themindislimitless:thechubbymermaidart:Brown is beautiful 10! The Akaha are an indigenous hill tribe
themindislimitless:thechubbymermaidart:Brown is beautiful 10! The Akaha are an indigenous hill tribe. They live in mountains in Burma, Thailand, Laos and China and are considered a simi-nomadic people. They migrated from China into SE Asia in the early 1900’s. They speak their own language, their religion is a combination of animism and ancestral worship, and they are an agricultural society. Though their dress varies via geographical location, a defining characteristic of Akha women is stringing of rupees and beads on elaborate head coverings.The painting is an Akha woman from Laos. Traditionally in paintings the women wore hand woven and decorated clothing that exposed a single breast. Beautiful beautiful women.Okay, here’s what’s up. My first reaction to anything Burmese is always delight but this is terribly misinformed and considering how much the Akha have been oppressed and how small their communities have become, this is not doing them much good. Let’s break this down tho.They are indeed hill-people and have developed their culture and farming traditions around this. Like most indigenous Burmese they are extremely protective of the environment and practice sustainable farming. They’re very heavily criticized on their traditional slash-and-burn use, though they are very specific about applying this to old plantation and not trees/forests. I don’t know how much the nomadic thing applies because they are also very heavily centered around long-term community building and it’s things like forced relocation due to wars which has made it even more difficult for their communities to survive. They do not practice ancestral worship, under no circumstances. Their culture highly values preserving ancestral history and honoring their memories but “ancestral worship” is a Western misinterpretation.They are also not “animists”, which is also a heavily Western-missionary biased look. Akha Zuah is centered around legal terms in relation to the environment and often incorporates spiritual elements into this. In the most simplest of terms, they are defined by basic coexistence and co-evolution with the ecosystems they are a part of, which is technically more scientific than most Western “environmentalists” are. But I’m not going to define them by “progressive Western terms” either.Also most Akha are Christian, if we’re talking about religion. Which makes it all the more interesting that despite the fact that they are largely Christian, Western missionary groups come into their communities, cut down trees from land (thus destroying an ecosystem) and build churches to send photographic evidence home. What this does is get the missionary groups more funding to keep doing this, even though their churches are largely left abandoned and most of the “work” they do is harass the people.Yes, clothing differs by region, but most women do wear clothing where the ‘shirt’ has a flap that can be opened for nursing and yes, this has been repeatedly criticized by missionaries and also sexualized by tourists. That said, their traditional clothing is generally not very revealing.(Thailand)(Burma)And you said they were painted with one breast revealed, I couldn’t find anything on that so I looked up some paintings that are painted by actual South Asians:(Street painting, artist unknown)(By Burmese artist Soe Win from the Pieces in Burma collection)And I was still very curious about that whole breast thing, because yes, the shirt opens and like, women will nurse their babies and missionaries will get all huffy about it and the women will be like…pls leave I am feeding my child? So I kept looking. And eventually I came across this image, of an Akha woman from Laos. Which is a lovely reference, but I do not understand why you painted this woman with her breast out when it clearly is not in the picture. And then I found a stash of deviantART stuff (…by non south asian artists) where the same picture was used but the same pattern was repeated and–Akha women are heavily sexualized and this results in abuse and trafficking, including sex trafficking/prostitution in South Asia by tourists who come and linger due to the already existent stereotypes about South Asian women in general.What I’m saying is, please stop reinforcing stereotypes about these people and contributing to the sexual abuse they suffer with inaccurate depictions such as these. Thanks. Also, since there is little info about them, by them, here’s a glorious resource: http://www.akha.org/content/aboutakhalife/index.html -- source link
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