Commentary | Tharaphi Than, Why Does Area Studies Need Decolonization?
In summer 2019, I taught a course entitled “Decolonizing Methodologies” at the University of Yangon. We read Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s pathbreaking book, which has been one of my main inspirations for thinking about this topic, both in and out of class. Very different groups, from the faculty members of History Department to the leading feminists of Myanmar or Burma,[1] attended the course. The reaction was mixed. From the first lecture, I framed decolonization as the process of getting rid of all colonial practices and traditions rooted in the academy, and hence equated colonialism to coloniality. Here I find the definition of coloniality by Nelson Maldonado-Torres useful. He argues:
Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday.
By focusing on coloniality instead of colonialism, we implicate in our challenge to decolonize the academy the ruling power and hegemons—be it the Ministry of Education or the local and foreign consultants involved in drafting policies for teaching and research. In this essay, I grapple with decolonization in Myanmar and the burden of disciplinary studies in the universities and academic institutions in the Global South. The students, by inheriting the colonial legacies of teaching and learning in an institution such as University of Yangon, immediately saw themselves as being implicated in sustaining toxic legacies, from oppression and silencing of non-Burman voices to occupying minorities’ territories. Most of our discussions emphasized how we as knowledge seekers and producers can use alternative praxis to break ourselves free of, and free others from, coloniality.
The Burden of Coloniality
Burma, or Myanmar, is a prime example of a nation and a people lost on the world stage. In the decade before the 2021 military coup, Myanmar was hailed as a country on its way to joining the liberal, democratic league. But what I witnessed during my seven-month stint there in 2019 was a place where both leaders and citizens were afraid to arrive at unknown territory. As a Burmese citizen working abroad, at a US institution, I am half-in, half-out (of Myanmar). Most of the time, locals treat me as a non-western Burmese female, and my position affords me the perspective to observe coloniality from its both giving and receiving ends.
“For academics in Myanmar, ‘arriving and making it in the academy’ means learning the language of the West: acquiring linguistic skills and finding how their own research ‘objects’ are written in the Western canon.”
For academics in Myanmar, “arriving and making it in the academy” means learning the language of the West: acquiring linguistic skills and finding how their own research “objects” are written in the Western canon. To be modern and be accepted in the world education scene is to act the way the masters did. As an anthropologist told me, “if we cannot compare our studies to the existing ones, there will be no value.” She was doing research on one of the small minorities in Southern Shan State, and her concern was that no one would understand her subject or subjects if she could not draw parallels from existing groups or peoples of the West. Her concern is real. Her research will be deemed valuable only when other people can understand it through the familiar peoples and theories of the West.
Decolonization meant empowering her to believe that her minority study has value in its own right, not only when it is put on the Western framework or juxtaposed with the “known” groups. I tried to explain that publishing her findings and her own theories was just as important (if not more important) than putting them in the context and the scholarship of the known. But I did not succeed. Value to her was not intrinsic of her research but imported from abroad. What I shared about decolonization appeared as a detour, and not as a route to establishment, for Myanmar scholars eager to arrive on the world academic scene. By the time I gave my lectures, these scholars had already figured out that the imagined academic community had a predetermined road map of institutions, journals, and disciplinary theories, along with certain ways of doing research, writing, arguing, and referencing. Going against these well-tested and trusted trends might be gaining popularity in certain circles of the Western academy, but it was too much of an ask from an emergent scholar from the Global South.[2]
Before Myanmar’s 2011 (re)opening, the last anthropologist to conduct extensive ethnography on Burmese religion(s) was Melford Spiro in the early 1960s. His works must be consulted if one researches Burmese spirituality and religions; otherwise, one is considered deficient in knowledge about Burma. His work is canonical on Burmese rural spiritual life. When the country (re)opened, Myanmar scholars had opportunities to leap-frog older works in the canon like Spiro’s, by confidently sharing their findings and theorizing new patterns and trends based on their own research rooted in communities that surround them. But as my course neared its completion, I saw that this optimistic vision was not meant to be. A fifty-year scholarship drought continues for local scholars because of how we have been represented in Western scholarship. The implicit misguided intention to sustain such a representation is the biggest of all impediments to local research. Compounded with the thought ”we are not good enough,” new research and scholarship by neither those trained locally or abroad moved as fast as they should. Many of us tend to think that we need to be first trained to be able to see our own world the way the West sees us. Those of us who have been trained in the West read the Western canon first and do not even know about our own canons. A canon of our own judged by local standards may never even exist, since Western standards are the only ones deemed to have real value. And what the West wants to know about us is still a cue for choosing a research topic.
Orientals adopting Orientalism is disheartening. Many would argue that the problem lies in weak institutions and the failure of education systems under authoritarian regimes. But improving national institutions and systems alone will not fix the problem. Malami Buba asked excellent questions regarding underdevelopment in Nigeria. We could borrow his questions here:
Could it be the outcome of embracing a system, whose essences are too alien to our ways of knowing? What mediationary forces are available in our current condition that can propel us to faster socio-economic growth and well being? Or is a clean break from the dominant western paradigm the great shift that is required before our thinking is localized and relativized for the benefit of our collective African communities? [3]
Historically, Burma was framed by the British, and research topics conducted by and at colonial institutions were aligned with the priorities of the empire. Burma Studies in general followed the British (and broader Western) systems of thinking and doing. British or Western curiosity about certain topics -- from long-necked Padaung minorities and Nats (Spirts) to liberal democracy and Rohingyas -- explain the lopsided distribution of research funding, papers, and inevitably the importance and value of certain topics. When new Burmese scholars attempt to see their own country through Western eyes or find a topic that has global currency, everything gets stuck. We might know a subject—for example, changing consumption patterns of lahpet or pickle tealeaf. But who cares about pickle tealeaf, even though there is a rich layer of cultural, historical, and political information reflected in laphet consumption. Laphet has shifted from a reception food when a host feeds a guest in an elaborate or simple display in a lacquered plate to a single item dish served with rice to cater to the time-poor migrant workers in satellite towns near Rangoon. Unsurprisingly, there has been no research on the topic.
Things we experience with our senses—smell, taste, sights—have no intrinsic value in Western scholarship until someone else, preferably a white scholar, attaches value to them. Empirical findings by a scholar who is detached, removed, and objective are assumed to reveal truth. Yet, the findings by scholars who experience, embody, or even enjoy the senses of the place and the people are dismissed as subjective, raw, uncouth, and therefore not reliable or replicable for further research.
We lost the bearings of our own familiar world while attempting to find something that attracts Western value and appreciation. We gradually lost ways of knowing, thinking, and describing the world in our own episteme. Instead, we struggle to describe our own world in a different episteme and language to a global audience who have been trained to receive us on their own terms. Excellence stops at self. Or rather, the quest for (universal) excellence stops self, eroding one’s confidence, changing original the local self to an acceptable universal self. Being Burmese is not good enough. Personhood in a Burmese cloak is not good enough. Burmese ways of knowing things are not reliable. What Burmese value might not have a global price tag.
Layers of Decolonization
In the face of persistent coloniality, the fine-tuning of area studies or any disciplinary studies is not enough. But no one is yet ready for the sledge-hammer. As Audre Lorde once said “The Master’s Tools will never dismantle the Master’s house.” An urgent task for us, however, is “how could we subvert the system”? How could we use the master’s tools available to us to change the system? Hearing the prefix ‘de’ in decolonization is, surprisingly, an ‘aha’ moment for many in Myanmar. In my conversations across the Burmese academy, from the president of a private university to indigenous researchers at a government university, I realized my colleagues were hearing the word ‘decolonizing’ for the first time. The North-South knowledge disparity underlies the silence of the most important words we, in the global South, should hear and engage with. The word itself is powerful immediately. It reminds people that there is another side of coloniality—i.e. decolonization, the attempt to destroy, disrupt, and dismantle coloniality. It is a further reflection of global power disparities that the movement(s) has originated in the global North, as in the UK campaign “Why is my curriculum white?.” In the global South, particularly in a country like Myanmar, the colonial history and the legacy of coloniality are too strong to voice dissent, and to deviate from normal, disciplinary expectations. Institutions in the West have to be undisciplined first and to find alternative ways of doing things to help lessen the burden for the institutions outside of academic Hollywood. From within coloniality, it is difficult to come up with the tools to avoid copying the masters.
In my decolonizing methodologies course, when we discussed the trends and topics of research in Myanmar, we came to the conclusion that most research topics at government institutions are not only Burma-centered but also studies on minorities framed to support the narrative of Myanmar as a happy union. Minority students are more attracted to universities emerging in their own areas. Feelings of exclusion among minorities are real because of the coloniality practiced at the government institutions. Topics on contemporary society, injustice, and (dis)arrangements of small communities or marginalized voices are absent in university-based research. It is not a coincidence that Myanmar currently has zero sociology departments in its 150+ universities and colleges. One minority faculty shared his experience of not being able to do research on traditional judiciary practices as his topic is outside the promoted research themes on rule of law (or judiciary practices drafted by the central government), and peace process funded by international donor agencies. He alluded to the twin-pillars of oppression: NGO-driven research agenda on peace studies; and government-driven, Burma-centered research projects. Graduate students also highlighted that their research topics still need to be vetted by their departments. Working with alternative sources that countered government narratives, such as interviews with ordinary citizens who witnessed historical events or about their everyday experiences, was deemed unreliable. Coloniality, entwined with the empirical hierarchy, is a obstacle impeded new forms of history writing or decolonizing projects in Myanmar. Public institutions do not yet have the space and power to decolonize, either from the West or from the Myanmarese majority.
Where do we go from here?
Globally, decolonizing the academy is taking place, albeit by the students, and often at the margin. One such place is “Humanities across Borders” (HaB), a research and teaching group mostly comprised of scholars and educators from the global South. Through place, practice, word, and food, a group of Asian and African scholars attempt to find unusual lineages and collaborations with an aim to “rehabilitate people's voice” and ultimately to subvert the current system. Academic-activism in sync with global civic movements free oppressed minds through innovative research methodologies. Using rice, indigo, and words as an intervention or research lens, local scholars and students are empowered and shown ways to document, narrate, and share their local communities to the rest of the world. When they are writing about food—be it a chewing betel or common tea-leaf salad—students are freed from the burden of getting the history right, as one History student in Myanmar, puts it. Such new methods and methodologies should be welcomed and, in fact institutionalized, by the global North. Decolonizing curricula and area studies can start from small steps. One such step is lifting the burden of mastering the canons or mimicking the West.
Decolonization failed to function as a teleological explanation for democracy because decolonization serves mostly the colonized, not the colonizers or those practicing coloniality. But to reclaim personhood, dignity, and confidence, decolonization is an empowering tool. As Tuck and Yang proposed, decolonization should not be a metaphor. Nor should it be a means to achieve something—for example democracy, which is presented to countries such as Myanmar as the end goal of their nation building project. Decolonization is both a starting point and a process to reclaim what has been lost to coloniality. We build peace, development, and aim for a political goal—be it democracy or something else—by freeing each other from coloniality. After the February 2021 coup in Myanmar, decolonization is even more urgent. If we cannot decolonize and reclaim ourselves or our physical and symbolic places and spaces from the neocolonial military, we will all not be freed. Decolonizing now is more relevant than ever.
Notes
[1] I will use Myanmar and Burma interchangeably throughout the essay. The country’s name was changed from Burma to Myanmar in 1989 as part of an anti-colonial movement centering Burmanization of the British era names.
[2] My friend commented after reading this essay. ‘‘decolonizing’ is much easier to do from a place like Berkeley – it’s fashionable at elite, well-resourced institutions while being practically impossible for a University of Yangon faculty member.”
[3] Malami Buba, Literature, Language and the Pursuit of Knowledge, Keynote Address at a Conference Organized by the Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, to Mark the Publication of Toyin Falola and African Epistemologies by Prof. Abdulkarim Bangura, Saturday, October 3, 2015.
Dr. Tharaphi Than is Associate Professor at the department of World Languages and Cultures at Northern Illinois University. Her first monograph 'Women in Modern Burma' was published by Routledge in 2014 and she is currently working on Feminism in Burma. She is a scholar activist working in solidarity with the Burmese resisting the coup.
Dr. Than would like to thank and dedicate this essay to all her students from decolonizing methodologies course taught at the University of Yangon in 2019, some of whom were unjustly imprisoned for their activism against the coup. She would also like to thank Pyo Let Han who emphasized the importance of decoloniality in the resistance, Thu Pone study group, and Dr. Hilary Faxon who encouraged her to send this piece for a wider audience.
To cite this Commentary essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Tharaphi Than, “Why Does Area Studies Need Decolonization?,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, November 20, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/XPTS4931.