‘Making Religion’ as a Form of State Territorialisation in Southeastern Myanmar
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22439/cjas.v42i1.7333Keywords:
Buddhism, infrastructure, state territorialisation, charismatic monks, MyanmarAbstract
This paper analyses religious infrastructure projects of saintly and charismatic Buddhist monks as a process of state territorialisation in conflict- affected areas of southeast Myanmar. Amongst lay Karen Buddhists, infrastructure projects which are conceived in the name of ‘making religion’ (thathana pyu) and spreading the sāsana are widely seen as an expression of compassion, so that they can make merit and build a peaceful Buddhist polity. However, in some areas, these missionisation projects have also inflicted brutal violence on local communities—both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. Drawing on a burgeoning anthropological literature that looks at religious works as a form of infrastructure, this paper explores projects of ‘making religion’ and demonstrates how they hold both enchanting and pernicious qualities for local people, when embedded in processes of state territorialisation. Coinciding with ongoing attempts by the Myanmar military to explicitly and actively missionise contested Karen territories, I argue that these projects can be understood as part of a broader nationalist project from the state to consolidate territorial control in restive parts of the country.
References
Appel, Hannah, Nikhil Anand and Akhil Gupta, A. 2018. ‘Introduction: Temporality, Politics and the Promise of Infrastructure.’ In Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel (eds.) The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1-38.
Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel. (eds.). 2018. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press.
Aung Zaw. 2024. ‘Unholy Alliance: Myanmar’s Mercedes Monks and the Men in Green.’ The Irrawaddy, 7 June. https://www.irrawaddy. com/opinion/commentary/unholy-alliance-myanmars-mercedes -monks-and-the-men-in-green.html (accessed 14 October 2024).
Callahan, Mary P. 2004. Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Caple, Jane. 2017. ‘The Ethics of Collective Sponsorship: Virtuous Action and Obligation in Contemporary Tibet.’ Religion and Society: Advances in Research 8: 145-57.
---. 2020. ‘Rethinking Tibetan Buddhism in post-Mao China: 1980- 2015.’ Review of Religion and Chinese Society 7 (1): 62-91.
Caple, Jane and Sarah Roddy. 2023. ‘The Stakes of Religious Fundraising: Economic Transition and Religious Resurgence in Irish Catholicism and Tibetan Buddhism.’ Journal of Cultural Economy 16 (5): 698-715.
Carse, Ashley. 2016. ‘Keyword: Infrastructure - How a Humble French Engineering Term Shaped the Modern World.’ In Penelope Harvey, Casper B. Jensen, and Atsuro Morita (eds.), Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 27-39.
Chambers, Justine. 2019. ‘Towards a Moral Understanding of Karen State’s Paradoxical Buddhist Strongmen.’ Sojourn 3 (4): 258-289.
---. 2024. Pursuing Morality: Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.
Chambers, Justine and Shaun Butta. 2019. A Housing Land and Property (HLP) Rights Based Analysis of Customary Land Dispute Resolution in Eastern Bago Region and Kayin and Shan State. Yangon: MyJustice, British Council.
Chambers, Justine and Nick Cheesman. 2024. ‘Revolution and Solidarity in Myanmar.’ Journal of Contemporary Asia 54 (5): 741-758.
Cohen, Paul (ed.) 2017. Charismatic Monks of Lanna Buddhism. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.
Cons, Jason and Michael Eilenberg (ed.). 2019. Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia. Antipode Book Series. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Dalakoglou, Dimitris and Penelope Harvey (eds.). 2014. Roads and Anthropology: Ethnography, Infrastructures, (Im)mobility. New York: Routledge.
Dressler, Wolfram and Eulalio R. Guieb III. 2015. ‘Violent Enclosures, Violated Livelihoods: Environmental and Military Territoriality in a Philippine Frontier.’ Journal of Peasant Studies 42 (2): 323-45.
Falk, Monica Lindberg and Hiroko Kawanami. 2018. ‘Monastic Discipline and Communal Rules for Buddhist Nuns in Myanmar and Thailand.’ Journal of Buddhism, Law and Society 3: 39-68.
Ferguson, J. P. 1978. ‘The Quest for Legitimation by Burmese Monks and Kings: The Case of the Shwegyin Sect (19th- 20th Centuries).’ In B. L. Smith (ed.) Religion and Legitimation of Power in Thailand, Laos, and Burma. Chambersburg: ANIMA Books, pp. 66- 86.
Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1978–1979. New York: Picador.
Foxeus, Niklas. 2019. ‘The Buddha was a Devoted Nationalist: Buddhist Nationalism, Ressentiment, and Defending Buddhism in Myanmar. Religion 49 (4): 661-690.
Frydenlund, Iselin and Phyo Wai. 2024. ‘Revolution or Order? Buddhist Responses to the 2021 Military Coup in Myanmar.’ Journal of Contemporary Asia 54 (5): 801-823.
Gombrich, R. F. 1988. Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Gravers, Mikael. 1999. Nationalism as Political Paranoia in Burma: An Essay on the Historical Practice of Power. Richmond: Curzon.
--- 2018. ‘A Saint in Command? Spiritual Protection, Justice and Religious Tensions in the Karen State’. Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship 1 (2): 87-119.
Harvey, Penelope and Hannah Knox. 2012. ‘The Enchantments of Infrastructure.’ Mobilities 7 (4): 521-536.
Hayami, Yoko. 2004. Between Hills and Plains: Power and Practice in Socio-Religious Dynamics Among Karen. Melbourne: Kyoto University Press and Trans Pacific Press.
--- 2011. ‘Pagodas and Prophets: Contesting Sacred Space and Power among Buddhist Karen in Karen State.’ Journal of Asian Studies 70 (4): 1083-1105.
--- 2023. ‘Labour of Devotion: Material Construction and Charisma of Saintly Monks in the Myanmar–Thai Border Region.’ The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 24 (1): 18-35.
Hinton, Elizabeth. 1999. Oldest Brother’s Story Tales of the Pwo Karen. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.
Hoelzchen, Yanti. M. 2022. ‘Mosques as Religious Infrastructure: Muslim Selfhood, Moral Imaginaries and Everyday Sociality’. Central Asian Survey 41 (2): 368-84.
Jensen, Casper Bruun and Atsuro Morita. 2017. ‘Introduction: Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments.’ Ethnos 82 (4): 615-626.
Jolliffe, Kim. 2015. Ethnic Armed Conflict and Territorial Administration in Myanmar. Report. Yangon: The Asia Foundation.
Keyes, Charles F. 1987. Thailand: Buddhist Kingdom as a Modern Nation- State. Boulder: Westview Press.
KHRG. 2014. Truce or Transition? Trends in Human Rights Abuse and Local Response in Southeast Myanmar Since the 2012 Ceasefire. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Karen Human Rights Group.
---. 2015. ‘With only our voices, what can we do?’ Land Confiscation and Local Responses in Southeast Myanmar. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Karen Human Rights Group.
Kyed, H. M. (ed.) 2020. Everyday Justice in Myanmar: Informal Resolutions and State Evasion in Times of Contested Transition. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.
Larkin, Brian. 2013. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327-343.
Lund, Christian. 2018. ‘Predatory Peace: Dispossession at Aceh’s Oil Palm Frontier.’ The Journal of Peasant Studies 45 (2): 431-52.
Mahanty, Sango. 2022. Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Makley, Charlene. 2018. The Battle for Fortune: State-led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Mark, SiuSue and Ben Belton. 2020. ‘Breaking with the Past? The Politics of Land Restitution and the Limits to Restitutive Justice in Myanmar.’ Land Use Policy 94 (104503): 1-10.
Matthews, Bruce. 1993. ‘Buddhism under a Military Regime: The Iron Heel in Burma.’ Asian Survey 33 (4): 408-23.
McLaughlin, Levi, Aike P. Rots, Jolyon Baraka Thomas and Chika Watanabe. 2020. ‘Why Scholars of Religion must Investigate the Corporate Form.’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88 (3): 693-725.
McDaniel, Justin. 2011. The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mendelson, E. M. 1975. Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership. New York: Cornell University Press.
Ministry for Immigration and Population. 2016. The 2015 Myanmar Population and Housing Census: Kayin State. Naypyitaw: Ministry for Immigration and Population, The Republic of the Union of Myanmar.
Motta, Stew, Wolf, Aaron. T., and Schipper, E. Lisa. F. 2023. ‘Immaterial Infrastructures and Conflict in the Salween River Basin’. Water Alternatives 16 (3): 793-820.
Mukerji, Chandra. 2009. Impossible Engineering: Technology and territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Oh, Su-Ann. 2013. ‘Competing Forms of Sovereignty in the Karen state of Myanmar’. ISEAS Working Paper. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Osella, Filippo and Daramir Rudnyckyj. 2017. ‘Introduction: Assembling Market and Religious Moralities’. In Daramir Rudnyckyj, and Filippo Osella (eds.) Religion and the Morality of the Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-28.
Parry, Jonathan and Maurice Bloch. 1996 (1989). ‘Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange’. In M. Bloch, and J. Parry (eds.) Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-32.
Peluso, Nancy L., and Christian Lund. 2011. ‘New Frontiers of Land Control: Introduction’. The Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (4): 667-681.
Ray, Reginald. A. 1994. Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values and Orientations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rodgers, Dennis and Bruce O’Neill. 2012. ‘Infrastructural Violence: Introduction to the Special Issue.’ Ethnography 13 (4): 401-412.
Rozenberg, Guillaume. 2010. Renunciation and Power: The Quest for Sainthood in Contemporary Burma. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sarma, Jasnea, Hilary Olivia Faxon and K. B. Roberts. 2023. ‘Remaking and Living with Resource Frontiers: Insights from Myanmar and Beyond’. Geopolitics 28 (1): 1-22.
Schober, Juliane. 1988. ‘The Path to Buddhahood: The Spiritual Mission and Social Organization of Mysticism in Contemporary Burma.’ Crossroads 4 (1): 13-30.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
South, Ashley. 2011. Burma’s Longest War: Anatomy of the Karen Conflict. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute.
---. 2018. ‘“Hybrid Governance” and the Politics of Legitimacy in the Myanmar Peace Process.’ Journal of Contemporary Asia 48 (1): 50-66.
Spiro, Melford E. 1970. Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and its Burmese Vicissitudes. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1976. World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
--- 1984. The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets: A Study in Charisma, Hagiography, Sectarianism, and Millennial Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tosa, Keiko. 2015. ‘Pagoda Construction and “Propagation of Sasana”: Thathana pyu in Myanmar’. Kyoto University Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 53 (1): 137-164.
Thawnghmung, Ardeth Maung. 2008. The Karen Revolution in Burma: Diverse Voices, Uncertain Ends. Washington, DC: East-West Center.
Vandergeest, Peter and Nancy Peluso. 1995. ‘Territorialization and State Power in Thailand.’ Theory and Society 24 (3): 385-426.Woods,
Kevin. 2011. ‘Ceasefire Capitalism: Military-Private Partnerships, Resource Concessions and Military-State Building in the Burma-China Borderlands.’ Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (4): 747-770.
--- 2016. ‘The Commercialisation of Counterinsurgency: Battlefield Enemies and Business Bedfellows in Kachin State, Burma.” In Mandy Sadan (ed.) War and Peace in the Borderlands of Myanmar: The Kachin Ceasefire, 1994-2011. Singapore: NIAS Press, pp. 114-145.
--- 2021. ‘Rebel Territory in a Resource Frontier: Commodification and Spatialized Orders of Rule in Tanintharyi Region, Myanmar.’ Geoforum 124: 371-380.
Woods, Kevin. and Jared Naimark. 2020. ‘Conservation as Counter- insurgency: A Case of Ceasefire in a Rebel Forest in Southeast Myanmar’. Political Geography 83 (102251): 1-11.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Justine Chambers
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
