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"In a tour-de-force study of sixty years of cinematic entertainment, Silver Screens and Golden Dreams traces the veins of Burmese popular movies across three periods in history: the colonial era, the parliamentary democracy period, and the Ne Win Socialist years. Author Jane M. Ferguson engages cinema as an interrogator of mainstream cultural values, providing political and cultural context to situate the films as artistic endeavors and capitalist products. Exploring how filmmakers eschewed colonial control and later selectively toed the ideological lines of the Burmese Way to Socialism, Silver Screens and Golden Dreams offers a serious yet enjoyable investigation of leisure during difficult...
The Shan have been fighting since 1958 for the autonomous state in Southeast Asia they were promised. Jane M. Ferguson articulates Shanland as an ongoing project of resistance, resilience, and accommodation within Thailand and Myanmar, showing how the Shan have forged a homeland and identity during great upheaval.
This book discusses contemporary film in all the main countries of Southeast Asia, and the social practices and ideologies which films either represent or oppose. It shows how film acquires signification through cultural interpretation, and how film also serves as a site of contestations between social and political agents seeking to promote, challenge, or erase certain meanings, messages or ideas from public circulation. A unique feature of the book is that it focuses as much on films as it does on the societies from which these films emerge: it considers the reasons for film-makers taking the positions they take; the positions and counter-positions taken; the response of different communit...
With a young population of more than 52 million, an ambitious roadmap for political reform, and on the cusp of rapid economic development, since 2010 the world’s attention has been drawn to Myanmar or Burma. But underlying recent political transitions are other wrenching social changes and shocks, a set of transformations less clearly mapped out. Relations between ethnic and religious groups, in the context of Burma’s political model of a state composed of ethnic groups, are a particularly important “unsolved equation”. The editors use the notion of metamorphosis to look at Myanmar today and tomorrow—a term that accommodates linear change, stubborn persistence and the possibility of dramatic transformation. Divided into four sections, on politics, identity and ethnic relations, social change in fields like education and medicine, and the evolutions of religious institutions, the volume takes a broad view, combining an anthropological approach with views from political scientists and historians. This volume is an essential guide to the political and social challenges ahead for Myanmar.
We live in a world populated not just by individuals but by figures, those larger-than-life people who in some way express and challenge our conventional understandings of social types. This innovative and collaborative work takes up the wide range of figures that populate the social and cultural imaginaries of contemporary Southeast Asia—some familiar only in specific places, others recognizable across the region and even globally. It puts forward a series of ethnographic portraits of figures that represent and give voice to something larger than themselves, offering a view into social life that is at once highly particular and general. They include the Muslim Television Preacher in Indon...
Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in which we draw our mental maps. Covering the early modern and modern periods, Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery investigates the asymmetrical and multi-directional structure of such encounters within Europe as well as in a global context. Exploring subjects from the shores of the Russian Empire to nation-making in Latin America, the international team o...
November 2010 sees the first elections in Myanmar/Burma since 1990, to be held as the culmination of the military regime's 'Road Map for Democracy' The conditions under which the elections are being held are far from favourable, although the laws and procedures under which they will be conducted have been in place for seven months and quite widely publicized. Political controls remain repressive, freedom of expression and assembly does not exist, and international access is restricted by government controls as well as sanctions. While the elections represent a turning point for Myanmar/Burma, the lead-up period has not been marked by many notable improvements in the way the country is governed or in the reforming impact of international assistance programmes. Presenters at the Australian National University 2009 Myanmar/Burma Update conference examined these questions and more. Leading experts from the United States, Japan, France, and Australia as well as from Myanmar/Burma have conributed to this collection of papers from the Conference.
Ethnicity, Borders, and the Grassroots Interface with the State brings together exciting new work by anthropologists working on mainland Southeast Asia. The volume honors anthropologist Charles F. Keyes and the chapters here address concepts central to Keyes’ own work—ethnicity, religion, and modernity—as they can be applied to the countries of Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The volume also reflects recent scholarly interest in “cross-border” issues, as reflected both in the complexity of identity, where ethnic groups extend across boundaries, and in increasing cross-border mobility. The volume is divided into three sections. The first, “The State and Public Ceremony,” ...