This week we feature a special book, at least to your Deep Cuts stenographer, one I proselytize first and foremost to all new Burma Studies students. It is Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung’s Behind the Teak Curtain (2004), a long-term, patient, and granular study of agrarian political economy and rural relations when people said that that kind of research simply could not be done. It probes localized understandings of “democracy” and governance and how maneuver and survival were possible under rapacious authoritarianism. Given the impressive “Anyatha Revolution” within the revolution occurring right now, it particularly warrants another look.

see here for the PDF.

Friday 4 March 2022 at 4-6pm (BST)

A VIRTUAL SEMINAR BY THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

Event takes place on Zoom. Please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIuce2rqjMiG9PUkCN0T2lzH_CX4lhvd4Ba

This week in BSG Pubs we are announcing our intention to start featuring more Burmese language texts. For this week we have Saw Kyaw Lin’s “Stateless” [နိုင်ငံမဲ့သူများ] on Karen ethnic identity under military domination. Back in the English category, we have Yamahata and Anderson with an edited volume incorporating the coup and uprising; Hue on Cold War relationships between Burma and China; and Selth updating his bibliography of post-1988 Burma Studies texts (quite appropriate for us here, who are in the archiving and circulating business too). See here for full citations: https://burmastudiesgroup.wordpress.com/recent-publications-2/.

This week in Deep Cuts, we feature anthropologist Jennifer Leehey’s 2010 dissertation, which contains one of the most insightful analyses of regime propaganda of the era. To wit: “I would emphasize that this is something other than a persuasive campaign to win the hearts and minds of state subjects. The authorities are much more concerned with producing a facsimile of public opinion than with convincing people, affecting their inner lives in some way” (13).  

Leehey, Jennifer. “Open Secrets, Hidden Meanings: Censorship, Esoteric Power, and Contested Authority in Urban Burma in the 1990s,” Dissertation, University of Washington, 2010. 

See here for the PDF.  

The Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Washington Presents – The Myanmar Coup/Genocide: One Year Later (featuring Berkeley Law’s Stephen Rosenbaum)

2 March 2022 | Time: 12:30-1:20 PM [PST]

More information here:

see here for more info, and here to register

“Creative Engagement with Myanmar: Using our Knowledge Outside Academia,” ANU’s MRC 2022 Dialogue Series. Register here.

see our full calendar here: https://burmastudiesgroup.wordpress.com/announcements/

CSEAS Spring Lecture Series: Jane Ferguson, “Repossessing Shanland: Rock & Roll, Nostalgia and Hope in the Thai-Burma Borderlands”

Friday, February 25 at 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM (CST)

More info / register here.

This week in BSG Pubs we have a two volume comparative study on “social transformations” in India, Myanmar, and Thailand (edited by Yamahata, Seekins, and Takeda). Saruya has an article on gender and Buddhism. Then Ray with a monograph on the Chin-Lushai border. See here for full citations.

see here for PDFs.