Insight Myanmar
“In Chiang Mai, in 1998, I met some Burmese activists and I was not only impressed and humbled by their incredible experience, but also became engaged and interested as well,” says Jane Ferguson in a podcast with Insight Myanmar. “The direct experience of working with folks and getting to know a little bit more about the ethnic tapestry, and then the ongoing civil war in Burma, made me want to ask more anthropological questions related to that.”
This interest would ultimately lead to an academic career, and the subject of today’s talk is Ferguson’s recent book, Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred. The book’s title refers to Shan attempts to reclaim their land and community after many years of conflict. “This idea of repossession as both a concept and as a metaphor, it engages these different aspects of, ‘What does rightful ownership mean? What does the law mean? What does territory mean?, ’across different historical time periods.”
Ferguson’s study of Shanland— which borders China, Laos, and Thailand, and encompasses the infamous “Golden Triangle”— starts with the legendary heroic figure, Suerkhan Fa, whose story blends history with mythology. “Every major Southeast Asian nation state that’s based on an ethnic majority group will have its national heroes that lived in the past,” she explains. “Their kingdoms were in decline, but then there was somebody strong and charismatic who was able to unite all of the kingdoms into a strong and thriving empire. The idea of a historical Golden Age is really important for ideas of nationalism in the present.”
Her theory that contemporary Shan leaders are working to “repossess” the region connects to Suerkhan Fa as the heroic figure who returned from exile to create a Shan empire that united its divisions. In this way, the Suerkhan Fa narrative underscores the historic lack of unity among Shan groups, including into the present.
Ferguson discusses the tendency to superimpose concepts of the present in trying to understand the past. One manifestation of this is the more modern idea of people having a national or pan-ethnic identity. “You don’t know you’re a citizen of a place unless there’s some mechanism for you to learn
about it,” she says. In other words, especially in long ago history, one would likely have no sense of belonging to anything beyond one’s family, community and religion, especially not the somewhat abstract notion of “nation” or “empire” without specific messaging about what that state comprises, how one is a member of it, and what one’s responsibilities as a member of the state are. This certainly describes the Shan and their lack of a sense of belonging to some sort of larger, historical, pan-Shan “nation.”
For Jane Ferguson’s full discussion of these issues, check out the podcast on Insight Myanmar here:
https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2024/4/5/episode-228-shan-chronicles
