Myanmar’s hidden-in-plain-sight social infrastructure: <i>nalehmu</i> through multiple ruptures

Roberts, Jayde Lin; Rhoads, Elizabeth

doi:10.1080/14672715.2021.2002703

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…16 These efforts coincided with the increasing awareness among the rural population of the significance and need for such documentation. These documents, for example, are increasingly needed to access formal employment, enroll in schools, purchase and sell land, and travel domestically and internationally (Roberts and Rhoads 2022). Moreover, in 2019, villagers shared with me that they had more desire to travel, which necessitated documentation to pass through check points and stay in other areas.…”

Section: Citizenship Conferral In Historical Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

“… 6. Indeed, as Jayde Roberts and Elizabeth Rhoads (2022) point out, the moto “being swallowed by the earth will not cause a race to become extinct, only another people will make a race extinct” is stated across the website and office walls of Myanmar’s Ministry of Labor, Immigration, and Population. In other words, there is the fear of foreign invasion through foreigners taking over the country’s ethno-national population. …”

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confidence: 99%

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“The Ancestral Line is through the Father”: The Gendered Production of Statelessness in Rural Myanmar

McAuliffe¹

2023

Law Soc. Inq.

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Myanmar’s citizenship law is stratified by ethnic membership, but, on the books, it is gender neutral. Much attention has therefore focused on ethnic discrimination codified in the law. But individuals whose ethnic identities should provide them with a legitimate claim to citizenship continue to face barriers. Why is this the case? This article examines the additional obstacles that women face legitimating their ethno-national membership and conferring citizenship on their children, despite the gender neutrality of the citizenship law. I argue that the patriarchal structure of evidentiary documentation and patrilineal understandings of ethnic membership transmission shared by village leaders operating as key gatekeepers influence which parent’s claim—father’s or mother’s—to taingyintha (Indigenous or national ethnicity) membership can strengthen or weaken an individual’s chances of obtaining citizenship. The ethno-national identity of women is not evaluated equally to that of men, challenging women’s ability to capitalize on their taingyintha identity for citizenship purposes and contributing to the reproduction of statelessness across generations. I focus on this intersection of gender and ethnicity in establishing ethno-national membership and citizenship across variation in regional geopolitical environments to expand socio-legal knowledge on how formal and informal discrimination together exacerbate inequalities beyond the letter of the law.

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Section: Citizenship Conferral In Historical Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Ancestral Line is through the Father”: The Gendered Production of Statelessness in Rural Myanmar

McAuliffe¹

2023

Law Soc. Inq.

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“…Burma lacks not only a biometric identification system but even a centralized database for those who hold its rudimentary card. Moreover, a third of the population lives without this card (Myanmar Census 2014), and while such cards are necessary for accessing formal sectors—tertiary education, finance, and employment (Roberts and Rhoads 2021)—these sectors’ substantive inaccessibility to millions is a function of poverty rather than regulatory exclusion. Further, the state has not standardized the use of surnames (a prerequisite of state-ness, according to Scott, Tehranian, and Mathias [2002]), meaning that nicknames and nommes de guerre proliferate (Selth 2010), which allows activists to evade state security (Houtman 1999: 29).…”

Section: Postcolonial Governmentality and Ethnicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Prasse‐Freeman

2023

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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In part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were “reified” and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing “reification” through the concept of governmentality to distinguish modes of regulation and the kinds of social responses incited, suggesting that India and Burma stand as respective exemplars of distinct governmental forms. Specifically, scholarship represents Indian population groups (of caste, tribe, ethnicity, etc. permutations) as being reified by dense and reinforcing applications of knowledge/power. Even when these various and interlinking regulatory apparatuses “fail” to accurately describe social reality, they interpellate a response from subject populations, a process that operates to dialectically reinforce the categories. Conversely, similar governmental apparatuses desultorily implemented in Burma have operated differently. While they have succeeded in making South Asian and Muslim subjects into Burma’s self-perceived constitutive outside, governmentality has “doubly failed” on its taingyintha (indigenous) subjects. Poor knowledge of these Burmese peoples has foreclosed intensive projects of knowledge production, leading to “misinterpellation,” a form of metapragmatic awareness in which subjects recognize that discourses misdescribe them, and then strategically maneuver with(in) those labels. Ethnic emblems become hollow integuments navigable with comparative ease, as individuals modify their particular bodily and dispositional indices. The article concludes by encouraging comparative postcolonial governmentality studies that would delineate particularities in a concept (governmentality) that often remains unnuanced.

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“…Described by Elizabeth Rhoads (2020) as part agents, part fixers and part mediators, informal brokers connected buyers and sellers and established a degree of confidence for both in a poorly regulated real estate market, rife with false documentation. Brokers offered this “guarantee”, alongside informal support and contacts needed for processing required paperwork, drafting necessary contracts and managing Myanmar’s opaque bureaucracy (Roberts and Rhoads 2022), for a fee, usually between three and five percent of the closing price.…”

Section: Making Myanmar’s Digital Land Marketmentioning

confidence: 99%

Networks of Speculation: Making Land Markets on Myanmar Facebook

Wittekind

Faxon

2022

Antipode

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Digital platforms have changed how property is sold and valued in the Global North, yet little is known about digital tools in emerging land markets. Drawing on in situ and digital ethnography, we argue that Facebook plays a key role in making a new kind of market in Myanmar, one in which land is transformed into a speculative asset, exchanged across ever‐expanding networks. While commodification is familiar within longer histories of capitalism, this case highlights the significance of digital platforms to the contemporary remaking of property relations. Unlike classic cases of market‐making enabled by active state regulation, Myanmar’s digital land markets were forged in the context of state absence by brokers who harnessed the technological affordances of social media to increase the scale, scope and speed of transactions. This creative re‐appropriation of the platform forged new, unregulated digital markets that ultimately accumulated corporate profits and intensified participant risk.

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Myanmar’s hidden-in-plain-sight social infrastructure: nalehmu through multiple ruptures

Cited by 12 publications

References 43 publications

“The Ancestral Line is through the Father”: The Gendered Production of Statelessness in Rural Myanmar

“The Ancestral Line is through the Father”: The Gendered Production of Statelessness in Rural Myanmar

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

Networks of Speculation: Making Land Markets on Myanmar Facebook

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