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

Chapter Eight: Outside-In: The Wider World in Temaphok
8.1 Introduction
Ama spoons out the dB1 bhBt in the gathering dusk, five
hours walk from the nearest road and shop with bottled drinks,
while dulcet American tones from the radio inform us all that
'Coca-Cola is it'. The Yakha are undeniably part of the
outside world, and the outside world is to an ever increasing
extent part of them.
This vignette from my second research report of July 1989 highlights
the paradoxes of life in what by most standards was an 'isolated' or
'remote' (cf, Ardener 1987) community, but one from which many
inhabitants were regularly leaving to experience the outside world. We
saw in the last chapter how the experiences and return of these migrants
brought changes in local people's sense of environment and identity.
However, there were also people, goods and ideas flowing into and
altering the environment of Tamaphok which did not initially hail from
the community itself, This chapter looks at what some of these were,
and the effects they had on the people living there.
There is a tendency amongst anthropologists and human ecologists to
peripheralize change and the wider environment respectively. I put 'the
wider world' at the end of this monograph not because I see change and
the wider world as somehow extraneous to my main subject, Nor do I wish
to create a dichotomy between the environment and culture of a
'traditional' Tamaphok and the forces of 'modernization' changing it
from without. Interaction with the outside world was, as we saw in
Chapter Three, by no means a new process, The cultural and
environmental changes represented by the process known as