Zotung Erotic

The Zotung (also written Zotung Chin) are a Chin people of the mountainous interior of Chin State in western Myanmar (Burma). Their heartland lies around the town of Rezua in the central and southern part of the state, a rugged country of steep ridges and deep valleys. The Zotung are counted among the many closely related Chin (or Kuki-Chin) groups of the Myanmar, India, and Bangladesh borderlands, and their population is usually estimated in the tens of thousands, on the order of 40,000 to 60,000 people.

Language

The Zotung language belongs to the Kuki-Chin branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages, part of the wider Sino-Tibetan family, and it is distinct enough from its neighbours that Zotung speakers are recognised as a separate group rather than a dialect community of a larger one. Like other Chin languages it is now written in the Latin alphabet, introduced with Christian missionary work, and the Zotung have their own body of hymns, scripture translation, and literature.

Society and subsistence

Zotung life is shaped by the mountains. Farming is chiefly by swidden (shifting) cultivation on the hill slopes, with rice, maize, millet, and vegetables grown on cleared plots, supplemented by kitchen gardens, by livestock such as pigs, mithun (a domesticated bovine prized for feasts and bride-wealth), and poultry, and by hunting and foraging in the surrounding forest. Traditional society was organised into villages under the authority of chiefs and elders, with kinship, clan membership, and reciprocal feasting binding communities together. Feasts of merit, at which a host gained prestige by slaughtering animals and distributing meat, were an important feature of the older social order.

Religion and appearance

Historically the Zotung were animists who propitiated local and ancestral spirits, but from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries onward Christian, largely Baptist, missionaries converted the great majority of the Chin, and most Zotung today are Christian, with the church now central to community life. In appearance the Zotung share the East and Southeast Asian-influenced features of the Tibeto-Burman hill peoples. Traditional dress featured handwoven cloth in distinctive patterns, worn as wrapped skirts, blankets, and shawls, together with beadwork and, on ceremonial occasions, ornaments of silver and other metals. Woven textiles remain an emblem of Zotung and wider Chin identity.