This week’s New Pubs features two chapters from the recently published Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia. One is by Fiskesjö on the Wa; the other by Sadan and Ja Htoi Pan Maran on gender in Kachinland. The last publication for this week is Sunam on Rohingya refugee life projects in Malaysia.
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
The Burma Studies Group and the John Okell Paper Prize Committee are pleased to announce that Lian Bawi Thang and Courtney Wittekind have been selected as co-honorees for this year’s inaugural paper price. Congratulations both.
Here are the remarks from the Prize selection committee about the papers:
“The committee was impressed by the two papers especially because they provide new ways of approaching questions that might seem to have been settled. By starting from a deep engagement with the empirical material and crafting an analysis from there, both authors generate nuanced analyses that steer clear of received and often polarized ideas about society, culture and politics in contemporary Myanmar. We welcome the creativity and openness to surprise their scholarship demonstrates.”
See here for other paper prizes.
Hedström, Jenny and Elisabeth Olivius. Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions. NIAS / Hawai’i U Press, 2022.
This is the first comprehensive account of the multifaceted processes of gendered transformation that took place in Myanmar between 2011 and 2021, and which continues to shape events today. The period began with the end of direct military rule and the transition to a hybrid, semi-democratic regime, precipitating far-reaching political, economic and social changes across Myanmar. To date, the gendered dynamics and effects of this transition have not yet received sustained scholarly attention. Remedying this gap, this book provides a much-needed historical corrective through a careful, nuanced analysis of the gendered dynamics of transitional politics, institutions and policymaking; feminist resistance, mobilization, and movement building; and their effects on labor, land, and everyday lives. Although the February 2021 military coup brought an end to this decade of experimentation and transition, in the richness of its analysis and detail, the book offers a deeper understanding of the current political situation in Myanmar. The gendered changes that the transition brought about have shaped both the current configuration of masculinized, military dictatorship, as well as the unprecedented role played by women in resistance to military rule after the 2021 coup. This analysis of the gendered dynamics and effects of the recent decade of political transition in Myanmar is therefore critical for understanding current events, as well as the ways in which Myanmar’s political landscape might continue to be reshaped.
See all of our future pubs here.
This week’s New Pubs features Campbell’s new book on life in Yangon’s informal settlements; Lahkyen Roi challenges extractivism in Kachin State; and Yaw Htung on the relationship between Kachin conceptions of ethnicity and the Kachin ethnonationalist movement .
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
A Masters Thesis from 20 years ago by Yoon Ah Oh, which is an ethnography of Insein Karen experiences with their Karen-ness.
See here for the PDF and other PDFs in the series.
This week’s New Pubs features the GSCN’s big report on post-coup revolutionary movement; Foxeus on the Buddhist nationalist rituals; and Thakur on the issue of global cruelty, with Myanmar’s treatment of Rohingya as a case.
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
Since the protracted ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya (episodes in the 1950s, 1978, 1992-94, 2012, 2017) recently became an object of scholarly attention, the Rohingya’s standing as an ethnic group has generated intense scrutiny. The same attention, sadly, has not always been focused on other ethnic groups in Myanmar, resulting in the Rohingya appearing to be a “political” identity when the others are simply “natural.” The Rakhine, for instance, are often taken as existing since time immemorial.
Kyaw Minn Htin’s PhD dissertation challenges that presumption, examining the historical processes of ethnogenesis that have led to the construction of the Rakhine. As he argues, “In the not-so-distant past, Burmese from Myanmar proper and Arakanese-speaking peoples themselves considered the Arakanese to be Myanmar (Mranmā) or ‘Burmese.’ In pre-colonial Arakan, these Arakanese speakers assumed various local identities depending on their place of dwelling, and it was in later colonial descriptions that the people who lived within the boundary of the map of Arakan were | collectively categorised as ‘Arakanese’” (13-4). This provocative thesis also includes arguments about the pre-colonial Muslim populations in Arakan (proto-Rohingya) and what happened to that identity after successive waves of in-migration from Chittagong during the colonial era.
See here for the PDF, and for all the other cuts.
This week’s New Pubs features an economic analysis of the gender wage gap in Myanmar; Pachau and van Schendel on human-animal-plant interactions in the greater Himalayan region; and for you international relations lovers, Dossi and Gabusi on China-Myanmar relations.
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
Call for applications: AAS is now accepting proposals for 2022-2023 Cultivating the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grants, available to scholars from South & Southeast Asia. See details at website and submit applications by September 30, 2022. https://buff.ly/3zp2X5l
This week we feature a mostly Burmese language journal, devoted in this issue to study of village social life. See articles by Myat Thein, Mya Than, Maung Aung, Aung Ni Oo, Aung Aung Hlaing, and others.
See here for the PDFs.
Burma Studies Group 