Based on the author’s extensive fieldwork among the Akha people prior to full nation-state integration, this illuminating study critically reexamines assumptions about space, power, and the politics of identity, so often based on modern, western contexts. Tooker explores the active role that spatial practices (and their indigenous link to a ‘life force’) have played in maintaining cultural autonomy in an historically migratory, multi-ethnic context. The book expands current debates about power relations in the region from a mostly political and economic framework into the domains of ritual, cosmology, and indigenous meaning and social systems. It is one of the few book-length anthropological studies of peoples of the Southwest China/Northern Southeast Asia borderlands.