Ed note: The following is a guest cut from Mike Dunford, PhD candidate at ANU. Thanks to Mike for taking the time, and please follow his lead in supplying your own contributions [email soceep@nus.edu.sg].

Lehman’s The Structure of Chin Society is one of my favorite classic ethnographies of Myanmar, but it has been massively overshadowed by Leach’s roughly contemporaneous Political Systems of Highland Burma, which came out one decade earlier but had a similar audience and intention. For me, the things that make Lehman’s work more engaging than Leach’s are the same things that have probably made it less famous: Lehman is very open about his relatively limited “time on the ground” in Chin State (roughly one year), and apologetic about the limited claims that he is able to make as a result: everything is very carefully done, and the theorization is limited to the particular relationship between the diverse groups known as “Chin” and their lowland counterparts in Manipur and Myanmar. However, Lehman does engage in some broader theorizing, which is fascinating. The book is a masterpiece on the politics of food, agriculture, and eating—i.e., how who gets to eat what (and why) is a political question. Lehman also argues for an understanding of kingdom-vassal relations as a form of class relations; and through that route, he argues for understanding of ethnic relations in Myanmar as a form of class relations as well. In that sense, Lehman’s book prefigures some of the current scholarship on Myanmar, which looks at the intersection of race and class in the Bamar majority (see recent work by Campbell + Prasse-Freeman). It’s an underplayed classic that I think ought to be read alongside Leach, not just to see what mid-century Myanmar anthropology looked like, but as a useful text to think with (and push against) in its own right.

Lehman, F.K. The Structure of Chin Society; A Tribal People of Burma Adapted to a Non-Western Civilization. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963.

See here for the pdf and for all the others in the series.