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Published as a Guest Column in The Irrawaddy, Reading Time: 7 mins read
In 1949, the newly independent Burma was said to be on the verge of collapse as Communist Party of Burma (CPB) forces occupied Mandalay, and the Karen Army encircled Yangon. In the early 1960s, Ne Win’s coup was supposed to restore stability but in fact led to a resurgence in highland ethnic armed groups, and in the lowlands, initiated the terror of the secret police with their dank prisons.…
I have been remiss in posting to Ethnography.com. For about ten years, this ws a forum I really enjoyed. There was a community of bloggers, and the quality of ethnography posted was unusual in both its geographic spread, and the vigor of its writings about places as diverse as Dominica in the Caribbean, Tunisia, Madagascar, Tanznia, Myanmar, Romania, and other places around the world. I think I am one of the few people in the world who actually enjoys editing ethnograhpic writing. …
In Northern Burma there is a railway bridge, the Gokteik Viaduct. It was completed in 1900 by a Pennsylvania steel company under contract to the British government, which had recently conquered northern Burma following the British-Burma War of 1884-1885.
The British Empire was focused on their version of free trade and they wanted to project British notions of mercantilism to all corners of the world, including southern China. So they decided to build a railway from their new colony in Burma with its port on the Indian Ocean, to Kunming in southern China. …
Peace Studies researcher Elise Boulding wrote that peace, including the type sought today in Myanmar, is focused by a “two hundred year present.” By this she meant that how people think about their values, fears, loyalties and dreams is inherited from the memories of parents and grandparents who recall the emotional events they heard about as children from their elders.
This is how they came to think about who is the “us” that is loved and trustworthy, and the “them” that is to be feared, avoided and distrusted. …
Miss Burma (2017) by Charmaine Craig is a historical novel that tells the story of Burma from the perspective of a Karen family that was part of Rangoon’s elite after World War II. The book describes the Karen perspective on mid-20th-century wars in Burma, beginning with the Japanese invasion in 1942 and continuing today. Resonating particularly well is the focus on the betrayals that underlay ceasefire and peace negotiations conducted in the name of liberal democracy starting in the 1940s.
The Joint Peace Fund, the group sponsoring the 2015 Ceasefire in Myanmar, sponsored a reception on International Peace Day at the Chatrium Hotel in September 2019. I was there because like much of Yangon’s NGO world, I know that the Joint Peace Fund administers a huge pot of foreign aid that funds the “peace process”. The keynote speaker at the International Peace Day reception was European Union’s Ambassador to Myanmar and Chair of the Joint Peace Commission, Ambassador Kristian Schmidt. …
Christina says I should write about my trip to Yangon (Myanmar/Burma) these last few days, as it is a city unfamiliar to the readers of Ethnography.com. Her impressions, and those of our readers are probably in the context of the international news about Myanmar which focused last year on the Rohingya refugee crisis in which some 800,000 fled to Bangladesh, and more recent fighting in the western province of Rakhine, which briefly made the news a week or two ago. …