Mlabri
The Mlabri , (also Mla, Mla-Bri, Mabri, Mrabri, Yumbri, Ma Ku, Yellow Leaf, Phii Dtong Lüang , Spirits of the Yellow Leaves ) are members of a so far little explored mountain people in the eastern north of Thailand . The population size was given in 1993 as around 200. A few more Mlabri (30-50) live mostly acculturated in Laos. Your migration area has always crossed borders.
The foreign name, which comes from the Thaiผีตองเหลือง ( pronunciation : [ pʰǐ tŋ lʉ̌a gelben ] - spirits of the yellow leaves ) is due to the custom of the Mlabri to leave a quickly built shelter made of banana leaves as soon as the leaves had changed color, because that was how they were the abandoned windbreaks were the only trace Thai and Lao hunters found of the forest dwellers for many years. The Mlabri were hunter-gatherers and had lived in the vicinity of Nan for ages . As former nomads, the Mlabri are now forced to live a sedentary life, one village is run by a Christian mission, another is under the care of the Hmong .
The language of the Mlabri is assigned to the Khmu group of the Mon Khmer languages . The Danish linguist Jørgen Rischel wrote a work on "the Mlabri".
literature
- Hugo A. Bernatzik: The spirits of the yellow leaves , Leipzig 1938.
- Hiroki Oota et al .: Recent Origin and Cultural Reversion of a Hunter-Gatherer Group . In: PLoS Biology , March 2005, Volume 3, No. 3. doi : 10.1371 / journal.pbio.0030071 .
- Jørgen Rischel: Minor Mlabri. A Hunter-Gatherer Language of Northern Indochina , Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen 1995. ISBN 87-7289-294-3 .
- MG Schoeneberg: Spirits of the Yellow Leaves (novel), Birmingham / Munich 2007 ISBN 978-3-940313-02-7 .