Contents

Accepting Gramsci’s reappropriation of the term ‘subaltern’ meaning the economically dispossessed, Spivak highlights the difficulty of the intellectual adequately representing the oppressed without the further projection of colonialist prejudices. The debate around the Hindi tradition of ‘sati’, of widow immolation forms the core of her essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, in which the absence of women’s voices is seen as a particularly apt emblem of the intermixed violence of both patriarchy and colonialism. Spivak’s argument is that the subaltern is unable to speak because the act of successful ‘speech’ negates the term ‘subaltern’. The Akha may be ‘subaltern’, but surely the question with far more relevance to their situation is not how adequately they can be represented by the intellectual but by the media. Is it possible for the Akha to find a voice when so many of the systems, the languages of representation are created and dominated by the West?

The Internet seems the ultimate system in terms of allowing a dispersed community to overcome their international divisions and communicate both to each other and the world. Perhaps the model that inspired Ambient TV was the ability of the Zapatistas to extend their struggle — and simultaneously their imagined community — beyond what was in the local terms of traditional military conflict confined to the tiny region of the Chiapas. This illustrates that the debate over colonisation is no longer an issue of space or geography, but the battle for the power inherent within the ownership of information and effective communication:

Within the post-colonial discourse debate, a purist could question whether the site, using slightly staid written English ("we are traditional Han/Akha spread over 5 different countries in S.E. Asia") truly allows the Akha to speak not only within themselves but also the international community — they can only ever be once removed from the process through the act of translation. That beyond the real-time intervention of Ambient TV, the entire system of digital communication itself, still dominated by the English written text, is inherently colonial. The fact that the Zapatistas language was internationally recognised Spanish was perhaps one of their strongest weapons.

Footage of Tarik’s introduction of the Internet to Apho and Asseh from the local Akha radio station in Chiang Mai highlights the gulf that exists in basic technical knowledge. However able Apho and Asseh are, they stand back, fairly perplexed as Tarik’s very language of explanation, fresh out of Silicon Valley, seems particularly alien. Among the more understandable terms are how you can "download audio files", go to an "application" and that yes, the information travels through your telephone but no, "no-one else needs to know your number to contact you". Just as the voices of the subaltern can be lost through being converted to Christianity, the terms of the Internet are the product of an entirely different form of cultural expression.

Beyond all this, of course Nicolas Negroponte, fails to perceive that the economic and political issues of technological access and education completely overshadow the debate. In arguing why the Internet is pluralistic rather than imperialistic, Negroponte attacks Jack Lang, the French minister for culture’s concern that:

Negroponte argues that such a conviction totally undermines the de-centralist structure of the Internet and the extraordinary cultural opportunities of a digital world. That "colonialism is the fruit of centralist thinking. It does not exist in a de-centralised world". This can only be described as naïve, for, whatever the opportunities the Internet represents as a model for communication, as a collection of autonomous and interconnected processors, the reality outside the utopian ideal of cyberspace is very different. His argument is totally American-centric as he cites three reasons why the net will be free from an imperialism that colonises its users into "English speaking puppets".

Firstly, he says the cost of entry is low. Well, within Europe the recurring costs of being online beyond equipment and installation maybe only $10 a month, but this is at least half an Akha’s annual income. It was only through the provision of a free server, domain name and the computers themselves that the Virtual Borders project could exist at all. With Internet cafes straddling the streets of developed towns such as Chang Rai in Thailand, this is clearly an issue of economics rather than geography, which brings us neatly to Negroponte’s second point. Yes, the Internet can include a community regardless of geographical density or the need to justify its users in terms of the mass medium, but again, what about the issue of who has access? Who is designing the hardware that can withstand extreme dust and humidity let alone the software - in the case of Simputer.org, establishing a Linux system in Hindi? The problem of access also overrides the final claim that the web turns the ‘medium’ inside out, enabling you to "pull" information in contrast to having it "pushed" at you. Who is enabled enough to get onto the platform from which the "pulling" can take place? Whilst there may be a certain element of choice in gaining access to certain information it also means that hardly anyone stumbles across a fairly obscure Akha website.

Classical American Imperialism has unwittingly provided the tools with which the Akha can speak if not to the world, than at least with each other. Since the first radio transmitters were established by the CIA during the American invasion of Vietnam, one in Chiang Mai, North Thailand was converted into a station broadcasting programmes in minority languages, with another existing in the same province. Stories, songs, agricultural and political information are broadcast through battery run transistor radios throughout villages in what is a fairly smooth progression from such a traditionally oral culture.

Apho Ratanawichaikul (right) and Asseu Somsri Dzuebaw, presenters from the Mountain Peoples’ Radio Station in Chiang Mai.

Apho has worked at the Chiang Mai radio station in Thailand for three years and explains:

Exactly how the Akha "know who they are" seems fairly ambiguous from the Thai governments point of view; is that ‘who they are’ as Thai citizens or as Akha? The authorities clearly want the Akha to identify with Thai nationalism, whilst the Akha have a fairly ambivalent attitude to belonging to any nation state.

Benedict Anderson defines the term ‘nation’ as an imagined (as both inherently limited and sovereign) political community. Homi K. Bhabha, highlights further the very ambivalence of the idea, of, "the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it" in quoting Hannah Arendt's view, that the society of the nation in the modern world is 'that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance’. Yes, and the relationship is dialectical: public interests assume, and create private significance.

It is through the airwaves of local community radio that both the Thai and Chinese Government’s hope to have some control over to what ‘imagined community’ any individual Akha feels they belong. Through radio the Akha sustain both a sense of local Akha identity as well as what is more ambiguously national, clearly a delicate balance from the authorities point of view; it can only be in the back of official minds that too much of a platform from which to be heard could instigate a more pronounced claim for independence. Yet from the point of the Akha’s economic development, it is only through being recognised as part of a ‘nation’ that any role within the international market can take place.

The Thai Government are not only largely indifferent to what languages hill-tribe minorities speak but continues to actively discourage attempts to provide groups with their own transcription systems or to develop publications in their own languages.

As all five of the nations within which the Akha are settling possess a different national script, NGO’s suggested the use of Latin letters as a neutral solution. The point with both Thai and Chinese community radio from the authorities point of view is that communication can be controlled, with at least the majority of the broadcast taking place in a language the authorities can understand.

It seems vital that the Akha know about government decisions that affect them, with news arriving through transcripts typed by local Thai’s in the shape of faxes, letters and by telephone and directly from local newspapers. Of course, newspapers, like mail do not seem to have a realistic role in the near future of communications of the Akha. Even beyond the poor levels of illiteracy, physical data (or paper) is just not deliverable to remote villages between two hours to two days walking distance from the nearest market place.

Miyeh has been working at the Xishuangbanna station in Jinghong, China since broadcasting began twenty years ago. She stresses that even if in the future the Akha people do not know their oral culture, then at least now audio and written records exist through which people can trace their ancestry. Of her work, she says:

Miyeh describes her preoccupation with three areas: firstly, to develop and edit stories daily for the radio programmes and try to involve younger people in the station. Since 1981 they’ve been trying to initiate TV broadcasts, now in the Akha language. Thirdly, deciding that the Akha needed a writing system, she established meetings with a professor in Kunming city and has been developing a script since 1981. The educational aspect of language programmes began when they started teaching the script over the air, important beyond being useful to the Akha but also meaning that they could "write down their knowledge". Although Miyeh felt they didn’t have the skills to write a curriculum, bi-linguistic experts from Beijing were called in and in 1993 after a meeting with the Hani it was decided that they would both use the same script, with more teaching books published in 1995. Yet, despite proposing that they would like to make "records on paper" over five years ago, a shortage of literate teachers is hindering both education and the printing of more texts.

Miyeh played a key role in explaining what was established at the 1996 conference to Akha in more remote areas and broadcasts seem to cover the majority of the Xishuangbanna province. Miyeh quotes up to 90% for both TV and radio, although due to electricity shortages, radio is far more predominant and reliable. She also reports of having responses to her broadcasts from across the borders of both Thailand and Burma. Miyeh is clear in her belief of the purpose of TV and radio, "to give knowledge to the people" and that while the younger generation, now growing up in cities in China inevitably end up speaking perfect Chinese, they mustn’t do so at the expense of totally abandoning their Akha culture:

Of the Chinese authorities role in all this, she speaks fairly favourably, if anything, due to the comparative size of the Akha to the Chinese, they are more a minority in terms of their population. Of course it’s worth remembering that Miyeh was very aware that she was talking to a Western journalist and what might well be passed back to the authorites, but nevertheless:

It seems that despite it’s limitations (namely the inevitable government control), community radio remains the most pronounced medium through which the Akha can be heard and just as significantly, communicate amongst themselves. Sadly, the present viability of the Internet is overshadowed by the issue of access: this isn’t a technological question but one of who will allow the subaltern to ‘speak’, or as we have established, create the space within which they can be heard.

Yet the Internet in the long run should not be dismissed. Perhaps community radio can exist as a precursor to Internet use, through its role in teaching the Akha script and perhaps eventually English. At least with the Internet, in comparison to Television, the Akha could one day ‘speak back’ and, looking at the rapidly prolific use of mobile phones in countries as close as Cambodia perhaps even the need to install phone lines could one day be over-stepped. As broadband develops perhaps one day the Akha will be able to access the Internet, ideally not only a tool for both education and health information through their TV’s, or even take part in interactive Customary Law soap operas. The possibilities within the Internet for distance learning mustn’t be dismissed and the increasing ability of the Internet to transmit both video and sound makes it far more applicable to the Akha’s oral culture, whilst this provides little more than community radio that already exists.