Twinship In Akha Society

I have conducted three and a half-month fieldwork among the Akha, a minority ethnic group in Menglian, a"frontier"town in southwest China. Focusing on the twin infanticide, I have collected materials on this practice, including rituals and ceremonies, and its relations with the institutions from kinship to territory, such as the house, the village, inter-village alliance, and conflict resolution, as well as the plotical and economic power of the state. At present, I can provide a relatively complete picture of this aspect of Akha life.It tries to understand how they classify abnormal children like twins and why they have to get rid of them, what will they do before and after child birth and why, how they dispose of abnormal children, and what rituals they perform. It intends to investigate and assemble every detail, including places, persons, and performance in the rituals centred in the twin birth and killing, and the narration and representation about them. In addition, it tries to put the local practice in the regional and transnational context.In the Akha society, Cleanness and purity is considered the foremost. All they want is to be a clean man within the village. In their point of view, twins are of ultimate impurity, They are human of no good(caope), in fact, belonging to ghost(ne). Whenever twins present, rituals must be performed to purge this impurity of village. In a word, to understand twin infanticide, one should start with understanding rituals and ceremonies. And to understand rituals and ceremonies, one should put them into the concrete relations with other aspects of Akha world. In a word, twin infanticide in Akha society is never an isolated event.