The Journal of Burma Studies Abstracts

1997

"The Importance of the Dhammathats"
Andrew Huxley

Burma's dhammathats are pre-colonial compilations of legal and ethical material. They provide vivid insights into the details of everyday village life and into the process by which Burmese authors adapted Pali texts from India to their own purposes. They appear to be at least as old as any other surviving Burmese literature and contain valuable lessons for contemporary Burma. This article hopes to rescue them from their unjust neglect.     

"Temples and Rainfall in Ancient Pagan"
Richard Cooler

This article examines unusual features of various religious buildings located at Pagan, such as below-ground monasteries and brick-lined water-catchment basins, to establish that low rainfall of less than 24 inches annually was a constant in the local climate throughout the Pagan period. Confirming this fact sheds light on the critical role the construction of religious structures played in linking the inadequately watered capital to outlying irrigated agricultural lands, thus ensuring the necessary provision of food to the city. As the population of Pagan grew, the need to increase food supplies from the outlying areas created an incentive for focusing the practice of the Merit Path to Salvation on the erection of still more religious buildings, thus creating the "forest of temples" seen at Pagan today.

"Comparison of Three Pottery Villages: Shan State Burma"
Charlotte Reith

During my visit from 1991-1994 to three pottery-producing villages in Shan State, I was struck by the differences in technology and product. Contrary to my assumption that this small area would evidence a shared technology and similar products, I found three distinctly differing pottery traditions. In some places in the world, membership in the same ethnic group seems to be an important factor in determining the techniques and products of the potters belonging to that group. However, two of these villages, Compani and Awe Yaw, are both populated by Danu and have distinctly different ways of making pots. While it is primarily concerned with the pottery-making processes in the three villages, this article is also interested in the lives of the potters and how they face the challenges inherent in their craft.

"Half a Century of Publishing in Mandalay"
Anna Allott

The Ludu Kyi-bwa-yay Press was established in Mandalay as a radical left-wing publishing house by Ludu U Hla and his wife, Daw Amar, in 1938. Ludu U Hla was a pioneering Burmese journalist, would-be social reformer, social historian, and, most of all, recorder of folk-tales. Daw Amar began her writing career in 1938 as a translator, mostly of anti-Western works; in 1964 she began a series of major works dealing with Burmese traditional performing arts and the history and culture of Upper Burma and of Mandalay. U Hla died in 1982, and in March 1984 much of the press was destroyed in the great Mandalay fire. Nevertheless, the press resumed publishing in 1987 under the direction of Daw Amar and despite continued strict government censorship has remained in operation until the present.

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"Chinese Historical Sources on Burma: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Works"
Sun Laichen

Sun Laichen's unique and valuable 100-plus page bibliography includes:

Bibliography
An annotated list of 135 Chinese primary sources on Burma from the pre-Tang through the Qing periods, complete with author-title index.

Introduction
An introductory discussion of the availability and recent uses of these sources.

List
A list of introductions and collections of Chinese historical sources on Southeast Asia.

Other
A list of Burmese, Chinese, English, French, and Japanese historical works on Burma that utilize the Chinese primary sources. Chinese names and book titles are shown in Chinese characters and in roman transcription.

"This annotated bibliography represents a tremendous amount of work and should be consulted by anyone interested in Sino-Burmese relations. Excellent and helpful." - Charles P. Giersch (University of Puget Sound)

"The paper is indeed an excellent introduction to the Chinese sources on Burma, unlike anything so far available in English, or even in Chinese." - Geoffrey Wade (University of Hong Kong)

"[A] very impressive work. No need to say, it will be most useful to many scholars working on China, Burma, and other countries in Southeast Asia." - Sylvie Pasquet (Etudes chinoises, CNRS, Paris)

"The North Win and the Sun: Japan's Response to the Political Crisis in Burma, 1988–1998"
Donald M. Seekins

Japan's response to the political crisis in Burma after the establishment of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in September 1988 reflected the interests of powerful constituencies within the Japanese political system, especially business interests, to which were added other constituencies such as domestic supporters of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's struggle for democracy and those who wished to pursue 'Sun Diplomacy,' using positive incentives to encourage democratization and economic reform. Policymakers in Tokyo, however, approached the Burma crisis seeking to take minimal risks–a "maximin strategy"–which limited their effectiveness in influencing the junta. This was evident in the February 1989 "normalization" of Tokyo's ties with SLORC. During 1989-1998, Japanese business leaders pushed hard to promote economic engagement, but "Sun Diplomacy" made little progress in the face of the junta's increasing repression of the democratic opposition.

"Pottery in the Chin Hills"
Charlotte Reith

During my research on contemporary pottery villages in Burma, I was given the name of one such village, Lente, by a native now living in the United States. Lente is located in the Chin Hills, a remote area of western Burma difficult to access, inhabited by many tribes speaking a large number of languages. Foreigners are rarely given permission to visit the Chin Hills, and although I obtained permission to travel to Lente, I was ultimately prevented by the authorities from going further than nearby Falam. I was nevertheless able to collect data from Lente in three ways: first, my guide Daw Moe Moe was able to visit Lente and take photographs of the potters there; secondly, Daw Moe Moe was able to return to Falam with a potter from Lente village and with enough of the proper kind of clay to facilitate a demonstration which I photographed and documented; and thirdly, I was given a copy of a videotape showing the potters working in Lente village. This tape was taken by a young man from Falam who is interested in recording local crafts processes. The tape allowed me to observe a process of making pots with which I was totally unacquainted, and which has otherwise escaped recent photographic or video documentation. This was a true "discovery" concerning the ways in which pots can be made, and still another indication of the imagination and ingenuity of humankind.     

"Languages in Contact: The Case of English and Burmese"
Julian Wheatley, with San San Hnin Tun

This article deals with the nature and the effects of the long period of linguistic contact between Burmese and English. Part 1 deals with general issues of contact and borrowing; part 2 provides examples of English loanwords in Burmese, and considers the processes of phonological and semantic accommodation that they reflect.

"Sariputta and Moggallana in the Golden Land: The Relics of the Buddha's Chief Disciples at the Kaba Aye Pagoda"
Jack Daulton

In this article, the author reconstructs and documents the story of th

"The North Win and the Sun: Japan's Response to the Political Crisis in Burma, 1988–1998"
Donald M. Seekins

Japan's response to the political crisis in Burma after the establishment of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in September 1988 reflected the interests of powerful constituencies within the Japanese political system, especially business interests, to which were added other constituencies such as domestic supporters of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's struggle for democracy and those who wished to pursue 'Sun Diplomacy,' using positive incentives to encourage democratization and economic reform. Policymakers in Tokyo, however, approached the Burma crisis seeking to take minimal risks–a "maximin strategy"–which limited their effectiveness in influencing the junta. This was evident in the February 1989 "normalization" of Tokyo's ties with SLORC. During 1989-1998, Japanese business leaders pushed hard to promote economic engagement, but "Sun Diplomacy" made little progress in the face of the junta's increasing repression of the democratic opposition.

"Pottery in the Chin Hills"
Charlotte Reith

During my research on contemporary pottery villages in Burma, I was given the name of one such village, Lente, by a native now living in the United States. Lente is located in the Chin Hills, a remote area of western Burma difficult to access, inhabited by many tribes speaking a large number of languages. Foreigners are rarely given permission to visit the Chin Hills, and although I obtained permission to travel to Lente, I was ultimately prevented by the authorities from going further than nearby Falam. I was nevertheless able to collect data from Lente in three ways: first, my guide Daw Moe Moe was able to visit Lente and take photographs of the potters there; secondly, Daw Moe Moe was able to return to Falam with a potter from Lente village and with enough of the proper kind of clay to facilitate a demonstration which I photographed and documented; and thirdly, I was given a copy of a videotape showing the potters working in Lente village. This tape was taken by a young man from Falam who is interested in recording local crafts processes. The tape allowed me to observe a process of making pots with which I was totally unacquainted, and which has otherwise escaped recent photographic or video documentation. This was a true "discovery" concerning the ways in which pots can be made, and still another indication of the imagination and ingenuity of humankind.

"Languages in Contact: The Case of English and Burmese"
Julian Wheatley, with San San Hnin Tun

This article deals with the nature and the effects of the long period of linguistic contact between Burmese and English. Part 1 deals with general issues of contact and borrowing; part 2 provides examples of English loanwords in Burmese, and considers the processes of phonological and semantic accommodation that they reflect.

"Sariputta and Moggallana in the Golden Land: The Relics of the Buddha's Chief Disciples at the Kaba Aye Pagoda"
Jack Daulton

"The Concepts of Dobama ("Our Burma") and Thudo-bama ("Their Burma") in Burmese Nationalism, 1930–1948"
Kei Nemoto

This article attempts to demonstrate the interdependent operation of the term dobama (“our Burma”) and its opposite, thudo-bama (“their Burma”), in the minds of members of the Dobama-asiayoun (“Our Burma Party”). From the party’s very beginning in 1930 to the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League’s struggle against Japanese rule and subsequently for independence from the British from 1944 to 1947, Dobama party members, known as “thahkins,” avoided being identified as thudo-bama, meaning “the Burmese of their (the British or Japanese) side” or “the Burmese people who collaborated with the colonial regime.” Instead, they invariably identified themselves as dobama, or “our Burmese.” The thahkins preferred to define themselves in negative rather than positive terms. In other words, they chose to identify themselves by describing what they were not rather than what they were, and by attacking their imagined enemies, the thudo-bama, rather than attempting a clear definition of dobama.

"Yenangyaung and its Twinza: The Burmese Indigenous "Earth-Oil" Industry Re-examined"
Marilyn Longmuir

In the early nineteenth century, the indigenous oil industry at Yenangyaung may have been the largest in the world. The article summarizes and evaluates the descriptions of nineteenth and early twentieth century European observers, with special attention to the pre-colonial uses of the oil, the legends about the site, the local institutions governing ownership of the wells, the indigenous methods of oil extraction, and the Europeans’ estimates of production levels.

"An Annotated Bibliography of Articles on the Burmese Peasantry from the Journal of the Burma Research Society, 1911–1970"
Maria Serena I. Diokno

This compilation covers fifty articles and twenty-six township records published in the Journal of the Burma Research Society between 1911 and 1970. The selected articles all shed light on the economic life of the peasantry and have been divided as follows: Part I) Translations of relevant sources or commentaries on the peasantry, Part II) Geographic and other background information necessary for understanding peasant life, and Part III) Analyses or descriptions of the traditional, colonial, and early modern economy, of which the peasants were an important part. The articles are arranged by theme and date of publications within each section and sub-section.

"The Fall of Ayutthaya: A Reassessment"
Helen James

Conventional views of the 1760–1767 Burmese attacks on Ayutthaya contend that the Burmese were taking advantage of an opportunity to attack a politically and economically weak kingdom. This article adduces evidence from the Burmese chronicles, from accounts by contemporary foreign observers, and from economic history to argue that Burma’s campaigns against Ayutthaya were part of an epic struggle between the two polities that began in the 1500s and continued until the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–1826. Control of trade was one of the central factors motivating this centuries-long conflict. It was the v

"The Voc in Burma: 1634–1680"
Wil O. Dijk

This article is intended to show that the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) at the General State Archives (ARA), The Hague, The Netherlands, are a rich source of information on seventeenth century Burma. Because this unearthed data is mostly about commerce, this paper deals with the VOC’s trade with Burma. What has come to light is that the Dutch factories in Burma were an important and integral part of the VOC’s network of trade, seeing that the profits helped to fund the purchase of Indian textiles that were the backbone of much of the Dutch inter-Asian trade. The Dutch, moreover, sold Burmese export products profitably from Persia to Japan and Holland. In the end, the VOC’s establishment in Burma became the victim of a general change in Dutch fortunes when forces in both Europe and the Far East began working against the Dutch East India Company.     

"Venerating the Buddha's Remains in Burma: From Solitary Practice to the Cultural Hegemony of Communities"
Juliane Schober

The veneration of Buddha relics and images is a neglected, yet central organizing principle of Theravada culture and religious practice. My essay is informed by a historised understanding of Eliade's hierophany, a manifestation of a universal Buddhist sacred reality that defines and identifies cultural orders at the centers of local, historical contexts. I further rely on Bells' work on ritual and Gramsci's writings on hegemony to describe Burmese veneration of the Buddha's remains in diverse social and religious contexts. These range from the solitary practice, meditation and personal service in the Ananda mode to the Royal mode that defines social hierarchy in public rituals and expresses socio-religious aspirations of individuals and communities through culturally salient metaphors.

"A Glimpse into the Traditional Martial Arts in Burma"
Michael Martin

The traditional martial arts are an aspect of Burmese culture that has been virtually ignored by Burma scholars. Yet these martial arts have a rich heritage dating back to the early days of Burma. Historic events, religion, political necessities, and, more have shaped them recently into economic realities. The traditional martial art came close to extinction during the British colonial period, but was revived during the Japanese occupation. In past times, they were utilized for warfare and self-defense. Today the self-defense element remains, while the combat element has been transformed into sports and artistic cultural expression. The present economic conditions and the spread of foreign martial arts pose a current threat to the survival of the Burmese traditional martial arts and require the attention of Burma scholars to document this important component of the historic cultural identity of Burma.

"Adoniram Judson and the Creation of a Missionary Discourse in Pre-Colonial Burma"
Helen James

In the following paper I argue that Adoniram Judson, the first American Baptist Missionary to Burma, was strongly empathetic with his adopted country. His work as interpreter-translator during the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826 and his visits to Ava both immediately before and after the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-1826), although coached in the language of Christian mission, exhibited characteristics markedly different from the perspective of Ann Judson’s memoir and from those of certain missionary narratives subsequent to his own. I propose to examine aspects of three texts:  Ann Judson’s An Account of the American Baptist Mission to the Burman Empire; Henry Gouger’s Personal Narrative of Two Years Imprisonment in Burmah; and Adoniram Judson’s deposition to John Crawfurd. I shall also refer to J. Snodgrass’ Narrative of the Burmese War (1824-1826) and Henry Trant’s Two Years in Ava for other perspectives of some events.

"Germans in Burma, 1837–1945"
Hans-Bernd Zöllner

This article gives an account of the Germans who lived in Burma or who visited the country between the beginnings of British rule in 1826 and the end of World War II. After surveying German-Burmese relations from 1826 until today, the manifold German engagement in Burma before World War I is detailed. This engagement was followed by a sharp decline in the number of Germans living in the country other than for short periods between the two great wars. After World War II, on the German side, there was almost no memory of German activities in Burma left. By contrast the Burmese kept and keep this memory very much alive.

"A Preliminary Study of Burmese Prophetic Sayings"
Saw Tun

The Burmese people are known to be superstitious in many ways.  One is a belief in prophetic saying known as tabaun. This paper explains how in the past, people placed importance on these prophetic sayings. It describes how learned Buddhist monks have reminded people not to be influenced by them. Rather, they should be concerned with their kamma.

"Making a Name for Themselves: Karen Identity and the Politicization of Ethnicity in Burma"
Jessica Harriden

The history of Karen nationalism has been interpreted in terms of inter-ethnic conflict and conceptualizations of ethnicity have influenced understanding of Karen political identity. While ‘Karen’ incorporated various linguistic, sociocultural, religious and political sub-groups, the Karen National Union (KNU) elite promoted a singular pan-Karen identity in order to minimize such diversity. As a result, factionalism emerged between different Karen groups, obstructing the KNU’s political vision and leaving many Karens dissatisfied with KNU attempts to represent their various interests. The fall of Manerplaw in 1995 was thus the result of intra-ethnic conflict as much as conflict between Karens and non-Karens.

Journal of Burma Studies - Volume 8

"The Coming of the “Future King: Burmese Minlaung Expectations Before and During the Second World War"
Susanne Prager

Throughout the history of Burma we come across rebellions often led by so-called “future kings,” minlaungs. In western historiography, minlaung-movements are usually attributed to the pre-colonial past, whereas rebellions and movements occurring during the British colonial period are conceived of as proto-nationalist in character and thus an indication of the westernizing process. In this article, the notion of minlaung and concomitant ideas about rebellion and the magical-spiritual forces involved are explained against the backdrop of Burmese-Buddhist culture. It is further shown how these ideas persisted and gained momentum before and during World War II and how they affected the western educated nationalists, especially Aung San whose political actions fit into the cultural pattern of the career of a minlaung.

"Conqueror of Kings: Burma’s Student Leader"
Megan Clymer and Min Ko Naing

During the democracy uprising in 1988, Paw Oo Htun, whose nom de guerre, Min Ko Naing, means Conqueror of Kings, emerged as one of the movement’s most prominent student leaders. Together with other student leaders, he revived the umbrella students’ organization the All Burma Federation of Student Unions. Today, while serving out a twenty year prison sentence, Min Ko Naing remains a symbol of the Burmese student movement. In this essay, interviews with close friends and student colleagues help document his story.

"The Self-conscious Censor: Censorship in Burma under the British 1900–1939"
Emma Larkin

It is often assumed that censorship was not used to any great degree by British authorities in Burma. Yet, by looking at the way the British colonial government reacted to a variety of media including traditional Burmese drama, western blockbuster movies, and Burmese political pamphlets agitating against colonial rule, it is possible to see that censorship was very much a part of the British administration. British authorities censored pamphlets, books, dramas, and movies not only to contain political thought contrary to colonialism, but also to control the image of British officials as seen in the eyes of the Burmese.

"Professor U Pe Maung Tin (1888-1973): The Life and Work of an Outstanding Burmese Scholar"
Anna Allott

In 1998, Daw Tin Tin Myaing (Brenda Stanley), the youngest daughter of the late Burmese scholar U Pe Maung Tin, organized a symposium at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies to honor the achievements of her father. U Pe Maung Tin grew up as a Christian, but mastered Pali, the language of Buddhism, early in his career. This led him to become one of the world’s leading translators of Pali texts into English and interpreter of Buddhist doctrine to Western scholars. This article by guest editor and former student Anna Allott outlines U Pe Maung Tin’s life and work as a Pali scholar, lifelong student and promoter of the Burmese language, historian, linguist, phonetician, teacher, and editor.

"Professor U Pe Maung Tin: A Gentle Genius, A Meek Master"
Alan Saw U

U Pe Maung Tin’s accomplishments as a Burmese scholar are well-documented. Less so are his teachings and writings about Christianity and the Christian ministry in Burma. Alan Saw U, executive secretary and editor of the Myanmar Christian Literary Society, reflects on U Pe Maung Tin’s life as a leading figure in the Anglican Church in Burma.

"U Pe Maung Tin — Researcher, Scholar, Pedagogue: His Contribution to Burmese Studies in France"
Denise Bernot

U Pe Maung Tin possessed, by nature, all of the qualities of an erudite researcher: he was always ready to learn more; constantly trying to deepen his understanding; frequently opening a new line of inquiry; and in his work, at once rigorous and bold. U Pe Maung Tin never allowed himself to become a prisoner of tradition, though he knew perfectly the traditions of his own country and masterfully assimilated those of Great Britain. Convention never obstructed him from stating a scientific truth or doing the morally right thing. For those reasons, he left behind a legacy of lasting valuable research.

"U Pe Maung Tin’s and Luce’s "GlassPalace Revisited"
U Tun Aung Chain

A leading contemporary Burmese historian, U Aung Chain Tun offers a thoughtful and illuminating perspective on U Pe Maung Tin’s translation ion of The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma with G.H. Luce.

"Notes on Dipavamsa: An Early Publication by U Pe Maung Tin"
Tilman Frasch

While trolling a Burmese market, German scholar Tilman Frasch unexpectedly found a battered copy of U Pe Maung Tin’s first work, Notes on Dipavamsa, a text that opened new doors to scholarship on the history and literature of Theravada Buddhism—and set U Pe Maung Tin on a long and fruitful journey as Burma’s leading scholar of the 20 th century.

"U Pe Maung Tin Bibliography"
Patricia M. Herbert

From age 23 until his death at 84, U Pe Maung Tin was a prodigious writer and editor in both Burmese and English. He was the editor of the im

"Deep Change? Burmese Wall Paintings from the Eleventh to the Nineteenth Centuries"
Alexandra Green

This article will compare the narrative constructions of early (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) and late (seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries) Burmese wall paintings to determine whether or not “deep change” has occurred. Although many of the same stories were depicted in the murals during both time periods, the method by which the visual stories were portrayed changed from an emphasis upon iconic imagery to an exploration of narrative process. By analyzing the narrative modes employed during the two periods, the emphases of each are revealed. The changes that occurred in the Burmese murals most likely relate to the increasing orthodoxy of Burmese Theravada Buddhism and strengthening crown control over the country. Because the teleological purpose of the murals remains virtually identical, however, it is argued that no “deep change” occurred in the murals between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries.

"The 'Traditional' High Status of Women in Burma: A Historical Reconsideration"
Chie Ikeya

This article traces the genealogy of a persistent cultural stereotype that has long defined and constituted academic and popular knowledge about Burma and, more broadly, Southeast Asia: the “traditional” high status of women. Although Southeast Asia scholars today generally concur that claims about the high status of women in the region are oversimplified and problematic, postcolonial scholars of Burma largely have perpetuated the discourse of gender equality, which has deterred any attempt to complicate conceptualizations of gender relations and hierarchies in historical Burma.

This study investigates the process whereby the “traditional” autonomy of Burmese women was constructed in opposition to the likewise “traditional” subordinate status of women in South Asia and in contestation of the superiority of European culture and society. It argues that this “tradition” is a product of the multivalent representational practice by colonizing and colonized women and men in unequal relations of power who coauthored essentially and powerfully gendered discourses of colonialism, modernization, and nationalism. This article concludes by suggesting possible ways to move beyond the practice of enshrining persistent and monolithic cultural stereotypes as essential components of Southeast Asian history and to engender scholarship of the region firmly located within, not isolated from, specific and complex historical contexts.

"Modern Burmese Painting According to Bagyi Aung Soe"
Yin Ker

Rangoon-based artist Bagyi Aung Soe (1924–1990) has been regarded by fellow artists as a pioneer of modern art in Burma. Influenced by precepts practiced at Rabindranath Tagore’s Úântiniketan, he elaborated an original painting approach and style synthesizing diverse artistic approaches, which neither adhered exclusively to the European or Burmese artistic tradition nor regurgitated twentieth-century Western artistic innovations

"A Norm of Burmese Kingship? The Concept of Raza-dhamma through Five Konbaung Period Texts" 
Aurore Candier

The Burmese concept of raza-dhamma, which derives from the Pali râja dhamma found in early Buddhist literature, refers to a tenfold code for righteous kings. In the early eighteenth century, U Kala’s Maha-raza-win-kyi connected the raza-dhamma to the origin myth of Mahathammata and laid the groundwork for later texts. While scholars thus far have limited their perspectives to the early Konbaung sources, this article attempts a more systematic approach tracing the evolution of a commentarial genre that broadened the scope of the concept. Throughout the middle and late Konbaung period, the interpretation of the ten raza-dhamma represents the first argument of a constantly redefined discourse on kingship. A historical and linguistic investigation of five significant texts shows how this concept participated in the gradual changes of the sociopolitical representations during three periods. From Bagyidaw’s reign (1820s–1830s), this article analyzes the royal chronicle Hman-hnan maha-raza-win-daw-kyi and two normative texts, the Monywe hsayadaw’s Razaw-wada-kyan and the Maha-dhamma-thinkyan’s Dhammaw-padetha-kyan, all three written between 1827 and 1832. Next, it investigates the concept in Mindon’s early reign (1850s–1860s) through the third Maung Htaung hsayadaw’s Raza-thewaka-dipani-kyan (1856), which enlarged upon the Dhammaw-padetha-kyan. Finally, turning to the late Konbaung period (end of the 1870s–1890s), this article look at the concept in Hpo Hlaing’s Raza-dhamma-thingaha-kyan (1878).

"It Has Now Passed For Ever Into Our Hands’: Lord Curzon and the Construction of Imperial Heritage in Colonial Burma" 
Stephen L. Keck

Lord Curzon’s ultimately successful effort to save the Palace of Mandalay from misuse and neglect constitutes a good example of imperial heritage building. The palace itself had already been the site for the construction of heritage as the Konbaung dynasty drew upon earlier models of Burmese kingship and Buddhist cosmology to use the pal­ace (and royal capital) to help proclaim its power and legitimacy. However, after the Third Anglo-Burman War, the combination of the removal of the Konbaung dynasty and the British occupation of the palace resulted in the decay of the buildings, leading British travel writers to complain about their condition. In 1901, Lord Curzon evicted the British over substantial objections and began the process of preserving the palace. Curzon’s aims reflected both his experience in India and the debate over historic pres­ervation and restoration. Ultimately, Curzon came down on both sides: restoring some features of the palace while preserving others. Preserving the palace was a means of making the positive aspects of British rule visible; it also had the effect of removing the Konbaung dynasty from the present and consigning them to history.

"Two Bullets in a Balustrade: How the Burmese Have Been Removed from Northern Thai Buddhist History" 
Justin McDaniel

This article questions the way the Burmese period of Northern Thailand has been depicted by Thai and international scholars. The Burmese have generally been described as violent invaders whose rule ushered in an era of decline in Buddhist prac­tice and learning. This period of more than two hundred years (1551–1772) has been classified as one of destruction, oppression, and intellectual stagnation. The Burmese, it is stated repeatedly, destroyed the “golden age” of Northern Thai Buddhist litera­ture. However, epigraphic, codicological, economic, and archaeological evidence does not indicate that

'Bodawpaya's Madness': Monastic Accounts of King Bodawpaya's Conflict with the Burmese Sangha: Part One"
Patrick Pranke

In the early nineteenth century, a conflict between the Burmese king, Bodawpaya (r. 1782-1819) and his council of monastic leaders led to the temporary persecution and suppression of the Burmese sangha. Historical research into the affair has relied for the most part on early European reports and more recently on Bodawpaya's own royal orders to come to an understanding of the motives and objectives of the king's actions. This article a somewhat different approach by exploring the incident as it was seen through the eyes of the monastic community. Citing both contemporary sources and later nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical retrospectives, this article discusses the issues deemed important by the sangha in terms of its perceived legitimacy, its role in the world as an agent of salvation, and its prerogatives as an institution vis-¨¤-vis the Buddhist state. This information, important in its own right, also helps to clarify the motives that informed the king's behavior, as well as allows a more critical assessment of western accounts of the controversy. The apologetics presented in the monastic narratives are technical and imbedded in a conceptual universe that merges the religious, the cosmological, and the political, and as such require a familiarity with Theravada scholasticism and the Burmese Buddhist world view to be understood. Implicitly, this article argues for the utility of such kinds of Buddhist cultural literacy in the study of Burmese religious history and in Burma studies more generally.

"Festivalizing Thingyan, Negotiating Ethnicity: Burmese Chinese Migrants in Taiwan"
Hsin-chun Tasaw Lu

Cultural performances at ethnic festivals in an immigrant context are often seen to represent the ideologies of ethnic identity tied to the performers' ancestral homeland. This article examines how Burmese people of Chinese descent (hereafter Burmese Chinese) in Taiwan negotiate their ethnic identity between pan-Burmese and pan-Chinese models as exemplified in their presentation of a Burmese festival called Thingyan. The author's objective is to pinpoint some issues in the representation of diasporic ethnicity and the politics of return migration. Return migrants have returned to their ancestral homeland after having been settled in foreign countries for generations, entangling complex ethnic politics, in which the identification with a home is frequently contestable. The issues discussed touch on a range of domains, in particular the study of diaspora, performances, and cultural tourism, with a primary disciplinary orientation in ethnomusicology. The emphasis on "festivalizing" is on the festive and celebratory aspect of these events through which Burmese Chinese have successfully promoted their ethnic identity in their new home: Taiwan. By analyzing the festival's performances, this case study aims to theorize the ethnic politics of returning migrants, as well as to examine the ethnic performances at sites where identities are negotiated and shaped. These identities are indeed subject to the ever-changing representations and interpretations of groups and individuals within ethnic politics at the different levels embedded in their double diasporic experiences.

"Legal Education in Burma since the mid-1960s"
Myint Zan

This article reports on and analyzes developments in Burmese legal education since the mid-1960s. Among others it analyzes the metho

"From Ava to Mandalay: Toward Charting the Development of Burmese Yazawin Traditions"
Alexey Kirichenko

Since the emergence of modern historiography of Burma (Myanmar), Burmese yazawin, or chronicles of kings, have been key scholarly sources. The most well-known of these chronicles are considered reliable after circa 1500 and provide a timeline of events for almost all research on precolonial Myanmar history. Despite this, we still have a quite vague understanding of textual genealogy and conditions in which these sources were produced, the foundations upon which they were constructed and the messages they carried. This article analyzes the corpus of Burmese yazawins and those narrative sources linked to yazawins that were instrumental in their compilation. It addresses the issues of typology and geneaology of yazawins, as well as the reconstruction of their development in terms of scope, structure, and conceptual focus. It challenges some historiographic stereotypes with regard to yazawins as a whole and the nature of individual sources in particular, and identifies a number of distinct yazawin traditions. The role of elites of royal cities of Ava, Taungngu, and Pagan in the production of yazawins is explored. Development of yazawin traditions is analyzed both as a kind of established textual activity with its own dynamics and as a function of changes in the organization of power and textual culture. Finally, the author suggests a number of tasks to be addressed in future research. All in all, the paper is conceived as a contribution towards the textology and hermeneutics of Burmese narrative sources and ideas in Myanmar in general.

"Three Nineteenth-Century Law Book Lists: Burmese Legal History from the Inside"
Andrew Huxley

Through the investigation of three Burmese law book lists by Maungdaung Sayadaw, Tha Dwe, and Kyaw Htun this article seeks to construct a narrative history of legal traditions. By breaking each list into smaller units and comparing the results a common core of Burmese legal history emerges. The lists, shed light on who the typical authors of a dhammathat were while items that appear on some, but not all, of the lists help indicate controversies that were still matters of live debate during the nineteenth century.

"Rockets and Ashes: Pongyibyan as Depicted in Nineteenth-and Twentieth Century European Sources"
Ralph Isaacs

This article describes the Burmese festival of pongyibyan, the ceremonies at the cremation of a senior monk, mainly by collating written accounts and photographs by Europeans who witnesses pongyibyan in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certain rites of the pongyibyan ceremony offer interesting parallels to accounts of the Buddha’s own funeral found in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta. This article cites descriptions of the preparation of the monk’s corpse by evisceration, embalming, lacquering, wrapping in cloth and gilding, including descriptions of both the simple inner coffin and elaborate outer coffin, and the mortuary chapel (neibankyaung) where the body lay in state awaiting cremation. The article depicts the architectural and symbolic significance of the tall funeral pyres with figures of mythical beings and the role of the sat-hsaya, the craftsman in bamboo and cut paper who built them as well offering a description of the lonswethi, the tug-of-war for merit. Numerous foreign observers reported the Burmese passion for rocketry. At least three types of rockets (don) were used at pongyibyan for kindling the funeral pyre. Rockets commonly caused injury or death to spectators, and were discouraged by the British colonial government.

Abstracts

Death and Disease in the Prisons of Colonial Burma

Ian Brown

Over the half-century from 1890 to 1940, the death rate in Burma’s prisons was cut by more than half. This article first seeks to explain that reduction by examining the shifting incidence of the main diseases found in the province’s jails in this period-dysentery and diarrhea, smallpox, cholera, plague, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis-and the measures taken by the prison administration to contain them. It then critically examines the argument advanced in the 1920s, for example, that a prolonged term in a Burmese prison was likely to improve the inmate’s physical condition-that he would generally leave prison fitter, heavier and in better health. Finally, the article seeks to explain why the incidence of disease and the rate of mortality among the inmate population were apparently of such concern to the prison administration of colonial Burma.

Bitter Pills: Colonialism Medicine and Nationalism in Burma, 1870-1940

Penny Edwards

This article examines medicine as a field of knowledge deeply implicated in the emergence of new ways of articulating national difference. Specifically, it aims to shed light on the symbiosis between perceptions of political space and sovereignty, and conceptualizations of human anatomy. The article offers an analysis of the presentation, dissemination, and institutionalization of western medicine by colonial researchers, missionaries, educators and policy-makers in Burma, and correlates these generally ethnocentric perceptions with European presumptions about indigenous medicine. Reflecting upon the place of medicine as a strategic handmaiden to both military expeditions and missionary ambitions, it considers proposals for medical education and medical rights in Burma by Burmese advocates of educational and labour reform and the specific place of medicine in the training of Karen nationalist leader Dr. San C. Po and Burmese nationalist U Thein Maung.

The Scientific and Hygienic Housewife-and-Mother: Education, Consumption and the Discourse of Domesticity

Chie Ikeya

This article examines the development of a discourse on modern domesticity in colonial Burma that not only emphasized the role of a woman in safeguarding the health and welfare of her family and nation, but also associated housewifery and motherhood with “domestic science,” medicine, and hygienic behavior. The article shows that two cultural and didactic institutions, one formal and the other informal, served to disseminate this discourse on modern domesticity: “secular” government-funded co-educational schools and the popular press. It reveals that the emergence of the ideal of the scientific and hygienic housewife-and-mother was not simply an effect of a unilateral and hegemonic process of imperialism. Rather, it is best understood as a phenomenon informed simultaneously and conjointly by “Western” and cosmopolitan notions of scientific progress, bodily discipline and hygiene, bourgeois femininity, and health technologies, and the rise of consumer culture, aided by the spread of illustrated printed material, especially advertisements.

Inoculators, the Indigenous Obstacle to Vaccination in Colonial Burma

Atsuko Naono

Colonial records on smallpox vaccination point to inoculations and inoculators as among the most serious obstacles to the progress of vaccination. However, despite their apparent importance, those identified as inoculators by the colonial medical officers remained an unclear, evasive and almost phantom-like group. This article examines how British colonial medical men wrote about a group who probably never existed in Burma outside of the colonial imagination. By locating the vaccinator’s enemy in a social practice and not in a particular group of practitioners, I seek to uncover the secret of inoculation’s resilience in the face of decades of aggressive vaccination campaigns. The inoculator was the bogeyman of colonial vaccination reports, requiring the historian to ask a different set of questions about indigenous resistance to colonial medicine and to look at the colonial records in a different way.

Syphilis and the Kachin Regeneration Campaign, 1937-38

Mandy Sadan

This article discusses the introduction of a policy known as the Kachin Regeneration Campaign in the Kachin Hills from 1937 to 1938. Initiated by a belief that the Kachin people were on the verge of dying out because of an epidemic of syphilis, the campaign reveals much about the realities of Kachin dissociation from the late colonial regime, contrasting sharply with the conventional historical narrative of Kachin compliance with imperial control. A significant part of the Regeneration Campaign’s agenda was a less publicly acknowledged awareness that former Kachin soldiers were becoming a potentially volatile interest group and that there was increasing discontent across the Kachin Hills with regard to the administration, the military and the missions. The article uses the concept of a sick role to describe the approach of the Regeneration Campaign to Kachin society and discusses how the rhetoric of the campaign became embedded in the sermons of the local Christian missions, justifying changes to women’s roles and more recently impacting upon early responses to the spread of HIV/AIDS in the region.

Healing, Rebellion, and the Law: Ethnologies of Medicine in Colonial Burma, 1928-1932

Maitrii Aung-Thwin

Asia’s encounter with Western medicine and the emergence of public health regimes might be regarded as one chapter within the larger framework of colonialism and its discursive practices. Medicine contributed to the ordering of colonized Asia by providing particular vocabularies and frameworks through which cultures and communities could be identified, categorized, and transformed into accessible knowledge. Notions of the body, race, cleanliness, sickness, “the patient” and healing were continuously shaped and negotiated within the context of this encounter, involving sites of healing, communities, and a wide range of socio-political contexts. This study considers the way in which “indigenous medicine” was delineated by two instruments of the colonial administration in British Burma: a committee appointed to integrate the study of local practices into the educational system and a special tribunal, which was formed to process detainees in the wake of one of the largest rebellions in colonial Burma’s history. It suggests that the shadow of Burma’s administrative connection to India might have corresponded to the manner in which healing culture was conceptualized. Due to changing political circumstances surrounding the question of Burma’s separation from India, the image of traditional medicine shifted to represent a distinct form of Burmese criminality and resistance.

The Alchemist and His Ball

Guillaume Rozenberg

Alchemy plays an important part in Burmese Buddhism as one means, among several, of gaining access to salvation. The practice of alchemy figures centrally in a specific religious orientation, the path of the superman (weikza lan) that offers a way to reach nirvana through seeking near-immortality. Within this ideological frame, defined by the ultimate horizon of deliverance, alchemy makes it possible—by means of understandings, technical manipulations, and the forces with which it deals—for the practitioner to act upon his person through the intermediary of a material double, the ball which serves as the object of alchemical activity, allowing him in this way to become the master of his own being and gain some control over his fate. Alchemy appears to be a form, religiously defined and socially meaningful, of self-making.

Notes on Burmese Manuscripts: Text and Images

Christian Lammerts

While recent cataloguing work in Myanmar, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Thailand has served to greatly enhance our knowledge of Burmese, Sanskrit and Pali texts transmitted in Burmese manuscripts, we still lack adequate descriptive and critical studies of manuscript-related practices and mentalities in pre-modern Burma. The present note is concerned with the development of manuscript ornamentation. It examines the varieties of Burmese manuscript textual supports and their histories, the scope of genres that received decoration, and the technologies associated with ornamentation.

The Seven Weeks: A 19th-Century Burmese Palm-Leaf Manuscript

Catherine Raymond

This paper describes in detail aspects of a rarely viewed palm-leaf manuscript illustrating classical Burmese cosmology. This manuscript, BC.9641A-025-031, dating from Burmese Era 1256 (CE1894), is a part of the Burma Art Collection at Northern Illinois University. This study analyzes only eight leaves, of which the focal image is reproduced as the cover illustration of the latest Journal of Burma Studies (14). The visual analysis based in part on our translation of the texts incorporated within the various illustrations provides a key to understanding the iconography of the Seven Sites, or the Seven Weeks Preceding the Buddha’s Enlightenment; as combined with the symbolic geography of the Sixteen Sacred Lands. Although the present work concentrates only on the events around the Enlightenment, the complete manuscript comprises a 110 page folio (some 55 folded leafs), including depictions of Mount Sumeru and the Three Realms, the Lake Anotatta and the Four Rivers, and the cross section of the Four Islands and the Buddhapada.

Special Section In Honor of F.K. Lehman

"Where to Begin? A Brief Intellectual Biography of F.K. Lehman (F. K. L. U Chit Hlaing)" 
Juliane Schober

"No Country for Middlemen:  Three Sketches of Conflict on the Xiao    Liangshan Frontier"  Ann Maxwell Hill

"Geneaologies of Nurture:  Of Pots and Professors" 
Penny Van Esterik

"The Legacy of F. K. Lehman (F.K. L. U Chit Hlaing) for the Study of Religion     and the Secular in Burma"
Juliane Schober

"The Saint Who Did Not Want to Die:  The Multiple Deaths of an Immortal Burmese Holy Man"  Guillaume Rozenberg -
 Translated from French by Ward Keeler (University of Texas at Austin)

The events preceding, surrounding, and following the demise of the person considered the greatest Burmese holy man of the late twentieth century, the great monk of Thamanya (1912–2003), reveal much about how a community seeks to gain some control over death. In attempts to prevent the monk’s death, in efforts to preserve his presence despite his death, and in arguments about how to organize his funeral, we see that the body lies, as the French anthropologist Robert Hertz long pointed out, at the center of conceptions and activities related to death. Whether doubled, used as the subject of rites, preserved or burned, the body is an instrument that is manipulated when people confront death’s effects on their community.

"Capitalism and the Development of Tin Industry in Burma"
John Hillman

Although Burma played an important role in the Asian tin industry during the era of mercantile capital, it faded into insignificance during the nineteenth century, the era of finance capital, but recovered in the first part of the twentieth as its deposits were exploited by western industrial capital. The first phase rested on the strategic location of Tenasserim astride the trade routes across the isthmus of Kra and outside the control of Western mercantile trading companies. However, that same location made it a site of the Burmese- Siamese wars which brought this era to end in devastation. Although the East India Company promoted exploitation of the mineral resources of Tenasserim following the first Anglo-Burma war, it was unable to establish the institutional infrastructure that allowed Chinese capitalists to finance the tin industry elsewhere. As tin prices rose in the twentieth century, British, South African and Australian capital reinvigorated the industry not only in Tenasserim but also in the Shan States. One of these ventures proved to be so profitable that became the basis of the first tin conglomerate to operate on a global basis. The new role for Burma is explored during the depression of the 1930s, both in the negotiations with the International Tin Committee which regulated the global industry and in the continued expansion of production. Although western capital remained dominant it rested on an uneven financial base, but it provided the framework which allowed small scale primitive workings by both Chinese and Burmese to flourish.

Scholarly Curiosities
"A Royal Collection of Bronze Model Boats and Soldiers from Eighteenth-Century Burma"
Bob Hudson

"Kingship by Merit and Cosmic Investiture: An Investigation into King Alaungmintaya's Self-Representation"
Jacques Leider

Alaungmintaya's rise from village headman to kingship in less than five years raises manifold questions regarding the perception of Buddhist kingship in Myanmar. The new king had to establish his credentials not only on the battlefield, but also within a particular cultural and religious environment. Based largely on the edicts and letters of the king himself, this paper takes a look at the way that the king communicated his claims to royal status to other kings and his subjects. It focuses in particular on the common notion of kingship by merit which, in the king's mind, not only explained and legitimized his political rise, but also made explicit the cosmic relevance of his mission to protect the Buddhist religion. For Alaungmintaya, kingship was not only a reward due to past merits, but the fulfillment of a higher mission with divine approval. By paying close attention to the religious connotations of key terms within their cultural and textual context, the paper tries to highlight the complexity of royal self-representation.

"The Making of the Culprit: Atula Hsayadaw Shin Yasa and the Politics of Monastic Reform in Eighteenth-Century Burma"
Alexey Kirichenko

The paper attempts to reconstruct the career of Atula Hsayadaw Shin Yatha (1700-1786), one of the key monastic leaders of eighteenth-century Burma, an advisor to the king Alaungmintaya, a prolific author, and a culprit portrayed as the enemy of the sasana in several influential religious chronicles of the Konbaung period. It is built as a survey of available materials on this important historical figure with a special emphasis on his monastic affiliation, his role inshaping the religious policy of Alaungmintaya, his banishment from the capital in the 1770s, and his trial, which took place in 1784. The paper explores how the image of Atula as a culprit was constructed and how that has affected the current understanding of monastic reforms in eighteenth-century Burma.

"Conjuncture and Reform in the Late Konbaung Period: How Prophecies, Omens and Rumors Motivated Political Action During the Years 1866-1869"
Aurore Candier

Contrary to the modern Western concept of reform, the precolonial Burmese concept of pyu pyin was not linked to the notion of progress, but to the notion of "regeneration." These reforms, called here "cyclical reforms," were meant to restore a pristine and ideal order. Their implementation was strongly connected to the "prophetic reading" of a time. Following Buddhist cosmology, wordly affairs reflect cosmic order, so that prophecies, omens, rumors and other extraordinary signs were immediatly reported to the king and interpreted by his experts in wordly matter knowledge (lawki piñña). When these "prophetic readings" were inauspicious, "cyclical reforms" were carried out to restore the socio-cosmic order. But there were also reforms, here called "conjunctural reforms," which were a more specific response to a changing context. Within this frame work, it is productive to bring the conception and practice of reform during the middle and late Konbaung period (1820s-1880s) under scrutiny. At that time, the Burmese government had to adjust to the coming of a new colonial order. The reign of king Mindon (1853-1878) was particularly rich in major sociopolitical changes and implementation of reforms, which were drafted as a response to the new "conjuncture."

The years 1866-1869 are particularly formative for two reasons. First, the year 1866 is the major political turn of king Mindon's reign. The heir-apparent, the Kanaung prince, leader of the "conjunctural reform" program after his brother Mindon took power, was murdered during a coup d'etat in August. Thereafter, king Mindon led both "cyclical" and "conjunctural" reforms until changes in the international context of Burma in the 1870s put an end to his attempts. Second, these years are particularly well-documented, both in vernacular and western primary sources. Only a careful and close examination of both types of sources will allow us to analyze how "prophetic" information was interpreted and understood at the Burmese court and allow us to see how this understanding influenced decision-making and choices of the appropriate type of reform, whether "cyclical"—a reversion to normative or ideal conditions—or "conjunctural"—a creation of a new precedent.

"Narratives of Nation, Questions of Community: Examining Burmese Sources Without the Lens of Nation"
Alicia Turner

As much as scholars know that Burmese identity was never singular or completely unified, we still allow the mirage of a singular nation to quietly seep into the assumptions that frame our research. As Prasenjit Duara has argued, the nation has become the subject of history. It shapes our disciplines and our orientations, as we write for and about Burma studies. A focused look at one moment in Burmese history, one document and even one person, however, reveals that even when efforts to produce a feeling of unity was at its peak, Burmese sense of themselves and their worldviews were inherently multiple. Diverse and hybrid modes of Burmese identity thrived even in the heart of the anti-colonial nationalist movement, and it was this multiplicity that made the response to colonialism possible. This article offers micro history of a single moment in the rise of the anti-colonial nationalist movement, looking at the meeting minutes of the Ninth All-Burma Conference of Burmese Associations and the biography of U Kyaw Yan a key figure of the period. Focusing in this way exposes the inherent multiplicity of Burmese worldview and identity at the micro level and help to make us, as scholars, more attuned to its impact in Burmese history in broader terms. In this, I offer a simple and perhaps obvious point: that when we return to the primary sources we find that history and the lives, motivations, and interactions of those we study are never as simple as the stories we tell about them.

"The Position of the Rajavasa Katha in Mon History-Telling"
Patrick McCormick

The Mons are are considered one of the foundational peoples of Burma. In comparison with Burmese-language sources, there are fewer Mon-language texts concerning history. The Rajavasa Katha is a collection of Mon-language historical texts and includes some of the longest, most elaborated, and well-known narratives in the Mon language. One of these concerns the rise and career of the Mon military hero and ruler, Rajadhiraj, forming a work perhaps better known in its Thai and Burmese “retellings” as a classic somewhere between history and literature. Yet for Mon scholars and intellectuals, this narrative seems to hold an equivocal position: while no one would dismiss it, it nevertheless does not seem to have the position of importance that it would seem to deserve. This essay is an attempt to understand where and how Mon scholars position these narratives within the Mon intellectual environment. This environment, in turn, is contingent upon the wider Burmese intellectual environment, itself a development out of indigenous practices and conceptions introduced through contact with British educational and intellectual traditions. This discussion touches on how history is conceived of, written, and retold in modern Burma, and the consequences that these conceptions have for Mon history. One of the most salient of these is that many Mon intellectuals consider the first millennium as the most important for Mon history, with more recent centuries–and the sources associated with them –less important to what is most central to be transmitted and told to the story of Mon history.

"From Gold Leaf to Buddhist Hagiographies: Contact with Regions to the East Seen in Late Burmese Murals"
Alexandra Green

In 1767 the Burmese army sacked the Thai city of Ayutthaya, and multitudes of people were captured and relocated to the Burmese central zone, including artists and theatrical performers. This event has been considered seminal in the emergence of Thai influences on Burmese art, including mural painting. Yet, Burmese deportations of people from the Thai, Lan Na, Sipsong Panna, and Shan States regions occurred on a number of occasions prior to the late eighteenth century attack. And, trade networks and religious exchanges between monasteries formed alternative routes of communication between Burma, Ayutthaya, Lan Na, Sipsong Panna, and the Shan States. Unsurprisingly, such variant interactions had an impact on artistic production in Burma prior to the destruction of Ayutthaya and the relocation of artists to the Ava region. The information utilized in Burmese murals ranges from central Thai elements of style and dress to the narratives and methods of religious practice found particularly in Tai regions. This paper explores these aspects in Burmese mural paintings from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in order to suggest the extent and nature of this impact, as well as the various means – social, religious, political – by which it came about. The murals ultimately present a view of Burma readily absorbing external material due in part to shared religious beliefs and fluid political relationships in the region.

"Reading "Saturn": Interpretive Practice Under Censorship in Burma"
Jennifer Leehey

The article analyzes a short story called "Saturn" written by Win Sithu and published in Burma in 1992. Of particular interest is the way the story relies on culturally-specific logics to produce effects on readers. Written in the context of strict state censorship, the story eludes easy interpretation and gestures towards meanings that would be dangerous if identifiably contained within the text itself. The complete short story in translation is provided in the appendix.

"A Textbook Case of Nation-Building: The Evolution of History Curricula in Myanmar"
Nicolas Salem-Gervais and Rosalie Metro

This article aims to analyze the history curriculum used in primary and secondary schools under the SLORC/SPDC from the perspective of the State's nation-building endeavors. To do so, we provide some background on history textbooks during colonial, parliamentary, and socialist eras, and then describe three shifts in discourse on national identity in post-socialist Myanmar: the replacement of Aung San by the Great Kings as main national references, the projection of "Myanmar" identity back in history, and the designation of Thais, along with British colonialists, as historical enemies of the nation. We argue that those shifts constituted a step away from a national identity based on some extent of inter-ethnic compromise, toward one based on an ancient and glorious indigenous essence. We then examine the textbooks of two ethno-nationalist groups, the KNU and the SSA-S to illustrate the discursive similarities across political boundaries.

While revisions of national history are common around the world and might even be a sine qua non for the emergence of a nation, we suggest that the SLORC/SPDC's narrow conception of national identity, coupled with the underfunding of the welfare state and especially education, has often been counter-productive to state aims, undermining the success of schooling as a tool of nation-building and lending legitimacy to radical ethno-nationalist conceptions of history and identity.

"Verging on Modernity: A Late Nineteenth-Century Burmese Painting on Cloth Depicting the Vessantara Jataka"
Gillian Green

This large (428 cm x 82.5 cm) opaque watercolour painting on cotton cloth is stitched into a cloth border. Its composition depicts events in the Vessantara Jataka narrative. Traditional Burmese painting on manuscripts and murals were surveyed for similarities but this demonstrated that the representation of the main protagonists in the panel was entirely novel. Compared with published nineteenth century Burmese paintings on cloth a group of paintings dated to between approx. 1885 and 1910 described as 'family group portraits,' showed the greatest similarity. Formal studio photographic portraits popular with elite Burmese families of that period also show striking compositional similarities.

Contexts for the use of these cloth paintings on this theme were investigated. Initially the long painted cloth scrolls employed in the annual Vessantara Festival in northeast Thailand and Laos seemed to provide a model but in the absence of any record of a similar function in Burma, this theory was rejected. Observations and photographs published by travellers in Burma in late nineteenth century illuminate a number of community events in Burmese life for which paintings on cloth (or paper) did serve a purpose. 'Family group portraits' are discernible in the photographs at these events. It is proposed that a small group of traditional Burmese painters stimulated by the challenge of photographic images, turned their hand, for a short period to emulating these photographic images on cloth for these purposes. The reasons for the choice of the Vessantara Jataka in this case as a subject are discussed.

Scholarly Curiosities

"Notes on a Burmese Version of the Vessantara Jataka, as Represented on Three Shwe Chi Doe in the NIU Burma Art Collection"
Catherine Raymond

The Burma Art Collection at NIU possesses a rare set of hanging textiles of narrative scenes, in appliqué, embroidery, and sequins —called shwe chi doe ("gold thread embroidery") in Burmese, but more commmonly referred to in Western sources as kalaga— which probably dates from the late 19th/early 20th century. The NIU pieces are evidently unique, as they comprise a series of three sequential kalaga illustrating the Vessantara Jataka (Wethandaya zat, in Burmese); focusing on the concept of perfect generosity, dana.

In this note, Catherine Raymond discusses the persistant popularity of the Wethandaya zat. Referring also to Burmese mural paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she addresses the particularity of the Burmese version(s) of the Vessantara, which illuminate certain details of these three kalaga which would otherwise be less easily interpreted. Similar shwe chi doe from different collections around the world have also been recently documented, which may provide additional guidance in analyzing both the function and the provenance of the NIU Wethandaya set.

"Spirits Versus Weikza: Two Compteting Ways of Mediation"
Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière

In this article, practices related to the weikza are not considered as a bounded realm but as existing in a complex setting of dialogical relationships crisscrossing the overall religious landscape. Particularly, processes of interactions between spirit mediums and weikza path practitioners will be examined in the context of the recent growth of the weikza phenomenon visibility. Starting at Mount Poppa, where various religious specialists are present together at the anniversary of Bomingaung, the inquiry moves toward changing practices involving weikza in spirit possession ceremonies and proceeds to the examination of a hybrid path combining mediation with both spirits and weikza. Finally, practices of mediation with spiritual agents by weikza path practitioners (dat si) and spirit mediums (nat win) are compared to show that differences displayed in this regard by weikza followers are used to delineate and rank their own field of practice as a distinctive one.

"Powerful Yet Powerless, Powerless Yet Powerful: The Burmese Exorcista" Guillaume Rozenberg

One of the most typical forms of weikza cult consists in congregations (gaing) specialized in the practice of exorcism. Relying on the monographic study of such a congregation-the Shweyingyaw Congregation-the article explores the Burmese exorcist's identity. It describes the parameters of this identity in accordance with the way the exorcists themselves conceive their role and their efficacy. The article eventually compares the Burmese exorcist with three archetypal figures in the scholarly study of religion (the possession specialist, the shaman and the Church priest) in order to offer a generic characterization of his exorcistic faculty.

"The Weikza's Role in Arakanese Healing Practices"
Celine Coderey

This article analyses the fact that in the Thandwe area, in Arakan State (Western part of Burma), weikza-related practices are largely widespread among healers and are highly appreciated by consultants. Taking the example of the diviners and the "masters of the upper path", I show that weikza knowledge and techniques potentially guarantee healers a wider field of action and a higher respectability, both of which are essential qualities for healers. My opinion is that this advantage comes from the fact that the weikzas' status, as well as the practices associated to them, combine and mix aspects which are – cognitively – kept distinct: Buddhist and non-Buddhist, this-worldly and other-worldly aspects. The force of the weikza phenomenon resides in its ambiguity and hybridity.

"The Longevity of Weikza and Their Practices"
Juliane Schober

In this essay, I critique received ideas that describe weikza practices as millennial or unorthodox and propose instead an alternate understanding that places this form of Theravada practice in creative tension with conventional Buddhist practices endorsed by the center of power in royal and modern time. In this approach, I follow the writing of Michael de Certeau on the ways in which certain religious practices were marginalized in the course of modernizing reforms.

This somewhat submerged form of Buddhism speaks powerfully to individuals at the margins of power and in need of alternate ways to garner and control it. This kind of Burmese imaginations has been inspired by charismatic figures like Bo Bo Aung, Bo Min Gaung and charismatic monks who became hermits and occupied sanctified spaces outside conventional Buddhist institutions. Weikza practitioners are inspired by narratives of heroic feats and miraculous accomplishments, by their desire for extraordinary powers gained in samatha meditation, and by secret knowledge revealed in dreams and visions or harnessed through spells and alchemy. As weikza practices and texts did not undergo the authoritative editing of Buddhist reforms, their repertoire is hybrid and resonates with other religious traditions, such as Tibetan Tantric and Shaivite notions. In the absence of historical evidence about the transmission of texts or initiation rites, such polytropic forms only underscore the marginalized displacement of weikza practices. Neither millennial or unorthodox, weikza practices implicitly and subversively contest the conventional sources of power and merit controlled by reformed institutions at the center of Buddhist polities.

"The World Emperor's Battle Against the Evil Forces"
Niklas Foxeus

In early postcolonial Burma, millenarian prophecies about the imminent arrival of Setkya Min, the world emperor, circulated. This exalted personage was expected to protect Buddhism, and usher in a golden age for Buddhism and Burma. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the anthropologists Michael Mendelson and Melford E. Spiro encountered a perplexing phenomenon – a few so-called royal esoteric congregations whose leaders behaved as kings and were treated as such by their followers. These leaders were held to fulfill the prophecies and thus to be impersonations of the powerful figure Setkya Min, a weikza, a future Buddha, and a righteous king.

Mendelson and Spiro understood these congregations as being continuous with the anti-colonial and even the pre-millenarian rebellions. Until now, this interpretation has remained uncontested, probably due to lack of empirical evidence, since most scholars have assumed that these kinds of congregations ceased to exist long time ago. However, there still exists one such congregation in Burma, and was founded in the early 1950s. This article demonstrates how this congregation has waged a "battle" with supernatural means against what it perceived as the evil, anti-Buddhist forces to save Buddhism from extinction, and that it is just as anti-colonial and anti-Western as the anti-colonial rebellions. Moreover, the article argues that this congregation is similar to those studied by Mendelson and Spiro, and that these kinds of congregations should be understood as new Buddhist movements emerging in response to crises of authority and identity, to projects of modernization and nation-building, and to political turmoil in the postcolonial period. These congregations represented a quest for identity (individual, communal, and national), and are comparable to the other new religious movements that emerged in Southeast Asia in the postwar period.

"From Bricks to Pagodas: weikza and the Rituals of Pagoda Building"
Keiko Tosa

Although pagoda building is undoubtedly highly regarded as a merit-earning act in Myanmar, the ritual process itself has seldom received much attention. Generally there exist five ritual processes of pagoda building. In each ritual, the specialists of weikza knowledge play much part. This article attempts to consider why these specialists of weikza knowledge are regarded as indispensable persons for pagoda-building, through the analysis of the rituals. The construction of pagoda differs from the other donations in many points. Pagoda-building, considered as big project requesting much time and financial support, is not ordinarily observed in the communities. The knowledge of pagoda building and its associated rituals is transmitted not within the village community, but through closed mentor–student relationships such as those between specialists of weikza knowledge. Pagoda-building is also more risky, compared with the other donations. It is prone to failure or delay, which has both karmic and social consequences for the donor. The donors also try to raise the protection power to complete the project by various practices such as keeping precepts, drawing the power of protection by payeik-recitation, following the time guided by astrology, bringing out the protection from spirits, calling on the weiksa, utilizing the knowledge of weiksa specialists. Especially when they face with the difficulties, they rely on the specialists of weikza knowledge on the rituals.

In other words, weikza specialists are expected to contribute pagoda-building, for they can bring out the protection of weikza and they hold enough knowledge by which they achieve ritual success.

"Introduction to Wa Studies"

The article provides an overview of the rich materials available to study multiple aspects of the Wa. The author presents the setting that has been the traditional homeland of the Wa people, a variety of forms of evidence facilitating knowledge of their past and present, including a rich oral tradition to supplement the many texts written and published in the Wa language. The available materials also include archaeological remains in the form of rock art. An extended section on Chinese, Burmese and Shan sources is supplemented with European, mainly British writings, and missionary narratives and correspondence. The article also delves into recent scholarship devoted to the Wa, by ethnographers and linguists. A bibliographical note calls attention to available web sites where further material may be found.

"A Themed Selection of Wa Proverbs and Sayings"

Justin Watkins

Professor Watkins provides a fascinating list of Wa proverbs and sayings, circulating in what he calls the Sinosphere, since much of the material handled has come to light through Chinese sources. The article as an outgrowth of the fruitful SOAS Wa Dictionary project that enabled in addition to much else, making available in Burmese and in English some of the information on the Wa which exists only in Chinese. The author shows the Wa’s importance in linguistic and cultural knowledge terms, explains the lexicographical source from the SOAS Wa Dictionary Project evolved, and alerts readers to the large collection of materials – a digitized corpus representing some 7000 printed book pages – used for the project. Professor Watkins thereupon explains the source from which Wa proverbs and sayings were culled and their semantic content and syntactic structure. The list is divided by subjects, covering diverse topics – such as Wa diversity and their neighbors, religious beliefs and rituals, attitude to work, hunting, poverty , wealth and good fortune, concerns with village life, family relationships and sex, among others.

"Phonological Outline of the Vo Dialect"

Atsushi Yamada

The author provides a long word list used in the Vo dialect. The Vo is the name of an ethnic group residing in Menglian Dai, Lahu and Wa autonomous country in Hunnan province, China. The Vo are regarded as members of the Wa nationality and according to Chinese calculations, number about 30,000 native speakers. Their language belongs to the Wa language group of the Mon-Khmer family, and uses a dialect hitherto neglected in the scholarly literature. The author thereupon presents a phonological analysis and a basic vocabulary of the Vo dialect as spoken in Fuyan.

"Clustered Communities and Transportation Routes: The Wa Lands Neighboring the Lahu and the Dai on the Frontier"

Jianxiong Ma

The article provides an innovative perspective on the historical changes that over the early modern period and later, impacted Wa society in transformative ways. The evidence used describes the history of frontier formation from the 17^th to the early 20^th century, in the context of Qing state extension towards the southwest. The society inhabiting the Wa Lands is examined as a clustered system, in which a variety of factors shaped Wa fortunes. These include the presence of a mining industry, migratory patterns, religious movements and changing market mechanisms. The importance of salt policy is particularly significant, as was the integration of the Dai chieftain into evolving socio-political arrangements, impacted by the rise and fall of religious movements among the neighboring Lahu and the growth of Han Chinese gentry power. Qing frontier policy and its aims, responsive to pressures from elsewhere, interlinked the region’s fortunes with dynastic developments in Burma and the subsequent era of British colonialism. The interaction between China and Burma changed the social landscape of local societies as well as imperial frontiers. Native groups found themselves clustered into a terrain of fragmentation whose varied players and their fortunes, such as the Dai chieftain, the Five Buddha Districts of the Lahu and the Han Chinese gentry based in Mianning were influential components. The author shows how contrary to recently fashionable but flawed readings of the evidence, the Wa lands were never a system of isolated areas, remote and outside the reach of organized state power. On the contrary, the Wa were for centuries integral elements in social systems sharing certain political structures. The article also examines the problematics of vague terms such as "autonomy," by showing how the Wa themselves were formidable negotiators among the various shifting forces impacting their habitats. The evidence is based on Chinese historical documents and long term field work. The article’s conclusions are applicable beyond the specific issue of the Wa lands, and serves as an important reminder of the complexities of political, economic and social reconstruction in seemingly marginal territories.

"To be at One with Drums: Social Order and Headhunting among the Wa of China"

Bernard Formoso

The article examines the practice of beating large drums, made of hollowed out tree trunks, among southeast Asian headhunting groups, the Naga of Assam, of Northeast India, and the so called "wild" Wa straddling the Burma-China frontier. The author looks as their kinship system, its political and religious prerogatives, agricultural practices, and village habitats. The Naga and Wa formed raiding groups when hunting heads, which in the case of the Wa generated group solidarity and functioning social units. Such cooperative endeavor generated supra village organizations acting as a small-scale sociocosmos. The evidence is based on ethnographic data compiled by the author in 1997 while domiciled among the Wa of the Lancang district, Yunnan province, and reports published by Chinese ethnographers who in the 1950s recorded the folklore of China’s different populations. The article examines the nature of the headhunting populations on China’s margin, the significance of the drums and the elaborate rituals and methods transforming material objects into sacred implements and the sophisticated mythology associated with head hunting practices. The latter’s relationship to animal sacrifice, community cohesion, familial status and other communal activities made head hunting an influential component of social life. Rituals of life regeneration are intimately interwoven with Wa myths of origin, for which monoxylous drum playing is crucial. The drums are associated with the figure of the snake, that in turn is linked to the social body that was said to have resulted from its dismemberment. Such rituals generate a sense of organic unity, important in the agonistic context of headhunting and lineage solidarity, stimulated by an ideology that moved such violent activities, as the author shows, outside the dialectal area. The drums’ hall was the true spiritual core of Wa villages.

"The Wa Authority and Good Governance, 1989 – 2007" Ronald D. Renard

On the basis of extended field data collected between 2003 and 2007, as well as interviews with involved officials and interested parties, the author examines the motivations of Wa leaders as they administered the Wa Special Region since 1989. Their administrative practices were formulated against the background of the banning of poppy cultivation and opium, in what was then the largest poppy growing area in the Mekong region. In return for agreeing to the ban, the region experienced a massive influx of international development aid. More importantly, as the author shows, as a result of the cease fire negotiated with the then leader of Myanmar, Secretary 1, Khin Nyunt, Wa Special Region 2, the Wa authorities faced numerous challenges that were the result of under development that left the region short of roads, schools and health clinics . These authorities’ success in creating a rudimentary infra structure, establishing an administrative system, collecting revenue and sustaining a substantial armed force is attributed by the author to the early influence of the Burma Communist Party’s in the region. The author headed the evaluation of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) Wa Project, subsequently revisited the region as a short term consultant, and in 2006 – 2007 was manager of the UNDOC project, thus having extensive and long term familiarity with the challenges Wa authorities faced. The article traces some of these challenges to their historical roots, the problematic origins of Wa authority, and its relationship to the Burma Communist party active in the region since the late 1960s, whose presence, as the Wa themselves see it, brought their people into the modern world. But having expelled the Burma Communist Party in 1989, the Wa created the United Wa State Army and party, with a Central Authority, to govern the region. Currently numerous problems remain unresolved, chief among them the Wa’s stated demand to be recognized as a special Region, along the pattern of Hong Kong’s relationship with China.

"Myanmar: The 2010 Elections and Political Participation" Marie Lall and Hla Hla Win

This co-authored article examines how the concept of citizenship is linked to the changing nature of the nation state in the Myanmar context. The authors examine a debate within Myanmar regarding the nature of citizenship, as the country moved from being governed by a military dictatorship to a parliamentary system still heavily dominated by the military. The authors ask how this new situation will affect the Myanmar concept of citizenship. Citizenship is defined as an individuals relationship with the state, and people’s understanding of the attendant rights and responsibilities, including political participation in elections. Data assembled in Myanmar derived from focus groups of young people of Bamar and ethnic minority origins as well as in-depth interviews with civil society leaders. The investigation employed a mixed methods approach, the distribution of a questionnaire with qualitative and quantitative sections distributed at a private higher education institution in Yangon, and in villages in the Delta. Another set of data was collected in Yangon in February 2011. The authors conclude that the concept of citizenship in Myanmar is thin, and is identified largely with passports and identity cards. The elections allowed some form of political participation that proved attractive particularly to young people who expressed a range of opinions regarding the possibilities offered by the political process, and the country’s future. The authors conclude that the elections began a debate about the rights and duties of participating in the political process, but without being linked to the concept of citizenship. This indicates how much more is needed to be done to increase the political literacy of Myanmar’s young people, moving forward.

"An Ethnographic Illustration of Wa People in British Burma during the Early 20^th Century; Notes on a Shan Album from the NIU Burma Collection, with Reference to Similar Illustrations from Other Sources" Catherine Raymond

The note explains the cover image of the Journal, representative of a certain type of ethnographic illustration of the Wa, within the context of hand painted " albums," at the turn of the 20th century. The volume is housed at the NIU Library, and is a rare example of what once was a more popular genre of representing the exotic and colorful populations scattered among imperial domains. The author has uncovered three additional albums in other collections, and applies a " compare- and- contrast" method to understand this genre of art work, its origins, the contributions of local artists, how they were influenced by their European clientele, and the possible connections between such productions and other traditions of ethnographic illustrations. The note also features an illuminating section on the ethnonyms for Wa people in Burmese, old Shan and Kheun, elaborating in linguistic terms on their variety and significance and how they relate to the various albums’ content.

"Those Men in Saffron Robes"

The article offers an overview of Myanmar’s state-sangha interactions in the monarchical and post monarchical period ushering a time when what the author calls a 900 year-old punctuated equilibrium is under stress. An ancient patron-client relationship collapsed when the colonial state refused to sustain the sangha as monarchs had done since the 11th century. Independence ushered further adjustments when the potential patron turned out to be a secular, modern republic with its inherited but also innovative notions of authority, legitimacy and responsibility. The evolution of concepts of state and politics, especially the battle for independence in the turbulent pre-1948 period, further fragmented the sangha, undermining its earlier notional integrity and cohesion thereby enabling for the first time the emergence of a hitherto unfamiliar type, the mobilized and politically active monk. In the first post-independence decade, the new state legislated a closer relationship between the sangha and authorizing institutions. When politics and pieties collided, successive Myanmar governments tried in various ways to make the institution of the sangha more amenable to a modernizing state’s needs. How these influential moves played out in the post 1988 period is the subject of the article’s conclusion. What has been called the Saffron Revolution (2007) is examined by the author in light of the issue of politicization – to argue that what happened was neither saffron, nor a revolution. The issues raised have profound implications for the sangha’s future and cannot be understood without a grasp of the institution’s past.

"A Cross-Cultural Encounter in Pre-Colonial Burma: Henry Gouger’s Narrative of Commerce and Captivity, 1822-1826"

The article brings to life the adventures of an Anglo-Indian merchant, Henry Gouger, whose Ava sojourn and incarceration during the First Anglo Burmese War (1824-1826) generated years later A Personal Narrative of Two Year’s Imprisonment in Burmah, published in 1860. The author examines what he calls the mentality of a private trader in the 19th century, against the background of the competition between two expanding empires, that of Ava and the English East India Company. By drawing upon the recent literature on travel narratives and cross-cultural encounters, the article restores to Henry Gouger an individuality enabled by liberating his story from the distorting focus on Orientalist stereotypes nefariously furthering colonialist agendas.

"Campā Epigraphical Data on Polities and Peoples of Ancient Myanmar"

The article traces the nomenclature applied to ethnic groups and polities in the early pre modern period, and re examines the first appearance of a name for the ceremonial center known as Pagan. By providing updated readings of epigraphical data derived from Campā, the authors correct an influential misreading of an important inscription known since the 19th century, its misdating traceable to Etienne Aymonier and inserted into the authorized Burmese narrative by Gordon H. Luce. As Griffiths and Lepoutre show, the inscription originated in the 13th century. This correction of the evidence, based on Claude Jacques’ and their own re-evaluation, is expanded to examine the names applied to polities ancient Myanmar may have interacted with.

"Anticipating Computer Language - On Some Conventions in the Burmese Inscriptions"

The author’s attention to early Myanmar inscriptions surviving on Pagan donative stones shows how spacial considerations, fluid spellings and the problematics of inscribing stone slabs and palm leaves generated orthographic conventions. These conventions need to be understood to ensure correct readings of Pagan’s informative stone-written records, from which the kingdom’s history has been reconstructed.

"The Academic Life of Savages"

Knowledge, in the context of Karen culture, has long been transmitted verbally through oral poetry, known as hta in S’gaw Karen. This form of knowledge transmission has been transformed by the continued hegemony of colonial ways of knowing that privilege written tradition and scientific objectivity. New ways of knowing, through text, has displaced orality so deeply that it is virtually irretrievable. This article is an experimental reflection on Karen ways of knowing and an attempt to speak back against the oppression of the written word. In this article, I explore modes of knowing and power through hta in the context of my own experience growing up in Western systems of education. The hta is first written in S’gaw Karen in a missionary script, followed by an English translation and a brief discussion. As hta is an oral form, I have recorded an audio version produced after the piece was written down. My aim here is to make something new out of cultural traces that remain from the long period of colonisation.

"Sitting on the Fence? Politics and Ethics of Research into Cross-border Aid on the Thailand-Myanmar/Burma Border"

This article analyzes the politics and ethics of anthropological research in a situation shaped by decades of conflict and violence, as well as a polarized and emotional debate. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with a cross-border aid organization on the Thailand-Myanmar/Burma border, the author identifies issues of wider concern to researchers working in sensitive and politicized research contexts. In particular, the article illustrates the difficulties of academic neutrality in a context shaped by a history of conflict, violence and disputed claims to socio-political legitimacy. It highlights the political and ethical complexities of “participant-insider” research. It focuses attention on how academic research is not only contingent upon, but can influence evolving socio-political relationships, positionings and perceptions. Finally, it discusses the importance of recognizing and taking into account objections to academics’ work – objections for which researchers are often underprepared, which remain largely absent from academic writings, but which raise important issues to do with intellectual and ethical debts to research participants.

"On Sensitivity and Secrecy:  How Foreign Researchers and Their Local Contacts in Myanmar Deal with Risk Under Authoritarian Rule"

In this article I describe some of the challenges faced by western researchers and their local research participants in trying to uncover the experiences of life in Myanmar under military rule. Perceptions of ‘sensitive’ topics, activities and affiliations differ among local people, and the resulting practices of secrecy sometimes clash with academic requirements for transparent and balanced reporting of research findings. As a result, field-based publications related to politics and human rights are scarce, and those that exist are vulnerable to accusations of bias or lack of transparency. Research in authoritarian environments comes with a particular set of dilemmas, which are often inadequately addressed by formal guidelines on research ethics. This might prevent research in unfamiliar or risky circumstances from taking place. Yet the absence of background knowledge and guidelines in the academic world should not deter us from studying people living under these circumstances, many of whom are interested in being heard, and are well positioned to assess the risks and opportunities of participation. Given the power inequalities between western researchers and local participants, the question is who should decide what level of risk is acceptable in order to gather knowledge on local experiences in ‘difficult situations’. I argue that the researcher is ultimately responsible for both the treatment of research participants, and the subsequent reporting of research findings. However, relying on the guidance of local contacts can help determine the ethical boundaries of one’s research, and can lead to valuable insights not only on events in the field, but also on how to act in difficult circumstances in the absence of clear guidelines.

"Who Do You Know Over There?” Fieldwork Experiences in Restricted Southern Shan State, Burma"

This essay reflects the researcher’s experiences from ongoing ethnographic field research concerning Shan laborers’ migration and commodity flows in the Burma-Thailand borderland regarding a main research question-- To what extent how are migration and commodity flows interconnected? It describes researcher’s various methods used to enter restricted zones to foreigners: both applying for a tourist visa to get inside Burma and then getting special permission to enter non-Burmese restricted zones, as well as border land-crossings from Thailand without going through immigration control. This essay proposes that creating a genuine rapport with informants—a key requirement of ethnography—may raise ethical dilemmas when these same informants facilitate access to sensitive research areas. The question: “Who do you know over there?” reflects the fact that as a researcher, one sometimes needs to form connections with influential people, whether it be intentionally or otherwise. The researcher’s experience reflects the ethical quandaries created when methodological approaches intersect with ethical issues during field research activities. If one wants to build a close rapport with local people that is required in ethnographic fieldwork, it is difficult to avoid cultivating connections with powerful people that facilitate research, as one may not know at first who possesses power in this complex political landscape.

"Fostering an Objectionable Burma Discourse"

Discursive truths about Burma are constructed within ‘cultures of circulation’ that can deny access to their putative objects, Burmese themselves. Moreover, even as these discourses are fabricated they operate back on Burmese people, often producing mimicry of the content of those discourses, ossifying that content as ‘common-sense’. Applying Bruno Latour’s analysis of objectivity in the social sciences, the ethical demand raised here is to create situations and frames of analysis that allow Burmese stakeholders of various class, religious, ideological, etc positions to object to what is written about them, thereby contesting essentializing discourses. By exploring the ‘hard case’ that is the Rahkine / Rohingya conflict, the paper will conclude by arguing that even within exclusionary vitriol there are critical political objections that must be heard – and contested in turn.

"Ethnic Histories, Reflections from the Field"

This essay is a consideration of the relative positions and the possible ensuing ethical hazards of an “international” scholars of Burma when dealing with the histories of Burma. Based on my own experience interacting with Mon and other Burman and non-Burman ethnic scholars, I reflect on the differences in how international and local scholars conceptualize history, view the purpose of writing it, and what is at stake for each. While international scholars in the past may have claimed the ability to be objective and to write from a neutral position, local scholars may invoke the exclusive privilege and right to interpret their pasts and represent them to others, both within Burma and without. Ethical questions related to doing research in or about Burma have often focused on the possibility of international scholars putting others or themselves at risk. I consider here instead a possibility that may arise when international scholars interact with local scholars: that our scholarship may be complicit in perpetuating discord or actual conflict. This possibility may arise when local scholars and interlocutors attempt to “convert” the international scholar – viewed as ignorant but as a potential ally– to local points of views on local histories. These local narratives embody the political and representational interests of the group, and therefore often focus on a common enemy and memories of violence being perpetuated against the group. A conundrum arises when the international scholar is caught between conflicting desires to take seriously the self-representations and narratives of local scholars, while also not wanting to participate in perpetuating discourses that can instigate conflict, hostility, or violence.

"The Idealization Of A Lost Paradise Narratives Of Nostalgia And Traumatic Return Migration Among Indian Repatriates From Burma Since The 1960s"

Drawing on recent interviews of Indian returnees from Burma, this article sheds light on a well-known yet understudied moment of Burma’s postcolonial history, the forced repatriation of Indian communities during the 1960s. The research has gathered first-hand narratives about the traumatic experiences shared by Indian repatriated families, from their much debated decision to leave Burma, to the perceived humiliation of departure and the dramatic (re)migration to India. The article builds on the scholarship on exile and nostalgia, which claims that repatriation processes often lead to a retrospective idealization by the returnees of what has been left behind. Interviews have indeed revealed how nostalgic memories of a “golden past” and a “paradise lost” in Burma have been shaped among the first generation of Indian repatriates ever since their resettlement in India. In contrast with the classic diaspora literature, which postulates that diasporic groups tend to idealize their homeland, Indians in Burma have tended to rather romanticize their Burmese host- land. They cherish the “golden days” they once lived in Burma, whilst expressing highly condescending feelings about their new Indian “homeland” where resettlement and re-integration to the Indian national space have proved harsher than expected.

Bogus Chinese Envoys, Spurious Chinese Princesses at the 18th-Century Myanmar Royal Court

U Thaw Kaung

Of Golden Palaces and Celebrated Rulers: Inventing Traditions in Pre-colonial and Contemporary Myanmar

Francois Tainturier

The Naturalization of Indic Loan-Words into Burmese: Adoption and Lexical Transformation

Nathan Waxman, Soe Tun Aung

Troubles in Siam: The Last Years of the Dutch East India Company’s Lodge in Ayutthaya, 1760–67

Lodewijk Wagenaar

Archaeological Researches on the Excavated Finds at the Ancient City of Wadee

Myo Nyunt Aung

Copper Plaques of the Great Shwedagon Pagoda

Daw Kyan

The Disciplining Discourse of Unity in Burmese Politics                        

Matthew J. Walton

A concern with unity has been a consistent theme in modern Burmese politics. This article examines a particularly problematic conception of unity that I argue draws strength from its resonance with Buddhist moral notions of the self and overcoming self-centeredness. As a moral concept, this narrative of unity is idealized in devotion to a common purpose and loyalty to a group or community; it requires subsuming one’s own interests for the benefit of the whole, something that encapsulates the Buddhist practice of rejecting atta (ego). Disunity, then, is the result of a group of individuals committed only to their own benefit; it is evidence of moral failure. This discourse of unity has been an effectively anti-democratic disciplining tool (deployed by both governments and opposition groups) for suppressing internal dissent. Despite General Aung San's oft-quoted slogan of “unity in diversity,” political movements in Myanmar have been more commonly characterized by hegemonic attempts at imposing a top-down unity that labels deviation from or criticism of dominant positions as disloyalty. This article examines the perpetuation of a rigid, unitary understanding of unity and argues that developing a more flexible and accommodating notion of unity will be a necessary step in the process of national reconciliation.

Disorder as Order: The Ethno-Nationalist Struggle of the Karen in Burma/Myanmar   

Mikael Gravers

Burma’s 66 years civil war is the longest armed conflict in the world. This article analyses the complexity of one of the many ethnic armed conflicts between the Karen and the state. The Karen ethno-nationalist struggle is rooted in the ethnic categorization and identity politics of colonial order, which has influences the political orders after independence. Al living generations in Burma have to some extend experienced violence. Violent disorder and memory of suffering and victimhood dominate a majority of the Karen. The author argue that the prolonged violent conflict has widened the ethnic incompatibilities and impacts the current ceasefire negotiations. Internal segmentation of the Karen society as well as internal divisions and conflicts has also had a considerable impact upon the track of this conflict. Cultural, religious and political diversity among the Karen – and other ethnic groups – further complicates prospects for a political solution to the armed struggle.

The Sixth Buddhist Council: Its Purpose, Presentation and Product      

Chris Clark

During the mid 1950s, the Burmese government organized and funded the “sixth Buddhist council,” a two-year gathering of monks and laypeople in which the Pāli canon was recited. In this article, a number of previously unexplored sources have been drawn from in aid of providing a better understanding of the purpose for which the event was held and the way in which it was presented to the wider public. These sources advertized the council as an effective means to purify Theravāda Buddhist scriptures and thereby protect the sāsana from decline. They consistently portrayed this work of purification as an international collaboration involving monastic groups from all major Theravāda Buddhist countries, despite evidence to the contrary. This article also includes a detailed analysis of a section of the principal textual product associated with the council, the widely used Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti Piṭaka series of the Pāli canon, providing insight into its sources and editing methodology.

The Village System and Burmese Society: Problems Involved in the Enforcement Process of the Upper Burma Village Regulation of 1887                                                          

Takahiro Iwaki

Many historians who have written about the administrative changes implemented in Upper Burma at the end of the nineteenth century have focused on the village system and the Upper Burma Village Regulation of 1887.  They emphasize the transformation of the precolonial local administration, particularly the abolition of the position of myothugyi as an outcome of the introduction of the village system.  However, their descriptions pay little attention to local society, simply regarding it as a passive subject affected by colonialism.  Thus, in order to elucidate the relation between the colonial administrative policy and local society, this article  re examines the village system and illustrates how the system developed at the district level, by focusing on the early arguments. After investigating the arguments of the central government and district officials on the village system, the article highlights the significance of additional regulatory rules introduced in 1890, and the case of the Shwebo District to reinforce the article’s arguments.

Buddhist Murals Illustrating Unusual Features in Temple 36 at Sale and Their Cultural Implications  

Samerchai Poolsuwan

This article describes Buddhist murals illustrating some unusual features and surviving in the small brick temple number 36 at Sale, one of the major satellite towns during the Pagan period.  The town is located on the east bank of the Irrawady River thirty miles downstream from Old Pagan.  The temple and its principal Buddha image can be stylistically dated to the thirteenth century.  A dated inscription, a later intrusion on the murals, provides solid proof that the murals predate AD 1582.  Likely postdating the temple, the murals show mixed features, some indigenous but others perhaps introduced from Sri Lank and north\central Thailand  into the area during the mid-fourteenth century,  the proposed date of  the murals.  These features had never been combined in such a fashion before  and the resulting combination perhaps lasted only shortly in the mural tradition of central Burma.  This is evidenced when the content of Sale 36  is compared with Pagan-era murals and others surviving from the fifteenth century.  The intrusive status, in the mural tradition of central Burma, of the Sale 36 materials is explained in a context of trans-regional movements of the Mahavihara monastic  lineage, originated in Sri Lanka, widely active in lower Burma and parts of Thailand during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Sale 36 murals might reflect the presence of this Sinhalese order in central Burma as well during the mid fourteenth century. These rare murals, a later addition in an already existing small temple, might correlate with a temporary role played by the Sinhalese order in central Burma during a limited period.  It probably ultimately yielded to a more popular and more powerful Aran sect of the area. 

Memorial Art as an Anthropological Object (Chin State of Burma)

François Robinne

The Indo-Chinese frontiers, including both the mainland and insular parts of Southeast Asia, were once described by Heine-Geldern and Furer-Haimendorf as “ megalithic culture.” This article will explore through an anthropological lens, the tradition of engraved steles in Burma’s Chin State. Given the stones’ relatively recent erection ( ranging from the mid- nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century) and the interconnected role themes such as ancestrality, mobility and territory played during their creation,   the analysis will focus on the idea  of those steles as belonging within the wider concept of a memorial space.  The Chin standing stones highlight due to the plurality of their appearances and their various roles, the exceptional diversity – linguistic, cultural, religious and political – that characterizes the social landscape of Chin State.  Whether or not the patterns of those engraved scenes are accompanied or not by written texts, they make for remarkable archives for historians as they are often the only tangible sources, or in situ archival documents, for society where an oral tradition still prevails.  Art historians will try to assess the style and overall composition of the stones before attempting to decipher their artists.  Moreover, anthropologists will more likely want to examine the relationship between the stones and the territory – in the context of clan segmentation and internationalizing migration dynamics.

The extreme social and linguistic diversity of Chin State, emphasized throughout the literature, has begun to overlap with an increasingly extended mobility. As seen within village and clan segmentations, urban migrations, Christian networks, economic expatriation; even where mobility becomes structural to chin subgroups, memorial art appears to be a major vector of social ties in ways that are both perennial and inconstant.  Despite the colonial and dictatorial violence that plunged Burma into civil war, social – and, therefore, memorial – change is expressed less in terms of rupture than of metamorphosis.  At the same time as new leaders emerge and clan membership disappears behind denominational affiliations, ancestry has tended to turn more and more into a memory exercise taken  over by Christianity.

SCHOLARLY CURIOSITIES

The Story of Nan Saw Kyi

The author, granddaughter of Daw Nan Saw Kyi, subject of this issue’s Scholarly Curiosity, narrates the story of a courageous, independent minded and resourceful woman who began her social and political activism early on. In 1938, together with some friends, she founded the Red Cross Association in her native town. Daw Nan Saw Kyi’s  skills, dedication, perseverance as well as endurance were severely tested during the horrific fighting that raged around Mogaung in 1944 and 1945, when together with others she extended whatever aid was available to masses of streaming refugees and wounded fighters and soldiers, casualties of the slaughter that pitted British, Japanese and Burmese armies against each other. Daw Nan Saw Kyi’s involvement was only the preliminary stage of a life time of activism on behalf of  various communal  needs, informed by her deeply held Buddhist beliefs.

POEM

Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing’s Grand Congratulatory Laycho for the Saturday Nagani Journal Inaugural Issue

Phoehlaing

Thakin Kodaw Hmaing is arguably the most important Myanmar writer  of the last century, known to young and old, both for his politics and his contributions to Burmese literature. He was the first of only two Burmese ( the second one being U Thant) to be honored, however reluctantly, by U Ne Win’s government,  with a grant of land plot for a private burial shrine near the Shwedagon pagoda. This literary figure’s immense national prestige encourages the Journal of Burma Studies to introduce one of his most famous poems to its readers, a novel development in the after life of the hugely influential Thakin who is utterly unknown beyond his country’s borders.

Three More Sanskrit Inscriptions of Arakan

Arlo Griffiths

The earliest phase of Arakan history, between about the fifth and the tenth centuries, has to be written on the basis of inscriptions and related material such as coins bearing Sanskrit texts, as well as sculpture and architecture. These show Arakan to have had strong ties to Southeastern Bengal (the Samataṭa and Harikela regions) and beyond this with the Buddhist communities of Northeastern India using Sanskrit as preferential medium of expression. A first batch of Arakan Sanskrit inscriptions was studied by E.H. Johnston and published posthumously in 1943. Since then, this field has moved forward thanks mainly to three articles by D. C. Sircar that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, no further epigraphic material of early Arakan has been published. The Sanskrit inscriptions of Arakan are often in deplorable state of preservation. But even fragmentary material can throw new light on the past, especially when studied in combination with epigraphical and numismatic discoveries made in Southeast Bengal over the past half-century. This article deals with three such fragmentary inscriptions, all previously unpublished. It presents the discovery that the ancient name of Arakan was Kāmaraṅga, discusses aspects of the history of Buddhism in Arakan during the first millennium, and discusses the problem of the chronology of early Arakan based on a detailed palaeographic analysis of the inscriptions published here.

The Lord of the Elephant: Interpreting the Islamicate Epigraphic, Numismatic, and Literary Material from the Mrauk U Period of Arakan (ca. 1430-1784)

Thibaut d'Hubert

With this article, I propose to revisit a corpus of multilingual inscriptions on coins, as well as one Persian stone inscription, whose dates range from the fifteenth to the first half of the seventeenth centuries of the Mrauk U period of Arakan (ca. 1430−1784). My primary aim is to revise the readings of some of those inscriptions and, with these revisions in mind, to reassess the significance of such texts in light of recent scholarship on the Mrauk U period. Rather than derive conclusions based on anecdotal evidence of the existence of an Islamicate idiom in Arakan during this period, I observe the internal features of those inscriptions and possible readings that could be made of the message they contain. I also extend my analysis beyond coin inscriptions and trace the various forms of the Arakanese royal title “Lord of the Elephant” and its use as a generic epithet associated with political power in later (ca. 17^th−18^th CE) Bengali Muslim literature.

King Maṅ: Co Mwan’s exile in Bengal – Legend, History and Context 

Jacques Leider and Kyaw Minn Htin

Maṅḥ Co Mvan is the name of an Arakanese king known as the founder, in 1430, of the city of Mrauk U (Mrok Ūḥ). Mrauk U was the capital of Arakan until 1785, when the kingdom was conquered by the Burmese. It became the seat of a Burmese governor, but lost its status after 1825 following the occupation of Arakan by troops of the East India Company. Accounts about and stories related to this important king, his biography and his rule vary in the sources. Still, some stories have been more successful than others. Since the colonial period they have been considered as historical or at least partly historical facts. This article reviews one of these stories in particular, namely the king’s alleged stay in exile for an extended period of time. As far as our knowledge about the troubled political context of the early fifteenth century goes, the king might indeed have left his country for some time looking for support to regain his throne. Nonetheless, there are no sources to prove this point. We deconstruct the master narrative that has been built on the exile story by investigating the historical context and the literary devices used to embed the story in a traditional framework, which show that beyond the issue of historical facticity, there is a compelling interest to study the way the story has been both rationalized and mythologized to satisfy different audiences. 

Buddhist Dhammasattha Literature Transmitted in Arakan and Chittagong

Christian Lammerts

This article comprises a study of a manuscript of an Arakanese-language Buddhist legal text (dhammasattha) currently held under shelfmark Or Add 12254 at the British Library, where it is part of an important, though hitherto unstudied, collection of Arakanese manuscripts assembled in Chittagong by John Murray (1745–1822 C.E.). It discusses the history, contents, scribes, and textual and material features of the manuscripts in the Murray Collection, demonstrating that paleographic considerations and Bengali script and Persian paratexts found therein reflect the multilingual and multireligious context in which these manuscripts circulated, as well as a degree of influence from Chittagonian scribal culture. It then compares the text of Or Add 12254 with that of a later Arakanese dhammasattha manuscript that has likely provenance from Sittwe, and also with the contents of 18^th and 19^th century manuscripts of the central Burmese Dhammavilāsa dhammasat. It argues that despite a range of suggestive parallels between these Arakanese and central Burmese legal texts, the two manuscripts from Arakan should be regarded as witnesses to a distinctive Arakanese tradition of written law.

Two Law Book Lists from Arakan

Andrew Huxley

The legal history of Arakan has not yet been written. We have a few surviving dhammathat texts, but no reliable information as to when they were first written or last copied. Were the surviving texts written before the conquest of Arakan? Can we treat them as evidence for tradition as it was under the Arakanese kings? The two 1870s lists discussed herein bring us closer to answering these questions.

Spirit Possession: An Autonomous Field of Practice in the Burmese Buddhist Culture

The cult of the Thirty-Seven Lords is distinctively known for its practices of spirit possession although possession by spiritual agents may be found in other domains of Burmese Buddhist culture. What sets apart the practices observed in the cult of the Thirty-Seven Lords is a form of individual and relocatable possession contrasting with traditional rituals linked to the locality and allowing for the professionalisation and the autonomisation of the ritual role of spirit mediums. Ceremonies of possession for the Thirty-Seven Lords mobilize communities of followers in which bonds of dependence with the nats are mediated by ritual masters, married to a nat, such bonds fashion these communities on the model of “clienteles” whose dominant authorizing principle is spirit possession. Spirit possession is what allows the cohesion of the spirit mediums practices that can be observed particularly during the festivals and can be said to constitue an autonomous ritual domain in the Burmese Buddhist culture. 

The Transnational Flow of Music from Burma to the United States

Some of the most prominent and commercially successful Burmese musicians have performed concert tours of the United States during the past decade. This article provides an empirical description of the transnational network which makes these concert tours possible, and then provides an explanation for this phenomenon. Burmese migrants—both the musicians and the emigrants who sponsor concerts—are identified here as transnational actors. This study, however, challenges much of the literature on transnational cultural flows, arguing that the appropriate focus for analysis in this case is not change and hybridity provoked by conditions in the host country (America), but rather the continuity of shared expectations and behaviors developed in the home country (Burma). In fact, it is the habitus of the Yangon-based music industry which makes possible the organization and funding of concert tours in the United States. This habitus, or shared way of thinking and behaving, includes: a flexible understanding of what constitutes a “band,” symbolic ties between musicians and fans which govern financial expectations, an informally structured industry which is open to the intervention of amateurs, and the habitual self-reliance of people who grew up under a government which provided few supports.

Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Marketplace, and the Chinese Community in Moulmein

This article examines the Chinese community in Moulmein, a cosmopolitan center of a newly established British colony after the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26), in the nineteenth century, and investigates interchanges and influences facilitated by the first port city in colonial Burma. As Chinese merchants and workers established commercial, social and religious networks during the formative years of British Burma, they interacted with their multi-ethnic neighbors within and beyond colonial market places. However, if the early experience of these Chinese migrants suggests a porous ethnic boundary, the impression of China and the Chinese dominating the European public sphere in Moulmein indicates a gap between the real-life Moulmein Chinese, which was encountered every day, and the imaginary China as a potential market to an eastern-looking British Empire, especially during the Opium War (1839–42). Taking the Moulmein Chinese as a case study, this paper investigates the limitation of J.S. Furnivall’s “marketplace” where people “mix but do not combine.” Instead of a reflection of the colonial markets operating rigidly along ethnic lines, this paper argues, Furnivall’s mid-twentieth-century observation is a direct result of colonial discourse and policies emphasizing ethnic segregation and stereotypes, when the discrepancies between real-life and imaginary China and the Chinese were further enhanced and eventually dominated the later years of British rule in Burma.

Kipling, “Mandalay” and Burma in the Popular Imagination

It is difficult to overestimate the impact on popular perceptions of Burma—indeed, of the “Far East” more generally—of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Mandalay”. It first appeared in the literary weekly The Scots Observer on 21 June 1890. It was subsequently included in the collection Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses, which was published in London in 1892. Given its importance, the poem deserves citing in full.

The Social Dynamics of Pagoda Repair in Upper Myanmar

Pagoda repair in Myanmar is not just a building upgrade but a significant mechanism connecting religious and lay communities. During the course of a renovation, the wider public is engaged, from urban elite to artisans, builders, shopkeepers and farmers in replenishing the dedicated space of the pagoda compound and the teachings it embod-ies. The case studies from Sagaing, Mandalay, Kyaukse and Bagan discussed here highlight how coordination of pagoda repair is often by word of mouth, familiar networks and more recently, social media. Informality is also pertinent in relation to archaeologi-cal calls for greater documentation of pagoda repair. Imposing daily recording could easily change malleable social contacts into disinterested form-fillers, rather than engaging local communities in the shared caretaking of their landscape. While information on archaeological and heritage management “best practice” is abundant, the processes of pagoda repair remains little known apart from the participants of each undertaking. Thus what a decade ago was a locally understood difference between repair and conservation, today is an urgent issue threatening both the vitality of the living Buddhist practice and its intangible heritage. Without a shared mechanism to oversee restorations of aged pagodas, the hard evidence from which to interpret the ancient cultural landscape will be irrevocably lost and its intangible sustenance gone. The issue needs to be openly debated and acted upon to ensure the compatible integration of international conservation and heritage practice with the existing social and religious dynamics of pagoda repair. 

Yangon’s New Stock Exchange in Comparative Analysis

In the political sphere, the citizens of Myanmar have witnessed and taken part in an expanding and deepening process of democratization and political liberalization in the past few years. In the economic sphere, changes are also underway that indicate a growth of economic liberalism. One part of that process is a slowly increasing financialization as indicated by the new Yangon Stock Exchange (YSX) set to begin trading operations in late 2015. This paper will analyze what this new stock exchange means for the citizens of Myanmar by placing it within a regional comparative analysis of stock markets across Southeast Asia, including the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HoSE), the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX), the Lao Securities Exchange (LSX), and the Cambodia Securities Exchange (CSX). The main argument is that despite calculable risks in terms of business transparency and national politics, the potentialities for a successful YSX are in place. The main socioeconomic conditions that warrant investment, both from the domestic as well as international perspective are 1) the depth and diversity of Myanmar’s adult population size, 2) Myanmar’s rallying industrial sector, 3) Burmese businesses’ current lack of bank financing, and 4) Burmese citizens’ little-to-no holdings in financial assets as compared to other non-financial wealth holdings. The YSX will not be an overnight success for either domestic Burmese investors or for domestic Burmese enterprises seeking new avenues to finance growth and project investment. However, the systemic socioeconomic conditions are in place for the Yangon Stock Exchange to parallel more closely the experience of the Vietnamese HoSE and HNX than that of the other Indochinese exchanges of LSX and CSX.

Tracking (un)Popular Music in Contemporary Myanmar

Jane M. Ferguson

The genre copy thachin or “copy song” pervades the popular music scene in Myanmar. These songs are akin to cover versions of existing international hits, but with new lyrics in the Burmese language, and performed by Burmese musicians. These songs can have incredible genre—crossing capabilities, from blues to rap, heavy metal to salsa. The current situation for popular music production in Myanmar is connected with the country’s history of military rule and years of censorship and economic difficulties. Advocates for the genre of copy thachin argue that borrowing international songs allowed local artists to learn about global popular music, and the numerous popular musicians and songwriters in Myanmar are testament to this. On the other hand, with the removal of the stringent censorship regime and the increasing contact with international consumer culture, groups of Myanmar music fans are increasingly critical of copy thachin, seeing the practice as derivative and an embarrassment. This article will explore the history of the genre, notions of authenticity, and discuss Myanmar’s changing relationship with the symbolic capital of its own culture industry and its relationship with international popular culture. 

A Lacquered History of the Kings of Pagan from an Illustrated Glass Palace Chronicle

Sylvia Fraser-Lu

A little known gem in the Spencer collection of Rare Books in the New York Public Library is a unique Burmese manuscript composed of fifteen pages made from heavily lacquered cloth. The pages of this manuscript have been cleverly joined together in the style of a Western book which is unusual for Burmese art. Compiled in 1906 by Hsaya Saing, a well-known master craftsman of the colonial period with a workshop in the Hmangyo Quarter Pagan, this manuscript based on The Glass Palace Chronicle is an illustrated account of a history of twenty-five of Pagan’s most eminent kings beginning with Popa Sawrahan (c. CE 613) and concluding with Zeyatheinka (Hti-lo-min) (r. 1210–34/35). The illustrations have been executed in the prevalent Burmese yun incised lacquer technique in a traditional palette of five colors. Although illustrated narratives are a well-known staple in Burmese art as far as wall paintings, wood-carving, and lacquer are concerned, depictions of such scenes tend to heavily rely on time-hallowed conventions largely derived from 8th- to 12th-century Pala art of eastern India. In this manuscript Indian conventions are followed when the subject matter is familiar. However, when unfamiliar subject matter presented itself, artisans rose to the challenge and created imaginative new settings in which to place an historic cast of characters resulting in some very original and appealing illustrations in the lacquer medium. 

“Burmanization” and the Impact of J.S. Furnivall’s Views on National Identity in Late-Colonial Burma

Carol Ann Boshier

J.S. Furnivall’s interventions in connection with extending the franchise under the Burma Reform Scheme while serving in the ICS, helped to create political identities that might be said to have reinforced the territory’s ethnic divisions. This confirms his agency in generating political identities that were distinct from the market-based identities that he later labeled the plural society. As a result, these actions and his personal efforts to establish a trans-ethnic national identity based on the dominance of Burmanization, have obscured rather than elucidated understandings of Burma and its problems since Independence. 

A Buddha Image for Exorcism

Richard M. Cooler

Buddhist iconography reflects extraordinary conservatism so that the appearance of images exhibiting unconventional features attracts immediate attention. This article examines, and documents a recently discovered image whose unusual features become intelligible when viewed in the context of Buddhist exorcism as practiced by weikza congregations. An identification of the image as exorcist is facilitated by dating its casting to the reign of King Bowdawpaya (aka Badon Min, reigned 1782–1819), a period of Buddhist heterodoxy when cabalistic squares (in) were widely used. The image is further identified as an exorcist Healing Buddha by setting it within the two hundred year iconic development of Burmese images that hold the myrobalan, a medicinal fruit whose use is believed to assist in expelling evil from the human body. An examination of contemporary weikza practices shows the additional iconographic anomalies to embody weikza concerns: in containing the occult letters sa, da, ba, wa appearing at nine locations on the body and the robe, the offering of two myrobalan fruit with contrasting gestures, the unorthodox wearing of the monk’s robe, the wide striated belt, the deliberate grinding away of the image, and a “relic” enclosed within the body.

A peripheral observation in this study concerns how closely nineteenth century visual representations of weikza saints such as Bo Bo Aung are homologus to those of the standing Healing Buddha.

The Role of Pali Grammar In Burmese Buddhism

Alex Ruiz Falques

This paper approaches Pali grammatical text from the point of view of scholastic literature, and thus argues that what we call grammar includes branches of philosophy that have been considered absent in Theravada Buddhism. As is well known, Burmese Buddhist scholars have been strong in Pali grammar since the Pagan period. A large number of Pali works written in Burma deal with grammatical or philological issues. Most of these texts have not been studied in the West. For this reason modern scholars have thought that these treatises were merely ancillary books. A deep reading of these texts however reveals that they contain much more than grammatical rules. They contain philosophical discussions that stem from the great Indian debates on logic, epistemology and the authority of scriptures, among other topics.

Helping Against Lives' Uncertainties and the "Theravada" Label

Lillian Handlin

A small shrine originally constructed in 1742 and  subsequently renovated in 1762,  in the village of Ma U,  was the meritorious deed of two members of one family, a wealthy widow, and later her son. Both  donors left relatively extensive statements explicating the significance of their merit making. The two inscriptions reveal generational differences, and how shifting historical circumstances informed their sense of self and the world around them.  The shrine testifying to their piety also includes in its programmatic décor a jataka of unknown provenance inscribed with the intriguing tag “ Theravada zat.” The article reads  the inscriptions in light of the wider world that was beginning to impinge upon royal subjects’ lives in the first years of the new Konbaung dynasty. The article also  examines the significance of recourse to a term that at the time had yet to become the label for a major religion.

The Burma Democratic Front: How the Eighty-Eight Generation Chin were Mobilized into the Chin National Front

Peter Swift

On September 18, 1988 a military takeover ended the nation-wide pro-democracy uprising in Myanmar. A common narrative is that after the coup, on the one hand students and others involved in the uprising fled to border areas to escape arrest, and that on the other hand they hoped to continue their struggle through armed means and were drawn by reports of assistance to armed resistance coming from other countries. In presenting the history of the little-known Burma Democratic Front, which was based in Champhai in northeast India and provided recruits early on for the Chin National Front, I demonstrate that this narrative is inadequate in three main ways. First, while some of those who joined the Chin armed resistance fled to escape arrest, the security situation varied between different places and fear of arrest was not the main determinant for many of them in the decision to leave Myanmar. Leaving Myanmar to India was also sometimes not the only option for those fearing arrest. Second, many of those who ended up in the Chin armed resistance went to India to find work or for other reasons unrelated to armed struggle. Third, relationships with others (based on kinship or participation together in university student groups or high-risk activism), and/or active recruitment by others (sometimes previously known to the individual being recruited, sometimes not), were often extremely important for the decision to go to India or join the armed resistance.

The Other Bayonet: A New Source to Frame the Second Anglo-Burmese War

AA Bastian

A new source reveals Burmese bravery at the Shwedagon pagoda following the hostilities of the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1853. Once buried in the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City a brief journal describing events in and around the Shwedagon Pagoda of that period has surfaced. The journal, written by a man situated in the Shwedagon Pagoda, strengthens postcolonial scholarship focusing on counter narratives to colonial conquest and dominance not easily found in primary sources to date. Destruction or suppression of primary sources served a strategic agenda as another type of bayonet for colonial conquest. Through this new eye witness, we can now glimpse amidst desecration and hostilities into Burmese rebellion against their aggressors.

Disarmament and Resistance in Colonial Burma: A Case Study of the Chin Hills

Pum Khan Pau

The paper is an in-depth analysis of the disarmament policy carried out by the British in the Chin Hills in the late nineteenth century. Situated within the larger context of British colonial policy across the world, disarmament, from colonial perspective, was not only important but a desirable and feasible goal of the so-called ‘pacification’ process. However, the harsh measures often adopted by colonial rulers to achieve its goal remain highly questionable and in most cases, they backfired. The paper argues that the British disarmament policy in the Chin Hills backfired and was strongly resisted by the Chin people not simply because they wanted to save their guns, but it they saw it as a struggle against colonial expansion into the hill tract. It further argues that though the British had successfully confiscated guns from the Chins and regulated possession of guns through licensing, secret re-armament among the Chins clearly reveals that they had not reconciled to colonial administration.

“The Friends of the Burma Hill People”: Lt. Col. John Cromarty Tulloch and the British Support to the Karen Independence Movement, 1947-1952

Giulia Garbagni

In the chaotic aftermath of Burmese independence, Britain officially maintained a policy of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of its former colony. However, the conservative dissatisfaction with what was perceived as a hurried independence soon found expression in “The Friends of the Burma Hill People,” an organization founded in London in 1947 in support of the Karen nationalist movement. This paper aims at shedding new light onto the internal dynamics and motives underpinning the underground activities of the group, focusing on its charismatic founder: Lieutenant Colonel John Cromarty Tulloch, Force 136 veteran and ardent supporter of the Karen independence cause. By relying on archival material from the British Library’s India Office Records, recently declassified Secret Service personal files, as well as on Tulloch’s wartime memoirs, this paper serves a twofold purpose. First, it sets to offer a new degree of accuracy in reconstructing the dynamics and connections of Tulloch’s network, providing a more nuanced insight of the motives and strategies of the “Friends of the Burma Hill People”. Second, it challenges the widespread tendency either to dismiss Tulloch’s endeavor as the machinations of a nostalgic veteran, or of interpreting it within a Cold War logic. Instead, it highlights the role played by colonial narratives of “martial race” and “loyalty” in fuelling British conservative opposition against the new Burma – which are well and alive to this day.

Railways in Shan State

Lindsay C. Stubbs

There are two major railway lines in Shan State, the largest of Burma’s administrative regions. The first starts at Mandalay, crossing into Shan State after Pyin Oo Lwin and going to the railhead at Lashio. A second starts at Thazi, and passes through Kalaw to go to Shwe Nyaung near Inle Lake before continuing north to the railhead at Yaksauk. Shwe Nyaung was once connected to Taunggyi by a rail line, now long since abandoned. There is another line, isolated from the rest of the network, which runs from Taunggyi to Kakku, then on to Namsang and Mong Nai. The line is only usable as far as Htiyi. A line from Mong Nai to Kengtung, known as the Shan State Railway, was announced with much fanfare in 2009 but construction was abandoned soon after it started. This paper will discuss the need for the immediate rebuilding of the line from Shwe Nyaung to Taunggyi, and in the longer term a line linking Taunggyi to Kengtung. The new National League for Democracy government could create much political goodwill for itself by rebuilding the line from Shwe Nyaung to Taunggyi (about 21 miles); by improving the road from Taunggyi to Kengtung (a distance of 281 miles); by re-opening the line from Taunggyi to Mong Nai; and in the longer term building a railway of quality from Taunggyi to Kengtung. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in Shan State in 2013, 2016 and 2017.

Textiles and Supernatural Power: A Tai Belief System

Susan Conway

This paper focuses on textiles (monk's robes and funeral shrouds) and supernatural formulae created by the Tai of Lan Na (Northern Thailand) and the Shan States (Myanmar). The term supernatural formula is used to describe a magical prescription that incorporates visual material with some form of verbal communication. Visual material includes representations of spirits, magical diagrams (yantra) and texts written in ancient Tai scripts and verbal communication involving incantations in Pali and Tai languages. Formulae are created in the context of a Tai magical-religious belief system that draws on the power of Buddhism and Nature, spirits and healing, scared objects and astrology, cosmology and numerology. This belief system has enabled the development of a distinct Tai material culture of which textiles are one aspect. A srā, meaning a craftsperson or artisan (Burmese: saya, Thai: paw maw or paw acharn), uses the belief system to invoke spirits to bring good luck and to create protection against evil spirits that bring bad luck. Monk’s robes are a source for protection and healing generated through the power of Buddhism. Funeral shrouds draw on power from a wider source that includes elements of the Tai magical belief system.

Myanmar. Through the lens of people.

Georg Winterberger

Crucial questions for every researcher using qualitative methods are about access to the field and about asking the right questions in the field. I was lucky to be able to use the Photo-Interviewing method, which allowed me to get insight into my informants’ points of view. In addition, this method enabled me to ask the right questions – or at least the ones that were of great importance to my informants. With this photo-essay, I want to illustrate from a methodological point of view how I got to this method and how it works. I introduce my own experiences with the Photo-Interviewing method first, followed by short presentation of similar methods in use. In the third part, I want to highlight the value of this method by discussing ten photos, which emerged while applying the method.

Buddha’s life in Konbaung period bronzes from Yazagyo

This article presents a collection of small bronzes retrieved from a cluster of ruined Buddhist structures at Yazagyo, in the Kabaw Valley, a remote area of Northwestern Burma. The items can be clearly dated to the early 1880s, near the end of the Konbaung dynasty, thus providing type specimens for chronological comparison. The bronzes recapitulate crucial chapters in Prince Siddhartha's and then the Buddha Gotama's life, and they are examined by the article's three authors. The article details the relics’ enshrinement, their dating, historical context, and the stories of the Buddha that they animate. The article includes 22 photographs. 

Siam-Myanmar relations through the perspective of the Royal Orders of Burma

Researchers of Myanmar history have found the Royal Orders of Myanmar kings to be a very important Myanmar literary genre. As wars with Siam raged on over centuries, Myanmar has a shared history with Siam from Innwa to Konbaung period. The Royal Orders contain invaluable historical facts which were not mentioned in the Siamese or Myanmar chronicles.  Therefore, students of both countries can benefit from the research work on the Royal Orders of Myanmar kings. Despite the existence of some works by Myanmar scholars on Royal Orders, it can be observed that these works seldom deal with Siam-Myanmar relations. Therefore, to contribute to this scholarship, this paper will focus on a detailed study of Royal Orders to provide contemporary accounts of Siam-Myanmar relations from mid-16th to 19th century.

Japan’s Early Twentieth Century Entry into Burma and British Perceptions (and Misperceptions) of the Friend that Became a Foe, 1903-1943: A Case Study in the Global Blindspot

This article examines the beginning of the Japan-Burma relationship at the turn of the twentieth century. It questions why the British Empire welcomed Japan into Burma and allowed Japanese interests, economic and political, to build up their capacity to the point at which Japan would successfully confront Britain in Burma and Southeast Asia more broadly. In tackling this question, a two-part theoretical concept is utilized that couples an in-built weakness of the British Empire - referred to as the “global blindspot” - with a Japanese approach to foreign policy called here the yoraba taiju no kage [serve the powerful for your own good] strategy. Drawing on original qualitative and quantitative sources, the analysis is framed by how Japan was situated vis-à-vis Burma as first within, then later outside, of the British Empire. It proceeds in four stages - two within the empire and two outside of it - to demonstrate Japan’s step-by-step buildup of power in Burma was a process that Britain occasionally noticed, frequently ignored, and completely underestimated. It concludes that the British severely under-estimated Japan in Burma, and did not fully appreciate that Japan represented a different model of political-economy to the liberal free-trading state that Britain thought Japan was. Economic power, political power, and military power are all intertwined because power is power is power. The cost of this under-estimation cost Britain its position in Burma and ultimately its empire in Southeast Asia.

The Myowun's Nap: An Incident in 1852 and the Fall of the Burmese Empire

This article examines a series of events from January 6, 1852, and how they could be tied to a British conspiracy to provoke war with Burma. When a delegation from Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of the East India Company in Calcutta arrived at the courtyard of the Myowun (Royal Governor of Rangoon), staff informed the delegation that the Myowun was asleep and not to be disturbed. After waiting for fifteen minutes, the delegation left, and the Following an overview of the background to this event, this article explores questions surrounding the supposed nap and its role in history, in particular: 1, whether the Myowun was really asleep; 2, if that was the case, why did his staff not awaken him, and finally 3, had the Myowun received the British delegation, would the future of Anglo-Burmese relations have been different?

Rethinking Land and Property in a “Transitioning” Myanmar: Representations of Isolation, Neglect, and Natural Decline

In this article, we assess ideas of “progress” in the evolution of Burma/Myanmar studies, asking whether shifting conditions might offer openings to reconsider narratives about the country. We question two recurring tropes consistent across the work of journalists, policy analysts and scholars: an alleged history of undifferentiated “isolation,” and the ensuing state of Burma/Myanmar following a seemingly “natural” decline. Such language reflects assumptions that otherwise go unspoken in accounts of Myanmar’s current transition. 

We consider descriptions of Yangon’s colonial architecture, asking what depictions of the city as having languished following the colonial era might tell us about assumptions in Burma/Myanmar studies. Such depictions are emblematic of a common trope in the literature, whereby historical narratives of isolation replace more dynamic accounts of interaction, particularly in regard to land and property. Drawing on work in Yangon and Shan State, we question common descriptive impulses related to the difficulty of accounting for history— including dependency on a conventional timeline broken into unquestioned periods, and recurring references to “isolation,” “nationalization” or “customary tenure” as glosses for the relations present in such periods. We ask how those analyzing Myanmar might progress beyond such impulses, cognizant that increased access to the country offers opportunities to trouble simplistic narratives, highlighting their political and intellectual perils.

“Transition” as a Migratory Model in Myanmar

‘Transition’ has been a staple concept in political science, law, economics, and development studies for several decades. Easily transposed from the analytic context into everyday parlance, it carries a teleological sense of progress and promise, a ritualistic shedding of a ‘before’ as part of a present journey into a brighter future. Even where it is not defined any further, it can serve as a rallying cry, or a delaying tactic in the face of those demanding more radical change. Today’s use of ‘transition’ in reference to Myanmar found in scholarly, journalistic, and general idiom, then, is nothing new: ‘transition’ as a paradigm has a long history in places like Spain after Franco, during the democratization of Latin America, and in the post-Soviet spaces of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. After reviewing the literature on ‘transitology’, we focus on the anthropological critique of the paradigm that was taken up by political scientists when ever more countries were declared to be ‘in transition’. We argue that Myanmar is only the last example of states that are assigned a transitory stage of development. This article addresses the political agendas and the pitfalls that travel along with the paradigm.

Appraisal of Burma/Myanmar’s Roundabout Roadmaps

The peace process Burma/Myanmar has got a momentum since 2011, and both government and non-State actors including Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs), political parties, and civil society groups put endeavor to make the process move on. This article is a comparative study of the seven-step Roadmap of National League for Democracy (NLD) and the seven-step Roadmap of previous military junta State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). While the military junta tactfully reached six out of its seven-step Roadmap and strictly holds on to the 2008 Constitution. It guaranteed the Tatmadaw (Army) a fixed position both in politics and defense. In contrast, the civilian government and ethnic groups are struggling to sign a union agreement— the 21st century Panglong Conference Agreement. This article argues that amending the constitution in accordance with the union agreement and the subsequent approval of the amended constitution may cause tension and pressure to be dealt with by the government, the Tatmadaw and ethnic groups. If the stakeholders are capable to get the union agreement to amend the constitution, there will be a wider chance to build a democratic federal union as planned in the NLD’s seven-step road map.

Road Plans and Planned Roads: Entangled Geographies, Spatiotemporal Frames, and Territorial Claims-making in Myanmar’s Southern Shan State

In this article, I investigate conflicting claims to land made in the peri-urban areas of Taunggyi, in Myanmar's Shan state, where decades of ethnic insurgency, the negotiation of ceasefire agreements, and resultant military-state development strategies have figured land as a primary site and object of struggle. Yet, as I argue in this paper, it is not only land that is at stake in ongoing conflicts, but also the incongruous conceptions of space and time that motivate such claims. By exploring case studies linked to proposed road construction in Pa-O majority regions, I develop an approach to "land grabs"- and the counter claims-making they impel- that foregrounds the spatiotemporal, showing how distinct senses of time are activated, embodied, and re-animated through encounters with particular spaces. In this, I specifically argue that the linear, historical timeline embraced by state authorities-a timeline tied to sequential notions of advancement, modernization, and democratization - cannot be taken as fact; instead, it must be considered alongside alternate conceptualizations, through which the notion of a single narrative of "progress" might be opened up to contain alternative notions of past and present, and with them, new political possibilities.

Anna Allott

Volume 1
"Half a Century of Publishing in Mandalay" pp. 83-106

The Ludu Kyi-bwa-yay Press was established in Mandalay as a radical left-wing publishing house by Ludu U Hla and his wife, Daw Amar, in 1938. Ludu U Hla was a pioneering Burmese journalist, would-be social reformer, social historian, and, most of all, recorder of folk-tales. Daw Amar began her writing career in 1938 as a translator, mostly of anti-Western works; in 1964 she began a series of major works dealing with Burmese traditional performing arts and the history and culture of Upper Burma and of Mandalay. U Hla died in 1982, and in March 1984 much of the press was destroyed in the great Mandalay fire. Nevertheless, the press resumed publishing in 1987 under the direction of Daw Amar and despite continued strict government censorship has remained in operation until the present. The latest book in Ludu U Hla's folktale series appeared posthumously in 1996. This article is followed by a translation of a short biography of Ludu U Hla written by Daw Amar.

Volume 9
"Professor U Pe Maung Tin (1888–1973): The Life and Work of an Outstanding Burmese Scholar" pp.7-10

In 1998, Daw Tin Tin Myaing (Brenda Stanley), the youngest daughter of the late Burmese scholar U Pe Maung Tin, organized a symposium at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies to honor the achievements of her father. U Pe Maung Tin grew up as a Christian, but mastered Pali, the language of Buddhism, early in his career. This led him to become one of the world’s leading translators of Pali texts into English and interpreter of Buddhist doctrine to Western scholars. This article by guest editor and former student Anna Allott outlines U Pe Maung Tin’s life and work as a Pali scholar, lifelong student and promoter of the Burmese language, historian, linguist, phonetician, teacher, and editor.

Myo Nyunt Aung

Volume 18
Archaeological Researches on the Excavated Finds at the Ancient City of Wadee

Maitrii Aung-Thwin

Volume 14
"Healing, Rebellion, and the Law: Ethnologies of Medicine in Colonial Burma, 1928–1932"pp.151-185

Asia’s encounter with Western medicine and the emergence of public health regimes might be regarded as one chapter within the larger framework of colonialism and its discursive practices. Medicine contributed to the ordering of colonized Asia by providing particular vocabularies and frameworks through which cultures and communities could be identified, categorized, and transformed into accessible knowledge. Notions of the body, race, cleanliness, sickness, “the patient” and healing were continuously shaped and negotiated within the context of this encounter, involving sites of healing, communities, and a wide range of socio-political contexts. This study considers the way in which “indigenous medicine” was delineated by two instruments of the colonial administration in British Burma: a committee appointed to integrate the study of local practices into the educational system and a special tribunal, which was formed to process detainees in the wake of one of the largest rebellions in colonial Burma’s history. It suggests that the shadow of Burma’s administrative connection to India might have corresponded to the manner in which healing culture was conceptualized. Due to changing political circumstances surrounding the question of Burma’s separation from India, the image of traditional medicine shifted to represent a distinct form of Burmese criminality and resistance.

Michael Aung Thwin

Volume 17
"Those Men in Saffron Robes"

The article offers an overview of Myanmar’s state-sangha interactions in the monarchical and post monarchical period ushering a time when what the author calls a 900 year-old punctuated equilibrium is under stress. An ancient patron-client relationship collapsed when the colonial state refused to sustain the sangha as monarchs had done since the 11th century. Independence ushered further adjustments when the potential patron turned out to be a secular, modern republic with its inherited but also innovative notions of authority, legitimacy and responsibility. The evolution of concepts of state and politics, especially the battle for independence in the turbulent pre-1948 period, further fragmented the sangha, undermining its earlier notional integrity and cohesion thereby enabling for the first time the emergence of a hitherto unfamiliar type, the mobilized and politically active monk. In the first post-independence decade, the new state legislated a closer relationship between the sangha and authorizing institutions. When politics and pieties collided, successive Myanmar governments tried in various ways to make the institution of the sangha more amenable to a modernizing state’s needs. How these influential moves played out in the post 1988 period is the subject of the article’s conclusion. What has been called the Saffron Revolution (2007) is examined by the author in light of the issue of politicization – to argue that what happened was neither saffron, nor a revolution. The issues raised have profound implications for the sangha’s future and cannot be understood without a grasp of the institution’s past.

L.E. Bagshawe

Volume 3 
"Kingship in Pagan Wundauk U Tinâ's 'Myan-Ma-Mwn-Ok-Cjok-Pon-Sa-Dnn'"

This paper analyzes the attitudes toward kingship expressed in the Myan-ma-Mn Ok-cjok-pon Sa-dnn’ ["The Royal Administration of Burma"], written by Pagan U Tin (1861-1933) and first published shortly after the author's death. Following a brief biographical account of Pagan U Tin, the discussion considers four perspectives on Burmese kingship appearing in the work: 1) the king as judge; 2) the king as guarantor of regularity; 3) the king as descendant of the Sun (and of Mahasammata, originator of civil society); and 4) the king as Buddha-to-be. The Burmese monarch was predominantly a symbolic figure who affirmed the kingdom's past and guaranteed its future. Although U Tin reports on the questionable morality of Kings Mindon and Thibaw, he nevertheless addresses both as "Excellent King" and admonishes his readers against offending the dignity of the throne.

AA Bastian

Volume 21.1
The Other Bayonet: A New Source to Frame the Second Anglo-Burmese War

A new source reveals Burmese bravery at the Shwedagon pagoda following the hostilities of the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1853. Once buried in the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City a brief journal describing events in and around the Shwedagon Pagoda of that period has surfaced. The journal, written by a man situated in the Shwedagon Pagoda, strengthens postcolonial scholarship focusing on counter narratives to colonial conquest and dominance not easily found in primary sources to date. Destruction or suppression of primary sources served a strategic agenda as another type of bayonet for colonial conquest. Through this new eye witness, we can now glimpse amidst desecration and hostilities into Burmese rebellion against their aggressors.

Carol Ann Boshier

Volume 20.2
"Burmanization" and the Impact of J.S. Furnivall's Views on National Identity in Late-Colonial Burma

J.S. Furnivall’s interventions in connection with extending the franchise under the Burma Reform Scheme while serving in the ICS, helped to create political identities that might be said to have reinforced the territory’s ethnic divisions. This confirms his agency in generating political identities that were distinct from the market-based identities that he later labeled the plural society. As a result, these actions and his personal efforts to establish a trans-ethnic national identity based on the dominance of Burmanization, have obscured rather than elucidated understandings of Burma and its problems since Independence.

Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière

Volume 20.1
Spirit Possession: An Autonomous Field of Practice in the Burmese Buddhist Culture

The cult of the Thirty-Seven Lords is distinctively known for its practices of spirit possession although possession by spiritual agents may be found in other domains of Burmese Buddhist culture. What sets apart the practices observed in the cult of the Thirty-Seven Lords is a form of individual and relocatable possession contrasting with traditional rituals linked to the locality and allowing for the professionalisation and the autonomisation of the ritual role of spirit mediums. Ceremonies of possession for the Thirty-Seven Lords mobilize communities of followers in which bonds of dependence with the nats are mediated by ritual masters, married to a nat, such bonds fashion these communities on the model of “clienteles” whose dominant authorizing principle is spirit possession. Spirit possession is what allows the cohesion of the spirit mediums practices that can be observed particularly during the festivals and can be said to constitue an autonomous ritual domain in the Burmese Buddhist culture.

Felix Girke and Judith Beyer

Volume 22.2
“Transition” as a Migratory Model in Myanmar

‘Transition’ has been a staple concept in political science, law, economics, and development studies for several decades. Easily transposed from the analytic context into everyday parlance, it carries a teleological sense of progress and promise, a ritualistic shedding of a ‘before’ as part of a present journey into a brighter future. Even where it is not defined any further, it can serve as a rallying cry, or a delaying tactic in the face of those demanding more radical change. Today’s use of ‘transition’ in reference to Myanmar found in scholarly, journalistic, and general idiom, then, is nothing new: ‘transition’ as a paradigm has a long history in places like Spain after Franco, during the democratization of Latin America, and in the post-Soviet spaces of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. After reviewing the literature on ‘transitology’, we focus on the anthropological critique of the paradigm that was taken up by political scientists when ever more countries were declared to be ‘in transition’. We argue that Myanmar is only the last example of states that are assigned a transitory stage of development. This article addresses the political agendas and the pitfalls that travel along with the paradigm.

Aurore Candier

Volume 15
"Conjuncture and Reform in the Late Konbaung Period: How Prophecies, Omens and Rumors Motivated Political Action During the Years 1866-1869"

Contrary to the modern Western concept of reform, the precolonial Burmese concept of pyu pyin was not linked to the notion of progress, but to the notion of "regeneration." These reforms, called here "cyclical reforms," were meant to restore a pristine and ideal order. Their implementation was strongly connected to the "prophetic reading" of a time. Following Buddhist cosmology, wordly affairs reflect cosmic order, so that prophecies, omens, rumors and other extraordinary signs were immediatly reported to the king and interpreted by his experts in wordly matter knowledge (lawki piñña). When these "prophetic readings" were inauspicious, "cyclical reforms" were carried out to restore the socio-cosmic order. But there were also reforms, here called "conjunctural reforms," which were a more specific response to a changing context. Within this frame work, it is productive to bring the conception and practice of reform during the middle and late Konbaung period (1820s-1880s) under scrutiny. At that time, the Burmese government had to adjust to the coming of a new colonial order. The reign of king Mindon (1853-1878) was particularly rich in major sociopolitical changes and implementation of reforms, which were drafted as a response to the new "conjuncture."

The years 1866-1869 are particularly formative for two reasons. First, the year 1866 is the major political turn of king Mindon's reign. The heir-apparent, the Kanaung prince, leader of the "conjunctural reform" program after his brother Mindon took power, was murdered during a coup d'etat in August. Thereafter, king Mindon led both "cyclical" and "conjunctural" reforms until changes in the international context of Burma in the 1870s put an end to his attempts. Second, these years are particularly well-documented, both in vernacular and western primary sources. Only a careful and close examination of both types of sources will allow us to analyze how "prophetic" information was interpreted and understood at the Burmese court and allow us to see how this understanding influenced decision-making and choices of the appropriate type of reform, whether "cyclical"—a reversion to normative or ideal conditions—or "conjunctural"—a creation of a new precedent.

U Tun Aung Chain

Volume 9
“U Pe Maung Tin’s and Luce’s "Glass Palace Revisited" pp.52-69

A leading contemporary Burmese historian, U Aung Chain Tun offers a thoughtful and illuminating perspective on U Pe Maung Tin’s translation ion of The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma with G.H. Luce.

Michael W. Charney

Volume 3
"Rise of a Mainland Trading State: Rahkaing Under the Early Mrauk-U Kings, c. 1430–1603" pp.1-34

This study of the rise of the maritime kingdom of Rahkaing (Arakan) in the 15th and 16th centuries attempts to demonstrate how the kings of Danya-wati gradually drew other power centers in the Rahkaing littoral (including Mekha-wati, Dwara-wati, and Chittagong) into its political orbit. Vital to this political centralization were the collateral processes of increasing maritime trade, demographic growth spurred by resettled war captives, the suppression of rival lowland tribes, supplies of firearms, and the development of a multi-directional system of religious patronage. By the end of the 16th century, Mrauk-U rulers, as both Buddhist kings and Islamic sultans, controlled the entire Rahkaing littoral as one kingdom and had begun their expansion into neighboring regions as distant as Dacca in Bengal and Pegu in Burma.

Violet Cho

Volume 18
"The Academic Life of Savages"

Knowledge, in the context of Karen culture, has long been transmitted verbally through oral poetry, known as hta in S’gaw Karen. This form of knowledge transmission has been transformed by the continued hegemony of colonial ways of knowing that privilege written tradition and scientific objectivity. New ways of knowing, through text, has displaced orality so deeply that it is virtually irretrievable. This article is an experimental reflection on Karen ways of knowing and an attempt to speak back against the oppression of the written word. In this article, I explore modes of knowing and power through hta in the context of my own experience growing up in Western systems of education. The hta is first written in S’gaw Karen in a missionary script, followed by an English translation and a brief discussion. As hta is an oral form, I have recorded an audio version produced after the piece was written down. My aim here is to make something new out of cultural traces that remain from the long period of colonisation.

Chris Clark

Volume 19
The Sixth Buddhist Council: Its Purpose, Presentation and Product
During the mid 1950s, the Burmese government organized and funded the “sixth Buddhist council,” a two-year gathering of monks and laypeople in which the Pāli canon was recited. In this article, a number of previously unexplored sources have been drawn from in aid of providing a better understanding of the purpose for which the event was held and the way in which it was presented to the wider public. These sources advertized the council as an effective means to purify Theravāda Buddhist scriptures and thereby protect the sāsana from decline. They consistently portrayed this work of purification as an international collaboration involving monastic groups from all major Theravāda Buddhist countries, despite evidence to the contrary. This article also includes a detailed analysis of a section of the principal textual product associated with the council, the widely used Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti Piṭaka series of the Pāli canon, providing insight into its sources and editing methodology.

Mark Clement

Volume 17
"A Cross-Cultural Encounter in Pre-Colonial Burma: Henry Gouger’s Narrative of Commerce and Captivity, 1822-1826"

The article brings to life the adventures of an Anglo-Indian merchant, Henry Gouger, whose Ava sojourn and incarceration during the First Anglo Burmese War (1824-1826) generated years later A Personal Narrative of Two Year’s Imprisonment in Burmah, published in 1860. The author examines what he calls the mentality of a private trader in the 19th century, against the background of the competition between two expanding empires, that of Ava and the English East India Company. By drawing upon the recent literature on travel narratives and cross-cultural encounters, the article restores to Henry Gouger an individuality enabled by liberating his story from the distorting focus on Orientalist stereotypes nefariously furthering colonialist agendas.

Megan Clymer and Min Ko Naing

Volume 8
"Conqueror of Kings: Burma’s Student Leader" pp.33-63

During the democracy uprising in 1988, Paw Oo Htun, whose nom de guerre, Min Ko Naing, means Conqueror of Kings, emerged as one of the movement’s most prominent student leaders. Together with other student leaders, he revived the umbrella students’ organization the All Burma Federation of Student Unions. Today, while serving out a twenty year prison sentence, Min Ko Naing remains a symbol of the Burmese student movement. In this essay, interviews with close friends and student colleagues help document his story.

Celine Coderey

Volume 16
"The Weikza's Role in Arakanese Healing Practices"

This article analyses the fact that in the Thandwe area, in Arakan State (Western part of Burma), weikza-related practices are largely widespread among healers and are highly appreciated by consultants. Taking the example of the diviners and the "masters of the upper path", I show that weikza knowledge and techniques potentially guarantee healers a wider field of action and a higher respectability, both of which are essential qualities for healers. My opinion is that this advantage comes from the fact that the weikzas' status, as well as the practices associated to them, combine and mix aspects which are – cognitively – kept distinct: Buddhist and non-Buddhist, this-worldly and other-worldly aspects. The force of the weikza phenomenon resides in its ambiguity and hybridity.

Susan Conway

Volume 21.2
Textiles and Supernatural Power: A Tai Belief System

This paper focuses on textiles (monk's robes and funeral shrouds) and supernatural formulae created by the Tai of Lan Na (Northern Thailand) and the Shan States (Myanmar). The term supernatural formula is used to describe a magical prescription that incorporates visual material with some form of verbal communication. Visual material includes representations of spirits, magical diagrams (yantra) and texts written in ancient Tai scripts and verbal communication involving incantations in Pali and Tai languages. Formulae are created in the context of a Tai magical-religious belief system that draws on the power of Buddhism and Nature, spirits and healing, scared objects and astrology, cosmology and numerology. This belief system has enabled the development of a distinct Tai material culture of which textiles are one aspect. A srā, meaning a craftsperson or artisan (Burmese: saya, Thai: paw maw or paw acharn), uses the belief system to invoke spirits to bring good luck and to create protection against evil spirits that bring bad luck. Monk’s robes are a source for protection and healing generated through the power of Buddhism. Funeral shrouds draw on power from a wider source that includes elements of the Tai magical belief system.

Richard Cooler

Volume 1
"Temples and Rainfall in Ancient Pagan" pp.19-44

This article examines unusual features of various religious buildings located at Pagan, such as below-ground monasteries and brick-lined water-catchment basins, to establish that low rainfall of less than 24 inches annually was a constant in the local climate throughout the Pagan period. Confirming this fact sheds light on the critical role the construction of religious structures played in linking the inadequately watered capital to outlying irrigated agricultural lands, thus ensuring the necessary provision of food to the city. As the population of Pagan grew, the need to increase food supplies from the outlying areas created an incentive for focusing the practice of the Merit Path to Salvation on the erection of still more religious buildings, thus creating the "forest of temples" seen at Pagan today.

Volume 20.2
A Buddha Image for Exorcism

Buddhist iconography reflects extraordinary conservatism so that the appearance of images exhibiting unconventional features attracts immediate attention. This article examines, and documents a recently discovered image whose unusual features become intelligible when viewed in the context of Buddhist exorcism as practiced by weikza congregations. An identification of the image as exorcist is facilitated by dating its casting to the reign of King Bowdawpaya (aka Badon Min, reigned 1782–1819), a period of Buddhist heterodoxy when cabalistic squares (in) were widely used. The image is further identified as an exorcist Healing Buddha by setting it within the two hundred year iconic development of Burmese images that hold the myrobalan, a medicinal fruit whose use is believed to assist in expelling evil from the human body. An examination of contemporary weikza practices shows the additional iconographic anomalies to embody weikza concerns: in containing the occult letters sa, da, ba, wa appearing at nine locations on the body and the robe, the offering of two myrobalan fruit with contrasting gestures, the unorthodox wearing of the monk’s robe, the wide striated belt, the deliberate grinding away of the image, and a “relic” enclosed within the body.

A peripheral observation in this study concerns how closely nineteenth century visual representations of weikza saints such as Bo Bo Aung are homologus to those of the standing Healing Buddha.

Jack Daulton

Volume 4
"Sariputta and Moggallana in the Golden Land: The Relics of the Buddha's Chief Disciples at the Kaba Aye Pagoda" pp.101-128

In this article, the author reconstructs and documents the story of the relics of the Buddha's chief disciples, Sariputta and Moggallana, at the Kaba Aye Pagoda in Burma. Using previously unpublished archival materials, including first-hand archaeological reports and internal museum documents, as well as contemporary newspaper accounts, the author details the discovery of the relics by British military officers in 19th-century India, the subsequent removal of the relics to England where they were placed on museum exhibition, and their eventual reenshrinement in Burma and India 100 years later.

Anne Décobert

Volume 18
"Sitting on the Fence? Politics and Ethics of Research into Cross-border Aid on the Thailand-Myanmar/Burma Border"

This article analyzes the politics and ethics of anthropological research in a situation shaped by decades of conflict and violence, as well as a polarized and emotional debate. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with a cross-border aid organization on the Thailand-Myanmar/Burma border, the author identifies issues of wider concern to researchers working in sensitive and politicized research contexts. In particular, the article illustrates the difficulties of academic neutrality in a context shaped by a history of conflict, violence and disputed claims to socio-political legitimacy. It highlights the political and ethical complexities of “participant-insider” research. It focuses attention on how academic research is not only contingent upon, but can influence evolving socio-political relationships, positionings and perceptions. Finally, it discusses the importance of recognizing and taking into account objections to academics’ work – objections for which researchers are often underprepared, which remain largely absent from academic writings, but which raise important issues to do with intellectual and ethical debts to research participants.

Wil O. Dijk

Volume 6
"The Voc in Burma: 1634–1680" pp.1-109

This article is intended to show that the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) at the General State Archives (ARA), The Hague, The Netherlands, are a rich source of information on seventeenth century Burma. Because this unearthed data is mostly about commerce, this paper deals with the VOC’s trade with Burma. What has come to light is that the Dutch factories in Burma were an important and integral part of the VOC’s network of trade, seeing that the profits helped to fund the purchase of Indian textiles that were the backbone of much of the Dutch inter-Asian trade. The Dutch, moreover, sold Burmese export products profitably from Persia to Japan and Holland. In the end, the VOC’s establishment in Burma became the victim of a general change in Dutch fortunes when forces in both Europe and the Far East began working against the Dutch East India Company.      

Maria Serena I. Diokno

Volume 5
“An Annotated Bibliography of Articles on the Burmese Peasantry from the Journal of the Burma Research Society, 1911–1970" pp.1-16

This compilation covers fifty articles and twenty-six township records published in the Journal of the Burma Research Society between 1911 and 1970. The selected articles all shed light on the economic life of the peasantry and have been divided as follows: Part I) Translations of relevant sources or commentaries on the peasantry, Part II) Geographic and other background information necessary for understanding peasant life, and Part III) Analyses or descriptions of the traditional, colonial, and early modern economy, of which the peasants were an important part. The articles are arranged by theme and date of publications within each section and sub-section.

Penny Edwards

Volume 14
"Bitter Pills: Colonialism, Medicine and Nationalism in Burma, 1870–1940" pp.21-58

This article examines medicine as a field of knowledge deeply implicated in the emergence of new ways of articulating national difference. Specifically, it aims to shed light on the symbiosis between perceptions of political space and sovereignty, and conceptualizations of human anatomy. The article offers an analysis of the presentation, dissemination, and institutionalization of western medicine by colonial researchers, missionaries, educators and policy-makers in Burma, and correlates these generally ethnocentric perceptions with European presumptions about indigenous medicine. Reflecting upon the place of medicine as a strategic handmaiden to both military expeditions and missionar

Renaud Egreteau

Volume 18
"The Idealization Of A Lost Paradise Narratives Of Nostalgia And Traumatic Return Migration Among Indian Repatriates From Burma Since The 1960s"

Drawing on recent interviews of Indian returnees from Burma, this article sheds light on a well-known yet understudied moment of Burma’s postcolonial history, the forced repatriation of Indian communities during the 1960s. The research has gathered first-hand narratives about the traumatic experiences shared by Indian repatriated families, from their much debated decision to leave Burma, to the perceived humiliation of departure and the dramatic (re)migration to India. The article builds on the scholarship on exile and nostalgia, which claims that repatriation processes often lead to a retrospective idealization by the returnees of what has been left behind. Interviews have indeed revealed how nostalgic memories of a “golden past” and a “paradise lost” in Burma have been shaped among the first generation of Indian repatriates ever since their resettlement in India. In contrast with the classic diaspora literature, which postulates that diasporic groups tend to idealize their homeland, Indians in Burma have tended to rather romanticize their Burmese host- land. They cherish the “golden days” they once lived in Burma, whilst expressing highly condescending feelings about their new Indian “homeland” where resettlement and re-integration to the Indian national space have proved harsher than expected.

Alex Ruiz Falques

Volume 21.1
The Role of Pali Grammar In Burmese Buddhism

This paper approaches Pali grammatical text from the point of view of scholastic literature, and thus argues that what we call grammar includes branches of philosophy that have been considered absent in Theravada Buddhism. As is well known, Burmese Buddhist scholars have been strong in Pali grammar since the Pagan period. A large number of Pali works written in Burma deal with grammatical or philological issues. Most of these texts have not been studied in the West. For this reason modern scholars have thought that these treatises were merely ancillary books. A deep reading of these texts however reveals that they contain much more than grammatical rules. They contain philosophical discussions that stem from the great Indian debates on logic, epistemology and the authority of scriptures, among other topics.

Jane M. Ferguson

Volume 20.2
Tracking (un)Popular Music in Contemporary Myanmar

The genre copy thachin or “copy song” pervades the popular music scene in Myanmar. These songs are akin to cover versions of existing international hits, but with new lyrics in the Burmese language, and performed by Burmese musicians. These songs can have incredible genre—crossing capabilities, from blues to rap, heavy metal to salsa. The current situation for popular music production in Myanmar is connected with the country’s history of military rule and years of censorship and economic difficulties. Advocates for the genre of copy thachin argue that borrowing international songs allowed local artists to learn about global popular music, and the numerous popular musicians and songwriters in Myanmar are testament to this. On the other hand, with the removal of the stringent censorship regime and the increasing contact with international consumer culture, groups of Myanmar music fans are increasingly critical of copy thachin, seeing the practice as derivative and an embarrassment. This article will explore the history of the genre, notions of authenticity, and discuss Myanmar’s changing relationship with the symbolic capital of its own culture industry and its relationship with international popular culture.

Magnus Fiskesjo

Volume 17
"Introduction to Wa Studies"

The article provides an overview of the rich materials available to study multiple aspects of the Wa. The author presents the setting that has been the traditional homeland of the Wa people, a variety of forms of evidence facilitating knowledge of their past and present, including a rich oral tradition to supplement the many texts written and published in the Wa language. The available materials also include archaeological remains in the form of rock art. An extended section on Chinese, Burmese and Shan sources is supplemented with European, mainly British writings, and missionary narratives and correspondence. The article also delves into recent scholarship devoted to the Wa, by ethnographers and linguists. A bibliographical note calls attention to available web sites where further material may be found.

Bernard Formoso

Volume 17
"To be at One with Drums: Social Order and Headhunting among the Wa of China"

The article examines the practice of beating large drums, made of hollowed out tree trunks, among southeast Asian headhunting groups, the Naga of Assam, of Northeast India, and the so called "wild" Wa straddling the Burma-China frontier. The author looks as their kinship system, its political and religious prerogatives, agricultural practices, and village habitats. The Naga and Wa formed raiding groups when hunting heads, which in the case of the Wa generated group solidarity and functioning social units. Such cooperative endeavor generated supra village organizations acting as a small-scale sociocosmos. The evidence is based on ethnographic data compiled by the author in 1997 while domiciled among the Wa of the Lancang district, Yunnan province, and reports published by Chinese ethnographers who in the 1950s recorded the folklore of China’s different populations. The article examines the nature of the headhunting populations on China’s margin, the significance of the drums and the elaborate rituals and methods transforming material objects into sacred implements and the sophisticated mythology associated with head hunting practices. The latter’s relationship to animal sacrifice, community cohesion, familial status and other communal activities made head hunting an influential component of social life. Rituals of life regeneration are intimately interwoven with Wa myths of origin, for which monoxylous drum playing is crucial. The drums are associated with the figure of the snake, that in turn is linked to the social body that was said to have resulted from its dismemberment. Such rituals generate a sense of organic unity, important in the agonistic context of headhunting and lineage solidarity, stimulated by an ideology that moved such violent activities, as the author shows, outside the dialectal area. The drums’ hall was the true spiritual core of Wa villages.

Niklas Foxeus

Volume 16
"The World Emperor's Battle Against the Evil Forces"

In early postcolonial Burma, millenarian prophecies about the imminent arrival of Setkya Min, the world emperor, circulated. This exalted personage was expected to protect Buddhism, and usher in a golden age for Buddhism and Burma. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the anthropologists Michael Mendelson and Melford E. Spiro encountered a perplexing phenomenon – a few so-called royal esoteric congregations whose leaders behaved as kings and were treated as such by their followers. These leaders were held to fulfill the prophecies and thus to be impersonations of the powerful figure Setkya Min, a weikza, a future Buddha, and a righteous king.

Mendelson and Spiro understood these congregations as being continuous with the anti-colonial and even the pre-millenarian rebellions. Until now, this interpretation has remained uncontested, probably due to lack of empirical evidence, since most scholars have assumed that these kinds of congregations ceased to exist long time ago. However, there still exists one such congregation in Burma, and was founded in the early 1950s. This article demonstrates how this congregation has waged a "battle" with supernatural means against what it perceived as the evil, anti-Buddhist forces to save Buddhism from extinction, and that it is just as anti-colonial and anti-Western as the anti-colonial rebellions. Moreover, the article argues that this congregation is similar to those studied by Mendelson and Spiro, and that these kinds of congregations should be understood as new Buddhist movements emerging in response to crises of authority and identity, to projects of modernization and nation-building, and to political turmoil in the postcolonial period. These congregations represented a quest for identity (individual, communal, and national), and are comparable to the other new religious movements that emerged in Southeast Asia in the postwar period.

Sylvia Fraser-Lu

Volume 20.2
"A Lacquered History of the Kings of Pagan from an Illustrated Glass Palace Chronicle"

A little known gem in the Spencer collection of Rare Books in the New York Public Library is a unique Burmese manuscript composed of fifteen pages made from heavily lacquered cloth. The pages of this manuscript have been cleverly joined together in the style of a Western book which is unusual for Burmese art. Compiled in 1906 by Hsaya Saing, a well-known master craftsman of the colonial period with a workshop in the Hmangyo Quarter Pagan, this manuscript based on The Glass Palace Chronicle is an illustrated account of a history of twenty-five of Pagan’s most eminent kings beginning with Popa Sawrahan (c. CE 613) and concluding with Zeyatheinka (Hti-lo-min) (r. 1210–34/35). The illustrations have been executed in the prevalent Burmese yun incised lacquer technique in a traditional palette of five colors. Although illustrated narratives are a well-known staple in Burmese art as far as wall paintings, wood-carving, and lacquer are concerned, depictions of such scenes tend to heavily rely on time-hallowed conventions largely derived from 8th- to 12th-century Pala art of eastern India. In this manuscript Indian conventions are followed when the subject matter is familiar. However, when unfamiliar subject matter presented itself, artisans rose to the challenge and created imaginative new settings in which to place an historic cast of characters resulting in some very original and appealing illustrations in the lacquer medium.

Giulia Garbagni

Volume 21.2
“The Friends of the Burma Hill People”: Lt. Col. John Cromarty Tulloch and the British Support to the Karen Independence Movement, 1947-1952

In the chaotic aftermath of Burmese independence, Britain officially maintained a policy of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of its former colony. However, the conservative dissatisfaction with what was perceived as a hurried independence soon found expression in “The Friends of the Burma Hill People,” an organization founded in London in 1947 in support of the Karen nationalist movement. This paper aims at shedding new light onto the internal dynamics and motives underpinning the underground activities of the group, focusing on its charismatic founder: Lieutenant Colonel John Cromarty Tulloch, Force 136 veteran and ardent supporter of the Karen independence cause. By relying on archival material from the British Library’s India Office Records, recently declassified Secret Service personal files, as well as on Tulloch’s wartime memoirs, this paper serves a twofold purpose. First, it sets to offer a new degree of accuracy in reconstructing the dynamics and connections of Tulloch’s network, providing a more nuanced insight of the motives and strategies of the “Friends of the Burma Hill People”. Second, it challenges the widespread tendency either to dismiss Tulloch’s endeavor as the machinations of a nostalgic veteran, or of interpreting it within a Cold War logic. Instead, it highlights the role played by colonial narratives of “martial race” and “loyalty” in fuelling British conservative opposition against the new Burma – which are well and alive to this day.

Nicolas Salem-Gervais and Rosalie Metro

Volume 16.2
"A Textbook Case of Nation-Building: The Evolution of History Curricula in Myanmar"

This article aims to analyze the history curriculum used in primary and secondary schools under the SLORC/SPDC from the perspective of the State's nation-building endeavors. To do so, we provide some background on history textbooks during colonial, parliamentary, and socialist eras, and then describe three shifts in discourse on national identity in post-socialist Myanmar: the replacement of Aung San by the Great Kings as main national references, the projection of "Myanmar" identity back in history, and the designation of Thais, along with British colonialists, as historical enemies of the nation. We argue that those shifts constituted a step away from a national identity based on some extent of inter-ethnic compromise, toward one based on an ancient and glorious indigenous essence. We then examine the textbooks of two ethno-nationalist groups, the KNU and the SSA-S to illustrate the discursive similarities across political boundaries.

While revisions of national history are common around the world and might even be a sine qua non for the emergence of a nation, we suggest that the SLORC/SPDC's narrow conception of national identity, coupled with the underfunding of the welfare state and especially education, has often been counter-productive to state aims, undermining the success of schooling as a tool of nation-building and lending legitimacy to radical ethno-nationalist conceptions of history and identity.

Felix Girke and Judith Beyer

Volume 22.2
“Transition” as a Migratory Model in Myanmar

‘Transition’ has been a staple concept in political science, law, economics, and development studies for several decades. Easily transposed from the analytic context into everyday parlance, it carries a teleological sense of progress and promise, a ritualistic shedding of a ‘before’ as part of a present journey into a brighter future. Even where it is not defined any further, it can serve as a rallying cry, or a delaying tactic in the face of those demanding more radical change. Today’s use of ‘transition’ in reference to Myanmar found in scholarly, journalistic, and general idiom, then, is nothing new: ‘transition’ as a paradigm has a long history in places like Spain after Franco, during the democratization of Latin America, and in the post-Soviet spaces of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. After reviewing the literature on ‘transitology’, we focus on the anthropological critique of the paradigm that was taken up by political scientists when ever more countries were declared to be ‘in transition’. We argue that Myanmar is only the last example of states that are assigned a transitory stage of development. This article addresses the political agendas and the pitfalls that travel along with the paradigm.

Mikael Gravers

Volume 19.1
Disorder as Order: The Ethno-Nationalist Struggle of the Karen in Burma/Myanmar   

Burma’s 66 years civil war is the longest armed conflict in the world. This article analyses the complexity of one of the many ethnic armed conflicts between the Karen and the state. The Karen ethno-nationalist struggle is rooted in the ethnic categorization and identity politics of colonial order, which has influences the political orders after independence. Al living generations in Burma have to some extend experienced violence. Violent disorder and memory of suffering and victimhood dominate a majority of the Karen. The author argue that the prolonged violent conflict has widened the ethnic incompatibilities and impacts the current ceasefire negotiations. Internalsegmentation of the Karen society as well as internal divisions and conflicts has also had a considerable impact upon the track of this conflict. Cultural, religious and political diversity among the Karen – and other ethnic groups – further complicates prospects for a political solution to the armed struggle.

Alexandra Green

Volume 10
"Deep Change? Burmese Wall Paintings from the Eleventh to the Nineteenth Centuries" pp.1-50

This article will compare the narrative constructions of early (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) and late (seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries) Burmese wall paintings to determine whether or not “deep change” has occurred. Although many of the same stories were depicted in the murals during both time periods, the method by which the visual stories were portrayed changed from an emphasis upon iconic imagery to an exploration of narrative process. By analyzing the narrative modes employed during the two periods, the emphases of each are revealed. The changes that occurred in the Burmese murals most likely relate to the increasing orthodoxy of Burmese Theravada Buddhism and strengthening crown control over the country. Because the teleological purpose of the murals remains virtually identical, however, it is argued that no “deep change” occurred in the murals between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries.

Volume 15
"From Gold Leaf to Buddhist Hagiographies: Contact with Regions to the East Seen in Late Burmese Murals"

Color Illustrations

In 1767 the Burmese army sacked the Thai city of Ayutthaya, and multitudes of people were captured and relocated to the Burmese central zone, including artists and theatrical performers. This event has been considered seminal in the emergence of Thai influences on Burmese art, including mural painting. Yet, Burmese deportations of people from the Thai, Lan Na, Sipsong Panna, and Shan States regions occurred on a number of occasions prior to the late eighteenth century attack. And, trade networks and religious exchanges between monasteries formed alternative routes of communication between Burma, Ayutthaya, Lan Na, Sipsong Panna, and the Shan States. Unsurprisingly, such variant interactions had an impact on artistic production in Burma prior to the destruction of Ayutthaya and the relocation of artists to the Ava region. The information utilized in Burmese murals ranges from central Thai elements of style and dress to the narratives and methods of religious practice found particularly in Tai regions. This paper explores these aspects in Burmese mural paintings from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in order to suggest the extent and nature of this impact, as well as the various means – social, religious, political – by which it came about. The murals ultimately present a view of Burma readily absorbing external material due in part to shared religious beliefs and fluid political relationships in the region.

Gillian Green

Volume 16.1
"Verging on Modernity: A Late Nineteenth-Century Burmese Painting on Cloth Depicting the Vessantara Jataka"

This large (428 cm x 82.5 cm) opaque watercolour painting on cotton cloth is stitched into a cloth border. Its composition depicts events in the Vessantara Jataka narrative. Traditional Burmese painting on manuscripts and murals were surveyed for similarities but this demonstrated that the representation of the main protagonists in the panel was entirely novel. Compared with published nineteenth century Burmese paintings on cloth a group of paintings dated to between approx. 1885 and 1910 described as 'family group portraits,' showed the greatest similarity. Formal studio photographic portraits popular with elite Burmese families of that period also show striking compositional similarities.

Contexts for the use of these cloth paintings on this theme were investigated. Initially the long painted cloth scrolls employed in the annual Vessantara Festival in northeast Thailand and Laos seemed to provide a model but in the absence of any record of a similar function in Burma, this theory was rejected. Observations and photographs published by travellers in Burma in late nineteenth century illuminate a number of community events in Burmese life for which paintings on cloth (or paper) did serve a purpose. 'Family group portraits' are discernible in the photographs at these events. It is proposed that a small group of traditional Burmese painters stimulated by the challenge of photographic images, turned their hand, for a short period to emulating these photographic images on cloth for these purposes. The reasons for the choice of the Vessantara Jataka in this case as a subject are discussed.

Arlo Griffiths and Amandine Lepoutre

Volume 17.2
"Campā Epigraphical Data on Polities and Peoples of Ancient Myanmar"

The article traces the nomenclature applied to ethnic groups and polities in the early pre modern period, and re examines the first appearance of a name for the ceremonial center known as Pagan. By providing updated readings of epigraphical data derived from Campā, the authors correct an influential misreading of an important inscription known since the 19th century, its misdating traceable to Etienne Aymonier and inserted into the authorized Burmese narrative by Gordon H. Luce. As Griffiths and Lepoutre show, the inscription originated in the 13th century. This correction of the evidence, based on Claude Jacques’ and their own re-evaluation, is expanded to examine the names applied to polities ancient Myanmar may have interacted with.

Arlo Griffiths

Volume 19.2
"Three More Sanskrit Inscriptions of Arakan"

The earliest phase of Arakan history, between about the fifth and the tenth centuries, has to be written on the basis of inscriptions and related material such as coins bearing Sanskrit texts, as well as sculpture and architecture. These show Arakan to have had strong ties to Southeastern Bengal (the Samataṭa and Harikela regions) and beyond this with the Buddhist communities of Northeastern India using Sanskrit as preferential medium of expression. A first batch of Arakan Sanskrit inscriptions was studied by E.H. Johnston and published posthumously in 1943. Since then, this field has moved forward thanks mainly to three articles by D. C. Sircar that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, no further epigraphic material of early Arakan has been published. The Sanskrit inscriptions of Arakan are often in deplorable state of preservation. But even fragmentary material can throw new light on the past, especially when studied in combination with epigraphical and numismatic discoveries made in Southeast Bengal over the past half-century. This article deals with three such fragmentary inscriptions, all previously unpublished. It presents the discovery that the ancient name of Arakan was Kāmaraṅga, discusses aspects of the history of Buddhism in Arakan during the first millennium, and discusses the problem of the chronology of early Arakan based on a detailed palaeographic analysis of the inscriptions published here.

Pamela Gutman, Win Maung (Tampawaddy), and Bob Hudson

Volume 22.1
Buddha’s life in Konbaung period bronzes from Yazagyo

This article presents a collection of small bronzes retrieved from a cluster of ruined Buddhist structures at Yazagyo, in the Kabaw Valley, a remote area of Northwestern Burma. The items can be clearly dated to the early 1880s, near the end of the Konbaung dynasty, thus providing type specimens for chronological comparison. The bronzes recapitulate crucial chapters in Prince Siddhartha's and then the Buddha Gotama's life, and they are examined by the article's three authors. The article details the relics’ enshrinement, their dating, historical context, and the stories of the Buddha that they animate. The article includes 22 photographs.

Lillian Handlin

Volume 21.1
Helping Against Lives' Uncertainties and the "Theravada" Label

A small shrine originally constructed in 1742 and  subsequently renovated in 1762,  in the village of Ma U,  was the meritorious deed of two members of one family, a wealthy widow, and later her son. Both  donors left relatively extensive statements explicating the significance of their merit making. The two inscriptions reveal generational differences, and how shifting historical circumstances informed their sense of self and the world around them.  The shrine testifying to their piety also includes in its programmatic décor a jataka of unknown provenance inscribed with the intriguing tag “ Theravada zat.” The article reads  the inscriptions in light of the wider world that was beginning to impinge upon royal subjects’ lives in the first years of the new Konbaung dynasty. The article also  examines the significance of recourse to a term that at the time had yet to become the label for a major religion.

Jessica Harriden

Volume 7
"Making a Name for Themselves: Karen Identity and the Politicization of Ethnicity in Burma" pp.84-144

The history of Karen nationalism has been interpreted in terms of inter-ethnic conflict and conceptualizations of ethnicity have influenced understanding of Karen political identity. While ‘Karen’ incorporated various linguistic, sociocultural, religious and political sub-groups, the Karen National Union (KNU) elite promoted a singular pan-Karen identity in order to minimize such diversity. As a result, factionalism emerged between different Karen groups, obstructing the KNU’s political vision and leaving many Karens dissatisfied with KNU attempts to represent their various interests. The fall of Manerplaw in 1995 was thus the result of intra-ethnic conflict as much as conflict between Karens and non-Karens.

Ryan Hartley

Volume 22.1
Japan’s Early Twentieth Century Entry into Burma and British Perceptions (and Misperceptions) of the Friend that Became a Foe, 1903-1943: A Case Study in the Global Blindspot

This article examines the beginning of the Japan-Burma relationship at the turn of the twentieth century. It questions why the British Empire welcomed Japan into Burma and allowed Japanese interests, economic and political, to build up their capacity to the point at which Japan would successfully confront Britain in Burma and Southeast Asia more broadly. In tackling this question, a two-part theoretical concept is utilized that couples an in-built weakness of the British Empire - referred to as the “global blindspot” - with a Japanese approach to foreign policy called here the yoraba taiju no kage [serve the powerful for your own good] strategy. Drawing on original qualitative and quantitative sources, the analysis is framed by how Japan was situated vis-à-vis Burma as first within, then later outside, of the British Empire. It proceeds in four stages - two within the empire and two outside of it - to demonstrate Japan’s step-by-step buildup of power in Burma was a process that Britain occasionally noticed, frequently ignored, and completely underestimated. It concludes that the British severely under-estimated Japan in Burma, and did not fully appreciate that Japan represented a different model of political-economy to the liberal free-trading state that Britain thought Japan was. Economic power, political power, and military power are all intertwined because power is power is power. The cost of this under-estimation cost Britain its position in Burma and ultimately its empire in Southeast Asia.

Patricia M. Herbert

Volume 9
"U Pe Maung Tin Bibliography" pp.130-176

From age 23 until his death at 84, U Pe Maung Tin was a prodigious writer and editor in both Burmese and English. He was the editor of the important Journal of the Burma Research Society. He wrote the first book on Burmese phonetics. With G.H. Luce, he edited Inscriptions of Burma and translated The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma. This invaluable annotated bibliography lists these and more than 200 other works by U Pe Maung Tin, a dramatic illustration of the legacy of this important Burmese scholar.

John Hillman 

Volume 15
"Capitalism and the Development of Tin Industry in Burma"

Although Burma played an important role in the Asian tin industry during the era of mercantile capital, it faded into insignificance during the nineteenth century, the era of finance capital, but recovered in the first part of the twentieth as its deposits were exploited by western industrial capital. The first phase rested on the strategic location of Tenasserim astride the trade routes across the isthmus of Kra and outside the control of Western mercantile trading companies. However, that same location made it a site of the Burmese- Siamese wars which brought this era to end in devastation. Although the East India Company promoted exploitation of the mineral resources of Tenasserim following the first Anglo-Burma war, it was unable to establish the institutional infrastructure that allowed Chinese capitalists to finance the tin industry elsewhere. As tin prices rose in the twentieth century, British, South African and Australian capital reinvigorated the industry not only in Tenasserim but also in the Shan States. One of these ventures proved to be so profitable that became the basis of the first tin conglomerate to operate on a global basis. The new role for Burma is explored during the depression of the 1930s, both in the negotiations with the International Tin Committee which regulated the global industry and in the continued expansion of production. Although western capital remained dominant it rested on an uneven financial base, but it provided the framework which allowed small scale primitive workings by both Chinese and Burmese to flourish.

Marie Lall and Hla Hla Win

Volume 17.1
"Myanmar: The 2010 Elections and Political Participation"

This co-authored article examines how the concept of citizenship is linked to the changing nature of the nation state in the Myanmar context. The authors examine a debate within Myanmar regarding the nature of citizenship, as the country moved from being governed by a military dictatorship to a parliamentary system still heavily dominated by the military. The authors ask how this new situation will affect the Myanmar concept of citizenship. Citizenship is defined as an individuals relationship with the state, and people’s understanding of the attendant rights and responsibilities, including political participation in elections. Data assembled in Myanmar derived from focus groups of young people of Bamar and ethnic minority origins as well as in-depth interviews with civil society leaders. The investigation employed a mixed methods approach, the distribution of a questionnaire with qualitative and quantitative sections distributed at a private higher education institution in Yangon, and in villages in the Delta. Another set of data was collected in Yangon in February 2011. The authors conclude that the concept of citizenship in Myanmar is thin, and is identified largely with passports and identity cards. The elections allowed some form of political participation that proved attractive particularly to young people who expressed a range of opinions regarding the possibilities offered by the political process, and the country’s future. The authors conclude that the elections began a debate about the rights and duties of participating in the political process, but without being linked to the concept of citizenship. This indicates how much more is needed to be done to increase the political literacy of Myanmar’s young people, moving forward.

Thibaut d'Hubert

Volume 19.2
"The Lord of the Elephant: Interpreting the Islamicate Epigraphic, Numismatic, and Literary Material from the Mrauk U Period of Arakan (ca. 1430-1784)"

With this article, I propose to revisit a corpus of multilingual inscriptions on coins, as well as one Persian stone inscription, whose dates range from the fifteenth to the first half of the seventeenth centuries of the Mrauk U period of Arakan (ca. 1430−1784). My primary aim is to revise the readings of some of those inscriptions and, with these revisions in mind, to reassess the significance of such texts in light of recent scholarship on the Mrauk U period. Rather than derive conclusions based on anecdotal evidence of the existence of an Islamicate idiom in Arakan during this period, I observe the internal features of those inscriptions and possible readings that could be made of the message they contain. I also extend my analysis beyond coin inscriptions and trace the various forms of the Arakanese royal title “Lord of the Elephant” and its use as a generic epithet associated with political power in later (ca. 17^th−18^th CE) Bengali Muslim literature.

Bob Hudson 

Volume 15
"A Royal Collection of Bronze Model Boats and Soldiers from Eighteenth-Century Burma"

Bob Hudson, Win Maung (Tampawaddy), and Pamela Gutman

Volume 22.1
Buddha’s life in Konbaung period bronzes from Yazagyo

This article presents a collection of small bronzes retrieved from a cluster of ruined Buddhist structures at Yazagyo, in the Kabaw Valley, a remote area of Northwestern Burma. The items can be clearly dated to the early 1880s, near the end of the Konbaung dynasty, thus providing type specimens for chronological comparison. The bronzes recapitulate crucial chapters in Prince Siddhartha's and then the Buddha Gotama's life, and they are examined by the article's three authors. The article details the relics’ enshrinement, their dating, historical context, and the stories of the Buddha that they animate. The article includes 22 photographs. 

Andrew Huxley

Volume 1
"The Importance of the Dhammathats" pp.1-17

Burma's dhammathats are pre-colonial compilations of legal and ethical material. They provide vivid insights into the details of everyday village life and into the process by which Burmese authors adapted Pali texts from India to their own purposes. They appear to be at least as old as any other surviving Burmese literature and contain valuable lessons for contemporary Burma. This article hopes to rescue them from their unjust neglect.

Volume 13 
"Three Nineteenth-Century Law Book Lists: Burmese Legal History from the Inside"

Through the investigation of three Burmese law book lists by Maungdaung Sayadaw, Tha Dwe, and Kyaw Htun this article seeks to construct a narrative history of legal traditions. By breaking each list into smaller units and comparing the results a common core of Burmese legal history emerges. The lists, shed light on who the typical authors of a dhammathat were while items that appear on some, but not all, of the lists help indicate controversies that were still matters of live debate during the nineteenth century.

Volume 19.2
“Two Law Book Lists from Arakan”

The legal history of Arakan has not yet been written. We have a few surviving dhammathat texts, but no reliable information as to when they were first written or last copied. Were the surviving texts written before the conquest of Arakan? Can we treat them as evidence for tradition as it was under the Arakanese kings? The two 1870s lists discussed herein bring us closer to answering these questions.

Chie Ikeya

Volume 10
"The 'Traditional' High Status of Women in Burma: A Historical Reconsideration" pp.51-81

This article traces the genealogy of a persistent cultural stereotype that has long defined and constituted academic and popular knowledge about Burma and, more broadly, Southeast Asia: the “traditional” high status of women. Although Southeast Asia scholars today generally concur that claims about the high status of women in the region are oversimplified and problematic, postcolonial scholars of Burma largely have perpetuated the discourse of gender equality, which has deterred any attempt to complicate conceptualizations of gender relations and hierarchies in historical Burma.

This study investigates the process whereby the “traditional” autonomy of Burmese women was constructed in opposition to the likewise “traditional” subordinate status of women in South Asia and in contestation of the superiority of European culture and society. It argues that this “tradition” is a product of the multivalent representational practice by colonizing and colonized women and men in unequal relations of power who coauthored essentially and powerfully gendered discourses of colonialism, modernization, and nationalism. This article concludes by suggesting possible ways to move beyond the practice of enshrining persistent and monolithic cultural stereotypes as essential components of Southeast Asian history and to engender scholarship of the region firmly located within, not isolated from, specific and complex historical contexts.

Volume 14
"The Scientific and Hygienic Housewife-and-Mother: Education, Consumption and the Discourse of Domesticity" pp.59-89

This article examines the development of a discourse on modern domesticity in colonial Burma that not only emphasized the role of a woman in safeguarding the health and welfare of her family and nation, but also associated housewifery and motherhood with “domestic science,” medicine, and hygienic behavior. The article shows that two cultural and didactic institutions, one formal and the other informal, served to disseminate this discourse on modern domesticity: “secular” government-funded co-educational schools and the popular press. It reveals that the emergence of the ideal of the scientific and hygienic housewife-and-mother was not simply an effect of a unilateral and hegemonic process of imperialism. Rather, it is best understood as a phenomenon informed simultaneously and conjointly by “Western” and cosmopolitan notions of scientific progress, bodily discipline and hygiene, bourgeois femininity, and health technologies, and the rise of consumer culture, aided by the spread of illustrated printed material, especially advertisements.

Ralph Isaacs

Volume 13
"Rockets and Ashes: Pongyibyan as Depicted in Nineteenth-and Twentieth Century European Sources" pp. 107-136

This article describes the Burmese festival of pongyibyan, the ceremonies at the cremation of a senior monk, mainly by collating written accounts and photographs by Europeans who witnesses pongyibyan in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certain rites of the pongyibyan ceremony offer interesting parallels to accounts of the Buddha’s own funeral found in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta. This article cites descriptions of the preparation of the monk’s corpse by evisceration, embalming, lacquering, wrapping in cloth and gilding, including descriptions of both the simple inner coffin and elaborate outer coffin, and the mortuary chapel (neibankyaung) where the body lay in state awaiting crema.

Takahiro Iwaki

Volume 19.1
The Village System and Burmese Society: Problems Involved in the Enforcement Process of the Upper Burma Village Regulation of 1887

Many historians who have written about the administrative changes implemented in Upper Burma at the end of the nineteenth century have focused on the village system and the Upper Burma Village Regulation of 1887.  They emphasize the transformation of the precolonial local administration, particularly the abolition of the position of myothugyi as an outcome of the introduction of the village system.  However, their descriptions pay little attention to local society, simply regarding it as a passive subject affected by colonialism.  Thus, in order to elucidate the relation between the colonial administrative policy and local society, this article  re examines the village system and illustrates how the system developed at the district level, by focusing on the early arguments. After investigating the arguments of the central government and district officials on the village system, the article highlights the significance of additional regulatory rules introduced in 1890, and the case of the Shwebo District to reinforce the article’s arguments.

Khen Suan Khai

Volume 22.2
Appraisal of Burma/Myanmar’s Roundabout Roadmaps

The peace process Burma/Myanmar has got a momentum since 2011, and both government and non-State actors including Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs), political parties, and civil society groups put endeavor to make the process move on. This article is a comparative study of the seven-step Roadmap of National League for Democracy (NLD) and the seven-step Roadmap of previous military junta State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). While the military junta tactfully reached six out of its seven-step Roadmap and strictly holds on to the 2008 Constitution. It guaranteed the Tatmadaw (Army) a fixed position both in politics and defense. In contrast, the civilian government and ethnic groups are struggling to sign a union agreement— the 21st century Panglong Conference Agreement. This article argues that amending the constitution in accordance with the union agreement and the subsequent approval of the amended constitution may cause tension and pressure to be dealt with by the government, the Tatmadaw and ethnic groups. If the stakeholders are capable to get the union agreement to amend the constitution, there will be a wider chance to build a democratic federal union as planned in the NLD’s seven-step road map.

K. Khine Kyaw

Volume 19.1
The Story of Nan Saw Kyi

The author, granddaughter of Daw Nan Saw Kyi, subject of this issue’s Scholarly Curiosity, narrates the story of a courageous, independent minded and resourceful woman who began her social and political activism early on. In 1938, together with some friends, she founded the Red Cross Association in her native town. Daw Nan Saw Kyi’s  skills, dedication, perseverance as well as endurance were severely tested during the horrific fighting that raged around Mogaung in 1944 and 1945, when together with others she extended whatever aid was available to masses of streaming refugees and wounded fighters and soldiers, casualties of the slaughter that pitted British, Japanese and Burmese armies against each other. Daw Nan Saw Kyi’s involvement was only the preliminary stage of a life time of activism on behalf of  various communal  needs, informed by her deeply held Buddhist beliefs.

Kyaw Minn Htin 

Volume 19.2
“King Maṅ: Co Mwan’s exile in Bengal – Legend, History and Context” with Jacques Leider

Manḥ Co Mvan is the name of an Arakanese king known as the founder, in 1430, of the city of Mrauk U (Mrok Uḥ). Mrauk U was the capital of Arakan until 1785, when the kingdom was conquered by the Burmese. It became the seat of a Burmese governor, but lost its status after 1825 following the occupation of Arakan by troops of the East India Company. Accounts about and stories related to this important king, his biography and his rule vary in the sources. Still, some stories have been more successful than others. Since the colonial period they have been considered as historical or at least partly historical facts. This article reviews one of these stories in particular, namely the king’s alleged stay in exile for an extended period of time. As far as our knowledge about the troubled political context of the early fifteenth century goes, the king might indeed have left his country for some time looking for support to regain his throne. Nonetheless, there are no sources to prove this point. We deconstruct the master narrative that has been built on the exile story by investigating the historical context and the literary devices used to embed the story in a traditional framework, which show that beyond the issue of historical facticity, there is a compelling interest to study the way the story has been both rationalized and mythologized to satisfy different audiences.

Sun Laichen

Volume 2
“Chinese Historical Sources on Burma: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Works" pp.1-116

Sun Laichen's unique and valuable 100-plus page bibliography includes:

Bibliography
An annotated list of 135 Chinese primary sources on Burma from the pre-Tang through the Qing periods, complete with author-title index.

Introduction
An introductory discussion of the availability and recent uses of these sources.

List
A list of introductions and collections of Chinese historical sources on Southeast Asia.

Other
A list of Burmese, Chinese, English, French, and Japanese historical works on Burma that utilize the Chinese primary sources. Chinese names and book titles are shown in Chinese characters and in roman transcription.

Christian Lammerts

Volume 14
"Notes on Burmese Manuscripts: Text and Image" pp.229-253

While recent cataloguing work in Myanmar, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Thailand has served to greatly enhance our knowledge of Burmese, Sanskrit and Pali texts transmitted in Burmese manuscripts, we still lack adequate descriptive and critical studies of manuscript-related practices and mentalities in pre-modern Burma. The present note is concerned with the development of manuscript ornamentation. It examines the varieties of Burmese manuscript textual supports and their histories, the scope of genres that received decoration, and the technologies associated with ornamentation.

Volume19.2
“Buddhist Dhammasattha Literature Transmitted in Arakan and Chittagong”

This article comprises a study of a manuscript of an Arakanese-language Buddhist legal text (dhammasattha) currently held under shelfmark Or Add 12254 at the British Library, where it is part of an important, though hitherto unstudied, collection of Arakanese manuscripts assembled in Chittagong by John Murray (1745–1822 C.E.). It discusses the history, contents, scribes, and textual and material features of the manuscripts in the Murray Collection, demonstrating that paleographic considerations and Bengali script and Persian paratexts found therein reflect the multilingual and multireligious context in which these manuscripts circulated, as well as a degree of influence from Chittagonian scribal culture. It then compares the text of Or Add 12254 with that of a later Arakanese dhammasattha manuscript that has likely provenance from Sittwe, and also with the contents of 18^th and 19^th century manuscripts of the central Burmese Dhammavilāsa dhammasat. It argues that despite a range of suggestive parallels between these Arakanese and central Burmese legal texts, the two manuscripts from Arakan should be regarded as witnesses to a distinctive Arakanese tradition of written law.

Emma Larkin

Volume 8
"The Self-conscious Censor: Censorship in Burma under the British 1900–1939" pp.64-101

It is often assumed that censorship was not used to any great degree by British authorities in Burma. Yet, by looking at the way the British colonial government reacted to a variety of media including traditional Burmese drama, western blockbuster movies, and Burmese political pamphlets agitating against colonial rule, it is possible to see that censorship was very much a part of the British administration. British authorities censored pamphlets, books, dramas, and movies not only to contain political thought contrary to colonialism, but also to control the image of British officials as seen in the eyes of the Burmese.

Jacques P. Leider

Volume 9
"Text, Lineage, and Tradition in Burma: The Struggle for Norms and Religious Legitimacy Under King Bodawphaya (1782–1819)" pp.82-129

Jacques P. Leider is a French historian following in the footsteps of U Pe Maung Tin, who pioneered the academic study of Burmese history through the editing, translating, and interpreting of primary textual sources. Leider examines a little-studied period of Burmese history, the reign of King Bodawphaya, whose radical attempts at religious reform laid the groundwork for the later.

Volume 19.2
“King Man: Co Mwan’s exile in Bengal – Legend, History and Context” with Kyaw Minn Htin

Manḥ Co Mvan is the name of an Arakanese king known as the founder, in 1430, of the city of Mrauk U (Mrok Uḥ). Mrauk U was the capital of Arakan until 1785, when the kingdom was conquered by the Burmese. It became the seat of a Burmese governor, but lost its status after 1825 following the occupation of Arakan by troops of the East India Company. Accounts about and stories related to this important king, his biography and his rule vary in the sources. Still, some stories have been more successful than others. Since the colonial period they have been considered as historical or at least partly historical facts. This article reviews one of these stories in particular, namely the king’s alleged stay in exile for an extended period of time. As far as our knowledge about the troubled political context of the early fifteenth century goes, the king might indeed have left his country for some time looking for support to regain his throne. Nonetheless, there are no sources to prove this point. We deconstruct the master narrative that has been built on the exile story by investigating the historical context and the literary devices used to embed the story in a traditional framework, which show that beyond the issue of historical facticity, there is a compelling interest to study the way the story has been both rationalized and mythologized to satisfy different audiences. 

Yi Li

Volume 20.1
Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Marketplace, and the Chinese Community in Moulmein

This article examines the Chinese community in Moulmein, a cosmopolitan center of a newly established British colony after the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26), in the nineteenth century, and investigates interchanges and influences facilitated by the first port city in colonial Burma. As Chinese merchants and workers established commercial, social and religious networks during the formative years of British Burma, they interacted with their multi-ethnic neighbors within and beyond colonial market places. However, if the early experience of these Chinese migrants suggests a porous ethnic boundary, the impression of China and the Chinese dominating the European public sphere in Moulmein indicates a gap between the real-life Moulmein Chinese, which was encountered every day, and the imaginary China as a potential market to an eastern-looking British Empire, especially during the Opium War (1839–42). Taking the Moulmein Chinese as a case study, this paper investigates the limitation of J.S. Furnivall’s “marketplace” where people “mix but do not combine.” Instead of a reflection of the colonial markets operating rigidly along ethnic lines, this paper argues, Furnivall’s mid-twentieth-century observation is a direct result of colonial discourse and policies emphasizing ethnic segregation and stereotypes, when the discrepancies between real-life and imaginary China and the Chinese were further enhanced and eventually dominated the later years of British rule in Burma.

Hugh C. MacDougall

Volume 22.1
The Myowun's Nap: An Incident in 1852 and the Fall of the Burmese Empire

This article examines a series of events from January 6, 1852, and how they could be tied to a British conspiracy to provoke war with Burma. When a delegation from Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General of the East India Company in Calcutta arrived at the courtyard of the Myowun (Royal Governor of Rangoon), staff informed the delegation that the Myowun was asleep and not to be disturbed. After waiting for fifteen minutes, the delegation left, and the Following an overview of the background to this event, this article explores questions surrounding the supposed nap and its role in history, in particular: 1, whether the Myowun was really asleep; 2, if that was the case, why did his staff not awaken him, and finally 3, had the Myowun received the British delegation, would the future of Anglo-Burmese relations have been different?

Heather MacLachlan

Volume 20.1
The Transnational Flow of Music from Burma to the United States

Some of the most prominent and commercially successful Burmese musicians have performed concert tours of the United States during the past decade. This article provides an empirical description of the transnational network which makes these concert tours possible, and then provides an explanation for this phenomenon. Burmese migrants—both the musicians and the emigrants who sponsor concerts—are identified here as transnational actors. This study, however, challenges much of the literature on transnational cultural flows, arguing that the appropriate focus for analysis in this case is not change and hybridity provoked by conditions in the host country (America), but rather the continuity of shared expectations and behaviors developed in the home country (Burma). In fact, it is the habitus of the Yangon-based music industry which makes possible the organization and funding of concert tours in the United States. This habitus, or shared way of thinking and behaving, includes: a flexible understanding of what constitutes a “band,” symbolic ties between musicians and fans which govern financial expectations, an informally structured industry which is open to the intervention of amateurs, and the habitual self-reliance of people who grew up under a government which provided few supports.

Michael Martin

Volume 6
"A Glimpse into the Traditional Martial Arts in Burma" pp.141-152

The traditional martial arts are an aspect of Burmese culture that has been virtually ignored by Burma scholars. Yet these martial arts have a rich heritage dating back to the early days of Burma. Historic events, religion, political necessities, and, more have shaped them recently into economic realities. The traditional martial art came close to extinction during the British colonial period, but was revived during the Japanese occupation. In past times, they were utilized for warfare and self-defense. Today the self-defense element remains, while the combat element has been transformed into sports and artistic cultural expression. The present economic conditions and the spread of foreign martial arts pose a current threat to the survival of the Burmese traditional martial arts and require the attention of Burma scholars to document this important component of the historic cultural identity of Burma.

Megan Clymer and Min Ko Naing

Volume 8
"Conqueror of Kings: Burma’s Student Leader" pp.33-63

During the democracy uprising in 1988, Paw Oo Htun, whose nom de guerre, Min Ko Naing, means Conqueror of Kings, emerged as one of the movement’s most prominent student leaders. Together with other student leaders, he revived the umbrella students’ organization the All Burma Federation of Student Unions. Today, while serving out a twenty year prison sentence, Min Ko Naing remains a symbol of the Burmese student movement. In this essay, interviews with close friends and student colleagues help document his story.

Rosalie Metro and Nicolas Salem-Gervais

Volume 16.2
"A Textbook Case of Nation-Building: The Evolution of History Curricula in Myanmar"

This article aims to analyze the history curriculum used in primary and secondary schools under the SLORC/SPDC from the perspective of the State's nation-building endeavors. To do so, we provide some background on history textbooks during colonial, parliamentary, and socialist eras, and then describe three shifts in discourse on national identity in post-socialist Myanmar: the replacement of Aung San by the Great Kings as main national references, the projection of "Myanmar" identity back in history, and the designation of Thais, along with British colonialists, as historical enemies of the nation. We argue that those shifts constituted a step away from a national identity based on some extent of inter-ethnic compromise, toward one based on an ancient and glorious indigenous essence. We then examine the textbooks of two ethno-nationalist groups, the KNU and the SSA-S to illustrate the discursive similarities across political boundaries.

While revisions of national history are common around the world and might even be a sine qua non for the emergence of a nation, we suggest that the SLORC/SPDC's narrow conception of national identity, coupled with the underfunding of the welfare state and especially education, has often been counter-productive to state aims, undermining the success of schooling as a tool of nation-building and lending legitimacy to radical ethno-nationalist conceptions of history and identity.

Elizabeth H. Moore and Win Maung (Tampawaddy)

Volume 20.1
The Social Dynamics of Pagoda Repair in Upper Myanmar

Pagoda repair in Myanmar is not just a building upgrade but a significant mechanism connecting religious and lay communities. During the course of a renovation, the wider public is engaged, from urban elite to artisans, builders, shopkeepers and farmers in replenishing the dedicated space of the pagoda compound and the teachings it embod-ies. The case studies from Sagaing, Mandalay, Kyaukse and Bagan discussed here highlight how coordination of pagoda repair is often by word of mouth, familiar networks and more recently, social media. Informality is also pertinent in relation to archaeologi-cal calls for greater documentation of pagoda repair. Imposing daily recording could easily change malleable social contacts into disinterested form-fillers, rather than engaging local communities in the shared caretaking of their landscape. While information on archaeological and heritage management “best practice” is abundant, the processes of pagoda repair remains little known apart from the participants of each undertaking. Thus what a decade ago was a locally understood difference between repair and conservation, today is an urgent issue threatening both the vitality of the living Buddhist practice and its intangible heritage. Without a shared mechanism to oversee restorations of aged pagodas, the hard evidence from which to interpret the ancient cultural landscape will be irrevocably lost and its intangible sustenance gone. The issue needs to be openly debated and acted upon to ensure the compatible integration of international conservation and heritage practice with the existing social and religious dynamics of pagoda repair.

Atsuko Naono

Volume 14

"Inoculators, The Indigenous Obstacle to Vaccination in Colonial Burma" pp.91-114

Colonial records on smallpox vaccination point to inoculations and inoculators as among the most serious obstacles to the progress of vaccination. However, despite their apparent importance, those identified as inoculators by the colonial medical officers remained an unclear, evasive and almost phantom-like group. This article examines how British colonial medical men wrote about a group who probably never existed in Burma outside of the colonial imagination. By locating the vaccinator’s enemy in a social practice and not in a particular group of practitioners, I seek to uncover the secret of inoculation’s resilience in the face of decades of aggressive vaccination campaigns. The inoculator was the bogeyman of colonial vaccination reports, requiring the historian to ask a different set of questions about indigenous resistance to colonial medicine and to look at the colonial records in a different way.

Kei Nemoto

Volume 5

"The Concepts of Dobama ("Our Burma") and Thudo-bama ("Their Burma") in Burmese Nationalism, 1930-1948" pp.1-16

Pum Khan Pau

Volume 21.2
Disarmament and Resistance in Colonial Burma: A Case Study of the Chin Hills

The paper is an in-depth analysis of the disarmament policy carried out by the British in the Chin Hills in the late nineteenth century. Situated within the larger context of British colonial policy across the world, disarmament, from colonial perspective, was not only important but a desirable and feasible goal of the so-called ‘pacification’ process. However, the harsh measures often adopted by colonial rulers to achieve its goal remain highly questionable and in most cases, they backfired. The paper argues that the British disarmament policy in the Chin Hills backfired and was strongly resisted by the Chin people not simply because they wanted to save their guns, but it they saw it as a struggle against colonial expansion into the hill tract. It further argues that though the British had successfully confiscated guns from the Chins and regulated possession of guns through licensing, secret re-armament among the Chins clearly reveals that they had not reconciled to colonial administration.

Phoelhaing

Volume 19.1
Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing’s Grand Congratulatory Laycho for the Saturday Nagani Journal Inaugural Issue

Thakin Kodaw Hmaing is arguably the most important Myanmar writer  of the last century, known to young and old, both for his politics and his contributions to Burmese literature. He was the first of only two Burmese ( the second one being U Thant) to be honored, however reluctantly, by U Ne Win’s government,  with a grant of land plot for a private burial shrine near the Shwedagon pagoda. This literary figure’s immense national prestige encourages the Journal of Burma Studies to introduce one of his most famous poems to its readers, a novel development in the after life of the hugely influential Thakin who is utterly unknown beyond his country’s borders.   

Oliver B. Pollak

Volume 3
“Robert Talbot Kelly and 'Picturesque' Burma" pp.35-45

Robert Talbot Kelly, through his art and his 1905 publication, Burma Painted and Described, provides a visual and textual account of colonial Burma that was subsequently marketed in England and America. Travelogues served as a form of voyeuristic education about the exotic for the stay-at-home adventurer. Postcolonial scholarship, to some degree assisted by Edward Said's Orientalism, now permits a reanalysis of both the art and the written texts of travel literature for what they say about cultural attitudes during the age of high imperialism, and in particular about Kelly's use of the word picturesque as a literary and artistic descriptor.

Samerchai Poolsuwan

Volume 19.1
Buddhist Murals Illustrating Unusual Features in Temple 36 at Sale and Their Cultural Implications  

This article describes Buddhist murals illustrating some unusual features and surviving in the small brick temple number 36 at Sale, one of the major satellite towns during the Pagan period.  The town is located on the east bank of the Irrawady River thirty miles downstream from Old Pagan.  The temple and its principal Buddha image can be stylistically dated to the thirteenth century.  A dated inscription, a later intrusion on the murals, provides solid proof that the murals predate AD 1582.  Likely postdating the temple, the murals show mixed features, some indigenous but others perhaps introduced from Sri Lank and north\central Thailand  into the area during the mid-fourteenth century,  the proposed date of  the murals.  These features had never been combined in such a fashion before  and the resulting combination perhaps lasted only shortly in the mural tradition of central Burma.  This is evidenced when the content of Sale 36  is compared with Pagan-era murals and others surviving from the fifteenth century.  The intrusive status, in the mural tradition of central Burma, of the Sale 36 materials is explained in a context of trans-regional movements of the Mahavihara monastic  lineage, originated in Sri Lanka, widely active in lower Burma and parts of Thailand during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Sale 36 murals might reflect the presence of this Sinhalese order in central Burma as well during the mid fourteenth century. These rare murals, a later addition in an already existing small temple, might correlate with a temporary role played by the Sinhalese order in central Burma during a limited period.  It probably ultimately yielded to a more popular and more powerful Aran sect of the area. 

Susanne Prager

Volume 8 
"The Coming of the “Future King: Burmese minlaung Expectations Before and During the Second World War" pp.1-32

Throughout the history of Burma we come across rebellions often led by so-called “future kings,” minlaungs. In western historiography, minlaung-movements are usually attributed to the pre-colonial past, whereas rebellions and movements occurring during the British colonial period are conceived of as proto-nationalist in character and thus an indication of the westernizing process. In this article, the notion of minlaung and concomitant ideas about rebellion and the magical-spiritual forces involved are explained against the backdrop of Burmese-Buddhist culture. It is further shown how these ideas persisted and gained momentum before and during World War II and how they affected the western educated nationalists, especially Aung San whose political actions fit into the cultural pattern of the career of a minlaung. 

Catherine Raymond

Volume 14
"The Seven Weeks: A 19th Century Burmese Palm-Leaf Manuscript" pp.255-267

This paper describes in detail aspects of a rarely viewed palm-leaf manuscript illustrating classical Burmese cosmology. This manuscript, BC.9641A-025-031, dating from Burmese Era 1256 (CE1894), is a part of the Burma Art Collection at Northern Illinois University. This study analyzes only eight leaves, of which the focal image is reproduced as the cover illustration of the latest Journal of Burma Studies (14). The visual analysis based in part on our translation of the texts incorporated within the various illustrations provides a key to understanding the iconography of the Seven Sites, or the Seven Weeks Preceding the Buddha’s Enlightenment; as combined with the symbolic geography of the Sixteen Sacred Lands. Although the present work concentrates only on the events around the Enlightenment, the complete manuscript comprises a 110 page folio (some 55 folded leafs), including depictions of Mount Sumeru and the Three Realms, the Lake Anotatta and the Four Rivers, and the cross section of the Four Islands and the Buddhapada. 

Charlotte Reith

Volume 1
"Comparison of Three Pottery Villages: Shan State Burma" pp.45-82

During my visit from 1991-1994 to three pottery-producing villages in Shan State, I was struck by the differences in technology and product. Contrary to my assumption that this small area would evidence a shared technology and similar products, I found three distinctly differing pottery traditions. In some places in the world, membership in the same ethnic group seems to be an important factor in determining the techniques 

T.F. Rhoden

Volume 20.1
Yangon’s New Stock Exchange in Comparative Analysis

In the political sphere, the citizens of Myanmar have witnessed and taken part in an expanding and deepening process of democratization and political liberalization in the past few years. In the economic sphere, changes are also underway that indicate a growth of economic liberalism. One part of that process is a slowly increasing financialization as indicated by the new Yangon Stock Exchange (YSX) set to begin trading operations in late 2015. This paper will analyze what this new stock exchange means for the citizens of Myanmar by placing it within a regional comparative analysis of stock markets across Southeast Asia, including the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HoSE), the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX), the Lao Securities Exchange (LSX), and the Cambodia Securities Exchange (CSX). The main argument is that despite calculable risks in terms of business transparency and national politics, the potentialities for a successful YSX are in place. The main socioeconomic conditions that warrant investment, both from the domestic as well as international perspective are 1) the depth and diversity of Myanmar’s adult population size, 2) Myanmar’s rallying industrial sector, 3) Burmese businesses’ current lack of bank financing, and 4) Burmese citizens’ little-to-no holdings in financial assets as compared to other non-financial wealth holdings. The YSX will not be an overnight success for either domestic Burmese investors or for domestic Burmese enterprises seeking new avenues to finance growth and project investment. However, the systemic socioeconomic conditions are in place for the Yangon Stock Exchange to parallel more closely the experience of the Vietnamese HoSE and HNX than that of the other Indochinese exchanges of LSX and CSX.

Elizabeth L. Rhoads and Courtney T. Wittekind

Volume 22.2
Rethinking Land and Property in a “Transitioning” Myanmar: Representations of Isolation, Neglect, and Natural Decline

In this article, we assess ideas of “progress” in the evolution of Burma/Myanmar studies, asking whether shifting conditions might offer openings to reconsider narratives about the country. We question two recurring tropes consistent across the work of journalists, policy analysts and scholars: an alleged history of undifferentiated “isolation,” and the ensuing state of Burma/Myanmar following a seemingly “natural” decline. Such language reflects assumptions that otherwise go unspoken in accounts of Myanmar’s current transition. 
We consider descriptions of Yangon’s colonial architecture, asking what depictions of the city as having languished following the colonial era might tell us about assumptions in Burma/Myanmar studies. Such depictions are emblematic of a common trope in the literature, whereby historical narratives of isolation replace more dynamic accounts of interaction, particularly in regard to land and property. Drawing on work in Yangon and Shan State, we question common descriptive impulses related to the difficulty of accounting for history— including dependency on a conventional timeline broken into unquestioned periods, and recurring references to “isolation,” “nationalization” or “customary tenure” as glosses for the relations present in such periods. We ask how those analyzing Myanmar might progress beyond such impulses, cognizant that increased access to the country offers opportunities to trouble simplistic narratives, highlighting their political and intellectual perils.

Francois Robinne

Volume 19.1
Memorial Art as an Anthropological Object (Chin State of Burma)
Color photographs

The Indo-Chinese frontiers, including both the mainland and insular parts of Southeast Asia, were once described by Heine-Geldern and Furer-Haimendorf as “ megalithic culture.” This article will explore through an anthropological lens, the tradition of engraved steles in Burma’s Chin State. Given the stones’ relatively recent erection ( ranging from the mid- nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century) and the interconnected role themes such as ancestrality, mobility and territory played during their creation,   the analysis will focus on the idea  of those steles as belonging within the wider concept of a memorial space.  The Chin standing stones highlight due to the plurality of their appearances and their various roles, the exceptional diversity – linguistic, cultural, religious and political – that characterizes the social landscape of Chin State.  Whether or not the patterns of those engraved scenes are accompanied or not by written texts, they make for remarkable archives for historians as they are often the only tangible sources, or in situ archival documents, for society where an oral tradition still prevails.  Art historians will try to assess the style and overall composition of the stones before attempting to decipher their artists.  Moreover, anthropologists will more likely want to examine the relationship between the stones and the territory – in the context of clan segmentation and internationalizing migration dynamics.

The extreme social and linguistic diversity of Chin State, emphasized throughout the literature, has begun to overlap with an increasingly extended mobility. As seen within village and clan segmentations, urban migrations, Christian networks, economic expatriation; even where mobility becomes structural to chin subgroups, memorial art appears to be a major vector of social ties in ways that are both perennial and inconstant.  Despite the colonial and dictatorial violence that plunged Burma into civil war, social – and, therefore, memorial – change is expressed less in terms of rupture than of metamorphosis.  At the same time as new leaders emerge and clan membership disappears behind denominational affiliations, ancestry has tended to turn more and more into a memory exercise taken over by Christianity.

Mandy Sadan

Volume 14
"Syphilis and the Kachin Regeneration Campaign, 1937–38" pp.115-149

This article discusses the introduction of a policy known as the Kachin Regeneration Campaign in the Kachin Hills from 1937 to 1938. Initiated by a belief that the Kachin people were on the verge of dying out because of an epidemic of syphilis, the campaign reveals much about the realities of Kachin dissociation from the late colonial regime, contrasting sharply with the conventional historical narrative of Kachin compliance with imperial control. A significant part of the Regeneration Campaign’s agenda was a less publicly acknowledged awareness that former Kachin soldiers were becoming a potentially volatile interest group and that there was increasing discontent across the Kachin Hills with regard to the administration, the military and the missions. The article uses the concept of a sick role to describe the approach of the Regeneration Campaign to Kachin society and discusses how the rhetoric of the campaign became embedded in the sermons of the local Christian missions, justifying changes to women’s roles and more recently impacting upon early responses to the spread of HIV/AIDS in the region.

Alan Saw U

Volume 9
"Professor U Pe Maung Tin: A Gentle Genius, a Meek Master" pp.35-41

U Pe Maung Tin’s accomplishments as a Burmese scholar are well-documented. Less so are his teachings and writings about Christianity and the Christian ministry in Burma. Alan Saw U, executive secretary and editor of the Myanmar Christian Literary Society, reflects on U Pe Maung Tin’s life as a leading figure in the Anglican Church in Burma.

Juliane Schober

Volume 6
"Venerating the Buddha's Remains in Burma: From Solitary Practice to the Cultural Hegemony of Communities" pp.111-139

The veneration of Buddha relics and images is a neglected, yet central organizing principle of Theravada culture and religious practice. My essay is informed by a historised understanding of Eliade's hierophany, a manifestation of a universal Buddhist sacred reality that defines and identifies cultural orders at the centers of local, historical contexts. I further rely on Bells' work on ritual and Gramsci's writings on hegemony to describe Burmese veneration of the Buddha's remains in diverse social and religious contexts. These range from the solitary practice, meditation and personal service in the Ananda mode to the Royal mode that defines social hierarchy in public rituals and expresses socio-religious aspirations of individuals and communities through culturally salient metaphors.

Donald M. Seekins

Volume 4
"The North Win and the Sun: Japan's Response to the Political Crisis in Burma, 1988–1998" pp.1-33

Japan's response to the political crisis in Burma after the establishment of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in September 1988 reflected the interests of powerful constituencies within the Japanese political system, especially business interests, to which were added other constituencies such as domestic supporters of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's struggle for democracy and those who wished to pursue 'Sun Diplomacy,' using positive incentives to encourage democratization and economic reform. Policymakers in Tokyo, however, approached the Burma crisis seeking to take minimal risks–a "maximin strategy"–which limited their effect.

Soe Thuzar Myint

Volume 22.1
Siam-Myanmar relations through the perspective of the Royal Orders of Burma

Researchers of Myanmar history have found the Royal Orders of Myanmar kings to be a very important Myanmar literary genre. As wars with Siam raged on over centuries, Myanmar has a shared history with Siam from Innwa to Konbaung period. The Royal Orders contain invaluable historical facts which were not mentioned in the Siamese or Myanmar chronicles.  Therefore, students of both countries can benefit from the research work on the Royal Orders of Myanmar kings. Despite the existence of some works by Myanmar scholars on Royal Orders, it can be observed that these works seldom deal with Siam-Myanmar relations. Therefore, to contribute to this scholarship, this paper will focus on a detailed study of Royal Orders to provide contemporary accounts of Siam-Myanmar relations from mid-16th to 19th century.

Lindsay C. Stubbs

Volume 21.2
Railways in Shan State

There are two major railway lines in Shan State, the largest of Burma’s administrative regions. The first starts at Mandalay, crossing into Shan State after Pyin Oo Lwin and going to the railhead at Lashio. A second starts at Thazi, and passes through Kalaw to go to Shwe Nyaung near Inle Lake before continuing north to the railhead at Yaksauk. Shwe Nyaung was once connected to Taunggyi by a rail line, now long since abandoned. There is another line, isolated from the rest of the network, which runs from Taunggyi to Kakku, then on to Namsang and Mong Nai. The line is only usable as far as Htiyi. A line from Mong Nai to Kengtung, known as the Shan State Railway, was announced with much fanfare in 2009 but construction was abandoned soon after it started. This paper will discuss the need for the immediate rebuilding of the line from Shwe Nyaung to Taunggyi, and in the longer term a line linking Taunggyi to Kengtung. The new National League for Democracy government could create much political goodwill for itself by rebuilding the line from Shwe Nyaung to Taunggyi (about 21 miles); by improving the road from Taunggyi to Kengtung (a distance of 281 miles); by re-opening the line from Taunggyi to Mong Nai; and in the longer term building a railway of quality from Taunggyi to Kengtung. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in Shan State in 2013, 2016 and 2017.

Peter Swift

Volume 21.1
The Burma Democratic Front: How the Eighty-Eight Generation Chin were Mobilized into the Chin National Front

On September 18, 1988 a military takeover ended the nation-wide pro-democracy uprising in Myanmar. A common narrative is that after the coup, on the one hand students and others involved in the uprising fled to border areas to escape arrest, and that on the other hand they hoped to continue their struggle through armed means and were drawn by reports of assistance to armed resistance coming from other countries. In presenting the history of the little-known Burma Democratic Front, which was based in Champhai in northeast India and provided recruits early on for the Chin National Front, I demonstrate that this narrative is inadequate in three main ways. First, while some of those who joined the Chin armed resistance fled to escape arrest, the security situation varied between different places and fear of arrest was not the main determinant for many of them in the decision to leave Myanmar. Leaving Myanmar to India was also sometimes not the only option for those fearing arrest. Second, many of those who ended up in the Chin armed resistance went to India to find work or for other reasons unrelated to armed struggle. Third, relationships with others (based on kinship or participation together in university student groups or high-risk activism), and/or active recruitment by others (sometimes previously known to the individual being recruited, sometimes not), were often extremely important for the decision to go to India or join the armed resistance.

Saw Tun

Volume 1
"The Development of Political Themes in Minthuwun's Poetry" pp.107-124

Min-thuwun is perhaps the greatest of living Burmese poets. Over the past 70 years he has published more than 100 poems covering a broad range of topics, including young love, the hardships of village and student life, and Burmese nationalism. Following a brief biographical sketch of the poet, this article presents a series of readings of selected poems that show Min-thuwun to be a passionate promoter of Burmese culture and an astute and subtle social commentator whose political messages are conveyed in figurative verse notable for its depictions of the victims of injustice. By framing his discussion within the periodization of 20th-century Burmese literature put forth by the poet-critic Mya Zin, the author demonstrates how Min-thuwun's career can be taken to exemplify the development of modern Burmese literature as a whole.

Volume 7
"A Preliminary Study of Burmese Prophetic Sayings" pp.70-83

The Burmese people are known to be superstitious in many ways. One is a belief in prophetic saying known as tabaun. This paper explains how in the past, people placed importance on these prophetic sayings. It describes how learned Buddhist monks have reminded people not to be influenced by them. Rather, they should be concerned with their kamma.

Matthew J. Walton

Volume 19.1
The Disciplining Discourse of Unity in Burmese Politics   

A concern with unity has been a consistent theme in modern Burmese politics. This article examines a particularly problematic conception of unity that I argue draws strength from its resonance with Buddhist moral notions of the self and overcoming self-centeredness. As a moral concept, this narrative of unity is idealized in devotion to a common purpose and loyalty to a group or community; it requires subsuming one’s own interests for the benefit of the whole, something that encapsulates the Buddhist practice of rejecting atta (ego). Disunity, then, is the result of a group of individuals committed only to their own benefit; it is evidence of moral failure. This discourse of unity has been an effectively anti-democratic disciplining tool (deployed by both governments and opposition groups) for suppressing internal dissent. Despite General Aung San's oft-quoted slogan of “unity in diversity,” political movements in Myanmar have been more commonly characterized by hegemonic attempts at imposing a top-down unity that labels deviation from or criticism of dominant positions as disloyalty. This article examines the perpetuation of a rigid, unitary understanding of unity and argues that developing a more flexible and accommodating notion of unity will be a necessary step in the process of national reconciliation.

Julian Wheatley, with San San Hnin Tun

Volume 4
"Languages in Contact: The Case of English and Burmese" pp.61-99

This article deals with the nature and the effects of the long period of linguistic contact between Burmese and English. Part 1 deals with general issues of contact and borrowing; part 2 provides examples of English loanwords in Burmese, and considers the processes of phonological and semantic accommodation that they reflect.

Georg Winterberger

Volume 21.2
Myanmar. Through the lens of people.

Crucial questions for every researcher using qualitative methods are about access to the field and about asking the right questions in the field. I was lucky to be able to use the Photo-Interviewing method, which allowed me to get insight into my informants’ points of view. In addition, this method enabled me to ask the right questions – or at least the ones that were of great importance to my informants. With this photo-essay, I want to illustrate from a methodological point of view how I got to this method and how it works. I introduce my own experiences with the Photo-Interviewing method first, followed by short presentation of similar methods in use. In the third part, I want to highlight the value of this method by discussing ten photos, which emerged while applying the method.

Win Maung (Tampawaddy) with Elizabeth H. Moore

Volume 20.1
The Social Dynamics of Pagoda Repair in Upper Myanmar

Pagoda repair in Myanmar is not just a building upgrade but a significant mechanism connecting religious and lay communities. During the course of a renovation, the wider public is engaged, from urban elite to artisans, builders, shopkeepers and farmers in replenishing the dedicated space of the pagoda compound and the teachings it embod-ies. The case studies from Sagaing, Mandalay, Kyaukse and Bagan discussed here highlight how coordination of pagoda repair is often by word of mouth, familiar networks and more recently, social media. Informality is also pertinent in relation to archaeologi-cal calls for greater documentation of pagoda repair. Imposing daily recording could easily change malleable social contacts into disinterested form-fillers, rather than engaging local communities in the shared caretaking of their landscape. While information on archaeological and heritage management “best practice” is abundant, the processes of pagoda repair remains little known apart from the participants of each undertaking. Thus what a decade ago was a locally understood difference between repair and conservation, today is an urgent issue threatening both the vitality of the living Buddhist practice and its intangible heritage. Without a shared mechanism to oversee restorations of aged pagodas, the hard evidence from which to interpret the ancient cultural landscape will be irrevocably lost and its intangible sustenance gone. The issue needs to be openly debated and acted upon to ensure the compatible integration of international conservation and heritage practice with the existing social and religious dynamics of pagoda repair.

Win Maung (Tampawaddy), Bob Hudson, and Pamela Gutman

Volume 22.1
Buddha’s life in Konbaung period bronzes from Yazagyo

This article presents a collection of small bronzes retrieved from a cluster of ruined Buddhist structures at Yazagyo, in the Kabaw Valley, a remote area of Northwestern Burma. The items can be clearly dated to the early 1880s, near the end of the Konbaung dynasty, thus providing type specimens for chronological comparison. The bronzes recapitulate crucial chapters in Prince Siddhartha's and then the Buddha Gotama's life, and they are examined by the article's three authors. The article details the relics’ enshrinement, their dating, historical context, and the stories of the Buddha that they animate. The article includes 22 photographs. 

Courtney T. Wittekind

Volume 22.2
Road Plans and Planned Roads: Entangled Geographies, Spatiotemporal Frames, and Territorial Claims-making in Myanmar’s Southern Shan State

In this article, I investigate conflicting claims to land made in the peri-urban areas of Taunggyi, in Myanmar's Shan state, where decades of ethnic insurgency, the negotiation of ceasefire agreements, and resultant military-state development strategies have figured land as a primary site and object of struggle. Yet, as I argue in this paper, it is not only land that is at stake in ongoing conflicts, but also the incongruous conceptions of space and time that motivate such claims. By exploring case studies linked to proposed road construction in Pa-O majority regions, I develop an approach to "land grabs"- and the counter claims-making they impel- that foregrounds the spatiotemporal, showing how distinct senses of time are activated, embodied, and re-animated through encounters with particular spaces. In this, I specifically argue that the linear, historical timeline embraced by state authorities-a timeline tied to sequential notions of advancement, modernization, and democratization - cannot be taken as fact; instead, it must be considered alongside alternate conceptualizations, through which the notion of a single narrative of "progress" might be opened up to contain alternative notions of past and present, and with them, new political possibilities.

Courtney T. Wittekind with Elizabeth L. Rhoads

Volume 22.2
Rethinking Land and Property in a “Transitioning” Myanmar: Representations of Isolation, Neglect, and Natural Decline

In this article, we assess ideas of “progress” in the evolution of Burma/Myanmar studies, asking whether shifting conditions might offer openings to reconsider narratives about the country. We question two recurring tropes consistent across the work of journalists, policy analysts and scholars: an alleged history of undifferentiated “isolation,” and the ensuing state of Burma/Myanmar following a seemingly “natural” decline. Such language reflects assumptions that otherwise go unspoken in accounts of Myanmar’s current transition. 

We consider descriptions of Yangon’s colonial architecture, asking what depictions of the city as having languished following the colonial era might tell us about assumptions in Burma/Myanmar studies. Such depictions are emblematic of a common trope in the literature, whereby historical narratives of isolation replace more dynamic accounts of interaction, particularly in regard to land and property. Drawing on work in Yangon and Shan State, we question common descriptive impulses related to the difficulty of accounting for history— including dependency on a conventional timeline broken into unquestioned periods, and recurring references to “isolation,” “nationalization” or “customary tenure” as glosses for the relations present in such periods. We ask how those analyzing Myanmar might progress beyond such impulses, cognizant that increased access to the country offers opportunities to trouble simplistic narratives, highlighting their political and intellectual perils.

Hans-Bernd Zollner

Volume 7
"Germans in Burma, 1837–1945" pp.29-69

This article gives an account of the Germans who lived in Burma or who visited the country between the beginnings of British rule in 1826 and the end of World War II. After surveying German-Burmese relations from 1826 until today, the manifold German engagement in Burma before World War I is detailed. This engagement was followed by a sharp decline in the number of Germans living in the country other than for short periods between the two great wars. After World War II, on the German side, there was almost no memory of German activities in Burma left. By contrast the Burmese kept and keep this memory very much alive.