Burma at the Turn of the 21st Century
Burma at the Turn of the 21st Century

Author: Monique Skidmore

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2005-07-31

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780824828578

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This is the first study in a half century of one of the least known societies in the contemporary world. Burma at the Turn of the 21st Century provides insight into the everyday lives, concerns, and values of the people of this reclusive nation. Prominent anthropologists and religion scholars with in-depth, long-term knowledge of central Burma offer detailed analyses of the ways in which Burmese actively manage and create lives for themselves in the shadow of a military dictatorship. Their research crosses the domains of religious, political, and social life, examining public festivals and performance, local-state relations, literary life, lottery frenzies, mass meditators, political rumors and black humor, the value of children, changing male identities, and more in this impressive, wide-ranging collection.

The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century
The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century

Author: Thant Myint-U

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2019-11-12

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1324003308

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A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2019 A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2020 “An urgent book.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times During a century of colonialism, Burma was plundered for its natural resources and remade as a racial hierarchy. Over decades of dictatorship, it suffered civil war, repression, and deep poverty. Today, Burma faces a mountain of challenges: crony capitalism, exploding inequality, rising ethnonationalism, extreme racial violence, climate change, multibillion dollar criminal networks, and the power of China next door. Thant Myint-U shows how the country’s past shapes its recent and almost unbelievable attempt to create a new democracy in the heart of Asia, and helps to answer the big questions: Can this multicultural country of 55 million succeed? And what does Burma’s story really tell us about the most critical issues of our time?

Blood, Dreams and Gold
Blood, Dreams and Gold

Author: Richard Cockett

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-09-25

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0300215983

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Burma is one of the largest countries in Southeast Asia and was once one of its richest. Under successive military regimes, however, the country eventually ended up as one of the poorest countries in Asia, a byword for repression and ethnic violence. Richard Cockett spent years in the region as a correspondent for The Economist and witnessed firsthand the vicious sectarian politics of the Burmese government, and later, also, its surprising attempts at political and social reform. Cockett’s enlightening history, from the colonial era on, explains how Burma descended into decades of civil war and authoritarian government. Taking advantage of the opening up of the country since 2011, Cockett has interviewed hundreds of former political prisoners, guerilla fighters, ministers, monks, and others to give a vivid account of life under one of the most brutal regimes in the world. In many cases, this is the first time that they have been able to tell their stories to the outside world. Cockett also explains why the regime has started to reform, and why these reforms will not go as far as many people had hoped. This is the most rounded survey to date of this volatile Asian nation.

Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia
Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia

Author: Kwok Kian-Woon

Publisher: NUS Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9971695065

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Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia applies a new theoretical literature on social memory to remembered events in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. Highlighting connections between theorizing based on European examples and unresolved memory issues in East and Southeast Asia, the authors show how comparative study of the interpenetration of politics and lived bodily experience, of communal and personal memories, and of dominant and suppressed narratives, can yield insights into the human potential to become either perpetrators, victims or bystanders. The memories found within different groups in any society are open to negotiation, suppression, contestation, or revision in the ever-evolving politics of the present. The searching and close-grained analyses of contemporary issues found in the volume vividly illustrate the essentially plural and multivocal nature of social memories, and demonstrate the intricate connection between transnational, national and sub-national politics. Readers seeking a more nuanced and complex understanding of the past and of its continued relevance to the present and future, will find here much food for thought.

Living Silence in Burma
Living Silence in Burma

Author: Christina Fink

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2009-10-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1848132735

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Eight years after the first edition of this insightful and highly regarded book, Burma remains one of the most troubled nations in Southeast Asia. While other countries have democratized and prospered, Burma is governed by a repressive military dictatorship and is the second largest producer of heroin in the world. In this exceptionally readable yet scholarly account of Burma today, Christina Fink gives a moving and insightful picture of what life under military rule is like. Through the extensive interviews conducted inside and outside the country, we begin to understand Burma's political and domestic situation and a comprehensive understanding of why military rule has lasted so long. This significantly revised new edition includes material taking the reader up to present day action and accounts, including the impacts of the dramatic 2007 monks' demonstrations, which were coordinated with former student activists and members of Aung San Suu Kyi's party. The book explores the regime's continued attempts to weaken and divide the democratic movement and the ethnic nationalist organizations and explains how the democratic movement and ethnic groups have sought to achieve their goals; in part, by working more closely together.

Voices of Weavers
Voices of Weavers

Author: Jella Fink

Publisher: Waxmann Verlag

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 3830992734

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The lives of weavers and their textile creations form the central subject in this monograph. It explores an understudied field of material culture studies in contemporary Myanmar. Textile cultures, craftsmanship and (national) identity are the core topoi of this work. Embedded in a century of shifting political and economic systems, the documented weaving cultures enhance our understanding of transformation processes on the local level. This book brings together current impulses of material culture studies and observations based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork data.

Race and Religion in American Buddhism
Race and Religion in American Buddhism

Author: Joseph Cheah

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-10-28

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0199756287

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While academic and popular studies of Buddhism have often neglected race as a factor of analysis, the issues concerning race and racialization have remained not far below the surface of the wider discussion among ethnic Buddhists, converts, and sympathizers regarding representations of American Buddhism and adaptations of Buddhist practices to the American context. In Race and Religion in American Buddhism, Joseph Cheah provides a much-needed contribution to the field of religious studies by addressing the under-theorization of race in the study of American Buddhism. Through the lens of racial formation, Cheah demonstrates how adaptations of Buddhist practices by immigrants, converts and sympathizers have taken place within an environment already permeated with the logic and ideology of whiteness and white supremacy. In other words, race and religion (Buddhism) are so intimately bounded together in the United States that the ideology of white supremacy informs the differing ways in which convert Buddhists and sympathizers and Burmese ethnic Buddhists have adapted Buddhist religious practices to an American context.Cheah offers a complex view of how the Burmese American community must negotiate not only the religious and racial terrains of the United States but also the transnational reach of the Burmese junta. Race and Religion in American Buddhism marks an important contribution to the study of American Buddhism as well as to the larger fields of U.S. religions and Asian American studies.

Burma, Kipling and Western Music
Burma, Kipling and Western Music

Author: Andrew Selth

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-11-03

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1317298896

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For decades, scholars have been trying to answer the question: how was colonial Burma perceived in and by the Western world, and how did people in countries like the United Kingdom and United States form their views? This book explores how Western perceptions of Burma were influenced by the popular music of the day. From the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-6 until Burma regained its independence in 1948, more than 180 musical works with Burma-related themes were written in English-speaking countries, in addition to the many hymns composed in and about Burma by Christian missionaries. Servicemen posted to Burma added to the lexicon with marches and ditties, and after 1913 most movies about Burma had their own distinctive scores. Taking Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 ballad ‘Mandalay’ as a critical turning point, this book surveys all these works with emphasis on popular songs and show tunes, also looking at classical works, ballet scores, hymns, soldiers’ songs, sea shanties, and film soundtracks. It examines how they influenced Western perceptions of Burma, and in turn reflected those views back to Western audiences. The book sheds new light not only on the West’s historical relationship with Burma, and the colonial music scene, but also Burma’s place in the development of popular music and the rise of the global music industry. In doing so, it makes an original contribution to the fields of musicology and Asian Studies.

Soldiers and Diplomacy in Burma
Soldiers and Diplomacy in Burma

Author: Renaud Egreteau

Publisher: NUS Press

Published: 2013-06-10

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 9971696738

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Soldiers and Diplomacy addresses the key question of the ongoing role of the military in BurmaÍs foreign policy. The authors, a political scientist and a former top Asia editor for the BBC, provide a fresh perspective on BurmaÍs foreign and security policies, which have shifted between pro-active diplomacies of neutralism and non-alignment, and autarkical policies of isolation and xenophobic nationalism. They argue that important elements of continuity underlie BurmaÍs striking postcolonial policy changes and contrasting diplomatic practices. Among the defining factors here are the formidable dominance of the Burmese armed forces over state structure, the enduring domestic political conundrum and the peculiar geography of a country located at the crossroads of India, China and Southeast Asia. Egreteau and Jagan argue that the Burmese military still has the tools needed to retain their praetorian influence over the countryÍs foreign policy in the post-junta context of the 2010s. For international policymakers, potential foreign investors and BurmaÍs immediate neighbors, this will have strong implications in terms of the countryÍs foreign policy approach.

Situating religion and medicine in Asia
Situating religion and medicine in Asia

Author: Michael Stanley-Baker

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2023-12-05

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 1526160005

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This edited volume presents the latest research on the intersection of religion and medicine in Asia. It features chapters by internationally known scholars, who bring to bear a range of methodological and geographic expertise on this topic. The book’s central question is to what extent ‘religion’ and ‘medicine’ have overlapped or interrelated in various Asian societies. Collectively, the contributions explore a number of related issues, such as: which societies separated out religious from medical concerns, at which times and in what ways? Where have medicine and religion converged, and how has such knowledge been defined by scholars and cultural actors? Are ‘religion’ and ‘medicine’ the best terms by which scholars can grapple with knowledge about the sacred and the self, destiny and disease?