Kachin - Religion and Expressive Culture

Christian missionaries have already been mentioned. At present most, if not all, Kachin communities are Christian, and the social rift between Catholic and Protestant communities sometimes is quite deep. Recent years have also seen some Government-sponsored Buddhist-missionary activity among Kachins in Myanmar.

Religious Beliefs. One class in Kachin religion includes the major deities, named and common to all Kachin, remote ancestors of commoner and aristocrat alike. These Sky Nat ( mu nat —the word "nat" means a spirit Lord) are ultimately children of the androgynous Creator (Woishun-Chyanun), whose "reincarnation" is Shadip, the chief of the earth nats ( ga nat ), the highest class of spirit. The youngest sky nat (senior by ultimogeniture) is the Madai Nat, who can be approached only by chiefs, whose ultimate ancestor was his eldest brother and dama, Ningawn-wa, who forged the earth. A direct daughter of Madai Nat was the wife of the first Kachin aristocrat. Below all these in rank are the masha nat, the ancestor nats of lineages; that of the uma, or youngestson line of thigh-eating chiefs, has special importance. There is also a vague sort of "High God," Karai Kasang, who has no myths (except that he seems to have something to do with the fate of the souls of the dead) and who Leach thinks is a projection of the Christian God of the missionaries; this spirit's name makes no sense in the Kachin language. Below all these are minor spirits such as household guardians and the spirits of immediate ancestors, witch spirits ( hpyi ) who possess those accused of unconscious hereditary witchcraft, and the maraw, unpersonified "fates" to be placated; they can upset the best laid plans and the boons granted by higher deities. Beyond these are the uniformly hostile ghosts and spirits, whose evil works are not, as Leach claimed, man's punishment for infraction of proper obligations.

Religious Practitioners. There are mediums and diviners; a medium works by trance and is inexplicably chosen for his or her calling, while divination is a learned skill. These are basically private practitioners. There are also priests ( dumsa ) who officiate at sacrificial rites, and the rather scarce jaiwa, or bards, who preserve and recite genealogies and associated myths at great Merit Feasts ( manau ) in which chiefs and other high aristocrats proclaim and validate the ancestral sources of their authority. These are all learned offices, never hereditary, and they are essential to the ritual practices of aristocracy and chiefdom. Priests have two sorts of sacrificial assistants (ritual butchers). Of all these offices, only that of medium may be exercised by women. Priests, bards, and sacrificers are paid with a portion of the sacrifice. Priests also can work as sorcerers. The main work in treating illnesses is intercession with spirits by some or all of these officiants. The chief has the ritual duty of declaring sabbaths from all work at the time of rites held for recurrent or exceptional communal times of crisis such as plagues or junctures in the agricultural cycle (e.g., just before the first sowing the chief and his priests make offerings to the spirit of the earth, which is followed by a four-day sabbath).

Death and Afterlife. One cause of death is said to be that the cord that the Creator holds, thus sustaining the soul, is eventually gnawed away by spirits. Spirits can also entice the soul from the body, and death ensues if the soul cannot be found and enticed back home. Ultimately myth has it that death came to Kachin mankind because human beings originally had to attend ceremonies of the sky-spirit people, and, as dama, had to contribute costly gifts. This cost so much that Sut Wa Madu, the ancestor who founded the sut manau (Feast of Merit, a major ritual connection between the two worlds), decided to hold a mock funeral, thus enticing the sky people to attend and bring gifts. The female sun spirit (Jan nat, one of the Sky Nats) felt that this compromised the asymmetrical relations between mayu and dama, and she decreed that if there were to be human funerals, then men would have to suffer death—not so much as a punishment as in order to restore the net balance of the relationship with a quitclaim payment of men's souls. This tale expresses the ultimate paradox of an asymmetrical alliance relation; for the net circulation of the system is impossible to maintain asymmetrically when there are fewer than three parties to the relationship. On the one hand, with payments going all one way, the system lacks completeness, or closure. On the other hand, payments in an asymmetrical relation cannot go both ways. Burial is a week after death; this interval is used to try to ensure the separation of the spirit of the deceased from the world of the living, a task aided by a priest, who makes offerings to the ghost and asks it to go away. The final obsequies may be postponed for as much as a year on account of the expense. Then the priest recalls the soul from its temporary limbo and tells it the route to the land of the dead. If thereafter divination shows that the spirit has not gone, it will be installed in the household altar, which had been temporarily removed from the house at the time of the death and is now reinstalled.