Hilary Faxon, PhD Candidate, Department of Global Development

Registration required: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fFgmspb5R6KyeIe8VDCLUg

Myanmar’s political transition has transformed the daily lives of its rural population. While economic liberalization and legal reforms have failed to address entrenched inequality or deliver Western-style democracy, they have brought new technologies of production and communication into the lives of Myanmar’s 35 million farmers. Adoption has been swift and exponential: one region’s share of rural households using combine harvesters increased from .5% to 50% between 2010 and 2016, while national mobile phone usage jumped from 11% to 98% between 2013 and 2017. In this talk, I draw on three years of ethnographic research to explain how the recent and rapid arrival of combine harvesters and smartphones is remaking food production, social reproduction and political mobilization in villages in Northwest Myanmar. I first show how the selective use of combine harvesters is changing rice cultivation practices and shifting relationships between farmer, market and state. Rather than igniting class conflict, machines are welcomed as a solution to labor scarcity caused by youth migration, even as the social status of male rice farmers falls in relation to new identities, such as that of the young female maid-migrant. As villagers venture abroad and online, Facebook use (surprisingly!) is sustaining and reshaping rural society as the processes of articulating identities, providing material support, and mobilizing in struggles over land increasingly take place in what I call the digital village. These interlinked processes of mechanization, migration and digitization are reshaping not only agricultural practices and politics, but also gendered labor, roles and values for Myanmar’s new generation. These findings highlight the importance of understanding Myanmar’s contemporary transformation through intersectional ethnographic investigation and of attending to the digital in scholarship on rural Southeast Asia and the global countryside.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series