The Inle Lake (Myanmar), a Region Under Transition
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Michalon Martin Master 2 Geography University Lyon 2 Lumière The gardener and the fisherman in globalization: The Inle Lake (Myanmar), a region under transition Prepared under the supervision of: - Professor Yanni Gunnell, Université Lumière Lyon 2 - Doctor François Mialhe, Université Lumière Lyon 2 Members of the jury : - Professor Yanni Gunnell, Université1 Lumière Lyon 2 - Doctor François Mialhe, Université Lumière Lyon 2 - Professor Michel Mietton, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 Acknowledgements During this fascinating research period, throughout the preparation, fieldwork and write-up stages, I was lucky enough to have the support of many people and friends, who knew how to advise, encourage, direct and correct me. First of all, I would like to thank Mr Yanni Gunnell and Mr François Mialhe, my research directors, for their reactivity, their listening and their always relevant advice, who allowed me to make that dream come true. It was my great fortune to be able to work under their direction. Then, I want to express my sincere gratitude towards Dar-Dar, my Burmese interpreter, whose smile, intelligence, vivacity and initiative turned my fieldwork into a fascinating and enjoyable quest. Ce-zu a-mya- gyi tin-ba-deh, za-ga-byan! It is also important to me to thank with all my heart all the interlocutors I met on the field, for their warm welcome, their patience, their kindness, and all the cups of tea I was treated with. Special thanks for Thu-Thu, whose advice and smile have been a daily pleasure to me. I also feel deeply obliged to Misuu for her amazing hospitality, her extraordinary generosity and goodwill, her unbelievable stories… a person I admire for her courageous commitment to the lake, the Intha, the Burmese, and for her optimism and her energy. You embody the much-needed hope that Myanmar has been waiting for so long! I also wish to thank from the heart the whole IID team, with whom I was lucky enough to work a bit, and to learn so much. Thank you Mike, Anne, Andrea and Sonja for all the chats, your good mood, your energy and your competence! I acknowledge Marceline, Fabien and Marion, my wandering mates, my Myanmar fellows… I so much enjoyed your open-mindedness, your intelligence, your kindness and your advice. Thanks for all the moments spent together. Moreover, I want to express my deep and sincere gratitude to the French Embassy in Yangon and to Augustin, who provided me with most useful help, as well as to the Rhône-Alpes Region, whose welcome financial support provided a unique opportunity, which I constantly appreciated. I also want to thank very sincerely all the friends who helped me translate this thesis from French to English… Thank you so much Marion, Mike and Anne for your patient reading and your corrections. That work would not have been possible without you! Lastly, I would like to thank my whole family, who have given me dreams and the will to make them come true, who have supported me and listened to me without any reservation all through the year of my study. Thank you. 2 Acronyms list: AEC: Asian Economic Community ASEAN: Association of South-East Asia Nations FAO: Food and Agriculture Organization ICIMOD: International Center for Integrated Mountain Development FDI: Foreign Direct Investments IID: Institute for International Development INSPQ: Institut National de Santé Publique du Québec MHT: Ministry of Hotels and Tourism MTS: Myanmar Tourism Statistics NCEA: National Commission for Environmental Affairs WHO: World Health Organization UNDP: United Nations Program for Development SLORC: State Law and Order Restoration Council 3 Introduction 1) Inle Lake, a globalization laboratory? “This is Burma, and it will be quite unlike any land you know about...”, Rudyard Kipling wrote in his Letters from the East (1898). One of the rare Westerners to visit this little-known territory in the colonial era, he depicts a unique world, an exotic population, an outstanding culture and mysterious sites. In 2011, the Lonely Planet guidebook of the “Golden Land” quotes this sentence and has its echo in contemporary Myanmar: “more than a century after [Kipling], Myanmar remains a world apart”, and the perfect illustration of this assertion, which is displayed on the front page of the book, is the region of Inle Lake, in the East of the country (Figure 1). This territory appears as totally specific: this water body at the core of the Shan Plateau shows at the same time exceptional natural features, and a population whose original culture is totally unique: the culture of the Intha people, organized around floating agriculture and fishing. Recent history contributed to nurture this image of Myanmar as a « world apart ». Indeed, in the 1950s, the country was one of the most dynamic in South-East Asia: main rice exporter, famous universities, cultivated elites, etc… (Steinberg, 2010). However, in 1962, the coup led by General Ne Win and the implementation of the “Burmese way to socialism” triggered the closure of the country: “the political parties were forbidden in 1964. The country was effectively cut off from the outside world” (Steinberg, 2010). Official, legal trade with foreign countries was most tenuous, and foreigners were carefully kept at bay1. The SLORC coup in 1989 marked a rupture with socialism, and the government progressively liberalized the economy, though it did not mean significant progress towards democracy. The international community, led by the USA, ramped up the harsh sanctions against Myanmar, which increased its isolation (Steinberg, 2010). However, recent years have seen a deep metamorphosis of the country. In 1996, the government launched the “Visit Myanmar Year”, aimed at promoting tourism in the “Golden Land”. In 1997, it joined ASEAN2 and started, with a long delay, its “Asian inclusion” (Tournier, 2007). Lastly, the 2010 elections, the self- dissolution of the military junta and the nominally civilian regime which took office in 2011, as well as significant shifts towards democracy have showed the opening of the country, its come-back on the international stage, which allowed a massive increase of foreign investments and increased volumes of tourists. Though Myanmar obviously remains very atypical, and shows features that have broadly disappeared in contemporary South-East Asia, it is not a “world apart” anymore: the bubble in which the country had barricaded itself exploded, and Myanmar now finds itself at the core of an extremely dynamic and globalized South-East Asia, crisscrossed by dense material and immaterial flows. As a consequence, Myanmar can be considered as a laboratory of globalization, which is quite unique in Asia, and probably in the world. Though the concept of globalization was initially defined in economic dimensions, which is “the historical process of progressive extension of the capitalistic system in the global geographic space” (Carroué, 2004), generating flows of goods and capital, it has now added a cultural dimension (the world thus becoming a “global village”, for McLuhan, 1967). Lastly, globalization sets in motion people, through migratory or tourism networks. The sum of those processes is globalization lato sensu, considered as the evolution of human activities towards a single, integrated and interdependent “System-World”3. So as to better understand globalization dynamics, as well as the result of that process, something “already there”, it was important to us in this study to focus on a region which features a juxtaposition between the globalization under progress and its already-visible result. The region of Inle Lake stood out as especially 1 From 1964 to the 1990s, journalists were only allowed 24-hour visas (Ko Ko Thett, 2012). Not until the 1996 Visit Myanmar Year were tourists granted a 4-week visa. 2 Association of South-East Asian Nations 3 This concept was built by Fernand Braudel, developed by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), and applied to the French geography by Olivier Dollfus in La Géographie Universelle (1990). 4 interesting: this territory, which used to be quite isolated, and in which majority of connections did not exceed the national boundaries, has been undergoing quick integration into the System-World. It is then a great field site to question the differentiated effects of that trend in space, time, and inside local communities. Figure 1: Location of the Inle Lake. Background is courtesy of Marion Sabrié, modified by the author 5 2) Inle Lake in the scientific literature: a region out of the world? The study of the Inle Lake area seems all the more interesting as the recent scientific literature has considered Inle Lake as isolated, as if it were in insular position with regard to the larger spatial scales, which are often vaguely defined and described, whereas scale-nesting and scale-connection is one of the major aspects of globalization. A partial reason for such a gap in the scientific literature is that the disciplines which have studied the Inle Lake, colonial explorers, sociologists, pollution specialists or economists, have come to the lake shore, but very researchers have tackled it from a human-geography point of view, as a quick browse of the existing literature can show. The latter can be broken down in three main stages. First, the early explorations of the region produced quite monographic and descriptive surveys. In 1897, the Briton Woodthorpe described in quite folklorist a way the lake’s “tribes”. In 1918, his compatriot Annandale extended the monographic trend of that time by describing the Inle region, its physical and geomorphological features, and by giving a glimpse on the floating agriculture. More than fifty years later, Bruneau and Bernot described thoroughly, and for the first time, the floating agriculture techniques, the ethnic composition of the region, and the handicraft activities in the villages (Bruneau and Bernot, 1972). In those three cases, apart from a national-scale location map, the region of the Inle Lake was not integrated in any regional, let alone national context.