Back on tracks

It’s been more than one year since the last post, and many things happened in the mid-time. One more expedition has been done in March 2016, allowing the footage of a documentary by Image Images, narrating the contemporary life of Moken, their loss over the past 15 years (notably the Moken boat, kabang), but most of all relating the everyday’s resistance of the last sea-nomads. For French speakers, the movie is already broadcasted on French television. Look for « Les frères de la tortue ». A French critique of the footage is available here. We will keep you informed as soon as the documentary is available in English. To make you wait, here are some pictures taken by the photographer Laurent Parienti during the expedition.

This journey has been singular in that we witnessed the first bo lobung (making of the spirit poles) ceremony performed in its « traditional » form since many years, over 3 days in 3 different locations. The icing on the cake, this ceremony was performed by the Nyawi group that did not held it since many years.

Last but not least, the project is about to benefit from a long awaited Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Culture from the Republic of Myanmar  (signed with the French National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS) that will allow greater visibility and cooperation with local stakeholders for the setting-up of a museum dedicated to the valorisation of Moken culture and the wider Taninthayi (Tenasserim) cultural heritage.

Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks!

A museum developed for and in cooperation with the Moken community, the sea nomads of Myanmar’s Mergui Archipelago

In Burma, and especially in the Mergui Archipelago, it is the right time for the development of tourism. Although still in its early stages, the tourism industry has much to gain from linking itself to local heritage, particularly to the exotic power of attraction of the Moken, one of the last sea nomad populations that is in constant evolution while never letting go of its core. Nevertheless, the social and political context in which they live remains complex.

© F. Galangau-Quérat

Amidst the rise of communitarian, territorial and/or religious demands, the media often depicts Burma’s ethnic minorities using simplistic representations as rebel armies or as exotic remnants of past archaic societies that have escaped from modernity.

Thus, creating a museum would be a means to assert identity, to preserve and value what remains of the heritage of a culture that is under threat, to create a place of memory, to rebuild a history. Since the end of the 1960s, a wide variety of local museum tools and methods have developed around the world to cater to increasingly numerous and diversified demands: local museums, community museums, eco-museums, heritage trails, cultural centres, etc. Often the spearheads of these projects, local populations are becoming more and more involved in project development. However, due to the harsh reality in which museums need to increasingly become their own sources of revenue as state funding is progressively decreasing — a phenomenon that has given rise to the museum-related term “cultural/creative industries” — what culture has to offer is inexorably pulling towards instrumentalization, often having to gear itself towards a luxury audience by offering prestigious displays and activities and by establishing economic partnerships that are primarily luxury-oriented. Thus, much of the museum experience feedback reveals a complex instrumentalization of both local communities and “tourists” alike, the latter being a polymorphous actor in this process¹.This phenomenon can be characterized through folklorization or exclusion, as experienced among the Moken of Thailand, thus making it necessary to work on both sides of the border, and through certain cultural elements being given more value over others in order to meet the demands of tourism, whether real or imaginary, thus resulting in the mummification of traditions in national parks or in their conceptualization in tourists spots reflecting the fantasies of NGOs, development actors or researchers. In order to develop a “Moken Museum” in Burma, one would need to go beyond the mere touristy image of flotillas of hulled boats by accommodating the dynamics of Burmese-Moken inter-ethnic relations all while asserting this potential museum’s active role in preservation. 

Matay Ka, renaissance

How can one not be entranced by the vision of a society that projects itself, more than it lives through, a perpetual ethnic flow that drifts Moken society towards radiant horizons, brighter days and more ideal faraway lands? It would be impossible not to. Everyone (except NGOs and former British colonizers) has fallen under the charm of this nomadic lifestyle. However, because it is impossible to go “elsewhere” (the Andaman Islands being a fantasy, even though some Moken have been there in their fishing boats to gather sea shells), this vision is becoming a dream of the past. The “good old days” — a concept that would usually be hard to imagine within a culture where genealogical amnesia makes it possible to reinvent themselves (a nomad “strategy”) — are henceforth a past image of flotillas of extinct Moken kabang boats, the women’s songs of “coral flowers” or of gathering activities on the foreshore, the “dancing field”. An anthropologists’s writings, photographs and films may revel in and lament over this culture’s distance from present-day difficulties such as raids, rape, the lack of care and other exotic moments lost in the limbs of our shared memory. How is it thus possible to not succumb to the beauty of these “virgin” islands, to these people who, despite their lack of possessions, are so powerful in terms of their unconditional freedom, the latter of which would be a death sentence to any Westerner?

But here we are, embarking on our 20^th journey aboard a catamaran used over many beautiful years on our Burmese cargos (cf. “Les aventures d’un ethnologue en Birmanie”, a film that has attracted much criticism from researchers who were shocked by what I said and the objects presented, while a film on the forced conversion of “natives” which was showed in the same film festival screen was met with praise and applause!) to go find “our” Moken in order to introduce them and their nomadic lifestyle to our museologist guest and colleague. For many years, I feared the possibility of the Moken projecting a negative image of themselves, so each meeting I organized always felt like a dreadful challenge (Thalassa, National Geographic, and other involuntary sponsors on the quest for exoticism). Since the Moken of Burma started abandoning their hulled boats between 2004 and 2007, boats which were the carriers of their ideology of non-accumulation, their society’s most remarkable “object” representing the human body, there is nothing much left of the exoticism that television seeks, nor is there anything left of the exotic content coveted by the photographer’s lens (from high-performance cameras that are becoming more and more sophisticated in capturing reality, in an era in which most are lamenting the loss of the “grainy” texture of yesteryear’s 16mm). Meanwhile, normalization across the world is putting pressure on traditional peoples, turning them into exotic objects and making them lose their significance. As a result, these peoples are made to rebuild their identity and to engage with society in order to change the mentality (by force, with money and support from local researchers). Moken projects and other illusions quenching the Western thirst for exoticism are flourishing (just like the gigantic foul-smelling Malaysian flower that blooms only once a year). This imposes a form of communitarianism among the Moken who must henceforth entertain this “friendship” and mingle in the name of communitarianism handed down from NGOs to the Moken. In this respect, this blog is aimed at opposing those who are preying on their culture, trying to forge a new ethnicity by proposing an alternative. One must discover and re-discover who the Moken really are.

Moken Renaissance and Ethnographic Revival

Reality adapts itself without recourse in the eyes of the observer, even if the observer is an anthropologist. This feeling is even more significant with the Moken. Indeed, if one wants to see the dead, that is, if one expects them to be a dominated minority on the verge of extinction, the Moken know how to accommodate this perfectly. The Moken proclaim to anyone who listens: “Moken matay ka” (“we are dead”). The person whose outlook was the first to change was Jacques, my teacher, friend and colleague. My outlook also somewhat changed, unless it was Jacques who managed to convince me of what I had been trying to make him hope for 12 years. The Moken are very much alive! Besides, why would anyone want to seek an exception in history amid several centuries of interaction, resistance, out-branching and reconstruction with sedentary peoples? Malays raiding for slaves, British missionaries, Thai nationalists or Burmese military, none of these neighbours or invaders ever managed to “swallow” the Moken. Why should it be otherwise with Burmese fishermen, these former rice farmers who twenty years ago began their conquest of the Mergui Archipelago?

Sedentary peoples do not want anything but the tools they need to equip themselves with. Everything in Moken society is a matter of symbolism, ideology, choice… Sedentary ideologies – whether communist, capitalist, socialist – “à la Burmese” or not – or ideologies of war, are based on access to resources. The Moken nomads thus have little to lose in interacting with sedentary peoples. All the material they need to equip themselves with is their nomadic ideology: adaptivity, non-accumulation, equality (despite the religious hierarchies that appear only when it comes to rituals), mobility, all of which are principles that take precedence over their strategies.