In the law & on the land: finding the female farmer in Myanmar’s National Land Use Policy

Abstract

This paper draws upon 12 months of activist research in Myanmar to examine how bureaucrats, activists, international development experts and rural women represented the female farmer during an unprecedented public negotiation of a critical agrarian policy. During National Land Use Policy consultations, antagonistic actors learned to behave like experts, rendered technical distinct ontologies of land, law, and gender to produce a bilingual, rights-bearing female farmer in the final text. Rather than identifying as ‘farmers’, however, rural women typically describe themselves as workers or helpers, a gendered identity inscribed in particular and hierarchical relations of land and labor. An emergent class of self-identified female farmers distinguished themselves as capable and independent, but these adopted attitudes were often tied to privileged positions. Understanding the production of these representations and the relationship between them problematizes Myanmar’s purported democratic transition and illustrates the gendered dynamics of agrarian change.

Keywords:

• gender
• land
• agrarian change
• democracy
• Burma
• Myanmar

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the collaboration of colleagues at GEN and LCG in Myanmar, especially Pyo Let Han, Naw Mu Paw Htoo, and Naw Ei Ei Min. Thanks to the Wolford Lab at Cornell and participants in the 2015 LDPI panel and Toronto Workshop for their comments, in particular Alice Beban, Ewan Robinson, Tim Gorman, Kasia Paprocki and Laura Schoenberger. Wendy Wolford, Rachel Bezner Kerr, Marina Welker and four anonymous reviewers provided helpful guidance and suggestions that improved the piece, and the support of a Gruber Fellowship from Yale Law School enabled me to start what has become a much larger project. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Previously, tax receipts functioned as de facto proof of possession, though many lacked these documents. Beyond the gendered consequences discussed subsequently, new forms of farmland registration hold potential to reorder agrarian relations in ways only tentatively explored to date (cf. Faxon 2015).

2 According to my interlocutors, some early drafts were first produced in English and then translated, while others were initially written in Burmese. I do not speculate on these processes here, but rather start from the premise that the way women were represented or erased in the public documents reflects disparate ontologies of gender, law and land, which came to a head in the consultation process.

3 I remain intentionally vague about institutional affiliations in the subsequent section to protect participants and ongoing research relationships.

4 One of these was the lack of documents or outreach in ethnic languages. Though some civil-society consultations may have included informal translations, the document and discussions remained Burmese (and English)-centric, a limitation that circumscribes my own analysis.

5 For a full analysis of gender equality in the fifth draft see GEN (2014) and TNI (2015).

6 Public arguments for gender-equal economic productivity did not feature in the subsequent meetings and documentation I observed; however, they could have been employed privately.

7 Most often women used the word alouqthama, literally one-who-works, rather than the lehtama or taungdu, Burmese for paddy or upland farmer. While Burmese has a rich vocabulary related to agricultural roles, I focus on this main distinction.

8 This particular quotation comes from a later workshop held with LCG in July 2016.

9 Data on the proportion of land registration documents issued to women is unavailable, but one paralegal organization found that 80 percent of clients pursuing farmland registration were male (Namati 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hilary Oliva Faxon

Hilary Oliva Faxon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University. Her dissertation focuses on land politics in contemporary Myanmar.