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  • From the Editor
  • Lilian Handlin

This issue of The Journal of Burma Studies illustrates the vibrancy and relevance that established and new scholars are bringing to the field of Myanmar Studies. The articles cover macro and micro concerns, exploring the opportunities the field offers for innovative research, re-reading of seemingly established evidence, and recovery of new materials, furthering badly needed re-evaluations. The great achievements of earlier scholarship notwithstanding, that scholarship has also saddled the Myanmar historical narrative with no longer tenable interpretations. Re-evaluations concerning the most fundamental structures of Burmese history, as well as narrower readings of inscriptional evidence and other sources that refresh the authorized narrative, have great relevance for current developments. Contemporaries’ handling of Myanmar’s most recent transitions is shadowed by past experiences that in turn will determine how the country’s most important institutions will live in the 21st century’s world.

“Those Men in Saffron Robes,” Michael Aung-Thwin’s overview of Myanmar’s state and sangha interactions in the monarchical and post-monarchical period comes at a time when what the author has called a 900-year-old punctuated equilibrium is under stress. And more so since the days of the Raj when the abolition of the monarchy removed one of this society’s twin stabilizing pillars. An ancient patron-client relationship collapsed when the colonial state refused to sustain the sangha as monarchs had done since the 11th century. Independence ushered in further adjustments when the potential patron turned out to be a secular, modern republic with its inherited but also innovative notions of authority, legitimacy, and responsibility. The evolution of concepts of state and politics, especially the battle for independence in the turbulent pre-1948 period, further fragmented the sangha, undermining its earlier notional integrity and cohesion, and also enabling for the first time the emergence of a hitherto unfamiliar type, the mobilized and politically active monk. [End Page i]

In the first post-independence decade, the new state legislated a closer relationship between the sangha and authorizing institutions, also mobilizing the monkhood as a weapon in ideational battles against alien ideologies like communism. When as inevitably was going to be the case, politics and pieties collided, successive Myanmar governments tried in various ways to make the institution more amenable to a modernizing state’s needs. As the author shows, such moves aimed to resurrect a patron-client structure but within a parliamentary rather than monarchical system and at a time of unprecedented disarray. The intervention of the army and the creation of the so-called caretaker government, was followed by a two-year hiatus that in 1962 ushered in the more than decade-long rule of general Ne Win’s Revolutionary Government of Myanmar. The latter ’s attempts to harness the sangha’s privileged authority on behalf of what was called the Burmese Way to Socialism reflected a growingly coherent state, governed by a one-party system, a disciplined military structure, and stronger and more far reaching civilian provincial administrative structures. An ancient institution, the sangha, was brought into the 20th century.

How these influential moves played out in the post-1988 period is the subject of the article’s conclusion. What has been called the Saffron Revolution (2007) is examined by the author in light of the issue of politicization — to argue that what happened was neither saffron, nor a revolution. The issues raised have profound implications for the sangha’ s future and cannot be understood without a grasp of the institution’s past.

In contrast to Aung-Thwin’s sweeping overview of Myanmar’s two most determinative societal institutions, Mark Clement’s article brings to life the adventures of an Anglo-Indian merchant, Henry Gouger, whose Ava sojourn and incarceration during the First Anglo Burmese War (1824–26) generated years later A Personal Narrative of Two Year’s Imprisonment in Burmah, published in 1860 . The author examines what he calls the mentalité of a private trader in the 19th century, against the background of the competition between two expanding empires, that of Ava and the English East [End Page ii] India Company. By drawing upon the recent literature on travel narratives and cross-cultural encounters, the...

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