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

Yakha came into Tamaphok in search of cures for afflictions said to have
been caused by Yakha spirits. Yakha likewise looked to members of other
ethnic groups for the treatment of diseases which Yakha dhgmis could not
cure. I would not go so far as Crandon-Malamud (19911, who argues that
the Aymara in highland Bolivia resort to medical practitioners for non-
medical reasons and use medical dialogues as a means of redefining their
ethnic and religious identities. For the Yakha, the spirit world was
simply another environment in which the negotiation and manipulation of
their own identities took place.
4.2 The Muntum
Although there appeared to be no word for 'religion' per se, the
word muntum represented the oral tradition on which Yakha indigenous
religious practice was based. "If they themselves were asked what it
was that made them a distinct social group, the more traditional among
them would probabIy reply that it was possession of their own Df umla",
wrote Allen (1978: 237) of an equivalent word in ThuIung Rai, M~rntum was
something which could be seen as similarly close to the cultural 'core',
Comparison of the literature on other Kiranti groups suggested that this
concept was shared, viz, muddum in Mehawang Rai, mtrndhtrm in Limbu,
mukdurn in Sunuwar, durn-la in Chamling (Gaenszle 1989) and Dfumla in
Thulung Rai (Allen 1978). According to Gaensz le, " the concept
semantically implies a certain unity, both in a spatial as well as in a
temporal sense. On the one hand, it emphasizes the common root of the
oral traditions of the various Kirant i groups in East Nepal, and on the
other hand, it depicts the tradition as a divine knowledge which has
been handed down in a basicaI ly unchanged way by a long i ine of