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

conventional view of 'environment' when I look at the natural
envi ronrnent around Tamaphok. However, I argue that cultural ly derived
attitudes are as salient In understanding how the Yakha perceived the
different components of the natural environment as is an understandfng
based on the more materialistic dimensions of nature.
Tamaphok was certainly not the only 'environment' of which the Yakha
living there were aware, The outside world was an increasingly
important 'environment' in their lives, and one to which increasing
numbers of Yakhs were travel1 ing, as Chapter Seven will show. Chapter
Efght portrays Tamephok itself as also changing as a variety of media,
education, development projects and political changes infiltrated the
fabric of Yakha society,
The concluding chapter returns again to the question of what this
study represents in terms of ecological anthropology, and argues for the
value of a less materielistic, ethnocentric and empiricist approach to
the subject. I also pull together certain key findings which I believe
have relevance to 'development' in the area, as a contribution to
'applied' anthropology,
Change is acknowledged as a difficult thing to write about in social
anthropology, a problem not helped by the widespread tendency sti 1 1 to
write accounts in the present tense, This is an account of Tamaphok and
its people as I experienced them during my fieldwork and (indirectly,
through letters and other contacts) afterwards. To attempt to give a
more accurate impression of temporality and change than the
'ethnographic present' allows, I have made a point of using the past
tense throughout my account,