Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore how indigenous understandings and practices of possessing the earth and of sovereignty are being translated and scaled up in to revolutionary new modes of conservation, in the form of the Salween Peace Park of southeast Myanmar.

Paper long abstract:

In the highlands of Southeast Myanmar, long ridden by armed conflict, the human inhabitants here regularly treat their landscapes as possessed, in the dual and entangled senses of being both haunted and occupied, by a whole host of hungry ghosts, ancestors, and other spectral persons. Following this, humans do not so much own the land as they borrow it temporally, by way of constant haggling and propitiating. As such, ownership in these uplands is always negotiated and nesting, ultimately resting in the spectral hands of the k’sah, the “lords” or “owners” of the water and the earth. Thus, rather than seeing this area as a “zone of no sovereignty” (Scott 2009: 60-61) we might better grasp these lands as being held under Spectral Sovereignty.

As war envelopes these hills once more, a growing movement is attempting to draw on these indigenous understandings and practices of possessing the landscape and sovereignty to radically rethink both revolution and conservation.

In this paper, I first explore indigenous practices such as Spectral Sovereignty, then examine how an ensemble of activists, subsistence farmers, and armed groups are attempting to translate and rescale them into a 5,500 km2 protected area known as the Salween Peace Park.