Introduction burma at the turn of the twenty-first century

Burma at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century is the first collection of essays 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 documented by human rights observers. The authors portray the dynamism, activity, and fragile flux in Burmese popular space and imagination through a survey of micro institutions and macro-level connections that have come to exist at least since the military coup of 1962. 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 of military 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,¹ but it is also extraordinary that this current volume about everyday urban and peri-urban life does not contain the work of any Burmese citizens. All those approached to contribute either quietly ignored the request or pleaded the continued safety of family and friends within Burma or their ability to return to the country. A very limited number of works documenting the lives and literature of the Burmese people have appeared in the past two decades, and there is a small cohort of Burmese expatriates, largely political refugees, who write about conditions within Burma, but without the benefit of contemporary immersion in a rapidly changing nation.² Before Gen. Ne Win's military coup in 1962, researchers collaborated on religious, rural, agricultural, political, and culture and personality studies, especially within mainland Southeast Asia. The past few years have seen an easing of some restrictions on scholarship, and a new generation of students is conducting fieldwork over extended periods of time in Burma. Burmese studies thus tends to be represented by researchers at either end of the age spectrum, although a number of midcareer researchers have managed to conduct research about religion, ritual, art, and archaeology.³ The most established field of Burmese studies concerns religion and ritual, and Burma has been included in a number of edited volumes that survey these themes across Southeast Asia. Within Burmese studies proper, the fields of political science and economics are frequently represented in contemporary manuscripts and edited volumes. Burma at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century brings together most of the anthropologists and scholars of religion who are actively working in contemporary urban and peri-urban central Burma. All of the contributors have conducted extensive field research in Burma, a fact that would be assumed in a book about the other nations of Southeast Asia, but is unusual in a volume about Burma. Together, then, these essays provide the first detailed analysis of the ways in which the Burmese people actively manage and create lives for themselves despite the shadow that military dictatorship throws across Burma's religious, political, and social life.