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Session Submission Type: Organized Panel
In Burma, knowledge of the wider world and the ways in which it was first dispensed in written form and progressively through visual materials by the sangha and the crown have largely served to establish a sacred and political order. Early on, notions of cosmology adapted from Pali literature strictly determined the place of all sentient beings in an overall hierarchy of realms extending from subterranean to celestial abodes and helped to plot Burmese sacred space on the basis of the Buddhist geography of Ancient India. Closer in time, empirical knowledge gained from land surveys helped to establish cadastral records, define boundaries between principalities, and locate the most appropriate place for the construction of new royal centers; in this, it served to consolidate local or regional political power and also to exacerbate the rivalry of colonial powers for regional domination.
The making of sacred charts and topographical maps has continuously developed well into the early twentieth century. While only the sangha out of the two institutional agents in charge has remained, it had to negotiate ever more widely-accepted positivist approaches to knowledge and attempt to offer a revised interpretation of its traditional worldview.
The panel seeks to examine the representations of these contrasting worldviews, the role of institutional agents in defining them and shaping spatial and geographical consciousness. The diversity of the panel members’ backgrounds promises to bring stimulating insights into the ideas and practices that generated the development of Burmese cartography from pre-modern times to colonial and post-colonial eras.
Plotting Cosmological Space in Burmese Art - Alexandra Green, The British Museum
Between Myth and Empirical Knowledge: Map-Making and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Burma - Francois Tainturier, Inya Institute
Using Burmese Sketches to Draw British Maps: Forms and Limits of a Geographic Encounter (Late 19th – Early 20th Century) - Marie de Rugy, University Paris 1-Pantheon Sorbonne
Our Homeland and Our Sāsana: A Brief History of Burma’s Changing Buddhist Landscape - Patrick Pranke, University of Louisville