Class 16 - Indigineity in Myanmar

Welcome back!

In this session, we’re going to try to get to grips with this idea of indigeneity by working through the arguments in Michael Dunford’s paper. Dunford refers to Stuart Hall’s work race, and on the work of Ian Baird and Tania Li to say, “a particular type of positioning that variously draws on history, landscapes and repertoires of meaning … that emerges through different varieties of struggles and engagement.” Indigeneity is… a floating signifier! And this leads to the problem that there is a distinction between the international legal concept of indigeneity, and the indigenous Myanmar concept of indigeneity.

So the central questions Dunford raises are these:

1. What is the concept of indigeneity in international law and scholarship, and what are the problems with this concept?
2. Dunford references Hall’s work on “floating signifiers”. It seems relevant here: how does indigineity act as a floating signifier in Myanmar / Burma?
3. How does the idea of indigeneity differ from the the Burmese concept of တိုင်းရင်််းသား taingyinthar)?
4. What are the implications of the tensions between these ideas?

I’m going to get you talking about these to start the session.

Feedback and discussion

There’s a lot to talk about, so I want each group to report back in some detail about what they have discussed. We’ll try and pin down this slippery term “indigeneity” a bit more.

BREAK

Ethnicity and Indigeneity in Maynmar

Note again that the current ethnic groupings in Myanmar are, to some extent, a legacy of the British colonial regime. So some of these large umbrella terms — Chin, Kachin, Karen — grouped together peoples who may not have had a great deal in common, but also granted specific rights and privileges.

Dunford follows the complex history of indigeneity through Burmese post-war politics. What is particularly interesting is the following question: if being indigenous is considered to confer certain rights, when who gets to be indigenous? But Dunford’s question also raises a more disturbing question: does being non-indigenous mean an absence of any rights? And this brings us to the case of the Rohingya.

Are the Rohingya indigenous?

As Dunford writes, the idea of indigeneity, or what it requires to be considered a တိုင်းရင်််းသား taingyinthar, or national race, is that a particular people should be “in the territory demarcated as Union of Burma before the first Anglo-Burmese War, which took place in 1824.” In this picture, Bamar Burmese are considered to be exclusively indigenous, in that they do not form cross-border communities, unlike other indigenous groups (this, as Dunford points out, is not true). So their indigeneity is, the argument goes, somehow more fundamental.

In 2014, U Thant Kyaw, Deputy Foreign Minister of Myanmar, said that in no sense could the Rohingya be considered indigenous. They are excluded by the 1982 citizenship law, despite the fact that Mulsims have been in the area since the 9th century CE, and Bengali muslims since the 15th century.

In the 21st century, this exclusion of Rohingya has formed the backdrop for anti-Muslim violence, and for policies and practices of what the government have called “clearance” that, as the United Nations investigation in 2018 established, meet the threshold for criminal investigation for genocide (https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G18/274/54/PDF/G1827454.pdf?OpenElement).

Discussion

In small groups, I want you to take two Burmese ethnic groups — the Rohingya and the Karen. What I want you to do is explore the following questions:

1. For each of these groups, what significance does the idea of indigeneity have?
2. For each of these groups, why is the Burmese legal notion of တိုင်းရင်််းသား taingyinthar salient?
3. In what ways can concepts of တိုင်းရင်််းသား taingyinthar / indigeneity serve to protect people’s rights in Myanmar / Burma?
4. In what ways have these concepts undermined people’s rights?
5. Do you think that Dunford’s conclusion — “there is a chance that Indigenous Peoples and related organisations could play a role in ending Myanmar’s civil wars and securing the recognition and autonomy that many seek” — is realistic? Does the coup and its aftermath make it more or less realistic?

Homework