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

y the religious practitioners who told the stories to us. For them,
they reflected a spiritual pantheon which, even if partially shared with
others, was still specifically Yakha in its manifestation.
4.6 Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued for the inclusion of the spirit world
in an account of the Yakha environment, and have looked at how these
spirits were perceived and manipulated through the work of the various
religious practitioners and their munturn. In the process, we have seen
how Yakha identity was defined and negotiated in and through this
environment, Neither the spirit world nor people's knowledge of it
could be seen as cohesive. Nor did the practitioners who manipulated it
come from a cohesive tradition. The danger of drawing together material
such as this, given to us by a variety of different people possessing
varying degrees of certainty and knowledge, is that an amalgam is
created which gives an illusion of cohesion. There is also the
possibility of creating an illusion of exclusivity, although as has been
shown, the spirits were certainly not all unique to the Yakha. Nor
should the list be taken as in any sense complete. Further comparative
study would be useful to ascertain the degree to which the spirits which
are paralleled in or shared with other groups have been 'culturally
interpreted' by the Yakha in a specific way, and which spirits the Yakha
do not appear to know about.
I would like to highlight Gaenszle's excellent analysis of
equivalent concepts to muntum once again, and compare the status of the
munturn with the status of the Yakha language described in the previous
chapter. Both could be seen as part of a Yakha cultural 'core', but