The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXXI, Part 1-2, 1983 - Khamkoo

142 Richard P. Lando
mony, was even lighter than at the minor offering ceremonies in 1981. An elder
complained that too often in the past when a large animal was sacrificed a large number
of people showed up at the ceremony only at the time the offering food was distributed
to those attending, and they mostly came with empty bowls. The main participation
the individual water user had in supernatural affairs concerning irrigation was. the
financing ofthe offerings,
In one sense the lordly spirits provided a unity to the supernatural protection
invoked for the irrigation systems under their protection. The distant forest and
mountain spirits that protected the river soun;e, the spirits of the dam, and the four
junior lordly spirits· were all under the direct control of Great Mountain Lord. He
was something like the irrigation headman of the supernatural irrigation committee.
He was metaphoricaily referred to in exactly this way by an assistant irrigation headman
explairrlng his job in relation to that of. the irrigation headman, and the position of
Victoriol1s Warrior Lord in reiation to Great Mountain Lord. ·The supernatural order
mirrors the hu~a1;1 one in the control of irrigation.
One important consequence of the veneration of the lordly spirits was that it
kept' the administrators of several irrigation systems in contact with each other for a
common purpose. Irrigation administrators and officials in the Phrae area have reported
no inter-village cooftict over water allocation within the same system, inter•system
conftict, nor the breakdown . of patterns of cooperative labor within the system that
are found in reports on traditional irrigation systems in other parts of North Thailand.
Michael Moerman (1968 :54-55) reported that the cooperation between villages in the
irrigation system in which his village participated, and the patterns of cooperative labor
were breaking down at the time of his research in 1959-196.0.
The arguments of Jack Potter (1976) concerning the role of the State in irrigation
affairs, and the conftict he reports in the irrigation system he studied in Sara phi
district; Chiang Mai, are interesting in light of the present work. The irrigation system
had two maximal canals which split off below the irrigation dam and irrigated fields in
two separate tambons. . There were also two irrigation dam spirits. One was offered
to by the villagers of the tambon on one side of the dam and the other was propitiated
by the villagers of the.second tambon on the other side of the dam. Potter (1976: 101)
noted "There is no one deity which symbolizes the unity of the entire system". He
reports frequent inter-village conflict over water allocation within the system he.studied,
and also between that system and an upstream system that planned to build .a concrete
dam. The people of Potter's system feared a concrete dam would inhibit flow of water
to their system during times of water scarcity and threatened to destroy any but a
traditional dam~ The district officer and government irrigation officer had to mediate
the disagreement. Potter (1976 : 101) concludes :