style of cultivation is that appropriate to the
uplands, not the more skilful and profitable sort practised in
the level tracts; and though the villages of the Kirdntis be
fixed, yet their cultivation is not so, each proprietor within
his own ample limits shifting his cultivation perpetually,
according as any one spot gets exhausted" (1880:400).
He added that the plough was rarely used, and the main products he saw
were maize, buckwheat, millet, legumes, dry rice and cotton. From the
stories we were told, it would appear that the diet of the people at
that time was supplemented by hunting and gathering in forests rich in
game, plants and honey. Shifting cultivation had been abandoned for as
long as anyone in Tamaphok could remember, but I shall suggest in
Chapter Six that the richness, diversity and types of crops of an ideal
Yakha phar-b6ri (house-f ield) could perhaps be seen as echoing the
horticultural techniques of the past, just as the continuing use of
pellet bows as an item of apparel by Yakha men reflected their much
greater use of forests for hunting in the past.
Thus the arrival of the caste Hindus and other groups had profound
implications for the social environment of the Yskha, and for their
perceptions of themselves in that environment, Let us look next at what
it meant for the contemporary distribution of the Yakha and the
boundaries they perceived to their ethnicity.