A Sense of Place and Belonging: The Chiang Tung Borderland of Northern Southeast Asia (NIU Southeast Asian Series)

By: Klemens Karlsson

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Synopsis: A Sense of Place and Belonging examines a marginalized society, Chiang Tung (Keng Tung) in the Eastern Shan State of Myanmar, between the dominant cultures of the Burmese, Chinese, and Siamese/Thai. Chiang Tung sits at the historic borderland known as the Golden Triangle, an area marked by drug trade, human trafficking, and civil war. Hiding a glorious literary and visual cultural tradition from the fourteenth century, Chiang Tung is remarkable for how well it has maintained its Buddhist culture in the turbulent history of war and forced resettlement that formed northern Southeast Asia. Klemens Karlsson examines the connection between the Buddhist traditions, the ancient cult of territory spirits—a cult of the earth, place, and village that forms a kind of religious map—and the monsoon culture of wet rice irrigation. Tying together myths and memories told by local people and written in local chronicles with the unique performance of the Songkran festival, which dramatizes a symbolic agreement between Tai Khuen people and the indigenous Lua/Lawa people, A Sense of Place and Belonging presents a historical, political, religious, and cultural context connecting the present with the past, the local with the global, and tradition with change and transformation.