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313 Pages·2005·3.388 MB·English
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Burma at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Burma at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Edited by Monique Skidmore University ofHawai‘i Press HONOLULU © 2005 University ofHawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States ofAmerica 10 09 08 07 06 05 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burma at the turn ofthe twenty-first century / edited by Monique Skidmore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 13:978-0-8248-2857-8 (hardcover :alk.paper) ISBN 10:0-8248-2857-7 (hardcover :alk.paper) ISBN 13:978-0-8248-2897-4 (pbk.:alk.paper) ISBN 10:0-8248-2897-6 (pbk.:alk.paper) 1.Ethnology—Burma. 2.Burma—Social conditions. 3.Burma— Politics and government—1962–1988. 4.Burma—Politics and government—1988–. 5.Burma—Social life and customs. I.Skidmore,Monique. GN635.B8B87 2005 306'.09591—dc22 2005003440 University ofHawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability ofthe Council on Library Resources. Designed by University ofHawai‘i Press production staff Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Contents Acknowledgments vii 1. Introduction:Burma at the Turn ofthe Twenty-First Century 1 Monique Skidmore Part 1: Spirituality,Pilgrimage,and Economics 2. The Cheaters:Journey to the Land ofthe Lottery 19 Guillaume Rozenberg 3. Women’s Practices ofRenunciation in the Age ofSäsanaRevival 41 Ingrid Jordt 4. The Taungbyon Festival:Locality and Nation-Confronting in the Cult ofthe 37 Lords 65 Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière 5. Respected Grandfather,Bless This Nissan:Benevolent and Politically Neutral Bo Bo Gyi 90 Mandy Sadan Part 2: Politicaland Moral Legitimation 6. Buddhist Visions ofMoral Authority and Modernity in Burma 113 Juliane Schober 7. Sacralizing or Demonizing Democracy? Aung San Suu Kyi’s “Personality Cult” 133 GustaafHoutman 8. The Chicken and the Scorpion:Rumor,Counternarratives,and the Political Uses ofBuddhism 154 Keiko Tosa vi Contents Part 3: PublicPerformance 9. Writing in a Crazy Way:Literary Life in Contemporary Urban Burma 175 Jennifer Leehey 10. “But Princes Jump!”:Performing Masculinity in Mandalay 206 Ward Keeler 11. Who’s Performing What? State Patronage and the Transformation ofBurmese Music 229 Gavin Douglas Part 4: The Domestic Domain 12. The Future ofBurma:Children Are Like Jewels 249 Monique Skidmore References 271 List of Contributors 287 Index 291 Acknowledgments Not many editors can say that an edited volume was a pleasure to put together,but this has been true for Burma at the Turn ofthe Twenty-First Century.The Burmese scholarly community is small and welcoming,and Bur- mese conferences seem more like family reunions and pwes (festivals), than numbing days ofpaper presentations.The 2002 Burma Studies Conference in Gothenburg,Sweden,afforded me the opportunity to plan this volume with its Canadian, French,American,Australian, English, and Japanese participants. Iwish to sincerely thank all ofthe participants for entrusting their work to my care,and also to thank Pamela Kelley at University ofHawai‘i Press for enthu- siastically and professionally guiding the volume to publication. A very special thank you from all of the authors to John Okell,who not only gave many ofus our first Burmese lessons,but who graciously rewrote all of the Burmese romanization using the Okell method (1971).I am also very grateful to Robert Weber who has graciously consented to the use ofhis pho- tographs in the volume. Parts ofseveral essays in this volume have been previously published.Parts ofchapter 11 were published in Worlds ofMusic; parts ofchapter 4 were pub- lished in Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient; and parts of chapter 7 were published as Chapter 15 in “Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy.”Each chapter in this book has,however,been wholly or substantially reworked. The research for this grant was enabled by the Rockefeller Foundation and an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.I am grateful to the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University ofNotre Dame for the research and writing time in which to expeditiously complete the vol- ume;to the University of Melbourne,Faculty of Arts,for granting me leave; and to Colin and Isabelle Rieger,for giving up a year of their lives to accom- pany me to Burma and to Notre Dame so that this volume could come to fruition. vii Map 1. Burma (Myanmar) –1– Introduction Burma at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Monique Skidmore Burma at the Turn ofthe Twenty-First Centuryis the first collection ofessays about everyday life in Burma in forty years. The anthropologists and scholars of religion who have contributed to this volume show how everyday negotiations about culture,power,and group and individual identity play out in contemporary Burma.The essays together demonstrate how the state is not one monolithic rational entity and how the Burmese people participate or manufacture some of the conditions of their own subjection.In this way the volume provides a context for,and corrective to,the totalizing discourses of the military state and the necessarily grim portrayals of repression docu- mented by human rights observers.The authors portray the dynamism,activ- ity,and fragile flux in Burmese popular space and imagination through a sur- vey ofmicro institutions and macro-level connections that have come to exist at least since the military coup of1962. The forty-year lacuna since the last edited volume of everyday (village) life in Burma—Manning Nash’s 1965,The Golden Road to Modernity: Village Life in Contemporary Burma—encompasses not only the period of Burmese Independence (from 1948 to the present),but also the period ofmilitary rule (from 1962 to the present). The anthropologists who contributed to Nash’s volume conducted fieldwork prior to Gen.Ne Win’s coup of 1962 and since that time access for researchers to this country has been severely limited. Not only is it almost inconceivable for there to be such a long time between published collections of such work,1but it is also extraordinary that this current volume about everyday urban and peri-urban life does not con- 1

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