Reading Myanmar's inland fisheries: postcolonial literature as theoretical lens

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary in scope, this article takes up the 1950 short story, “Ko Danga,” by Burmese author Kyay Ni, as a critical lens through which to approach the contemporary political economy of Myanmar's inland fisheries. Due to its level of ethnographic detail, Kyay Ni's account of the inland fisheries regime in early postcolonial Burma provides an effective historic baseline against which to assess more recent developments in this sector – developments outlined herein based on interviews and research trips to inland fishery locations in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Region. Going further, the article argues that Kyay Ni's writing offers heterodox insights into contemporary political economic concerns, of relevance in Myanmar and more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• fisheries
• Kyay Ni
• Myanmar
• postcolonial literature

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Phyo Win Latt, Peter Vandergeest, and two anonymous reviewers for input on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes on contributor

Stephen Campbell is an assistant professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and a research fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway.

ORCID

Stephen CAMPBELL http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5408-2342

Notes

1. Kyay Ni (2001, 19).

2. See Kyay Ni (2001).

3. This and most other informants’ names are pseudonyms.

4. On the idea of latent commons, see Tsing (2015, 135).

5. On Marx's characterisation of the proletarian as factory worker, see Marx and Engels (2016 [1848]).

6. On Marx's shift away from a linear, teleological conception of capitalist development, see Anderson (2010).

7. Fishers who participated in these protests showed me a list of 13 demands they issued at the 2017 event, which included the two items listed herein, and several related demands for fishers’ collective access to in valued less than four million kyat.

8. While this case was eventually resolved in favour of the defendants, I use a pseudonym for the village name to avoid risk of retaliation against village informants.

9. The exchange rate at the time of writing was approximately 1 USD = 1,200 kyat.

10. Given ongoing risk of violence in this case, this village name is a pseudonym.