S'gaw Karen Erotic

The S'gaw are the largest of the Karen branches and the one that has done most to fix what Karen means to everyone outside Myanmar: the alphabet, the Baptist hymnals, the flag, the refugee camps, a war older than most of the people fighting it. Their country runs down the eastern hills along the Thai border, through Kayin State and into Tanintharyi, with a second large population far to the west in the flat rice ground of the Irrawaddy Delta. Those two settings made two S'gaw worlds, upland villages with swidden fields on one side, delta towns wired into Burmese commerce on the other, and the split still shows in dialect and in what people expect of one another. Their language sits in the Karenic group of Tibeto-Burman, a distant relative of Burmese that refuses to behave like one. Most Tibeto-Burman languages put the verb last. Karenic puts it in the middle, subject verb object, a habit picked up over centuries of living alongside Mon and Tai speakers. The script arrived in the 1830s, adapted from Burmese letters by American Baptists working with Karen collaborators, and it did more than write the language down. It made scattered hill communities legible to each other as one people.

Buddhism is the majority religion, as it is for the Karen generally, but the Christian share among the S'gaw is far larger than among their Pwo neighbors and has weighed on their politics ever since. Missionaries in the 1820s met a S'gaw tradition about Y'wa, a creator who gave their ancestors a book and let it be lost, to be returned one day by a younger brother from across the sea. Scholars still argue over how much of that story predates contact. Nobody argues about how fast conversion followed. Under both church and monastery runs an older layer that neither displaced: the k'la, a soul that wanders off and has to be called home, which is why white cotton thread tied at the wrist remains the ordinary answer to illness, departure and homecoming in households of every faith. The British recruited Karen into the colonial army and police, the Second World War hardened that arrangement, and independence in 1948 left the question of a Karen state open. The Karen National Union took up arms in January 1949 and has never set them down, making this one of the longest civil wars anywhere. Camps in Thailand absorbed hundreds of thousands from the 1980s on, and resettlement after 2005 built substantial S'gaw communities in Minnesota, Nebraska, Australia and Norway. One correction worth making: the brass neck coils that turn up in travel photography belong to Kayan women, a different Karennic people, not to the S'gaw.