Open lecture with Maxime Boutry, French National Research Council (CNRS)

Successive military governments of Myanmar have relied on a process of selective commemoration and obliteration of the past to legitimize their power, hence producing a fractured memorial landscape. At the same time, the state has used urbanization and erasure to control dissenting populations. This lecture explores the links between experiences of violence, space, and memories in the formation of urban landscapes, from the perspective of bridges. As liminal spaces, bridges are symbolically potent places for commemorating experiences of violence. Designed by the state as key infrastructural elements for exercising violence and producing “silent cities,” they are also important sites of resistance. 

Drawing on ethnographic research and oral histories covering the period from 1988 to the present, I describe the struggle of peri-urban citizens to commemorate past events of resistance amid repression, as well as the strategies they deploy to contest the erasure of memories by governments. I then discuss how the quest for historical recognition to counter state-imposed silence also creates tensions, as it risks disembodying the landscape from its memories and its dead. At the same time, while tangible memorials may appear as a necessary step towards transitional justice, the resilience of local and intimate practices of memorialization lies precisely in their immunity from seizure and destruction.

 

Maxime Boutry obtained a PhD in social anthropology (EHESS, Paris) in 2007, and devotes his research to the dynamics of social recompositions, mobility regimes and resource appropriation logics in marginal areas of Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand). He is currently working at the French National Research Council (CNRS) as part of an interdisciplinary research project on the intersections between experiences of violence and forms of mobilization in Myanmar. He is particularly interested in the peri-urban areas of Yangon and the maritime Myanmar-Thailand borderland.