Kayah (people)
The Kayah , also known as Karenni or Red Karen , are a subgroup of the Karen people in Myanmar . The majority of them settle in Kayah State . Their ancestors probably immigrated to Myanmar from southern China. Your language belongs to the Karenian languages and thus to the Tibetan Burman language family .
Under British administration, the Kayah lived in a largely autonomous state that was incorporated into the Union of Burma in 1947. Due to the ongoing civil war , however, numerous Kayah fled to Thailand from the 1980s , where they are currently housed in UN refugee camps near the Thai-Myanmar border.
Culture
Kayah believe in a multitude of spirits who are good, bad, or indifferent to people. The spirits live around people and receive offerings in the form of meat and alcohol. If the future to be predicted with the help of the ghosts, this is done by consideration of chicken bones, the liver of a pig or a cow - similar to a oomancy the Lahu in northern Thailand. Some rituals and their own ritual music serve the Kayah to ensure that the spirits are always close. Above the spirits there is a supreme being called Ywa , who cannot be addressed directly by people and who also has no influence on them.
At annual festivals and necromancy rituals, an orchestra with several gongs occurs, which occurs similarly in many villages in Southeast Asia, but differs in musical style from the others. Each Kayah village has its own set of publicly owned musical instruments. Old bronze kettle gongs with four frog figures on the upper edge ( kloh , "frog drum ") are particularly valuable and of magical significance . A typical ensemble consists of two hand-held humpback gongs, a pair of cymbals and a long, slender tubular drum . Dance songs for entertainment are accompanied by pan flutes and possibly a double-headed drum.
The Kayah own some musical instruments made from bamboo. There are two spar xylophones of different sizes with around eight sound bars made of slotted bamboo tubes. The two bars are made of fabric twisted into bundles. Other bamboo tubes cut at an angle and with certain pitches are struck against each other instead of gongs. A tubular zither , the strings of which have been cut out of the outer layer of the bamboo tube (i.e. are idiochord), is called ting-tung . Its design corresponds to the chigring of the Garo in the extreme northeast of India, the east Indonesian sasando or the valiha of Madagascar.
Web links
- Karenni Independence through Education (KITE) karenni.org
- Kayandream. kayan.weebly.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Karenni. Music from the border areas of Thailand and Burma. (Ethnic Series) Produced by Fred Gales. PAN Records, 1994 (PAN 2040)