The Frontiers of “Burma”

The thesis underlying this essay may be summarized as follows: The modern European concepts frontier, state and nation are interdependent but they are not necessarily applicable to all state-like political organisations everywhere. In default of adequate documentary materials most historians of South-East Asia have tended to assume that the states with which they have to deal were Nation-States occupied by named “Peoples” and separated from each other by precise political frontiers. The inferences that have been made on the basis of these initial assumptions sometimes conflict with sociological common sense. It is not the anthropologist's task to write history, but if history is to be elaborated with the aid of inspired guesses then the special knowledge of the anthropologist becomes relevant so as to point up the probabilities.