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ABSTRACT
The essay addresses the issue of which cultural tools are used in order to index particular ethnic identifications within an interethnic environment. It is analysed how the Inle Lake region has undergone a symbolic restructuring of its socio-cultural network since the end of the 1950s. We shall first address the issue of how the interethnic dynamics was renegotiated after the waning of the Shan political sway upon the region and how the Intha emerged as the new dominant ethnic group as well as how they symbolically manipulated a socio-cultural landscape common to all the ethnic communities inhabiting the region; it will eventually be analysed how a particular ethnic community, the Taung’yo, indexes its position within a newly created dynamics through the technical choice of phonetic markers in a specific context of interaction in order to align with the position within the interethnic dynamics that the oral traditions grant them.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Gordon Mathews (Chinese University of Hong Kong) who kindly invited me at the Department of Anthropology to give a seminar from which this essay is drawn; I also would like to thank Anna Wierzbicka (Australian National University, Canberra), Bonnie Urciuoli (Hamilton College), Alessandro Duranti (UCLA), Victor Lieberman (University of Michigan), Paul Sidwell (University of Sydney), Michel Francard (UCLouvain) and Gary B. Palmer (University of Nevada) as well as and Two AE anonymous peer-reviewers for their helpful comments. Remaining errors are my sole responsibility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Burmese words in italic are transliterations, whereas their phonemisation is indicated between [ ].
2. By “re-Socialisation process”, we mean the attempt to negotiate a new ethnic dynamics.
3. As a reviewer very aptly pointed out, the concept of ‘Burmanisation’ in Western-language scholarship is taken quite negatively, that is, as a process during which the central government forces other ethnic communities to abandon their culture.
4. The terms ‘tsao-pha’ or ‘cao-pha’ are also used; however we prefer to use the term sao-pha according to its Shan pronunciation where the proto-Southwestern Tai phoneme [*c-] evolved into the phoneme [s-] in Shan, whence [sawC1 phaːB2].
5. But looking out for their own interest though (Communication from a reviewer).
6. Also mentioned as leikpya in the anthropological literature.
7. It should be noted that the cotton thread betrayed a Shan influence, for it is commonly used among the Thai Theravadan ethnic groups, whether they be Lao, Siamese or Shan.
8. In Myanmar villages are administratively organised as clusters of villages called ’up cu [ʔǫɷʔ sṵ]; the Intha still very often use the ancient administrative term tuik [taɩʔ] to name those circles of villages though. As far as the circles of villages or hamlets upland are concerned, they are called ’up cu, when a Burmese term must be used to name them.
9. The administrative term ukketa [ʔǫɷʔ kətɑ̰] (which means ‘ruler’ in Pāli) is now replacing, even in Intha, the title tuik cukrī: [taɩʔ sṵ ɟíː] to name the responsible at the head of those circles of villages. Furthermore and quite interestingly, the very term cukrī: initially meant a ‘legion comprising of indigenous and foreign troops’, which clearly alludes to the times when the Inle Lake area was considered as a frontier area.
10. On the Mandala and its significance in analysing Southeast Asian societies, see Wolters (Citation1999).
11. It should be noted that the inclination to move the sacred images of Buddha towards the center was not so uncommon during the Pagán kingdom as soon as up in the twelve century ad (Pichard, Citation2003) ; round the Inle Lake, it remains an intrinsic Intha reorganisation of the symbolic architectural sphere though.
12. As Robinne (Citation1998, 354–5) pointed out, the markets are also organised according to a quinary basis with the centrality of the cycle in the Intha village of Rwa Ma in the center of the lake.
13. The lipprā (the ‘butterfly spirit’ or ‘vital principle’) is thought to bind both facets of all organisms together: the rūpa ‘bodily dimension’ to the nāma ‘spiritual or psychological dimension’ (Spiro, Citation1982, 86 ; Spiro, Citation1978, 69–70; Shway Yoe [Sir George J. Scott], Citation[1882] 1963:390–5). According to this Buddhist stance on Human duality, the procession would be the material, bodily, counterpart (rūpa) of the psychological Intha ‘ethnic sense of self’ (nāma).
14. According to a version of this oral tradition that we recorded in the Pa-O village of Seik Pyo Myaut. Historically, the Pa-O would originate from the Gulf of Martaban in Lower Burma; their language is related to the Northern Karenic branch of Tibeto-Burman.
15. Their skills as archers would possibly account for their autonym Danu meaning ‘bow’ in Pāli (Myin Maung, Citation1986, 37–8).
16. Danaw is a Palaungic language from the Mon-Khmer branch of Austroasiatic. In the Inle Lake region, even if their language is still vivid, they incline to speak Taung’yo in an interethnic context of communication.
17. This princess, named Veluvati, the ‘Bamboo Princess’, is furthermore mentioned in the Glass Palace Chronicle (Maung Tin Luce Gordon, Citation[1923] 2008; Pain, Citation2008, 18–9).
18. Robinne (Citation2000b, 67–8) mentions a slightly different version of this myth, but whose overall framework of the Taung’yo being autochthonous remains untouched though; his informant was an educated monk, a phounji, who was quite privy to the oral traditions of his own ethnic group. On the other hand, my informants all belonged to the laity who, somehow and sometimes, had a vent over their ‘ethnic imagination’.
19. See Pain (Citation2019) on this issue.
20. As a reviewer aptly pointed out, this might also be addressed as an attempt to standardise their pronunciation in public.
21. The linguistic development will not be addressed in depth here as it will most likely seem, if not be, irrelevant to a socio-cultural anthropologist. For an introduction to Burmese diachronic phonology, see Pain (Citation2017) and Bradley (Citation2002) among many others.
22. The Marma data were collected in Bandarban, Chittagong Hill Tracts, during two fieldworks with Dr. Sikder Murshed (University of Dhaka) in Bangladesh in 2013 and 2014.
23. The Taung’yo data were collected in Nyaung Shwe for the curuṁ corpus and, for the ‘everyday-life’ Taung’yo data, in Lak Maung Kwe (lak moṅ kwe:) in the mountains west of the lake, some 3 hours away on foot from Nyaung Shwe. Selected parts of the corpus were transliterated into Burmese writing with the help of Mr. Ko Aung (from the Taung’yo ethnic community) and Mr. Min Min (from the Intha ethnic community). Their profound knowledge of their language alone makes this work possible. Okell (Citation1969) was used for the morpho-syntactic chunking and analysis of the corpus. Abbreviations: 1.sg = ‘personal pronoun, 1. pers. singular’; clf = ‘classifier’; ctr = ‘affix marking a contrast’; fp.app = ‘final particle used to seek approval’; fp.emph = ‘final particle used for emphasis’; fp.proh = “‘final particle used to mark prohibition’; fut = ‘verb affix marking a future tense’; neg = ‘negation verb affix’; nfut = ‘non-future verb affix’; plur = ‘plural affix’; pos = ‘noun affix marking a genitive construction’; quest = ‘question – polar or open – marker’; sm.flf = ‘subordinate marker used to indicate that the action is now fulfilled’; sm.if = ‘subordinate marker used to introduce an if-clause’; sm.rel = ‘subordinate marker used for relative clause construction’; sm.sim = ‘verb subordinate marker for simultaneous actions’; subj = ‘marks the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb’. The segment written in italic is a transliteration in Roman symbols of the Burmese written counterpart.
24. It should be noted that even in traditional China, the literacy rate was not as high as in Burma. Incidentally, the role of the Buddhist monk as a teacher for the laity is a peculiarity of the Theravadan tradition in Burma; many Chinese Buddhist monks or Taoist priests did not play any role in the secular process and many of them were illiterate; literacy was a Confucian elitist monopoly (Yang, Citation1967, 337–8, quoted in; Spiro, Citation1982, 307, n.2).
25. Particularly dating back from the later part of the 18th century when monks began to be seen as masters of texts per se (Charney, Citation2006, 50).
26. As far as modern Burma is concerned, more specifically the education of the Taung’yo children in 2013–14, young children are taught in their hamlet in class given by Intha primary school teachers coming up to the Taung’yo hilly regions. Incidentally, it should be pointed out that the social morphology of the Burmese monasteries is twofold; on the one hand, the monks are involved in the Great-Tradition component of Buddhism (the vinaya ‘discipline’) and on the other hand, they are involved in the dassana ‘lay religion’; in the latter component, the monks are involved, among others, in the preparation of horoscopes for lay families, they provide for popular astrological cults, and teach to the laity. The very dual conception of religion as the Burmese understand it where vinaya and dassana overlap is therefore mirrored in the very social morphology of the Burmese monastery; this implies, towards the absolute, that even teaching to lay children is a religious act per se that eventually partakes in the Burmese ethnicisation process. It should nonetheless be mentioned at this point that since the end of the 1980s, the junta (now the federal government) has implemented a ‘re-Socialisation’ plan; one of its pillars, whose purpose was supposed to speed up the re-Socialisation process, was the erection of state-run schools in the most remote areas of the country to be superposed on the traditional teaching offered in the Buddhist monastery schools (bhun:krī: kyoṅ).
27. It should be pointed out that in standard Burmese the use of a literary vs. colloquial register (Bradley, Citation1977; Citation2010, 98–100; Okell, Citation2010) does not hinge upon such an interactional context and does not partake in the same identification process aiming at shoring up an ethnic position within a pluriethnic interactional environment by using a ‘literary form’, or rather a diachronic written form (that is, in the case of Taung’yo, a rhotic phonetic sequence indexing the status of being the first inhabitants of the region vis-à-vis all the other ethnic communities).
28. There is little doubt, if any, that the Burmese central authorities have not hampered the emergence of a new dominant ethnic group in the region, as the Intha prevailing position within the interethnic dynamics seamlessly defused any Shan and Pa-O divisive endeavours prone to violent armed outbursts. Furthermore, incorporating a King of the Pagán Dynasty and endowing him with a focal role in the local oral traditions hook the regional grand narrative upon which a good share of the local ethnicisation processes are predicated to a broader nationalist agenda.
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Frederic Pain
Pain Frederic is ‘chercheur associé’ at the Laboratoire Des Langues et Civilisations À Tradition Orale (LACITO-CNRS, UMR 7107, Paris). He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica 中央研究院, Taipei (2012-2014). He wrote on linguistics and anthropology in several journals such as JAOS, Anthropological Forum, Australian Journal of Linguistics, BSOAS.