Today’s post picks up on yesterday’s refutation of the claim that the Rohingya can be easily classified as a “racial” identity. First, as a general defense, let me say that my article that posited Burman ethnic identity as a privileged identity similar to White privilege in the West was intended mainly to show the utility of the framework of privilege in a Burmese context and to demonstrate that it was indeed transferable. It’s clear that any given context will contain multiple axes of privilege and even a single person will find herself privileged in one situation based on one aspect of her identity and oppressed in the next based on another aspect. It’s probably not even fair to claim that ethnicity is the most significant axis of privilege in the country, although it probably is the most publicized. Ian has raised the issue of race with regard to the Rohingya but gender privilege is all the more entrenched and is particularly challenging because of the presence of strong myths that insist (falsely) on a tradition of gender equality in Myanmar.

The initial challenge is that there are no words in Burmese that clearly map onto either “race” or “ethnicity”. The most commonly used word is lu myo, which literally translates as “type of person”. Discrete categories of race or ethnicity arose in the West and were generally transplanted to other countries through colonial practices of classification and categorization. This doesn’t mean that people didn’t have discernible identities prior to colonialism (or that there wasn’t discrimination), but rather that the boundaries were more permeable and not necessarily based on things such as birth culture or skin color.

When you ask a Burmese person what lu myo she is, the most common response will probably be related to ethnicity. But, given that some common identities in Myanmar are in fact national identities, one might also hear “Chinese” or “Indian”. Indeed, if someone asked me this question, not having an ethnicity in the Burmese sense, I would respond “American lu myo” and this would make perfect sense. (Even though there is a separate term to indicate “citizenship”, it’s not usually used in this context.) In some situations, the response might also be a religious identity, more likely a non-Buddhist identity, but I and several colleagues have heard people respond to this question by saying, “I’m Buddhist”. (It’s also worth noting that, reflective of their insensitivity to the complexity and specificity of local understandings of identity, the UNFPA, that is advising on the current census, simply and unproblematically equates lu myo with ethnicity.)

Another term that refers more directly to ethnicity is tain yin tha. This is used mostly to refer to the ethnic groups more generally, although, as I point out in the article, it is still not very precise because it is not clear whether the term includes the Burman majority or not. I have argued that the vague referent of this term is actually a reflection of Burman majority privilege because, in everyday speech, tain yin tha is taken to refer to the non-Burman ethnic groups, but occasionally Burmans can strategically include themselves in the category if they want to de-emphasize their majority position and portray themselves as simply one among many ethnic groups in the country.

Yesterday’s post ended up noting the conceptual confusion between Ian’s characterization of the Rohingya as a racial identity and his use of primarily religious terms. Admittedly, these elements are often effectively intertwined in Myanmar, which leads me to a provisional conclusion that, while incorporating a “racial” category might not be the proper corrective to my focus on ethnicity, a more productive approach could be to focus instead on the ways in which particular configurations of identities (Burmese Muslim versus Rohingya Muslim, or Shan Buddhist man versus Burman Buddhist woman) combine to create different levels of privilege or oppression. Here the important point is not simply recognizing the range of privileged identities in Myanmar, but also advocating on behalf of those who, like the Rohingya, find themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy, oppressed at every turn.

For me, separating out ethnicity was not only a manageable way to approach the challenge of talking about privileged identities, it was also a way of acknowledging the particular suffering that non-Burman groups have experienced that Burmans never have. But (as I point out in a recent piece in Asia Times Online), discussions of inclusion and exclusion in Myanmar cannot be confined to ethnicity. I thank Ian for initiating this reflection with his critique and hope that others might add their own perspectives.

Matthew J Walton is Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He can be reached at [email protected].