From the Editors

Paw Oo Thet (1936–1993), whose watercolor painting graces the cover page of the current issue, is today regarded as the foremost exponent of modernism in twentieth-century Myanmar. His work, some of it preserved at Northern Illinois University, reflects an experimental spirit, contending with western and indigenous styles and motifs. Paw Oo Thet’s depictions are said to reflect what some regard as the Burmese people’s buoyant disposition, exemplified in this colorful and vivacious composition. One can only hope that this buoyant disposition is indeed operative, given the difficult transition period the country has now embarked upon, with the decisive victory of the NLD in the last election. Articles in the current issue examine different facets of Myanmar’s historical and contemporary experiences to provide a nuanced under-standing of how the country’s past shadows its present and future. The articles also suggest some of the tools contemporaries inherited from their pasts, to confront present-day challenges.

A country that prides itself on being a guardian of Buddhism, Myanmar has long celebrated a multiplicity of religious approaches. One of the oldest and most widely practiced of these systems is spirit possession and propitiation. The foremost expert on the subject, Bénédicte Brac de La Perrière, succinctly synthesizes her long-standing, in-depth engagement with these practices used by the Burmese for centuries, to understand their place in the world. The article links the author’s interlocutors to their own predecessors, provides a more extended timeline bridging past and present and shows how vestiges of nineteenth-century conceptualizations, believed to have flourished during the reigns of Myanmar’s last kings, have fared in more recent times. Modernity, however defined, generated more articulated explanatory frameworks and definitions of their cults, also encouraging the appearance of specialists servicing an increasingly urbanized clientele. Brac de la Perrière shows how, what she calls the autonomous field of spirit possession, has accommodated itself to what she defines as the Burmese Buddhist culture.

As Burmese cultures engaged modernity, they have spread both through diaspora and intercultural interaction. Heather MacLachlan’s article traces the trajectory not from the west to the rest, but in this instance from Burma to the United States. She shows how concert tours by famous and commercially successful Myanmar performers and musicians during the past few decades sustain interactions between the homeland and diasporas. Such exchanges, in which participants—as performers, sponsors or listeners—become transnational actors, show that current examinations of the workability of transnational cultural flows need to be refocused. Whereas most of the literature has tackled notions of change and hybridity in light of the place where foreign imports are performed, MacLachlan sees continuity between where the music originates, in the home country and where it is performed, determined by shared expectations and behaviors. The article examines factors that facilitate such continuities, and why shared ways of thinking and similar organizational activities inform interfaces between performers, tour organizers, musicians, and theirs fans at home and abroad.

Yi Li revisits the fortunes of the Moulmein Chinese community, and contributes thereby to further illuminating one of the most influential components of the intricate and multifaceted social mosaic creakily housed in the framework colloquially conceived as Myanmar. The article’s focus on Moulmein recalls the influence of J.S. Furnivall, whose analysis of the nature of British imperialism has recently been the subject of much scholarly attention. Yi Li thereby also turns our attention away from the country’s various and ever shifting capitals, to one of its ports. The evolution of Moulmein, center of British Burma between 1826 and 1862, indicates how this important port was much more than what Furnivall called a marketplace. The port’s shifting fortunes during these eventful decades evokes a colonial urban culture in which Cantonese members of the Chinese community were particularly influential. Echoing recent scholarly examinations of interactions between multiple ethnic communities under the umbrella of royal governance, the author fleshes out communal, ethnic, and economic tensions that shaped colonial policies as well as its discourse. The marketplace as a public sphere in an important port...