Papers by Chu May Paing
CU Boulder Center for Asian Studies Newsletter, 2021
(or 1221, as the day is now being called) marked a new era of political involvement in Myanmar. D... more (or 1221, as the day is now being called) marked a new era of political involvement in Myanmar. During the night, the Myanmar military (Tatmadaw) decided to disregard the November, 2019 election results, which had given the National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi's party, a powerful majority. The Tatmadaw seized power while arresting her and many activists, and calling a national state of emergency.
Yet to be Earned
Position Politics, 2020
Yet to be earned is a short narrative film capturing a series of old family photographs from the ... more Yet to be earned is a short narrative film capturing a series of old family photographs from the artist’s archive. It presents an audio-visual narrative about one family but broaches the concept of “earned kinship”—that is, something that has nothing to do with blood nor with relatedness but something that has to be earned.
Opinion: Is Neocolonial Education a Solution to “Military Slave Education”?
FORSEA (Forces of Renewal Southeast Asia), 2023
Exposed Souls: Reflections from the Field in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Inya Institute Winter Newsletter, 2023
“For Dear My Love…”: The Social Life of Burmese Sticker Photography
Writing Foto, 2023
Trolling: Breaking Rules, Poking fun, or Just Outright Harassment?
CATSAC (Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing) Platypus , 2024
Ethnography: Rethinking from the Interstice
The New Ethnographer, 2020
JSEALS Special Publication 6 Anthropology of Language in Mainland Southeast Asia, 2020
On August 26, 2015, the Myanmar government passed the Race and Religion Protection Laws or myosau... more On August 26, 2015, the Myanmar government passed the Race and Religion Protection Laws or myosaun ubade proposed by Wirathu, founder of The Patriotic Association of Myanmar (Mabatha). This paper analyzes the gender ideologies embedded in the choice of High and Low reference register in Burmese language for women in the Myanmar-Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage Law as part of myosaun ubade. The choice of High register reference term amyothamee (daughter of lineage) in the rhetoric of myosaun ubade evokes a shared anxiety among the public and recruits other ethnic and religious minorities to join in the Burman Buddhist nationalistic agenda. By putting gender at the center of a linguistic analysis, I argue that Burman Buddhist nationalist discourses downplay ethnoreligious diversity and attempt to create a sense of alliance among the citizens of Myanmar.
Viral Satire as Public Feeling in Myanmar
American Ethnologist , 2020
Talking back to white Burma Experts (with Than Toe Aung)
Agitate Journal, 2021
Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement
While there is a rising number of research studies on heritage language maintenance among East As... more While there is a rising number of research studies on heritage language maintenance among East Asian immigrants, there have been very few studies on Southeast Asian minority heritage language maintenance. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the practices and ideologies towards heritage language maintenance in two Buddhist immigrant families from Myanmar residing in New York City. This paper approaches the topic of heritage language maintenance by employing Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin's (1984) theoretical framework on language socialization-socializing U.S. born Burmese children to become competent members of both their heritage and American societies. The findings suggest that the socio-semantically ambiguous concept bāthā in Burmese referencing both language and religion leads to the prioritization of religious socialization over language socialization in the process of heritage language maintenance. Although the former could compliment the latter, both families seemed to be satisfied by the achievement of the former. By doing so, the participants in this study however achieve in successfully compromising between full assimilation to mainstream American society as a minority immigrant community and maintaining their heritage roots, even if not linguistically.
Book Reviews by Chu May Paing
Myanmar’s Buddhist-Muslim Crisis: Rohingya, Arakanese, and Burmese Narratives of Siege and Fear, by John Holt. Honolulu, Hawaii. University of Hawaii Press, 2019. 301pp.
Oxford Tea Circle, 2019
Witnessing is political: Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring
ArtsEquator, 2022
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
strike most readers as uncontroversial. What is missing from AIAC is a prescription for how forma... more strike most readers as uncontroversial. What is missing from AIAC is a prescription for how formal theories of information might be made more supple, more receptive to the cotextual and social-indexical cues through which we enact coordinate attention. The last two chapters feel like a missed opportunity. In a discussion of Chomsky's hierarchy of formal automata, the decidability space of deterministic Turing machines, and Bayesian inference, Kockelman seems to fall back on the kind of negative dialectics he has been chiding anthropologists for all along. What might have been more interesting is a discussion, say, of how-counterintuitivelynondeterminism has come to play a central role in modern computing, above all in the convex optimization strategies that underlie statistical (aka machine) learning. This is counterintuitive because, as Kockelman points out, a deterministic Turing machine is formally complete, that is, there is no decidable halting process that cannot be formalized in deterministic terms. And yet, even in the absence of a proof that P 6 ¼ NP, that is, that the space of problems that are decidable in polynomial time is a proper subset of those decidable in nonpolynomial time (long the El Dorado of computing theory), it has become clear that a lot of the things we depend on computers for can only be done efficiently with the addition of randomness. Nondeterminism is just one example of a theme where I wanted to see Kockelman stretch, technically and interpretively, to imagine a theory of computing he and others interested in the pragmatic dimensions of communication might embrace. What I have called premature ontological commitment (Computable Bodies, Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 55) remains, of course, a problem for computing. But perhaps it's become a problem for anthropology too.
Books by Chu May Paing
စာတံတိုင်းကိုကျော်လွန်၍နှင့် အခြားဆောင်းပါးများ (Beyond the Wall of Words and Other Essays)
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Papers by Chu May Paing
Book Reviews by Chu May Paing
Books by Chu May Paing