Laur Kiik is Junior Researcher of Southeast Asian Studies at Tallinn University, Estonia. He studies nature conservation, nationalism, and religion in Burma’s Kachin region. He completed an MA in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in 2012. Recently, he published the article ‘Nationalism and anti-ethno-politics: why “Chinese Development” failed at Myanmar’s Myitsone Dam’, Eurasian Geography and Economics (2016).
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Although the KIO/KIA has never asserted that it is a Christian evangelical organisation, since the collapse of the ceasefire there has been a retrenchment in popular understandings of the significance of Christian faith in the popular analyses of the current situation. The battle slogan of the KIA expresses the need for a Christian victory, and this slogan has been converted into a highly popular song (left). This more assertive statement of Christian faith has been one of the outcomes of the experience of hostility and threat felt by many Kachin nationalists since the collapse of the ceasefire.
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Since the ceasefire, the development of new technologies in visual and audio production has seen the rapid expansion of a Kachin popular culture, especially youth culture. It has become an important vehicle for the development and expression of internal discourses and discussions about the present condition of Kachin people, as discussed in this chapter. Here, the popular singer Maran Seng Naw sings Sim Sa Mayu Ai Ndai Majan, expressing emotions about the present war. Images of the suffering of children are common motifs in these representations, especially as the recent conflict has seen so many displaced and without formal education.
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This music video, produced by the Yangon Kachin Church youth group appropriates the term Majan (see Introduction) to convey the sense of loss and desperation about the effects of drug abuse and the war on drugs that is necessary. |
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More controversially, the Kachin tradition of communal action can, in the flourishing atmosphere of conspiracy, lead to activities that are seen by some as vigilantism. This has arisen especially because of the widely held belief that that the Myanmar government is not averse to seeing high rates of drug addiction in Kachin society as a means of undermining its capacity for reproducing ethno-nationalists across generations. The needs to take action into their own hands has led to the appearance of groups such as Pat Jasan, who take a hardline approach not only to the drug producers and dealers but, more controversially, to the addicts themselves. See here. Also, see the chapters by Hkanhpa Tu Sadan and Nhkum Bu Lu.
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