Oh, I am so bad.
Looks like I'm back to posting about how I don't ever post.
School seems to do this to me.
What can I say? By and large, I find what I'm doing in school interesting. Which is why I'm here. But it doesn't make for great narrative. As in -- I actually spent a fair chunk of my day in a very involved discussion about how to best diagram the fluid and variegated nature of the plural society that existed (according to some, but not all scholars) in the Burma Delta in the early twentieth century.
Actually though, today was a rather more interesting day than usual. I had the opportunity to have lunch with Zainah Anwar, the executive director of Sisters in Islam a feminist group based in Malaysia. Apart from offering a very interesting vision of Islam, one that manages to be both iconoclastic and devout, she was a fun person to get to hang out with for a bit. I am planning to write a profile of her for a class assignment, so more on her later.
I also had the chance to attend a screening of Agent Orange: A Personal Requiem by Masako Sakata, a visiting scholar from Japan at the J School. Her husband, an American Vietnam veteran, took ill and died, quite suddenly, at the age of 54. Masako's search for insight into the underlying causes of his death pointed increasingly to his exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Eventually, her own personal quest to survive his death led Masako to travel throughout Vietnam, meeting Vietnamese villagers who suffer from diseases they believe are caused by the dioxin in Agent Orange, and whose children suffer from horrible birth defects, even 3 generations after the war.
It was a difficult film to watch -- lots of long, lovingly shot cuts of terribly deformed children -- but very moving, especially because Masako's personal journey is so much a part of the story.
Unfortunately, the film is unlikely to get much distribution in the U.S., but keep an eye out for it.
...And now that I've cracked the guilt barrier about posting, perhaps I'll be writing more.
About Me
- Isabel E
- I notice that most of my posts begin with apologizing for not posting more. I drink too much coffee, don't sleep enough, and am more likely to run into friends at the library than at the bar. Once upon a time, though, I had an exciting life that involved traveling all over the world and otherwise leaving the house. I intend to resume these things some day...
5 comments:
I'd love to hear what you came up with in terms of the fluid and variegated nature of plural society in the Burma Delta. Not knowing a whole lot about this period, I definitely have a gap to fill!
Perhaps I'm too quick to assume that nobody else could possibly be interested in this kind of stuff...
Schematically, the best we could come up with was a variation on the standard idea of a tiered pyramid -- i.e. a small number of Europeans on top, overseas Indians and Chinese below, and the mass of Burmese on the bottom {with, perhaps, a very thin strata of minority ethnic groups under them}.
Both Adas, and to an extent Furnivall, complicate this picture, by pointing out the varying economic status within, as well as between, ethnic groups. There were, for example, both Burmese officials and landless Burmese laborers, just as there were both Indian doctors and Indian dockworkers. There do not, however, seem to gave been any appreciable numbers of European coolies or Karen bureaucrats. So, at both the top and the bottom, the pyramid looks basically the same as "conventional wisdom" dictates. The middle of the pyramid, though, looks different. The relatively small populations of Indians and Chinese, and the much larger group of Burmese should be situated side by side, each group vertically extending through strata ranging from officialdom to dispossession.
This, however, is just a thought exercise in how to draw a two-dimensional diagram. One of these days, though, I'd love to have a discussion about what this array actually meant.
Thanks for the thoughts! However uncouth the pyramid might be, you're right. It's definitely a good exercise. The middle is always complicated isn't it?
Sorry to come back to this but I was thinking about sojourner colonization in places like Burma this morning...
I'm wondering where the European ability to lump both populations and landscape together as one determinative Environment plays into the pluralstic society in the Burma delta. Thining about acceptance, resistance, and suffering, what sorts of reciprocal processes are at work between Burmese plural society and Europeans striving for human and environmental modification?
No need for apologies. A lot of the reason I decided to come to grad school was because I want to be thinking about and discussing these kinds of things.
One thing that needs to be kept in mind is what exactly we mean when we talk about pluralism or a plural society. In common usage, these terms are generally used to refer to tolerance of, and engagement with, diversity. You can certainly argue that a lot of discourse about tolerance and multiculturalism is a cowardly way to avoid dealing with very real social inequalities, but in general I think it’s safe to say that tolerance is a positive and empowering ideal.
However, the concept of a “plural society,” as introduced by Furnivall, has a very specific and very different definition. He {and other social scientists following his model} used it to describe a lack of unity or common social will. In Burma’s case, this condition resulted from the erosion of traditional society caused by the British colonial administration, and Burmese society’s subsequent inability to adapt to and encompass the flood of Indian and Chinese migrants that came with the empire. Instead of forming a common culture, society fragmented. This was reinforced by colonial policy, which opened particular occupations only to specific ethnic groups. {For example, urban industrial labor was almost exclusively the provenance of “alien” Asians}
As a result, people were divided by ethnic blocs. But they also lacked unity within those blocs. For example, a Burmese agricultural laborer would view himself as being in opposition to both his Burmese employer, and also to “Indians,” whom he would lump together as a monolithic bloc. An Indian, however, would distinguish herself not just from Burmese, but also from Indians of other religions, other linguistic groups, other castes and other economic classes. Without a common social life, ethnic solidarity did not develop across classes, nor class solidarity across ethnicity. The only forum in which these groups interacted was the marketplace – an arena tightly controlled by the British, and by its nature competitive and individualistic.
In this case, I think pluralism was not so much an element of a “lumping together” but an extremely effective manifestation of divide-and-rule tactics.
Interesting to note, by the way, that for all of his insight and the damage caused by colonial policy, Furnivall – himself a colonial official – didn’t really question the morality of the colonial project, and La Mission Civilitrice, as a whole.
He did advocate independence though, and viewed nationalism as the only force capable of forging a plural society into a unified whole. One of his case studies: the United States, where flag-waving, chest-thumping patriotism, and the idea of being “American” may be the only thing that holds society together.
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