Burma at the Turn of the 21st Century

313 Pages·2005·3.388 MB·English

by  Monique Skidmore

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