Beyond the Trans-National: Rethinking Mon Pasts through Networks

• In Event: Burma in the World/Burma and the World: Celebrating the Career of Michael Adas - Sponsored by the Burma Studies Group

Abstract

The modern nation-state of Burma (Myanmar) bounds the history of the Mons. A Mon past has been incorporated into the national history of Burma so that the Mon presence is pivotal to a national narrative of the modern country. Mon nationalists and intellectuals have found this incorporation useful because it establishes their position before that of the Burmans.

Mon pasts, however, have never been limited to the modern territory of Burma. Historical, archaeological, and art-historical researches all suggest a wider presence in the region. With a sizeable population in Thailand, a logical move might be to write a trans-national history of the Mons. Yet this border crossing would place the Mons under not one, but two, constraining meta narratives of the Mons playing crucial, but eclipsed, roles in the creation of Burma and Thailand

A focus instead on Mon networks and communities is one way to rethink Mon pasts. Networks of trade, textual, and cultural exchange place people in the foreground and push the nation—whether the Mon nation or larger nation-states—into the background. This strategy is not without complications, any attempt to take the past, Mon or otherwise, out of the nation means also to question long accepted understandings of ethnicity. Ethnicity is the foundational means for establishing the subject in historical writing. Writing from outside the nation has the potential to cause “the Mon” to fall out of focus or disappear altogether.

Author

• Patrick McCormick, École française d’Extrême-Orient