No egalitarianism in the Wa hills: relative commensuration in kinship, sacrifice, and war

Abstract

The autonomy of the United Wa State Army of Myanmar today is said to be based on the egalitarianism of Wa communities in the past. The analysis of commensuration in kinship, sacrifice, and war challenges these portrayals of autonomy and egalitarianism. In the past, the making and taking of lives could not be measured in absolute terms but required situationally specific and relational commensuration. Since the 1960s, commensuration has intensified with modern technologies and communication networks, especially in the context of military government, enabling new scales and benchmarks for measuring social relations. Military organization and cultural authenticity are based on absolute measures and exact equivalences, at least in theory. In practice, the levelling of human lives is resisted in the social relations of para‐militarism, and in the cultural production of para‐nationalism. Assessing the scale and violence of measurement, the article describes how relations of autonomy and mutuality changed from sacrificial exchange in the past to para‐nationalist sacrifice today, without ever becoming ‘egalitarian’ in the strict sense of the term.