ИСТИНА

Since the mid-eighteenth century, Burmese polity saw an intensified interaction with its neighboring regions paralleled with the consolidation of Burmese control over frontier areas. Such accelerating connectivity, further augmented by colonial and post-colonial experiences after the nineteenth century, exposed Burma to a range of novel social and administrative challenges. Indigenous vocabulary used to describe non-Burmese identities well into the late nineteenth century comprised of rather vague and fluid terms that made little differentiation between ethnic, religious, and social belonging. For instance, the term lu-myo (lit. “a class of people,” presently used to signify ethnicity, nationality, and race) was applied to ethnic and religious communities, castes, social classes and service groups, and occasionally even royal dynasties. Several terms were used as the approximations of “religion” and “creed,” each with its own range of contexts and targets. Arguably, such taxonomies were pegged to differentiate communities with specific legal or social standing under Burmese custom. Yet, despite its notably localized nature, this vocabulary was also dependent on self-representation of such communities and their ability to negotiate their status with the Burmese court. Drawing on a diverse set of cases reflected in legal, administrative, and diplomatic documents as well as in art materials created at the capital, at frontier trading hubs, and in areas with mixed populations, the paper will explore the evolution of Burmese conceptions of ethnicity and trace the impact of contacts with state and non-state actors from Asia and Europe on it. Though focused primarily on early modern period and on members of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian communities, the paper would also briefly discuss how and to what extent these taxonomies were altered by the imposition of colonial legislation and globalizing discourses of more universal sociological frameworks and how the legacies of pre-colonial usage persist in contemporary Burmese understandings of ethnicity.