You’ve seen new pubs from BSG. But why this fetish of the new, eh? So we have also been running an initiative focusing on the oldies, in which we circulate a (perhaps?) forgotten text, article, book, pamphlet. Here is our first page of archives. Return to the main Deep Cuts page here.

• 18 April 2022: Mobilization against inter-communal violence – This week a new article is out by Nathaniel Gonzalez on inter-religious collaboration in Mingalar Taung Nyunt. It brings to mind a host of literature on similar topics on these issues that those interested should also consult. For instance, back in 2017 Walton, Schissler, and Phyu Phyu Thi analyzed what helped foil the နောက်ကွေကလက်မဲကြီး-orchestrated riots then. On similar community-led efforts we also have Chan Myawe Aung San’s article on the way that cultural and religious festivals and events enable community cohesion in a deprived Yangon Buddhist and Hindu neighborhood, and Harrison’s article on Muslim life in Mawlamyaing. Then, for some historical context of inter-religious inclusion, see the article by Htet Min Lwin.

Chan Myawe Aung San. “Festivals and Events as Manifestation of Community Cohesion Buddhist and Hindu Residents in an Impoverished Urban Neighborhood,” Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development, Understanding Myanmar’s Development, 2018.

Gonzalez, Nathaniel. “Preventing Communal Violence in Myanmar: Power and Legitimacy in Local Conflict Prevention,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2022.

Harrisson, Annika Pohl. “Everyday Justice for Muslims in Mawlamyine: Subjugation and Skilful Navigation.” Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship 1.2 (2018).

Htet Min Lwin. “Religious Inclusion in the not-too-far Past, as Understood by Mahgandhrum Sayadaw,” IJBS 1, 2021.

Walton, Matthew, Matt Schissler, and Phyu Phyu Thi. “Failed riots: Successful conflict prevention in four Myanmar cities.” M. MAS Working Paper 1.2 (2017): 1-24.

• 11 April 2022: Burmanization (part 1 of ?) – This week in Deep Cuts we feature discussions of “Burmanization,” with several texts circling around state language policy and its effects. We have: Callahan’s sophisticated description of Burmanization; followed by Kyaw Yin Hlaing’s riposte about language policy; then flashing forward to the relative present with Lall and McCormick, respectively, with their divergent analyses of the role of Burmese as medium of instruction in ethnic areas today. It finishes with Sai Kheunsai’s short but very sweet personal take on how the sit-tat state’s obtuse prohibitions of Tai language is what turned the author away from being a Bama. For a more detailed editorial analysis, see here.

Callahan, Mary. “Making Myanmars: Language, Territory, and Belonging in Post-Socialist Burma,” in Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices (2004): 99-120.

Kyaw Yin Hlaing. “The Politics of Language Policy in Myanmar: Imagining Togetherness, Practising Difference?” Language, nation and development in Southeast Asia. ISEAS (2007):150-180.

Lall, Marie. “The value of Bama-saga: minorities within minorities’ views in Shan and Rakhine States.” Language and Education 35.3 (2021): 204-225.

McCormick, Patrick. “Ethnic Education Systems in Burma: Possibilities for Harmonization and Integration,” in Unravelling Myanmar’s Transition: Progress, Retrenchment and Ambiguity Amidst Liberalisation, eds Chachavalpongpun, Prasse-Freeman, and Strefford, Kyoto University Press, (2020):190-208.

Sai Kheunsai. “How I Became Shan” in Ashley South and Marie Lall, eds. Citizenship in Myanmar. Singapore: ISEAS, 2018.

• 4 April 2022: Discussions of Debt – “A debt of money can be liquidated but a debt of gratitude is never completely settled” – so goes the epigraph to Toe Hla’s 1987 PhD dissertation on money lending during the Kon-baung period, a fascinating study of social relations of the time rendered through examination of exchange. We also feature more recent studies of debt that may have flown under the radar, with Carstens and Watanabe, respectively, exploring how kyay-zu (rendered as ‘debt’) likewise sometimes may never be discharged, while Campbell shows how debt works to link squatters – seemingly ‘outside’ of capitalism – to markets as de facto wage workers.

Campbell, Stephen. “Debt collection as labour discipline: the work of finance in a Myanmar squatter settlement.” Social Anthropology 28.3 (2020): 729-742.

Carstens, Charles. “Gift narration: dynamic themes of reciprocity, debt, and social relations in Theravāda Buddhist Myanmar.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 35.1 (2020): 31-51.

Toe Hla, “Money-lending and contractual thet-kayits: A socio-economic pattern of the later Kon-baung period, 1819—1885,”  Ph.D. Diss, Dekalb: Northern Illinois University, 1987.

Watanabe, Chika. “Commitments of Debt: Temporality and the Meanings of Aid Work in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar.” American Anthropologist 117.3 (2015):468-479.

• 28 Mar 2022: This week in Deep Cuts is Maxime Boutry appreciation week. The practicing anthropologist and scholar has studied Moken, Rohingya, land dynamics in places as varied as the dry zone and the Delta with his work with GRET, and has also done some of the most interesting research on urban precarity in Yangon that we have seen (and all of this is just his English language research; he writes in French too!). We feature two of his chapters, the first that deconstructs Bama-ness, especially outside of “Bama” spaces (an absolute hidden gem), the second on auto-construction on the peripheries of Yangon.

Boutry, Maxime. “Burman Territories and Borders in the Making of a Myanmar Nation State,” in Su-Ann Oh, ed Myanmar’s Mountain and Maritime Borderscapes. ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, 2016: 99-120.

______.  “Migrants seeking out and living with floods: A case study of Mingalar Kwet Thet settlement, Yangon, Myanmar,” in C Middleton C., R Elmhirst and S. Chantavanich, eds. Living with floods in a mobile Southeast Asia. New York: Routledge, 2018: 42-62.

• 21 Mar 2022: In 1938 Thakin Po Hla Gyi led one of the largest anti-capitalist / anti-colonial worker actions in Burma’s history. Nicknamed The Ogre, PLG wrote Strike War to raise funds for the strikers but also to incite the rest of the country’s workers and peasants to revolution. The text is provided in Burmese and translated into English by ရဲေဘာ္ Stephen Campbell, whose own work on worker movements and daily life in Myanmar is clearly inspired by Thakin Po Hla Gyi. The translation is part of a broader series called the Myanmar Literature Project that includes translations of other old, but hopefully not forgotten, Burmese texts.

• 14 Mar 2022: This week we feature a volume for ဗမာစကား / မြန်မာစာ lovers out there. Edited by Justin Watkins, it contains a ton of fascinating investigations into how the language works: Phonology! Syntax! Verb semantics! Discourse and stylistic register! Old Burmese! Lexicography! It’s not for everyone… it’s for us.

Watkins, Justin, ed. Studies in Burmese Linguistics. Pacific Linguistics, Australian National University, 2005.

• Special in Remembrance edition – John Badgley: “Today the Burmese word for politics, naing ngan yeh, is rarely used at the village level for their own politics. It is reserved for the more dramatic intention to seek power at higher levels through a party, national organization, or the professions. There is no evidence to indicate that this concept connotes a different meaning than it did under the Burmese kings. Rather, the idea of collective opinion, of general belief, ayuahsa and atwe-akhaw, is used for the political action within the community” (70-1)

Badgley, John. “The Theravada Polity of Burma,” Zonam Aija Kenkyu, II, 4 march 1965, 52-75.

7 Mar 2022: 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.

Thawnghmung, Ardeth Maung. Behind the Teak Curtain: Authoritarianism, Agricultural Policies, and Political Legitimacy in Rural Burma/Myanmar, Kegan Paul Press, 2004.

• 28 Feb 2022: This week 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. 

• 21 Feb 2022: This week in deep cuts, we feature F.K. Lehman’s important work on ethnogenesis in Burma. Often overshadowed by E.R. Leach, Lehman’s is arguably more complex and thorough, in the way he conceives of any given ethnicity as taking its meaning not just by its dyadic differences with an alter group, but in how it relates to the entire field of ethnic relations.

We have included two works by him, an article that sums up the theory of reticulate systems, and then his monograph on Chin society:

Lehman, F.K. “Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems,” in Peter Kunstadter, ed., Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations. Princeton (1967): 93-124.

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

reader Magnus Fiskesjo contributed an additional Lehman text and PDF:

Lehman, F.K. (Chit Hlaing). 1989. “Internal Inflationary Pressures in the Prestige Economy of the Feast of Merit Complex: the Chin and Kachin Cases from Upper Burma.” In Ritual, Power, and Economy: Upland-Lowland Contrasts in Mainland Southeast Asia. Susan D. Russell, ed. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University. Pp.89-101.

• 14 Feb 2022: This week in Deep Cuts, coinciding with Tharaphi Than’s upcoming talk on images in the uprising, are a few texts that consider visuality and visual practices in Myanmar. We have Mandy Sadan’s 2014 article on the history of photography in Burma, Jane Ferguson’s 2012 writings on the portrayal of Shan/Tai people in Burmese cinema, and Thurein Naing’s recent paper (2012) on the sit-tat’s annual propaganda films.
  • Thurein Naing. “Shooting with the Lens: Tatmadaw Fighting the War of Representation,” 3rd International Conference on Burma/Myanmar Studies, 5-7 March 2021, Chiang Mai University.
  • Sadan, Mandy. “The Historical Visual Economy of Photography in Burma.” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land-en volkenkunde Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 170.2-3 (2014): 281-312.
  • Ferguson, Jane. “From Contested Histories to Ethnic Tourism: Cinematic Representations of Shans and Shanland on the Burmese Silver Screen.” In Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia, edited by Lim and Yamamoto, London: Routledge (2012): 23–40.

• 7 Feb 2022: This week in ‘deep cuts’ we feature work from the late Michael Aung-Thwin [“Prophecies, omens, and dialogue: tools of the trade in Burmese historiography,” in Wyatt, Woodside, and Aung Thwin, eds. Moral Order and the Question of Change: Essays on Southeast Asian Thought. New Haven: Yale U Press (1982): 78-103.], whose article about omens and prophecies feels particularly potent during these revolutionary times (for instance, recent flocks of hornbills alighting in Yangon had social media speculating; the popular Pale PDF leader is calling himself Bo Naga, the leader of the Royal Dragon Army, because the Tabaung foretold that the Dragon army will win; etc.).
  • Contributor Patrick McCormick was kind enough to submit the works of Aurore Candier, who has continued the lineage of research on rumors and omens in Myanmar:
    • 2011. “Conjuncture and Reform in the Late Konbaung Period : How Prophecies, Omens and Rumors Motivated Political Action from 1866 to 1869,” The Journal of Burma Studies, 15 (3), pp. 231-262.
    • 2004. “Imagination and Knowledge: some Comments on Rumours in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Konbaung Court,” in Proceedings of the Conference Traditions of Knowledge in Southeast Asia, part. I, Yangon, University Historical Research Center, pp. 165-191.

• 31 Jan 2022: Tinzar Lwyn, “Stories of Gender and Ethnicity: Discourses of colonialism and resistance in Burma.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 5.3 (1994):60-85, whose later pages (pp 73-83) feature testimonials from women in revolution circa 1988, which are haunting for their resonance with today’s struggle.