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Throughout mainland South East Asia, there are numerous indigenous histories of the loss and return of the written word. These histories are often linked to narratives of Christian conversion, and the desire for literacy and modernity. In this article, I revisit questions about the cultural politics of orality and the written word from the perspectives of certain Akha communities in the Thai–Myanmar borderlands that are relative newcomers to both Christianity and the desire for literacy. I discuss three different histories of the loss and return of the written word as found among Akha Old Traditionalists, Neo-Traditionalists and Baptist Christians in the region. I highlight the ways in which these histories speak to Akha Neo-Traditionalists’ and Baptist Christians’ competing efforts to reimagine the boundaries of Akhaness in a modern, authentic and religious fashion. I conclude by noting how these particular Akha cases contribute to a resurgence of scholarship on the region and its peoples inspired by James Scott’s reframing of the region as ‘Zomia’. I especially narrow in on the fruitful debate inspired by Scott’s most controversial claim that so-called Zomians intentionally discarded their prior writing systems and adopted orality as a means of evading the state.

‘The buffalo skin written word’: the cultural politics of orality and writing in mainland South East Asia