Mapping ethnicity in nineteenth-century Burma: When ‘categories of people’ (lumyo) became ‘nations’

Abstract

Successive wars and the establishment of a border between the kingdom of Burma and British India in the nineteenth century challenged Burmese conceptions of sovereignty and political space. This essay investigates how European, and more specifically Anglo-American, notions of race, nation, and consular protection to nationals, progressively informed the Burmese concepts of ‘categories of people’ (lumyo) and ‘subject’ (kyun). First, I present the semantic evolution of these concepts in the 1820s–1830s, following the annexation of the western Burmese province of Arakan by British India in 1824. Then, I argue that the Burmese concept of lumyo was progressively associated with the European concept of ‘nations’ in the 1850s–1860s, following the annexation of Lower Burma in 1852. Finally, I uncover developments in the 1870s, when British consular protection extended to several freshly categorised ‘nations’, such as Shan, Karenni, and Kachin.

Reassessing Reification: Ethnicity amidst “Failed” Governmentality in Burma and India

“…To explain why “Bamar” (and other lumyo s) resisted reification, we can look to previous sociological reality: the persistence of a plurality of categorization modalities. Candier’s recent review of Burmese precolonial conceptions of lumyo , a term she translates as “categories of people” (2019: 347–51), provides evidence. Candier adduces a number of people-labeling typologies circulating in eighteenth-century Burma that appear divergent from the conceptions ostensibly brought during colonialism: whether the 101 lumyo that drew upon Buddhist cosmology and remained nebulous; to administrative distinctions that divided Burmese subjects into four key divisions—kings (lord-warriors), priests, wealthy, and peasants; to the upland/lowland distinction described by Leach (1959) and Lieberman (1984: 136), the coexistence of multiple categorization projects militated against categorical fixity.…”

“…Yet, Lehman does not explain how these European ideas diffused. Candier (2019: 358), making a similar diffusionist argument, attributes the shift to the outcome of international relations in the context of transnational commercial exchanges, but she likewise provides no rationale for why such ideas became hegemonic. It is here that the governmentality argument emerges, since it at least provides a mechanism for reification: revolutions in categorization reinforced by extensions of governance through those categories was meant to have made those categories real.…”