François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, co-editors of a 2007 volume reappraising Edmund Leach’s Burma work, have a concluding essay that applies the concept of ‘transethnicity’ to Myanmar. They use the concept to destabilize the analytical primacy of the ethnolinguistic group through a pincer move wrought by two different scalar reorientations. First, they consider the broader social systems in which many ethnic groups interact (“transethnicity may refer to a somewhat arbitrarily defined area in which a social system exists, whatever may be the ethnic diversity of that area” (300), a reorientation which also allows them to get “below” the ethnic group to stress that often the relationships that matter “are not between ethnolinguistic subgroups, but between villagers and partners, whose exchanges and networks contribute to the establishment of social cohesion, albeit an unstable cohesion, in a multi-ethnic landscape” (304).

And it’s only 11pp long, with a map!

Robinne, François and Mandy Sadan, “Postscript: Reconsidering the dynamics of ethnicity through Foucault’s concept of ‘spaces of dispersion’” in Robinne and Sadan eds Social dynamics in the highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering political systems of highland Burma by ER Leach. Brill, 2007.

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