Political Systems of Highland Burma

In Political Systems of Highland Burma Edmund Leach interpreted the concepts of gumlao and gumsa as political models in Kachin society. In this chapter, I will question Leach’s attempt to establish his oscillatory model as a general theory of social change applicable to segmentary societies in this part of Asia by comparing it with neighbouring societies of the Indo-Burmese border, especially the Nagas. I will argue here that, while some of the Naga systems can be viewed as gumsa-like organizations, a model such as Leach’s gumlao as de ned in Political Systems cannot be found anywhere in the Naga Hills, according to the ethnographic material collected to date. This assertion, which corroborates F. K. Lehman’s ndings about the Chins of Burma (1963), casts some doubt on the validity of Leach’s oscillatory model. Leach started the concise comparison he made of Kachin and Naga modes of governance in Political Systems by remarking that the Naga systems, like the Kachin’s, were characterized by the existence of two contrasting forms of village government. The Sema Nagas, for example, with their powerful hereditary chiefs, could easily be contrasted with the Angami Nagas, whose villages were described in early ethnographic reports as being run on a more ‘democratic’ basis. However, Leach went further than this by equating the political organization of the Semas with the gumsa model, while considering Angami political organization to be a gumlao-like model.1 However, in so doing, the author of Political Systems seems to have been misguided by the colonial sources he was using. This can be demonstrated in a number of ways. First, and most obviously, at the time of British political expansion in the region, ‘autocracy’ and ‘democracy’ were western concepts applied to the Nagas and, as such, did not have equivalents in local languages. Second, ethnographic works carried out under the British regime in Assam were undertaken rst