Karen Erotic

The Karen are not one people in the tidy sense the name suggests. The label gathers together a cluster of related peoples — S'gaw and Pwo Karen on the central plateaus and the Irrawaddy delta, the Karenni (sometimes called Red Karen) in the hills further east, the Kayan whose women are known abroad for the brass coils that lengthen the neck, and the Pa'O in their dark turbans further north. They share a Karenic branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, but the languages within it diverge enough that a S'gaw speaker and a Pwo speaker often switch to Burmese to handle anything complicated. What ties the branches together is less a single tongue than a long history of living in the rough country between the Burmese lowlands and the Thai hills, and a long history of being squeezed by both.

The homeland runs along the eastern spine of Myanmar — Karen State and Kayah State, the Pa'O zone in southern Shan, and across the border into the Thai provinces where Karen villages have existed for centuries. It is upland country, terraced where it can be terraced, forested where it cannot, and the older economy turned on swidden rice, betel, and the slow rhythms of forest stewardship. Karen elders still speak of the land in custodial terms rather than ownership ones; the kaw, the ancestral territory of a village cluster, is something held in trust.

Religion does not sort cleanly along sub-group lines. Most Karen are Theravada Buddhists, often layered over older animist practice — a household will keep the Buddhist precepts and still feed the lord of the water, the lord of the field. A substantial Christian minority took root after nineteenth-century Baptist missions, particularly among the S'gaw, and that conversion shaped Karen literacy, Karen schooling, and eventually Karen political identity. The Karenni hills lean more strongly Catholic. The Pa'O, by contrast, are among the most observantly Buddhist of the branches, and Pa'O monks carry real weight in local affairs.

The defining inflection point of the modern era is the war. Since 1949, only months after Burmese independence, Karen organisations have been fighting one of the longest-running insurgencies on earth. That conflict is the reason Karen communities now exist across Thai refugee camps, in resettlement towns from Minnesota to Melbourne, and in a diaspora that has carried S'gaw hymnals and Pwo weaving patterns far from the hills they came from.