Ritual Care: How the Akha Take Care of Their Small Kids?

Abstract

This article draws on long-term fieldwork materials to explore a cosmological approach to the process of childcare among the Akha, an ethnic minority community in southwest of China. The article introduces the Akha definition of childhood in relation to their cosmology, showing how cosmological forces are vital to a child’s survival and health, and how this perception shapes villagers’ childcare practices. Children are viewed as creatures of both the human world and the ghost world, and human parents have to fight with ghosts to protect the life of their children. Two pairs of gods and goddesses of children pose additional threats to children’s survival and health, but they also bestow blessings and protection at ritual and daily occasions. Meanwhile, because children are born with souls, they might fall sick if their souls are scared away. Finally, there are two hostile beings associated with neighbouring ethnic groups that cause disease, or even death, to vulnerable children. To protect children from all these multiple life-threatening cosmological forces, Akha villagers have developed several ritual care practices such as daily caring acts, protective talisman, and healing rituals. These practices are meant to deal with cosmological forces, and as such, they transcend more secular dimensions of bodily and emotional care (including biomedicalized forms of care), thus broadening the meaning and the scope of what is conventionally understood to be included in the work of care by social scientists and medical professionals who approach the subject with a strictly secular paradigm.