THE PEASANT AND HER SMARTPHONE: AGRARIAN CHANGE AND LAND POLITICS IN MYANMAR A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Hilary Oliva Faxon August 2020 © 2020 Hilary Oliva Faxon THE PEASANT AND HER SMARTPHONE: AGRARIAN CHANGE AND LAND POLITICS IN MYANMAR Hilary Oliva Faxon, Ph. D. Cornell University 2020 This dissertation investigates how farmers, officials and activists navigate Myanmar’s contemporary political and agrarian transformations. I root my analysis in a particular agrarian landscape—the Kalay Valley—that provides a window onto environmental change and ethnic encounter in a privileged site of Southeast Asian state formation: the seam of the hills and the plains. Ethnographic research in and beyond Kalay allows me to examine how two different ethnic groups, the Burmans and the Chins, negotiate the changing values and meanings of land as collective territory, individual property and a source of livelihoods and community life. Recent economic liberalization and legal reforms have achieved neither democratic nor rural transition, as conventionally conceived. Rather, they have brought new technologies of production, communication and rule into the lives of Myanmar’s 35 million farmers, tools that shape both the stakes and terms of struggles on and for land. Each of three parts of the manuscript makes a distinct contribution that advances scholarship on environment, society and state. First, I bring together scholarship on ethnic and territorial boundary-making with insights from political ecology and agrarian studies to show how the erasure and recovery of political borders is embedded in the creation and closure of smallholder agrarian frontiers. Second, I contribute to debates on property, authority and state formation by analyzing Myanmar’s contemporary land reforms and proliferating land claims through the interlinked analytics of legal debris, elastic land, risky rights and performing property. Third, I bring classic agrarian questions of capital, labor, and class into conversation with work on rural-urban connections and the nascent field of digital geography to analyze the adoption of tractors, combine harvesters and smartphones. I highlight the role of new internet connections in sustaining communities across virtual and physical space, theorizing the ‘digital village’ as a simultaneously rural and virtual sphere, in which both soil and seasons, and the affordances of Facebook, structure social life and land politics. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Hilary Oliva Faxon completed her B.A in Environmental Studies and Masters of Environmental Management from Yale University. Before beginning her M.Sc./Ph.D. in Development Sociology at Cornell, she worked with women’s and land rights activists in Myanmar and environmental conservationists in Bhutan. She is currently a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. v To my mother, Jayne my grandmother, Alicia and my sister, Ma Khine Khine vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ေကျးဇ&း Americans tend to overuse ‘thank you,’ trivializing gratitude by blurting out the phrase in response to common courtesies. Let me here, then, use kye zu tin ba deh in the Myanmar sense: as an expression of appreciation that conveys the depth of my debts. My thanks goes, first, to the many farmers, villagers, officials, activists and entrepreneurs who gave their time and insights to participate in my research. None of this would have been possible without their willingness to share their stories. In Kalay, several friends connected me with interviewees, accompanied me across the valley and welcomed me into their lives over the years. To Hla Hla Win and her family, Mi Nge, Moesess, Migyi and their family, Jesse, Sandar, JK, U Pui-Ah and Joyce Sui: I owe you decades of karaoke. Ngun Siang Kim and Khine Zin Yu Aung’s friendship and research assistance were critical to this project. Thank you, Siang, for your critical mind and sense of adventure. And thank you, Khine Zin, for your tireless travel, transcription and efforts in the name of lu mu ye. I might never have started to learn Burmese without the incentive of participating in lunchtime banter with my colleagues at GEN, including Kaythi, Honey, Phyu Phyu and Aunty Pansy. And I certainly never would have achieved any degree of proficiency without the patience and brilliance of Ma Khine Khine, or enjoyed language study nearly as much without Ko Thi Ha to feed me and Tha Kaun to keep Matthew company. Thank you for welcoming us into your family. Julia Fogerite’s piercing insights, dark humor and costume trunk have been treasured companions since my first night in Yangon. Long discussions at Winstar, especially with Glenn Hunt, David Abrahamson, and Paul Minoletti, comprised perhaps the most fun component of preliminary analysis. Thinking with Jasnea Sarma, Kim Roberts and Sarah Allen continues to be vii a source of strength and an absolute pleasure. I have learned so much from working with Myanmar friends and organizations over the years. Special thanks to Hsi Hsi, Pyo Let Han and Myat Thet Thitsar: you are inspiring researchers, writers and activists who continue to teach me. I came to Cornell to work with Wendy Wolford and to be part of the Southeast Asia Program; this dissertation is shaped by community and scholarship I found in both quarters. I am deeply influenced by Wendy’s brilliant work on land and approach to scholarship and grateful for the incredible group she has cultivated. My thanks to Tim Gorman, Alice Beban, Kasia Paprocki, Youjin Chung, Ryan Nehring, Karla Peña, Ewan Robinson, Fernando Galeana Rodriguez, Delilah Griswold, Kendra Kintzi and Michael Cary for reading many drafts and sharing your own. Ryan and Fernando have read each chapter here at least once and, with Ewan, provided the intellectual and moral support to get me over the finish line; I look forward to returning the favor. Andrew Ofstehage’s mind, mentorship and humor similarly played a key role in my final stages. The SEAP community has provided incredible financial, intellectual and social support over the years. This is, in large part, because of the commitment and hard work of Thamora Fishel. Thanks is also due to James Nagy for his administrative support, Yu Yu Khaing for language and laughter, and MK Long for bike rides and house exchange. Beyond the Wolford Lab and SEAP, I am deeply grateful to my committee: Eli Friedman, Rachel Bezner Kerr and Magnus Fiskesjö. Invaluable advice and much-needed support came at crucial moments from Lindy Williams, Phil McMichael, Durba Ghosh and Marina Welker. My DSOC graduate student colleagues, including Katie Rainwater, Ellie Andrews, Tess Pendergrast, Isha Bhatnagar, Shrey Kapoor, and Rebakah Daro Minarchek, have made the whole thing worth doing. I yearn to sneak upstairs again for a chat with the ineffable Allison Barrett. Collaboration and conversation with Jenny Goldstein taught me new ways to ask viii and answer questions. Maggie Jack’s rigorous and creative research on tech in Southeast Asia provides a continuing source of inspiration. Whitney Taylor’s ability to find and structure an argument has expanded my ideas and capacity to express them. Janet Smith, you’re the smartest of all of us. I am grateful for the financial support of the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Blakemore-Freeman Foundation, Engaged Cornell and FLAS funding from the Southeast Asia Program. Just as critical to my success has been a long line of gifted teachers stretching far back from this terminal degree: Amity Doolittle, Mark Turin, John Mack Faragher, Craig Fehrman, Fred Strebeigh, Rob Leith, Sharon Krauss, Mark Lindberg, Brian Staveley, Mr. D’A. Thank you. It sounds trite but remains true that I could never have finished or even started this project without the love of friends and family. Dr. Paige Weber and Dr. Ginny Peisch have been excellent pacers in a very long race. O’Mara Taylor, Sara Edwards, Pete Sack and Greg Faxon were always a phone call away. Kate Selker turned the drudgery of field notes into a joyful exchange. Hugs from Elise Pinchot—and support from our PNW community—helped get this manuscript done when we arrived in White Salmon as COVID refugees. My grandmother, Alicia Craig Faxon, has provided timeless advice on navigating the academy. My parents nurtured a boundless curiosity and have always encouraged me to go confidently in the direction of my dreams, even when it took me farther away than they ever imagined. Thank you. Matthew has moved across the world and back, sweated out most of his bodily fluids and staved off several core breaches in the course of this project. I will see you on the porch, beh gyi. White Salmon, Washington July 25. 2020 ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Part 1: Territory 1: After the Rice Frontier………………………………………………………………………...56 2: Producing State and Ethnic Territory…………………………………………………………89 Part 2: Law & Claims 3: Legal Debris, Elastic Land and Risky Rights………………………………………………..125 4: Performing Property After Authoritarian Rule………………………………………………165 Part 3: Technology 5: Making Sense of Mechanization…………………………………………………………….191 6: Welcome to the Digital Village……………………………………………………………..231 x PREFACE Fieldnotes. September 24, 2018. We go to see the mye thein kan ya deh lu [the people whose land has been taken]. It’s a sad visit—Siang [my research assistant] is quickly overwhelmed, I am initially not as sensitive as I should be and then perhaps too quiet, wanting to give space for him and his wife to tell their story. It was 1991, after the election, and they and some others had voted NLD, and the military grabbed over 130 acres to make a compound, including their land. They were supposed to get other land—11 acres—but just got a house plot. Someone else had lived there and been kicked out; they feared a curse, and sold it for 40,000 kyats. Those times were so hard—the kids dropped out of middle school, they had to live on the pity of relatives. Perhaps it was punishment for voting for democracy. It is difficult for him to speak about these struggles. He pulls out the documents—faded yellowed folded—and we look at the petition. Figure 1: Hand-drawn map accompanying the petition for compensation or return of land. xi “How did you write this?” I ask. There are more than 50 signatories and back then there were no cell phones. “We’re all farmers, we’re friends, we rode bicycles to visit each other and outside St Mary’s Cathedral there was a typewriter we could hire,” he tells me. Oh! Imagine this. And imagine holding onto this document for almost 30 years. And we have no help for them. Siang and [my friend] have to explain again and again: “She is just a student, but she can tell your story and speak out like it is hard for us to.” On the motorcycle back, [my friend] explains that he thinks my work is good because city people don’t understand the real situation for farmers. I’m grateful they see it that way—see me as a guest from a powerful place without direct means of aid, but with the ability to tell these stories. I want to honor that. xii INTRODUCTION Golden Land ‘Now is a time for us to be bold and ambitious, and bold and ambitious we shall be.’ Daw1 Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader and former global human rights icon, addressed a crowd of over 1,000 businesspeople, officials and journalists wearing Western suits and Burmese2 longyis. We were gathered in the country’s largest convention center, MICC2, for the 2019 Myanmar Investment Forum. The sprawling cement complex stood at the end of one of Naypyitaw’s characteristically empty, dusty, multi-lane highways. This new capital city had been built in the early 2000s at the behest of ruling General Than Shwe, who moved the government from the country’s economic and political hub of Yangon a six hour drive south, allegedly on advice from his Buddhist astrologer. But if Naypyitaw’s creation was superstitious, its design was strategic. The wide avenues and hulking offices were built on land grabbed from smallholder farmers and reflected the priorities of a military junta focused on subduing ethnic militias while extracting natural resources and avoiding public protests. The city was geographically central, politically isolated, and astrologically ordained. Myanmar had been ruled 1 ‘Daw’ is an honorific for senior women; ‘U’ is the equivalent for senior men. ‘Ma’ (for women) and ‘Ko’ (for men) are common terms of respect for slightly older people or contemporaries. 2 Names are confusing in Burma/Myanmar. Throughout this dissertation, I use ‘Burmese’ or ‘Myanmar’ to refer to the national language, the country’s inhabitants, or characteristics that transcend ethnic groups, such as traditional male skirt known as a longyi. I use ‘Burman’ to refer to members of the dominant Burman or Bama ethnic group, in contrast to minority ‘Chin,’ a name for people who alternately refer to themselves as Zo or by the names of dozens of tribes, and are closely related with the Mizo and Kuki in India and Bangladesh. The military government changed the country’s name from ‘Burma’ to ‘Myanmar’ in 1989, though several countries, including the US, have never officially recognized this name change. I refer to the country as Myanmar after 1989 and use ‘Burma’ to refer to the country before this period. However, I follow scholarly convention in referring to academic studies of the country as ‘Burma Studies.’ 1 by successive military juntas since 1962, but in April 2016, the bizarre capital city welcomed a new government: Daw Suu’s National League for Democracy (NLD). I had been to MICC2 twice before: in 2015 to finalize a National Land Use Policy, and again in 2018, to kick off the drafting of a National Land Law. Both times, hundreds of land activists, foreign donors, and staff from the Forest, Agricultural and Attorney General’s Departments had sat for rambling panel discussions, gamely participated in break-out activities, and stood in line for free lunch in the name of land reform. Six months before the Investment Forum, newspapers carried photos of the latest round of peace talks between Ethnic Armed Organizations and the Tatmadaw, the armed forces, held in this space. Together with the Investment Forum, these high-profile events illustrated three key and intertwined foci of Myanmar’s reform efforts: land governance, ethnic federalism, and economic development. I had never seen the convention center this full. During the breaks, I hobbled between MICC2’s massive wings, my feet unaccustomed to high heels after months of sandals and bare feet in the village. Upstairs, interconnecting rooms hosted rows of business booths featuring educational apps and seaside hotels. On the look-out for land issues, I spoke with MAPCO, an agricultural conglomerate courting investment capital for the construction of crop warehouses. I also found agribusiness in unlikely places; at a company called, ‘Ever Flow Logistics,’ the Burmese boss responded to my questions by mentioning that he had been given 5,000 acres of plantation land by the government back in the day. During the military regime, ‘gifts’ of land grabbed from smallholder cultivators were common rewards for officers. Today, the boss told me that 1,000 acres were planted with rubber and 1,000 with mango. Could I provide a loan or information about how to create value-add export products, for example dried mango? I could not, nor could I get a straight answer to who had owned the land previously, what was happening 2 with the 3,000 uncultivated acres, and how a man whose massive concession suggested a military background had repackaged himself as an entrepreneur in the nation’s nascent services industry. Over the next few days, I listened to Ministers from each of Myanmar’s seven Division and seven States make their pitch in the convention’s lower-level auditorium. The Shan Chief Minister, for example, boasted 800,000 acres available for agribusiness development. The Mandalay Chief Minister touted his region’s strategic location between China and India, throwing an English buzzword—‘geopolitics’—into his Burmese speech: ‘in terms of “geopolitics,” ours is the best!’ The Chin State Minister showed pictures of rhododendrons and requested roads for future eco-tourists, while the Sagaing Chief Minister staged a public handshake on an investment in an industrial zone. One of the key initiatives announced at the Investment Forum was a new Land Bank, which would contain information about parcels around the country that were available for development. The creation of a digital catalogue for land implicitly acknowledged the nation’s challenges with land governance, but, unlike carefully- scripted interchanges about managing the ‘situation in Rakhine,’ a veiled reference to the Rohingya genocide, the need to address land conflicts did not feature in any discussion I heard. In keeping with the Forum’s fundraising goals, the positive rhetoric was relentless. The hosts laid out the welcome mat, wishing everyone, as the President of the Chambers of Commerce and Industry put it, ‘a successful visit to our land of golden pagodas, with the golden opportunity.’ The focus on developing rural land and providing formal jobs was perhaps most elegantly illustrated by Serge Pun, a man who headed one of Myanmar’s largest conglomerates and had a reputation for staying out of war, drugs and other popular pastimes of the crony class. His clean rap and charisma had made him beloved of the international investment and development 3 community. On the main stage with the country manager of the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector arm of the World Bank, Serge was jovial and direct. In contrast to Daw Suu’s formal, scripted assertion that, ‘these reforms have had a profound impact on Myanmar,’ the tycoon offered straight talk to his fellow businesspeople: ‘today you hear all this stuff but if you go to the ministry tomorrow they will say ‘ma ya bu, htin deh’ (I don’t think that’s possible). But, it used to be ‘ma ya bu’ (No way)! And soon it might be ‘cho za ya meh’ (We’ll give it a shot)!’ I laughed at Serge’s description of recalcitrant civil servants, which resonated with the rituals of bureaucracy I had noted in my own interactions. If anyone knew how to work the system, it was Serge; his jokes derived from a long, close and lucrative relationship with officials. Serge emanated enthusiasm for his own pet project, the Yangon New City Development, a major industrial complex under construction in the rice paddies east of Yangon. He promised to raise billions of dollars and provide two million new jobs, a number that would represent employment for almost 4% of Myanmar’s population. Picture, he told us, 2,000 workers in each of 1,000 new factories! In her opening speech, Daw Suu marked the date as the birthday of one of Burma’s ancient kings and proceeded to outlined her government’s record of reform—from the Myanmar Investment Law to the Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan—and recite projections of 7.4% economic growth. With a reference to ‘constellations’ that seemed to nod at the continued importance of Buddhist cosmology and in a clipped British accent that evidenced her Oxford education, Daw Suu linked what was happening in her country to the historic rise of Asia in the global economy: Ladies and gentleman, just as Myanmar has undergone rapid social, economic and political constellations in recent times, our world has also been undergoing multiple, concurrent constellations. Throughout the last 40 years our region has experienced the greatest surge of economic growth the world has ever seen. This rapid growth…. has 4 spearheaded the growth of new trade relations, the invention of new technologies and facilitated the movement of people, ideas, goods, services and capital in ways that in the past had never before seemed possible. We live in an era in which Asia is rising, posed to reshape the world… [this moment] presents Myanmar with vast opportunities. In the final minutes of her speech, Daw Suu committed to continued reforms and welcomed her guests to Myanmar, Southeast Asia’s ‘final and best frontier.’ Dual Transformations Contemporary Myanmar is in the midst of dual political and agrarian transformations. As Daw Suu pointed out, new laws and policies have bolstered unprecedented economic growth; as Serge Pun articulated, the vision is a sweeping structural transformation, one that will put poor farmers to work in his factories. Conventional wisdom regards these both as linear transitions, the first from military authoritarianism to free-market democracy, and the second from subsistence agriculture to urban industry. These assumptions about, or aspirations for, modernization as progressive marketization, democratization and urbanization guide development interventions, foreign investments and scholarly analysis. They also animate Myanmar elites. I think, for example, of my first meeting with the director of the master’s degree program at Myanmar’s national agricultural university, who had written a PhD outlining the prospects for a transition to an industrial economy. For the woman charged with training government land management and farm extension staff, agriculture was a thing of the past. There is no doubt that Myanmar has seen major changes in political systems and rural society over the last decade. On November 8 2015, jubilant parties erupted across the nation to celebrate the arrival of Myanmar democracy. Led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and the daughter of the nation’s martyred founder, the NLD swept the polls. The result was a formal end to decades of military-authoritarian rule. This change was the 5 culmination not only of political struggles by exiled and domestic social movements, but also of top-down planning. The military junta’s retiring leader, General Than Shwe, had put in place an accelerating project of liberalization and ‘discipline-flourishing democracy’ that remade the global pariah into a frontier for investment and aid in just a few years (Thant Myint-U 2020). The General’s plan succeeded in spurring the economy—the World Bank reports a seven-fold increase in GDP since 2003, with annual growth rates of between 5.9 and 8.5% from 2012 to 20183—and putting in place a military-reform government (2011-2016) that abdicated peacefully after the NLD’s electoral victory. But as the end of the NLD’s five-year term approaches, disappointment is palpable. Despite Daw Suu’s promises and Serge Pun’s ebullient optimism, investors, like activists, frequently complained to me that the NLD had shut out their voices and shut down their projects. Peace talks with Ethnic Armed Organizations have stalled since the 2015 National Ceasefire and Myanmar has regained its international status as a human rights violator; the International Court of Justice ordered the government to take provisional measures to protect the Rohingya against genocide at the hands of the military in January 2020. Scholars’ shift from investigating the political economy of transition (L. Jones 2014) to declaring this process indefinitely stalled (Stokke and Aung 2020) is reflective of growing doubt in the possibility of a break from military authoritarianism and the prospects of a democratic, post- conflict society. Such efforts to evaluate Myanmar’s democratic turn focus on political economy and formal institutions, often failing to acknowledge or interrogate the sweeping impacts of recent reforms on the nation's predominantly agrarian population. Myanmar’s rural transformation receives far less elite and international attention than its human rights violations or economic 3 Data retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/country/MM. 6 prospects, but is critically important to the nation’s future. Today, about 70% of Myanmar’s population of 54 million live in rural areas and two-thirds of the labor force works in agriculture. Myanmar was once the world’s largest rice exporter, and the crop is still a source of national pride. The country’s diverse agroecologies include sites of rubber and oil palm production in the Southeast, sesame and melons on the central plains, and bananas and swidden agriculture in the hills. Today, agriculture makes up less and less of GDP and migration is on the rise: the International Organization for Migration estimates that 20% of Myanmar’s population were internal migrants in 2014 and quotes government figures stating that 4.25 million Myanmar nationals live abroad, with up to 3 million in Thailand and substantial numbers in Malaysia, China, Singapore and the US.4 Scholars have only begun to explore the implications of this shift for rural livelihoods and labor relations (Vicol, B. Pritchard, and Htay 2018; Belton and Filipski 2019; B. Pritchard, Rammohan, and Vicol 2019). Reforms have created new land rights and regulations, ushered in mechanized agriculture, formalized migration, and made internet access affordable, raising new questions about the legal status, social relations, and economic opportunities of rice farmers and their children. Land lies at a crucial intersection in these dual transformations, key both to the population’s livelihoods and to the practice of government under the NLD. In the early years of reform, assessments of democratic success were sometimes reduced to the question of good land governance. When the former US Ambassador to Myanmar visited Cornell in the fall of 2016, for example, he answered a question about the prospects for post-authoritarian change with, ‘everything is about land.’ Solving land conflict and improving farmers’ lives were key promises of the NLD’s successful 2015 election campaign. The NLD’s election manifesto makes sweeping 4 Data retrieved from https://www.iom.int/countries/myanmar 7 promises about land and rural development, tying together good governance, modern farming and commercialization in their vision for Myanmar democracy: We will work towards the development of a modern farming sector, the fair resolution of farmland disputes, the establishment of land tenure security, and transparency in line with laws and regulations regarding the protection and transfer of farmland. We will work to ensure sufficient access to necessary inputs and finances for the development of the farming sector and rural areas. We will enable access to livelihood programmes for the landless and itinerant workers. Through the development of the agricultural sector, we will also see the bolstering of the industrial and service sectors and increased exports. (NLD 2015, p.9) After winning the election, the NLD built on the initiatives of the military-reform government to put in place new policies with major impacts on agricultural production and rural life. As I show in the pages that follow, rural landscapes have been a central object of government interventions that seek to promote ethnic harmony, grow the economy, rationalize property, and rectify past injustices. At the same time, territory and resources are enmeshed in racialized violence and questions of ethnic belonging that lie at the heart of the current Rohingya crisis, the world’s longest-running civil war, and aspirations for ethnic federalism. Recent economic liberalization and legal reforms have achieved neither democratic nor rural transition, as conventionally conceived. Rather, they have brought new technologies of production, communication and rule into the lives of Myanmar’s 35 million farmers, tools that shape both the stakes and terms of struggles on and for land. In this dissertation, I show how new technologies of land control enable farmers, officials and activists to enact new forms of authority, remake ethnic boundaries, and perform competing claims to property. And I trace the ways in which the adoption of tractors, combine harvesters and smartphones decenters traditional farming work, extends rural life and remakes intersectional relations of ethnicity, class, gender and generation. At the Myanmar Investment Forum and in my conversations in Yangon, Naypyitaw and rural villages, I heard often of the need for Myanmar to ‘catch up,’ a phrasing that betrays a 8 shared belief in a single path towards global modernity. At the Investment Forum, Myanmar’s Foreign Investment Minister doubled-down on the metaphor, promising not a leap-frog, but rather a quantum leap. But Myanmar is not merely a case of democracy, or industrial capitalism, arriving late. The golden opportunities being touted at the Investment Forum, and golden land itself, were not conjured on a blank slate or created in a digital Land Bank, but rather had been forged through specific and often painful histories. This was immediately obvious in encounters like the one I describe in the preface with a farmer whose land had been grabbed by a military battalion. My interviews with dispossessed farmers, which I began conducting in 2014, were often confusing and distressing. They revealed contradicting claims, staggering injustices and persistent inequality that undermined national narratives of progress and raised new, normative questions of who would benefit from future prosperity. People’s stories of their work on and claims to specific landscapes also highlighted the ways in which the outcomes of new reforms were structured by their experiences under military and socialist rule. As Rhoads and Wittekind have shown, contemporary developments in Myanmar, in particular around land and property, draw on preexisting rhetorics and techniques of rule: Transitions in Myanmar's history may be more cyclical and less exceptional than we think. Understanding transition as recurring serves to highlight historical continuity rather than defining the current moment as wholly differentiated from ruptures of the past. Viewed in this way, the current transition underway in Myanmar is not a moment of emergence from isolation, nor productive of a blank slate for investment, but a moment that articulates with previous claims, authorities, and ruptures. (Rhoads and Wittekind 2018, p. 186) These cyclical dynamics are not only temporal, but also spatial. In contrast to Daw Suu’s characterization of Myanmar’s frontier as singular, superlative and finite, an examination of the country’s history reveals that recurrent frontier dynamics have played out in different ways across its diverse geographies. Frontiers are made and remade at national and local scales and 9 around new resources at particular moments (Peluso and Lund 2011). I problematize Myanmar’s dual transformations with attention to the ways in which farmers, officials and activists negotiate the swift and simultaneous arrivals of new modes of governance and rural life within these longer environmental and social histories. To do so, I center the changing use, control, and values of rural land. Myanmar provides a powerful case for understanding global development, state formation and agrarian change more broadly. Political and agrarian transformations often come hand-in-hand, whether 20th Century Vietnam and China or 16th century England (B. Moore 1966; Skocpol 1979; Polanyi 1944). But these contested and interconnected shifts acquire new meanings in a global conjuncture marked by the rise of authoritarian populism (Scoones et al. 2018; Neimark et al. 2019), the exploitation and abandonment of surplus populations (E. Friedman 2017; Yates 2011; Li 2010), and the environmental and political crises of anthropogenic climate change (Paprocki 2018; Ribot 2014). More than ever, the desirability of the presumed destination is now in question. In this sense Myanmar is not ‘behind’ in following other countries on a well-trodden path towards modernity, but rather, as Daw Suu’s speech implies, in the vanguard of new constellations of social, political and economic change in the 21st century. Key Contributions At its heart, this dissertation is about how farmers, officials and activists navigate Myanmar’s contemporary dual transformations. These political and agrarian transformations are simultaneous and swift. They are structured by particular relationships forged with land, the state and local communities during authoritarian, socialist and colonial pasts. I root my analysis in a 10 particular agrarian landscape—the Kalay Valley—that provides a window onto environmental change and ethnic encounter in a privileged site of Southeast Asian state formation: the seam of the hills and the plains. Ethnographic research in and beyond Kalay allows me to examine how two different ethnic groups, the Burmans and the Chins, negotiate the changing values and meanings of land as territory, property and a source of livelihoods and community life. Each of three parts of this dissertation advances an original argument. In part one, I detail the environmental history of the Kalay Valley and analyze the contemporary production of state and ethnic territory. I show how the erasure and recovery of political boundaries is embedded in the creation and closure of a smallholder resource frontier, arguing that understanding contemporary territorialization requires attention to historical processes of agrarian change. In doing so, I build on and contribute to scholarship on resource frontiers (Rasmussen and Lund 2018; Cons and Eilenberg 2019), territorialization (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995), and borders (Reeves 2014; Asad 2004; R. Jones 2012) by demonstrating how smallholder labor shapes not only the physical landscape, but also the articulation of ethnic and political boundaries. In part two, I contribute to scholarship that theorizes the co-production of property, authority and state formation (D. Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011; Sikor and Lund 2009; Skocpol 1979) as well as critical studies of liberal rights and property (Merry 2006; Verdery and Humphrey 2004; Blomley 2013) and land grabbing (S. M. J. Borras and Franco 2012; R. Hall et al. 2015; Wolford et al. 2013; Baird 2014). I explore the process and effects of contemporary land reform by situating new policies in unfolding legal history, lived socioecologies, and cultural notions of rights. I analyze competing claims that emerge in response to NLD promises of restitution and redistribution, arguing that land reforms provide a stage for agentive, though unequal, performances of property. The notion of performance highlights the ways in which multiple, 11 overlapping types of claims, historic power dynamics, and new actors and audiences shape the emergent property regime. In part three, I turn to the ways in which farmers harness newly-available technologies of production and reproduction to remake life on and beyond the land. I bring classic agrarian questions of capital, labor, and class (Bernstein 2004; Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010; McMichael 1997) into conversation with new work on rural-urban interconnections (Rigg 2019; N. L. Peluso and Purwanto 2017) and the nascent field of digital geography (Elwood and Leszczynski 2018; Ash, Kitchin, and Leszczynski 2018). I demonstrate how new modes of agrarian production, mobility and connection are disentangling traditional farming work from village life, and argue for attention to the arrival of new technologies as a lens onto changing rural economies, political tactics, and relations of ethnicity, class, gender and generation. I highlight the role of new internet connections in sustaining communities across virtual and physical space, theorizing the ‘digital village’ as a simultaneously rural and virtual sphere, in which both soil and seasons, and the pervasiveness of Facebook use, structure social life and land politics. Together, these arguments advance a situated and agentive account of dual transformations that informs studies of state formation, agrarian change, and global development. My study provides conceptual and methodological insights into the problem of ethnicity in Southeast Asia and points towards new approaches to studying contemporary Myanmar, area studies contributions that I detail later in this introduction. This dissertation also builds on scholarly conversations on the relationships between land, state and society. Next, I outline this theoretical framing. 12 Theoretical Framing My conceptual approach is shaped by insights in the fields of political ecology, critical agrarian studies and studies of development and state formation. By integrating and extending these literatures, this dissertation provides an account of political and agrarian transformation that explains how contests over land shape new relations of identity and authority. My analysis starts from a conceptualization of land as simultaneously a productive resource, source of political potential, and anchor of identity and community. Political ecology provides a crucial foundation for understanding how the materiality of the landscape – ecology – and the consequences of social difference – politics – mediate natural resource access, use and ownership (Walker 2005; Walker 2007; Peet, Robbins, and Watts 2011; Ribot and Peluso 2003; N. L. Peluso and Watts 2001). New scholarship in feminist political ecology has highlighted the intersectional process through which social relations and resources access are co-constituted (Sultana 2011; Nightingale 2011; Elmhirst 2011; Chung 2017; Sundberg 2004). My project began to take shape in the midst of scholarship on the ‘global land rush,’ which analyzed transnational land acquisitions and social movement responses in the wake of the 2008 food and fuel crisis (Cotula 2013; Scoones et al. 2013; S. M. Borras and Franco 2013) and the ways in which specific local and national histories drive land speculation and capitalist transition in uneven and often unexpected ways (Baird 2014; Edelman and León 2013; Goldstein and Yates 2017; Li 2014a; Sikor 2012; Levien 2013). Scholarship on land grabs highlighted the international dimensions and power relations of 21st century land politics, however, Schoenberger, Hall and Vandergeest (2017) argue this focus also obscured important agrarian- environmental transformations taking place in Southeast Asia, including state territorialization (N. L. Peluso and Vandergeest 2011; K. M. Woods 2019; N. L. Peluso and Vandergeest 2020), 13 migration (Rigg, Salamanca, and Parnwell 2012), resource frontiers (Cons and Eilenberg 2019) and crop booms (D. Hall 2011). Land reforms are often animated by a labor theory of value (Wolford 2007), yet as rural out-migration increases land is no longer necessarily or primarily a site of production (J. Ferguson 2013; Rigg et al. 2018). Land is a locus of new forms of political power, and a continuing source of social life. New technologies of land control, like development projects more generally, may not deliver their stated goals, but they have important and political effects (Li 2007; J. Ferguson 1994). Recent scholarship on land titling in nearby Cambodia, for example, has highlighted the ways in which the anticipation and act of titling transformed the physical landscape and formalized new exclusions (Work and Beban 2016; Dwyer 2015). Throughout this manuscript, I chart the ways in which property and territory claims produce state authority, reify ethnic difference and inaugurate new subjects. In doing so, I acknowledge the continuing power of territory as a political technology in a global moment of rising nationalism (Elden 2013; Murphy 2019). Land provides a crucial arena to make and defend claims to ethnicity and citizenship through battles over property and borders (Cons 2016; Eilenberg 2016; Lund 2011). Work on and struggles over land reconfigure social relations, beliefs and values (Nadasdy 2003; Verdery 1994) and transform rural people into particular types of political subjects (Hetherington 2014). At the same time, land remains a site of rural livelihoods and provides a basis for the broad activities of social reproduction I call making meaningful life (Faxon 2020). These processes of work and care forge intergenerational ties through engagement with particular landscapes, cultivate intimate environmental knowledges, sustain cultural identities, and renew communities. 14 This project centers not only rural land, but also those who call it home. A new and vibrant wave of scholarship has built on the classic agrarian question of the role and fate of rural classes under capitalism (Kautsky 1988 [1899]) by examining the political and cultural economy, lived experiences, and broader significance of contemporary agrarian change (Edelman and Wolford 2017). A series of debates within this fields have examined peasants’ relationships to capitalism, political potential, and gendered roles (McMichael 2006; McMichael 2014; S. M. Borras 2009; Bernstein 2006; Bernstein 2014; Li 2014b; Narotzky 2016; Van der Ploeg 2008; Mintz 1973; E. R. Wolf 1999; Carney and Watts 1990). These debates call into question the constitution, and even the existence, of the rural subject in a world of uneven global connection (Bebbington 2000; Hecht 2010). Recent work in Southeast Asia has highlighted the increasing entanglement of new forms of migration and agrarian change (Kelly 2011; Beban and Gorman 2017; Rigg 2007). Former farmers do not abandon their rural homes or identities; rather they become ‘cosmopolitan villagers,’ (Keyes 2012) whose capital earned abroad often returns to construct ‘remittance landscapes’ (McKay 2005). This dissertation highlights the creative agency of ordinary people as they negotiate overlapping roles as farmers, family members, migrants, minorities and claimants. In doing so, I start not from academic questions of what constitutes the peasant, or from the typical model of Myanmar’s rural people—a man and his ox cart—but from a woman and her smartphone, a figure that emerges from my own empirical observations and feminist politics. Starting from the peasant and her smartphone playfully questions assumptions about who embodies a farmer, a peasant, or a rural citizen, and highlights the shifting relationships of class, gender and mobility that are rapidly remaking rural identities. This dissertation re-centers the state as an actual, expected or absent mediator in processes of agrarian transformation. In doing so, I return to agrarian studies’ foundational 15 emphasis on the relationship between agrarian classes, property and state formation (R. Brenner 1976; B. Moore 1966; Skocpol 1979). However, unlike these structuralist scholars, my approach ‘unbundles’ the state to understand government as a contested process, carried out by multiple, competing actors (Wolford et al. 2013). Following Abrams’ (1988 [1977]) distinction between the powerful state-idea and the practices of the state-system, scholars have convincingly demonstrated the fragmented, enacted, and localized nature of the state (Das and Poole 2004; Hansen and Stepputat 2006; Stepputat 2012; Steedly 1999; Ong 2000). I combine ethnographic attention to everyday practices of state formation from below (Joseph and Nugent 1994; J. C. Scott 1985) with insights into the ‘uncertain authority' (Mathews 2011) of state actors whose daily work of drafting and enforcing land policies takes place within the constraints of coercive bureaucracies (Hull 2012a; Gupta 2012). Rather than reify the divide between state and non-state spaces that surfaces in literature on Southeast Asia (Scott 2009; van Schendel 2002), I approach both Myanmar as a whole, and Kalay Valley in particular, through the analytic of a frontier. In doing so, I contribute to a growing body of literature that seeks to understand overlapping and uneven sovereignty in Myanmar (Harrisson 2020; South 2018; Fiskesjö 2010; Maclean 2008) by highlighting the ways in which contests over resources at the edge of state authority shape national territorial imaginaries and produce new forms of spatial control. While the frontier is a central image of the global capitalist imaginary, it is also allows analysis of both state attempts to extend authority, and local refusals, performances, and cooptations (Barney 2009; Sarma and Siddaway 2020; Tsing 2005). In my case, conceptualizing Myanmar and Kalay’s land as a reoccurring and multi- scalar frontier–of state control, national development, and rice cultivation–centers struggles over land in studies of state formation. 16 This approach departs from classic studies of the Myanmar state that have focused on the role of charismatic leaders, institutions, and the military (Callahan 2003; Taylor 2009), engaging new scholarship on creative negotiations of law, ethnicity, and nation (Cheesman 2015; Roberts 2016; Sadan 2013; Saha 2013). The result is a resounding rejection of the notion of ‘democratic transition,’ in favor of four broad insights into the changing nature of the Myanmar state. First, the state is abandoning agriculture, a shift with implications not only for the national economy, but also for its relationship with millions of people who, for decades, interacted with the government primarily through paying (or avoiding) the rice tax. This leads to a second insight, that the state is reaching people in new ways, through a new class of actors that include Members of Parliament, grassroots land law trainers, NGO directors and Farmers’ Union leaders, and new media, including Facebook pages. Third, the government is in the midst of a historic shift from grabbing land, to governing it. This shift involves normative debates and hinges, finally and crucially, on a renewed attention to racial separation and territorial exclusivity. Throughout this manuscript, I trace how these shifts take place across Kalay’s landscape, and how Burman and Chin farmers, activists and officials negotiate and make sense of them. Orientation A Brief History of Blood and Soil Contemporary efforts to formalize, delineate, and modernize land and agriculture play out in relation to the Myanmar’s contentious political and ethnic history. I provide detailed discussion of the development of agrarian policies, ethnic inclusion, and legal regulation in chapters one, two and three. Here, I briefly outline the relationship between ethnic minorities, land management, and successive government regimes in Myanmar’s uplands and lowlands. 17 Colonial Rule Land has been crucial to generating state income and authority since the British invaded the area then called Burma. The British annexed Myanmar’s western coast, southeast, and central plains in successive Anglo-Burmese Wars (1824-26, 1852-53 and 1885). They governed Myanmar as part of India until 1937 and then as a separate colony until 1948, with the exception of two years of Japanese occupation during World War II. Colonial rule brought a spate of new regulations, many imported from Kolkata and Delhi, which codified a new system of land control designed to make people and resources legible and taxable (Scott 1998). The British introduced a key and abiding principle of formal separation of the directly-ruled agrarian lowlands and the indirectly-controlled, teak-rich, uplands. These different forms of spatial control were enacted in parallel with a project of distinguishing and classifying ethnic groups. British techniques of governance broke with pre-colonial conventions of power and authority in the region. In the central lowlands, dynastic Burman kingdoms held variable, overlapping power over land and labor, with rule particularly concentrated in key cities, ports, irrigated rice-growing areas, and trade routes (Tambiah 2013; M. Sahlins 2008; Aung-Thwin 1984; L. Williams and Guest 2012). Pre-colonial kingdoms had multiple administrative zones: a directly-ruled area often engaged in irrigated rice production, a set of dependent provinces, and loosely-aligned tributary areas (Taylor 2009, 23). Ethnic communities in the hills that surround the central plains developed different patterns of sovereignty, culture and hierarchy forged through borderland flows of goods, ideas and people, and different relationships to lowland kingdoms (Robinne and Sadan 2007; Scott 2009; van Schendel 2002; J. Friedman 1979). In Myanmar as in elsewhere in Southeast Asia, encounter with Western powers brought new ideas 18 and practices of territorialization that fundamentally transformed the relationship between space and nation (Winichakul 1997; Peluso and Vandergeest 2001). A new type of state was imposed under colonial rule, one that governed land as private property as part of a larger imperial project of rice export and resource extraction and formally divided the area and population of lowland ‘Burma Proper’ from the upland ‘Frontier Areas.’ The colonial government set up a rationalized bureaucracy in the lowlands during the 1880s (Taylor 2009, 80-6, 193). The institutions and policies they put in place remain salient today. Century-old farmland maps from the Land Records and Agriculture Department, for example, remain the basis for contemporary land titling, and colonial laws like the 1894 Land Acquisition Act provide a basis for farmers to request compensation for lost land (Mark 2016b). To fund a ballooning bureaucracy, the colonial state transformed the area south of Yangon into what Michael Adas (1974) has termed a ‘rice frontier.’ The British promoted rice production in the lowlands through land grants to peasant proprietors who cleared and cultivated land, doubling the area of cultivated (and taxable) land in Burma proper between 1860 and 1880 (Odaka 2016, 40). While rice production expanded in the lowlands, the British administered the Shan, Kachin, and Chin Frontier Areas indirectly, with a separate legal code. Under The Chin Hills Regulation of 1886, clan and village headmen could govern according to custom, but in ultimate deference to the British and with special rules to regulate firearms, opium and forests. Separate management of the hills and plains, and of hill- and plains-people, was a core tenant of colonial rule that set the stage for struggles over cultural expression, resources, and territorial control in the Independent Union of Burma. Work by colonial anthropologists and commentators emphasized ethnic diversity and fluidity in what J.S. Furnivall (1948) famously called a ‘plural society.’ Ethnic communities had different livelihood practices and political 19 organizations, but the boundary between them was fluid rather than fixed, as Edmund Leach (1954) showed in his seminal analysis of how neighboring tribes changed ethnic identifications by adopting new forms of leadership or agriculture. Like land types, the 135 official ethnic categories used today are rooted in British colonial classifications. British colonial officer- anthropologists played a key role in cultivating and codifying the ethnic differences of hill and plains peoples, creating hierarchical classifications that set the foundation for contemporary identity claims (J. M. Ferguson 2015). Through spatial and social classification, the British made Burma’s territory and population amenable to military control and resource extraction. Independence The 1947 Panglong Agreement, which was signed by Burman, Shan, Kachin and Chin representatives on the eve of independence, bound the Frontier Areas with Burma Proper in the pursuit of freedom and independence. Shortly after the agreement was signed, its architect Aung San was assassinated, an event that, in popular account, doomed prospects for ethnic equality and federalism. During the period from 1948-1962, the new Union of Burma attempted to regulate ethnic minority representation in government, but armed conflict and a rising tide of Buddhist Nationalism eroded the possibility of multiethnic democracy. Service provision was minimal, and substantial portions of the population knew the state only through its military. Historian Robert Taylor estimates that 30 of the 314 townships, hosting about 10% of the nation’s population, were outside of state control during the 40 years after independence (Taylor 2009, 335-6). Many of these areas hosted ethnic militias and troops from the Communist Party of Burma, who fought each other and the Tatmadaw, or Burmese military. In response to widespread violence, the leader, U Nu, ceded control to a military caretake government in 1958- 20 9 before winning the 1961 election on a promise to make Buddhism a state religion. This policy further alienated Christian ethnic minority groups like the Chin (Crouch 2014, 12). But it was not enough to prevent U Nu’s eventual ousting by a military coup. Mary Callahan (2003) has argued that warfare made the state in Burma. National heroes and former fighters started with ‘the rickety yet repressive architecture of colonial states, which was often at odds with their anti- colonial ideological programs,’ (Callahan 2003, 10) and built a durable, coercive and extensive military that would wield power for decades. Nationalizing land was an early priority in the Union. At the turn of the 19th century, migrants had flocked to the Ayarwaddy Delta on the promise of land to those who cleared and worked it, but by the 1930s, millions of acres of rice paddy were owned by Indian money-lenders after Burmese peasants defaulted on their debts. Ending foreign land ownership played a key role in a mobilizing the independence movement in the 1930s and ‘40s, animating both peasant rebellions and urban elite associations. The 1947 Constitution declared all land and resources above and below ground the property of the state. The claim was put into force in the 1948 Land Nationalization Act, which aimed to redistribute land to the land-poor and banned land sale and landlordism. While the Act was barely implemented—only 17% of cultivated land was ever nationalized (Boutry et al. 2017, 66)—it replaced colonial private property with state ownership and farmers’ nontransferable use rights, a system that remained in place until 2012. Socialism Intensifying ethnic conflict provided an excuse for the army to take control in the name of national security. General Ne Win’s 1962 coup ushered in decades of military rule. His Revolutionary Council arrested intellectuals, shuttered universities and abolished prominent 21 institutions of private property and Western-style democracy. Ne Win’s Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) retained control until 1988 and swiftly annihilated the possibility of self-governance within the Union. One of their first acts was to abolish the independent ministries of Arakan and Mon; two years later they eliminated special border zones (Taylor 2009, 302-3). The 1974 Constitution affirmed that sovereignty resided in the center, recognizing seven ethnic states that served as mere symbols of cultural pluralism, without substantive autonomy (Taylor 2009, 305-6). The BSPP asserted control of almost all aspects of agriculture and trade while employing pro-peasant rhetoric and promising land-to-the-tiller as part of what they called, ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism.’ The 1963 Tenancy and Farmers’ Rights Protection Laws were designed to grant land to cultivators and prevent land confiscation by private debt collectors, while 1964 Executive Order I/64 gave a cultivator use rights to land after five years of productive use. These opportunities for cultivation came with new obligations. Most often, these came in the form of a rice tax; the BSPP and its successors would practice varying forms of compulsory rice procurement for 40 years. Currency devaluations in 1964, 1985 and 1987 would lead to economic collapse. While national rice yields actually decreased in this period (Than 1990), for smallholders in and beyond Kalay, socialist policies incentivized rice production in new areas, motivating agricultural expansion. Military violence and forced labor continued to terrorize much of the countryside, even as a powerful racialized notion of political inclusion began to take shape. Nick Cheesman (2017) has argued that exclusionary notions of ethnic-based citizenship came into being during this period as part of a socialist state-making effort tied to the nationalization of assets. In his genealogy of the term taingyintha, or national races, Cheesman places the birth of the modern 22 notion of national races in a 1964 Ne Win speech, and explicitly ties it to attempts to extend state power by acquiring foreign-owned land and capital. Today, the exclusionary concept of taingyintha serves as a basis for political inclusion and has transcended citizenship as the basis for state rights, duties, and entitlements. Military Rule The growing strength of the country’s legendary 88 generation, a pro-democracy movement, forced Ne Win’s eventual resignation. But the change was not the one that freedom fighters had hoped for. A new military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), took over in September 1988. SLORC would soon reject the results of the 1990 elections, jail activists, suspend the Constitution, and sweep aside the last vestiges of socialism to inaugurate state-backed crony capitalism. New armed resistance movements and reenergized Ethnic Armed Organizations made their headquarters in upland areas, or across the border in India, China or Chiang Mai (Smith 1999; Lintner 1999; Lintner 2011). In the decades that followed, lucrative and often illicit trade of borderland timber, jade and drugs perpetuated armed conflict and resulted in wide-scale dispossession, the enrichment of military elites on all sides, and zones of fragmented, negotiated sovereignty outside of central state control (Buchanan, Kramer, and K. Woods 2013; J. M. Ferguson 2014; Meehan 2015; K. Woods 2011). For farmers in government-controlled areas, this era was marked by coercive agrarian policies and frequent land acquisitions by well-connected cronies. Small farmers struggled to meet socialist rice quotas, and many sold their land for whatever price they could procure on the black market when they failed to keep up with impossible demands from the central state. Some of this land was acquired and reallocated by the state, which gave over five million acres to 23 individual agribusiness entrepreneurs between 1991 and 2016 (Thein et al. 2018). Often, the beneficiaries were military officials. South of Yangon, for example, local officials were likely the biggest beneficiaries of hundreds of thousands of acres of confiscated and granted land (Mark and Belton 2020). Ardeth Thawnghmung (2004) details the reception of various policies designed to increase crop production in two villages in central Myanmar in this period, arguing that programs that benefited farmers played a crucial role in propping up the military regime’s legitimacy, while farmers generally blamed disruptive or coercive programs on greedy local officials. Local land confiscation and a succession of coercive policies produced persistent rural poverty: in 2005, half the total population and the majority of rural residents lived below the national poverty line. In 2017, 30% of the rural population lived on less than 1,590mmk, about US$1.17, per day (MLCS 2019). The military repression of the 1990s appeared to slow at the turn of the millennium. In 2004, General Than Shwe’s government launched the ‘Roadmap to Democracy,’ a rhetorical shift that hinted at possibilities for opening the country. Soon after the military rushed the 2008 Constitution through a widely-criticized referendum, reforms began in earnest, starting a few days later when the government allowed international humanitarian aid in response to the devastating Cyclone Nargis. As Burmese scholar Thant Myint-U (2020) details, individuals within the military played a key role in negotiating reforms and foreign influence during this period. He paints a sympathetic portrait of the retired general Thein Sein, who General Than Shwe hand-picked as to serve as president from 2011-2016, and ex-military reformers in his government who faced the twin challenges of ethnic strife and economic inequality. Despite any creative efforts and good intentions, when the NLD took the helm, power remained concentrated in the executive branch and military, with key ministries and a quarter of seats in the Hluttaw 24 (parliament) reserved for the army, giving them effective veto power. While a National Ceasefire was signed in 2015 on the principles of democracy, federalism and self-determination, military violence has continued and intensified in Rakhine, Kachin and Northern Shan States. It is in this context of uneven reform, contested sovereignty and racialized violence that farmers, officials and activists in the Kalay Valley seek to navigate Myanmar’s contemporary transformations. Myanmar Information Management Unit Kalay ValMleyya nmar Topographic Map 90°0'E 93°0'E 96°0'E 99°0'E 102°0'E BHUTAN Ü INDIA KACHIN STATE Myitkyina .! CHINA SAGAING REGION BANGLADESH Hakha .! CHIN STATE Mandalay Sagaing .!.! SHAN STATE VIETNAM MANDALAY REGION RAKHINE Taunggyi.! STATE MAGWAY .! Sittwe REG.!ION Magway (![_ Loikaw Nay Pyi Taw .! LAOS KAYAH STATE BAGO REGION Bay of Bengal Bago .! Pathein Yangon Hpa-An.! .! !. KAYIN YANGON !. STATE AYEYARWADY REGION Mawlamyine REGION MON STATE THAILAND Andaman Sea !.Dawei TANINTHARYI CAMBODIA REGION Kilometers 0 70 140 280 90°0'E 93°0'E 96°0'E 99°0'E 102°0'E Legend Map ID: MIMU982v01 Data Sources : Completion Date: 5 March 2F013i.A4 ([!_ Capital Elevation-metres 751 - 1,000 2,501 - 3,000 Base Map - MIMU Projection/Datum: Geographic/WgGS8u4 re 2: M!.aSptates C apoitalf Myan0 - 2m50 ar (so1,u001r - 1c,50e0 : M3,00I1 M- 4,000U) Baounndadrie s t- WhFeP/M IKMU alay Valley (source: Google Earth) Water Body 251 - 500 1,501 - 2,000 4,001 - 5,000 Place names - Ministry of Home Affairs info.mimu@undp.org Major Road 501 - 750 2,001 - 2,500 5,001 - 7,002 (GAD) translated by MIMU www.themimu.info International Boundary Disclaimer: The names shown and the boundaries used on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations. 25 12°0'N 15°0'N 18°0'N 21°0'N 24°0'N 27°0'N 12°0'N 15°0'N 18°0'N 21°0'N 24°0'N 27°0'N The narrow Kalay Valley lies at the foot of the Chin Hills and stretches almost 200 miles North from the town of Gangaw to the Indian border at Tamu. In encompasses three sub-valleys: the southern Yaw, the central Kale or Kalay, and the northern Kabaw. Together, these three areas stretch along the long, narrow plateau northwest of Myanmar’s central dry zone between the Myitta River and the Chin Hills. The valley’s largest city, Kalaymyo, is located in the middle of the valley, a two-hour flight or 24-hour bus ride from Yangon. Chin and Burmans generally live in separate, though often adjacent, villages. The valley itself marks the contested border between the Burman Sagaing Division and the ethnic-minority Chin State, a subject explored in chapter two. Burman settlements are more common on the south and east sides of the valley, especially along the Myitta River. Chin settlements become more common in the north and west, along the foot of the Chin Hills. Burmans are Buddhists and speak quick country Burmese; Chins are Christians and speak Falam, Hakha, Mizo or dozens of other languages. Due to a long history of international migration driven by ethnic persecution and opportunities for work and refugee resettlement abroad, Chin villages are more likely to feature concrete houses financed by remittances. Both Burman and Chin farmers grow a single crop of rice, followed by corn, beans, peanuts, sunflowers or sesame. In survey I conducted in Kalay in 2017, 74% of Burman and just 36% if Chin farmland users reported having a government land certificate. These differences reflect the very different relationships these communities have historically to the Myanmar state. Burmans are the nation’s dominant ethnicity and see themselves as unambiguously Myanmar citizens in a Buddhist country; scholar Matthew Walton (2013) likens Burman’s racial privilege to that of White Americans. In contrast, Chin people are acutely aware of and articulate identity through their 26 religious and ethnic minority status (Sakhong 2003; Dunford 2019). In scholar FK Lehman’s account, it is the oppositional relationship to the nation of Burma and to Burman people that unites diverse tribal groups into a single ethnicity. He writes: 'Indeed, we may speak legitimately of a single, over-all, Chin cultural and social system, despite the great diversity among the various Chin social types, precisely because the pattern of this diversity is, as we shall show, ordered largely in response to a single major variable—the local mode of relationship to Burma' (Lehman 1963, p. 28). The Chin were signatories of the 1947 Panglong Agreement, which established the foundations for an independent union, engaged in armed struggle against the military government in the late 1980s and 1990s (Swift 2019), and are recognized today as one of the eight major national races among 135 official ethnic groups. While Chin State is the poorest in Myanmar (MLCS 2019), Chin people enjoy unofficial ‘model minority’ status, with a reputation for being clever and highly-educated that can earn influence in national affairs, for example with a Chin Vice-President. As I explore further below, these ethnic differences mean that even when Chin and Burman farmers are working and living in close proximity, they experience Myanmar’s dual transformations in distinct ways. One day when we were walking in her village, Hla Ywa, my friend Mi Mi Soe shared this proverb about Kalay’s contrarian nature: taung ga hpi la the mountain sticks out myit ga pyaun pyan the river flows in reverse lu ga kan lan the people are argumentative It is true that the hill Taung Pilar, topped, like most major peaks in Myanmar, by a golden pagoda, juts out from the floor of the Kalay Valley; we could see it from Mi Mi Soe’s fields and from most of the surrounding villages. The Myitta River flows northward along the valley’s eastern side, irrigating rice and sunflowers with seasonal floods until it meets the larger 27 Chindwin, which, like all of Myanmar’s major waterways, flows south to the Andaman Sea. I am not sure if Kalay’s people are especially obstinate; when I told friends in Yangon that I was working in Kalay they usually described it as small-town, backward, and dominated by ethnic minority Chin people without implying it was known for assertiveness. Despite this poem’s suggestion that Kalay is unusual, I selected the field site, in part, because the valley’s agrarian, multi-ethnic, and contested landscape typifies some of the key challenges of Myanmar’s everyday rural transformation and land politics. I also choose Kalay because it provides a strategic space for understanding ethnicity, ecology and power in Southeast Asia: the seam of the hills and the plains. Below, I situate my field site and study within an expanding social science literature on Myanmar before articulating my approach to understanding ethnicity. Towards a New Burma Studies Burma Studies before 2010 was a tiny sub-field composed mostly of historians and religious studies scholars, with research access limited and scholarship polarized by the military government (Selth 2010; Taylor 2008). With little opportunity for data collection during the reign of the military junta, researchers relied heavily on colonial records in London’s British Library and on the writing of British colonial officers-cum-anthropologists. Quantitative data of any type was notoriously absent or false; Myanmar did not conduct a census, for example, for 40 years. Qualitative social science was also sparse, with a few notable exceptions – among them Chika Watanabe’s (2015) ethnography of Japanese aid, Ardeth Thawnghmung’s (2004) analysis of 1990s agricultural policies and Christina Fink’s (2009) account of life under and with the junta. As travel restrictions eased, researchers boarded planes to Yangon alongside development practitioners and foreign investors, flocking to Myanmar with a cacophony of questions about 28 everything from household budgets to child psychology to craft beer. This research rush engendered a heady mix of excitement and arrogance; at a swanky bar in Yangon during the summer of 2016, a University Chicago PhD student visiting the city for the second time introduced himself to me, completely seriously, as the first sociologist of Burma. Conducting dissertation fieldwork during a research rush meant that I was not only shaping a single project, but also part of a rapidly-emerging sub-field. My study is one response to Jim Scott’s call for a new wave of Burma Studies scholarship that moves beyond elite accounts to center the lived experiences of ordinary citizens (Scott 2016). It has been crafted in conversation with Myanmar and foreign researchers and activists seeking to understand and shape politics, economics and society in the wake of authoritarian rule. Together and at its best, our work draws on language skills, innovative methods, and long-term immersion and collaboration to provide new ethnographies and analyses of a changing Myanmar. While studies of Myanmar have been long been absent from scholarship on Southeast Asian agrarian change (Schoenberger, Hall, and Vandergeest 2017), academic and activist research on land, resources and rural society has proliferated in the past five years. Studies have demonstrated the limitations and challenges of contemporary land reform (McCarthy 2018; Suhardiman, Kenney-Lazar, and Meinzen-Dick 2019) analyzed resource grabs and strategies of accumulation (Woods 2018; Borras, Franco, and Nam 2020; Barbesgaard 2019), and explored Ethnic Armed Organizations’ alternative visions for and practices of land governance (Suhardiman, Bright, and Palmano 2019; Hong 2017). Much of the data from these studies comes from a few sites. Most researchers work in and around Yangon, where interviews with English-speaking activists and development practitioners provide a sweeping, if partial, view of the key issues. Many head southeast to Tanintharyi Division or Karen State, where recent 29 mobilization against the Dawei Special Economic Zone, expanding oil palm plantations and the overlapping Myanmar Government and Ethnic Armed Organization administrations create rich case studies of resistance, land grabs and legal plurality (cf. Bächtold, Bastide, and Lundsgaard- Hansen 2020; Lundsgaard-Hansen et al. 2018). Others focus on the northeast, where ongoing armed conflict, a booming drug trade, and expanding Chinese infrastructures provide beak case studies in resource conflict and ethnoterritorial projects (cf. Kiik 2016; K. Woods 2011). Together, this work has illuminated key issues of justice and political economy, but it falls short of explaining how rural transformation and land claims are negotiated on the ground. These sites are important, but not sufficient, for understanding rural transformation and land issues in Myanmar for two reasons. First, research access in the north- and southeast is severely restricted. The vast majority of research conducted in these places, including my own past work, relies heavily on teams of locals who fan out to villages while foreign researches hole up in provincial capitals. This approach is adequate for understanding the broad contours of land issues, but not for understanding ethnographically how people differentially experience social change. It is also subject to forms of elite capture by a small cadre of charismatic activists who tell important stories to short-term researchers; I can often identify individuals based on their anonymized quotes in research articles on Myanmar, because there are a few popular participants with clear, if not necessarily representative, positions. Second, the dynamics in these places do not apply to vast swathes of the country’s population or land area. Comparatively little research has examined land control in the central and western parts of the country (but see Huard 2020). Instead, existing research in these sites often focuses on changing livelihoods (Belton and Filipski 2019) and on rural networks of community support (Griffiths 2018; G. McCarthy 2016). This creates an artificial dichotomy in emerging work on Myanmar, one in which some parts of 30 the country are depicted primarily as sites of spectacular accumulation and violence, and others are glossed as unremarkable examples of monotonous village life. While there is, of course, variation in where particular phenomena occur across Myanmar’s diverse geographies, I choose to focus on the interconnections between agrarian change and land politics, rather than to treat them separately. I did so through work in Kalay, a site with minimal foreign investment, aid organizations, active armed conflict and previous research. Choosing this ‘boring’ and little-studied field site presented three distinct advantages. First, with Burmese language skills and friends from previous work, I was afforded a level of access almost impossible to obtain during short-term fieldwork stints or in highly-contested parts of the country. The repeated visits, long-term relationships, and mixed methods I detail in subsequent sections allowed for an inductive approach, iterative research questions and methodological rigor. Long-term ethnographic engagement provided the chance to explore the situated and creative agency of farmers, provincial officials and grassroots activists, highlighting everyday negotiations and meaning-making within the repressive structures of state authority and global political economy. Second, the comparative lack of controversy and violence in Kalay allowed me to focus on the profound and sometimes surprising changes in everyday work and life that define many Myanmar peoples’ experiences of the reform period. In contrast to the armed conflict and foreign investment that characterizes popular research sites, villages around Kalay illustrate the more common, and more banal, dynamics of farming, land conflict and ethnic difference that are common in rural Myanmar. Kalay lacks the ballooning oil palm concessions of Tanintharyi or Chinese-owned banana plantations of Kachin, but the transformations of property, territory, farming and social connection underway are staggering. It is my hope that this intimate 31 ethnography of everyday transformation can complement my colleagues’ important insights into the political economy of land and exploitation, while highlighting and valorizing the experiences of rural people who often see themselves and each other, as Mi Mi Soe’s poem reminded me, as unique and contradictory. Finally, Kalay provided a privileged vantage point to consider the ways in which ethnic difference is forged through dynamic interactions and shapes experiences of social change, and relationships between state and society. Burma Studies has long been divided between studies of ethnic minorities and studies of ethnic Burmans. Working at a site shaped by long histories of ethnic encounter allowed me to trouble dominant scholarly and popular conceptions of ethnic hierarchies in Myanmar. Writing about Kalay the late 1950s, the anthropologist FK Lehman noted, with some bewilderment, that the behaviors and beliefs of Chins and Burmans in Kalay Valley disrupted his neat theorizations of Chin society and of plains civilization (Lehman 1963, p. 36). Lehman did not go on to elaborate a full explanation of how these observations might reshape the theories of ethnicity he had constructed based primarily on observation in the Chin Hills. In contrast, I start from the premise that it is because of these confusing, contradictory and dynamic ethnic encounters that Kalay provides an important site to consider the empirical significance and analytical construction of ethnicity. Approaching Ethnicity Scholarship on the construction of ethnicity highlights the ways in which individuals can transform ethnic categories or groups’ perceived hierarchy, change their personal place within cultural groups, or raise or mute the political and social salience of this identification (Barth 2000; Barth 1969; Wimmer 2008; Brubaker 2009). These articulations take place with specific 32 sets of power dynamics that present different groups varying opportunities to claim an ethnic identity and imbue it with moral weight (Li 2000). Ethnicity is not a closed category, but rather, like EP Thompson’s (1966) conception of class, a historical relation. In Southeast Asia, tremendous cultural diversity, a particular set of encounters with Western empires, and patterns of racialized violence have led to intense contemporary debates about how ethnic minorities should be incorporated into democracies and who, if anyone, counts as indigenous (Baird 2015; Miller 2011; Keyes 2002). In the Kalay Valley, ethnic difference arrives unarmed and takes root through daily practices of farming, worship, work and family. Building on a long tradition of examining the construction of ethnicity in Myanmar, below I use a pair of women farmers’ photos to show how ethnicity is constituted through engagements with land, refracted through relations of gender, class and generation, and defined by socio-technical boundary-making. These perspectives do not undermine the historical persecution of Chin people and other minorities in Myanmar, but they do help move beyond explanations premised on armed struggle, absolute separation and essentialism. In the case of Kalay, this conceptual framing informed a comparative analysis of how distinct social and agricultural histories shape how Burman and Chin farmers adapt to territorialization, new forms of property, and changes in life on and beyond the land. During the participatory photography project in which I first met Mi Mi Soe, she shared the photograph on the left, of a man preparing land for peanut plantation using a simple hand plow. The next day, a Chin woman was eager to show her own photograph of the same agricultural task. The image was taken just a dozen miles from Mi Mi Soe’s, yet the cultivation method was visibly different: in the Chin community, men and women worked together with short hand hoes to prepare the land. When she described her photo, the Chin woman emphasized 33 how these agricultural practices were different than the ones in Burman communities, and constituted a distinct ethnic identity: This is a peanut field. The Burmese use plows to cultivate, but not us Chin people. We do so by hand. In taking this picture I wanted to show how in our Chin society, men and women usually do this work together. In general, more Burmese than Chin cultivate peanuts, but in Burman communities, only men do that work. I had never seen that before; I was surprised. I want to show that our community is different. I smile when I look at this picture and see how pretty they look cultivating. Figure 3: Burman and Chin photos of peanut cultivation. On the left, ‘The morning activity of a man.’ On the right, ‘The way men and women do daily work.’ These images and the exchange between the photographers highlighted several critical aspects of ethnicity in Kalay. First, ethnicity was produced through engagements with the land. Farming practices are intrinsically linked to ethnic identity, as O’Connor (1995, 969) notes: ‘In Southeast Asia agriculture is a locus of meaning, not just a means to subsist. As these societies arise performatively, farming’s technical practices easily become ritual acts that constitute a moral stance and define ethnic identity.’ Within the larger landscapes of Myanmar, swidden cultivation (shwe pyaung taungya) is increasingly described as indigenous customary land management in ways that contrast with lowland rice cultivation and codify ethnic difference, a 34 topic I explore in chapter three. But as the interaction above shows, even similar fields can host diverse practices that become the basis for ethnic identities. Second, as recent work in feminist political ecology argues, ethnicity intersects other social relations of gender, generation and class, all of which are negotiated in part through resource use and acces (Nightingale and Rankin 2014; Elmhirst et al. 2017; Lamb et al 2017; Mollett and Faria 2013). This intersectional analysis is not merely additive, but rather illuminates the way in which symbolic performances of social difference within households and communities create real material changes on the landscape (Nightingale 2011). In the images the Burman and Chin women shared shared, ethnic customs shaped who does agricultural work. In chapter five, I show how embodied cultural politics of work shaped the diminished status of farming for members of a new generation in both Chin and Burman communities, and elevate the status of Chin daughters traveling abroad for domestic work over that of their farmer-fathers. An intersectional approach to ethnicity allows for attention not only to differences between communities, but also to the similarities across groups and to changing relations within them. Finally, as the Chin woman’s eagerness to distinguish her people betrayed and as Fredrik Barth (1969, 2000) has long argued, ethnicity is constituted through the creation of boundaries. Far from seeing the plow as a superior or more effective production technology, she defended group labor as an intrinsically Chin technique exclusive of plow use: ‘The Burmese use plows to cultivate, but not us Chin people.’ Hand plows are not only used to work the land, but also to remake ethnic boundaries. Riffing on Barth to emphasize the role of technological use in reifying ethnic boundaries, I suggest we can understand ethnicity as the socio-technical organization of cultural difference. Like the peanut fields, new technologies provide terrain for self-definition through differentiation. In the chapters that follow, I show how Chins and Burmans use tax 35 receipts, provincial borders and Facebook groups to claim property, establish territory and consolidate community in ways that remake ethnic boundaries. Research Methodology Arrival, Access, Positionality I first arrived in Kalaymyo five years ago, in the dusty heat of April. I unloaded my bicycle, ate a bowl of noodles, and left at dawn for the 67 mile, 4,000 foot ride to Falam. As I ascended, I could see the flat rice paddies of the Kalay Valley, punctuated by Taung Pilar’s pagoda and edged by mountains. Eventually I crossed the Manipur River on its way from India to the southern part of Kalay Valley, and huffed the steep last miles to Chin State’s former capital, a set of brightly-painted homes perched on cliffs. I spent two weeks teaching at a new community development school and enjoying the forgotten pleasure of blankets and the small- town notoriety of being the only person ever to have arrived from Kalay on a bike. I had been working with activists in Yangon for almost a year, and with minimal cell phone signal and cool weather, the Chin Hills seemed the perfect spot for the Buddhist new year holiday. Yangon was shut down, its streets filled with dancers, water cannons and drunks, but no one in Falam celebrated Thingyan (Burmese New Year). We kept up classes, slurped sabuti, a corn and beef soup, and drank sweet Chin wine, and went to one of Falam’s innumerable churches on Sunday. When my time was up I bid farewell, broke my bike chain 15 miles out, and hitched a ride on a passing minibus. I sat squeezed between raisin-faced old ladies chewing tobacco soaked in alcohol to ward off car sickness, and admired the taungya (hillside cultivation)— bananas and rice—planted on the steep slopes. As soon as the car’s axel shifted horizontal, we were thrust back into the last gasp of the Burman nation’s biggest celebration; children and 36 adults lined the roads of Kalaymyo, splashing our van with water to celebrate the Buddhist new year. Drenched, I gained a visceral understanding of Kalay Valley as a site of encounter between Chins and Burmans. This ethnographic study is born of this and subsequent journeys across Myanmar between 2014 and 2019. It is inherently multi-sited, informed by the years I spent in Yangon, Naypyitaw, the Chin Hills, and other rural sites, and by the movements of my research participants. When I next returned to Kalay, for example, it was on the invitation of a land activist whom I had met during National Land Use Policy work in Yangon and Naypyitaw. My multi-scalar, relational approach stems from a feminist epistemology that recognizes situated knowledges and interrelated webs of authority (Haraway 1988; Mohanty 1988; Rocheleau 2008). I build on a feminist tradition that insists on centering everyday social negotiations and linking them to larger political struggles (Mountz 2017; Federici 2012), specifically studies of gendered agrarian change and postcolonial intersectionality that highlight how negotiated and relational identities shape resource access, labor, and the terrain for social change (Hart 2001; Razavi 2009; Deere 1995). Such an approach is uniquely suited to address the complex realities of a global political economy, including a fundamental transformation of the ‘global countryside’ (Marcus 1995; M. Woods 2007; Massey 2005). While its concerns are wide-ranging, this manuscript is rooted in the particular ecologies and experiences of Burman and Chin farmers in the Kalay Valley. In doing so, I adopt a ‘rooted networks’ approach, one that recognizes the importance of material, place-based socio-ecologies within broad and relational networks of knowledge and power (Cantor et al. 2018; Rocheleau and Roth 2007). Choosing to start from and return to Kalay 37 allowed me to see how Myanmar’s sweeping and yet abstract transformations materialized, and were made to matter. My research approach, questions and analysis were informed by an engagement with Myanmar that predates, transcends and shapes this dissertation. This included work as an advisor to gender equality and land rights activists in Yangon in 2014 and 2015, an experience which gave me insights into the gap between expert processes of legal reform and everyday practices on the land (Faxon 2017). Over the past six years, I have had the opportunity to teach, research, present, publish, advise, and curate art exhibitions with a number of remarkable Myanmar collaborators who have honed my research questions and analysis and kept my spirits high. This work is difficult to summarize. Rather than rehash my many debts of gratitude, I provide an excerpt from an essay on ‘Learning Feminism from Myanmar’s Female Farmers,’ that I wrote with my friend Pyo Let Han in 2018 as a reflection on how collaboration deepened our perspectives and work as a Myanmar activist and an American academic. We write: Figure 4: Photograph taken by Pyo Let Han outside Monywa in July 2016. 38 Initially, we were excited to talk to this woman, who was violating a traditional gender norm by plowing her field. But, as we spoke to her, we learned that she was not proud of doing this work; rather she plowed because the men of the family were all labor migrants and the burden of maintaining the farm had fallen to her. Speaking with her upset our own normative assumptions about ‘empowered’ women, and brought into focus the ways in which, within a larger political and socio-economic situation in which many farmers struggle with little state support, women often take on extra work to provide for their families. Listening to rural woman not only re-values them within scholarship, activism, and development, but also increases the depth and efficacy of broader projects by drawing on gendered knowledge and practices. Amplifying female farmers’ voices in elite settings from which they are habitually excluded can help transcend dominant gender and class narratives, enriching our ability to understand and transform social structures of domination. …Rather than teaching feminism, Pyo writes that as feminist activists, we are learning feminism from rural women through three main steps: by encouraging them to articulate how they see themselves and their own intersectional issues as women of Myanmar; by facilitating their analysis of external and internal forms of oppression; and finally, by discussing how we can work together to find common ground and confront the historical marginalization of women. Working with grassroots leaders and women farmers, Rainfall [her organization] is building a platform for the feminist movement and generating the same language for everyone when we say “feminism.” For Pyo, reading and working together with scholars like Hilary has given her new perspectives, experiences and ways to re-think her own activism and the larger context for Burmese feminism. For Hilary, work with Pyo has disabused romantic notions of resistance or femininity, allowing her to recognize the pragmatic realities of intersectionality. Together, we have been surprised, humbled and delighted by our conversations with women farmers from across the country. Eating together, sweating together, traveling all night together, drinking too much coffee together – these embodied practices, and a commitment to value each other’s thoughts, suggestions, language, and skills, have enhanced both our work and lives. It’s this sort of engagement we encourage. This is a time to rethink what it means to be an activist, NGO or development practitioner in Myanmar, to commit to listening to the daily struggles and priorities of women farmers, and to support them to represent themselves. Similarly, academics need to constantly consider the questions we ask, who we ask, and how the stories we tell reproduce certain social orders. Such conversations – with ourselves, and with others – contribute to strengthening women farmers to challenge patriarchal systems in the home, in the office, and in the paddy field. (Faxon and Pyo Let Han 2018) 39 My work with activists like Pyo positions this manuscript within a larger portfolio of collaborative and personal research and practice. This dissertation is also directly informed by three participatory action research projects that I conduced with Myanmar CSOs in in 2015, 2016-8 and 2019. The first and final of these pursued questions about the process and impacts of Farmland Registration in Kachin State. We conducted two rounds of research, four years apart, in seven villages to evaluate barriers and strategies for registering land, and the emergent impacts of patchwork formalization. This work produced two reports, which describe a highly unequal process of registration that results in new exclusions in land and loan access (Faxon 2015; Faxon and Khine Zin Yu Aung 2019). The 2016-8 project studied gender and land in Mandalay, Kalay, Dawei and Kawkreik. We conducted interviews, a participatory photography project, and a 400- household survey and resulted in a female farmers’ forum, photography exhibitions, policy briefs and report (Faxon and Knapman 2019). Data from this project also forms the basis of a recent article in which I use rural women’s own photographs of life on the land and survey data evidencing women’s exclusion from new land reforms to argue that those whose labor is sustaining life and making land valuable are being given the least claim to it. My analysis suggests that what is at stake Myanmar’s contemporary land reform is not just abstract notions of legal equality or statistics of agricultural yield, but rather the state’s role in securing women and men’s abilities to make meaningful life (Faxon 2020). While I draw sparingly on this data in this text—using participatory photography data in the introduction, data from the 2017 survey to describe the creation and closure of the rice frontier in chapter one, and select findings on Kachin farmland titling to illustrate new exclusions enacted by land reforms in chapter three—my experience using participatory methodologies and the analytic insights they offered informed how I conceptualized and conducted this study. My decision not to include these studies into this 40 text reflects a decision to root my study in Kalay, as well as the challenges of not only recognizing, but also integrating, different socioecological knowledges (Mcintyre 2003; Nightingale 2016; Pain 2004; Wang and Burris 1997) In my dissertation project, long-term relationships with activists often opened doors, both to expert interviews, such as when a Yangon lawyer friend arranged meetings for me with Members of Parliament, and in rural villages, such as when friends in Kalay took me to border villages to better understand the stakes of the boundary debate described in chapter two. One of the participants in the 2017 photography project, Mi Mi Soe, became a close friend and opened her family’s home to me for an extended stay. My past work shaped how research participants responded to me, for example when a Farmers’ Union leader preemptively explained his stance on gender equality after recognizing me from my previous work with women’s rights activists. Sometimes, my allegiances closed off opportunities as I was perceived as having picked sides; among activists in Yangon, colleagues at Land in Our Hands were sometimes hesitant to spend time with me because of my past work with Land Core Group, and in Kalay I only managed one interview with the Upper Chindwin Youth Network because of bad blood with my friends at Rights and Peace. Schisms in Myanmar’s emerging civil society have been noted by a number of authors (cf. Prasse-Freeman 2012; Faxon, Furlong, and May Sabe Phyu 2015) and appear to have deepened as donor aid money has dried up and government engagement has waned. In late 2019, one Yangon activist colleague I interviewed expressed nostalgia for our work together back in the good old days of cooperation and funding. Now, resources were scarce, the government had withdrawn, and the CSOs were fighting among themselves and ‘roadblocking the democratic process,’ she told me. While not my primary focus in these pages, these politics of social movements, development and NGOs will play a crucial role in shaping the next chapter 41 of Myanmar’s land and agrarian reforms. They were the water through which I swam to negotiate access and collect data in the field. Previous work in Kalay, as well as the relative safety and lack of surveillance in the area, ensured the access essential for ethnography. My access was also enabled and shaped by my ability to speak conversational Burmese and drive a motorbike in a htamein (traditional skirt), and by the company and insights of two research assistants—one Burman, the other Chin—and several friends and interlocutors. My position as a young, white, Myanmar-speaking American woman endowed me with a privileged status that was particularly obvious and painful when research participants looked to me as a source of material aid, an expectation my friends became very adept at shattering with blunt introductions like, ‘This is Hilary, she’s an American but she has no money and she cannot help you. She’s only a student, and she wants to hear from you if you can give us some time.’ In the field, whiteness was a source of both awe and expectation (Faria and Mollett 2016). I worked my identity to my advantage in interviews with lu gyi,5 trading on their predictable shock and delight at a visit from a white girl speaking bad Burmese to ask questions that would be off-limits to most Myanmar people. I posed for selfies, attended weddings, sang karaoke, and got drunk with my research participants, activities that sometimes reinforced, and sometimes troubled, my own gendered and racialized position (Gillen 2016). In Kalay, I almost always traveled with a research assistant or a friend, and once enlisted my partner Matthew for a short tour that provided a lasting charm to ward off harassment since, in the words of one disappointed suitor, ‘your husband looks like Vin Diesel.’ 5 Lu gyi literally means ‘big people.’ In practice, people use this term to refer to individuals or groups with more importance or status than themselves, whether at the scale of the household (e.g., an elder), the village (e.g. the village headman) the workplace (e.g. township officers referring to district, division or central officials) or national society (e.g. wealthy businessmen and national leaders or celebrities). 42 My reception was slightly different in Burman and Chin communities. Burmans I met in the valley generally had never met a white person and spoke no English. I was treated to snacks and greeted with enthusiastic surprise. We spoke Burmese, and I often relied on friends for help if accents were strong or the sun was too hot. Chin, on the other hand, often told me of family or neighbors who had immigrated to the US, or practiced their English with me. We spoke slow Burmese together, or I worked with friends and assistants who translated Chin languages to Burmese or English. Both communities sometimes expressed surprise that I would be interested in the other group. Burman ideas of Chin poverty and barbarity were often not far from the surface. When I returned to Yangon once with stories about tasting dog meat at a Chin friend’s home, my Burmese teacher reacted with shock and explained to me that the Chin were wild. Chin leaders usually assumed that I was Christian and therefore sympathetic to them as a persecuted religious minority. After a Chin village head asked bluntly how I ranked Burman versus Chin people, my Chin research assistant Siang helped me to recognize that Chin communities would almost always expect an American white lady to be vocally ‘on their side.’ Conversations like this one with my Chin research assistant, Siang, and my Burman research assistant, Khine Zin Yu Aung, were essential to my own ability to collect and interpret data (Caretta 2015). In highlighting these contingencies, limits and acts of interpretation, I seek to revive Myanmar’s long-dormant ethnographic tradition not in the colonial model of the all- seeing outsider, but rather from the relational stance of feminist research. Data Collection and Analysis This manuscript draws primarily on data collected in Kalay, Yangon and Naypyidaw in February, May, and July 2017, and February 2018, as well as August 2018—June 2019 and 43 November—December 2019. I was fortunate to have three years to conduct this work; time away, as well as previous encounters, allowed for events to unfold and for me to develop sense of familiarity and openness with my research participants. In total, I spent six months living in Kalay, including one month living in Hla Ywa,6 a Burman village of about 85 households located 15 minutes south of Kalaymyo by motorbike. Hla Ywa is a relatively small rice-growing village with minimal land conflict. Living there and frequent visits between 2017 and 2019 provided a window onto daily life for rural Burmans, allowing me to participate in the rice harvest, weddings and monastic ordinations, and daily walks, chats and bike rides. During the other five months, I was based in Kalaymyo, conducting interviews in town and traveling repeatedly to over a dozen Chin and Burman villages in Kalay Valley, as well as to the Indian border town of Tamu and into the Chin Hills to Falam and the state capital of Hakha. Chin Ywa, a large Chin village north of Kalay, was a particularly important research site, a place where I frequently enjoyed the hospitality and ingenuity of the natural-born researcher and grassroots activist I call Keats, to honor his affection for the romantic poet. In Kalaymyo, I spent many days at my friend Ekari’s house, which doubled as an office for her land rights organization, Rights and Peace. There I watched claimants arrive from across the valley, and gained an appreciation for the dimensions and limits of land activism, particular important to my analysis in chapter four. During the rest of the research period, as well as for language study and participatory research in 2017 and the first half of 2018, I was based in Yangon with trips to Naypyitaw and other areas of Myanmar. I relied on the tools of critical ethnography, a powerful approach to studying the complexities of the state and social change in a globally connected world (J. Ferguson and Gupta 6 This and other village names, as well as names of all local friends and informants, are pseudonyms. 44 2002; Hart 2006; Wolford 2006). This meant that I paid particular attention to relationships and contractions as I attended events related to land and agriculture and participated in daily village life and land activism. To understand the processes of making territory described in part one, I attended a border press conference and visited border villages for interviews and walks of the boundary. To understand how reforms were made and understood, I attended land law drafting meetings in Naypyitaw and Yangon as well as land law trainings conducted by grassroots activists in a dozen villages around Kalay. I also followed community leaders, grassroots activists, and individual claimants as they sorted out a diverse array of land cases: from adjudicating the return of land grabbed by the military to settling and neighborhood dispute about stinky chicken farms. To understand agricultural mechanization and the rise of social media, I attended government demonstrations and rice harvests in Kalay, meetings about agriculture and digital rights in Yangon, and online observation, especially of village Facebook groups. I drank tea, attended Church and took selfies at pagodas, crossed into India illegally, and learned to harvest rice. I took daily fieldnotes, prioritizing moments of tension, emerging patterns, and the tactile details of village life. In addition to participant observation, I collected data through interviews, focus group discussions, a household survey, and document and digital media review. I conducted over 150 semi-structured interviews with villagers, activists and community leaders, businesspeople and officials in Kalay, Falam, Hakha, Yangon and Naypyitaw. Early in my project, my interviews in the village were often conducted with village heads and aimed to get a sense of the village’s history, contemporary livelihoods, and land conflicts. As I developed a sense of the dissertation chapters and key themes, my inquiries became much more targeted, for example in interviews I conducted with village youth about their social media use, with machine owners about their 45 purchase, use and rental businesses, and with elders in border villages about the history of the forest and the borderline. I interviewed civil society organizations and NGO staff, as well as officials in the Myanmar Agricultural Development Bank, Agricultural Department, Survey and Land Records Department, Cooperatives Department, Forest Department and General Administrative Department stationed in Falam and Kalaymyo, as well as the Chin State Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, Forestry and Mines in Hakha. These interviews usually started stiffly, and focused on the organization’s daily work and key concerns, but sometimes led to more enlightening opportunities for casual chat and observation. I interviewed or spent time with five current Members of Parliament, asking about land issues in their constituencies, new laws, the law-making process, and specific cases in Kalay. To understand agricultural production, I interviewed tractor retailers, rice millers, and rice brokers around Kalaymyo and in Yangon. Late in my project, I conducted a round of interviews with friends and former colleagues who had worked for at least five years as land activists and development workers in Yangon. During these interviews, I shared preliminary findings and outstanding puzzles of my research, and asked about how the patterns I saw in Kalay mapped onto their experiences elsewhere in Myanmar. At several points during my research, I conducted focus group discussions to understand new topics, broad patterns and emergent themes. In May and July 2017, I conducted eight discussions with approximately 85 total participants who had been involved in the settlement and destruction of Umnak, the case described in chapter four. These conversations focused on the reasons for settlement, the details of the eviction, the hopes for return, and the plans for survival in the meantime. They provided a basis for repeated interviews that I conducted with settlement leaders over the next two years, as well as interviews with officials, brokers and observers of the case. In September 2018 I conducted a day-long workshop with eight grassroots land law trainers 46 in order to understand their motivations for teaching the law and experience in diverse villages. I followed this focus group with observation of these trainers at work, and individual conversations over ensuing months. In March 2019, I conducted focus groups in seven Burman and Chin villages that focused on mechanization and social media use. These were designed to be separate discussions, but were sometimes hastily and rather awkwardly combined due to farmers’ schedules and communication challenges. These discussions allowed me to develop nascent ideas about technology that form the basis of part three, which I followed up on with participant observation and individual interviews. In order to better understand changing livelihoods and to provide a baseline for future research, I conducted a household survey (n=85) on machine use and migration in Hla Ywa village in December 2019. I worked with three village-resident university students to enumerator and conduct preliminary analysis on this data, which I draw on in chapter five. This survey complemented basic livelihood and land ownership survey data that I had gathered from 200 households in Hla Ywa and Chin Ywa in 2017 as part of participatory action research on gender and land. Document, map, and digital media review also played an important role in my research. To understand Kalay’s environmental history and contemporary boundary disputes, I consulted colonial laws, maps and reports, local accounts compiled in Chin and Burmese languages by amateur historians, the Myanmar government’s official map of Kalay (which is officially a state secret!), and contemporary satellite maps from Google Earth and Landsat. To understand land reform and the process of claims-making, I reviewed the texts of land laws and policies and examined farmers’ and settlers’ registration certificates, tax forms, product record books, petitions and letters, and written accounts and photographs. I reviewed local news coverage of 47 land cases, including in sources such as Chin World Media, and Facebook posts. As I got deeper into questions of mechanization, I found myself collecting an astonishing array of promotional materials, as well as reviewing farmers’ sales receipts and loan terms. I also reviewed the National Agricultural Development Strategy, a TV debate on modernizing agriculture, and other documents, news articles, and shows. Finally, understanding social media use required not only adapting my interview methods—using what I call Facebook-elicitation interviews to discuss online behavior and content while asking about the subjects’ interpretations—but also manually coding the themes of Village Facebook Groups and following Myanmar Government Department and land activist pages. My strategy for extending my field site into the digital domain, and its limitations and implications, are discussed in chapter six. In the field, I complemented and synthesized daily fieldnotes in a series of memos identifying key themes and potential chapter topics, which allowed me to revise my research design and questionnaires. With the help of my research assistants, I transcribed most of my interviews and focus group discussions. A few of these were unrecorded, often when an important person was uncomfortable or when conversations took place while walking or driving, and later reconstructed from my hurried field notes. Back in Ithaca, I imported my data into NVivo and coded for themes, working iteratively with memos and patterns discovered in the materials. My initial analysis in summer 2019 guided the questions I brought back to Myanmar the following fall, when I received feedback on preliminary results of my work, addressed gaps in my data with additional interviews, and joined the 2019 rice harvest in Kalay. 48 Roadmap The chapters that follow comprise a critical ethnography of how Burman and Chin farmers, as well as land activists and officials, claim land and make a life on it and in doing so shape the character of rurality and democracy in Myanmar’s dual transformations. In part one, Territory, I explore the historical relationships between agrarian frontiers and political borders, describing the historical political ecology of the Kalay Valley before analyzing the production of state and ethnic territory in a contemporary boundary debate. Part two, Law & Claims, examines state-led land reform and the creative claims that have sprung up in the context of past grievances and new promises of restitution and rural development. In part three, Technology, I examine how farmers and migrants negotiate the arrival of tractors, combine harvesters, and internet-enabled mobile phones to remake agrarian production and village life. Chapter one traces the emergence and closure of a smallholder rice frontier in Kalay Valley, articulating the shifting relationships between ecology, policy and labor. I show how the rise and decline of the national significance of rice played a key role in shaping settlement and land use in the valley, but the effects of governance priorities were shaped by the agency of the environment and the labor of people who live on it. Before the British arrived, Kalay Valley was a densely forested confluence of different ethnic groups, who brought with them cultural imaginaries of space. Colonial officers divided the Chin Frontier Area from the Burman plains and declared vast areas Reserved Forests. After independence, new policies encouraged smallholder cultivation; Burmans and Chins migrated to the valley and turned the jungle into rice paddy. The creation and closure of this smallholder rice frontier was a pivotal moment in the valley’s history. I show how two forms of frontier closure—land consolidation that spurred 49 international labor migration, and military dispossession—enabled the emergence of remittance fishponds and idle plantations that dot the landscape today. This socioecological history provides critical context to understand the ways in which the contemporary production of territory is both a bid for state control and a practice of ethnic boundary-making. In chapter two, I explore a debate over the location of the border separating the Burman plains from the Chin Hills. Chin activists’ and officials’ contemporary efforts to restore the colonial boundary of Chin territory erased multi-ethnic frontier histories by marshalling historic principles of ethnic separation that aligned with a national turn towards territorialization. I argue that disputes over the border’s location in fact reveal a more fundamental agreement on the desired existence of clear, separable ethnic and territorial boundaries. This marks a shift away from decades of cultivated ambiguity and creates a new urgency for Burman and Chin farmers around the border to articulate their claims. The national government’s decision to restore the colonial boundary in Kalay Valley marks a larger shift from a regime of ambiguity, to one of spatial and social delineation. These new practices of governance constitute a final form of frontier closure in Kalay and are intimately linked to how resources are valued in and beyond the valley. The erasure and restoration of Kalay’s colonial boundary demonstrates the ways in which political borders are articulated within cycles and spaces of agrarian change. Chapter three attempts to understand the nature of contemporary land reform in Myanmar, starting from the moments of contradiction and confusion I observed in grassroots trainings that aimed to teach villagers about new land laws. I situate reform efforts within unfolding legal history, lived socioecologies, and cultural notions of rights, arguing that three phenomena—legal debris, elastic land, and risky rights—are central to the nature and effects of 50 Myanmar’s contested land reforms. I first build on Ann Stoler’s concept of ruination as an active process through which debris from past regimes exert force on the present to analyze Burmese legal history and contemporary debates over new policies. I then turn to the ways in which legal debris surface in contemporary policy texts. Next, I build on Katherine Verdery’s work to explore the ways in which negotiations over the law’s application appear produce elasticity in land itself: land appears to shrink, stretch, move and change. In this context, and consistent with the Burmese notion of a kwin a ye, new laws confer both risks and rights, obligations and opportunities. In practice, legal debris, elastic land and risky rights benefit more savvy, wealthy or well-connected people who can recover past statutes, stretch land, and avoid risks to extend their control of land. Chapter four examines how grassroots actors make claims to land in this context. At the national level, NLD promises to address land grabs have prompted a proliferation of unresolved land cases and an array of creative actions to position competing claimants as legitimate landholders. Rather than evaluating authenticity, I conceptualize land claims as performances of property, attending to how narratives, documents and artifacts were mobilized in one settlement and eviction case. Consistent with the broader pattern of land cases I observed around Kalay, the government retained control through force, couched in performances of authority and productivity. However, settlers’ creative performances of need, responsibility and belonging, as well as the critical role of new audiences and elites, point to the agency of individuals and the ability of repeated actions to shift the parameters of property regimes. In chapter five I use mechanization as a lens onto shifting relationships between farmer, market and state and the changing practices and values of farming. First, I show that, while modernizing Myanmar agriculture is key to domestic visions of national development, farmers 51 themselves are experiencing mechanization and privatization as a form to state abandonment. Second, I describe the rapid adoption of tractors and combine harvesters in the fields around Kalay, emphasizing the ways in which local ecologies and labor relations shape emergent hybrid modes of production. Finally, I consider how mechanization and migration, together, are shifting the gendered and embodied politics of work in Chin and Burman communities, most notably by elevating the status of young migrant maids over that of their farmer-fathers. Together, this analysis highlights how the interlinked processes of mechanization and migration not only change the mode of production and source of rural incomes, but also provide avenues to renegotiate state authority, class relations and the gendered value of labor for a new generation. In chapter six I explore how, as village labor and identities move away from local agriculture, Facebook use (surprisingly) is sustaining and reshaping rural society as the processes of articulating identities, providing material support, and mobilizing in struggles over land increasingly take place online. I bring new work in digital geography together with critical agrarian studies to argue that we cannot understand contemporary rural development without critically examining how online platforms often construed as Western, urban, and modern are enabling social reproduction, community development and political mobilization in what I term the digital village. I show how villagers, especially ethnic minority youth, use social media platforms not only to maintain family connections and ethnic communities, but also to collectively sustain and creatively remake the land claims and landed societies online. 52 PART ONE: TERRITORY 53 INTERLUDE Notes from On-the-Way Below the plane, the Myitta River appears to undulate the length of Kalay Valley like a lazy silver string. In October, the last clouds of monsoon swath slopes that rise on eastern and western sides of a lush patchwork of rice paddies. The green will change to yellow when winter sunflowers bloom in February, and go tawny in the dry heat of April as farmers celebrate Burmese New Year and wait for June rains. A golden pagoda glints on each of the valley’s occasional hills. The long and narrow Kalay Valley, the rice bowl of Northwest Myanmar, runs about 200 miles south from the Indian border at the town of Tamu. It straddles the seam of the hills and the plains, where the predominantly Burman-Buddhist lowlands meet the Chin Hills that crest into the Indian States of Mizoram and Manipur. Each time I fly, the plane is loaded with an assortment of people with money and a reason to come to or through Kalaymyo, the valley’s central town: Chin-refugees-cum-American-citizens catching a car uphill on a return visit, Burman banking executives setting up a new branch in the growing town, and missionaries from Korea or Kansas City coming to meet Chin sister churches. The plane doesn’t stop its engine at the landing strip – there’s no fuel here – just deposits its passengers to wait in the dust for their bags, loads the next batch, and jets away to Mandalay. Down on the roads you can see the difference between Burman and Chin settlements, my Chin friend Mosses explains to me as we bump along in his truck. Burmese houses are not very nice compared to ours, he says, noting that most Chin villages have at least some two-story cement homes, built with money from remittances. Certainly a Burman village would never have a church, though, at the behest of the Myanmar government, a Chin village might well find itself an unwilling host to a Buddhist monastery. We travel north from Kalaymyo along a familiar 54 dusty track that will soon become the site of a new, German-funded, paved road. The distance we cover in almost two hours that day, I will complete in an easy 40 minutes just a year later. The improved road will connect these villages more closely to the Indian Army-built Kalaymyo- Tamu highway. Driving that route provides a tour of the military infrastructures that remain the most prominent monuments to state power. Heading home to Kalaymyo that way, I count a jail famous for holding political prisoners, a prison work-farm, two military training camps, and several government teak plantations. At least two of these are on land taken from Burman and Chin smallholders. One day I walk out into the fields with two old farmers to see the lingering effects of fertilizer damage from last year’s bad batch. One fingers the long stiff stalks, showing me the difference between the sickly yellow and the vibrant green. The other leads the way on the narrowing berms that separate the paddy ponds, pointing out his wife’s work to plant the muddy embankments with red beans, mustard greens and okra. The chest-high rice plants stretch as far as I can see, but they are relatively recent arrivals. The farmers tell me their fathers had cleared dense woods from this place to create paddy fields and pay the socialist rice tax. They describe thousands of acres of forest, stretching from the village up the slopes of the Chin Hills, with wild animals for hunting and abundant wood for constructing homes for new arrivals and growing families. I begin to notice that, all around the valley, paddy fields stretch out behind signboards marking protected forests. The disconnect hints at the extent of environmental change since my companions arrived, as boys, on Kalay Valley’s rice frontier. 55 CHAPTER ONE AFTER THE RICE FRONTIER The village headman took me out behind his house to show me the destruction. The winter ground was dusty, empty of the beans and sunflowers typically shooting up in February. The floods piled silt and stripped the top soil, he told me. If they tried to plow after the rains, the cows would just sink deep into the mud. They had not harvested rice for two years and had little hope of planting in the coming season. He held a hand at his collarbone to show me the height of the waters that had inundated his fields and home 18 months ago. This was one of my first trips to the villages of Kalay Valley, and one of the first of many times I would hear about the 2015 floods. Due to the extent of the destruction, some nearby farmers had given up on paddy and dug deep holes for fishponds. But this village had neither money nor water available for such a project. It had been 50 years since Chin settlers cut down the forest to found this village and plant rice. When I visited these fields two years later, they would again be golden with ripening paddy, though farmers told me that yields were still sparse. In July 2015 the rice bowl of Kalay Valley became, in the words of one Dutch disaster assessment team, a bath tub. After heavy monsoon rains, the Myitta River burst its banks and filled the valley, destroying homes, roads, bridges and fields. This was not the first flood to ravage Kalay, but it was the worst in memory. The Dutch team attributed the floods’ severity to bottlenecks in the meandering Myitta River. Grassroots activists I spoke with linked the scale of destruction to an incompetent and unresponsive government. Some farmers attributed the disaster to an unlucky year in Buddhist numerology; others cited decades of deforestation in the name of rice cultivation. As the village headman explained to me, these floods had a momentous 56 impact on local livelihoods. They catalyzed land conversion, from rice paddy to fishponds, and community response, including from the many grassroots activists I met who pinpointed the lack of government aid during the floods as the impetus to start development work. They also shaped crucial events that I discuss later in this manuscript, including by spurring border conflict (see chapter two) and controversial attempts at resettlement (see chapter four). The floods represented a watershed moment, one that highlights the interplay and significance of environmental agency, state policy, and new relationships between land and labor in making the valley’s history. Figure 5: Aerial view shows floodwaters inundating houses and farmland in Kalay on August 2, 2015. Source: Ye Aung Thu, AFP. Kalay Valley lies at the seam between the hills and the plains, a key site of ethnic encounter and the historical edge of state power across Southeast Asia. It hosts a dynamic 57 landscape that has been shaped by regional and global flows. During my fieldwork, I was often struck by the dissonance of Kalay’s simultaneous remoteness and connectivity; the valley was both a gateway and an edge, a confluence and an out-of-the-way place. I was also continually uncovering the extent to which the valley’s ecology had changed as successive authorities and new settlers adopted new land management strategies and farming styles. The flood had been a sudden event, but it was woven into a longer trajectory of environmental change. Over 150 years, Kalay Valley went from ethnic confluence to protected forest to rice frontier to become the landscape I traveled, one pockmarked with idle plantations and remittance fish ponds. I understand these historical shifts as the result of both environmental agency and human intervention, specifically new regulatory regimes and relationships between land and labor. Kalay Valley’s steep slopes, rich soils, teak trees and unruly waters have attracted settlers and shaped livelihoods. As the 2015 floods reminded Kalay’s residents, nature is a powerful agent, one never fully tamed. Wetland bogs noted by colonial officers were channeled into irrigation channels, but periodically overflowed their banks. State policies prioritizing different environmental uses have recategorized and remade this landscape. While colonial officials sought to manage teak by creating Reserve Forests, post-independence policies and practices encouraged settlers to clear trees and cultivate rice. In response, the labor of Burman and Chin migrants created new paddy fields and settlements on the rice frontier, fostering the ecological conditions for increased flooding while increasing crop production. The closure of the rice frontier stemmed from and set in motion new government actions, labor prospects, and material environments. In one trajectory, paddy taxes and demonetization contributed to land consolidation, which helped spur Chin youth to enter circuits of global capitalism. The money they send home constructs remittance landscapes. In another, land grabbing enabled by military 58 rule left farmers in debt and despair, while new plantations often sat idle. Compared with rice paddies, these two environments are marked by an absence of people and new relationship between land and labor. In the first, work abroad provides capital to turn paddies into less labor- intensive landscapes. In the second, forcible dispossession often leaves land uncultivated, especially when new crops won’t take. This chapter provides an environmental history of the ethnographic present, outlining a transformation from colonial forest to socialist rice towards remittance fishponds and idle plantations. I trace the emergence and closure of a smallholder agrarian frontier in Kalay Valley, articulating the shifting relationships between ecology, policy and labor. The rise and decline of the national significance of rice played a key role in shaping settlement and land use in the valley, but these governance priorities are shaped by the agency of the environment and the labor of people who live on it. Understanding Kalay Valley as the site of the former smallholder rice frontier makes visible the radical shift and hard work of producing state and ethnic territory, the subject of the next chapter. This historical political ecology perspective also provides broader context for contemporary struggles to control and claim land, the subject of part two, as well as for changing modes of agrarian production and rural life, the subject of part three. In what follows, I first develop a conceptual framework to analyze the histories of environmental change that shape how land is used, lived on and governed today. I then describe the landscape that British colonial officers encountered, one shaped by centuries of human movement across an ethnic confluence that produced alternative cultural geographies that continue to inform how Burmans and Chins navigate space. Crucially, the British declared large swaths of this area Reserved Forest, and put in place infrastructures that would continue to link Kalay in networks of war and trade. A key moment in Kalay Valley’s trajectory was the creation 59 and closure of a smallholder rice frontier. I highlight the ways in which land-to-the-tiller policies and settler labor deforested the valley before turning to two forms of frontier closure: quotidian consolidation linked with labor migration, and military-backed land grabs. The result is a landscape shift from small scale rice cultivation towards remittance fishponds and idle plantations. Shifting paradigms of spatial control and ethnically diverse smallholders put in place successive and distinct political ecologies in the fertile and ferocious Kalay Valley. Writing Environmental History I approach the trajectories of landscape transformation in the Kalay Valley with the tools of environmental history and political ecology. Environmental history examines changing relationships between human and non-human nature over time and space, emphasizing the agency of the environment to influence the trajectories of political and social change. Emblematic of the cultural turn in this field is William Cronon’s (1983) Changes in the Land, which examines the interactions between Native Americans and English colonialists and the New England environment. Cronon highlights how different ways of living on and with the land, and different notions of seasonality, mobility, wealth and livelihood, shape how natives and colonists thought of, and ultimately shaped, the material landscape. Cronon emphasizes the recursive relationship between humans and nature, viewing the interaction between material conditions and culture as a driving historical force. He writes: An ecological history begins by assuming a dynamic and changing relationship between environment and culture, one as apt to produce contradictions as continuities. Moreover, it assumes that the interactions of the two are dialectical. Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to people at a given moment, but then culture reshapes environment in responding to those choices. The reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilities for cultural reproduction, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination. Changes in the way people create and re-create their livelihood must be 60 analyzed in terms of changes not only in their social relations but in their ecological ones as well. (Cronon 1983, 13). Cronon’s term ‘culture’ encompasses perhaps too wide range of sociological and political economic forces, including capitalism, imperialism and religion. Later environmental historians have been more specific, for example in examining the ways in which hydrological transformations have shaped both a modern river and a modern nation (S. B. Pritchard 2011). Similarly, classic work in the interdisciplinary field of political ecology has situated and analyzed specific environmental phenomena—whether land degradation (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987) or deforestation (Fairhead and Leach 1998)—within social relations and power dynamics of particular times and places. Important feminist and anti-racist scholarship has called attention to the limitations of these analyses by highlighting the role of intersectional social categories in local negotiations of resource access and larger material and cultural transformations of nature (Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993; Finney 2014). But Cronon’s motivating question—how did distinct cultural groups interact with the environment and each other, and how did these interactions shape changes in the land over time—remains a powerful entry point for historicizing contemporary landscapes. I revisit historical and theoretical accounts of pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial and contemporary place-making with these tools. To describe the shift from ethnic confluence to colonial forest, I draw on studies of highland Southeast Asia that emphasize fluidity, plurality and exchange (Fiskesjö 2011; J. Friedman 1979; van Schendel 2002). In their reconsideration of Edmund Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma, for example, Robinne & Sadan ( 2007) adopt Foucault’s notion of ‘spaces of dispersion,’ to describe the dynamic, mobile and multi- ethnic networks that stretch between present day India and China. These conceptions of space and connection resonate with early histories of the Kalay Valley and contrast with the regimes 61 put in place by colonial powers. Across British India, colonial techniques recategorized resources and introduced notions of scientific management and private ownership that field staff and local communities negotiated across particular landscapes (Cederlöf 2014; Sivaramakrishnan 1999). Across Southeast Asia, colonial protected forest designations broke with the past and paved the way for future state efforts to control land and territory via ‘political forests.’ As Vandergeest and Peluso (2001, 779) note: … colonial legal assumptions of state domain and jurisdiction were not consistent with precolonial local practices and power relations, particularly in the areas colonial authorities identified as natural forests… Local property rights had more often been based in people (labor), resources, or products (trees, crops) rather than in the land itself. Land unclaimed or unused by individuals, families, or other groups might be considered either open access or community (village or longhouse) land but was rarely, if ever, ‘owned by’ distant rulers. The creation of Reserved Forests across Kalay Valley represented a distinctive break with earlier notions of space that provides critical tools in contemporary state efforts to control space described in chapter two. At the same time, colonial maps and descriptions provide evidence of a dramatically different past environment, a dense jungle punctuated by multi-ethnic settlement clustered around streams and rivers. Deforestation in Kalay was driven by a smallholder rice frontier in the decades after independence. In contrast with the colonial government’s focus on controlling land via forests, socialist policy and practice focused on mobilizing labor to produce rice, a set of priorities that carried major ecological consequences. While the term ‘resource frontier,’ is often applied to the massive extractive projects of contemporary capitalism and violent, illicit economies (Watts 2018; Barney 2009), here I follow Cons and Eilenberg’s (2019) call to move beyond the political economy of extraction to consider how diverse actors, cultural logics, and political and economic pressures create new zones of production, and how these frontier moments radically reconfigure 62 peoples’ relationships to land and rule. Doing so is particularly appropriate in Southeast Asia, a place where many archetypal frontier dynamics—a land rush, renegotiation of rules, and subsequent social differentiation and state expansion—are common to longstanding, smallholder-driven land pioneering and boom crop production (D. Hall 2011; De Koninck 1996; Hirsch 2009). Today, smallholders across the region are reshaping ecologies and power relations through their labor on the land, carving out new political and material resource frontiers (Lukas and Peluso 2019; Peluso 2017). Their actions are entangled in broader forces of socio-ecological transformation: in Kalay, smallholders cut down trees, established new settlements, and put in play new processes of intimate exclusion that, alongside regulation, violence, and large-scale accumulation (D. Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011), remade the valley’s landscape. Frontiers do not last. Subsistence agricultural systems premised on land pioneering can collapse when powerful actors arrive to take land in spectacular acts of dispossession and enclosure, a phenomenon well-documented across historical eras and geographies (Levien 2017; Thompson 1975; Peluso and Watts 2001). Land grabs remake not only social and political relations, but also the very nature of the land itself, especially in the case of large agribusiness and other monocrop plantations that replace diverse smallholder ecologies with a single crop (Baird 2020; Lu 2015; Haraway 2015; Li 2017). But ‘land’s end’ can also arrive through mundane processes of differentiation. As Tania Li (Li 2014b) demonstrates in the Indonesian highlands, indigenous social relations premised on abundant land can undergo stealthy overhauls that result in new regimes of capitalist compulsion, even without obvious outside influence. As in the Lauje highlands, the introduction of new crops, land uses and property regimes in Kalay, like military land grabs, resulted in frontier closure. 63 Land loss spurred a search for new livelihoods. For many Chin families and a rising number of Burmans, labor migration provided an essential way to earn money that was re- invested in transforming the agrarian landscape. During my time in Chin communities around Kalay, I thought often about remittance landscapes, a term coined by Deirdre McKay (2005) to describe the new infrastructures capitalized by labor abroad that visibly transformed villages in the Philippines. More recently, Peluso and Purwanto (2017) have analyzed the emergence of ‘remittance forests’ in Java, where women’s work as maids in Hong Kong funds new investments in cows that require active management of the forest understory for elephant grass feed. This story echoes the phenomenon of forest regeneration due to out-migration that Susanna Hecht (2010) observes in her work on new rurality in rural Latin America. These accounts highlight the visible and sweeping role of labor migration and remittance capital in erecting new infrastructures in villages and reforesting their surroundings in the 21st century. Remittance landscapes are both increasingly common and qualitatively different from proceeding migration ecologies in agrarian communities because capital from labor elsewhere, as opposed to labor on the land itself, shapes space. These remarkable new formations are situated historically and materially within a longer trajectory of environmental change. New infrastructures, whether remittance-funded houses or foreign aid-funded roads, arrive on land animated with ecological agency, and inscribed with a series of socioecological shifts. In the empirical sections that follow, I focus in particular on the ways in which state policies and smallholders’ arrivals, dispossessions and departures produce new configurations of labor, land and capital, and in so doing change the composition of plants, soil, water and cement. 64 From Ethnic Confluence to Colonial Forest On January 20th, 1894, Lieutenant W.H. Dent and his Yorkshire Regiment set out northward from the rest-camp at Kalaymyo. They traveled on a military road that led through boggy terrain with occasional paddy-fields, which soon gave way to ’tree-jungle with grass undergrowth; jungle being chiefly bastard teak.’ The party continued, following a narrowing track across streams and through a jungle punctuated by Burman villages, some with cultivated paddy-fields alongside waterways, others that had been abandoned due to Chin raids. The party camped at Yazagyo, describing a night in the, ‘fine old village. We encamped in the former sawbwa’s [Shan ruler’s] palace, which is capable of holding a large number of troops,’ before setting off into thick jungle, ‘chiefly teak with little undergrowth,’ to cross the watershed boundary from the Kalay to the Kabaw valley. After several nights of camping in the dense forest, seeing ‘no supplies except fish and plenty of game in the jungle,’ they emerged on January 25th. 56 miles from Kalay, at a Chin settlement of 60 households (Carey and Tuck 1896, Vol 2, p. clxv-clxvii). This road report, included as an annex in the Chin Hill Commissioner’s encyclopedic 1896 tomb, describes a landscape that contrasts to the one that I encountered on my own travels in the valley. The main intersection in Kalaymyo still hosted a handful of spectacular Indian restaurants, and I, like Dent, often struggled to keep track of different Burmese and Chin names for the same mountains, settlements and streams. But the dense jungle Dent described was gone; it sometimes seemed that more Reserved Forest signboards than actual trees remained. More persistent, perhaps, were the cultural geographies that continued to animate the valley. Kalay Valley’s history as an ethnic confluence gave rise to networks of exchange and overlapping cultural geographies that continue to animate how people relate to space. There are no clear-cut autochthony claims here, but rather stories of arrival, departure and exchange. This 65 is typical of highland Burma, a region that has incited scholarly debates over mobility patterns and lineages for almost a century. Both Burman and Chin-authored written and oral histories that I collected around Kalay noted a multi-ethnic past, one in which multiple groups cohabitated, though not always peacefully, for the thousand years before colonialism. Rather than attempt an exhaustive account or to assess the veracity and authenticity of these various oral and written sources, I provide a select set here to emphasize that Kalay Valley has historically been an ethnic confluence, one in which multiple tribes, languages, and religious traditions settle and shift. Kalay’s flat and fertile soils attracted a variety of settlers who cultivated crops around its waterways. Until the 20th century, the valley was densely forested and lightly populated, with select sites of religious, trade and military activity. The British classified this landscape into Reserve Forests, and attempted to draw a boundary between the hills and the plains. These acts of boundary-making reflected extractivist colonial policies that broke with local notions of environment and space, and would prove crucial to contemporary delineation efforts. My own quest to learn about the history of the Kalay Valley had brought me to Yazagyo village 125 years after Dent and his men spent the night in the sawbwa’s palace. The structure itself was gone, but it was described to me by the former village headman. As we sat on the edge of a football field in the shade of a small, white-washed pagoda, he traced lines on the horizon, describing the palace, moat and waterlily pond that had once stood there. The palace and its pagodas had been built not by the Shan, but rather by Indian rulers, he told me. They used three types of bricks, made of red, yellow and white soil. He explained that the colors represented different classes of society: the royals, the intellectuals, and the people, respectively. He told a story I would read again in local Burman history books, of a set of royal brothers from India, true followers of Buddha. Their lineage had a terrible tradition: the sons must kill their father. Rather 66 than do so, the brothers left their native kingdom and traveled east until they found this place surrounded by five mountains, which they named after their ancestral land. Memorial stones the headman showed us in his village, as well as local history books dated the construction of Yazagyo palace to the Buddhist year 100 (444 BCE). This was where Buddhism arrived to Burma, he told me proudly. The former village headman told us that Buddha’s treasure had been buried right here by those early kings, and of a powerful force that would make water gush from the earth if anyone tried to disturb it. Buddhist relics have in fact been recovered from the Yazagyo site, though they are dated as considerably more recent—from the Konbaung Period, 1752-1885 (Hudson et al. 2018). As we listened to the headman’s story, a Burman friend I had traveled with nodded and tried to rectify the look on my face by explaining the story more slowly; everyone in her own village several hours away had heard of this legend, and she wanted to make sure I got the details correct. We left the former headman’s house full of hot fried bananas, carrying books full of pictures of temples, sketches of eastward migrations, and Buddhist astrological charts. On the long drive back to Kalay and on subsequent trips together, my friend explained more; the five pagodas in different parts of the valley, the pond where Buddha had once washed his hands. I found it almost impossible to keep track of the Pali names and religious calendar years, but together, the stories illustrated for me the existence of a detailed Buddhist geography, and a long history of Buddhist inhabitants, in the valley. Chin people had their own stories that tied their ancestors to specific places and plants. One involved a Banyan tree in the town of Khamphat, in the northern part of the valley, which was planted when Chin people were forced out of the valley with a prophecy that when it was cut down, they would return (cf Lehman 1963, 35). Chin historian Sakhong (2003) reports that the 67 Chin were the original residents of the Upper Chindwin Valley, further east, but crossed the river and arrived in Kalay in the late 1200s before being expelled into the Chin Hills. In his account, it was only then that the ethnic group splintered into the dozens of tribal and linguistic groups that exist today. A Mandalay University master’s thesis I read on the history of the Mizo, a Chin tribe, explained that the group arrived in the valley in the 8th Century CE, and then continued on to Mizoram in India in the 14th Century. They returned in the late 1800s, after they had already been converted to Christianity in India (Laithangliana 1975). Several decades later, another group of set out to fulfill the Banyan tree prophecy, resettling Khamphat in 1916 (Sakhong 2003, 20). According officer W.H. Dent, Chin people had been back in the preceding decades, though not for permanent settlement. In his 1894 road report, he noted the village of Khamphat had been abandoned after a Chin raid. Burmans and Chins are not the only groups with roots in the area. While the valley came under nominal control of the Bagan kingdom in the 12th century CE, for centuries it was dominated by Shan sawbwas (rulers) who had originated on the eastern side of the plains. The Shan ruled Yazagyo and built Kalaymyo in 1395 as a double-walled fortress town, a military and trade hub from which to extend their empire even further west, into present-day Assam (Sakhong 2003, 15). In Sakhong’s account, it was the construction of this city with forced labor that drove the Chin to abandon the valley and head into the hills. One book I consulted reported that the word ‘Kalay’ derived from the Shan for ‘trading town,’ an explanation more plausible than its meaning, ‘children,’ in Burmese. When the British arrived in the late 1880s, they viewed the area as Shan territory, noting a raging conflict between an uncle and his nephew for the position of sawbwa and the increasing frequency of Chin slave raids on their lowland settlements. The Chief Commissioner of Burma referred to the area as the, ‘little Shan State of Kale’ (Sakhong 2003, 68 90). While I never met self-identified Shan people in the valley, perhaps they had never quite disappeared: the former village headman at Yazagyo introduced himself as Burman, but explained that his ancestors had spoken Shan language. These centuries of multi-ethnic settlement undoubtedly shaped the landscape that Dent and his men encountered on their march. Dent takes note of rice paddies near wetlands, evidence of ecological conditions favorable to the crop and agrarian labor. But rice was not widespread, despite an abundance of water—one report from a day’s march south of Kalaymyo enumerates 40 stream crossings in a single day’s seven-mile march (Carey and Tuck 1896, ccviii). What the British saw and codified was forest, specifically teak. Consistent with policies across colonial Burma, large areas within and around the valley were designated Reserve Forests in the years following the road report. In his work on the political ecology of Burma’s forest, Bryant (1997) shows that state management of reserve forests was adopted in response to the massive deforestation of the Southeast under a laissez-faire approach. Chastened by the high-speed destruction of Tenasserim’s forest at the hands of private enterprise in the first half of the 19th century, the colonial Forest Department put in place new polices to control commercial teak extraction, promote teak regeneration, and regulate a variety of forest products after they annexed considerably more forested territories in the second Anglo-Burmese war of 1852. A system of reserved forests, in which the state exerted control and regulated access, was a key mechanism for this mode of resource governance (Bryant 1993). As both British holdings and the Forest Department expanded, Reserve Forest area increased from 134 square miles in 1872-3 to 17,153 square miles in 1900 (Progress Report of Forest Administration in British Burma, cited in Bryant 1993, 125). 69 By the 1930s, maps of Kalay reflected this larger national trend. On 1932-3 Survey of India maps, the area surrounding Dent’s road shows large swaths of Reserved Forest on the east and west slopes, with a scattering of villages in a green valley that is labeled with the words, ‘dense mixed jungle.’ Agricultural land appears limited to areas adjacent to stream and river-side settlements. While settlers would expand the area of farmland in the coming decades, aided by roads built by the British and improved by the occupying Japanese during World War II, the Reserved Forest designations remained. These maps document not only colonial concern with timber extraction, but also the ecology of an ethnic confluence. New polices promoting rice production would encourage agrarian expansion that would dramatically transform this landscape. Creating Kalay’s Rice Frontier While the British were designating parts of Kalay Valley as Reserved Forests, they were turning the Ayarwaddy Delta south of Yangon into the world’s rice frontier by promising land to anyone who cleared the malarial swamp and planted paddy. Immigrants flocked south from Upper Burma and, in the early decades of the 20th century, Burma exported over two million tons of rice annually (Brown 2012, 6). However, by the 1930s Myanmar’s first experiment with state- led agricultural development had ended in social, economic, and ecological disaster, with over one-third of the region’s agricultural land owned by foreigners, many of whom were money- lenders from other parts of British India, after peasants defaulted on their debts (Adas 1974). The rise of Burman landlessness would fuel the anti-colonial struggle and guide land and agricultural policies after independence in 1948. 70 The creation of a smallholder rice frontier in Kalay Valley decades later would involve similarly large-scale landscape transformation and new forms of land control with political implications. But while the Delta’s agricultural expansion was driven by the British empire’s concern with global markets, Kalay’s rice frontier was shaped by increasingly isolationist and erratic government policies concerned with maximizing domestic agricultural production. In response to the high rates of foreign ownership in the Delta, the Land Nationalization Act of 1948 designated all land property of the state. After General Ne Win’s 1962 military coup, the socialist government asserted control of almost all aspects of agriculture and trade while employing socialist, pro-peasant rhetoric and promising land-to-the-tiller polices. The 1963 Tenancy and Farmers’ Rights Protection Laws were designed to grant land to cultivators and prevent land confiscation by private debt collectors, while 1964 Executive Order I/64 gave a cultivator use rights to land after five years of productive use, regardless of whether or not they had documentation. Some form of compulsory rice procurement was practiced from 1964 through 2003 (Boutry et al. 2017). Farmers around Kalay remember this as the era of the rice tax, zaba dine kit, a time when land went to those who cleared land and planted rice. Despite coercive quotas, Myanmar’s rice production declined in these decades, even according to inflated official statistics (Than 1990). At a national scale, agrarian policies and three rounds of currency devaluations, in 1964, 1985 and 1987, would lead to economic collapse and eventual take-over by an oligarchic military junta by the end of the 1980s. For Kalay’s smallholders, post- independence policies motivated unprecedented agricultural expansion and shaped the unequal outcomes of frontier farming. In the decades after independence, migrant smallholders arrived in the Kalay Valley to cut down trees and cultivate paddy rice in protected forests and establish new settlements. 71 Anthropologist FK Lehman noted that during his fieldwork in 1957, increasing numbers of Chins arriving to the valley and, like their Burman neighbors, cultivating with a mix of farming techniques: Chin coming from hills in Kabaw Valley begin by planting crops in fields cleared from plains jungles in the same kind of swidden pattern that is used back in the hills. Eventually they open up more and more permanent fields, but these take time to complete. Burmans farming jungle lands bordering the hills also practice taungya [mixed crop, hillside] farming along with their regular farming of irrigated rice fields. (Lehman 1963, 48) Farmers were attracted by the possibility of plentiful dama u cha, land cleared to establish use rights. As I detail in the next chapter, paddy quotas encouraged local officials to turn a blind eye to cultivation in Reserved Forests. As Lehman notes, early swiddening and taungya practices steadily gave way to open fields; by the time I conducted my research, there were very few pockets of taungya left in the hills surrounding the valley, cultivated by nearby Burmans and Chins. Available land encouraged two main flows of migration: Chin farmers coming down from the western hills, and Burmans heading upland from Magway and Sagaing. Chin migration has been carefully documented by local historians. According to oral and written histories I collected in Kalay, Chin villages began sprouting up around Kalay at the turn of the 20th century. A history written by a Chin pastor, for example, included a list of 86 Chin settlements organized by tribal group, with the earliest ones founded in 1912 and the latest in the 1980s. Most Chin settlers had practiced shifting cultivation and had little idea about lowland agriculture. The strangeness of lowland farming in a hot climate for these Chin migrants was made apparent to me in several oral and written histories that described a similar realization—that Burman people were not lazy, rather, they napped mid-day because of the intense heat, and confined fieldwork to sunrise and sunset. Older Chin farmers told me frankly that they copied farming techniques from 72 Burman neighbors already living around Kalay. One man in a village near the hills explained, for example, that his community had imitated the methods of planting and harvesting beans in alluvial soils that they had seen in Burman settlements located closer to the Myitta River. While some Chin villages were temporarily abandoned when Japanese and British fought in the valley during World War II and farmers fled to the Indian state of Mizoram, these were restored and joined by a surge of new settlements in the wake of independence. These included villages such as San Tait, a Chin community founded in 1986 by on the site of a former government teak plantation whose name literally means ‘Rice Warehouse.’ After the government cleared the biggest trees and abandoned unsuccessful attempts at fostering a teak nursery, former workers began planting rice. Burman migration patterns were less extensively documented, but nonetheless apparent in individual and settlement histories. My Burman host father’s parents, for example, had come to Hla Ywa from Burman villages further southeast along the Myitta River. As a boy and young man, he had spent years going and coming from the area, looking for casual agricultural work and saving money to buy land of his own. He told me that Hla Ywa was originally a Chin village; not a single Burman lived there before Ne Win’s 1962 coup. But by around 1980, when he was able to buy land, the village was 20 or 25 households, and entirely Burman. While I stayed with them, the family hosted a weaving apprentice from the southernmost part of the valley, sometimes referred to as the Yaw Valley, now located in Magway Division. I noted that poor families or new arrivals in Burman villages were often from this dusty region down the slope and further south, evidence of continuing migration. For both Burmans from the plains and Chin from the hills, Kalay Valley’s land and the possibility of farming one’s own rice represented an opportunity to improve their life. Kalay’s 73 flat land, abundant water, and rich soils made rice cultivation possible, and state policy incentivized agriculture, but neither made land conversion inevitable. Rather, it was smallholder labor that turned teak forest into rice paddies. In oral histories with old-timers, I heard about the elephants once spotted in Kalay’s jungles, wildlife that had now been replaced by rising temperatures and worsening floods. Many attributed these changes to the loss of forests, which had persisted through the 1960s in parts of Kalaymyo where, like my neighborhood, there were now motorcycle repair shops and dusty paved roads, but almost no remaining trees. When a friend translated one history of this neighborhood written in Chin language for me, it told of a tiger and other wild beasts that Chin settlers drove away in 1927 to found a farming community. Memories of a forested landscape were corroborated by colonial documents I reviewed that describe plentiful trees and sparse settlements. One set of colonial documents from 1930-1 permitting the founding of a village in the part of Kalay town where I currently lived. The documents specified that the 20-60 households should not disturb the protected forest there. Landscape change is also apparent by comparing colonial maps to current satellite imagery. The 1934 Survey of India map showed ‘dense mixed jungle’ across the valley floor and denoted large areas as Reserved Forest (figure 6). These contrast with the land cover captured by contemporary satellite images. Images like the one below show the same areas almost completely converted into agricultural and urban use (figure 7). This dramatic shift in the valley’s ecology was due to environmental conditions, production policy, and smallholder labor on the rice frontier. 74 Figure 6. Colonial Map of Kalay Valley. Excerpt from a 1932-3 Survey of India map shows ‘Dense Mixed Jungle’ around most of Kalaymyo and denotes this area as part of the Upper Chindwin District of Upper Burma. Source: National Library of Australia. Figure 7. Contemporary Satellite Map. 2019 image showing conversion to farmland, urban and village settlements in the same area. Source: Google Earth. 75 Frontier Closures Not long after Burman and Chin farmers converted forests into paddy and created new settlements in the valley, new forms of consolidation and dispossession emerged. Initially, land was widely available, but over time, rising rice taxes pushed poorer farmers to sell to richer neighbors and military cronies claimed the best plots. Below, I center the stories of two frontier farmers and their families to illustrate how smallholders labored to create the rice frontier, and how these same families experienced alternate forms of frontier closure. First, disruptive socialist policies in the 1960s, 70s and 80s created the conditions for local land consolidation, which accelerated the entry of labor into the circuits of global capitalism. Second, military land grabs in the 1990s prompted widespread accumulation by dispossession in which a violent state and crony elite grabbed land and left smallholders in debt. These frontier closures involved new forms of coerced and constrained mobility that reshaped relationships between labor and a changing landscape of prison plantations and remittance fishponds. Socialist Shock, Capitalist Closure, and Remittance Fishponds I met Hlual in a house across from a rural market that served as a local hub for the surrounding Chin settlements established during the rice boom. Migrant farmers from the Chin Hills, like Hlaul’s father, were attracted to this area by the possibility of plentiful dama u cha, land cleared to establish use rights. But the family’s experiment with lowland rice farming ended a decade after their arrival; a currency devaluation and rising rice quotas forced his family to sell their land to an emerging class of local elites. When Hlaul’s sons reached adolescence, they had no farm waiting, and followed other Chin youth to work abroad. Like an increasing number of former Chin rice farmers, Hlual now tended a fishpond built with remittances sent from his sons. 76 Hlual’s story illustrates how an economic squeeze from socialist agriculture and currency policies ended a phase of land pioneering and began a period of wealth concentration. Landlessness was one key factor in pushing increasing numbers of youth to seek work abroad, and their remittance capital was reinvested to change local landscapes. Hlual’s father moved the family to the village in 1962 from the Chin Hills. He purchased eight acres of farmland for 2,300 kyat and began to grow rice, believing this would prove more lucrative than shifting cultivation. In 1973, they sold the farmland to the village head, a man whose duties would have included collecting the paddy tax and reporting total yields, for 23,000 kyat. During our interview, we laughed together about these low prices: land now goes for hundreds of times that amount. Hlaul recounted: At that time the government forced farmers to pay annual tax [in baskets of rice]… Our farm was too muddy—we could not grow enough paddy. There was big pressure from the government and such great trouble that we sold it. Hlual and his wife owned and lived on a small plot in town, where they raised pigs and had a modest fishpond. Their main income came from their children, all of whom had left the village. Two sons made $200US per month in Malaysia as a waiter and hotel receptionist. The other had gone to China a few months earlier, where he made $145US packing fish with an additional, unknown portion of his salary being held by the boss. None of Hlual’s sons had passports; they had travelled through Chin brokers. One had attempted to go to Australia by presenting himself as a refugee at the United Nations offices in Malaysia, but when unsuccessful he went back to work. In six years, none had come back to visit. Many of Hlual’s neighbors reported similar situations. In a survey of 100 convenience- sampled households I conducted in his village in 2017, only 9% of respondents reported being born there, with a majority, like Hlual, having moved from the Chin Hills. In the 1970s, when 77 rice taxes and currency devaluation caused a major crisis for farmers, many sold their land. Of the 42% who owned rice land, 30 households had bought the land, 12 inherited, and only two cleared the land themselves, suggesting that only about one-third of farmland has remained in possession of the families who cleared it. In contrast, 29% of respondents reported that they had alienated land, many explaining that they sold to a community member because they needed money or did not have enough labor. Families without farmland bred animals, sold vegetables, worked as day laborers or farmed rented land, but the Village Head emphasized that this work alone could not finance daily maintenance. Only those with money from children abroad could afford to build a house. In an interview in 2017, he estimated that 50 young people had left that year for work. In Chin villages like Hlual’s, fishponds were an increasingly common sight. Land conversion had been catalyzed by the devastating 2015 monsoon floods that stripped top soil and deposited silt on large areas used to grow rice. One day I interviewed the largest landowner in a Chin village that hosted the most fishponds of any place I visited. The landowner had a reputation for frugality and was one of the few male farmers I met who had never married; as he neighbors explained, while they struggled to feed their families, he had carefully and slowly acquired their land. In fact, the friend who introduced us that day, an older farmer and land law trainer who now lived in a rented, ramshackle home at the edge of the village, told me after the interview that he had sold his own land to this man years before for just 500 kyat an acre when he could not manage to pay the rice tax. Today that price could not buy a cup of tea, he laughed. The landowner was in the midst of a major project. He explained to me that while the 2015 flood was particularly terrible, his 150 acres of rice was on low ground near the river and had been prone to increasingly severe flooding since 2010. Now, he was in the process 78 converting many of his plots. ‘Because of the floods, there’s not much paddy left; all is fish pond now,’ he told me. So far, with a large tractor and hired workers, he had converted 100 acres. After the interview on his porch, we headed out to meet a crew of three men living in a modest encampment amongst the growing pits. Some were filled chest-deep and stocked full of fish, others were empty, weedy holes. As we jolted along on the back of a large tractor on a tour of the fishponds-in-formation, my friend pointed out his daughter gathering morning glory in large recycled rice sacks, work she did for a daily wage. His son was renting his own small fishpond from another better-off neighbor back in the village, and later invited me to the catch. In this village, fishponds had replaced rice paddies as the dominant source of agrarian livelihoods, both for the rich who could afford to own them and the poor who rented or worked them. Aquaculture is becoming more and more popular across Myanmar, particularly in the Ayarwaddy Delta, where in 2015 there were an estimated 235,000 acres of fishponds on the site of the colonial rice frontier (Filipski and Belton 2018). This analysis shows that small, commercial fish farms generate higher returns than agriculture, and highlights a greater annual labor demand. In contrast, fishpond owners I interviewed reported their ponds took less hard work than paddy, though they also reported not being sure they knew proper aquaculture techniques. A field researcher at World Fish stationed in Kalaymyo told me that while there was increasing interest in aquaculture since the 2015 floods had ruined rice lands, few landowners around Kalay knew how to properly and sustainably manage a fishpond. He himself had been born on a farm, but had little interest in agriculture when he was young. Now, he trained farmers in a new and more lucrative livelihood: small-scale aquaculture. Each month, he and six other full- or part-time staff trained 10 groups of 15 farmers how to dig out ponds with backhoes, install a lining, and feed the fish. He explained to me that the costs of legally changing farmland 79 to fishponds was often very high because farmers had to pay off the Agriculture Department, Land Records Department, Fishery Department and the General Administrative Department. While the official cost to register a fishpond was between 1-2 lahks per acre, farmers frequently paid 30 lahks (about $2,000) to legalize their land use change. Or they choose not to register; the large landholder above, for example, told me that he had chosen to leave half of his acreage unregistered to avoid cost and hassle. Despite the high costs of registration and construction, farmers with capital were keen to invest. ‘The landowners want to do it when they see the other people get profit from that livelihood,’ the World Fish trainer told me, ‘they can get profit and make enough money for the whole family even if they have only a half-acre of fish ponds.’ Fishponds posed an especially attractive alternative to rice in Chin communities, where remittances provided the necessary up-front capital, and labor was increasingly scarce. Not all fishponds were funded by remittances—the large landowner profiled above, for example, did not have children working abroad—nor were these infrastructures completely absent from Burman communities. The phenomenon of remittance landscapes was perhaps more visible in the multi- story churches and homes that lined the main streets of Kalay’s Chin villages than it was in the waters pooling where rice used to be. However, as migration increased in both Chin and Burman communities and both faced flood damage related to a changing climate and deforested slopes, the replacement of children’s labor with children’s capital provided an important factor for more and more families to consider converting away from rice. The possibility and even profitability of aquaculture did not necessarily equate with desirability. When I asked Hlual if he wished to be a farmer again, he was quick to respond, ‘Yes, of course. This is the only way [of life] we are familiar with. If we had a farm, I would not have to send my sons to foreign countries.’ Hlual’s personal history was intertwined with the 80 transformation of the surrounding landscape from common forest to concentrated paddy to pock- marked fishponds, and of the population from frontier settlers to labor migrants and those left behind. When Hlual’s family arrived, land was widely available, but over time, rising rice taxes and a devastating currency devaluation pushed poorer farmers to sell to richer neighbors. This experience was common in both Burman and Chin communities. Eventually, labor ‘freed’ from family farming sought work beyond the confines of the village. Chin people had a longer history of international migration, and, on the whole, more remittance capital available for investment. Precarity catalyzed by the socialist policies as well as Chin migration networks allowed Hlual’s village to go from booming frontier settlement to a source of international migrant labor within one man’s lifetime. Smallholder labor on the land had turned forest to paddy; now labor abroad was contributing to a shift from paddy to fishponds. Violent Dispossession, Persistent Despair, and Prison Plantations When I worked as a farmer, because we cut and cleared everything [the land] was flat like a football field. In order to do that, we worked. We worked on over 50 acres…from spring to monsoon to winter we had to cut down big trees, and animals bit us! We submitted to the superior: if we work the land, will we own it? The land record department said yes, work it, that’s the case. We worked it and our family lived there…After we cleared the land…the Corrections Department Head showed up. When [he] came we couldn’t work it anymore. When we couldn’t work it anymore, our family had nothing for our survival. Back in Yazagyo village, U Min and his wife told me their story over tea and sugary snacks in her brother’s home, where they had moved after their land was taken. The small house lay in the shadow of a massive new dam designed for local irrigation and electricity but left unused because of sedimentation. The Burman couple lived just across the paved Tamu-Kalay road from the site of their former land, now part of a massive, fenced, and barely-farmed property worked by prisoners. At the time of my visit in October 2018, a signboard marking the 81 entrance to Chin State had been removed from the edge of the Burman village and leaned up against the back of a closed medical clinic. As U Min told me of a military government land grab that left his family destitute, it was hard not to read these crumbling infrastructures as a material history of state neglect. When U Min arrived in the area from his birthplace several hours south in 1983, it did not feel that way. It had been the end of what farmers called the era of the rice tax, zaba dine kit. U Min knew that, under the socialist government, land went to those who cleared forest to plant paddy. In his telling, U Min emphasized this hard labor as a basis for his claims. The land he cleared was inside a vast Reserved Forest, but local officials eager to meet their rising rice quotas hardly cared. Fifteen years after he began clearing, an official in the military government arrived and took hundreds of acres without warning or compensation. The land grab happened right before planting but after local farmers had borrowed money for input costs, casting many into financial ruin. That was a time of so much suffering, U Min told me. Q: Before the land was taken did they give any notice? A: They told the village only by mouth. Then they kicked us out… and said, ‘You can’t live here, you can’t work it.’ Q: Did they give any reason? A: They didn’t give us any. The land was already prepared, ready for planting. At that time, they kicked us all out. And then they planted it themselves, and got the bounty. We couldn’t do anything! On the day they took it, that morning I was in such despair. That day and for about three days afterwards I couldn’t eat, thinking, ‘What will become of us?’ I couldn’t do anything. ‘Come live here, don’t go away’ said my brother-in-law. ‘Come here. Come live in our house.’ Q: Before kicking you off the land, when did they give you the notice? A: It wasn’t like that. They didn’t tell us in advance. They arrived and only then, just then, they told us not to [plant]. Only after that [I saw another farmer]. Tears were falling down his face, he was crying, ‘What will I do? The debts, how will I ever pay them back!’ So the tears fell. He must have had over 200 acres. U Min had spent two decades writing unanswered petition letters to sequential military authorities, but had been unsuccessful in recovering his land. Both his Burman neighbors and 82 Chin farmers in a neighboring village had also tried, separately, to recover fields now incorporated into the prison plantation. When I met with the Chin group a month later, they showed me signed petitions and took me for a walk on the periphery of work camp. From the paved road, I could see paddy, but as we pulled off onto a dirt track and drove our motorcycles across streams next to the fence, my guides pointing out large swaths that had been left uncultivated. The Chin village had been founded in 1975 when the farmers planted sugar cane, they told me. They farmed in an area they explained to me was legally a Reserve Forest, but had been cleared during the Japanese occupation in World War II for a military encampment. Soon after they switched to rice, the Corrections Department grabbed their land with no warning or compensation. In the early years, they explained, the military had allowed them to rent back their land for the share of the crop. But both this practice and the prison population had dwindled, resulting in land left fallow. In a strange twist that reflects the elasticity of land discussed in chapter three, the group had been awarded a community forest plantation adjacent to the concession the previous year, and had already reforested five acres of teak. I met many other farmers around Kalay, both Burman and Chin, who had lost their land to military actors. Out of 60 land-related cases collected by a grassroots activist group in Kalay Town that I reviewed, almost one-half the disputes stemmed from land grabs by the military government in the 1990s. These implicated multiple government departments and occurred in over a dozen villages and towns. They included requests to get land back or compensation for stolen land, only two which had achieved some success by late 2019, and disputes between different claimants on land that had been ostensibly returned, often after being bought and sold multiple times. Sometimes original owners were in conflict with more recent settlers, or with people who had worked the land for the military as forced labor or in rental arrangements. The 83 number and complexity of these cases highlight both the widespread trend of military-backed dispossession, and its irreversible implications for frontier closure, demonstrating the broader relevance of U Min’s case. While military government land grabs proliferated in the 1990s, prominent officers continued to leverage military connections and force to take land long afterwards. When I interviewed one former military official at his outdoor brick factory a few miles from his former base, he complained that locals were laying claim to parts of a 2,000 acre concession he had received in 2013. I also followed a case from 2016-2019 in which families displaced by the 2015 floods were evicted for ‘squatting’ in a state forest that was later granted to a retired general, which I analyze in chapter four. These patterns of military land grabbing are common across Myanmar; an analysis of government data uncovered over five million acres allocated to agri- business between 1991 and 2016 by military government agencies or, in 27% of the total area, directly by military commanders (San Thein et al 2018). The study noted that many large-scale concessions for crops such as oil palm, rubber, rice, oil seed crops and corn were signed between 2007 and 2011 and that large concessions had lower rates of land use effectiveness than smaller plots. Low levels of cultivation stemmed in part from sporadic prioritization crops that were ill- suited to the ecological conditions of acquired lands. Southeast of Kalay in Sagaing Division, for example, I learned of two massive concessions that the military junta allocated for jatropha production in 1997 and 2006. Together the concessions totaled about 13,000 acres, but only 100 were ever planted. Cases like these suggest that the idle plantations I observed were part of a broader pattern of ill-gotten, uncultivated land. Military-backed land grabs, like devalued currency and rising production quotas, ended the prospects of making a living by one’s own labor and cast farmers off their land and into debt. 84 In this second process of consolidation and closure, individuals and institutions empowered by military rule dispossessed settlers of desirable plots, violently terminating dreams of land and opportunity on the rice frontier. Acquisition was often followed by abandonment, leaving smallholders fenced out of their former, now fallow, plots. The stories of U Min and Hlual exemplify how both violent land grabs and quotidian processes of consolidation put in place new systems of land control that shaped the lives of settlers, both Burman and Chin, who moved into the Kalay Valley driven by the promise of a better life cultivating rice. These forms of frontier closure are remaking the valley’s material landscape, as smallholder paddies give way to fallow plantations and fishponds. Conclusion This chapter has described human-environmental change in the Kalay Valley as a series of moments of encounter, settlement, departure and dispossession. Successive regimes of spatial governance and different forms of labor on and beyond the land produced a series of distinct changes in the physical landscape, as well as in how it was valued and used. At the same time, the particularity of the valley’s ecology and agency of its waters and soils have shaped how humans have seen, settled and used the land, most recently and dramatically in the case of the 2015 floods. Kalay Valley has long served as an ethnic confluence, a place inscribed by Buddhist pagodas, Shan fortresses, and Chin names. Origin myths and sacred geographies highlight the ways in which this place is entangled within and constituted by broader circulations, and continues to be animated by contrasting cultural logics. 20th century British, Burman and Chin arrivals set to work reshaping this landscape. The stories of Hlual Var and U Min illustrate how Chin and Burman smallholders who were driven by the promise of a better life cultivating rice 85 changed forest to paddy, and how both military land grabs and quotidian processes of consolidation put in place new systems of land control on the rice frontier. Forced dispossession and international labor migration, like rice cultivation, transformed Kalay Valley, but local environments also shaped the possibilities for land use. Military grabbers abandoned agribusiness when crops refused to take root, and those with capital dug fishponds after floods destroyed their rice paddies. While the national policy and local practice of prioritizing rice irrevocably altered Kalay’s material, social and legal environment, shifting relationships between ecology, policy and labor shaped successive landscapes before and after the rice frontier. Ethnicity matters to these processes. British notions of the inherent differences between hill and plains peoples, as well as racialized ideas about proper forest management, directed their demarcation of reserve forest and frontier areas. While both Burmans and Chins migrated to the valley, Burmans carried with them farming skills that were more easily adapted to Kalay’s soils. Chin people accustomed to hill swiddening had to learn new lowland cultivation tactics. They often did so by imitating their Burman neighbors, a practice embedded in longer histories of ethnic exchange, adaption and co-habitation. More recently, ethnic social networks enabled migratory labor that funds new remittance infrastructures. Hlual’s sons went abroad, and U Min’s did not, in part because Chin networks for labor migration are much better established than Burman routes. This is partially due to racialized state persecution and neglect, which drove Chin people out of Myanmar as political and economic refugees. These important differences in relationships to the state structure contemporary social infrastructures and experiences of agrarian change in various ethnic communities. Despite their differences, the historic exchanges and the commonalities between Burman and Chin experiences of clearing forest for rice 86 cultivation stand in contrast with the descriptions of ethnic separation that will animate the chapter that follows. While Kalay provides a particularly dynamic case of environmental change, it is certainly not Myanmar’s first or last resource frontier. Attention to the interplay of ecology, politics and labor points to new ways of understanding how histories of landscape shape contemporary rural life and resource politics in Myanmar. Specifically, I use this approach to push against a persistent notion that Myanmar’s contemporary transformations are dictated by geopolitical or environmental determinism: a country sandwiched between India and China, with an irreconcilable divide between the uplands and lowlands. In contrast, environmental history analysis offers grounded attention to the material conditions, policy constraints and hard work that go into making resources and frontiers in different historical moments. The case of Kalay Valley highlights in particular the dramatic material transformations of the socialist period, an era often skimmed over in accounts of Myanmar history. My analysis also points to the role of migration in creating Myanmar’s landscapes, an important corrective to racist efforts at ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State, as well as more insidious notions of segregated space and ethnic purity. Decades of war and migration play a major role in shaping environments across the country. In Kachin and Northern Shan States, for example, the past decade has seen a massive surge in the arrival of Chinese-nationals who lease land for massive banana plantations that are rapidly transforming the ecological and social landscape. In the Southeast, remittances are funding increasing numbers of commercial fishponds and smallholder rubber plantations, even as foreign-owned oil palm plantations set up shop on the sites of former military land grabs. Across diverse agroecologies, Myanmar’s landscape is shaped by histories of mobility that are 87 structured by power, often enacted through violence, and entangled with questions of ethnic belonging. Kalay’s environmental history shapes the political space of the valley in the present. Together, this chapter and the one that follows trace Kalay Valley’s transformation from forested periphery to agrarian production zone to a critical site of racialized state-making. Both teak trees and colonial categories have long roots: today, Reserve Forest designations can restrict farmers’ access to registration documents, while the colonial administrative border has become a critical site for defining state authority and ethnic autonomy. These boundaries became less salient on the rice frontier, but are now being re-articulated in ways that redefine ethnic difference and extend state authority in spaces previously characterized by state neglect and cultivated ambiguity. This turn towards delineation represents a final form of closure on Kalay Valley’s former rice frontier, one marked not by material transfer but rather by territorial fixation. Together, these chapters examine what happens when a smallholder agricultural frontier crosses a colonial borderline and becomes the site of contemporary ethnic territorial boundary-making. 88 CHAPTER TWO PRODUCING STATE AND ETHNIC TERRITORY In September 2018 I attended a heated press conference in Kalaymyo’s one-room youth center. Shouting, an ethnic minority Chin activist announced that the government had just re- surveyed the local university’s lands and declared them to be within the neighboring Burman province. Kicking over a chair, he demanded the borderline be restored to its proper, colonial location, which would cede both the university and the fertile Kalay Valley to Chin State. A Burman farmer’s union leader stood to defend the boundary’s move as one of administrative necessity that ultimately benefited farmers. He presented a stack of photocopied documents to support his claim, evidence to counter the gigantic reproduction of a colonial map that hung behind the speakers. As several dozen of us sweated in monsoon humidity, hundreds more discussed the issue on Facebook, where maps circulated among local activists and media, elected officials, and the Chin diaspora in Malaysia, Australia, and the US. Meanwhile, Chin and Burman farmers who had cleared forest to plant rice continued to work the disputed land. As I travelled the valley in search of the border, residents complained that neither province would supply them with farmland registration, emergency relief, or crop loans. They presented me with decades-old documents from both the Burman Sagaing Division and Chin State, evidence they hoped would enable them to locate their land and legitimate their claims. As we walked through rice paddies marked as state forest in the disputed border zone, I saw how smallholder settlement and cultivation had not only transformed Kalay’s environment, but also blurred the lines between land types and ethnic groups. 89 While Chin activists touted border measurement as a technical exercise of recovering the authentic past, boundary demarcation erased embodied, multi-ethnic frontier histories to forge political futures premised on territorialized ethnicity. Chin activists were ultimately victorious in getting a national edict to return to the ‘original’ 1938 boundary. The announcement created new urgency for border residents to position themselves and the land they worked in relationship to provincial authorities. The democratic turn had made new forms of legibility feasible and desirable, but the scale of ecological, social, and political transformations on the rice frontier made a return to the past impossible. The previous chapter described the historical formation of Kalay’s socioecological landscape, tracing the roles of state policy, smallholder labor and environmental agency. This chapter examines the production of political space through analysis of how officials, activists and farmers negotiated territorial boundary-making. I argue, first, that disputes over the border’s location in fact reveal a more fundamental agreement on the desired existence of clear, separable ethnic and territorial boundaries. While this principle has historical precedent, it represents a profound shift from recent practices of governing rural land and people who live on it. During the rice boom, farmers removed border posts to create farmland and officials ignored the destruction to meet their paddy quotas. Decades of cultivated ambiguity in service of rice production are now being replaced by formal demarcation premised on a shared conception of national strength through ethnic separation. Contemporary territorialization is driven by negotiations over different visions of land governance that cohere around strengthening state power, spatial boundaries, and ethnic categories. Provincial boundaries are key arenas for defining the shape and significance of democratic federalism in Myanmar today. The case of the Sagaing Division-Chin State border 90 demarcation illuminates a broader shift in Myanmar state formation: from a regime of ambiguity towards a regime of delineation. These new practices of governance constitute a final form of frontier closure in Kalay, one in which private property and bounded territory are replacing land pioneering and productive ambiguity. This change is intimately linked to how resources are valued in the valley; just as a shift from timber to rice prompted the erasure of colonial boundaries, the decreasing significance of agriculture creates the conditions for Chin activists to reestablish the border in service of animating ethnic territory. These observations highlight the temporal and spatial entanglements of political borders and agrarian frontiers. The erasure and restoration of this colonial boundary, I argue, demonstrates the ways in which borders are articulated within cycles of agrarian change, in particular the creation and closure of smallholder frontiers. In what follows, I build on studies of territorialization, border work and boundary-making to conceptualize the dual processes of racial and spatial categorization. I then present empirical material in two parts. First, I show how Chin officials and activists invoked border histories that emphasized ethnic separation and autonomy in their contemporary quest for demarcation. I introduce the central official involved in this case, using his account to introduce histories of ethnic territory in Myanmar. In the following section, I show how the Minister and Chin activists marshaled technical evidence and historical narratives to successfully lobby for delineation of the colonial border. Their accounts aligned with a new national regime of governance, one that advanced a vision of strong and separable state and ethnic territory. In the second part, I examine how border residents and farmers negotiate delineation in the context of a long history of productive ambiguity. I show how practices of land use and management on and after the rice frontier blurred administrative boundaries before highlighting the ways in which farmers now 91 seek to position themselves in relation to the emerging borderline. Together, these different forms of border work redefine ethnic difference while extending state authority into spaces previously characterized by neglect. Conceptual Framing: Border Work & Territorialization Practices of boundary-making are essential to the work of producing ethnicity and sovereignty. Borders are negotiated through multi-scale, social processes that are crucial to the formation of national identities (P. Sahlins 1989; Paasi 1999) and state territories (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995; Sack 1983). A rich vein of literature examining state formation from the margins has explicated the privileged vantage point of borderlands to understanding the fragility and violence of law, authority and nation (Das and Poole 2004; Cons and Sanyal 2013; Reyes 2019). For example, in his work on the Indian-Bangladesh enclaves, Jason Cons (2016) describes these borderlands as ‘sensitive space,’ an analytic that demonstrates the ways in which national territory is made and contested through active projects of controlling, interpreting and navigating the border. Bounding space can have stark consequences not only at international borders, but also when internal lines create new categories of inclusion and exception that simultaneously define and territorialize state authority, whether around state forests, special economic zones, or indigenous communities (Ong 2000; Astuti and McGregor 2017; Campbell 2015a). Representations of space play a key role in the production of the political space of nation (Lefebvre 2009). Maps like the ones brandished at the borderline press conference are critical instruments in territorialization-through-boundary-making processes that produce new national and political imaginaries (Craib 2004; Mitchell 2002; Winichakul 1997). 92 Territorialization in Kalay Valley is shaped by a frontier past. The establishment, destruction and reformation of spatial orders occur in historical relation to each other (Rasmussen and Lund 2018). Memories and material impacts of earlier land struggles and property regimes create the conditions of possibility for contemporary land control (Edelman and León 2013, Verdery 1994). Teo Ballvé (2020) illustrates a particularly intimate and violent relationship between frontier practices and territorialization projects in Colombia, where a discourse of state absence paradoxically produces new and overlapping forms of state-like territory, a dynamic he dubs, ‘the frontier effect.’ This notion of frontiers, in their material and cultural specificity, as generative of territory grounds Elden’s (2013) conceptualization of territory as a political technology in the historical and embodied relationships of land, labor and violence that shape terrain. Elden’s emphasis on the project of controlling both the economic and strategic aspects of space illuminates the Myanmar government’s motivation for the range of new development projects, mapping initiatives, legal reforms and military operations that fixate on delineation. But producing territory is not solely an elite occupation. Rather, everyday geopolitical practices construct borders and ethnic others (Culcasi 2016; Tyerman 2019). In Kalay Valley, the production of territory is a contested process shaped by frontier actors and environments, specifically by the creation and closure of a smallholder rice frontier. The declining importance of rice and new possibilities for ethnic autonomy fueled advocacy for Chin State’s demarcation. While recent scholarship has demonstrated the limitations of indigenous recognition through territorial entitlements in the Americas (Anthias 2018; Coulthard 2014), in South and Southeast Asia hopes for subnational autonomy are both emotional and embodied and carry potent political force, ‘anxious belongings’ that stoke separatist movements and structure everyday social life (Middleton 2013). Practices of spatial 93 boundary-making are intertwined with cognitive and social processes of categorization (R. Jones 2009). In both territorialization and the construction of ethnicity, the contents are defined by their limits (Barth 1969). This affinity structures the ways in which the social meaning of race are woven into a sedimented and entangled landscape (D. S. Moore 2005). These processes are neither smooth nor universal. In her work in Central Asia, Madeleine Reeves (2014) shows how attempts to ‘shore up’ international borders premised on a vision of the salience, violence and naturally-territorialized nature of ethnicity are undermined and renegotiated in daily practices of trade, kin and mobility. Following Reeves’ notion of ‘border work,’ I attend here to how ethnicity and territory are made together, and made to matter, in a specific time and place. Reeves reminds us of the, 'eventfulness of borders—their capacity to appear, disappear, and de/materialize at particular moments, and, of the need to attend, ethnographically, to this variability’ (Reeves 2014, 237). The closure of Kalay Valley’s rice frontier, and the national dual rural and political transformations underway, provide the conditions of possibility for the border’s reappearance. The temporality and work of borders, Reeves argues, cast new light on the state 'not just as a terrifying externality but as the locus of intense emotional investments, as a site of enactment or performance, as the source of legitimation, and as an object of hope' (Reeves 2014, 238). Border work in Kalay Valley produces both state authority and ethnic difference in a moment in which both are subject to redefinition. Mobilizing Border Histories The Minister didn’t want to talk about the border, but I had come a long way. Chin State was Myanmar’s only region with no airport, a sore subject among my Chin friends, which meant 94 that the best way to reach its capital, Hakha, was a 24-hour bus ride from Yangon. After traveling all day across Myanmar’s flat and dusty central plains, we spent the final hours careening up winding cliffs in the pitch black, ascending westward into the Chin Hills. At daybreak, I disembarked to the guttural sounds of rolling v’s and r’s ringing out in the cold air as passengers and hawkers called greetings in Chin languages, which sounded nothing like the tonal rhythms of lowland Burmese. The guesthouse I had stayed at for Chin National Day celebrations two years before was just down the hill. On the way I could see vendors starting to arrange the dark red textiles typical of this district and famous across the country. The most prized of these were those that women had woven with their village’s traditional patterns on backstrap looms; a single, foot- wide strip could fetch hundreds of dollars. With Yangon behind me, I could see Hakha’s new build sprawled out across the hill tops and along the only other paved road in this part of the country, which I would take the next day through villages, taungya shifting cultivation plots and cherry blossoms for the bumpy eight hour ride down to Kalaymyo. I had heard this Minister’s name for years when I asked about border issues in the valley. I would show up at new Chin settlements and hear that he had recently visited and promised to recognize the new village as within Chin State (see chapter four). The Minister was a NLD appointee who took office in April 2016 with a sweeping mandate: his official title was Chin State Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, Forestry and Mines. He was also a member of the Siyin tribe, whose customary territory was located around the border in the forests just west of Kalaymyo. With only two weeks left in my research, I had begged friends to arrange a meeting. After a few hours of sleep underneath a pile of blankets at the guest house, I wrapped myself in a Chin htamein and prepared to sweet talk the guards, the secretaries, and the Minister. 95 The interview started badly. When she made the appointment, my friend had told me the official would be eager to tell me about the border, his pet project, and so I made the mistake of eschewing Myanmar etiquette and broaching the subject directly. But the Minister initially refused to speak about the border, telling me this was an issue for the Union level. Instead of answering my question, he relayed an extended history of Chin customary land tenure. He explained that colonial law for the lowlands did not apply to Chin State; the British had set aside the Chin Hills as a ‘Frontier Area’ for a limited form of self-governance. He told me that Chin customary practices were recognized in colonial law. He emphasized the promises of co- independence and self-determination articulated in the Panglong Agreement, the pre- independence accord signed by select leaders of major ethnic groups. As he recounted 300 years of legal history, the Minister paced his room, gathering copies of Myanmar’s land laws and setting them out on the table in front of me. As my despair subsided, I realized that these diversions were strategic, and telling. The Minister’s narrative echoed what I had heard from Chin activists in Kalay: that the boundary issue was deeply entangled with colonial regulations and broken promises of equity and autonomy. Luckily, boundary delineation was also foundational to adjudicating pressing contemporary cases, including the legality of a new Chin settlement I knew of beyond Kalaymyo. When, after 40 minutes of nodding politely, I asked the Minister to help me understand the challenges to formalizing this particular settlement, he sat back, offered me a cigarette, and shouted for his maps. I began to learn about this man’s three-year quest to demarcate the colonial boundary of the Chin Frontier Area, now known as Chin State. Land claims are often entangled in attempts rewrite the past (Lund 2008). Adjudicating a boundary is, then, in part a question of whose history counts. My interview with the Minister 96 illuminated the ways in which contemporary politics of demarcation are embedded in historical relationships between ethnicity, territory, and sovereignty. While these pasts are understood very differently by Burmans and minorities, a principle of ethnic difference and territorial separation put in place by the British is a cornerstone for the contemporary regime of demarcation. Next, I outline the historical relationships between ethnicity and territory in Myanmar before turning to how the Minister and others mobilized narratives about the past in the borderline debate. Ethnicity, Territory and Sovereignty in Myanmar Understanding the Minister’s history lesson requires situating the Chin State-Sagaing Division border within broader relationships of ethnicity and territory in Myanmar. Upland and lowland ecologies, cultures and economies were distinct but linked before the British arrived. Separate management of the hills and plains, and of hill- and plains-people, was a core tenant of colonial rule. The British formalized a paradoxical unification and differentiation of the ethnic borderlands and lowland areas, setting aside the ‘Frontier Areas,’ including the Chin Hills, and in doing so setting the stage for struggles over cultural expression, resources, and territorial control in the Independent Union of Burma. During the socialist and military periods, the government enforced extensive land management systems prioritizing production in the lowlands while neglecting, extracting, or attacking upland ethnic minorities. These violent and divergent histories are obscured in a centralized administrative system composed of seven predominantly lowland, Burman Divisions and seven predominantly upland, ethnic minority States. Today, the ability of these regions to self-govern is a subject of active debate, while notions of territorial control, separation and autonomy animate development projects, political movements, and 97 military violence. The contemporary national push to demarcate territory is intimately tied to contemporary aspirations for democratic federalism and Myanmar’s longer politics of ethnicity. From the Burman lowlands, pre-colonial territorial sovereignty was characterized by dynastic rulers holding variable, overlapping power over land and labor, with rule particularly concentrated in key cities, ports, irrigated rice-growing areas, and trade routes. Southeast Asian kingdoms are often described through the metaphor of a mandala, an image that contrasts with Western theories of territory and emphasizes the fluctuating and radial extension of power from a dynastic king (M. Sahlins 2008; Tambiah 2013). Agricultural potential and port accessibility played a key role in structuring political forms in the area now known as Myanmar (Aung-Thwin 1984). During the lowland Toungoo (1587-1752) and Konbaung (1752-1885) dynasties, the kingdoms had three administrative zones: the directly-ruled nuclear zone, the zone of dependent provinces overseen by centrally appointed staff, and tributary areas ruled by hereditary chiefs (Taylor 2009, p. 23). Residents of the nuclear zone enjoyed state services such as irrigation in return for frequent corvée labor, became more and more culturally homogenous over time, and were locally ruled by hereditary village leaders. Those in the secondary areas had fewer benefits and obligations to the state, and were ruled by myo-sa (literally ‘town-eaters’) who were appointed by the king but did not have permanent or hereditary property rights. Tributary areas varied widely in their relation to the central state, but often were fairly autonomous, most notably in the case of the Shan sawbwas (Taylor 2009). Upland communities developed different patterns of sovereignty, culture and hierarchy based in part on their interactions in the borderlands, with distant states, and in global networks (Sadan 2013). James Scott (2009) famously characterized the region’s pre-colonial uplands as zones of escape, where agricultural and social forms developed based on a moral refusal to be 98 incorporated into the state. Scott’s favored term for this region, Zomia, comes from van Schendel (2002), who, rather than anticipating Scott’s dichotomous state/non-state conception, argues for an attention to the flows of objects, people, and ideas, including with lowland states, that have historically characterized these spaces. One model of these interactions describes a ‘continuum of control,’ with periphery, tributary polities existing alongside egalitarian communities preying off the state, and Scott-like refugee zones (J. Friedman 2011). Fiskesjö’s (2010) work on the Wa underscores the peculiar ‘anti-state’ nature of certain borderland communities, and the historical work of maintaining egalitarian distribution and autonomy in the face of imperial expansion. These accounts highlight the relative autonomy of upland communities, as well as the diversity of social and political structures. While ethnic communities had different political organizations, the boundary between them was fluid, as Edmund Leach’s (1954) shows in his work in Kachin. While he has been criticized for ecological determinism and divorcing Kachin from their historical, globally-connected context (J. Friedman 1998; Robinne and Sadan 2007), Leach offers a clear picture of different arrangements of ‘territorial sovereignty’ among the Kachin and Shan, one characterized by distinct upland and valley locations, varying concentrations of authority, and ethnic identification derived in part from particular livelihood practices. Notably, in Leach’s account, ethnicity was malleable. While his analysis is flawed, it points away from colonial classifications and towards an analysis of the situated construction of ethnicity. Colonialism fundamentally reconfigured these networks by imposing imperial systems of resource extraction and governance that formally divided the area and population of lowland ‘Burma Proper’ from the upland ‘Frontier Areas.’ In the lowlands, hereditary village leaders became official extensions of the rationalized bureaucracy in the 1880s, responsible for governing and extracting tax from specified village units (Taylor 2009, 80-6, 193). Even if, in 99 practice, this system perpetuated patron-client relations, class inequalities, and misconduct— what Saha (2013) calls ‘disorder’—on paper, Burma Proper had been territorialized. The colonial government’s strategy was markedly different in the Frontier Areas, which were allowed to retain some control over local resources and social organization even as the British army extracted tremendous amounts of teak. As they attempted to control the colony, the British produced new maps, censuses, and knowledge about Burma’s terrain, as exemplified in publications such as the British Burma Gazetteer, an 1880 tomb that covered topics such as physical geography, mineralogy, forest and vegetation, ethnology, religion, mammals, manners and customs. British colonial officer-anthropologists played a key role in cultivating and codifying the ethnic differences of hill peoples, creating extensive lists and classifications that set the foundation for contemporary identity claims (Ferguson 2015). Through these spatial and social classifications, the British made Burma’s territory and population amenable to military control and resource extraction. As the Minister explained to me, the Chin Hills were governed not as part of Upper Burma but rather under The Chin Hills Regulation of 1886. The Regulations outline a form of indirect rule in which clan and village headmen govern according to custom, but in ultimate deference to British. This system contrasted with the direct administration of the lowlands, but was far from autonomy. Chapter three of the Regulation, ‘The Headmen and their Powers’ circumscribes the local authority and custom within the power and interests of British officers. For example, clause five reads: (1) Subject to any general or special orders of the Local Government the Superintendent may appoint and remove any headman and may define the local limits of his jurisdiction and declare what clan or village, or both, shall be subject to him. (2) Where a headman is appointed for a group of villages or clans, the Superintendent may declare the extent to, and the manner in which the headman of the villages or clans composing such group shall be subordinate to the headman of the group. 100 (3) In making a declaration under this section the Superintendent shall be guided as far as practicable by local custom. Not only the appointment of headmen, but also their disciplining and dismissal, were the responsibilities of colonial officers. Like other Frontier Areas, the Chin Hills were managed as distinct from Burma Proper. The British protected their economic and military interests, for example by creating special rules to regulate firearms, opium and forests. But as long as village headmen kept the peace and collected taxes, British officials were interested in, and sometimes deferential towards, local land use practices. Today, the wide variety of customary practices and fragmented sovereignties has left a complex and evolving system of land governance in contemporary Chin State (Mark 2016a; Boutry et al. 2018). But from the Minister’s perspective, by separating the region from the lowlands, these colonial policies set the stage for contemporary efforts for self-rule. After a brief period of decentralized rule in the early years of independence, possibilities for self-governance swiftly eroded. One of the first acts of the Revolutionary Council after the 1962 coup was to abolish the independent ministries of Arakan and Mon; two years later they eliminated special border zones (Taylor 2009, 302-3). The 1974 Constitution affirmed that sovereignty resided in the center, even as it symbolically recognized a total of seven ethnic-based states. These entities were mere symbols of cultural pluralism, without substantive autonomy (Taylor 2009, 305-6). They emerged from the British Frontier Areas and survive today in Myanmar’s administrative organization. As the military-socialist government extracted from lowland rice-growing areas, substantial portions of the population knew the state only through war: Robert Taylor estimates 30 of the 314 townships, hosting about 10% of the nation’s population, were outside of state control during the 40 years after independence (Taylor 2009, 335-6). As the Communist Party of Burma, Ethnic Armed Groups, and drug lords mobilized 101 armies and controlled agriculture and resource extraction and lucrative trade, sometimes with the support of foreign powers such as China and the American CIA, they created zones of fragmented, negotiated sovereignty concentrated in the ethnic borderlands (Maclean 2008, Meehan 2015, K. Woods 2011). The uneven and contested terrain of sovereignty in the uplands muddies the traditional view of Burma as a tightly-controlled and staunchly isolationist military dictatorship. Rather, independent Burma displayed dichotomous territorial sovereignty—an aspiring ‘classic modern state’ in the center surrounded by zones of overlapping, negotiated authority and violence in the borderlands. Today, these territorial histories are racialized through a particular articulation of ethnicity: taingyintha, or national races. In his genealogy of the term, Nick Cheesman (2017) argues that the concept of taingyintha, now applied to Myanmar’s eight major ethnic groups, denotes inclusion into Myanmar’s political community and has transcended citizenship as the basis for state rights, duties, and entitlements. Cheesman places the birth of the modern notion of taingyintha in a 1964 speech by Ne Win and explicitly ties it to attempts to extend state power by acquiring foreign-owned land and capital: ‘The project for national races meshed with a larger programme for political domination and exclusion through nationalisation of assets and deportation of alleged aliens’ (Cheesman 2017, 465). Crucially, in Cheesman’s rendering, taingyintha’s political salience has always relied on its utility to the state for both extending internal territorial control and defining external others. This dynamic plays out today in Rakhine where popular sentiment supports military atrocity in the name of defending Rakhine taingyintha and their territory against the ‘foreign’ Rohingya, commonly referred to derogatively as ‘Bengalis’ to emphasize their otherness. The military and their allies justify brutal racist violence 102 as a defense of territorial sovereignty and the taingyintha. The pervasiveness of this narrative reveals the renewed power of the principle of national strength through ethnic separation. This idea also guides contemporary calls for federalism. The aspiration and architecture for a federal union is laid out in the 1947 Panglong Agreement, which was signed by Burman, Shan, Kachin and Chin representatives on the eve of independence. The document binds the Frontier Areas with Burma Proper in the pursuit of freedom and independence, and states that ‘Full autonomy in internal administration of the Frontier Areas is accepted in principle.’ Practice has fallen far short. Today, while each of the seven minority taingyintha has its own named territorial State (the Burmans claim the seven lowland Divisions), these administrative units have little control over internal affairs, revenues or resources (Ninh and Arnold 2016). In contrast, Ethnic Armed Organizations that control the five Special Administrative Zones and the Wa Special Administrative Division maintain substantial control over land and populations. Today, the principle of federalism is invoked both by mainstream development actors promoting good governance, and Ethnic Armed Organizations negotiating with the central state. The 2015 National Ceasefire Agreement’s first basic principle states: Establish a union based on the principles of democracy and federalism in accordance with the outcomes of political dialogue and in the spirit of Panglong, that fully guarantees democratic rights, national equality and the right to self-determination on the basis of liberty, equality and justice while upholding the principles of non-disintegration of the union, non-disintegration of national solidarity and perpetuation of national sovereignty. In the peace negotiations that followed, dubbed the 21st Century Panglong process, military strength, natural resource wealth, and historical relationships to the governments of Myanmar and China shaped the different degrees to which ethnic groups can articulate territorial claims. The 2017 Pyidaungsu Accord that emerged from this process aims to ‘build up the Union in harmony with the Panglong spirit, based on democracy and federalism.’ This document includes 103 an agreement on land and resources includes a principle of decentralized control. Little meaningful progress has been made towards this aim (K. Woods 2019). However equitable, decentralized governance of land and natural resources remain at the heart of calls for ethnic federalism. In 2015, the Karen National Union in Myanmar’s Southeast published their own Land Policy, making that EAO the vanguard of ethnic territorial self-determination. Today, Myanmar has entered a heightened moment of territorialization, one in which the government seeks to delineate and police both spatial and social boundaries. The state’s concern with border and boundary-making is evident in new laws, such as a 2018 Boundary Demarcation Bill that set the rules for demarcating towns, villages, village-tracts farmland plots, and a draft Survey Law that appeared to make most forms of non-governmental topographical mapping illegal. Standardizing spatial information had become a top priority for the government and its donors, as exemplified in the Swiss Government-funded, US$8 million One Map project that aims to systematize wildly divergent and often inaccurate data across government departments. These initiatives reflect a turn towards delineation, one that mobilizes the colonial principle of ethno-territorial separation. While this principle contrasts with both pre-colonial and recent practices, the Minister and Chin activists successfully invoked it as a basis for restoring the colonial border. Demarcation The Minister and his allies sought to shape the spatio-political arrangements of ethnic federalism in part by playing to contemporary state concern with establishing order and modernizing governance. They did so through a particular telling of history, one that emphasized an orderly and separate past. Chin activists’ stories of recovering ancestral territory bore little 104 resemblance to the embodied frontier histories described in chapter one, but did important work to set new boundaries and, in doing so, territorialize both the state and ethnicity. When the Minister told me about Chin customary taxation systems, the Chin Hills Regulation and the Panglong agreement, he was building a narrative of legitimate and autonomous rule that he contrasted with Burman mismanagement. Similarly, in their petitions, Facebook posts, and interviews, Chin activists told a particular, selective, story of the historic boundary. The colonial era served as the baseline, when they claimed the Chin Hills had spread east all the way to the Chindwin River. Chin activists also called on more recent evidence, claiming that, upon its founding in 1990, the vast majority of Kalay University’s lands were acknowledged as within Chin State. They blamed subsequent ‘Burmanization,’ a term that refers to the very real cultural and physical violence enacted on minorities by Myanmar’s military junta, for stealing the university and eroding ethnic territory. After decades of persecution, colonial rule was remembered fondly for its protection of ethnic minorities. It was also invoked as a model of data-driven governance. Chin activists emphasized that only the colonial maps had validity because only they had actually been demarcated on the ground. The Minister told me that no document in the country could unravel the border problem. He dismissed the idea of using the boundary lines on the most recent official government map, telling me there were ‘a lot of human errors’ and ‘gaps with reality.’ Only maps that had been sourced from ‘the London Library’ and modern GIS units could establish the truth. The digital circulation of maps and statements amplified the connection between broken promises and the line. This was particularly acute in discussions of Kalay University. I heard contrasting stories on the ground about the university’s location: one Chin farmer whose land had been taken to build the university told me the grabbed land was all located within Sagaing 105 Division at the time. But activists and online commentators noted that Chin State was the only State or Division without its own university, a shameful handicap to development that violated foundational principles of equality. In the Facebook post below, for example, a Chin commenter references the Panglong agreement, demands the university’s Chin name, ‘Khaikam University,’ be restored, and circulates a google earth image that appears to place the university within Chin State (figure 8). When I checked google earth in November 2019, Kalay University was clearly located within Sagaing. But the satellite image of the university nestled in the hills communicated a sense of belonging. Several activists also told me that the 2008 Constitution prohibited re-delineating the territorial boundary of a State or Division without the prior consent. Indeed, clause 53 lays out a stringent procedure involving securing approval more than half of eligible voters in the concerned township, as well as the consent of relevant parliamentarians. Moving the colonial border without local consultation, they told me, was therefore illegal. Chin activists made frequent allusions to past promises and powerful symbols—state signboards, boundary posts, and the university—rather than to the lives of border residents. In doing so, they set the terms of the borderline debate as ethnic inclusion and citizenship, rather than as farmers’ livelihoods. In contrast, the few Burmans who entered public border debates, as well as many farmers I spoke with, framed the border issue as a practical, not political, concern. Better roads and flat terrain made it faster for farmers to get to Sagaing Division offices in Kalaymyo than Chin State offices in Hakha, Falam or Tedim. But this framing, and the lack of Burman mobilization on the borderline issue, also reflected the Burman position at the top of Myanmar’s racial hierarchy and at the center of national identity. Like white privilege in the American context, Burman’s position of ethnic privilege made it difficult to see the border in racial terms (cf Walton 2013). Some Burman friends I asked told me they had no interest or 106 business in the border debate. Others found claims to a colonial inheritance ridiculous; for example, a young Burman born in a border village joked that if Chin people wanted to go back to the colonial system, they should stop worrying about the boundary line and give the whole valley back to the British. Figure 8: Facebook Post about the Boundary. In one of the few English language posts about the subject, a Chin commenter links the boundary and university issues to founding promises of ethnic equality and development. 107 The evidence to support Chin activists’ claims was equivocal, but their stories about the past advanced vision of bounded state and ethnic territory compatible with the national regime of delineation that was taking shape in Naypyitaw. The battle over the boundary arrived in Myanmar’s capital via an official petition by the Chin State government. In a letter to the Vice President’s national demarcation committee in October 2018, the Chin State Minister listed a number of places where the Chin State boundary was unclear or contested. He explained the issue of provincial delineation was causing practical problems, such as challenges with farmland registration. But he also framed the issue in terms of national security, writing that a failure to demarcate the Chin State border could disrupt ethnic harmony. He asked specifically for the return of Kalay University and the surrounding area to Chin State, and wrote that resolving this and other border issues were critical for the ethnic solidarity. The letter provided a colonial map that put the boundary west of Kalaymyo but lacked enough detail to determine the university’s location. At a scale of one inch to 32 miles, the map stretched from Bangladesh almost to Mandalay. But the Minister’s request was timely. Jurisdictional conflicts between administrative regions had become common across the country. In response, parliament was drafting a new boundary demarcation law and a national committee had recently been formed to resolve administrative boundary disputes. The northern Chin State-Sagaing Division boundary was the first to be adjudicated by this committee, making Kalay Valley a critical site for modeling new forms of delineation. By aligning ethnic territorial aspirations with state desire to control space, the Minister and other influential Chin leaders eventually succeeded in convincing the national government to demarcate the boundary in accordance to a 1938 order. Chin activists told me this was a victory, but, on the ground, the line was still blurry. While I found a handful of colonial sources that included more of Kalay Valley in the Chin Hills 108 area, I found many more that placed the boundary close to its current location. Many, including the 1932-3 Survey of India maps, explicitly marked the boundary as ‘approximate.’ I spent hours squinting at various maps, satellite images and at Burmese and English language versions of the 1938 document describing the boundaries of the Upper Chindwin District. In terms of precision, its language left something to be desired: West. - Thence northwards in a straight line for 11/2 miles to the Chin path running up the Tinthn Chin Village market by Post No. 28; thence northwards along the foot of the hills for about 31/2 miles to the Chin path at a point where it enters the hills, marked by Post No. 27; thence northwards in a straight line for about a quarter of a mile to a point on the right bank of the Nankathe at the foot of the hills, marked by Post No. 26; thence northwards in a straight line to the junction of Myaung stream and the Nankathe, marked by Post No. 25; thence northwards along the foot of the hills for about 3 miles to a point on the bank of the Maung stream, marked by Post No.24 on the right bank, thence first in an easterly and then in a northerly direction along the foot of the hills for about 6 miles to the Byitkyikyank stream at the point where it is joined by the Taungpeln Chin path marked by Post No. 23; thence northwards for 4 miles, then in an easterly direction for 21/2miles along the food to the hills to the left bank of the Panmun stream, marked by Post No. 22; 300 yards to the Indin-Falam mule track to a point one-fourth of a mile below the Panmum Public Works Department bungalow…. I was given copies of this notification twice by Chin activists working on the border issue with assurances that the document would clear up my questions. But the posts were long gone, and I struggled to map long-gone mule tracks, poorly-Romanized landmarks, and evaporated streams onto the borderland’s rice paddies, braided seasonal rivers, dusty motorcycle roads and big trees. Colonial maps lacked the resolution of modern GIS, the landmarks were gone, and the locals I spoke with were prone to forgetfulness. All this meant that delineation was far from a mere technicality. As one Chin pastor and amateur historian told me when I came asking about the boundary, ‘If you want to talk about the border, we have to talk politics.’ A year after he sent the letter requesting demarcation, the Minister travelled to Kalay with government representatives from the Chin State and Sagaing Division to hold four public meetings about restoring the boundary posts. He explained to local media that these consultations 109 were only one step in a longer process that would be carried out with the approval of the people, and of the Union level committee. According to informants who lived in one of the consultation villages, in the meeting the officials announced that the national committee had agreed to use a 1938 order but did not show any documents or maps, nor did they specify in local terms where the line would fall. They merely demanded the attendance of one representative per household and asked for an oral agreement to the restored border. Given Myanmar’s authoritarian past, I was unsurprised to hear that the villagers agreed immediately. Without actually clarifying the location of the boundary, officials had exerted their authority to delineate state and ethnic territory. For the Minister, this was an incremental victory in a long quest for ethnic recognition and territorial autonomy. But what did this announcement mean for the farmers who so quickly acquiesced? The principle of ethno-territorial separation contrasted with the local history of the borderline, one characterized by collective practices that obscured or blurred administrative boundaries. Next, I consider how border residents negotiated these new attempts at delineation within longer histories of productive ambiguity. Cultivating Ambiguity and Clarity The contemporary urge to demarcate contrasted with longstanding and deliberate practices that generated and maintained spatial uncertainty. Despite the colonial principle of ethnic and territorial separation, in Kalay Valley officials and farmers of both ethnicities ignored forest and administrative boundaries. During the rice frontier period, this ambiguity was productive in a very literal sense: a blurred boundary between regions and land types facilitated the expansion of smallholder rice cultivation. This production of ambiguity reflected the 110 emphasis on rice, rather than colonial timber, as the valley’s most valuable resource, and would clash with later efforts to delineate territory. By the time I arrived to Kalay, the mounting advocacy to restore the border was matched by a remarkable lack of clarity about where the border was and should be, which increasingly represented a contemporary challenge for border residents. The extent of the confusion over the border was apparent in a report shared with me by a Chin activist in Kalaymyo whose CSO had conducted a survey with the goal of gathering evidence to support restoring the colonial boundary. The report details conversations with Chin villagers who remember multiple, stymied attempts by Sagaing Division government to annex their villages under a Burman General’s stated principle that, ‘People from hills have to live on the hills and every flat land must be included in Sagaing Division.’ A short, translated excerpt from the report documenting responses to one of the survey questions reveals the extent to which physical locations, past interactions, and future aspirations were combined in local narratives about the borderline. Do you think that the borderline between Chin and Sagaing is clear around your village? The villages of survey sites are in Chin side. According to the survey findings, half of interviewees answered that the borderline was clear and the other half said that it’s not clear. Another 11 interviewees couldn’t answer to that question. The villages in the north of Mway Taung said that originally, Chin state extended until Mya Lin village and the borderline passed through that place. Some said that Chin state extended until Nat Myuang and others said that the road in the eastern part of Mway Taung is the Chin-Sagaing borderline. Some also said that the boundary post existed nearby Nan Kyin Saung village around 1990. Regarding demarcation, they said that they preferred the boundary that was demarcated in the colonial time. They wanted the exact measurement as original boundary. Some interviews answered that some evidence of the borderline, such as boundary posts, were moved or destroyed and they’re dissatisfied with it. Some also said that was because of clearing farmlands…. 111 Though one villager said that the forest post at Bo Lan Go was the boundary post, no one else could confirm anything about Bo Lan Go. Similarly, another interviewee said that he wanted the borderline made by Bo Rang Cung, the officer from Forest Department in 1990, to be unchanged. But, that person couldn’t explain how that borderline was made. One villager said that as Chin-Sagaing border was beside Mainuai village, the borderline should be at Palarta stream (not about the actual borderline, he just said what he wished according to current situation)… What is notable about this excerpt and the larger document, besides the poignant and almost satirical reflection of the challenges of contradictory evidence in social science research, is that borderline ambiguity existed even within advocacy for its supposed restoration. There were historical reasons for this profound confusion. During the frontier period, it was in everyone’s best interests to leave boundaries ambiguous. Blurry borders allowed deforestation and rice production to proceed quickly and smoothly so that farmers could feed their families. As participants in the survey and my own interviewees noted, farmers—both Chin and Burman—removed colonial boundary posts demarcating both the Chin State-Sagaing Division border and protected forests to facilitate rice production. I learned of one case, a Chin village that feared annexation into Sagaing Division during the military era, in which the destruction of the posts was collective and political. But for most farmers, eradicating boundary posts was a practical matter; removal facilitated ploughing, and farmers increasingly paid rice tax and dealt with official matters in nearby Kalaymyo, rather than traveling over the mountains to offices in Chin State. My quest to learn more about the historical boundary led me to a series of old Chin men who commanded positions of respect in their communities. One day, coming home to Kalaymyo from a few nights in a friend’s village, I visited a former teacher who was compiling a 20 volume encyclopedia for his Chin tribe, the Zomi, sponsored by ‘Zomi USA,’ an association of American 112 refugees. This man was particularly articulate in describing the shifting stakes of the borderline debate, from farmland and livelihoods, to territory and nation. As we sat sipping juice in his tiled living room on the western side of Kalaymyo, he described the process through which Chin people settled in the valley and chose to remove posts. His narrative demonstrates practices of negotiation between Chin and Burman settlers and officials on the rice frontier: There are reasons why the boundary posts disappeared. When we moved to lowlands, we built the villages along the borders with the permission of Burmese people, we didn’t squat [without permission]. Burmese people had already settled down in the lowlands. Chin people got the place only at the foot of the mountains. Chin people removed the boundary posts as they had concerns that there would be problems later. They did it honestly. They also thought the posts were just a mess for their farming. So, they removed and threw away those posts. Then, they registered their lands in Sagaing Division. So, those lands were automatically included in Sagaing Division. The posts also disappeared… When the government made the boundary for Nat Myaung Reserved Forest Area, the farmers wanted to get more farmlands. So, they removed the boundary posts. They didn’t think about politics. They did it honestly for farming. If not, the Chin State Forest Department would fine them very often [for farming rice in the forest]. So, they removed those posts. Later, it happened to be political problem. It was not created by the government or the [activist] organizations. It was created by the farmers for their farming. Then, the more farmlands they have, the more lands Sagaing Division occupies. The farmers did it honestly without knowing the impacts. In this account, the erasure of the very boundary that Chin activists sought to restore was not the result of Burman aggression, but rather the unintended consequence of individual Chin farmers, who had removed posts to expand cultivation without penalties on the rice frontier. This account fails to note the contributions of Burman farmers to this process, but captures the sentiment that led to the destruction of the physical boundary. At the time of my fieldwork, only one original post, located not on a field but rather on the Tamu-Kalay road, remained. Ambiguity benefited officials on both sides of the border. Sagaing Division officials could meet their production quotas by taxing ‘extra’ agricultural land, while Chin State officials could avoid arduous journeys through mountain jungles to enforce forest rules. The major 113 changes in the valley’s ecology and landholding explored in the previous chapter failed to register on official maps and documents. Rather, officials deliberately cultivated uncertainty around the interconnected issues of protected forests and the provincial borderline. The Chin elder continued, explaining to me about how this negotiated uncertainty maintained peace in previous times: Before, there was a problem between the [Chin State and Sagaing Division] governments in General Thura Kyaw Swar time [late 1980s]. They almost fought each other. Later, they announced in a statement that there was no exact border between states and divisions everywhere. So, the issues automatically stopped. But that problem can happen again in democratic era. [Now] they need to know the boundary. To meet paddy quotas during past decades, provincial officials overlooked illegal farming and sometimes issued documents that seemed to legitimate agricultural land use. Because rice production, not timber extraction or territorial control, was the primary governance priority, it was in the interest of both officials and farmers to ignore or blur land classifications and provincial boundaries. As the Chin elder pointed out to me, this negotiated ambiguity contrasted with the careful policing of the nearby international border with India during the same period. The contrast highlights different attitudes towards territory that stem, in part, from the comparative importance of rice. Long-cultivated ambiguity was increasingly problematic for farmers who worked land around the line. Many people I spoke to about the border mentioned the 2015 monsoon floods. When rising waters destroyed villages and crops, Chin State and Sagaing Division had attempted to aid their respective residents. It quickly became evident that the boundary was unknown, and some villages received help from neither territory. As these farmers watched neighboring villages receive government support, the issue of demarcation became both personal and material. In the wake of the floods, government survey teams appeared to measure land, but the map they 114 produced was confidential. I received a copy but, without coordinates, the map served as a poor authority. Rather than providing clarity, the secret map fueled anxiety and claims in the boundary area. In this new regime of delineation, frontier ambiguity had become a liability. The problem of blurred boundaries deepened for farmers who faced difficulties registering farmland. New land reforms—notably the 2012 Farmland Law—had put in place protocols that formalized use rights and tied them to specific townships. To get a farmland user certificate, commonly known as Form 7, farmers needed evidence of cultivation in areas officially categorized as farmland. This was not always easy when both the location and the type of land had long been purposely obscured. For example, in one Chin village located just within Chin State, resident farmers had received Form 7, including for some paddy fields that were located within protected forest. But Chin farmers in neighboring villagers—whose houses were in Sagaing but whose plots were in Chin—were denied, or had not heard a response on their applications. The exceptions were the plots of certain well-resourced individuals, who farmed in Chin State, lived in Sagaing, and had strong connections that enabled them to get Form 7. The result, village headmen explained, was a patchwork of titled and untitled farming plots, all located within what was locally understood as (unenforced) Chin State protected forest. As I discuss in chapter three and elsewhere (Faxon and Aung 2019), this patchwork of formalization was common across the country, but particular acute in the case of Kalay’s border. Further north, I heard from farmers whose land lay between Chin and Burman villages. Since local knowledge of the borderline—that it stretched from the top of Snake Mountain to the middle of Yazagyo town—did not match official maps, neither village headman felt they could approve cultivation. Farming continued, but without legal permission. 115 Both Chin and Burmans explained to me that the opportunities of the democratic era had created a new urgency to demarcate. Some emphasized development projects and emergency relief, others land titles and crop loans, but the unifying theme was the recognition that after decades of neglect, new forms of state support were tied to place. The state’s interest in rice was declining (see chapter five) and land was no longer available to those who worked it, but those with legally-recognized property had a chance to receive new types of benefits. This realization was tied to a final form of frontier closure in Kalay Valley, one enacted through territorial delineation. In this context, farmers were faced with a new challenge of negotiating their personal property claims after decades of cultivated ambiguity. Negotiating Delineation The challenges of localized delineation are encapsulated in the story of one farmer I will call Ko Aung, who lived and farmed in a village a 45 minute drive south of Kalaymyo. Like many Burmans who farmed land near the borderline, Ko Aung was concerned by the prospect of having to travel past the Kalaymyo offices an additional four to eight hours by bus to a remote mountain town to accomplish basic administrative tasks should his lands be recognized as within Chin State. With the assistance of local Burman activists, he was actively working to get 61 plots near his village recognized as Sagaing Division farmland, but so far neither he nor any of his neighbors had successfully received the farmland registration document known as Form 7. One exceptionally hot day, I met Ko Aung at a mutual friend’s house after he had finished his morning work harvesting sunflowers. As we sucked toddy palm sugar lumps and spit out sunflower seed husks, Ko Aung explained the situation: We cannot get Form 7… because of the Chin-Sagaing problem. There is no change in the delineation of the borderline since the British government marked it. No one measures 116 the lands and no one will do a field inspection. The day before yesterday, land record staff from Kalay [town] came here…[my land] is in Kalay [Sagaing] Division. But, they do not dare to give me the document; they will be in trouble if those lands are in Chin State. In Ko Aung’s account, these lands had always been located in Sagaing Division; the problem was not a moving boundary but rather skittish officials. Colonial boundary posts on his land, as with elsewhere, had long ago gone missing, but he insisted the boundary had not moved. As proof, he showed me unconvincing photos of flimsy border markers his neighbors had created and placed on the far edge of their fields (figure 9). These acts of reconstruction implicitly acknowledge the importance of visible delineation of the border. Ko Aung continued, describing a quarter-century of jurisdictional disputes: We didn’t squat on the land. In 1994-5, we applied according to the [national] directive to get enough [rice] yield for the country. The Union level approved us to work on those lands… As soon as we cleared the land, the Chin State Forest Department sued us, saying that we destroyed the forest. They came to arrest us three times… Finally, all of the department staff and colonels [from both sides] came together. They compared both maps and decided those lands were in [Sagaing]… There were no more problems after that. We continued farming. Ten years ago, the Chin State Forest Department came again. The land record staff involved in first agreement had all retired or died. At that time, the Chin State Forest Department claimed that those were their lands. So, the problems happened again and we still cannot get Form 7. Before, we got the Product Record book and tax receipts. We were regarded as land owners if we had those. We also had to pay taxes. We farmed legally. But, we have come to have such problems! Like the smallholders discussed in the previous chapter, Ko Aung’s claim was founded on his family’s labor, which had been applied to clearing land in line with national directives to plant rice. His family had dealt with jurisdictional conflicts before, but, in the past, productive use had been adequate to ensure continued access. Despite their claims to have been always and only located in Sagaing Division, Ko Aung’s family had a long history of dealing with both provincial governments. This was evident in the stack of papers he showed me as evidence of his family’s legitimate claim; a collection that included photographs, handwritten oral histories, and, 117 importantly, official documents from both Sagaing Division and Chin State. For example, a product record book was issued by Sagaing Division in the mid-1990s and list the family’s 29.15 acres, but an accompanying tax receipt explicitly states, ‘This tax receipt is not the proof of the land ownership.’ Ko Aung also showed me documentation from Chin State that seemed to undermine his case, including a 2006 fine for destroying protected forest and a 2004 application for permission to cultivate (figure 10). Like the historical narratives that Chin activists marshaled in defense of a colonial boundary, this evidence was not definitive. Rather than providing clarity, Ko Aung’s multiple receipts and documents paid testament to decades of frontier ambiguity. Figure 9. Copy of Ko Aung’s Picture of the Reconstructed Boundary Post. The sign says ‘This is the place where the original post was destroyed,’ and points to the north and south. 118 Figure 10. Ko Aung’s Evidence. From left to right, agricultural land tax receipt from Sagaing Division, forest land penalty from Chin State, application for agricultural land from Chin State. Ko Aung sought Form 7 from Sagaing for practical reasons—it would enable him to keep farming his land, and to access nearby administrative support and crop loans. Ceding his land to Chin State meant, at best, massive inconvenience, and, at worst, that he would have to stop cultivating the ‘forest.’ But Ko Aung also held the philosophical position that it was best for the country to establish a clear boundary between Burman and Chin territory: We all are ethnic people [taingyintha]. But, we should have some rules and lines between us. If not, there will be more problems in the future. Even in a family, there are problems for inheritance. So, for the country level, it is worse. On this point, if not necessarily on geographic location, Ko Aung’s views aligned with those of Chin activists who saw spatial and ethnic delineation as steps towards peaceful, multi- ethnic democracy. This vision of security through separation contrasts with the explicit and implicit agreements to maintain uncertainty during the frontier period. The move from ambiguity to demarcation required new forms of work from farmers like Ko Aung as they sought to position individual land claims. 119 New practices of territorialization, as well as the diminished economic centrality of rice, are reshaping patterns of settlement in the valley. When I met with Chin settlers forming new villages at the foot of the Chin Hills, I was struck that, unlike earlier generations, they were not primarily motivated by growing paddy. Instead, they pinned their hopes for a better life on a combination of lowland agriculture; access to healthcare, roads, education, and other state services; and the vision of residing in an ethnic homeland. These motivations were key to the founding to Umnak, the settlement case explored in depth in chapter four. They were also particularly pronounced in the case of a settlement founded in 2011 in the northern part of the disputed border area. Farmers from the Chin Hills had arrived to plant rice and establish community forests, encouraged by Chin State officials. These officials, led by the Minister whom I interviewed, visited the settlement and supported its community forest application despite conflicts with the neighboring Chin village located in Sagaing Division. The new arrivals undoubtedly sought material improvements, but the settlement was also explicitly about claiming ethnic territory: its name literally translated to ‘Chin Land.’7 As the economic driver in Chin villages shifted from rice to remittances and the governance regime shifted from ambiguity to an often-racialized delineation, the primary resource at stake in these frontier settlements also shifted from productive land to ethnic territory. Conclusion Delineation was both a bid for state control and a practice of ethnic boundary-making that signified a shift in practices of governance and remade the resource at stake on the former frontier. In this chapter, I first considered the history of ethnicity, territory and sovereignty in 7 For discussion of the complex relationship between the people known officially in Myanmar as Chin and the Zo, Zomi and other tribes of the transborder area see (Sakhong 2003) 120 Myanmar and the ways in which a Chin Minister and activists mobilized historical narratives of ethnic separation to successfully advocate for a return to colonial boundaries. Chin activists’ stories of recovering ancestral territory bore little resemblance to the embodied frontier histories described in chapter one, but did important work to set new boundaries within an emerging regime of delineation. New forms of legibility are possible and desirable in the democratic era, both for smallholders seeking property documents and for politicians advancing ethnic minority self-determination. This interest in recognition represents a break with smallholders’ and officials’ deliberate production of ambiguity as a strategy for contending with a sometimes- predatory, largely-absent state in the decades following Myanmar’s independence. Demarcation necessitated new forms of border work and claims-making for Chin and Burman farmers who lived on the border line, heightening the urgency to locate and make legible one’s property, and providing new motivations for settlement. The Minister and Chin activists emphasized the recovery of original territory after a period of misrule, and yet stream erosion, land conversion and regulatory obfuscation had completely remade Kalay Valley since boundary posts were set. Rather than reading demarcation efforts as acts of restitution or pure romanticism, I show that contemporary territorialization is driven by negotiations over different visions of spatial governance that cohere around strengthening state control over land and maintaining ethnic separation. Materializing this vision requires contending with the social and material legacies of multi-ethnic smallholders on the rice frontier. My analysis therefore provides new insights into the erasure and reformation of political borders by showing how they are articulated within cycles of agrarian change. The decision to demarcate demonstrates a shift in the practice of governance and a final form of closure on Kalay Valley’s former rice frontier. Unlike the processes of land consolidation 121 and dispossession investigated in chapter one, this was not primarily a material transfer. Rather, this third form of frontier closure was marked by a push for legal and social delineation in hopes of ensuring new types of state-backed rights. In the past, provincial officials overlooked farming in Reserve Forests and sometimes issued documents that seemed to legitimate agricultural land use in order to meet paddy quotas. For farmers forced to articulate their claims in new ways, the democratic turn is experienced as a shift from a regime of opportunism, random violence and ambiguity towards a regime of delineated state power, spatial boundaries, and ethnic categories. Kalay’s delineation bears on broader processes of territorialization and political transformation in Myanmar. The northern Chin State-Sagaing Division boundary is the first to be adjudicated by the national committee tasked with resolving internal border disputes. Kalay Valley’s lack of clarity around internal boundaries, however, is not unique, nor are its patterns of migration, cultivation and dispossession. In conversations with Myanmar activists, lawyers, and researchers in Yangon, I learned about similar provincial boundary disputes taking place across the country. These border negotiations are intimately tied to the question of whether and how the NLD can deliver on promises of equality and multi-ethnic democracy. Chin activists’ symbolic victory for a return to colonial borders demonstrates that territorialized federalism is gaining ground in bureaucratic practice. And yet despite passionate calls for federal land law,8 this model may fail to deliver what ethnic minority activists seek. Scholars have argued that the geographic dispersion of Myanmar’s ethnic population demands a non-territorialized federalism (Kipgen 2018). During my interview with the Minister, he complained about the Chin brain drain, part of 8An example published on the day I write this illustrates the key themes of activist calls for ethnic territorial federalism: ‘From the Authoritative Land Management System to the Federal Land Governance System.’ https://www.tni.org/en/article/from-the-authoritative-land-management-system-to-the-federal- land-governance- system?fbclid=IwAR1NgK6TgHCrz3YiR0CwZAtkf7Sd5rBxLeTAWrXrtH2zHmCAJ3mC8v9s4tI 122 a larger pattern that puts Chin State’s rate of out-migration as the highest in the nation. That the Minister could note that a decreasing proportion of the Chin population lived in his jurisdiction while simultaneously working to fix the border attests to the ongoing power of what Agnew (2005) famously termed the ‘territorial trap.’ Globally, ethnic communities continue to base their politics of self-determination on modernist notions of bounded territory, despite the reality of population dispersion and mobility (Murphy 2019). In Kalay, ethnic territory was taking shape alongside remittance fishponds, in the same fields where just decades before Chin farmers had removed boundary posts to plant rice. Border negotiations in and beyond Kalay are shaped not only by ethnic territorial aspirations, but also by national debates and local practices of land governance. It is these questions of law and property to which I now turn. 123 PART TWO: LAW & CLAIMS 124 CHAPTER THREE LEGAL DEBRIS, ELASTIC LAND AND RISKY RIGHTS Thiri: And what about farmland, how many types of land are there? Farmers: Eight types! Thiri: And farmers? Farmers: Seven types! Thiri: There are seven types of farmers. If you remember this, it’s enough. When you arrive to the office, they’ll say, ‘You know a lot! How do you know so much about farmland?’ There are eight types of farmland and seven types of farmers. Hey you, you’ve attended a little class haven’t you? In this way, you’ve achieved some knowledge, the leaders and important people [lu gyi] will say. Later if there’s a disagreement, how will they definitely decide it? The Division and State Farmland Committee will decide it for sure. And so, altogether how many days will it take? 135 days. And now, at that time what number form should you submit? Farmers: We submit Form 7! Thiri was pacing the cramped space at the head of the house, running a rapid-fire review for about 30 men and women from five villages who had crammed in for a two-day land rights awareness training. When it wasn’t too busy on the farm, Thiri taught dharma school. Years of volunteering at her village monastery had ingrained a pedagogical style that emphasized rote memorization through boisterous interaction. Now, working as a grassroots land law trainer in a village a two-hour drive from her own, these tactics succeeded in keeping participants awake, despite the stifling heat. Thiri continued her call-and-response through the three levels of land administration, the three types of land rights, and the six types of land rules. She highlighted the strict language around government ownership of all teak trees, quizzed the farmers on punishments and reviewed the opportunity to request compensation in the case of land acquisitions, emphasizing personal responsibility: 125 Thiri: If the land was taken before, if they paid or didn’t pay [and] you’re just sitting there, it’s not like they will certainly come and give [compensation]. You have to do it for yourself. Whose responsibility is it? Farmers: Our own responsibility! Thiri: You have to investigate, and verify and ask. That will be your own responsibility. They won’t just come and give it to you. Thiri and her co-trainer, my friend Mi Mi Soe, had completed an 8-day Training-of- Trainers program run by a Yangon land rights NGO, and their lesson was part of a broader development initiative. According to data from the Yangon NGO, local partners conducted almost 900 trainings throughout the country between November 2014 and December 2017. These activities continued in 2018 and 2019, funded by a substantial amount of international donor money; one staff estimate placed the average costs of a single village training around US$1,000. Meanwhile, the Yangon NGO was carrying out similar education campaigns for State and Division officials and elected legislators, who were often just as ignorant of existing policies as farmers. Other organizations, including USAID, ran parallel program to educate farmers about land law. Thiri and Mi Mi Soe now taught the curriculum intermittently in surrounding villages for a modest stipend. On the first day, I was impressed to see both women command the authority of their audience, explain the principles and processes behind the 2012 Farmland Law, 2012 Vacant Fallow and Virgin Land Law, and the recently-passed 2018 Forest Law, and execute activities with enthusiasm. That night, the three of us slept side-by-side on the floor of one of the attendee’s homes. Thiri and I, exhausted, passed out immediately after dinner, but Mi Mi Soe fielded questions about farmland registration late into the evening. But the next day did not go quite as smoothly. After the final units and Thiri’s review, the farmers had a chance to ask questions. One brought up an issue that concerned many local residents: alluvial land. This village was located on the banks of the Myitta River, which 126 overflowed its banks and carved new channels almost every year. Some participants had previously farmed land that was now in the center of the river; others laid claim to newly- exposed parcels. How were they supposed to register their land according to the new laws? The question launched a heated discussion. Farmers drew out parcels of land and erased and re-drew them to mark the moving river on the slab that Thiri and Mi Mi Soe had brought to serve as a chalkboard. The two women had different opinions about how to handle the situation: one suggested putting a tall flag in the ground that would wave above the rising waters and mark the spot for future use. Finally, Thiri attempted to respond definitively by reading the law out loud, calling out series of sections that dealt with alluvial land applications and referring the villagers to the Township Land Management Committee. Figure 11: Thiri leads a village land law training 127 Before leaving the village, we went out to see the wandering river, which, in October, was swollen and could only be passed by boat. When I returned to the area five months later, I crossed the narrow water by motorcycle, tottering across a temporary bamboo bridge that was erected every dry season while admiring the bean plants sprouting in the rich wet soils revealed by the water’s retreat. The villagers had adapted their agriculture and transit habits to the river, but the law appeared much more rigid. The struggle of these villagers to adapt the stipulations of new farmland titles to their alluvial holdings provides one example of how reforms created in the capital slip and slide when they arrive to the countryside. The confusion generated in the final hours of the lesson contrasted with the apparent certainty and simplicity of the curriculum, but was typical of the dozen grassroots land law trainings I attended in Kalay. As I listened to questions and examined whimsical cartoons of user rights, I identified three distinct sources of bewilderment. First, the laws themselves were confusing, and sometimes bordered on nonsensical. Why would a smallholder have to apply through multiple layers of bureaucracy in order to change the crop she planted on a single field? (figure 12) Did the government really own the teak tree that I planted in front of my house? These rules incorporated the debris of socialist nationalization and authoritarian control-obsession even as they experimented with liberal property. The resulting laws were not only internally contradictory, but also difficult to apply. I frequently listened to trainers outline legal procedures in excruciating detail, only to undermine them with reference to na leh hmu, a term for informal arrangements or mutual understanding. As I watched Thiri and Mi Mi Soe struggle to convey the significance of the law in local terms, I recognized a collective attempt to stretch the law to fit a changing landscape, and to recategorize bean fields in relation to new rules and past practices. Finally, the trainings were notable for their simultaneous 128 emphasis on rights and punishments. New laws were double-edged: they not only brought new entitlements for farmers, but also new obligations that were enforced with strict penalties, incurring a degree of risk. As Thiri noted in the case of compensation for land acquisition, rights hinged on personal responsibility. The state gave nothing for free. In the words of one farmer who had attended a training, “You need to follow the rules to keep the rights.” Figure 12: “Procedure for Changing Crops” (Source: LCG land law training manual) 129 New laws, policies and procedures to govern land have played a central role in current efforts at reform in Myanmar (South 2018; Mark 2016b; Scurrah, Hirsch, and K. Woods 2015). Scholars have enumerated the many, contradictory laws and many, competing actors in land governance (S. McCarthy 2016) and explored the existence of plural land governance systems (Harrisson 2020; Suhardiman, Bright, and Palmano; Hong 2017), divergent notions of legitimate claims (Mark and Belton 2020), and the gaps between how land is owned, accessed and used on paper and in practice (Faxon 2017, Huard 2020). These observations of contradiction and plurality are important, but their analytic utility is limited. I follow recent analyses in viewing current land governance reform efforts in Myanmar as fields of contestation (Suhardiman, Kenney-Lazar, and Meinzen-Dick 2019). Unlike these authors, I reject a notion of 'path dependency' as adequate to understand how preexisting power dynamics shape legal reform. Understanding reform as ‘contested’ is necessary but not sufficient; rather, new laws must be situated in unfolding legal history, lived socioecologies, and cultural notions of rights. To do so, I start from and return to the moments of contradiction I observed in attempts to teach farmers new land laws. I understanding these trainings as privileged spaces from which to examine the challenges and significance of Myanmar’s land law. Reform unfolds across multiple temporal and spatial scales, which I capture through participant observation in high-level policy drafting meetings, historical and legal analysis, and interviews with Members of Parliament (MPs), activists and farmers. I show that contemporary policy-making takes place within a longer process of legal ruination, and I argue that three phenomena—legal debris, elastic land, and risky rights—are central to the nature and effects of Myanmar’s contested land reforms. In practice, all three of these seeming paradoxes provide tools for more savvy, wealthy or well- 130 connected people to recover legal debris, stretch land, and avoid risks to extend their control of land. In what follows, I provide a conceptual framing before drawing on Ann Stoler’s theorization of ruination to show how laws propagated by past regimes continue to exert force in the present. I outline Myanmar’s layered legal history and the contours of contemporary policy debates, connecting these in an active process of ruination. I then turn to the effects of this process, examining examples of legal debris in new law texts. In Elastic Land, I situate the law in everyday negotiations of access before building on Katherine Verdery’s work to demonstrate the ways in which land appears to stretch and transform in relation to new policies. Finally, I return to the land law trainings themselves, exploring the contingent, relational, and risky nature of new legal rights, a concept captured in the Burmese term a kwin a ye. Conceptual Framing Efforts to promote the power of law in general, and the power of law over land in particular, contend not only with Myanmar’s violent histories but also with a classic scenario of legal pluralism (von Benda-Beckmann 2002). In her work on Myanmar’s ‘layers of legal development,’ Melissa Crouch (2014) charts the invention and sedimentation of law from the narrative Buddhist dhammathat texts of the 12th Century Bagan Kingdom through imported colonial regulations and successive regimes in independent Myanmar. Sue Mark (2016) adapts Esther Roquas’ (2002) term ‘stacked laws’ to describe the ways in which Myanmar’s colonial, socialist and military regimes created 73 contradictory and confusing laws and regulations related to land. While Mark highlights new forms of strategic engagement for farmers’ rights, she argues that historically, the law is ‘stacked against’ smallholder farmers, in other words, 131 powerful actors selectively emphasize or ignore conflicting provisions to support their claims. These notions of law as layered and stacked build on models of institutional change in political science, for example Streeck and Thelen’s (2005) typology of displacement, layering, drift and conversion. These latter two categories—in which the impact or enactment of existing rules changes over time—hint at the dynamism masked by existing analysis of Myanmar law. While Myanmar law is sedimented, it is not static. Rather, I argue that the law is in an active process of ruination, one in which old rules serve not only as reminders of past repression, but also tools for continued and renewed exploitation. Following Ann Stoler (2013), I offer ruination as an analytic to illuminate the ongoing process through which the past continues to exert social and material force on present reform efforts. Stoler writes particularly of the ways in which ruination generates imperial debris and against the blunt logic of ‘colonial legacy;’ I extend this notion to highlight the ways in which successive and repressive formations are repurposed, writing against the related terms, ‘socialist’ or ‘authoritarian legacy,’ that occur so frequently in the Myanmar context. In a place where both patterns of possession and dispossession and imaginations of decline, emptiness and ownership have long and cyclical histories (Rhoads and Wittekind 2018), the outcomes of ruination—legal debris—shape how land is claimed, used and imagined. The process of ruination shapes the terms and effects of land reform. Making law meaningful is a particularly fluid and active project in moments of political transformation; in post-socialist contexts, property formalization is not only about spatial control but also the creation of new social values (Verdery and Humphrey 2004; Sikor, Stahl, and Dorondel 2009). In an illustrative example, Katherine Verdery (1994) writes of how villagers in post-Soviet Romania contend with what she dubs ‘the elasticity of land,’ the surprising shrinking and stretching of parcels that occurs as neighbors negotiate restitution. This elasticity is produced not 132 only through physical transformations—a meandering river—but also historical practices— underreported parcels, unrecorded transfers and abolished boundary-markers—and contemporary tussles over inheritance, migrants, authority and memory. In Myanmar, land’s elasticity is similarly generated through ecological change as well as through social work to bend and negotiate regulations and access. As new and old rules and practices produce conflicting claims in shared space, amounts and types of land appear to shift on paper and on the ground. Law and society scholarship on the vernacularization of rights and local meanings of democracy has highlighted the ways in which ‘universal’ forms are reinterpreted and remade in particular cultural and historical settings (Levitt and Merry 2009; Merry 2006; Schaffer 1998). Work in political ecology and agrarian studies has analyzed the way in which law is often a tool of the powerful, one used to dispossess peasants and shore up new forms of authority (Lund 2008; Peluso 1992). Consistent with these analysis, my own research shows that for Myanmar farmers, rights are intrinsically linked to responsibilities and to the threat of punishment. Rather than incurring obligations on the state to protect its citizens, these rights incur obligations on citizens to follow the state’s rules, even as they are presented as expanded opportunities. Accepting legal rights means accepting new rules to live by, and shouldering new types of risk. While Hall et. al (2011) have demonstrated the ways in which property rights confer access for some and exclusion for others, my analysis highlights another double-edge: for a farming family, a land title carries both risks and rights. Ruination in Myanmar Law Myanmar’s contemporary land reforms are enacted on a legal landscape characterized by overlap and contradiction. A massive apparatus to govern land has accumulated from a long and 133 winding legal history: the authoritative volume on the current legal framework of Myanmar’s housing, land and property rights weighs in at 1,255 pages (Leckie and Simperingham 2009). Laws are not only numerous, overlapping and internally contradictory, but also selectively emphasized and erased to promote various claims, a process that often disenfranchises smallholders (Mark 2016b). While the state’s relationship with land as inscribed in law has evolved and changed significantly over time, law is historically a tool of the powerful, particularly when it comes to the questions of property, land and natural resources (Hudson- Rodd and Htay 2010). This section provides an selective overview of Myanmar’s layered legal history, highlighting key laws aimed at rural land from the colonial period until the 2011 elections. Doing so provides key context for understanding the ways in which the process of ruination shapes prospects and practices of land control in the reform period. Key and recurring principles such as productive use and state resource ownership resurface throughout Myanmar’s legal history and are codified as legal debris. The colonial period represented a moment of rupture marked by a massive increase in the state’s supervision and private ownership of land (Thant Myint-U 2001). In the pre-colonial Burmese kingdoms, as in much of Southeast Asia, power was not derived through territory, but rather through control of labor and relations of trade and violence (Tambiah 2013; Winichakul 1997; Aung-Thwin 1984). A new type of state was imposed under colonial rule, one that governed land as private property as part of a larger imperial project of resource extraction. The British annexed Myanmar’s territory in a series of three Anglo-Burmese Wars (1824-26, 1852- 53 and 1885) and governed Myanmar as part of British Burma until partition in 1937. While British officers such as J.S. Furnivall studied precolonial land relations and wrote local norms selectively into legal codes, legislation and administrative structures were largely imported from 134 the main part of British India. A spate of new regulations codified a new system of property, providing procedures for measurement, documentation and, most importantly, taxation. The 1876 Lower Burma Land and Revenue Act and 1889 Upper Burma Land and Revenue Acts laid out regulations for land governance in the Southern and Northern Lowlands. The British incentivized expanded cultivation through the patta system, in which grants of 15-50 acres were given to peasant proprietors who could convert the licenses into landholding rights after 12 years of planting and paying tax. Policies like this one help double the area of cultivated land in Burma proper between 1860 and 1880 (Odaka 2016). The Shan, Kachin, and Chin Frontier Areas were administered with a different, and looser, set of regulations, as discussed in chapter two. Colonial laws like the 1894 Land Acquisition Act, which provided a basis for farmers to request compensation for lost land and remained the only regulation on this subject for more than a century, continue to serve as a basis for farmers’ claims today (Mark 2016b). This was also the period in which the key institutions of Myanmar’s land control were put into place. Perhaps most important was the State Land and Records Department, recently renamed the Department of Agricultural Land Management and Statistics (DALMS), which was founded in 1906 to administer colonial tax collection, make cadastral maps, and provide property documentation. Myanmar’s early years of independence (1948-62) were a time of fitful parliamentary democracy. The new Union of Burma made early attempts to ensure separate and independent branches of government, for example in a constitutional provision guaranteeing the independence of judges. It also regulated ethnic minority representation by allocating 62 seats to Burmans and dividing 63 seats among Shan, Karen, Kachin, Chin and Kayah ethnic groups in the lower chamber of Parliament (Crouch 2014, 11). However, the possibility of multiethnic democracy was steadily eroded by continuing armed conflict and a rising tide of Buddhist 135 Nationalism. In response to widespread violence, the leader, U Nu, ceded control to a military caretake government in 1958-9 before winning the 1961 election on a promise to make Buddhism a state religion. This policy, enshrined in Constitutional amendments that included a mandated 50% of government expenditures to religious affairs, was one of several that alienated Christian ethnic minority groups (Crouch 2014, 12). The leaders of the major minority groups had agreed to join the Union of Burma on promises of autonomy and the possibility of secession, both of which were laid out in the 1947 Panglong Agreement. By the time a military coup ended the first era of Burmese independence, both these principles had been officially redacted. Despite this repeal, these principles and key texts provide legal debris that ethnic minority activists mobilize in contemporary federalism quests, as shown in chapter two. Calls for returning land to Myanmar people had fueled the independence movement in the 1930s, animating both Sayar San’s peasant rebellion and in urban Buddhist intellectuals such as Dobama Asi-ayone, the We Burmans Association. Nationalizing land was an early priority of the new independent government. The Union of Burma’s 1947 Constitution declared all land and resources above and below ground the property of the state, a principle that would be reinforced in subsequent Constitutions. The claim was put into force the next year, when the Land Nationalization Act made all agricultural land state property. While the Act was initially only implemented in one district, it provided a radical response to British notions of private property and to colonial practices of foreign money-lending and landholding that had cast smallholders into debt and fired up the independence movement. The Act aimed at taking back land owned by foreigners and large landowners in order to redistribute to landless and land-poor. It banned land sale, mortgage or division and abolished earlier systems of landlordism and tenancy. In 1953, the Act was amended for implementation nationwide, but fell far short of that goal: only 17% of 136 cultivated land, 25% of total rice paddy land, was nationalized (Boutry et al. 2017, 66). While the Act was barely implemented, it had enormous consequences for land relations because it replaced colonial private property with state ownership and farmers’ nontransferable use rights, a system that remained in place until 2012. After General Ne Win took control of the government in 1962, his Revolutionary Council arrested prominent lawmakers and judges, replaced institutions, and shuttered universities or tightly controlled curricula. On offer, instead of Western-style democracy, was the Burmese Way to Socialism. Under Ne Win’s Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), Crouch writes, ‘law was seen as a means to reinforce control and prop up a thin socialist ideology’ (Crouch 2014, 13). On a practical level, people suffered: currency devaluations destroyed savings, forced labor broke bodies, and military violence continue to terrorize much of the countryside. Despite a new 1974 Constitution, shifts in territorial divisions, and changes of Ne Win’s titles, the General retained dictatorial control until 1988. Early BSPP regulations appeared to support a socialist, pro-peasant ideology with land- to-the-tiller polices, but over time rural governance was reduced to coercive paddy procurement. During these decades, both overall rice production and colonial forms of management of rural land and populations declined substantially; no full national census was taken after 1973, and cadastral maps were rarely updated. In lowland areas, peasants encountered the state primarily through the rice tax and through local interventions aimed at increasing rice production (Thawnghmung 2003). In 1964 the government began a paddy procurement policy, some version of which would continue until 2003. At this point, landholders officially became state tenants. The 1963 Tenancy and Farmers’ Rights Protection Laws were designed to grant land to cultivators and prevent land confiscation by private debt collectors, while 1964 Executive Order 137 I/64 gave a cultivator use rights to land after five years of productive use, regardless of whether or not they had documentation. While these laws were repealed by the 2012 Farmland Law, the 1964 Executive Order and the principle it enshrines—that of productive use as a basis for land rights—remains the foundation for legal strategies to protect smallholders’ claims today (Mark 2016b). This provides one example of the ways in which ruination generates legal debris that are mobilized in contemporary claims. Ne Win’s eventual resignation was due, in part, of the escalating protests and growing strength of the country’s legendary ’88 generation, a pro-democracy movement. But the shift was not what the one they imagined. Instead of democracy, a new military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), took over in September 1988. SLORC rejected the results of the 1990 elections, jailed activists, suspended the Constitution, and swept aside the last vestiges of socialism to seek new levels of personal enrichment. State-backed crony capitalism emerged as a dominant system of resource extraction, one intertwined with ongoing ethnic violence in the borderlands (L. Jones 2014; Buchanan, Kramer, and Woods 2013; K. Woods 2011; Callahan 2009). Emblematic of land law in this period were the 1991 Wasteland Instructions, which facilitated the repurposing of land for private development. The Instructions codified a much longer practice of legalizing land confiscation that enriched dominant groups while dispossessing people who were not generating revenue for, or were considered enemies of, the state (J. M. Ferguson 2014). The military repression of the 1990s appeared to slow at the turn of the millennium; General Than Shwe’s government launched the 2004 ‘Roadmap to Democracy’ and rushed the 2008 Constitution through a sham referendum: the government announced the document had been approved by 92.4% of the population in the days after Cyclone Nargis devastated the 138 Southern part of the country. The deeply-flawed document serves as a foundation for the reform period, and a locus of debate about the direction of Myanmar’s democracy. A clause that guarantees the military one-quarter of parliamentary seats gives the army effective veto power over law-making, illustrating the structural inadequacy of the document. Another clause targeted Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, whose late husband and two sons are British citizens, by prohibiting family of foreign nationals to serve as President. When her efforts at changing this clause failed, Daw Suu simply invented a new position, that of State Councilor, which she publicly announced was above the president. These problems—not only with the text itself, but with how it was ratified and undermined—demonstrate the unstable footing of law in contemporary Myanmar. Scholars have questioned whether the law is the appropriate tool for delivering justice in this context (Prasse-Freeman 2014) and investigated how ‘rule of law’ is conflated with a more violent and repressive ‘law and order’ (Cheesman 2015). This slippage helps explain why, while the 2010s were characterized by a frenzy of law-making activity, new laws were often short and contained vague language that gave wide leeway for implementation. As the NLD took the helm, power remained concentrated in the executive branch and military, with a limited role for the Hluttaw (parliament) and little judicial action, independence or credibility (Crouch 2014). Contemporary land reforms are shaped both by the limitations of law as a vehicle for progressive change, and by past regulations and principles pertaining to land. The sheer number of legal logics and rules imposed by military force over the past century is striking. The result of this history was not only a trail of short-lived institutions with shallow roots, as Crouch argues, or even the set of 73 stacked laws and regulations pertaining to land that Mark describes. On the eve of the reform period, Myanmar’s legal landscape was in an active process ruination, one in 139 which contemporary actors mobilized principles and texts from the past to actively shape possibilities for present policy and claims. Reform in Ruination The Director of the Myanmar Timber Enterprise had a question. Or perhaps it was more of an explanation. Standing up among the crowd of government staff, development workers, and land activists, he complained that the Enterprise had trouble registering property that they had owned for decades. He recited a proud history of the Enterprise, which had been extracting timber since the British victory in the 3rd Anglo-Burmese War, and bemoaned a lack of intra- government coordination. The National Land Use Policy consulted with the public but not with government departments, he declared, the land given to government departments has lots of issues and problems! From the stage, the Union Attorney General responded. You’ve raised a lot of issues, he said, but I think the key issue you’re addressing is the lack of land information. The way to address this is land information management. He spoke of the need for updated, consolidated maps and reliable data. He explained that his own office had similar problems—their office land had been allocated in the 1970s but they did not have a land grant or registration. He spoke in sympathy to a fellow civil servant, ‘We don’t have land security as well, let me assure you.’ I watched this exchange at the at the kick-off meeting for drafting the National Land Law, an event that brought high-level officials and invited experts and activists together in Naypyitaw’s biggest convention center, MICC2, to envision a future for land governance. Over three years had passed since we had gathered there to finalize a National Land Use Policy, an aspirational document that had not yet translated into palpable change in rules or practices. The 140 Union Attorney General’s office had been charged with drafting a Law to put the Policy into action. The public admission that much government land was unregistered raised clear challenges for contemporary efforts at reform, not only because it revealed the extent of informality, but also because it was historically likely that some parcels had been acquired coercively, through civil war or land grabs. But an even more fundamental challenge to the task at hand was revealed by the Union Attorney General’s reduction of these issues to a problem of land information. Seated next to me were activists working for dispossessed smallholder farmers and displaced ethnic minority communities; the conflation of their struggles with the civil servant’s complaints as a common problem of land insecurity disregarded the power differential between state entities and everyday people. While these officials hoped for a Law that would protect and empower their own Departments, the people seated next to me envisioned a legal process that would correct historic injustice. Over the last decade, Myanmar’s new and amended laws and regulations have created new forms of legal entitlements, application procedures, and administrative structures for redistribution and governance, even as new committees have investigated, scrutinized and consulted on past land cases. The number and diversity of these policies and activities are notable; figure 13 gives an overview of the major reforms passed since the Thein Sein government took office in 2011. I understand this broad set of diverse activities, together, as composing ‘land reform.’ While these activities are often characterized by stated concerns with good land governance, economic development and formalized rights, the central goals of reform are far from clear. As conversations at the National Land Law meeting demonstrated, there was little consensus on who or what needed to be reformed, and how. Based on my longer work on and analysis of land policy, however, three major trends were apparent in recent reform efforts: 141 actors aim to standardize, rectify or harmonize the law. To do so, activists, officials and MPs draw on past laws and rules even as they incorporate international principles or new normative aims. Figure 13: Major contemporary land reform activities First, land reforms aim to clarify, codify, assign and ensure land rights, both to increase production and to formalize and extend state control. This concern reflects global development priorities and has motivated new rules that partially roll back socialist regulations to confer unprecedented rights of farmland use, transfer and sale in line with efforts to attract foreign investment and a rationalized land market. Statutes like the 2012 Farmland Law, which created a new titling system conferring individual use rights for land zoned as ‘farmland,’ aim to formalize holdings. The ongoing, eight million dollar One Map project, which aims to centralize spatial data across government departments, and recent attempts to set up an online Land Bank of investment-ready parcels also center information and standardization. A new Land Acquisition Law and the controversial Vacant Fallow and Virgin Land Law similarly aim at marketization 142 and clarification of rights. The push for formalization, standardization, and information is undermined by incomplete data, as the Attorney General noted, but more fundamentally by historic inequality. Second, reforms aim to address past injustices. A series of committees and have dealt with restitution from historic land grabs and possible procedures for future acquisitions. These attempts at land justice and social protection are a response to public calls to return land seized by military elites and resettle millions displaced by armed conflict. However, restitution has moved slowly— the Farmland Investigation Commission received over 30,000 complaints of stolen land from 2011-5, and awarded compensation to less than 3% (Pierce 2015). Critics have noted deeply flawed investigation processes and persistent disagreements over who deserves land (LIOH 2017). At the National Land Law meetings, I watched another government official ask how the National Land Law would help to defend the nation against Bengali invaders, a term used pejoratively to describe Rohingya Muslims who were being violently forced off their lands by the Myanmar military. When I brought up Rohingya dispossession in conversations with activists who advocated for the protection and return of ethnic minority lands, several told me the problems in Rakhine had nothing to do with the subject at hand. Ideas of justice were intrinsically bound to exclusionary notions of territorial sovereignty and racial belonging. Third, work on the National Land Use Policy and the National Land Law have sought to ‘harmonize’ existing laws and to establish central principles and rules for governing land. Articulating a master framework is seen important to addressing the very different norms, values and viewpoints described above, but it also aligns with the larger NLD project of establishing ‘rule of law.’ The primacy given to legal coherence was on display in my interview with the Chairman of the Parliamentary land committee. The former political prisoner and longtime NLD 143 member explained to me that there were four major issues with land in Myanmar. First, the legacy of military rule. Second and third, the ignorance and poverty of the farmers. Finally, the laws themselves: When we tried to solve the issues according to the law, we found out that some laws are not harmonious with the situation on the ground. There are also controversial issues between the laws. For example, according to Investment Law, someone who has Form 7 [Land User Certificate] can do business with foreigners, for example for livestock… but, according to the land administration law, they can use the farmlands in other ways only after applying for it. Reconciling contradictions to produce a coherent legal framework was key to solving Myanmar’s land problems, in this MP’s view. Up until early 2018, the concept of harmonization, employed in a series of public consultations and meetings about various land laws, appeared to exert a positive, unifying force. Government officials I met and observed appeared optimistic about the prospects of creating a ‘mother’ or ‘umbrella’ law to guide a comprehensive approach to land management. But by the end of 2019, drafting had slowed even as the promise of a National Land Law was undermined by various amendments and new statutes moving swiftly through parliament with minimal consultation. The shift from cooperation to contention was palpable for those who had been involved in advocacy since the drafting of the National Land Use Policy in 2014/5. After reminiscing about our time together in those early days, one Myanmar lawyer intimately involved in the National Land Law drafting process told me bluntly that the biggest problem stalling reform was now in-fighting among the reformers themselves. The unifying principle of harmonization was cracking under pressure from competing actors with different normative priorities. These contested reforms take place within a longer process of ruination. Old rules shape not only the material patterns that reforms aim to address, but more profoundly the ways in 144 which regulation itself is envisioned and expressed. One concrete manifestation of this process is the incorporation of language that enshrines historical principles into new laws. Legal Debris Ruination generates legal debris that surface in the final drafts of land reform texts. Two excerpts from recent laws illustrate the persistence of past principles, specifically state control of valuable resources and prioritization of permanent rice agriculture as the highest form of productive use. Like the principle of ethno-territorial separation discussed in the last chapter, these ideas have long roots but are now being repurposed in new ways. The MP’s use of a colonial road regulation as an excuse to avoid paying compensation for land acquisition demonstrates the ways in which powerful people are able to manipulate the law by mobilizing specific legal debris. At several grassroots land law trainings I attended, trainers struggled to explain the key points of a new Forest Law, enacted in 2018. Most difficult to grasp was the government’s policy with regards to teak. More than once, I witnessed trainers resort to reading aloud a particular section of this new law: 145 Excerpt from 2018 Forest Law Chapter III, ‘Constitution of Reserved Forest and Declaration of Protected Public Forest’ 8. (a) A standing teak tree wherever situated in the State is owned by the State. (b)The Ministry may grant permission (to any person or any organization) to own lawfully the teak trees planted in the following areas by issuing special order and directives thereof (relating to those teak trees):- (i) teak trees in the private teak plantation established in the forest land with permission (ii) teak trees in the private teak plantation established outside forest land and registered at the Forest Department (iii) teak trees in the land established as community forestry and registered at the relevant Forest Department (iv) teak trees planted in the living compound and registered at the relevant Forest Department (v) teak trees planted in the private owned land, public land, religious land (area), departmental land and military land/land entitled to military and registered at the relevant Forest Department (c) The Ministry may:- (i) declare, alter or cancel according to the locality the species of reserved trees which are to be conserved by the Forest Department; (ii) declare, alter or cancel the categorization of hard wood species Attendees wanted to understand under what conditions they might be able to plant or own teak, but the language of the law was complicated and seemed to be open to change. What was clear was that the state still valued and sought to micro-manage this species. While illegal timber harvesting was punishable by two years imprisonment and a 300,000-500,000mmk fine, unlawful teak extraction earned a much harsher penalty: up to seven years imprisonment and a 500,000-1 million mmk fine. Extraction, transporting or possessing over one tonne of teak timber without permit was punishable by up to 15 years in jail and a three million mmk fine. The special status of teak reflects the continuing salience of the colonial Forest Department’s priority of teak extraction and control, as well as the hardwood’s high market value. According to official statistics that, given large amounts of illegal deforestation, are certainly underestimates, 10,000 tonnes of teak were extracted from the country in the 2019-20 fiscal year (Global New Light of 146 Myanmar 2020). The continuing control of teak stands out within a Forest Law whose objectives include following international agreements on ‘environmental conservation’ and ‘sustainable development’ as well as ‘contributing towards the food, clothing and shelter needs of the public.’ Teak extraction, which had enriched colonial elites and well-connected cronies with permits from the Myanmar Timber Enterprise, would continue to be, at least in principle, a privileged site of state control. Legal debris was also evident in the text of the 2012 Farmland Law. While this law is frequently understood as attempting to put into place formal registration systems that endow new rights and seek to spur investment, the terms and conditions on new Land User Certificates demonstrate the persistence of socialist-era principles of government agricultural control and even older assumptions about productive use. Three clauses (g, hi and I, highlighted below) in particular forbid the landholder from changing land use, changing crops, or leaving land fallow. These clauses are legal debris from earlier agricultural policies that evidence the continuing influence of past rules. As I discuss later in this chapter, they also contribute to farmers’ understanding of rights as risky, contingent opportunities. Excerpt from 2012 Farmland Law Chapter IV ‘Terms and Conditions to be Complied by the Person who has the Right to Use the Farmland’ 12. The person who has the right to use the farmland: (a) shall carry out the farmland as prescribed in this Law; (b) shall pay land revenue and other taxes levied by the Ministry relating to the farmland; (c) shall register in the relevant Township Department by paying the stamp duty and registration fees for the contract stipulated by the Department in carrying out sale, mortgage, lease, exchange and gift of the right to use the farmland; (d) shall register in the relevant Township Department in accord with the stipulations when the right to use the farmland is obtained by inheritance in accord with the existing law; 147 (e) shall have the right to mortgage the right to use the farmland only for the purpose of investment for cultivation and shall mortgage it in the Government bank or the Bank recognized by the Government; (f) shall not trespass and carry out without being granted by the relevant Administrative Body of the Farmland; (g) shall not use the farmland by other means without permission; (h) shall not change the originally cultivated crop with other kind of crop, without permission; (i) shall not be fallow the farmland without sufficient reason; (j) shall no sell, mortgage, lease, exchange or gift the farmland during the period before having the right to use the farmland or during the period the dispute arises relating to the right to use the farmland; 13. If the dispute relating to the right to use the farmland arises after this Law has come into force, it shall have the right to settle legally only after registration in the Department. 14. The person who has the right to use the farmland shall not sell, mortgage, lease, exchange or gift on the whole or part of the right to use the farmland without permission of the Government to any foreigner or any organization in which the foreigner is included. Both legal debris and competing aims of reform shaped the final drafts of these texts. The result was new laws that bring forward historical principles, such as state control of resources, and priorities, such for permanent rice cultivation, even as they ostensibly embrace free markets, sustainable development and liberal rights. While aspects of formalization, restitution and harmonization appear incompatible with these older principles, in practice, actors on various sides of reform debate have swept legal debris into emerging policy texts. The effects of legal debris can be more pernicious than mere contradiction, a point driven home to me during a chat with one MP who wanted to use arcane prohibitions in a colonial road regulation as the basis for taking smallholder land for an expansion project without giving compensation. When I asked if the landholders knew about the century-old restrictions, he looked at me quizzically, saying, of course not. This example highlights the unequal ability to recover and mobilize legal debris. Regulatory texts are situated in broader societal power 148 relations that determine who knows, and can make use of the law. This observation provided one key justification for land law awareness trainings, which aimed to mitigate the use of the law as a tool of dispossession by sharing both the strengths and weaknesses of the law. But in these same trainings, I saw how contradictory texts clashed with lived practices of land use and management to produce the phenomenon of elastic land. Elastic Land Land begins to take on plastic properties: it pulsates and heaves, oozes out at the borders and evaporates into nothing. (Verdery 1994, 1086) The debate I witnessed in that first village land law training over how to register alluvial land emerged not only from confusion over the interpretation of legal debris, but also from the puzzle of elastic land. As Verdery notes in her own case, land’s periodic disappearance and reappearance due to riverine ecologies presents obvious challenges to fixing property rights. In villages around Kalay Valley’s Myitta River, meandering waters had physically changed the land, sparking a debate about whether individuals’ plots had disappeared or simply relocated. Transformations in Kalay’s landscape, elaborated in chapter one, created ecological elasticity that challenged new rules. However, historical relations between villagers and local surveyors would also shape the law’s application. In this section, I build on Katherine Verdery’s work to consider the ways in which situated negotiations of land access in the context of legal debris and new rules engender at least two other types of elasticity: on one hand, stretching acreage, and, on the other, morphing land categories. Land laws are situated in relations of authority, morality and reciprocity enacted at various scales and in particular places. Political ecologists have long recognized that formal rules are only one dimension of resource access (Ribot and Peluso 2003; Rocheleau and Roth 2007). 149 Interlocking and intersectional negotiations are co-constituted with resource use (Nightingale 2011). Scholars working in Myanmar have highlighted the ways in which competing authorities, alternative moralities, and intimate and reciprocal relations of obligation shape and are shaped by, land claims. Take, for example the issue of inheritance. Contemporary inheritance practices vary widely across ethnic groups, and are entangled in changing gender norms (Faxon and Knapman 2019). Historian Chie Ikeya (2005) has shown that British colonizers’ ideas of Burmese women’s independence were predicated on their observations that Buddhist law endowed women with control over property; colonial interpretations of egalitarian inheritance helped build a remarkably persistent myth of Burmese women’s ‘traditional’ high status and gender equality. In his ethnography of a Burman village not far from Kalay, Stephan Huard argues that 'transmitting inheritance is about redefining authority and responsibility over things, and obligations between people' (Huard 2020, 84). He explains a seemingly paradoxical statement, that ‘nobody owns the land,’ by showing the ways in which land, kin and debt relationships are carefully and simultaneously maintained, belying clear and separable claims. These examples highlight the way in which historical interactions between religious and ethnic customs and statuary law produce diverse patterns of land inheritance, and vice-versa. For farmers around the country, these overlapping systems are often adjudicated through intimate negotiations that hinge on gendered relations of kinship and obligation. Within this context, and key to understanding the material effects of land reforms, is the social process of implementation and enforcement. It is commonplace among activists and development workers in Myanmar to criticize officials and bemoan corruption, but I was surprised at the frankness with which government staff themselves discussed the shortcomings of their work in land management. The first time I met the head of Kalay’s Department of 150 Agricultural Land Management and Statistics, I timidly asked about whether some land documents his office issued might be inaccurate. He responded by telling me a story from his previous posting. As we sat sweating in plastic chairs and staring at framed photos of political leaders in his unairconditioned office, he explained that he received a directive to give out Form 7, the farmland registration document. He had to sign and distribute 1,000 titles in a single day, he told me, concluding, ‘Of course they are wrong!’ When I met with civil servants getting Masters degrees at the national agricultural university, they were equally honest about the limitations of their work. One officer in the Department of Agriculture and Land Records explained to me: The number of acres on the map does not match with the field since the military government time. We call it, ‘Climbing Palm Tree Survey.’ It implies that they measure the lands not exactly, but just by guessing. The land survey officer climbs the palm trees and looks out over the lands from the trees. [The measurement] will not be sure. Before, there were fewer [agricultural] fields and they could handle it. Now, they have to work for more lands. They have to measure the lands every week and month. So, they do not have enough time for all of the lands. The upper level [lu gyi] should ask only the amount of work they can do. Embedded in this complaint about rising workloads was a stark, if humorous, acknowledgement of the low and diminishing quality of the department’s measurements. Civil servants I spoke with often blamed the shoddiness of their work on insufficient resources, but they also pointed out the problems with the law itself. Like the land law trainers, officials I spoke to about the law and its application often used the word shot deh, meaning disordered, confusing or a mess. Making sense of this legal debris with limited resources, they explained, was often impossible, or at least above their pay grade. Legal debris and situated relationships of access and implementation combine to create the conditions of possibility for land’s seeming elasticity. In the face of new forms of property registration, land’s expansion was a common phenomenon in villages I visited. This was 151 produced by strategic underreporting of acreage under socialism, a practice incentivized by the rice tax, which was levied per acre. As a result of this policy, many farmers I met had tax receipts and other documentation for only a portion of their landholdings. In contrast, today the government rewards landholders based on acreage. The Myanmar Agricultural Development Bank provides loan amounts based on dry crop and rice paddy acreage, while the Mechanization Department will sell large machines only to farmers with documentation for over 10 acres. As new forms of documentation arrive with promises of property rights, farmers seek to accurately, or even over-report their holdings: more land has gone from liability to benefit. Farmers I interviewed sometimes paid survey staff a little extra to count their full acreage, not just the plots listed on their old tax receipts. Land appears to stretch. At the same time, land categories buckle and bend. Myanmar’s legal land categories emerge from colonial attempts at resource exploitation and management and rarely match contemporary use. In part one, I discussed the ways in which people around Kalay sought to register farmland in areas still formally classified as Reserved Forest, despite the fact that land had been cleared for rice decades prior. Failing in their quest for Form 7, some of these farmers turned to another legal mechanism, banding together to apply for use rights to the same plots under the 1995 Community Forest Instructions. While these procedures were not new, formation of Forest User Groups was extremely limited in the first 15 years, often to villages with international donor support. In 2011, the Forest Department had only allocated 104,146 acres of Community Forest, a far cry from their goal of 2.27 million by 2030 (Tint, Springate-Baginski, and Gyi 2011). New interest in Community Forests from officials and domestic NGOs helped spur an increase in applications. At stake in these transformations are the types of rights possible under different legal categories, for example 30-year, collective community forest leases versus 152 individual claims in perpetuity that come with Form 7. But the possibility of some rights was enough to change land, materially and quasi-legally, from forest to rice paddy and back again. At a national scale, the elasticity of legal categories is most obvious, and most dangerous, in the case of so-called vacant land. The 2012 Vacant Fallow and Virgin Land Law established new procedures for granting ‘unused’ land to agribusiness and individuals in an attempt to attract investment. This law extended a long history of state dispossession of smallholders, which included the re-allocation of over five million acres under the 1991 Wasteland Instructions (San Thein et al 2018), in the name of productive use. In a genealogy of the legal category of ‘waste land,’ Jane Ferguson (2014) argues that the colonial classification as such became a critical tool for military dominance under the juntas, when aggressively characterizing agricultural lands as derelict cleared the way for rent-seeking in so-called insurgent areas, sustaining the poorly- funded Tatmadaw troops while opportunistically extending territorial and institutional control. Changing land’s classification to vacant, therefore, represents a form of categorical elasticity that historically enables dispossession. In ways that resonate with global cases of rendering land waste or empty as a tool of dispossession (Safransky 2014; Baka 2013), the land appears to change, and the military takes control. Today, land becomes classified as ‘vacant, fallow and virgin’ by default if it is not zoned as farmland, forest land, or other categories. According to government figures there were over 167 million acres of VFV land in October 2016, many of which are concentrated in ethnic minority States (Thein et al 2018). On the ground, it is not obvious what plots are included in this land category. Land that locals call taungya (hillside cultivation), bubwapine (ancestral), or dama u cha (self-cleared) could all be classified as VFV. In late 2018, an amendment to the 2012 VFV Law requiring registration within six months ignited frenzy of protest—implementation was so 153 unrealistic that it threatened mass disenfranchisement, which, given Myanmar’s history of land grabbing and inequality, would likely consolidate holdings among elite while dispossessing farmers (Springate-Baginski 2019). In protest, ethnic minority activists recategorized these lands again, this time as ‘customary land.’ Bright memes circulated on social media declared that the government was coming to steal customary land (figure 14). Yet this category was also capricious. In one village in Kalay, a poor and recently-established Burman community farmed hilly land without titles. They had no hope for recognition as either productive farmers or customary cultivators because they practiced forms of subsistence agriculture that defied both the government’s notion of productive farming and activist notions of indigenous traditional use. Within a longer history of wastelands as a tool of dispossession, some contemporary groups are better positioned than others to do the political work of reclassification. The result of both elite and activist maneuvers is that land appears to switch types, from subsistence to vacant, or from vacant to indigenous. Figure 14: Social media campaign against the amended VFV Law (‘You will become a squatter on your ancestral land in 120 days!’) 154 Claimants negotiate legal debris and local access in ways that appear to stretch and transfigure the land. Elastic land is the effect both of physical changes, such as those wrought by riverine ecologies or reforestation, and of social work to stretch the law in order to recognize resource claims. Land is not equally elastic for everyone, nor is it elastic in the same sorts of ways. However, the debate over alluvial land in that first village land law training was illustrative of a larger pattern through which legal ruination and lived relations of land access and formalization produced apparent transformations in the character of the land itself. Risky Rights Thiri: What comes next? Rights. How many types are given? For farmland, for farmland rights how many types are given? Those who attended the first day will know. There are three types of rights. What are they? The right to work the land, the right to hold the land, the right to benefit from the land, there are three types. And how many types of rules are there? Farmers: Six types! Thiri: Oh, you remember that! There are six types of rules. And what comes next? Punishments. How many punishments are given? It follows the rules, in that way you can know. But at the time, you might forget the rules a little bit. And you might forget the punishments a little bit. But you really don’t want the punishment! And prison, you don’t want a single bit of it! And fines, it’s too much! Farmer: We don’t need to remember rights, but we need to reminder the rules, or else the punishment will come to us, right? Thiri: Yes, you have to remember the rules so you can dodge the punishment. Rights and rules were always presented together in the land law trainings. In one lesson, trainers used colorful diagrams or flip charts to enumerate the entitlements and restrictions that came with Land User Certificates. This documentation for farmland holdings, colloquially known as Form 7, was created by the 2012 Farmland Law. Figure 15 shows the scope of authorized activities. Someone with Form 7 can, for example, work and benefit from the land, give the land as inheritance, sell the land, or partner with a foreigner to work the land. Figure 16 155 shows the restrictions in land use: farmers cannot allow ‘squatting,’ which for practical purposes means they cannot erect homes on land classified as farmland; they also cannot leave land fallow or change the crop or land use. As previously discussed, these specific restrictions represent a form of legal ruination, one in which old crop priorities, ideas of productive use, and patterns of state control reassert themselves in new texts. But these educational materials and the way in which Thiri presented the relationship between rights and rules revealed a more fundamental insight: new permissions were inseparable from new obligations, and from the possibility of punishment. Figure 15: “The Rights/Opportunities of the one with Authorization to Use the Land (Source: LCG land law training manual) 156 Figure 16: “The Rules that Farmers must Follow” (Source: LCG land law training manual) This double-edge of rights and rules was apparent not only in the text and trainings, but also in how farmland registration was put into practice. Farmers and land law trainers I spoke with knew that Form 7 carried a new set of formal restrictions, the most commonly mentioned being the limitation on crop choice, that were accompanied by strict penalties, including the possibility of government land seizure. Some of the opportunities promised by Form 7 were, upon closer examination, premised on an erasure of previous access. In a participatory action research project I conducted in another part of northern Myanmar, we found that villagers’ main motivation for registering was to be able to access Myanmar Agricultural Development Bank loans, modest, low-interest loans provided seasonally based on acreage. These loans were available before the 2012 Farmland Law, however, in 2018 the Bank began requiring Form 7 as 157 collateral. While farmers considered access to these loans the main benefit of registration, not all farmers with Form 7 could get them. Furthermore, many farmers were unable to register their land because of various challenges. Farmers without Form 7 complained about not being able to get MADB loans that had previously been available with a tax receipt or the recommendation of the village head. For those without Form 7, the loss of this loan was experienced as a restriction of opportunities, rather than as an expansion of rights. Rather than universally securing land, titling produced a patchwork of opportunities and exclusion (Faxon and Aung 2019). The ways in which land titling was taught and implemented reflected a different conception of rights than the one that underlies global development initiatives. International promotion of land titling programs is often premised on the notion that secure and formal property rights are essential to economic development and poverty remediation (WB 2008, de Soto 2000). Yet the entitlements Form 7 provided were not inalienable, rather, they were conditionally given by the state, who retained Constitutional ownership of all land and resources. These limitations derived from processes of legal ruination but were not merely statutory; rather, they were inscribed in the very language that farmers and land law trainers used to talk about entitlements and opportunities. The Myanmar word that is used to translate the English word ‘rights,’ a kwin a ye, carries at least three meanings. The first transmits a relational sense of authorization, license or permission, for example kwin phyu deh (to give permission) or lou’pine kwin (authorization to work [the land]). The second carries a meaning akin to opportunities, for example in a sentence like, ‘because she got a scholarship, she had the opportunity to study abroad.’ These opportunities are structural and situational, but never completely guaranteed. Only recently has the word been used in the sense of lu a kwin a ye, or human rights. This conception of innate rights contrasts with, and does not completely erase, the term’s older 158 relational and contingent sense. The notion of a kwin a ye—a descriptor of legal rights that invokes a conditional sense of ‘opportunities’ or ‘license’—invites consideration of how legal reforms sketch the contours of possibility, rather than providing definitive guarantees. In the case of farmland registration, Form 7 may have provided new licensing, but its opportunities were contingent on obeying the rules. As the exchange above illustrates, avoiding punishment was often the primary concern of farmers learning about new land rights. It is in this sense that land reforms, both as a system, and for individual farmers, can be seen as granting risky rights. With these insights, I turn to a question I often considered while sweating through land law trainings on the floors of strangers’ homes, that of what these events aimed to do and actually accomplished. A 2015 version of the Land Law trainers’ handbook lists the goals of the training as follows: To increase the knowledge and understanding of the farmers of Myanmar with regards to land laws, customs and responsibilities so they know about the authorization to work the land (lou’pine kwin) and opportunities/rights (a kwin a ye) for the improvements and benefit of their life. To have a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the law. To be able to carry the law with them, avoid trouble, and to follow the dos and don’ts of the law. This stated mission emphasizes the double-edge of risky rights: attendees should be able to improve their life, but they needed, at least, to stay out of trouble. When I asked the Director of the Yangon NGO that organized these trainings about their goals and effects, he explained to me that the key take-away was not content, but rather confidence to advocate for oneself and engage with officials. Like the mining company trainings Welker (2012) observed in Indonesia, these trainings can be understood as attempted subject-making projects. The desired outcome was not only a farmer who understood the law, but a farmer who understood herself as a rights-bearing, and therefore rule-following, citizen. 159 Underlying the efforts was an explicit link between legal literacy and modernity. As one trainer speaking to a room full of village youth put it: ‘The farmers who don’t know [the law] won’t develop! They will stay dissatisfied!’ At the same time, critical awareness of the law’s dangers and limits was inscribed into the curriculum and the minds of many who taught it. When I asked another particularly outspoken trainer about the goal of these events, he explained trainings as a kind of self-defense crash course in a context in which law was historically a tool of the powerful: We explain the law’s weaknesses when we give the trainings. There are three eras for land law: the British era, the Socialist/Military era and the Democracy era. The British era was much better than the Council [Socialist/Military] time… [but] now people can be sent to jail. This democracy era is the worst! A crony can apply for up to 5,000 acres and the people can only apply for 50…. So we have to explain the weakness of the law to the people, that it is a trap…we explore the existing laws to know what is hidden behind them. This account highlights how laws like the 2012 Farmland Law did not endow farmers with a list of guarantees, but rather imposed a set of restrictions, permissions and penalties and were subject to abuse by powerful actors. As Thiri’s rapid review session reminded me, it was the heightened possibility of punishment, rather than the expansion of state protections, that often heralded a new law’s arrival. Trainers and farmers were agentive participants in a dynamic material-legal landscape, one defined by the accumulation of messy, overlapping and contradictory policies, on one hand, and the (dis)appearance, stretching, and transformation of plots, on the other. In this context, land law trainings developed a critical sense of the dangers and opportunities of the law. Conclusion This chapter attempts to understand the nature of contemporary land reform in Myanmar, starting from attempts to teach villagers new land law. I first showed how the process of 160 ruination shapes the outcomes of land reform in the present, providing an overview of historical land regulation and the contemporary pursuit of competing goals of formalization, justice and harmonization. Ruination produces legal debris that meet uneven implementation and situated socioecological relations to produce elasticity in land itself: land appears to shrink, stretch, move and change. In this context, and consistent with the Burmese notion of a kwin a ye, new laws confer both risks and rights. Historical laws and principles shape the text of new policies and the practice of land governance to produce three apparent paradoxes that characterize farmers’ experience of land law: legal debris, elastic land and risky rights. This analysis provides quite a different view of land reform than studies that start from legal texts, elite interviews, or empirical results. Rather than evaluate reform as a bounded set of laws, goals or outcomes, I explore the process by which past legal principles, land management practices, and understandings of permission and punishment produce particular, rather peculiar, effects. Doing so builds on a core insight of critical property theory; property rights are not made in a vacuum, or under conditions of ‘path dependency,’ but rather within existing and unfolding social relations and cultural histories. Like disease, land reform is characterized by multiplicity, not only of actors and interests, but more fundamentally of practices, relationships and ideas (Mol 2003). In Myanmar today, these multiple threads are cohering around a system marked by contradiction, one that is failing to effectively address any of the three aims of formalization, redress and harmonization. At the same time, my work suggests that powerful people are better positioned to mobilize legal debris, stretch their land, and avoid the risks inherent in new rights. While law in Myanmar remains primarily a tool of local and national lu gyi, new and overlapping rules can provide fodder for smallholders, informal settlements, and ethnic minorities to claim and defend property (Rhoads 2018; Suhardiman, Bright, and Palmano 2019; 161 Mark 2016b). Land law trainings aimed to give farmers confidence to engage with law, but formal rules provided only one of a diverse set of mechanisms through which people I met sought to recover or protect their land. Strategic actions and creative efforts were key to shaping the ways in which claimants in Kalay Valley performed property, the subject of the next chapter. 162 INTERLUDE Ekari used to do this drive by herself, two hours one bumpy way in her little red car. But that was before she was pregnant. Today, belly eight months big and swathed in green velvet, Ekari rides in the cab of the truck with her brother driving. I’m in the back with my research assistant and another brother, who is conducting a soliloquy about the failures of the NLD. We are headed, first, to see Daw Win, a woman Ekari helped to defend her land from someone who was either a foreign crony or her brother-in-law, depending on what day I ask. When we arrive, Daw Win plies us with chicken and coconut far beyond her means. Then, we continue on to the Village Tract office, where Ekari introduces us to the lu gyi, the ‘big men,’ and clarifies our intentions, telling the room that we have nothing to give them except this coffee mix and these snacks we brought from Kalay. We are here to learn. The big men explain. In this Village Tract, the government has given back over 4,600 acres of land grabbed by the military in 1996 and 1997. After the return ceremony in 2014, all hell broke loose. Without any directions or expertise for redistribution, the local authorities (only one of whom, the Village Tract Administrator, receives a salary) have inherited the task of choosing owners among their neighbors. Sensibly, they have started with the lands without conflicts. They tell us these are already returned and registered, but comprise less than 1/5th of the total acreage. The rest is under dispute. Those who cleared brush during the socialist era, when land went to those who planted paddy, were up against those who had been forced to work for the military, or had rented it out, lining the pockets of some regional commander. Since the return ceremony, recent migrants had flocked to the newly available land, especially to areas 163 with water access for irrigation, offering payments to the local authorities and creating more chaos. We listen for hours as the men talk over one another, articulating their challenges. For example, it takes two hours each way by motorcycle to reach the authorities, which is a problem, because they need the authorities’ instructions to get anything done. I once heard a rumor, in another land return site, of village heads who received a package of completed land titles from the township office, but did not distribute them, because they had not been instructed to open the box. Stories like these undermine the NLD government’s brags of vast land return and make space for entrepreneurial idealists like Ekari to shape land cases and claims. After I am done scribbling notes, she exchanges phone numbers before we pile back into the truck, off to investigate the next land case. 164 CHAPTER FOUR PERFORMING PROPERTY AFTER AUTHORITARIAN RULE Resolving land conflict has been central to calls for reform in Myanmar. Just weeks after taking office in 2016, the NLD founded the Land Reinvestigation Committee to investigate and facilitate the return of grabbed land. Like its predecessor during Thein Sein’s presidency, the Committee’s work has been painfully slow. Often, resolution is dependent on negotiations with land-grabbers, resulting in return of only low-value lands (LIOH 2017). Petitions for reinvestigation are routed through an slow bureaucratic journey via township officer who forward them to district, then regional, and then national-level committees. Over five million acres of disputed lands were reallocated legally during the military government, and many now have multiple claimants (Thein et al. 2018). Weighing competing claims is made more challenging by the fact that the question of who deserves land remains unanswered in Myanmar law: there are few substantive criteria for adjudicating conflicts and no guidelines for facilitating restitution. Legal documentation is limited. The paralegal organization Namati estimates that 30- 40% of farmers have some sort of documentation to verify past ownership (Namati 2017). This is particularly true in the case of grabbed land. As one participant in the case described above noted: ‘The military took the lands without any records, and gave them back without any records.’ Writing in 2014, Myanmar scholar Kevin Woods noted that while the phrase ‘land grab’ had become increasingly common, reflecting continuing injustices and new political space to talk about them, the phrase often obscured the historic diversity of various types of land acquisitions in Myanmar (K. Woods 2014). His analysis aligned with a contemporary turn away from 165 narratives of a global land grab and toward investigation into the roles of domestic elites, gendered relations and historical struggles in structuring land politics in Southeast Asia (Lamb et al. 2017; Schoenberger, Hall, and Vandergeest 2017; Baird 2014). After the NLD took office, the complexity Woods noted only intensified. The party’s commitment to addressing land issues was met by a rising number of cases that belied simple definition. A member of Kalay’s District Land Reinvestigation Committee once made a list for me of the main types of issues he saw: land grabbing, especially on land categorized as Vacant, Fallow and Virgin; disputes arising from shifting alluvial plots or resettlement after the 2015 floods; problems with registering farmland in border areas; and kyuu kyaw, squatters, seeking registration in Reserve Forests. More than one of these issues, he told me, might emerge in a single case. During my time in Kalay, I spent hours at Ekari’s mother’s house, which doubled as an office for her grassroots activist organization, listening to people explain their problems. I met farmers whose land had been taken by government departments, and by their own family members. I watched Ekari call up the Chief Minister, make copies of application forms, provide directions to government offices, and instruct claimants on how to collect signatures for petitions. Ekari kept a jumble of files documenting the evidence and outcomes of land cases with which she had assisted. We reviewed documents together for 61 cases she had worked on between 2015 and 2019. Almost half were related to military land grabs, most of which took place in the 1990s. Of 16 cases dealing with requests to return land, Ekari told me that only two had been successful. Eleven additional cases dealt with disputes over land that had already been returned, such as the one described in the proceeding interlude. Often, these cases featured arguments between claimants who fashioned themselves as the original owners and more recent users, who had sometimes been conscripted as forced labor. Several conflicts hinged on the re- 166 sale of returned land for private profit. The cases reflected the particular issues common in Kalay, where a frontier history and strong military presence define the priorities pursued in the early years of reform: chiefly getting land back from military or government grabs, or resolving boundary and settlement disputes. In the previous chapter, I examined state efforts at land reform, analyzing the ways in which new laws were shaped by layered legal histories, situated social relations, and cultural notions of rights. It will come as no surprise to critical scholars of development that top-down efforts at improvement generated unintended, eminently political consequences (J. Ferguson 1994; Li 2007). In the case of Myanmar’s land reforms, I argued that attempts to write, implement, and teach new policies generated three seemingly contradictory effects: legal debris, elastic land, and risky rights. But Myanmar’s land reform is not only a set of rules imposed from above. It is also a historical moment in which the government’s public intention to rectify past injustice, return land, and formalize property creates an impetus for new types of claims from below. In chapter two, for example, I described how a governance shift from productive ambiguity to ethnoterritorial delineation prompted new efforts by border residents to reconstruct border posts, produce documentation and officially locate their holdings. Research in other parts of Myanmar has shown how competing claimants mobilize different conceptions of legality and legitimacy in cases of land restitution (Mark and Belton 2020) and use land titles given by Ethnic Armed Organizations to negotiate with the Myanmar government for farmland user certificates (Suhardiman, Bright, and Palmano 2019). These studies highlight not only the large number and varied types of land conflicts in Myanmar, but also the array of creative efforts to provide evidence and position oneself as a rightful landholder in an emerging property regime. 167 This chapter explores the ways in which grassroots actors stake and negotiate land claims. To understand the various strategies and trajectories of land conflicts, I focus on an illustrative case of settlement and eviction in the foothills outside Kalaymyo. This is not a case of military land return, but it does exhibit several overlapping characteristics common among cases I observed around Kalay: it involved flood resettlement and informal occupation of Reserved Forest, and required negotiation with authorities on both sides of the Chin State and Sagaing Division border who eventually awarded so-called Vacant, Fallow and Virgin land to a former military general. My long ethnographic engagement with the settlement make it a particularly rich case for understanding the lived experiences of land conflict, and the ways in which performances of property reshape authority and land control. As I met with dozens of villagers and was handed hundreds of documents and digital files over almost three years of interviews and observation, I was struck not only by the tremendous suffering and anxiety of the settlers, but also by the wide variety of ways they sought to legitimate land claims. When, two years after the eviction, I began to learn more about the elites entangled with this case, my moral outrage at yet another story of Myanmar’s land grabs and state violence was replaced by an urgency to examine how property is performed, and whose performances are successful, in the pivotal early years of the NLD government. In this chapter, I use a close analysis of the Umnak case to show how, in the early years of NLD Myanmar, performances of property draw on historical relationships between state and citizens to bolster existing and unequal regimes of resource control. I demonstrate the ways in which settlers stake their claims through vernaculars of responsibility, need and belonging, and examine how the government justified violence and asserted land control through performances of legitimate authority and productive use. I call attention to the role of emergent elites and 168 diasporic audiences, new actors that trouble a neat division between society and state and subtly shift the distribution and norms of property. In relying on the notion of performance, I am not disparaging certain claims as less than genuine. Rather than attempting to evaluate authenticity, I use performance to highlight the social construction and underlying politics of all forms of property. These characteristics become particularly apparent in moments of conflict and change, allowing for broader insights into the ways in which property regimes are made through diverse and agentive performances staged on resolutely unequal planes. In what follows, I ethnographically develop legal geographer Nick Blomley’s (2013) analytic of performing property, showing how actors leverage historical narratives, social relationships, and totemic objects to claim land. I situate these insights within a larger literature that theorizes the relationships between property, authority and land control in contexts of state formation and legal pluralism. I then turn to the Umnak case. After describing the events of settlement, eviction and petition, I show how settlers, the government, and elites performed property in Umnak, and analyze the outcomes of these competing claims. I close with a discussion of how the performances I observed in this case help explain larger patterns in the land cases that I observed in Kalay. Performing Property Legal geographer Nick Blomley (2013) offers a theorization of property intended to move beyond what he calls the ‘mismatch critique,’ which highlights the gap between social realities and the ‘ownership model’ of individual, alienable rights. Blomley employs the concept of performance to show how representational acts—whether building fences, titling land, or writing law review articles—construct both individual property claims and the dominant 169 property regime. He emphasizes that these performances are both citational and reiterative; it is through successive re-enactments that claims solidify into felicitous representations. Building upon previous scholarship, he notes that only some performances are persuasive (Rose 1985), an observation that raises ethical questions about whose enactments create the world, especially given property’s violent histories (Blomley 2003). Here, I take up Blomley’s call to investigate the particular ‘dense networks of meaning, violence, record-keeping, and sedimented history that make such performances possible’ (2013, 37). I extend these insights to examine the ways in which particular performances, firmly embedded in historical policies, cultural practices, and specific places, are rendered through words, actions and objects. The notion of performance can be expanded to include claims made in a variety of ways, including through labor (Wolford 2007), through narratives of kinship and work (Verdery 1994) or indigeneity (Bryan 2012; Li 2000). I categorize all these forms as performance in part because actors in my field site employ multiple strategies to represent their claims to different audiences at various moments. The techniques they employ draw from a rich repertoire that includes both different narratives of the past (Lund 2008) and different visions of the post-authoritarian future. Building on anthropologist Matthew Hull’s (2012a; 2012b) work on the ways in which documents mediate bureaucracy in Pakistan, Campbell’s (2015) observations of forged titles in Brazil, and Hetherington’s (2012) analysis of the relational and political qualities of land documents in Paraguay, I highlight in particular the ways in which letters, lists, photographs and testimonials, in hard and soft copy, constitute property around Kalay. The metaphor of performance, often associated with scholarship on gender (Butler 1990), the market (Gibson-Graham 1996) and the state (Geertz 1980), calls attention not only to the socially constructed nature of the system, but also to relational power dynamics within it. 170 Performances are agentive but not equal. They involve directional interactions between claimants of various social statuses, and state and non-state authorities who serve as their audience. While subaltern actors must appear to adhere to the script, powerful actors can disregard or even rewrite it (Spivak 1988; Scott 1990). Performances are also embodied and material: while Judith Butler’s account of performance illuminates the ways in which social beliefs are inscribed onto the body, mine emphasizes the ways in which social norms and inequalities are inscribed onto the land. Like the analytics of ‘access’ (Ribot and Peluso 2003) and ‘exclusion,’ (D. Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011) performance moves away from narrow and normative evaluations of authenticity, and instead highlights the varied and political work of land claims. Choosing to think with performativity re-politicizes the notion of property, troubling a category that, in Myanmar and elsewhere, serves as a tool for exclusion, even as it masquerades as a natural fact. In Myanmar, the question of which performances will succeed is intimately tied to the question of whose suffering and worthiness the state will recognize. The process of claiming and authorizing property is not only about resource access, rather, making property is a process of making authority, one that constitutes everyday state formation (Sikor and Lund 2009). In post- socialist contexts where the very nature of property is being reshaped by new laws, global influences, and everyday negotiations, what property does in the world is a subject of investigation (Verdery and Humphrey 2004). Myanmar’s recent histories of military land grabs and ethnic violence tie property claims directly to the viability of ethnic inclusion and civilian rule in the reform period. Here, I suggest that we can examine which performances are persuasive as a way of understanding the relationship between resource control and state formation in a particular time and place. This strategy is likely to be particularly useful in contexts, like Myanmar, where the social norms governing land access and control are 171 overlapping, changeable, and not fully known, rendering the performative nature of claims easier to discern than in systems where actors, audiences, and repertoires are standardized. Opportunities to renegotiate resource control occur at multiple and overlapping scales, as national aspirations collide with longstanding local spatial politics (Byrne, Nightingale, and Korf 2016). In Umnak, despite having neither official permission nor a long history of settlement, speculators and settlers took advantage of the chaos that occurred after a major natural disaster to make claims in a wide variety of forms, imitating and inventing a range of logics and styles in hopes that some would stick. In classifying these acts as contrived and contingent, I am not accusing the Umnak villagers of fabrication. Rather, I am arguing that all property is not what it says it is. Below, I interrogate performances of property and their outcomes in order to ask what underlying spatial logics and state-society relationships are taking shape in contemporary Myanmar. The evidence suggests that the state is continuing to neglect the vast majority of its people, even as the forms of claims and sources of support expand. Settler performances of need, responsibility, and belonging, like state performances of authority and productivity, drew on historic and emergent vernaculars to produce competing property claims. Umnak Settlers The settlement and eviction at Umnak took place in a critical moment within national and regional histories. In July 2015, monsoon floods devastated the Kalay valley, covering paddy fields in silt and resulting in massive formal and informal resettlement. Chin farmers in two villages outside Kalaymyo started scouting for a place to settle and farm on higher ground, and petitioned the government to resurvey a patch of reserve forest land devoid of trees so that it could be converted into village land. The area was surveyed a month after the NLD won 172 elections in late 2015, and officials, including the influential Chin State minister I introduced in chapter two, recommended the site be made available for settlement. In May 2016, shortly after the NLD took power, high-ranking officials attended an event on the site, shared a traditional feast, and gave the new village the name Umnak. Soon, the settlement ballooned to almost 1,000 households. Hundreds of families settled on the fertile plain, drawn by the productive farmland and proximity to the city’s schools and health services. But just a few months later, police warned residents that eviction was imminent. While community leaders held out hope for renegotiation, local officials made plans to demolish the settlement. Early in the morning on September 1, 2016, bulldozers and police surrounded the site, arrested the leaders, and began destroying homes. In the days that followed, settlers sheltered at a nearby church, barred from re-entering the area to collect their possessions. By the end of the month, authorities had put up large signs that declared the area Reserved Forest, posted guards and planted teak. When activist friends first took me to meet the so-called ‘Umnak villagers’ eight months after their eviction, many were still holding out hope for return, despite rumors that a businessman had claimed hundreds of acres under a new law facilitating development of so-called Vacant, Fallow, and Virgin land. The settlers supplied me with evidence of their claims: stacks of documents, cell phone images of their homes’ destruction, and testimonials about the conditions that brought them to Umnak. By February 2018, most had given up: political rivalries and greed among powerful state and business lu gyi (important people) had rendered their case hopeless, one activist told me. But as I continued to monitor the case, it became clear that the future of this particular parcel was still up for debate, and that settlers, officials and speculators were continually engaged in staking their claims. 173 I first met the Umnak settlers eight months after the eviction, in May 2017. In July, I returned and met with over 85 settlers. Over the next two years, I had multiple interviews with settlement leaders and activists supporting the case. I spoke also to government officials and urban elites, and collected, translated and reviewed official documents, unofficial lists, meeting minutes, images and videos, and media such as Facebook posts and local news coverage to better understand the context and events of the case, as well as what was at stake in the settlers’ claims. Below, I draw on this data to demonstrate the performance of property through an examination of the content and modes of representation Umnak settlers used to make claims on land for their intended audiences. I focus on three themes: responsibility, need, and belonging. Responsibility I left Kalay in July 2017 with letters and lists. One enumerated 402 families, the amount of money they had spent building homes in Umnak, where they came from, and what they had done after the eviction. Another stack of documents listed 933 individuals grouped by region of origin, providing occupations (most were farmers), identity card numbers, and the place they were headed. A third set, bound and labelled in the margins ‘confidential,’ comprised copies of official letters and reports about the case. The value of these documents had been confirmed in the settlers’ minds by the fact that an original set had already been taken by authorities; a farmer leader had re-written a crucial set of meeting minutes from jail. Settlers met me on the way to the airport with additional papers. Later, when I tried to make sense of them, I realized papers were missing and out of order. The documents in the bound book were always officially stamped, signed, and dated, but they were not arranged chronologically, nor were they always complete. The lists of settlers and 174 their losses, full of blanks, carried a plea for aid directed at the government, random white lady researchers, and anyone else who might listen, but it was not always coherent. Number 389 reported investing roughly US$30,000 into Umnak, an inexplicable sum. Number 38 had not started building yet, and was now living as a dependent, presumably with her family of 6. Spread out upon my office floor, the papers were overwhelming and often tragic. But what claims were they making? And how did they articulate with the other stories settlers told about why they came and deserved to stay? The documents on my floor were the result of a long history of claim-making, including repeated encounters with state officials. In an excerpt from my fieldnotes from one of my first interviews, one settler leader recalled how, in one of these meetings, they had been instructed to work systematically: The minister called us and we made a meeting. There were over 400 people were there. He said ‘in fact, according to the law you are intruders. But you don’t cut valuable trees… and you don’t destroy the forest. So this is a good place for resettling. It is not for forest, it is convenient for living, for settling your village. So you must arrange systematically and have a vision to be like a town – you must do it systematically.’ In that meeting, he himself named this place ‘Umnak.’ Settlement leaders and the activists understood that their settlement was technically illegal. In the absence of official permission, they supplied documents, dates, references to national edicts, and testimonies to support the legitimacy of their claims, or, as they insisted to me, that they were not intruders. The settlement leader speaking above remembers the minister’s instruction to do things systematically, a point repeated by others with whom I spoke. Demonstrating that they had done things systematically—petitioning for re-zoning at multiple levels, surveying land and population, informing the authorities of a temporary settlement, and forming a representative leadership committee after eviction—became an important component of demonstrating their status as deserving citizens. 175 In Myanmar, democratic citizenship is often associated with a discourse of responsibility: the state’s move toward reform in the early 2000s was announced with a roadmap towards ‘discipline-flourishing democracy.’ In Umnak, settlers attempted to establish their worthiness by recording evidence of following the rules and of their investments in the site. The documents, with their bureaucratic representational style and the relationships to authority they index, made powerful claims on the state, even in a context where documents rarely do what they say they do. And the list of investments in Umnak served as evidence of intentions towards productive use, even if, as settlers explained to me, few had planted crops yet and some had not yet moved there permanently because of the seasonal monsoon. In contrast to their own deliberate efforts at planning a community, settlers often portrayed the state as unsystematic and therefore irresponsible. They had initially only informed the settlers of the need to move orally, one told me. When they did bring a written document, it did not have the name of a department, or a seal. Women settlers, who did not read Burmese, had been forced to sign the notice. The authorities grabbed their hands and forced them to sign, another explained. A repeated point of outrage was that the government had duped their leaders, inviting them to a meeting and then arresting them and imprisoning them without trial for over three months, which was illegal. At the back of the book of official documents, which includes letters and reports but not the eviction notice, are photos of Umnak before and after the demolition. The inclusion of images of bulldozers and rubble at the end of the stack of the supplicant’s petitions underlines the senselessness of the settlement’s destruction. Need 176 The official documents emphasize the claimants’ loss during the July 2015 floods, enumerating the damage in the villages settlers originated from, and claiming the move was necessary ‘so that the villagers can be free from natural disasters, and develop out of poverty.’ Steeped in the vocabulary of the bureaucracy, if not always rendered in perfect Burmese, the petitions request meeta—a Buddhist term for compassion—in swiftly re-zoning the parcel as village land. The sentiment that the people’s neediness entitled them to land was reflected not only in the language of the settlers’ documents but also my interlocuters’ interpretations of their plight. One activist friend commented after finishing an interview: ‘if you look at the law they are in the wrong but if you think about the people… the government has no mercy.’ Settlers articulated to me their vast and varied needs for land in Umnak. Official documents reference a specific a group of 54 households from two nearby villages directly affected by the 2015 floods, and many people I spoke with who hailed from the surrounding area cited past or potential flood damage as their motivation for moving to the higher ground. One man I met with in a nearby village gave me a DVD commemorating his brother’s death during the floods. Settlers from further away, in the Chin Hills, cited chronic landslides, another environmental disaster common in monsoon season, as one reason to move to the lowlands. Umnak’s perceived environmental security—the settlement was located on a plateau just above the valley floor, at the foot of the Chin Hills—was a major attraction for settlers who had experienced multiple types of natural disasters. Settler leaders admitted to me that Umnak had expanded far beyond the area and population outlined in their initial petition, attracting hundreds of diverse settlers who had come from across Northwest Myanmar in search of a better life. Some had been practicing shifting cultivation in the Chin Hills, and came to the valley for access to health, education, and 177 transportation afforded by the settlement’s proximity to Kalay. Others had been working as day laborers in Kalay town, and wanted to leave urban poverty and be able to farm their own land. After the expulsion, settlers often said their greatest sadness was that their children now had nowhere to go to school. Activists emphasized the settlers’ precarity and neediness in two press conferences in Kalay and Mandalay, and in social media posts about the eviction. Settlers’ narratives of need went beyond the acute challenges of the 2015 floods; rather, they rested claims to property on chronic neediness born of poverty, remoteness and a lack of state support. Belonging Narratives of neediness were entangled in performances of indigeneity in a prayer ceremony held in the site of the former village. Following the suggestions of Kalay activists, school children made signs emblazoned with messages such as ‘I want to go to school,’ and posed for pictures while adults cleaned up debris wearing all-white traditional Chin outfits before sharing a group prayer. Images of this event were shared with me along with the copies of settlers’ official documents and hand-written notes. All these media were performative objects, but, in contrast to the official documents that represent settlers as unmarked Myanmar citizens, the images broadcasted ethnic distinctiveness. This invocation was striking because the land itself was not a traditional tribal site. But because Umnak fell just within the border of Chin State, the theme of returning to Chinland and of Chin belonging was a salient source of claim- making power for many of the settlers. The pull of return was particularly dramatic for the few settlers who came back from living abroad, often in India, to claim a plot in Umnak, but it was also pronounced for settlers coming from Kalaymyo, just across the state border. One settler explained to me that his parents 178 had long ago moved from Chin State to Kalay for work, but that the family felt homesick. When he moved to Umnak, he took his mother with him, because, despite being just nine miles from Kalay town, Umnak satisfied the old woman’s desire to return to Chin State. When I interviewed him in Kalay, he explained, ‘here we are strange, but if we move to Umnak we will be in our own land.’ Settlers emphasized that for Chin people, having one’s own land and house was particularly important; crucial to identity and adulthood. Renting a home or staying with family, like going into debt, was shameful. The desire to return to Chinland was interconnected with hopes for a peaceful agrarian life, even if farming work rarely featured in narratives of the settlers’ hopes for Umnak. Chin tradition was also an important vernacular through which claims were expressed and recognized in settlers’ accounts. For example, many mentioned to me that during the Minister’s visit in May 2016, the villagers shared traditional foods synonymous in Chin custom with the founding of a new village. After losing the land, villagers held three ceremonies like the one described above, in which they prayed for the return of their land in visible collective displays of Chin Christianity. Chinland was both a motivation and a mode of expression for claiming land in Umnak. The themes of responsibility, need and belonging surfaced throughout the land cases I followed in Kalay. Demonstrating responsibility by doing things systematically was a hallmark of Ekari’s coaching when it came to advancing land cases, however large or small. One day I joined a group of farmers who were following her instructions by collecting signatures for a petition against their neighbors’ noisy and stinky chicken farms. The petition was never submitted; the news of the document scared the chicken farm owners into conceding to their 179 neighbors’ demands. Contemporary performances of need contrast with the way that land has been claimed historically—recall the narratives of hard work clearing forest to plant rice that animated the smallholder accounts in chapter one. Similarly, claims based on ethnic identity represent a break with past practices of ambiguity in service of agricultural production, part of a broader shift from rice frontier to ethnic territory that I analyze in chapter two. State Violence and Performances of Legitimacy The settlers’ performances were ultimately unsuccessful in securing property. Instead, the state responded with force, followed by a series of performances that re-established the area as state forest. The eviction itself was a violent affair, with bulldozers toppling homes and armed police refusing to let anyone into the former settlement. After the demolition, state officials secured the area. For several months a permanent camp of guards remained at the site to dissuade settlers from return. At the same time, the government posted new accounts that disparaged the settlers and planting teak saplings where their homes had stood, re-framing its own violence and rejecting the settlers’ claims with their own performances of authority and productive use. Figures 17: The Chin State Government’s signboard and Facebook posts about Umnak 180 In signboards and Facebook posts, the government asserted its authority to the area by assuming the role of forest protector managing unruly invaders. This messaging took both traditional and digital forms, as exemplified by the images of a signboard erected at Umnak, and a Facebook post from the Chin State Government. Signs such as the one above, which is titled ‘prohibitions’ and lists activities not permitted in the forest area such as grazing, hunting, or clearing land, were put up around the former settlement shortly after the eviction. Another sign was blunter, ‘Don’t invade the forest! Invasions will be dealt with according to existing law.’ By referencing the law and framing former and potential settlers as invaders, the state strongly asserts its own legitimate authority over space and to punish claimants. The use of the word kyuu kyaw, meaning squatter or invader, emphasizes the settlers’ illegality, undermining their performances of responsibility. The government’s characterization of claimants as kyuu kyaw was common in the cases I reviewed around Kalay, and in conversations I had with land activists working in other parts of urban and rural Myanmar. On Facebook, a primary medium of news and government communication in Myanmar (see chapter 6), the Chin State Government made several posts about the case. The one above right, posted two days after the demolition, is titled ‘The demolition of buildings constructed by invaders (kyuu kyaw) who didn’t have permission in the area of Si Yin forest parcel 144 in Falam Township, Chin State.’ Another post referred to the Umnak settlers as ‘fake flood victims,’ highlighting that the majority had not come from the original two villages affected by the 2015 floods. In doing so, the government undermined settler performances of need. Taken together, these physical signs and digital messages are performances of the state’s authority, not only to designate and govern space, but also to punish disobedience and prevent resistance, future settlement attempts, and return. 181 The government also performed their claims through farcical demonstrations of productive use, in this case the act of planting lucrative teak saplings. When I first visited Umnak in May 2017, settlers pointed out the seedlings, six inches to a foot high, which had been erratically placed in the dusty soil. The plants did not appear to be thriving, and they were clearly recent additions. Teak plantation is a classic strategy of state territorialization in Myanmar and throughout Southeast Asia, an act that allows the government to claim both sustainable resource management and productive use (Bryant 1997). In this case, productive use provided the basis for a different type of property claim. Settlers reported that a military-businessman had been given a massive concession on the site, and told that if he planted teak, his claims would be legally affirmed in 2020, when the government changed. This rumor was confirmed for me 18 months later, when I interviewed a farmer living near the former Umnak settlement who described his own dispute with a powerful military man who had taken 500 acres of land in the area for timber production in 2011. When I asked how he acquired the land, the farmer explained: ‘He was a soldier with a three-star rank. They have power… I have never met with him… He is the kind of lu gyi who can have 400 acres or 500 acres everywhere.’ Several months later I found a document dated in 2018 that granted the same military man a 30-year forest lease on 200 acres of land in parcel 144, the Umnak site. Together, state violence and performances of authority and productive use re-territorialized Umnak as state forest, alienable to well-connected elites. Elite Actors and Alternative Audiences Settlers’ performances of responsibility, need and belonging failed to secure their property; the outcome of this case appeared to follow patterns of state and crony land grabbing 182 all too familiar in Myanmar’s history. And yet, in the years following the eviction and my first meetings with the settlers, my initial understanding of this story as one of state violence against marginalized citizens was challenged in several ways. First, I began to learn more about urban elites and NLD party members who participated in and benefited from the Umnak settlement, blurring the line between both ‘settlers’ and ‘state,’ and also restitution and opportunism. Second, I saw how settlers’ ongoing performances were directed toward and resonated with audiences beyond the state, including myself. In the absence of state recognition, these performances cast diasporic populations as sources of legitimation and material support. These developments show both that neither resource control nor authority are monopolized by the state, and that performances involving a range of actors and audiences can subtly shift distribution and norms of property regimes. Initially, I thought I was watching a story of poor farmers being evicted by the NLD, the very party they had elected to protect them, for the benefit of military cronies. Eventually, I realized I was in fact implicated in a far more complicated series of performances. While it is true that the Umnak case demonstrates a continuity in the old spatial logics of rule, the story of the general and the small farmers, abandoned by their government, misses the critical performances of brokers, politicians, and elites. These actors are particularly important because they blur the line between state and society and, in doing so, offer opportunities to slowly change the social rules around what property is, and who deserves it. The first breech in my original understanding of this case came when a friend showed me a picture of his own house in Umnak. In the image, we look out over the top of crossed feet and an unfinished floor, through the skeletal beams to the lush green Chin Hills. It is a classic template for relaxation in a beautiful place, in this case after a hard day’s work of house building. 183 The image could be interpreted as performative in that it too laid claim to land, evidencing sweat and nostalgia. But this friend was in no way a flood-affected farmer, nor was he coming down from the Hills in search of a better life. He was the son of a gem trader with a graduate degree from abroad, but was drawn to the chance to live in the countryside and to build his own home. I was sympathetic to this dream, and sorry for his loss, but it did not align with what I had been told by Umnak leaders about a community of poor farmers. Over the following months, as I went through settlers’ documentation, I was startled to note that households had reported thousands of dollars in losses. When I asked interlocuters if these numbers were perhaps inflated in hopes of greater compensation, they replied that the figures were likely accurate, and reflected the expensive furniture and brick used in some Umnak houses. Later, a student leader and the son of a prominent minister in Kalay told me his family had been lucky: they had heard rumors of impending eviction and quickly sold their home in Umnak just before the demolition. My initial understanding of this case collapsed completely when my grassroots activist friend Ekari recounted that even she had briefly bought land in Umnak: she had sent her younger brother to the broker, where he paid three lahks (about US$250) for a plot, but a few days later she too got word of the demolition, and sent him back to say they needed the money back urgently for medical care. These three individuals represented a class of Umnak settlers—essentially middle-class urbanites seeking second homes—who had gotten away from the incident comparatively unscathed. Their existence seeded doubts in my mind about earlier performances of responsibility and need. They also troubled my conception of land activists. I met each of them, initially, through their work on land rights cases—the first was employed for parts of my fieldwork by a national NGO working on natural resource governance, the second was the vocal 184 president of Kalay’s university student association and involved in adjudicating land disputes around and with the university, and the final had her own grassroots land rights organization. The tensions between their opportunistic maneuverings as individual claimants and land activists alerted me to the emergence of new brokers and elite who played pivotal role navigating in land cases. Throughout the course of my research, I met many people who both worked for the greater good, and sought personal gain. A prime example was U Tint, a Farmers’ Union leader I heard celebrated as a long-standing pro-democracy activist and disparaged for bribing officials with embezzling NGO and community funds. Despite his mixed reputation, political history, and position of influence, U Tint always represented himself to me as just a ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ farmer (taungthu a sit), and farmers as the quintessential democratic subject: The farmers are honest and open. We, farmers, already have democracy when the world was just starting to say that word. We help with each other and we have mutual understanding. We are nice to each other without being jealous and support each other. This is democracy. Figures like U Tint alerted me to the emergence of new actors who troubled the line between activism and opportunism, and between conventional understandings of smallholders and the state in land grab cases. Political party leaders played similarly important and ambiguous roles. Over the next year, I heard another set of stories about Umnak, one of speculation, corruption, and schism within the NLD. When I finally asked the settler leaders directly in June 2019, they acknowledged that brokers had sold off plots in the Reserved Forest area, but said the men arrested were not the ones really responsible for the speculation. A high-ranking NLD official had been behind it, they and others told me. Even the Chin State Government, in a lengthy Facebook post shortly after the demolition, had named this individual and several other members of the party and condemned their role in the sales. The official with the most responsibility had 185 embezzled substantial funds, switched political parties and fled the country, while the middlemen below him had been jailed in Falam. When I interviewed two high-ranking NLD politicians about the event separately, they both called the settlers ‘liars.’ They were not flood victims, they emphasized. The real problem in Umnak was the corrupt NLD official and his underlings who stole and sold the land to settlers. The NLD official was initially quite successful in leveraging the authority of his office to performance property and pull off a scam. Now, NLD officials felt that to award compensation, or even an apology, would be in some way to acknowledge the government’s culpability. While Umnak leaders continued to fight for land or compensation in mid-2019, parliamentarians had told them that party politics barred them from supporting the case. In the end, the existence of well-connected speculators and scammers does not diminish the suffering of the settlers, but rather highlights the unequal terrain upon which performances of property are staged. The Umnak case not only demonstrates the emergence of new actors, but also the role of non-state, diasporic audiences in the performance of property. After news about the eviction spread through local news, social media, and kin networks, aid rushed in from the Chin diaspora in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and the US. Compiled in pages of penciled lists, cash and kind donations were distributed to former settlers in the form of bags of rice. For several months after the eviction, community leaders were able to distribute material aid to former settlers, aid that came in direct response to performances of ethnic Chin belonging, need, and responsibility shared primarily through Facebook. As I describe in chapter six, one Umnak leader’s post from a month after the eviction listed about US$5,000 in donations collected from Chin as far away as Norway and the US. For a few lucky families, these performances did result in property; a Chin businessman living in Yangon donated housing for about eight families just below the entrance to 186 the former Umnak village. When I visited, children were in school uniforms, demonstrating that, in contrast to the majority of the settlers, these families had a legitimate claim that resulted in their admittance to state education. I do not romanticize these outcomes. For most families, a few bags of rice was very poor compensation for the loss of their economic and emotional investments in Umnak. And yet, the ethnic imaginaries and mobilization tactics pioneered in this case—Facebook messaging, media conferences, aid distribution—can build repertoires of resistance for land struggles while shifting the stage for future performances. The provision of aid from Yangon and abroad demonstrates the material effects of successful mobilization of translocal ethnic networks who validated settlers’ claims with shows of support. This suggests the need to attend to the ways in which property is performed to alternative audiences, especially in cases like Myanmar in which state power is insecure and contested. As more and more institutions—whether Ethnic Armed Organizations or International NGOs—enter into the business of land governance, alternative audiences may play an increasingly important role in deciding what constitutes a successful performance. Conclusion As I interviewed actors involved in the Umnak case over the course of almost three years, the validity of claims became less and less apparent, but their performativity became increasingly clear. Drawing alternately on narratives of diligence, environmental and economic vulnerability, and a longing to return to a Chin ethnic homeland, settlers attempted to present themselves as good citizens and worthy inhabitants in ways that resonate more broadly with reform-era rhetoric. Government authorities responded with force, which they justified through 187 performances of authority and productive use aimed at shoring up state control and legitimacy. The rejection of settlers’ claims represented a continuity of old spatial orders in the early years of NLD rule. Declaring settled areas state forests or wastelands has been a key strategy of military dominance for decades, and continues to provide territorial control, despite strategic performances of need, belonging and responsibility. The real transformation has taken place not in land distribution, but rather in the emergence of new audiences and actors with constrained ability to shape specific land cases and larger regimes of land control. The Umnak case highlights the relative power of local-level authorities and provincial elites to renegotiate property claims and regimes. The success of a particular performance may be largely determined by broader relations between military, government entities, and different claimants, yet accumulated and repeated performances can shift norms as they enroll different actors, audiences, media, and referents. This analysis helps move beyond the practical and analytical impasses of ‘land grabs,’ towards an understanding of the ways in which power dynamics and negotiation tactics play out in specific land cases. Performance highlights the relational and political nature of property, providing an important complement to activist and academic research in Myanmar that seeks to count acreage and shame bad actors. This perspective is important because, as my informants explained and the case of Umnak shows, many of Myanmar’s land conflicts cannot be explained simply, or solved quickly by giving land back. While the specifics of the cases I observed around Kalay varied, the concept of performing property resonates more broadly with the ways in which farmers, elites, and officials adopted multiple, overlapping strategies to represent and constitute their claims. Attending to these performances and their outcomes will be particularly important as the Myanmar government and international development partners embark on a new phase of 188 restitution and reallocation, which includes a controversial three million dollar project to redistribute 12,000 acres of former concessionary land in Magway Division, 200 miles south of Kalay. Together, these two chapters have examined the creative use and limits of law and the constitution of property claims. The previous chapter analyzed the process of land reforms historically and sought to understand why and how new rules generate confusion and contradiction. These conditions provide fertile ground for new and competing claims from existing and emergent actors, which this chapter has explored through the case of Umnak and the analytic of performing property. While individual claimants are sometimes able to employ the rhetoric, connections, and tools of the reform era, it is still often true, as one farmer told me, that in land cases, ‘money defeats justice.’ Powerful people can leverage the law and performances of property to extend control over land, even in a conjuncture marked by political promises to address longstanding inequalities. 189 PART THREE: TECHNOLOGY 190 CHAPTER FIVE MAKING SENSE OF MECHANIZATION ‘In other countries they live in the past and work for the future, but here we live in the future and work for the past; we just work to pay old debts.’ ‘It is better to have daughters than sons today! Here when we have a daughter, we celebrate, and name her “Singapore!”’ Rural livelihoods in Myanmar are undergoing concurrent and fundamental shifts. A rich tradition of scholarship has demonstrated how, around the world, practices of subsistence agriculture are being complemented by new forms of pluriactivity, and displaced by commercialization and agribusiness (Rigg 2019; Bernstein 2004; Breman 2012). In Myanmar, farming, the traditional source of subsistence and income for the majority of the country’s population, is being transformed by the recent arrival of machines, and displaced by an increase in migration. Agricultural mechanization increased exponentially between 2010 and 2016: in some areas in Southern Myanmar, the share of rural households using tractors increased from 12% to 94% while the use of combine harvesters jumped from .5% to 50% (Win et al. 2018). These dramatic shifts in the mode of agricultural production are paralleled by the rise of alternative livelihood strategies, namely internal and international labor migration. Most migration is informal, making it difficult to find reliable data about its prevalence and economic impact. But migration from rural areas is substantial and increasing. World Bank data shows a massive jump in remittances received in Myanmar over the past decade: a 5,000% increase from US$54 million in 2009 to US$2.84 billion in 2019. Estimates that include funds sent by unofficial migrants are substantially higher: one placed remittances at $8 billion, or 13% of Myanmar’s GDP, in 2015 (Akee and Kapur 2017). Mechanization and migration are intrinsically 191 linked in rural economies, with social consequences. In their recent analysis of community and household survey data from central Myanmar, for example, Belton and Filipiski (2019) argue that migration produces labor scarcity and raises rural wages in ways that accelerate mechanization and advantage landless laborers over their landholding neighbors. Data and analyses such as these highlight the scale and speed of agrarian transformation in Myanmar, and question the causal links between mechanization and migration. But these accounts fail to explain how farmers, officials and businessmen make sense of these profound shifts. For farmers like the ones quoted above, new technologies of agricultural production and opportunities for migratory work have arrived hand-in-hand, and are swiftly changing not only economic calculations, but also the relations, practices and values of farming. These older Chin men had made their living and forged their identities farming rice, but their remarks illustrate both the inadequacy of agricultural incomes, and excitement over new sources of support derived from their children’s waged labor abroad. This chapter provides an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which unprecedented agricultural mechanization in a moment of increased migration is reshaping relations between state and market, reorganizing land use and labor practices, and disentangling village life from traditional farming work. I use mechanization as a lens onto agrarian change in three domains. In national discourse and policy, mechanization is key to modernizing the nation, but in practice, it results in the displacement of government officials by a rising class of private businessmen. This tension reflects broader shifts in economy and authority as Myanmar moves out of military state- backed crony capitalism into some version of integration with uneven global markets, as well as the influence of international actors that push agricultural privatization. In and around Kalay’s fields, the roll-out of tractors and combines is swift, but not universal. Rather, the process is 192 conditioned by existing ecologies of land and plants and moral economies of village and kin, producing hybrid modes of human-cow-machine farming and new strategies of capital accumulation. Within rural households, migration opportunities are shifting the embodied politics of work, making farming less desirable for the new generation and elevating the status of migrant daughters over that of their farmer-fathers. While the long-term impacts of these shifts are not yet clear, I argue that the immediate results are to diminish the power of the state, create new hybrid relations of production, and reduce the social and economic status of the farmer. In doing so, I emphasize the power dynamics, local ecologies and moral economies, and intersectional negotiations inherent in government slogans and popular calls to ‘move from manual to mechanized agriculture.’ In what follows, I first show how the adoption of new agricultural technologies is embedded in the broader project of modernizing Myanmar agriculture and contributing to shifting the everyday relationships between farmer, market and state. Second, I examine how the purchase, use and rental of tractors and combine harvesters is shaped by local ecologies and social relations. I draw especially on interviews and participant observation in one Burman village, Hla Ywa, to demonstrate emergent hybrid cultivation practices and strategies of accumulation in Kalay Valley. Finally, I describe how the concurrent processes of mechanization and migration are entangled in the shifting gendered and generational politics of work, ultimately resulting the separation of farming from household status and village life. 193 Modernizing Myanmar Agriculture Figure 18: Screen shot from DVB Debate We’ve all heard saying: ‘Bathing with oil, warming yourself with tobacco, piling up a mountain of rice.’ We feel tremendous pride when we consider [the richness of] Myanmar’s agricultural products. At one time, Myanmar was the world’s largest exporter of rice. But today, Myanmar’s agricultural sector lags behind the rest of Southeast Asia. If you compare the living standard of Myanmar’s farmers with that of others in the region, it is quite disparate. 70% of Myanmar’s population are dependent on agriculture, so, what changes are necessary in order to develop the sector? We will consider and discuss in this week’s DVB Debate. Over the summer of 2019 I watched a heated argument over the future of agriculture on one of Myanmar’s most popular TV shows, the DVB Debate. The host teed up the episode with the introduction above, delivering his remarks in a pre-recorded segment filmed in a warehouse filled with bags of rice (figure 18). He emphasized the former magnificence and current backwardness of Myanmar’s agricultural sector, depicting rice, in particular, as a source of wounded national pride. When the shot switched back to the studio, the host’s first question was about the most immediate agricultural development needs. Speaking to the four guests—a farmers’ union leader, government official, big farmer, and major rice trader—he acknowledged 194 a shared understanding, ‘I think we all agree that our agricultural sector is out-of-date. But was is the most important change to start with?’ The men touched on a range of issues that I often heard farmers raise in Kalay—high costs of inputs and labor, market instability, the government’s artificial depression of the rice price, poor water infrastructure. These were common concerns voiced by easily-identifiable subjects: as middle-aged men hailing from the central lowlands, the guests embodied dominant notions of masculinity and authority in farming and agriculture (Faxon 2017). Their views on how to develop the sector did not always align; participants alternately cast blame upon each other, citing the government’s incompetence, farmers’ laziness, and traders’ greed. Yet their comments conveyed a shared urgency to fix a broken system, a sentiment heightened by nostalgia for a glorious past in which Myanmar was the world’s rice bowl and humiliation at the comparative decline of the sector during the decades of the Green Revolution. For these actors, as well as for international development professionals, modernizing Myanmar agriculture is key to the nation’s future. But how to modernize was up for debate, on and beyond the TV show. Domestically, reviving the country’s historic prowess, specifically its mythic status as the world’s rice bowl, was seen as a key to facilitating economic growth and improving farmer’s livelihoods, a narrative illustrated by the DVB Debate. International development professionals have also called for changes in agriculture, but rather than expressing nostalgia, they bring new, global models premised on the privatization of farming and deagrarianization of the population. Mechanization, land consolidation and labor-saving are important parts of visions of higher rice yields and of more efficient integration in global commodity chains. Tensions and shared premises in these different notions of development help explain why, while agricultural mechanization is rhetorically key to modernizing the nation, it is, 195 in practice, displacing the state through the process of privatization. Below, I describe historical and contemporary developments in agriculture at the national scale, before turning to the ways these played out in Kalay. Rice is intimately linked to lowland state power and rural livelihoods across Southeast Asia. Myanmar was founded as a rice-growing colony, and grew into a rice-growing nation. Production has defined the historic relationships between governments and good proportion of the population. Rice is Myanmar’s most important crop and staple food. Most people eat rice three meals a day and can tell by taste the variety and quality of the grains and whether they were cooked over a fire, on a stovetop or in an electric rice cooker. The most common way of expressing the English verb ‘to eat’ in Myanmar language translates literally as ‘to eat rice.’ While Kalay has never been Myanmar’s most important site of rice production, the cultivation of that crop has transformed the valley’s environmental, social and political space, as I discuss in chapters one and two. Today rice production for subsistence and sale remains a key livelihood in the Burman and Chin villages where I worked. Across the country, rice is grown wherever it can be: over 16 million acres, about 10% of the country’s land area, is devoted to paddy (Torbick et al. 2017). This is, in part, due to colonial policy. While they plundered the uplands for teak, the British transformed Lower Burma’s Ayarwaddy Delta into the world’s rice bowl by incentivizing immigration, land clearing and cultivation. In the early 20th century, Burma was exporting over two million tons annually (Brown 2012, p. 6). Rice was farmed under particularly miserable systems of labor and living standards that colonial officer J.S. Furnivall described as ‘civilisation under the machine’ (Furnivall 1931, p. xii). These poor conditions are not part of the dominant narrative of former agricultural glory, which instead emphasizes export prowess and fertile soils. 196 After independence in 1948, the government attempted, unsuccessfully, to nationalize land and overhaul the agricultural sector (see discussion in chapter three). In the 1960s, when Arthur Moser was distributing his influential text book, Getting Agriculture Moving, to eager Southeast Asian countries embarking upon the Green Revolution (White 2013), Burma was withdrawing from the world under a new military-socialist government that imposed crippling currency and production policies. As rice yields soared in Southeast Asia, they declined in General Ne Win’s Burma. Exports dropped from 3.177 million tons before World War II to just 50,000 tons by the end of the 1980s as a result of both declines in production and government procurement policies (Than 1990). In the mid-1970s, the Burmese Socialist Programme Party – the military-socialist government – began promoting high-yielding variety seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. In an authoritarian twist on contemporary Green Revolution programs, the push for higher yields was executed through forced labor, coupled with restrictions on crop choice and compulsory sales of paddy to the central government, and widely resented by peasant farmers (Thwangmung 2003). High rice quotas caused many farmers to fall into debt, lose land, and, during bad harvest years, starve (Thawnghmung 2004, 79). In the 1990s, a new government enacted unpredictable and partial economic liberalization that nonetheless improved farmers livelihoods: farmers could plant beans and intermittently sell to buyers other than the government (Thawnghmung 2003). Still, in 2013 most Myanmar farmers remained poor, and their rice yields were among the lowest in Asia (World Bank 2016). When Myanmar opened its doors to international investment and development, observers were appalled by the state of Myanmar agriculture. Describing her first trip out to the Myanmar countryside in the mid-1990s, one Burmese-American development worker compared the technological stage of rural Myanmar to that of ancient Egypt: 197 Back then they were really shockingly isolated. In terms of technology, they were centuries behind… There was no electricity, just ox carts on dirt roads. It had been the same for centuries. ‘Wow this is crazy!’ I said. I often heard similar reactions from both foreigners and urban Burmese after their first trips to rural areas. These sentiments guide development policy. In a recent call to ‘unlock the potential’ of Myanmar’s economy, the Asian Development Bank made a similar assessment of farming’s poor performance: Yet, as in other areas, agricultural productivity trails far behind Myanmar’s neighbors, causing high indebtedness among farmers, and malnutrition and low levels of education in rural areas. Multiple factors have held back agricultural development, including low investment, outdated technology, unpredictable government policies, poor water control and management, inefficient and unbalanced land distribution, high transportation costs, weak rural financial institutions, and exports of low-value unprocessed products alongside a lack of diversification in export markets. (ADB 2014, 20) A World Bank analysis of farm production economics adds rural people themselves to the list of problems in the sector when they state, in bold font, ‘the quality of human capital in Myanmar agriculture is very low’ (World Bank 2016, 14). In response to these concerns, the international donor-funded 2018 Myanmar Agricultural Development Strategy and Investment Plan laid out a vision for an ‘inclusive, competitive, food and nutrition secure, climate change resilient, and sustainable agricultural system contributing to the socio-economic well-being of farmers and rural people and further development of the national economy’ (MADSIP 2018, ix). The plan is oriented around commercialization, which is, in many ways, a return from a failed socialist system to one similar to the capitalist model of export-oriented agriculture put in place by the British. However, most contemporary development strategies assume a future in which the population will rely less and less on farming. Today’s international donors in Myanmar promote a vision of ‘stepping up’ to commercial farming or ’stepping out’ of agriculture altogether. This vision aligns with broader 198 trends international development practice, which increasingly emphasizes the role of migration and remittances in fueling rural economies. A recent World Bank report puts it bluntly: The rich have many assets; the poor have only one—their labor. Because good jobs are slow to come to the poor, the poor must move to find productive employment. Migration is, therefore, the most effective way to reduce poverty and share prosperity, the twin goals of the World Bank. (https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/publication/moving- for-prosperity) Currently in Myanmar, cultivation of crops and livestock supports two-thirds of the nation’s population, and generates one-third of its GDP (MADSIP 2018). But migration is on the rise—an estimated 20% of Myanmar’s population were internal migrants in 2014, while approximately 4.25 million Myanmar nationals lived abroad (IOM 2020). These shifts in livelihood opportunities and mobilities as well as dominant global development strategies raise new questions about whether, for many small farmers, the best way to modernize agriculture is to stop farming. More tangibly, increased migration is spurring an increase in rural wages and new demand for machines that reduce labor requirements (Belton and Filipski 2019). Agricultural mechanization has long been a state promise, but increasingly is being delivered by private businesses. The controversial 2008 Constitution, fast-tracked through approval in the wake of a major natural disaster, states as one of its 48 Basic Principles: ‘The Union shall provide inputs, such as technology, investments, machinery, raw materials, so forth, to the extent possible for changeover from manual to mechanized agriculture’ (GoM 2008, clause 29). This specific commitment stands out in a document known for its regressive protection of military-state power. The new Agricultural Development Strategy shares the goal of accelerating mechanization, but sees the private sector, rather than the state, as the appropriate vector of this change. For example, the Strategy calls for the partial privatization of and a proportional budget reduction for the Agricultural Mechanization Department. The shift in national strategy is 199 paralleled by an expanding private sector. The number of agricultural machinery supply shops nationwide, for example, increased 333% between 2008 and 2018, from 54 to 234 (Belton, Fang and Abaidoo 2019). Reforms that enabled private bank and supply store partnerships allowed purchase by installment, driving a wave of sales. The vast majority of machines are sold by private retailers, rather than the Agricultural Mechanization Department. Today in an beyond Kalay, international brands like the Japanese Kubota and the Dutch New Holland, as well as cheaper models from India and China, are increasingly common sights. Over my years in Yangon, I watched young entrepreneurs respond to the challenge of modernizing agriculture as a market opportunity, launching new businesses with slogans such as ‘Make Myanmar Agriculture Great Again,’ and ‘Agriculture old fashioned? We are making it sexy!’ These lines recall past glory and backwardness even as they play on international tropes and promise radical change. In Kalay, many farmers and officials talked about rice and agriculture as a national industry and tradition, but it was private entrepreneurs who increasingly sold agricultural machines, and embodied agricultural modernity. Golden Farmer and the Decline of the State Tractors and combines were powerful symbols of national development, but the rise of private sources of agricultural products and expertise displaced the state from its historical role in farming. The process of mechanization, therefore, provides a lens onto the experiences and effects of a broader shift from state socialism to liberalized economy. Unlike past moments in Myanmar’s history in which state officials were at the forefront of pushing new farm techniques, around Kalay it was often private vendors, admittedly well-connected to provincial officers, who were seen as at the cutting edge of agricultural modernization. Privatization and mechanization 200 went hand and hand, leading to farmers to experience technological transformation as a form of state abandonment and to recall restrictive agrarian policies as evidence of past state care. The ambivalent, awkward and sometimes amusing position of government officers in relation to farming and farmers is captured in an excerpt from my fieldnotes from a demonstration rice harvest I attended in December 2018, in which provincial staff suffered mild humiliation during an attempt to show off their new harvest technology. I had gotten to know the Kalay Township Agricultural Officer over a series of interviews with his superiors and staff. Eventually, he invited me to watch as they showed off their new combine harvester in the fields in front of the office, which was a single-room cement structure located near a golden statue of national hero Aung San on the outskirts of Kalaymyo. At 7, an hour before we’re supposed to arrive, we get a call from the Township Agricultural Officer, checking on us, and letting us know we should start towards the bweh [event], which will start at 8…When we arrive, we’re ushered inside to eat kon yin boun [sticky rice] at the table just below three lu gyi, at least one of whom is military. We snack and wait. There are maybe 50 people there, from other departments - fisheries, DALMS [Department of Agricultural Land Management and Statistics], AMD [Agricultural Mechanization Department], Immigration. Officers are staking out a tenth of an acre, which they will harvest and then check the yield with the yei chwe set [combine harvester]. When it’s time to start, we’re hurried out for a photoshoot in front of three signboards. The big machine has a tough job in the small plot, and it’s too early - usually with the yei chwe set you should wait until 11 or so, when everything is dry and not laying down. These thoughts flit through my head casually as we chat with U Hpone about the difference between hand and machine harvest (he says the yield is 5% less with machine) and the wet [water-intensive rice] varieties on the left of the road. Then the machine breaks. This is hilarious. The inside is clogged with cow yo [the rice stalks], and AMD jacketed men immediately jump up to fix it. To do so, they call for tha zin - the sickle - using the hand-harvest tools to fix the new Japanese machine. The irony… this is an ethnographic boon. I take a photo of them repairing the machine with sickles, a golden pagoda and Aung San [national hero] statue in the background. The machine deposits the yield to cries of ‘is that all? Any more?’ And the Ag staff go to work with baskets, measuring out nine tins. 90 tins/acre is not bad, but last year it was over 100, so this is disappointing - the effeminate officer tells me this is because the soil is bad. We go back inside as the lu gyi disperse, and drink more la pet ye [milk tea]… 201 I attended the only other demonstration harvest held that year on the road running south of Kalay. The event featured more special-occasion sticky rice and a lecture from the District Agricultural Head on the proper spacing of rows during which I was pulled into photoshoots with Kalay’s mid-level civil servants. Lu gyi pontification, milk tea, and staged photoshoots were typical of all government functions I attended, whether in Kalay, Yangon or Naypyitaw. At this event the staff used a thresher to process hand-harvested rice, explaining to me that the rice was sagging too much to use the combine. Few farmers attended; these were ‘demonstrations’ of generic progress geared towards government, rather than of applicable agricultural techniques. In this light, my own presence as a white, foreign woman was as important to the Township Agricultural Officer as the presence of the combine; hence his early morning calls to ensure my attendance. Both of us symbolized achievement and modernity, even if neither of us were very effective instruments for the harvest itself. Officers I spoke to did not often go to the village or consider it their duty to reach out to farmers. They had almost no interest in the majority of Kalay Valley’s farmers, who had less than 10 acres. The provincial head of the Agricultural Mechanization Department, for example, told me that he rarely left the office in Kalaymyo. When I asked about the changes he noticed over the last three years, he spoke pejoratively about farmers, even as he readily admitted his own ignorance: It is difficult to criticize the farmers here. I also don’t understand much about the farming. I think the farmers here are lazy despite of the good-quality lands. The lands are productive for fruits and vegetables, but the farmers don’t plant systematically. Government staff I spoke with held farmers in low regard, and sometimes actively ignored or exploited them. When I tried to interview the head of the Agricultural Bank, a man responsible for giving loans to farmers, I learned he rarely arrived in the office before 11am. I heard gossip 202 about provincial officials who siphoned off the money given by the central bank for farmers’ loans, and loaned it out themselves at a higher interest rate, making a profit. Civil servants were responsive, most of all, to orders from Naypyitaw. When I asked the Township Agricultural Officer how he decided what varieties to plant, for example, he told me he planted whatever seeds were sent from the capital. Another official once told me bluntly ‘there is no democracy for civil servants.’ Once, drinking whiskey with a Chin police officer who had never given a ticket outside the central traffic station, I learned a new word, nget deh, which can be translated as, ‘to be sandwiched.’ Whether actively disdainful of farmers or caught between the national government and the people, most officials had little room to make substantive improvements in farmers’ lives. Instead, most took their low but steady salaries, occasionally supplemented with bribes, and did the minimum, following the saying: ma lou’ / ma shou’ / ma pyou’ (don’t do anything, don’t speak out, don’t get fired). Given this stance, it is unsurprising that most farmers in Kalay avoided government offices. My friend Thiri, a Burman farmer, was always dismissive when I spent time with the local agricultural staff. She had never seen a demonstration plot, she told me, and only saw the staff at planting time. The seeds they sold were too expensive and a hassle to order; farmers in her village either saved their own or bought privately. Her observations were consistent with national-level analysis, which indicate that the government meets only 4-10% of farmers’ demand for seeds (Oo and Shwe 2014). In contrast, farmers were increasingly connected to private companies who offered a burgeoning array of pesticides, fertilizers, seeds and, of course, machines. Government staff themselves described this in terms of a decline of their influence. In a series of interviews at Yezin, the national agriculture university, I spoke to civil servants who told me that when an agricultural officer went to a village 20 years ago, he had power. But today, 203 only the private companies that could support farmers with fertilizer commanded authority. The agricultural officers, spread too thin and often with no computer access or reliable data, could not possibly compete, they explained. Machinery salesmen I spoke to sometimes formally cooperated with the government, for example in joint trainings with the AMD, and boasted of being drinking buddies with local officers, even as they viewed the government with disdain for failing either to sell machines, or to put in place policies that promoted production and supported farmers. This new class of private agriculture sector capitalists were the sons of well-off farmers, traders, or military officers in Kalaymyo, and many had spent time working abroad that allowed them to amass capital to start their own business. They cooperated with provincial officials even as they challenged the state’s historical monopoly on the management of agricultural production. The close relationship between private businessmen and provincial officials, as well as the quiet disdain both sets of actors often had for the central government, was on display one day in December 2019 when I visited the Township Agricultural Officer. We sat on the veranda looking out over the demonstration plot and chatting about the prospects for harvest as he bounced his first child, born since my last visit, on his knee. I asked if he had contact information for an organization I had heard other government staff mention called Shwe Taungthu, Golden Farmer. The Officer made a call, and within a few minutes a Burman man in his early 40s pulled up in a beat-up SUV and handed me a business card decorated with tractors. He had grown up in a village about an hour north, and gone to Korea for five years, where he saw farmers ‘like bosses’ using technology and benefiting from government support. When he came back, he and eight friends started buying up combines and tractors for rental. Now he lived in Kalaymyo, and rented out his 50 acres in his birthplace. Together, the official and the businessman criticized the government for its failure to provide a steady market. The Township Agriculture Officer had 204 been on a government exchange trip to Israel, and spoke about the pathetic cucumbers that they got to export to Holland because of strong government-to-government agreements. Neither was particularly sympathetic to, or even aware, of the situation of poor and middle farmers. In contrast to historical visions of smallholder-driven state socialism, these men imagined a future for agriculture in which the state brokered international trade while ambitious entrepreneurs modernized the countryside through mechanization. Experiencing State Abandonment Smallholders shared many of these men’s critiques of the government. During my fieldwork, the uncertainty of farming was exacerbated by a wildly fluctuating market—both the bean market and the rice market crashed, consecutively, because of decisions by India and then China to close border trade. On Facebook, I watched protesters in Sagaing Division’s state capital, Monywa, with signs calling for the government to raise the rice price. In Kalay, farmers, provincial staff and private sellers I spoke with criticized the central state for not protecting them from these crises. One group of Chin farmers spoke about what they heard from relatives in India and America of government technical and financial support for agriculture, ‘[There] it’s like a big business… but here we can’t change from struggling for survival to business… Myanmar farmers are very hard-working and industrious. We work in the rain, in the sun, and overnight, but we don’t have capital. I watch TV, the Hluttaw [parliament] channel, everyday…[but] I scarcely hear about Sagaing farmers… they don’t care much.’ Another man chimed in to say they did not need any help from the government, they just needed the government to stabilize the currency. His friend agreed that they were not asking for any hand-outs, but they wanted to be able to get a loan, with a fair rate of interest, that would allow them to buy big machines and free 205 them from debt. ‘In other countries they live in the past and work for the future,’ one said, ‘but here we live in the future and work for the past; we just work to pay old debts.’ These men and other farmers I spoke to saw very little change in life under the NLD, and were sometimes nostalgic for the socialist era, when the government clearly valued rice, and therefore provided some support and protection to producers. Today, they told me they had little contact with government staff. Farmer 1: The office staff cannot supply us with technology or machines or materials, so they are not so important for us. Farmer 2: In my view, during the zaba dine kit [reference to the socialist period. Literally, ‘the era of paying the rice tax.’] they cared about our fees and our land and our paddy. If the farmers had a lot of paddy than the government would get more. So they cared and there was good contact between the farmers and the government. After that system, in the new system, there is no room for them to care for farmers. In the zaba dine system they taught us htwe hto [high-yielding] system and they taught us and how to use pesticide and fertilizer. In the new system they don’t teach, supply or care about us because there is no reason for them to do so—they will not get any paddy for it. These memories of life under socialist agriculture contrast with how farmers perceived state agricultural policies—as coercive and unfair—at the time (Thawnghmung 2003). As I discussed in part one, the same policies that enabled the creation of a rice frontier in Kalay ultimately led to new forms of quotidian consolidation, dispossession and legal ambiguity that caused substantial suffering for people who had cleared the forest to plant rice. Farmers’ yearning for the zaba dine kit therefore reflects not the objectively better policies of that period, but rather the ways in which the sensation of state abandonment went hand in hand with the experience of private- driven mechanization. Emergent structural changes in the locus of agricultural profit and expertise point to the ways in which mechanization was a vehicle for remaking systems of post- socialist authority and exchange. It was also remaking land use and labor relations in Kalay’s fields and villages. 206 Mechanizing Kalay Valley When I first saw a combine harvester at work, the speed and automated power enthralled and astonished me. I was coming back towards Hla Ywa village during an evening bike ride with my research assistant and my host-sister, all of us looking forward to dinner at the home where I stayed for the 2018 rice harvest. Just a few days before, my host-sister had taken me for a walk in the fields and laughed as her neighbors tried to teach me how to cut and bundle rice with a sickle. I found handling the blade with one hand and bunching the stalks with the other to be exhausting, precise, and hazardous work. While the two women who taught me were much faster and less clumsy, they told me it would take the them two days to finish an acre. In contrast, the Kubota combine harvester we spotted from our bikes appeared to be tearing through the tawny stalks. We left the dirt road and joined the small crowd congregating at the edge of the field to watch the machine spiral inward from the perimeter of the plot, gobbling half an acre in about 15 minutes. After it reached the center, the machine glided over to a waiting tarp, lifted its long arm, and deposited hundreds of pounds of rice in an unbroken stream. All of us were impressed at the speed of the harvest, but my host-sister told me that the quality of the rice was lower than hand- harvested grains. Myanmar has seen exponential growth in the purchase and use of agricultural machines since 2010 (Win, Belton, and Zhang 2018). Around Kalay, mechanization was a visible, noisy phenomenon; I noticed more and more tractors and combine harvesters in fields and villages over the three-year period that I visited. Ten years before I arrived, there had only been one rice mill and one major agriculture machine shop in Kalaymyo. By the end of 2019, ten mills competed for business, and new shops selling everything from oil presses to bulldozers had sprung up along the southern road. I witnessed a swift and tangible transformation in the mode of 207 agricultural production, yet machines had not annihilated manual and animal labor. The result of the initial stage of rapid mechanization was a hybrid production process, one in which farmers made enthusiastic use of new technologies while holding onto traditional modes of human and animal labor because they were available and reliable. This process echoes Kautsky’s (1988 [1899]) classic analysis of the barriers to capitalist agriculture, specifically his discussion of the ways in which rocky land, fragmented parcels and remote plots hinder mechanization in farming. It also resonates with Gupta’s (1998) discussion of hybridity in Indian villages, where Green Revolution technologies were used alongside traditional practices without a sense of tension of contradiction. In Hla Ywa and other villages around Kalay, farmers adapt new technologies to local ecologies and social relations in emergent hybrid modes of production. To highlight the speed of recent technological change is not to say that the local agricultural sector had been static. The family with whom I stayed during the 2018 rice harvest described major changes in farming practices since the time that they had finally saved enough to buy their own land in Hla Ywa village. During the socialist era, farmers did not use fertilizer and got only 50-70% of the yield they could get today, they explained. They were not particularly incentivized to produce; they could only keep a small amount of the rice—13 tins9 per person plus some for visitors, monks and nuns—and had to give the rest as rice tax or sell to the government at a low price. There were not many varieties of crops and plants before; farmers had only recently started planting winter corn and commercial peanuts and beans. ‘These days, people have to invest more but they also earn more. There are more things to spend on and also more chances to make money,’ Uncle told me. Many farmers still saved their seeds rather than 9 Tin is a local volumetric measurement for a basket of crops whose exact size varies and is sometimes a topic of dispute. A recent analysis of farm production economics lists a basket of unprocessed paddy is about 46 lbs., while a basket of processed rice is 75lbs (World Bank 2016) 208 buying them from the government or private businesses, but the use of expensive fertilizers had increased, even after a bad batch in the 2017 season had decimated crops around Kalay. Farmers in and beyond Hla Ywa also had to contend with flooding; my host-parents could remember three major events, the most recent and severe of which had washed away the village bridge and ruined the soils in 2015. As I described in chapter one, some farmers in neighboring villages had given up after this last flood, selling their land or converting paddies into fish ponds. Despite these changes, such a rapid adoption of new technologies was unprecedented. The speed of technological change was evident in focus group discussions I conducted in seven Burman and Chin villages around Kalay in March 2019. The villagers’ ‘technology timelines’ showed access to rice mills, oil presses and motorcycles for over a decade, but cars, solar panels, motorized grass cutters and pesticide sprayers had only appeared in the last few years. While some villages reported the use of small, two-wheel tractors as early as 2000, large tractors first arrived between 2010 and 2016. Mechanized threshers had been around for about ten years, but the combine harvester was first seen in each village in either 2015 or 2016. While all seven villages used small and large tractors and threshers, only five of the seven used combines. The initial emergence and increased use of multiple new technologies in just a few years, in particular the arrival of big tractors and combines, enabled major shifts in the mode of agricultural production. Around Kalay and in Myanmar, farmers traditionally plowed by hand or with oxen. After winter crops like peanuts, sunflowers, corn, and beans were harvested and the rains arrived, farmers prepared the land again for rice. In Hla Ywa two female labor teams were on hire in June for transplanting; in other, drier villages with scarce labor farmers used broadcast methods. When the earliest variety, kaun ngin, or sticky rice, ripened around early November, farmers 209 hired labor, most often landless families in the village like the one shown working below, to cut, bundle and stack the rice in the field. Before the threshers, farmers generally used oxen, yoked together and walking in a circle, stepping on the rice stalks, to remove the grain from the stalk. Occasionally they had practiced yite po, the exhausting task of hand-threshing by striking bundled rice. In 2018, I caught sight of the oxen-threshing method in the field behind the house in Hla Ywa. A labor leader explained to me that the use of draft animals might persist even after mechanization, but no one with a choice would return to the brutal method of yite po. With the thresher, farmers still hired labor to cut, bundle and stack, and then again to feed the machine and bag the rice. With the combine, farmers had to hire only the machine-driver and perhaps a relative to help bag. Figure 19: Photos of hand harvest and use of a combine harvester near Hla Ywa in 2018 According to a survey I conducted in December 2019, every household farming land in Hla Ywa, 46 that year, had used a big tractor, with the exception of one family that used a small tractor that they already owned. Households accessed these machines through existing social networks. Hla Ywa families rented either the big blue tractor that sat in my host-family’s yard, which belonged to a rich uncle who lived nearby and was driven by my host-sister’s new 210 husband, or the other two purchased in 2015 and 2019 by well-off families in the village. The use of the large tractor did not preclude the use of other land preparation methods; five households also used a small tractor, usually because they were cheaper, available and adequate for a certain subset of land preparation tasks, reducing the overall costs of land preparation. Around Kalay, farmers also continued to use oxen for the final stages of leveling the land. While the animals themselves and their use were becoming less common, they were still visible in the village: a quarter of Hla Ywa’s households owned oxen in 2019. The price of buying and renting oxen had increased, not decreased, after the arrival of the big tractors, a fact related to both a new practice of selling cows to Chinese brokers, and the common perception that certain tasks on certain types of land could not be done properly without them. Some farmers complained that the big tractor damaged and compacted the soil, particularly in wet areas, and preferred to use a combination of oxen and small tractors for the delicate and critical work of land preparation. This was particularly the case in areas with small, narrow, uneven and irregularly-shaped plots. Some farmers noted that big tractors dug too deep, disturbing the fertile top soil, while others explained that problems introduced by the big tractors could be mitigated with a skilled driver. I met only a few farmers who entirely refused to use big tractors, but I spoke with several who explained the machine was useful but not sufficient for their land preparation needs. The combine was also adopted widely, if slightly less whole-heartedly. In 2019, 21 households in Hla Ywa used a thresher and 27 used a combine harvester. A major limitation to the combine was that it needed relatively good roads to access plots; farmers with lands behind other, not-yet-harvested fields or beyond streams could not use it. Farmers who chose the combine often cited labor scarcity in their decision. Combine rental was also usually equivalent to or cheaper than the overall costs to hire both labor and a thresher. The seasonal monsoons had 211 been unpredictable in the past year, fueling a desire to be able to harvest swiftly. While ten households were new adopters of the combine in 2019, five households that had used the combine in the past had decided not to hire one that season. Households that had stopped using the combine listed a range of reasons, including that the machine was not available and that the rice was lower quality. In several villages I visited in 2018 and 2019, there was no combine use. This was sometimes a matter of machine availability, but also dependent on the land itself. Two focus group villages with extensive alluvial holdings, for example, explained the machine did not suit their wet, soft soils or their narrow, terraced plots. Four households in Hla Ywa used both a thresher and a combine in 2019. This hybrid strategy was related to the characteristics of particular plants. After harvesting kaun ngnin [sticky rice], which made up a relatively small proportion of the village’s crop, two main varieties of rice remained in Hla Ywa: the higher quality but lower yielding aye ya min and the lower quality but higher yielding sin thu kha. While the latter stood straight and was therefore easy to harvest with a machine, the aye ya min stalks often leaned over as the rice got heavy, slowing the combine’s work and sometimes jamming up its processors. As a result of these difficulties, some combine owners started charging more to harvest an acre of aye ya min for the 2019 season, quoting prices up to double that of the going rate for sin thu kha. A few farmers in Hla Ywa paid the inflated rate, but others returned to the use of hand harvest and thresher, now comparatively cheaper. Some of these farmers ended up hiring a combine for their sin thu kha and labor and a thresher for their aye ya min. These strategies highlight how agricultural knowledge of the characteristics of different plant varieties and land types guided farmers’ use of new machines. The speed of machines, appealing especially given the perceived difficulties in recruiting labor and increasing uncertainty of the weather, also introduced new problems of quality. 212 Specifically, the combine harvester did not leave time for rice to dry as the bundles lay stacked in the fields. Without a drying facility, which I never saw in Kalay, or several days spread out in the sun, rice often had a high moisture content that fetched a lower price and led to spoilage. Some also complained that the yield was lower using a combine harvester, a loss that could be up to 15% of the crop if the driver was unskilled. There was another issue related to timing: while fast, a combine could only do about 10 acres a day, and fewer if the rice was aye ya min. When farmers’ crops ripened at the same time, there were not enough combines to harvest the waiting acres. If they could not get a machine, farmers again turned to threshers. Farmers with cows bemoaned the combine’s destruction of the rice stalks; some preferred the use of the thresher because its by-product provided ample food for their animals. Finally, a few farmers noted that the combine mixed batches of rice, making it difficult to get pure seeds from this year’s harvest. The particular demands of land and plant varieties, as well as collective seasonal cultivation cycles, structured the ways in which farmers adopted tractors and combines. While hybrid production practices were remaking village agriculture, moral economies of village and kin would shape how individuals purchased, rented and perceived the arrival of these machines. Production relations and class perceptions New machines arrived into preexisting systems of agricultural production and consumption constituted through dense networks of kin and community. These social relations structured how machines were purchased, rented out, and profited from. Yet when it came to the question of who benefited from these machines, class was not determinate. My oldest host-sister, Ma Ma Gyi, provides an illustrative example of how social relationships emerged from and transcended the physical bounds of the village to shape all stages 213 of rice production and sale. Since she was a child, Ma Ma Gyi had a knack for trading; she had a deep line spreading down from her index finger across her palm, which her family proudly explained to me indicated her predisposition for business. As a young woman, she would take the train to Gangaw to purchase wholesale goods to resell in the village. Now she had her own small rice shop in the main market across from the train station. Ma Ma Gyi bought her parents’ rice and much of the crop in Hla Ywa, and sourced from several other villages directly and through other brokers. Her shop in Kalay town was always busy with customers, deliverymen and broker women on motorcycles arriving with samples for Ma Ma Gyi to try. Her standards were high; one day I watched her pour the small bag into a woven tray and check the grains—their color and shape—then spoon a few into the palm of her hand for a closer look at their quality, and finally bite a grain of the raw rice to assess its taste. She turned to the broker and dismissed the sample, “there’s a lot of aye ya min [rice variety] at the moment.” Though she left school after fourth grade, Ma Ma Gyi kept meticulous track of her expenditures and sales in a thin lined notebook. That day, she was selling six varieties, including the expensive paw san mway, a high-quality rice that could not be grown around Kalay. She ate lunch between customers in four sittings and was on track to make a typical day’s profit of about 40,000mmk (US$30). While eating, she told me that the rice harvested by combine was of lower quality than hand-harvested rice, but that she paid the same price for both types. Kin and community relationships bound field to market, not only in the case of rice, but also for other crops. Similarly, social ties shaped mechanization and related and emergent strategies of accumulation. I heard of many cases, like my host family’s, where a rich city relative had purchased a tractor or combine and stored it at a country-cousin’s home, where it was easier to rent out. Men in the family generally drove the machine, making about 3,000mmk 214 per acre. On a busy day, a driver’s profits would be at least four times the going wage for day labor, and could even approach Ma Ma Gyi’s. If combines and big tractors were owned within a village, it was generally by the richest families. Emblematic of the wealth and social status of these machine owners was one Burman farmer I will call U Kyaw Aung, whom I got to know in a village north of Kalaymyo. U Kyaw Aung had grown up poor, but he had acquired 30 acres over the last several years and risen to the position of village headman. While I did not know how he had acquired his wealth or influence, a framed certificate on his wall thanked him for a donation to the Union Solidarity and Development Party, suggesting he was well-connected to the political establishment of the former military government. On our first meeting in his home, we sat on teak chairs as he proudly showed me his folders of personal land titles and community petitions for a village road, documents that evidenced his substantial holdings and leadership role. He then took me out back to show off his beautiful new Kubota combine harvester, which he kept clean underneath a tarp in a specially-built shed while a dusty thresher rusted nearby. Mechanization was enabled by new forms of financing, such as the bank loan that allowed this farmer to purchase his Kubota on a two-year installment plan from a larger private company in town. The receipt listed the machine’s total cost at around US$30,000. He had paid 30% up front and would make payments every six months with 17.5% interest, an interest rate I found staggering until I learned that the only other available forms of finance, loans from private moneylenders, would have incurred charges of 30-40%. On my second visit a few months later, I met U Kyaw Aung in his field to see his combine harvester in action. We ate curries and rice under a tarp as the gleaming machine poured grains into a growing pile. With his machines, documents, optimism and comparative 215 wealth, this man conjured for me the image of Myanmar’s model ‘modern farmer,’ as envisioned by documents like Myanmar’s Agricultural Development Strategy. Wealthy individuals with the means to purchase new machines had the opportunity to pay back their loans and even turn a profit through renting them out. To meet his loan payments, U Kyaw Aung planned to rent out the combine to his neighbors for 50,000mmk (about US$40) per acre. I interviewed a combine owner in another village who charged two different rental rates: a low and consistent one within the village, and a higher and variable one outside. This farmer explained that while he trusted his neighbors to accurately report their acreage, when working with outsiders he used a smartphone app to measure their land via satellite image. This latter practice was becoming more common among younger combine owners who rented in unfamiliar areas. In the socialist era, farmers had decreased their reported holdings to avoid paying the rice tax; now, no one believed the acreage on government documents. The combine owner’s decision to use two different sets of standards in his rental business underscores the ways in which pre- existing social relations shaped machine owners’ strategies of accumulation. In this case, a moral economy of mechanization rendered local rentals outside purely market logics, but did not extend beyond the confines of the village. Urban residents who owned machines had no such restrictions; they approached machine rental not as neighbors, but as businessmen. Whether village elite or urban entrepreneurs, there was no doubt that tractor and combine owners were comparatively rich. To purchase from the government, a relatively small share of sales, farmers needed to show they owned at least 10 acres. To purchase from private sellers, buyers needed to pay several thousand dollars up front and take on substantial interest rates. Buyers could purchase expensive Japanese-made Kubota combines or cheaper models from India and China, but Chinese models, in particular, were 216 widely acknowledged to be inferior and to require constant repair, as illustrated by the rhyme: ’ta yoke set / ta yet pyet,’ ’Chinese machine / breaks every single day.’ Most machine owners I interviewed said business was good, but they were uncertain of profitability in the future. In fact, many village-resident machine owners had purchased in 2018 or 2019 second-hand from Kalaymyo owners who had bought in 2015 or 2016, and then had trouble renting in a saturated market. The combine owner who charged two separate rental rates was particularly recalcitrant to make predictions about future profitability, and, as if to hedge his bets, had a second business buying and selling oxen. In this case, draft animals were an alternative accumulation strategy and insurance against a possible crisis in machine demand. Machine-owners sought to profit from renting their machines, within the constraints of village moral economies. Potential machine-renters evaluated their options for family, wage labor, or machine hire based on the ecology of their plots, availability of machines and cash, and social connections they might have to owners. But households who made their living through agricultural labor were given no choice in the matter, and appeared poised to lose the most from mechanization. This landless class was substantial. In Hla Ywa, about half the households did not have land, and about half of these relied heavily on a category of casual agricultural labor locally referred to as a nga yan lite, which included rice harvesting and transplanting, tying greens into bunches for sale, and planting peanuts and garlic. In other villages I visited, informants estimated between 10-75% of households were landless. I expected to find that machine adoption limited livelihood opportunities for landless laborers. Instead, I found that the perception of labor scarcity was common among both landowners and landless laborers in all the villages, and led to both groups welcoming machines. 217 With limited exceptions, laborers did not see the tractor, or even the combine, as a threat. When I probed once during a focus group with Hla Ywa youth, only one person, a precocious university student who was also the daughter of laborers, acknowledged the possibility of negative future consequences of mechanization for poor households. As I spent more time in Hla Ywa, I learned that part of the reason that villagers refused my suggestion that machines might harm poor households was that the class implications of mechanization did not appear straightforward, a complexity illustrated by the comparison of two of the village’s richest and poorest households. The man I jokingly referred to as, ‘Unlucky Uncle,’ had more machines and land than anyone in the village and a sturdy home with a cement floor. As his wife told it, they had experienced a string of bad luck: they bought the first phone in the village just before prices dropped, they bought a big tractor just before the 2015 floods ruined their farmlands, and they bought a car just before three households in the neighboring village did so, cutting into their rental market. They had bought their tractor from the government on an installment plan, borrowing money from two private money lenders to afford the down payment. As Aunty told it, the floods had destroyed their lands and business prospects, and they were still struggling to pay back the debt. Her drunk husband complained that this was only one of their problems. Labor shortages had started about four years ago when the youth started to migrate and seek other work, like construction, he said. ‘Farming work is so tiring and low in value that no one wants to do it… Most youth in this village don’t know how to farm, to grow the rice. There are some youth who have never been to the farmlands.’ When I asked Unlucky Aunty what the biggest change was since they started using machines for farming, she said ‘Before we had nothing, now we have debt!’ 218 This bleak outlook contrasted with my jovial discussions with one of Hla Ywa’s poorest households, a family with so many children that they were locally known as the village’s other primary school. In 2018, the patriarch told me there was more work than ever. He explained that within the village there was still plenty of rice to harvest, as well as a number of other tasks. At the same time, he told me that because migration was increasing in the village, there were fewer and fewer young people around for farm work. His son-in-law jumped in to agree that there was ample work both within and outside the village, and to assert that it was laborers, not farmers, who set the price of wages. In Hla Ywa and every village around Kalay, day wages were increasing every year; in 2018 he earned 4,500mmk per acre of rice harvested, up from 3,500mmk the previous season. The harvest machine was a good thing, he said, it was powerful, faster and less tiring. There was plenty of work for women, such as planting onions and garlic or weaving, and for men to work in construction or with the machines. I heard similar sentiments from another labor leader who explained to me that the combine posed no threat: enough farmers would plant aye ya min, want to harvest early or on inaccessible plots, need hay for oxen, or seek to maximize their yield that there would always be work for the careful and flexible hand- harvester. Unlike Unlucky Uncle, the primary school family had no debt, saying, ‘if we borrow money from others, we cannot live in peace.’ This family was nonplussed by the arrival of machines and optimistic about the overall direction of their economic prospects. When I asked about the major changes in their livelihood situation, the patriarch pointed at a small DVD player playing Indian videos and said, ‘Now we are rich!’ When I came to see the primary school family the following year, four men had left to make their fortunes in the gold mines up north. Rather than bemoaning a lack of local work, the patriarch declared that it was time to build a proper house, and that money from outside work 219 (and Buddhist merit) had improved their economic situation. He himself had traveled for work as a younger man, boasting that his skills in carpentry had earned him the nickname ‘Prince of Trees.’ He reported three times as much income from the mines as from farming the plot they had been able to rent out that year. While he spoke, his eleventh and twelfth children, named dozen kjo, ‘almost a dozen,’ and dozen win, ‘dozen arrives,’ played ball below the creaky wood platform that served as their floor. While the family’s good humor and optimism was undiminished, the dramatic change in their household composition points to another major trend remaking the material and social landscape alongside machines: migration. Embodying the Politics of Work The simultaneous demand for mobile labor and availability of machines and private finance had created a situation of relative capital abundance and labor scarcity in Kalay Valley. Belton and Filipiski (2019) argue that, in nearby Burman villages in Myanmar’s dry zone, accelerating migration to urban areas since 2010 has led to rural labor scarcity and a resultant increase in agricultural wages, shifting the relative wealth and power in favor of landless, over landholding, households. This analysis helps explain why some rich households, like Unlucky Uncle’s, bemoaned mechanization’s negative consequences, namely debt, while some laborers, like the Primary School family, greeted the machines as improvements and appeared confident in their livelihood prospects. Both landowners and laborers’ assessments of the impacts of mechanization were rooted in a shared acknowledgement of the recent phenomenon of labor scarcity, which drove up rural wages. But the impacts of new technologies and livelihood strategies are not determined merely by wage and labor economies. Machines arrived to Kalay in a moment in which migration was 220 shifting gendered and generational social values. In her analysis of Tibetan landlords and their Han vegetable farming tenants, Emily Yeh explains the extra-economic reasoning that leads Tibetans to rent out use rights even when cultivating their own crops would be more lucrative by theorizing the: ‘power-laden, shifting meanings… [and] cultural logics of practice that govern embodied dispositions that shape preferences and conduct towards work’ (145). Here, attention to the cultural politics of work helps illuminate how the increased availability and comparative desirability of migratory work meant that fewer and fewer youth in Kalay were working in agriculture, a dynamic that shaped prevailing ‘common sense’ about the arrivals of tractors and combines. Machines, always driven by men, replaced young women and men’s work in the fields, but this disruption generated little anxiety at a time when this form of labor was considered less and less dignified. While youth and their parents viewed migratory work as desirable in comparison to traditional farming in both ethnic communities, the implications for attitudes towards mechanization were slightly different. In Burman villages like Hla Ywa, where migration was relatively new and steadily increasing, mechanization fit cleanly into a popular national narrative of modernizing Myanmar agriculture. In Chin villages, migration was a well-established livelihood strategy, but new patterns of mobility, specifically the travel of young women to other Asian countries to work as domestic maids, presented a fundamental challenge to patriarchal hierarchies of men’s productive work. Attention to the gendered and generational experiences of migration in these two ethnic communities helps illuminates the ways in which migration and mechanization intersect beyond economic calculations of wage rates and labor demand. Migration disentangled village life from traditional agricultural work for a rising proportion of youth who sought alternatives to farming but wanted to live in the village. At the same time, 221 money earned abroad meant new economic and social status for young woman, as maid- daughters replaced farmer-fathers as the primary breadwinners in many Chin households. Migration in Burman Villages In 2019, one out of five households in Hla Ywa had at least one member working outside the village. Of the 26 individuals, 16 worked elsewhere in Myanmar as teachers, drivers, and gold miners. Only 10 worked abroad: eight in factories in Thailand, one in a hospital in Singapore, and one in chicken processing in China. These numbers were lower than the constant discussion of migration had led me to believe, but they represented a marked and recent increase. They are also consistent with surveys from other Burman villages in central Myanmar, which report about one-quarter of households had a current migrant, and that this migration was primarily internal (Pritchard et al. 2017). Like other Burman villages in and beyond Kalay, migration had become increasingly popular for youth in recent years. This was in part because of legalization: while I interviewed some Burman village men who had traveled the ‘black way’ to Malaysia for factory and plantation work in the early 2000s, many younger men now aspired to work in factories in Korea, a legal and lucrative opportunity that required passing a language test. Even more than migration, Burman youth and their parents aspired to education, in part because they viewed this as a path out of the tough work of farming. One male university student who lived in Hla Ywa told me: I won’t do agricultural work. As I will be a graduate, I will do the work which is suitable with and worthy of my educational level. We can rent out our lands to uneducated and landless villagers who can only do agricultural work. Another female student answered: I am not interested in [farming rice] because we are not sure whether or not we can get a profit, even though we have to invest a lot. I have also observed that those who plant 222 corn, they make a profit sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. Farmers have to invest a lot and the yield is not sure for every year. My host-parents laughed when I asked if they wanted their grandchildren to be farmers. When I asked Burman villagers in focus group discussions, they always said no. Instead, they talked about the longer practices of domestic migration and increased opportunities for foreign work since around 2017, including construction jobs in China or the border towns. This work was lucrative: ‘their daily wage is the same as our income for a month,’ one told me, ‘so most want to migrate for their future.’ This conversation in a Burman village not far from Hla Ywa typifies the responses I received when asking about the future of farming and expands on some of the ways farmers speculated about the possibilities for village and national development in comparison with what they knew about neighboring countries: Q: Do you want your children to be farmers? A: I want my children to have international knowledge and skills to apply for the country and the family. Personally, I don’t want my children to be farmers. I don’t want to give them such difficult work as an inheritance. But, I cannot help if my children are not clever enough. I have no thought in my mind that they would be farmers. I want them to do other business or work in the education field. Q: If so, what do you think will happen to the farming sector in the future? A: If there are fewer farmers, it is not good for the country. But, it is not also good for us to be farmers. From what I see, for instance in China, they can produce the products. They are going well with their products. Also for our country, it will go well even if there is less farming work. I have read in a newspaper, maybe about Thailand, that their farmers are very old and their next generation also doesn’t do farming work. They are old like us. There is no next generation to work as farmers. I also don’t want them to neglect the farming work. If the farming sector here is developed like in Vietnam, I want [the next generation] to work [as farmers] together with other work. I want them to be educated and have international knowledge. The farmers in Thailand are more developed. This discussion highlights a tension I often noted in discussions with Burman farmers, who saw agriculture as core to the nation’s economy and identity even as they hoped for their own children to escape the hard physical labor and low status of farming work. In this telling, mechanization offered a possible solution by enabling the continuity of the national agricultural 223 tradition while promising a possible end to manual toil. In a context in which both Burman and Chin youth showed a disinterest in agriculture and instead sought opportunities for more lucrative and adventurous labor abroad, mechanization made common sense. Migration in Chin villages While migration was increasing in Burman villages, it was long-established in Chin communities around Kalay, where almost every household had a migrant. In Burman villages, opportunities for men and women to work abroad were considered equally lucrative, but Chin networks of brokers and agencies for international domestic work meant that in Chin communities, the most important migrants were young women. Chin men might work in factories, plantations or restaurants in Malaysia and China, but their incomes were dwarfed by what women could make as maids in Singapore, Macao, and China. Chin villages also differed from Burman villages because of their long history of international mobility. Every village had a handful of Chin families that had successfully applied for refugee status, usually in Malaysia, and been resettled in the US or Australia. On one visit to a Chin market in a large village outside Kalay, I spotted a t-shirt from Midland, Texas and swapped cheesy puns with a visitor home for the holidays from Battle Creek, Michigan. But Trump had closed the channel to America, and now a family’s best bet for financial advancement lay in their young female members. Young women’s abilities to earn the lion’s share of household incomes challenged the primacy of farming fathers and brothers. This represented a major reversal of Chin social hierarchy, which explicitly valued sons, giving them land inheritance and exclusive access to leadership roles in the home, community and church. As one older Chin man told me, in the past, 224 the birth of girl was a non-event, but now: ‘it is better to have daughters than sons today! Here when we have a daughter, we celebrate, and name her “Singapore!”’ Former domestic workers’ stories illuminate the new kinds of gendered labor that had earned girls unprecedented social status. Women traveled from the village to employers’ homes via an extensive network of Chin brokers, which started from their own neighbors who recruited on commission, led to hostels filled with other Chin girls in Yangon, put them on planes and instructed them on how to change their passport details during the flight and find complicit officials in the airport’s immigration station, and finally delivered them to the agency that would serve as their point-of-contact in the host country. Once girls signed and gave their recruitment bonus to their families, they were at the mercy of these brokers for the duration of their contract, usually two or three years. When I asked one former maid what she would advise a friend who wanted to migrate, she told me, ‘I would tell her to pray for a good agent.’ In the case of China, a more recent, lucrative, and dangerous destination, women travelled by bus on a harrowing journey. One former domestic worker who had recently been deported described the trip for me through a translator: [We traveled in one small] mini-bus for 40 people. From the border of Myanmar to China, Muse, we took a 7-day visit card and we waited for the brokers from the China side, Shwe Li. That mini bus picked us up and they dropped us on the hillside near a river or a canal and we have to walk down and up the hills. After we crossed that river by boat. All this was on foot. After crossing that river, we climbed up the hill and another bus picked us up again. After that we were put in that minibus again and the driver said there are police or armed forces there and we had to wait. We could barely breathe. We were too hot, we were sweltering… it took us nine days to reach to our destination…. We took that minibus and went on foot for eight days and on the last day we were transferred into the bigger bus… on my way to my destination I couldn’t communicate with my family. Many women achieved their primary goal in making the journey: to send money back to their families. The economic benefits were obvious. However, their stories illustrate that the 225 labor itself was by no means objectively easier than farming. While a few women traveled legally, mostly to Macau, the vast majority went through informal networks that put them at risk of human trafficking and abuse in their host households. Despite the difficulties, the gendered and generational politics of work structured preferences for migration, just as they often, eventually, led women back into patriarchal marriages. Many women I spoke with took multiple trips abroad. When they returned for good, few had a clear idea of what came next. One woman who had recently returned from Macao was starting a beauty parlor, called ‘Chin Lady,’ in her parents’ home in the village while she finalized arrangements for her wedding to a man she had first met on Facebook while living abroad. She explained to me in a mix of English and Burmese that coming home was a different experience for everyone. While some, like her, used their money and skills to start a business, others did very little or quickly left again. H: what else do you think I should know about your experience? CL: One thing is, I will tell you. We are not the same. Some people have a passion and when they come back [they act on it]. I have one friend who came back and started an agency. Some come back and start a restaurant. And some without any hobby or passion actually do nothing. [I think] what plan do you have - when you come back what will you do? Or will you go abroad again?… I think it will be better for some if they just go out again. KZ: [Before you went to] Singapore and Macau could you open this shop? CL: Absolutely not! We don’t have the condition here, it would not be possible. We can’t save just harvesting rice! H: Does anyone who comes back want to be a farmer? CL: I don’t know anyone. Maybe there’s someone, but I don’t know them. In making money abroad and starting her own business, this woman was pioneering a different type of role for Chin women. But she was uncertain how long her project would last; her future husband was a pastor, and beauty work was not considered appropriate for a minister’s wife. Many former Chin domestics wanted to settle down and make a life in their villages, but few wanted to be farmers. This was in part because of the physical drudgery of farming, in part 226 because of the uncertain profits, and also because its low comparative status. An elder, male Chin farmer explained this to me bluntly: ‘The dignity of a farmer is less than the dignity of a domestic maid in Singapore or Malaysia.’ This sentiment represents a shift in gender relations in Chin communities, and reflects a broader devaluation of farming work. Conclusion Tractors and combines provide a hulking and noisy response to calls to ‘Make Myanmar Agriculture Great Again.’ Yet rather than restoring national strength through rice production, the move from manual to mechanized agriculture erodes the authority of officials and elevates an emerging class of private agribusinessmen in provincial towns like Kalaymyo. Smallholders experience this privatization, in part, as state abandonment, a sensation heightened when they recall past agricultural policies, even those often considered coercive, as evidence of withdrawn government care. Around Kalay, the material qualities of land and plants and the political and moral economies of labor shape decisions about machine use. New technologies of production impact rich and poor landowners, businessmen, and laborers differently, yet the analytic of class is insufficient for understanding people’s response to machines. Making sense of mechanization requires moving beyond labor economies to examine the shifting gendered and generational politics of farming and migratory work in different ethnic communities. Migration not only produces labor scarcity and rising rural wages that accelerate mechanization, as Belton and Filipiski (2019) note, but also, in Chin communities, shifts social value from (senior, male) farmers towards (young, female) migrants. Together, this analysis highlights how the interlinked processes of mechanization and migration not only change the mode of production and source of 227 rural incomes, but also provide avenues to renegotiate state authority, class relations and the gendered value of labor for a new generation. The turns to mechanization and migration are not finished processes, but rather dynamic components of an ongoing rural transformation. It has been just a few years since the first tractors and combines were seen in Kalay and is too early to say whether hybrid production strategies, for example, the use of draft animals or hand-harvest on inaccessible plots, will persist. The relations between provincial officials and private businessmen, as well as between landholders and laborers, are similarly subject to change as broader political economic processes and local livelihoods continue to evolve. Perhaps the most well-evidenced and permanent shift of those I have described here is the diminishment of the male farmer’s role as household breadwinner and model Myanmar citizen. The devaluation of the masculine, productive work of farming raises new questions—what is the rural in Myanmar, if not organized around rice? For many Myanmar migrants, land remains central to the intergenerational work of social reproduction and making meaningful life (Faxon 2020). But new digital connections in a time of rising mobility allow for community engagement far from the fields of home, and conjure new rural subjects—from a male farmer and his oxcart to a female migrant and her smartphone. Next, I turn to the ways in rural identities and communities are reproduced through new types of engagement that take place across translocal, digital space. 228 INTERLUDE ‘I have committed my Facebook to God.’ We were sitting in the shade of someone’s porch while Benjamin took a break from constructing a new community center. John Keats, a local land activist nicknamed after his favorite poet, had just introduced us. If I wanted to talk to the village youth about social media, Keats told me, this was my man. Benjamin was fluent in English, effusive, and direct. When I introduced myself in Burmese, his face lit up. He clutched his chest and responded flirtatiously in English, ‘Oh, it’s a sin! To hear you speak!’ For Benjamin, committing his Facebook to God meant that he used his considerable digital talents and growing fame to spread Lord’s word. This included quoting and discussing Bible verses on his profile. It also meant practicing what amounted to spiritual counseling via Facebook messenger; Benjamin had met several young Chin people online and chatted them through horrendous ordeals migrating or being trafficked to China. Later, three of them had come to the village to personally thank him for dissuading them from suicide. More generally, Benjamin’s commitment was a tacit acknowledgement of what he could have been doing on Facebook: seeking a girlfriend, watching sports, or taking a modest salary from members of the Chin diaspora to disseminate local news on Facebook Pages. In using the platform to extend Christianity and his own spiritual authority, Benjamin was updating a traditional path for charismatic Chin men, an overwhelming number of whom become ministers. In fact, his day job, when he wasn’t laying brick for the community center, or painting the neighborhood storage shed, or receiving gifts for these spaces sent from villagers working abroad, or proudly posting 229 about all of this on the Village Facebook group, was for a missionary organization based in Pennsylvania. The Americans were under the impression that Benjamin worked from an office in Yangon, but they had no way to know if he answered emails from his mother’s house in the village, a 24- hour bus ride away, where he preferred to stay. Benjamin had taught his mother Facebook in order to communicate with her other children, all of whom lived abroad, and she was a frequent user. Like his siblings, Benjamin saw no future in farming, but told me that he aspired to find a wife and stay in the village. For Benjamin, his family and his peers, digital media were increasingly important to, even constitutive of, village life, even as agriculture and physical residence were less and less essential. Benjamin and Keats were currently engaged in a public Facebook debate over the recent decision to ban the sale of alcohol on one side of the village, and my interview there on the porch ended with the two of them reprising the key points of contention and promising to pick up the fight again online. A few days later, Keats posted photos of me chatting with Benjamin on his own Facebook page. My minor adventures were often broadcast in this way during my three years of fieldwork in rural Myanmar, an uncomfortable experience for a private luddite like myself that seemed to underscore and amplify the reciprocity inherent in ethnography. As I asked Benjamin about his Facebook use and plans for the future, I too was being woven into the widening net of the digital village. 230 CHAPTER SIX WELCOME TO THE DIGITAL VILLAGE Myanmar’s rapid internet adoption makes it a dramatic site from which to examine the social impacts of digital connection. Since the 2014 break-up of the military telecommunications monopoly, cheap mobile phone cards have enabled widespread internet use that has profoundly altered how Myanmar people learn about the world, represent themselves, and communicate with others. Access has increased astronomically: the population online jumped from 1% in 2011 to at least 40% in 2017, making Myanmar the fastest-growing smartphone society in the world (Brooten, McElhone, and Venkiteswaran 2019). As the Rohingya genocide intensified, international journalists and the United Nations condemned Myanmar’s predominant online platform, Facebook, for fostering fake news and hate speech. But much less attention has been paid to the ways everyday Myanmar people like Benjamin make creative use of the platform within constraints set by a profit-seeking company and a repressive state. Benjamin’s desire to live in the village and his use of Facebook to supplement, support and celebrate village life challenge mainstream modernization theories that predict, on one hand, rapid rural exit, and, on the other, a ‘digital divide’ resulting in widespread technological illiteracy in non-urban, non-Western places. Agrarian studies scholars have examined the impacts of technological change on relations of production (S. A. Wolf and Buttel 1996; Patel 2013) and argued that migration patterns require new emphasis on translocal processes of reproduction, redistribution, consumption and care (Rigg et al. 2018). However, with a few exceptions confined to the Global North, agrarian studies has yet to address the question of how a specific set of technologies—those that enable widespread digital connection—are reconfiguring village 231 life and land politics. Understanding these phenomena is central to theorizing agrarian change in a mobile, digital age. At the heart of this chapter is a provocative observation: online platforms once regarded as beacons of Western, urban, modernization are enabling social reproduction, community development, and political mobilization in what I term the digital village. This paradox requires new theorizations of rural places and processes, suggesting we cannot understand contemporary resource struggles and rural development without thinking through and with digital forms. Accounts of how rural people actually engage digital platforms are few, particularly in the Global South. My empirical findings on Facebook use in Myanmar therefore provide a window onto how interlinked online and offline practices might both sustain and transform rural life more broadly. By showing how villagers, especially but not exclusively Chin youth like Benjamin, are harnessing Facebook to send and share material support, connect with families and larger ethnic and religious communities, and learn about and mobilize around land politics, I demonstrate how new social media use extends existing social infrastructures to collectively sustain certain aspects of rural life, albeit in new forms. In the proceeding chapter, I showed how unprecedented agricultural mechanization in a moment of increased migration is reorganizing land use and labor practices, disentangling village life from traditional farming work while reshaping gender roles and relations to market and state. Here I explore another technological transformation: the accelerating use of Facebook. National liberalization enabled the simultaneous influx of tractors, combines and smartphones. These technologies serve as symbols of development in the reform era, but exist within and shape larger patterns of agrarian change. 232 In the next section, I bring together key insights from critical data studies and agrarian studies to theorize the digital village. I next outline methodological implications and approach. I then draw on Facebook-elicitation interviews, participant observation and media review to document the development of Myanmar’s national data infrastructure, and to describe how it enables users to construct virtual villages that are intertwined with material structures and social practices. I then discuss ethnic differences in Facebook use before demonstrating how Chin communities use social media in social reproduction and community development. Next, I turn to the ways that advocacy and activist networks employ the platform in fights for land justice. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings for studies of global development in an age of digital connection. Conceptual Framing Understanding the digital village requires bringing agrarian studies into conversation with the new field of critical data studies. Predecessors to the latter literature have grappled with questions of media, identity and politics for more than two decades. These accounts often build on Ben Anderson’s (1983) foundational insight that a 15th century technology—the printing press—fundamentally changed social connection, allowing readers to participate in imagined communities of nation-states. While the last two decades have not witnessed the demise of these nation-states as Appadurai (1996) predicted, his insights that increased flows of mass media and migration would fundamental transform social identities and politics in the 21st century set the tone for subsequent work on digital media. Miller and Slater’s (2000) seminal ethnography of the internet in Trinidad broke with early accounts of cyberspace by insisting that the internet was rooted in place, and that digital interactions built upon existing socio-material relations. Their 233 work carried a methodological imperative to study digital mediation as embedded in and transforming particular cultures, a directive that guided early anthropology of online communities (Wilson and Peterson 2002). Subsequent qualitative research focused on the entanglement of on and offline relationships and, like Miller and Slater, many studies focused on early adopters of digital technologies: diasporic populations. Centering the large diasporas of countries like Eritrea, Haiti and the Philippines, this research demonstrates how family ties and place-based identities are maintained through, and changed by, digital connections across physical and virtual space (Bernal 2005; Panagakos and Horst 2006). In subsequent years, the use of internet in anti-globalization protests, indigenous movements and the Arab Spring brought the question of internet politics to the forefront of popular debate (Tufekci 2017; Juris 2005; Petray 2011). Digital representations are an increasingly important part of land governance, but social media is not necessarily a vehicle for emancipatory rural politics: in Cambodia, for example, in the aftermath of an independent media crackdown, online platforms increasingly serve the interests of an authoritarian state, and erase rural land struggles (Beban, Schoenberger and Lamb 2020). Today, the social media sites that constitute ‘Web 2.0’ are more interactive and responsive than ever before. The technological affordances of particular sites, as well as the economic and cultural contexts in which they operate, produce a rich and diverse array of interactions (boyd 2015). Facebook, in particular, appears to lend itself to creative, localized adaptations, for example when American moms appropriate the platform for new forms of e-commerce that foster trust without traditional accountability tools (Moser, Resnick, and Schoenebeck 2017), or when Cambodian entrepreneurs and officials tackle urban logistics and rural development challenges (Jack, Chen, and Jackson 2017; Jack et al. in review). These community adaptations 234 take place within the broader politics of Facebook and the global political economy of the internet, systems that are increasingly criticized for imperialism, surveillance and value extraction from the Global South to US tech companies (Zuboff 2019; Young 2019; Kwet 2019). No social science has escaped the ‘digital turn,’ and it is inadvisable to generalize about the widening set of assumptions and approaches to studying the digital age. Yet many sub-fields share a key insight that emerged from earlier work on the internet: the unique characteristics of particular societies shape and are shaped by the entanglement of on- and off-line worlds. This process has been conceptualized as a ‘networked public’ (boyd 2010), ‘digitally networked public sphere’ (Tufekci 2017) and ‘digital environments’ (Frömming et al. 2017). While these approaches differ in their emphasis, they share a recognition that digital technologies, and the virtual sociality they enable, stem from and rework material and social conditions. I extend this insight to theorize the digital village, a simultaneously rural and digital sphere, in which both the specificity of soil and seasons, and the pervasiveness of Facebook use, structure social life and political possibilities. In doing so, I address a persistent urban bias that runs across digital literatures, and follow recent calls in digital geography to move beyond the Global North to investigate the ways in which 'digital technologies challenge notions of place-based identity as defined by a shared location... [as] pre-existing social relations are not extinguished but rather transformed' (Ash, Kitchin, and Leszczynski 2018). Doing so also provides a corrective to dominant development theory and practice, which portrays rural subjects as victims of the ‘digital divide,’ or as objects of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) interventions (Kleine 2018). While barriers to internet access, differences in use, and impacts in rural areas are important subjects of empirical research, the ‘digital divide’ concept more often follows standard 235 development models to render rural people in need of outside improvement, and erase their specificity (Li 2007). I counter this tendency by following Coleman’s (2010) imperative to provincialize digital media, and Elwood and Leszczynski’s (2018) call to attend to the ways in which inequalities are reproduced through them. As a concept, the digital village both signals the commonalities of rural internet use, and invites empirical investigation into its specific manifestations. Building on recent scholarship that highlights the ways in which remittances and mobilities reshape the rural (Rigg 2019; Peluso and Purwanto 2017), I reject an understanding of the peasantry as somehow outside of circuits of capital and cultures of modernity, and instead ask how (former) farmers use digital tools to reproduce, mobilize, and reimagine rural communities in an unevenly connected world. In and beyond Kalay, social media provides one tool to stay connected to the village while seeking work elsewhere. Village residents and their far-flung neighbors use Facebook to connect the village community, build on traditions of grassroots development and mobilize politically, confounding traditional assumptions about rural society and online participation. Interlinked online and offline practices strengthen ties to particular places, families and ethnicities while facilitating flows of material aid and enabling new forms of politics. Methodology Recognizing digital connection has methodological implications. Jenna Burrell (2009) argues for thinking about the field site as a network of digital and virtual spaces, iteratively constructed by the researcher. In doing so, she builds on now-classic anthropological insights that global flows have challenged the traditional notion of a bounded, isolated culture, demanding multi-sited ethnographic strategies (J. Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Marcus 1995). 236 Burrell initially conceived her own research on the internet in Ghana to be sited at internet cafes, but soon realized the limitations of observation there and the impossibility of observing the city and the virtual world as a whole. Rather, to understand the social implications of digital connection, she suggests seeking entry points rather than research sites, mapping various material, social and physical networks and setting their limits, and relying both on in-person interviews and online observation. While Burrell’s specific strategies are particularly useful in cyberspaces, the problem of constructing a networked field site is not unfamiliar in agrarian studies, where a growing number of scholars employ networked approaches to account for migratory circuits and the multi-sited nature of the household. I did not set out to study the digital village. Rather, I was confronted with the entanglement of online and offline worlds over the course of my research on land politics and agrarian change. I first remember an awareness of this in June 2015, when, after a one-day workshop on gender and land in the provincial town of Lashio, attendees suggested that we all keep in touch by forming a group on Viber, a popular messaging app. After Facebook started emerging not only in conversations with Yangon or grassroots activists, but also with villagers, I realized that understanding the arrival of smartphones and internet connectivity was essential to framing and answering my original research questions about the shifting use, values and governance of land. To approach this topic, I follow Burrell in using entry points, most notably village Facebook groups, to help map the flows of ideas, social relationships, and materials that travel across and beyond Myanmar’s land and cyberscapes. I rely on review of five village Facebook groups, as well as ongoing online participant observation in news, government, agriculture, diaspora and activist Facebook profiles, pages, public and messenger groups. In addition, I conducted focus group discussions about technology adoption and use in seven 237 villages and what I call Facebook-elicitation interviews with 16 active village-resident Facebook users. During these semi-structured interviews, I asked questions as we scrolled together through the participant’s phone. Using Facebook together was essential for me to understand how villagers interpreted the meaning of posts, and in these conversations I drew previous experience with participatory photography to discuss the images on the screen, their larger social context, and what they represented, a strategy that resonates with Portilla’s (2017) use of mobile phone photo review to understand rural youth’s relationship to land in Laos. In and beyond Kalay, I had dozens of informal conversations about Facebook and internet use, and sometimes asked to see phones. I incorporated questions into interviews with activists and village heads and observed events such as the Myanmar Digital Rights Forum in January 2019 to better understand the development of Myanmar’s data infrastructure. My longer engagement with and physical residence in Kalay’s villages is essential to my interpretation of digital phenomena. While I spoke with several current villagers who had previously used Facebook to keep in touch while living abroad, my networked field site is purposefully limited to those residing in the village. Resolutely grounded in the specificity of Chin and Burman ethnic communities in my long-term ethnographic field site, this is a story of a particular set of digital villages that invites new inquiries into the ways in which social media reshapes rural societies. Myanmar Data Infrastructures I had only been living in Myanmar for a few months on the late monsoon day when the SIM cards came. To get my own first phone connection, I had paid $120US and collected the tiny chip along with photocopies of the false identity papers associated with the number. A few 238 years before, a mobile SIM had cost over US$1,000, an amount roughly equivalent to Myanmar’s average annual income. Everyone had heard that cheap connections were coming. The government awarded the first private telecoms licenses to the Qatari firm Ooredoo and the Norwegian Telenor in January 2014, and SIM prices had already dropped in anticipation of their entry into the market. On August 2nd, 2014, my roommates and I woke to find the crooked, crowded streets of our Yangon neighborhood festooned with Ooredoo maroon; the Qataris had beat the Norwegians to provide coverage in major cities, and suddenly vendors were selling SIM cards alongside pagoda flower bouquets and steamed buns, all for $1 each. Figure 20: The global business community celebrates Myanmar’s rapid advancement in mobile phone connections (Source: Bloomberg) Since that day, mobile internet connection and the Facebook use it enables have become inextricably part of Myanmar’s economic, political, and social life. According to government figures, Myanmar’s number of internet users rose from two million in 2014 to more than 39 million in the first two years after the liberalization of the telecoms sector, with the number of 239 SIM cards in circulation quadrupling in the same period. The industry hailed telecom liberalization as the opening of the world’s second-to-last telecom frontier (North Korea being the final holdout), and foreign firms invested over US$2.8 billion in 2014 and 2015. According to industry leader GSMA’s mobile connectivity index, Myanmar had 90% 3G coverage and 98% mobile penetration in 2018. By 2018, Facebook had taken a dominant role in Myanmar’s media landscape, influencing both direct users and those who heard the platform’s news second-hand (Lehmann- Jacobsen 2018). While the company has not released an official number of users, estimates range from 14-22 million of the total population of around 53 million. Facebook quickly established itself as the national digital platform by hooking new users with heavy discounts on mobile data usage. For example, from June 2016 to September 2017 Facebook partnered with the government telecommunications company to provide no-cost access to its platform through the Free Basics program, part of a global initiative, internet.org, that the company touts as humanitarian, and critics call digital colonialism. By the time the program was discontinued in Myanmar, government offices, electoral candidates, and Ethnic Armed Organizations cultivated Facebook profiles, and my friends and colleagues in Yangon parted promising to ‘see you soon on Facebook.’ Despite high hopes that digital connection would facilitate democratization, Facebook has provided critical tools to expand repressive government surveillance and spread anti-Muslim violence (Fink 2018; Dean 2017). The government has used the infamous 66d clause of the 2013 Telecommunications Law to clamp down on activist free speech, while failing to address fake news and hate speech that has incited violence since July 2014, when a Facebook rumor that a Muslim man had raped a Buddhist women started race riots. In 2018, international media, 240 Myanmar activists and US lawmakers publicly criticized Facebook for perpetuating the Rohingya genocide and pointed out that the Myanmar military uses the platform to actively promote racist propaganda, forcing the company to issue apologies, hire Myanmar-speaking content moderators, and ban dozens of generals from the site. These corporate steps are modest, particularly in light of the government’s ongoing internet blackout, which has continued for over a year in parts of Rakhine State. These events provided a sobering corrective to utopian predictions that the internet would deliver digital freedoms to Myanmar, and raise new questions about how Facebook use functions to enable or restrict political, economic and social life. The answer, to quote a notorious Facebook status, is that ‘It’s complicated.’ New Burma Studies scholarship has investigated proliferating forms of media and their contradictory relationships to the current political transition, emphasizing that contemporary social media are embedded in histories of censorship and communication (Yan Naung Oak and Brooten 2019). Facebook use and its significance depend on and alter pre-existing communication practices developed under authoritarian rule, and vary across different social groups (G. McCarthy 2018; Schissler 2015). For example, recent reports have highlighted the ways in which Facebook is used by Muslim women to forge economic independence through e-commerce (Frydenlund and Schun Lei forthcoming) and #metoo activists to break the stigma of talking about sexual harassment (Kyaw and Miedema 2020). These studies hint at the diversity of online practices taking place within Myanmar, and point to the necessity of grounded research on how different populations make creative use of the platform within terms set by a foreign corporation and a repressive government. Welcome to the Digital Village 241 Around Kalay, village society is increasingly a digital society. This does not mean that everyone uses the internet, but rather that the internet, specifically Facebook accessed by mobile phones, is becoming inseparable from daily practices such as sharing news, making money, and communicating with families that constitute rural social life. Internet use is not erasing analogue practices and inequalities, but rather building on these to reinforce class and generational divides. This shift was enabled by the remarkable increase in mobile phone availability, spurred by the government’s reform of the telecom sector. Ten years ago, there were almost no phones in the villages around Kalay; to make a call, one would have to travel, usually by bicycle, to a town with a phone rental business, and pay to call on a landline phone. In focus groups, respondents reported that cell phones first appeared in the village between 2010 and 2014, when the richest or luckiest residents could afford to buy a SIM card, or won them in ‘lucky draw’ phone lotteries. In all the villages, phones became more popular after prices started to decline and all groups reported that in early 2019, every household had a phone. As I traveled through the villages, I found that all but the poorest Chin and Burman youth had a personal smartphone. Most had received it in the last three years, and now reported using Facebook every day. While Facebook was not the only information and communication technology in the villages— many older people relied on TV for news, and those with migration experience had often experimented with messaging services such as Viber, Line and We Chat, as well as mobile money services such as Wave Money—internet browsing was almost unheard of, and Facebook was clearly king. In just a few years, the platform, and the smartphones that enabled its use, had gone from nonexistent to ubiquitous. Smartphone owners participated in a variety of Facebook activities. Some read news from print media outlets, government or party pages, or MPs’ profiles, others abstained from 242 politics and watched sports. Almost everyone followed a local news group called ‘Everything to Know about Kalay City’ that documented traffic accidents, job vacancies, homes for sale, and festivals in the main town. People used Facebook to further their livelihood strategies: several young women had joined Facebook groups about sewing to build their tailoring businesses; one young man planning to migrate for work had joined a Korean language group. Villagers occasionally followed groups like one titled ‘Let’s Share the Challenges and Successes of Rice Farming,’ which featured posts selling seeds or offering promotions; offering advice on how to use small tractors, grow rice in different seasons, or make organic fertilizer; and documenting protests about falling rice prices. Individuals posted photos of family and friends, and text that ranged from Buddhist or Christian teachings to political opinions to original fiction. They chatted with Facebook friends, who could be family abroad, next door neighbors, or people they had never met. Attitudes about who to ‘friend’ ranged and were often a source of humor—for example when focus group participants teased each other about joining the social network to meet girlfriends. Unlike American Facebook, users did not necessarily see Facebook profiles as reflections of their offline selves. They chose new names and photos, and frequently used the site to chat with strangers. When asked about the advantages and disadvantages of Facebook, respondents noted the ability to get information, including sectoral knowledge and news of current events. Many mentioned better communication, especially with family abroad. Despite harsh words, inappropriate posts, and rumors of hacking and scams, everyone I spoke with believed that Facebook use would increase. One young Burman woman I will call Ma Hlaing illustrates some of the ways in which villagers used social media. I first met Ma Hlaing in March 2019, when she attended a technology focus group discussion in her village. As we sat on the monastery floor listening to 243 the men explain tractors and combine harvesters, I noticed several older women looking over the shoulder of a woman in her early thirties, who was scrolling on her smartphone. When we asked about phones, the older men fell silent, and Ma Hlaing volunteered that she had two Facebook accounts, one for learning and one for personal use. Confused and intrigued, I returned later to interview Ma Hlaing. Her parents’ house was adjacent to the 1-acre plot where the family grew pagoda flowers for sale. Ma Hlaing took a break from sewing an angyi, traditional woman’s blouse, to serve us tea leaf salad and fried snacks. It was the hot part of the day in the hottest season, and her husband, a traditional healer, father, a former driver, and mother, a tailor, all lounged on the floor nearby. Ma Hlaing’s household was somewhat exceptional in that they had used a cable phone for business before the cell phone era. Ma Hlaing said that she had personally used a smartphone for two or three years, and used Facebook every day. She was reducing her use because Facebook was distracting and expensive—she now turned off the data and put her phone away while working, which allow her to reduce credit costs from 20,000mkk to 5,000mmk a month. A friend had created her first account to help her find clothing designs and sewing tutorial videos. After the 2015 floods destroyed the family’s garden, she had used this account to buy seeds for the pagoda flowers. A broker in Mandalay advertised the seed’s sale on an agriculture Facebook group; she communicated with him via messenger and sent payment on Wave Money. She had used the same Facebook group to get advice about pest eradication by posting photos of the afflicted plants with a caption requesting suggestions for treatment. A year later she created a second account to talk with friends, though she rarely checked or posted, and only had about 15 friends. Her father and husband used Facebook to watch sports and read news, but she told me, in front of them, that she did not friend them online because they would annoy her. She read local news on ‘Everything to Know about Kalaymyo’ and occasionally to about 244 ‘Mother Suu’ (NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi), but she primarily used Facebook to build her family sewing and flower businesses. She did not belong to any religious or political Facebook groups, and there was no Facebook group for the village. During the chat I waited impatiently for images to load on groups like ‘Happy learning for sewing’ and ‘Let’s make beautiful clothes.’ Ma Hlaing’s phone was a small Chinese model, which she kept charged off a battery linked to solar panels. As we spoke, our mutual friend Thiri, a farmer and land law trainer of a similar age who lived several houses away, looked over our shoulders at the small screen, directing Ma Hlaing to friend a town resident who posted frequent local news updates, and a national celebrity famous for his funny weather forecasts. Not everyone in the village used Facebook. Thiri herself had once been an avid user, but had been offline since her phone stopped working three months before. Without reifying the digital divide, I did observe differences in internet use across urban and rural places, and also across class and generation. Rural people noted that high costs and poorer coverage limited their data usage, and rarely mentioned computers, Google, or other hardwares and softwares common in Yangon, and even Kalay city. One household I interviewed in December 2018, the poorest in that village with a dozen children, had bought a mobile phone the previous year but had not been able to afford to replace it after it broke. Another friend, an older agricultural laborer and land law trainer, could barely afford credit for his tiny, battered keypad phone. He was often confused about who was calling, since the screen was smashed, and asked me to top up his credit so that he could afford to call me back. Older farmers like this one often used ‘brick’ phones rather than smartphones, and, in focus groups, notably quieted when it came time to talk about the internet, or told us bluntly to ask the youth. In one focus group with elder Chin men in March 2019, one of the farmers 245 explained that while they thought that phones were useful—they could be used to call city fertilizer shops, fish brokers and customers, or to coordinate water usage among irrigation groups—expensive, internet-enabled devices were not practical. One explained, ‘For a real farmer it is not good to use a smartphone. The old generation drops it in the water again and again.’ Some elders I spoke with did use Facebook. Like Benjamin’s mother, many had been taught by their children. In the focus group, one man showed us a video his son had found for him showing a machine that reaped and bunched rice. The elders crowded around his phone and deemed the video entertaining but unrealistic; such an expensive machine was too expensive for small farmers like themselves. Rather than using the internet personally, many of farmers relied on their children, all of whom were online, for Facebook updates about traffic accidents and local events. This extension of online activities into offline spaces through intergenerational ties is a core characteristic of the digital village. Ethnic Differences in Facebook Use Some people I spoke with, like Ma Hlaing, were mostly observers in digital spaces, reading news and friends’ conversations without commenting, and seeking additional information sparingly, in private chats. Others, like Benjamin, were active participants, projecting their opinions and experiences in posts, comments, and direct messages to politicians, or curating the content of Facebook groups as ‘admins.’ I make a distinction between individual or collective-oriented online participation. Consuming news, flirting over messenger, and posting one’s status to a profile page, while certainly social, are qualitatively distinct from digital activities that create and maintain online communities. While individual online behaviors varied, in general, I found users of the dominant ethnic group (Burman) were more passive and 246 individual, while minority (Chin) users were more active and collective in their online activities. These different ethnic accounts of technological change challenge a linear notion of digital literacy or progress and highlight how particular social histories shape the adoption and use of digital tools. One obvious difference across ethnic social media was language—Burman people posted and read almost exclusively Burmese, while Chin people might use their mother tongue, Burmese, some English, and a few other Chin languages. For some active users I spoke to, using ethnic minority languages provided a sense of safety, since few government staff would be able to read comments that might be critical or intimate. Using Chin languages also strengthened tribal and ethnic ties. One young Chin woman I interviewed posted original poetry and short stories on her profile in Falam, her native language, and explained that Facebook allowed her to share her work and promote Falam literature far beyond the confines of the village, to over 4,000 friends. Ethnic minority groups around Myanmar have long fostered linguistic traditions in Language and Culture Committees; Facebook groups posting short stories or jokes in Chin languages extended this cultural project. Another difference between Burman and Chin users was the number, and level of engagement with, various Facebook groups. In over a dozen Burman villages around the Kalay, I found only one village Facebook Group (figure 21). In contrast, most Chin villages had one or more. Chin users were also more likely to join and actively participate in other types of groups, detailed below. These differences illustrate the collective and active use of Facebook platforms for community connection in Chin villages, and stem from particular ethnic histories of international migration and social organization. Most importantly, due both to persecution at home and opportunities for work and refugee status abroad, Chin people have a much longer 247 history of migration. Burman villagers have sometimes migrated within the country, but are only now beginning to move abroad for work in substantial numbers. Because family in the US, Australia, Thailand and Malaysia both brought back new technologies and know-how, and necessitated (and often funded) technological engagement to sustain communication, Chin people had a much longer history of, and perceived need for, digital connection. Figures 21: A Burman village Facebook group This was evident when I asked Chin and Burman villagers what they had used before Facebook. Burman villagers talked about landline payphones or, more often, riding bicycles to neighboring villages to share news. In contrast, Chin villagers often referred to ‘Gmail kit,’ or, the era of Gmail. For Chin users, Gmail enabled communication between far-flung families, news of village events, and information about remittance flows, which typically came via 248 Western Union, long before the arrival of Facebook. But the era of Gmail was over, they explained: cheap mobile internet connections and Facebook had quickly supplanted the letter- like email with an interactive medium that could serve as news source, soapbox, and meeting space, in addition to facilitating private communication. These different communication histories—the era of the bicycle and the era of Gmail—reflect distinct scales and cultures of contact that structured how Facebook was perceived and used. Internet use is not erasing analogue practices and inequalities, but rather building on these to recreate ethnically-distinct social forms. The ways that Burman and Chin people around Kalay used Facebook were distinct, not only in terms of language but also in terms of level of collective engagement. The active and collaborative use of groups and pages in Chin communities stemmed in part from a longer history of migration and access to information and communications technologies, but also built on existing Chin social infrastructures. Next, I turn to the ways in which Chin communities used Facebook to represent, reproduce and develop their villages. Social Media as Social Reproduction in Chin Communities By 2019, Facebook had become a part of life in both Burman and Chin villages, despite different patterns of access and use. But Chin people were particularly active in adapting Facebook platforms to support and extend analogue ethnic institutions—churches, newspapers, and development associations—that had long organized community life. These interlinked online and offline practices strengthened ties to particular places, families and ethnicities while facilitating flows of material aid. In this process, social media became a critical mode of social reproduction, understood broadly to include maintenance of family ties, community identity, and 249 material resources. At the same time, Facebook allowed villagers to expand long-standing traditions of kothukotha, or do-it-yourself development, in a mobile, digital age. Chin villagers built on existing cultural practices to strengthen family and ethnic identities through Facebook use. Family Facebook messenger groups allowed parents and children to communicate across space. Chin print media outlets are prolific; on Facebook, journalists started at least a dozen new digital news sources in multiple Chin languages. Ethnic gender norms also appeared unchanged online; ‘admins’ in Village Facebook Groups, like religious and secular leaders in Chin villages, were almost exclusively male. Writing in an ethnic minority language allowed authors to feel safe from government scrutiny, and to actively celebrate Chin culture in the myriad groups sharing jokes, marriage advice, or literature in different Chin languages. In contrast, Burman users tended to join fewer groups, follow only mainstream national media or the Kalaymyo page described above, and to abstain from public, collective displays of support. One Burman woman in her 50s did tell me that, in addition to following national politics and sharing her own political party activities, she had used Facebook messenger to coordinate with villagers working in other Myanmar cities to send money for Buddhist donations. This woman lived in the only Burman village I found with its own Facebook group, but, like many residents, she was not a member. Rather, her donation collection was private. These individual activities contrast with the collective, public action seen on Chin group pages. The village Facebook group provides an entry point to understand how social media facilitates rural social reproduction. Village Facebook groups were not all the same, but they were generally private groups requiring membership and post approval by an administrator. The most active had several posts per day and thousands of members. In some places, village groups 250 were supplemented by Facebook groups for community development, youth, churches, or diaspora, with titles like ‘[Village Name] Family in Malaysia’ or ‘[Village Name] Family USA.’ With the exception of the one Burman village group, in which the comparatively few posts were all written in Burmese, most groups relied predominantly on the Chin language most common in the village, with occasional use of other Chin languages, Burmese or English. A review of posts in several village Facebook groups reveals common themes. Groups provided platforms to share timely, locally-useful information such as weather forecasts, motorcycle sales, and requests for exotic meat. Posts documented daily activities, including village meetings, clean-up campaigns, traffic accidents, funerals, and festivals. One group featured a ‘live watch party,’ a specific Facebook feature that allows streaming video, of a praise and worship ceremony at a village church. This video-conferencing of daily village life suggested village groups play an important role in keeping non-resident villagers socially, and even spiritually, connected. Several former migrants and village residents explained that a central purpose of these groups was to share information with those living abroad. Some Facebook groups for larger Chin towns, regions, or sub-ethnicities were in fact created and administered by Chin living abroad, who paid a modest salary and sometimes sent smartphones to clever youth willing to update the page with local news. While direct diasporic funding was not present in any of the smaller village groups I studied, the groups’ content represented migration as intrinsic to village life, for example by featuring job vacancy announcements in Kalay, Yangon or abroad, and public service announcements about migration and common English words. Village Facebook groups were cultural artifacts and media objects produced by and inseparable from both in situ everyday life, and translocal mobility. 251 Documenting and encouraging financial and material support from abroad back to the village community was another critical Facebook function. Village groups showcased the generosity of members living abroad, for example in a post expressing appreciation for a donation of cups and money from a young woman working as a maid in Singapore. Cups were a particularly useful cultural object, since villagers would use them to serve chicken soup during funerals, which traditionally lasted one day and one night, during which the community stayed up and sang together. Photographs included in the post showed the cups themselves, the girl’s parents handing over the box and cash to the community group, and the girl herself smiling under a Singapore skyscraper. After just 18 hours, the post had elicited 276 likes and 49 comments expressing gratitude. Community donation and development are not new in rural Myanmar, where the historic absence of state support and international aid has meant that kothukotha, or ‘do-it-yourself development,’ has long played an important role in creating and maintaining village infrastructures in both Burman and ethnic minority communities (Griffiths 2018). Practices of donation also had religious roots: when I attended Church in Chin villages, the service often included words of gratitude for microphones or money sent by a member of the congregation living abroad, and one of my friend’s churches had a prominent sign displaying a running tally of donations to date. Many Chin villages had started Facebook groups as an extension of older community associations, whether religious or secular. This was the case in Mizo Ywa, a Chin village located just outside Kalay town. Mizo Ywa did not look like my Burman host village Hla Ywa. Its infrastructure and landscape has been transformed by high levels of migration. Rather than the simple wood or thatch homes surrounded by rice paddies, Mizo Ywa’s main street boasted several multi-story 252 cement houses, many complete with calendars of ‘Miss Chin Australia.’ Beyond this were smaller homes surrounded by water. As I described in chapter one, after the 2015 floods destroyed most of the rice land, villagers used capital sent from abroad to create fish ponds and buy pigs and chickens, a livelihood better suited to increasing labor constraints. We held our technology focus group in an enormous home with tiled floors, running water, and photographs of the owner’s children in Australia and Norway. Older participants reported that their children had set up their Facebook accounts, and that they used family messenger groups to communicate with sons and daughters in Korea, New Zealand, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand the UAE, and the US. They also mentioned the International Mizo Ywa Association, a Facebook group that connected local residents to villagers living abroad. After the discussion, I accepted an invitation to visit the home of one of the participants, a one-room cement building completely surrounded by fish ponds. As we drank tea, the owner said he knew little about aquaculture, but was willing to try given land degradation, the lack of work opportunities, and the availability of cash sent by his children to hire machinery and buy fish stock. Later, a young man living in this village explained to me that the International Mizo Ywa Association had been founded before his time, ‘in the Gmail era,’ so that villagers abroad could provide funding for local poor and community events. The IMWA was proceeded and complemented by other village organizations with longer histories, namely, the Mizo Ywa Youth Association and the Church. IMWA’s activities were still coordinated by a ‘web master’ living in Norway, but with the arrival of Facebook the villagers now conducted much of the Association business in a Facebook group, whose administrator they selected by an annual vote. Officers of various regional associations, for example the president, vice-president, and treasurer of the Mizo Ywa Association USA, were also selected annually, and announced on the Facebook 253 group. On the day of our interview in a cold drinks shop at the edge of Kalaymyo, the young man estimated that everyone with a phone in the 350-household village had joined the group. Consistent with his estimate, when we checked together on his phone, the group had 1.5 thousand members. The IMWA Facebook group was more regulated than others I learned about. The young man explained that the administrator was responsible to ensure that posts did not reflect badly on the village, and that financial matters were handled via established protocols and paperwork—likely holdovers from the Gmail era—in a private messenger group. In village Facebook groups, preexisting social practices, the needs and funds of the diaspora, and the interactive, mobile nature of digital information combined to provide a powerful form of grassroots rural development. Once I started looking for these groups, they were everywhere. I had known Piang Piang since early 2017 and heard him talk about his charity group, but it was not until almost two years later that I visited his village. I rolled up, dusty and freezing, huddled in the back of truck on a December morning. The village was about an hour’s drive North from Kalay and tucked inside the boundary of Chin State. Though we were only at the foot of the Chin Hills, as I gratefully accepted a steaming cup of tea and listened to the chatter in Tedim language, I felt I had been transported to the mountains. I was there to accompany a friend from Kalay who was donating winter coats. Piang Piang explained that the group had divided the villagers into three categories of need, and would distribute the coats accordingly. We took photographs of my friend shaking Piang Piang’s hand in front of the village school and pile of coats, which both of them later shared on Facebook. Piang Piang had co-founded the village development group when he was working in Malaysia in 2014. The group had used Facebook almost immediately, relying on the platform not only to share public announcements of donations but also for messenger groups between 254 administrators who lived in the village, China and Malaysia. A few months later, I returned to interview three young women currently volunteering for the group. All of them had recently returned from Singapore, where they used Facebook messenger to coordinate pooling wages and sending a donation to purchase an oxygen tank, a critical resource for medical emergencies given the long drive to the hospital. After the interview, I donated enough to buy an additional oxygen tank. Again, we took photos together, Piang Piang and I each holding one side of the conspicuous brown envelope. Afterwards, Piang Piang asked me to write my name and suggested English text for his Facebook post. Historic state neglect has also made grassroots social mobilization crucial to disaster recovery. In Kalay, Facebook was used to solicit support after the 2015 monsoon floods that devastated Kalay valley. Grassroots activists explained to me that, in the absence of a systematic government response, they had posted photos and requests for aid, and communicated via Facebook to receive donations from across Myanmar and abroad and disburse them to those in need. In the violent eviction case described in chapter four, diasporic aid solicited through and recorded on the Facebook profiles of grassroots leaders played a crucial role in supporting displaced settlers, one of whom told me she had learned in Church how to responsibly record and redistribute funds. Funds were often sent to local leaders or family members via Western Union, and used to purchase rice locally, which was then distributed to a list of displaced families. In one Facebook post, a community leader gave thanks for aid, listing contributions from Chin communities in Myanmar, Australia, the US, and Europe totaling over US$5,000, and called for additional support from the global Chin community. Facebook did not originate do-it-yourself development or collective aid, rather, villagers and local leaders used the platform to amplify and extend existing mechanisms of day-to-day 255 support and emergency response. Around Kalay, Chin communities were particularly active in harnessing the technological affordances of Facebook groups to encourage multimedia participation amongst a curated but geographically dispersed public. Similar forms of online communication and collective action were a key component of emergent forms of grassroots political mobilization. Digital Land Politics One day at John Keats’ home as we waited for sunset, I asked how he got involved with activism. It started with the protest of the Chinese copper mine at Snake Mountain, he told me. That was 2012, 2013. He visited the villages, just an hour’s motorcycle drive from his own, to explain environmental and social impact assessments, and went all the way to Hakha, the seat of the Chin State Government, and to the national capital, Naypyitaw, to discuss the matter with Chin members of parliament. ‘What came next,’ I asked. ‘Was it the bazaar corruption case?’ I gestured at the village market, just down the road from Keats’ home. I had heard these stories many times. They were familiar, but tangled up in late night discussions over Keats’ favorite drink, paosi, or ‘dumpling,’ slang for cheap whiskey poured into a glass of cheaper beer. Keats reached for his phone to answer my question. ‘Sure, let me check Facebook.’ He had opened his account shortly after the Snake Mountain case. During the 2015 floods, organizations in Yangon and abroad responded to his posts about the devastation by sending donations for emergency response. Keats posted photographs of the donation receipts and the materials he purchased being used to help survivors. He scrolled back through his timeline, showing me photos from his village trainings on environmental issues and translating irate posts about the new Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Land Law, which he explained to me was a trap for local people so the government 256 could give their rights to the cronies. During his battles, Facebook had helped Keats coordinate and get his message out. Now, it served as his archive. For Keats, Facebook was inseparable from activism. Facebook is also remaking the terrain of Myanmar’s land politics. This is both because the Myanmar Government and the Facebook corporation have made the platform essential to official governance and national debate, and because public campaigns, dispersed networks, and individual activists like John Keats use the platform to start and sustain movements for land and agrarian justice. The reform government embraced Facebook a key medium of official communication. In the latter half of Thein Sein’s presidency (2011-2016), the Minister of Information’s Facebook Page became a primary news source, often being the first to announce major policies and actions. Under the NLD, each government office has a Page; de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s ‘Myanmar State Counsellor Office’ Page, for example, had over 1.2 million followers in September 2019, with almost daily posts in Burmese and English documenting her activities, each garnering thousands of likes. In April 2020, she started a personal page that amassed over two million followers in its first month. These pages are not just propaganda. Facebook pages for federal and provincial forest and agricultural departments are key sources of information about new rules and regulations, as demonstrated in a post from a provincial department sharing updated instructions and application forms for Community Forests (figure 22). Elected Members of Parliament used Facebook profile pages to demonstrate their efforts to constituents, whether through videos of their speeches on the Parliamentary floor, lists of local infrastructural improvements written in local ethnic languages, or by sharing the NLD’s posts showing photos of new roads throughout the Union. Facebook also provides a space of communication and 257 accountability with MPs, and Keats and other activists I spoke with used public comments and private messages to advocate to their representatives on land issues. These forms of political communication, which take place in-person, via email, phone and websites in the US, occur predominately on Facebook. Figure 22 (left): A regional Forest Department post about new Community Forest application procedures. Figure 23 (right): A satirical cartoon circulated on a farming Facebook Group. Facebook is a critical tool for social mobilization. Over the last five years, organized Facebook Pages and public campaigns have become ubiquitous among Yangon-based networks and groups working on land issues as well as environment, peace, and gender. After amendments to the Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Land Law in passed in September 2018 to set a 6-month deadline to register land, a national land rights network launched a major Facebook campaign to 258 protest the law, complete with colorful and terrifying memes counting down the days until the government would take ancestral lands away from ethnic minorities (see chapter three). At the same time, individual organizations posted updates and warnings about the deadline’s implementation in each of the provinces. Grassroots activists in my own network post a steady stream of photographs depicting protests over rice prices or land grabs, and evidence of illegal logging. Posts like figure 23 adapt and circulate satirical cartoons, a genre of political critique with a long history in Myanmar. The image depicts Sayar San, a national hero who led the 1930-32 anti-colonial peasant rebellion, asking incredulously, ‘The agricultural sector has not developed until now, huh?!’ A terrified farmer with a sickle answers diminutively, ’Yes sir, Sayar San.’ I found the cartoon posted in a farming Facebook group with over 78,000 members, accompanied by a long essay entitled ‘Stepped on.’ The text shared one farmer’s personal story of struggle, critiqued the government’s neglect of farmers despite the historic importance of agriculture, and bemoaned the lack of machines, fertilizers, and support services. Despite the fact that the group’s description warned against discussing politics, this social critique was authored by a group administrators and sparked active discussion, including requests for more posts and allegations of government corruption. Both centralized social media campaigns and individual posts leverage Facebook’s popularity and interactive nature to incite protest, refusal and debate about alternative values. Activists used Facebook to sustain their networks, and themselves. I found the Ayarwaddy Forest Department Community Forest Instructions post through two separate private messenger chats for Myanmar land activists, and during my fieldwork these were used to spread information about new laws and upcoming events and to organize trainings and travel. One 259 prominent Yangon land activist explained to me that while foreigners dominated the major land issues email group, Facebook messenger was the most important form of communication for Myanmar activists, provincial officials, and farmer’s unions. For individual land activists, many of whom are prolific Facebook users, public posts not only provide a chance to spread advocacy messages and scathing critique, but also celebrate their achievements in what can be difficult and dangerous work. Some I spoke with felt that active Facebook use also provided some measure of safety through publicity, making it harder for the government to disappear them secretly. In Kalay, I shared and received news of human rights, environment and mapping trainings, and social events through a group for land law trainers, and followed local land and human trafficking cases on friends’ feeds. But Facebook activism was often centered in Yangon, and heavily saturated with the selfies of a few charismatic individuals. While few farmers produced radical content, by reading posts and perhaps joining groups they were exposed to a wider set of ideas, information and critique than had been possible under the military regime. And for grassroots activists like Keats, Facebook provided a toolkit to connect, speak out, and document continued neglect and injustices. Conclusion Youth like Benjamin had little interest in farming, yet they used social media to stay connected with and support the village and many planned to make a life there after periods of work abroad. Their engagement highlights how quotidian practices of Facebook messaging, posting, and commenting—activities that Leszczynski (2019) dubs the ‘digital mundane’—are increasingly important to sustaining social and material infrastructures and to mobilizing for land rights in rural Myanmar. In this chapter, I bring agrarian studies into conversation within critical 260 data studies to theorize situated social media practices as a form of rural social reproduction. Facebook use sustains the village materially (through provision of money and aid), culturally (through celebration of places and ethnic heritage) and socially (through family and village ties). At the same time, online mobilizations are increasingly central to land struggles. Rather than representing a universal form or a rupture with the past, the digital village is rooted in place, shaped by ethnic histories of migration, technological use, and religious organization. In my networked field site, people use Facebook to build on old forms of social cohesion developed under the authoritarian regime, whether do-it-yourself development, Christian traditions of donation, or activist networks. Their online activities change both the landscapes of home and the tactics of land politics. Facebook in Myanmar challenges existing theorizations of development actors and processes. Facebook is the consumer product of a powerful American company whose main motivation is profit. The story of Facebook’s spread, and shirking of moral responsibility, in Myanmar is quintessentially capitalist. The Myanmar government regulates online expression and has cut off internet access in conflict zones. And yet, this private American platform has become an essential domain for national and grassroots politics. Facebook has become a primary medium not only for debate, but through which rural people follow government announcements of new roads and bridges, and therefore come to know the state. In Yangon, I spoke to several aid workers and app developers working on digital tools for agricultural extension, but I never met a farmer in Kalay who used them. Instead, rural users harnessed the platform to advance grassroots mobilization, support their communities, build livelihood strategies, and celebrate collective identities. As the economic role of farming and land-based income in village life is decreasing in Myanmar, land-based social ties are celebrated and maintained in Facebook groups 261 and activists networks. These tensions raise new questions about possibilities for creative online engagement within larger systems of uneven development, repressive states and global capitalism, and invite new inquiries into the diverse forms and consequences of digital villages. Like the combine harvesters and tractors explored in the previous chapter, the smartphone’s arrival is due to reforms aimed at connecting Myanmar to global markets. All of these technologies turn a profit for foreign companies and serve as symbols of national development, but they also exist within and shape larger patterns of agrarian change. Villagers’ hybrid and creative use of new technologies carry material and economic implications— changing the mode of agricultural production and its labor demands in the case of combines and amplifying diasporic support in the case of smartphones. They also create new political possibilities, whether new channels of communication and circulation via social media or by shifting the historical relationships between farmers, private sellers and provincial officials. Finally, examining the adoption of these technologies highlights changing social values and structures, for example when Singaporean maids gain income and status above that of their rice- farming fathers or when the village expands into the virtual domain. Attention not only to class and ethnicity but also to the relations of gender and generation is essential to understanding how each of these technologies are received, used and reimagined. 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