Based on the author's extensive fieldwork among the Akha people prior to full nation-state integration, this illuminating study critically reexamines assumptions about space, power, and the politics of identity, so often based on modern, western contexts. Tooker explores the active role that spatial practices have played in maintaining cultural autonomy. The book expands current debates about power relations in the region from a mostly political and economic framework into the domains of ritual, cosmology, and indigenous meaning and social systems.

Deborah E. Tooker is associate professor of anthropology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, and is a faculty associate in the Southeast Asia program at Cornell University.