 All right, I want to thank Nathan and Saus and Anna for bringing me here today. And thank you all for coming to listen to me. I practiced this talk, and it might be a little bit long, so I hope you're patient with me. Looking through my notes, I remember that I gave a somewhat similar talk a few years ago in 2016 at a workshop in Chenmai. And I had called it Linguistic Evidence for Ethnic Origins in Search of the Unfindable. And what had brought about that talk and what also is sort of motivating this talk is that a colleague at the University of Zurich at that time had asked me, what is the earliest evidence for the Burmese language and the Burmese people? And when he asked me this, I kind of groaned, because I thought, all right, here we go again. You know, we're going to have to look at the old colonial era scholars to find answers to these questions, which are not easy to answer. Do you, shall I? What do you want? I can do it myself. I don't have any slides. Okay. Yeah, and it's going to be a while before I go to the next slide. And that question, you know, my colleague's question and then this question of the origins of the Burmese and the Burmese brought me to Luce because he is one of the few people who have actually addressed this question of where did the Burmese come from and what are their origins? So again, I'll say a little bit more about that talk. I found, you know, I found there was a lot to say about origins, about migrations. And then it struck me how important this idea of the migration has been in historiography, both inside Burma and outside Burma in Southeast Asia in general. You'll find, for example, whether we're talking about the Burmese, also known as the Burmese, the ethnic majority, or some of the other ethnic minority groups of Burma, they will often say, oh yes, we came from somewhere else. We came from China. We came from Mongolia. We came from Central Asia. So in 2016, one of the themes that I had wanted to develop was how linguistics in history often inform each other, but they can also misinform each other because scholars in one discipline don't necessarily understand how the scholarship in the other discipline works, or changes that have occurred in more recent decades. And I see this all the time on both sides. I won't name any names, but there are some real guilty parties out there. The most important point I was trying to make at that point was that origins, in the sense that my colleague was asking, and in the sense that a lot of people want to know, is not something that we can really answer easily. It's ultimately a political question, one that the evidence from history and linguistics alone cannot prove or disprove, but it can only give us ideas which nationalists, in the sense of nationally-minded historians or intellectuals, can then decide is a point of origin or not. I hope that makes sense. And if it doesn't, I'm gonna come back to that theme. So at that talk, I was talking to a bunch of hardcore linguists who maybe weren't so sympathetic to my line of reasoning, and also maybe didn't really understand what I was going on about. The reaction of that audience was kind of summed up by a Vietnamese specialist of the Vietnamese language who said, oh, I always make sure to show my work to historians first, so I know that it's right. Anyway, today I have a bit more time for me to talk, and I'm also gonna be able to focus more on Luce himself and his ideas. And I think it's really important that we talk about people like Luce and some of these other early scholars whose work is really foundational, not only to Burmese studies, Burmese studies which we're talking about today, but more generally in Southeast Asian studies across the board in today, what we call Indonesia or Thailand or Cambodia, Vietnam. There's a lot of this early scholarship from early European scholars who really set the tone for how we see these countries and places. And we haven't necessarily, especially in Burma, gone back to their work and see whether it still stands up to more recent developments. So today I'm gonna talk about Luce, the trope of migration. I'm gonna spend some time talking about the larger context in which British scholars were writing with Luce being a really good representative of a whole generation of scholars. I'll talk about the actual idea of migration and what it does, why it's useful, why people like to talk about migration or at least used to. Then I'll step back a minute and spend a little bit of time sort of historicizing or critiquing some of Luce's ideas and other ideas of that time. And finally, I have a few interesting examples of how intellectuals and scholars in Burma today still very much make reference to the idea of migration. All right, so let's dive in. So I'm gonna talk about the larger context. So when Luce was active, I wanna talk about what was going on in Britain and Europe and what had gone on before Luce even got here. Burma was a colony of Britain from 1824 to 1947 and the British were coming from India. So the British, this mean, when I say the British, it's a shorthand for colonial administrators, for scholars, for other people involved in the machinery of colonialism. They brought with them new concepts, new practices and new technologies of governance to Burma. Also at the same time, in Europe, or we could maybe say the Western experience, there were new ideas and new ways of looking at the world that were developing. So just one really good example is Darwinism, the idea of the survival of the fittest that certain species survived because they were better adapted than others. So an offshoot of this in the 19th century was the idea of social Darwinism, the idea that certain people, certain cultures, certain civilizations were inherently stronger or superior and more fit to rule than others. Another thing, I think another important development in the 18th and 19th century was an ongoing political development. That you could say is a move away from seemingly irrational forms of government or political arrangements, like the empire in the European sense, into the rational ideal of the nation state. So when I say empire, I'm speaking here specifically of things like further in the past, the Holy Roman Empire, or more contemporary with that time, the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, do we have Prussia not already, but this idea that, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that's what I mean. So the idea that under one kingdom, under one emperor, you would have many languages, many peoples, and all sort of mixed up. And so the ideal was, under the idea of romantic nationalism, just let's say nationalism, the sort of national awakening, is that you have this ideal new form of the nation state in which there's one people, one culture, one language. And that ideal is, if we don't have to think very much, to realize how much political violence was committed in the 20th century in the name of trying to create this kind of nation state. Now interestingly, at the same time that at least Western Europe people were fighting against that idea of empire, they were also actively going out in places all throughout the world to establish the British Empire, the French Empire, et cetera. And when the British take over the territory of what would become Burma, which really wasn't called Burma yet at that time, I'll get into that, they were also taking over a kingdom that had a lot of similarities with an empire. You had the center in Mandalay, and it had control, often very loose, over a great variety of peoples and cultures, languages, all that stuff. So when the British got to Burma, I keep wanting to say here, because I think I'm still in Burma. They wanted to make sense of what they found, the people and the place itself. Now in India, they could classify people based on religion and caste. Classifying them this way was very useful. It told administrators who was civilized or the level of civilization they had, and it also said something about, once you had these classifications, it also said something about where in the colonial machinery you could put people. So you could also figure out who would be taxed and who would be useful in serving in the government. So for example, Bengalis were often put into the civil service, as you find a lot of Bengalis going into Burma and doing that. Tribal people, like in today, we say in Northeast India or some of the other tribal people in central India were kind of to be left alone because they weren't that civilized. And then the people like the Gurkhas were to serve in the armies. So, oh, and also the British administrators in India had gotten very interested in history, and here I'll use the script, the scare quotes, the idea of history as we understand it today, which just means something like the establishing of truth and the facts. And they're interested in India and getting in history was often to resolve conflicting claims for land ownership, which meant the more you study history, the more you could understand taxation. Anyway, so when the British arrived in Burma, they found that religion and caste were not useful in a country where there was no caste and most people at that time were Buddhist or animist or some combination of the two. So the practice of governments that the British introduced was to classify people by language, which, so language became a proxy, an indicator of the idea of race at the time. And race is something which now has largely been replaced by the word ethnicity outside of the country. But in Burma today, people still off, and when speaking English, they still often use this word race. And I wanna make a point here that I suspect to an English speaking audience, this seems normal and natural that language would equal ethnicity or race, but it actually isn't. It's a particular, you find the association particularly strong in the English speaking world. It's less strong, for example, as I understand in French scholarship and some other intellectual traditions. And I will come back to the idea of race and go into that more. The other thing that the British did is that they took over control of writing the past for Burma and its interpretation. So the past and history were taken out of the hands of the Burmese courts, which was one of the traditional sites where histories were written, and also to a degree out of the hands of monks, because monks were also interested in recording religious histories. So to use a modern phrase, the Burmese were no longer in control of the narrative over their own past. So a new dynamic was set up. The British, which included, here I'm using, I'm going across several decades when I had mentioned these names. This included people like Blagdon, like Harvey, like Hall, Fernable, Loose, and some others were often dependent upon local people, local interlocutors to help them with the reading and the interpretation of sources, especially those that were not in Burmese. Those could be in Maun, or as we'll see, in Loose's case, also Chinese. Although as Carol has pointed out, he did study Chinese. But then in the other hand, the Burmese themselves would take on much of the British ideas and practices through a dealing with history, which they had learned through exposure to colonial institutions of learning, so schools. So the British would come in, they set up the story, and then through schools, the Burmese would internalize these new ways, these new ideas about their own history, and new ways of looking at their own past. Most importantly, the British brought in a new kind of history. So of course there's always been history in Burma, but the British brought in a very particular conception of history as the pursuit of facts and the truth, again the scare quotes. The idea of we're going to study to find out what really happened. There was scientific reading of the past, whether it was artifacts or sources. So British scholars, and I should say Burmese scholars trained in the British tradition, looked at Burmese sources and found them wanting. They were unreliable. They didn't tell the truth. They were all mixed up, and Karelment mentioned Harry Shorto, who taught here at SOAS, and his specialty was mon language and mon sources, and he has this essay that was published in a volume dedicated to Hall, where he says, these mon sources, they're pretty unreliable, they're pretty useless. As part of this process, there was also, people started to divide history into genres. This is a really simple point. Whereas history writing might be this big overall field in a place like Burma, pre-colonial Burma, pre-colonial Siam, all those places. Now it was divided into proper history, then literature, then myth and legend. This is where you put all that stuff that was in the chronicles, which was not the truth. And a point, this is a bit abstract, but I think this is an important point to understanding what Luce was trying to do. In doing, throughout this whole process, what the British were essentially doing was creating new subjects or objects of study. And I should point out, it wasn't just British scholars, but it was also people like the administrators who were doing things like conducting censuses, where they were trying to figure out all the different people living in the country by giving their languages names. So what do I mean by that? Well, we can understand something as an object of study, right? I don't mean to get too precious here with the linguistic terminology, but you can think of, what are people studying? Oh, I am studying Burmese history. I am studying Burma. I am studying this ethnic group. I'm studying that ethnic group. So they became objects of study. But these, they also became subjects in a more literal sense. You find in English language histories, and then later on in Burmese histories, that these new subjects, so I'm talking here about the Mons, the Bermans, the Buu, became actual subjects of studies. The Mons did this. The Bermans did that. If you look at a pre-modern Burmese or Mons source, they never talk like that. They talk about very specific people. They talk about forces. They talk about personalities, but they don't talk about races. They don't talk about, they generally don't talk about countries in the sense that we understand them today. Right, and so I will, I'll spend more time a little bit later talking about the racial categories. But the most important point right now is that these new subjects were created. And so there were new categories of thought when people were looking at Burma and the Burmese past. So this is the intellectual inheritance, or a big part of it, that Loose had when he came here. So as Carol mentioned, and also not only here, but in her book, she goes into great detail. She didn't give a plug for her book, but I will. Loose, as Carol indicated, Loose was fascinated by Burma. And as you would say, and where I come from, he was like a kid in the candy store. He was interested in everything and tried his hand at all different kinds of disciplines, topics, whatever you wanna call it. So he wrote related to history, related to philology, historical linguistics, art history, archeology, everything. As far as I know, he was fairly dependent on working with local scholars. My understanding is that he could not speak Burmese or not speak it very well. This is not for me, but this comes from Michael McLean who had gone to meet him in the 70s before he died and he said he wasn't really able to have a conversation. But I do understand that he could read it and he could probably read Maan. He studied Chinese, but I also know that for his work on the Manchu, which I will get into a moment, I think he also had to work closely with some Chinese speakers. And as we know, as Carol told us, he worked closely with Pei Mengdian and even married his sister. So, since Lewis was looking at so many things, all these disciplines and spheres of competence informed each other. So that means that his observations in art history or archeology would inform his ideas of linguistic interpretation, which informed his thinking about history. I'm just gonna have to swallow water if you don't mind. All right, to return to a theme that I brought up in the beginning. Luce was looking for origins. This is what the British and other Europeans were doing in the rest of the world when they would go off into their colonies. They were asking themselves, at least intellectually inclined, where do these people come from? And this was especially important in places where the Europeans thought that the new subjects had no history. They didn't have a lot of sources. They didn't have any inscriptions. This is true in Burma. It's still true today that people like the Kachins or the Khorins don't have history because they don't have lots of old manuscripts. Also, we have to keep in mind that Burmese sources didn't talk about origins in the way that the British were interested in. So sources here, I've used that word a couple of times now, it generally means something like the court-sponsored chronicles. And these chronicles, which are written, there are lots of them, and they were written over several centuries, and they cite each other quite a bit. There's a lot of intertextuality, as they'd say. They talk about lineages and precedents of kingdoms. What was the earliest, what is the connection between this kingdom and another kingdom? What's the connection between this royal line and that royal line? And they talk a lot about the Sasana, which is a word I will use because I think it's important because that's the precursor to what we now call, since the 19th century, Buddhism. But at the time, if you look at the sources, they don't really use this word, anything like Buddhism or the Burmese or Mon equivalent. They're talking about the Thalana, the Sasana. And of course, the sources themselves were not static. They developed over time. Kings and courts would want to rewrite them and have them have mistakes removed in a process of purification, which is my word, very similar to the purification of Buddhism or the Sasana that happened periodically. So, let's see. So to the extent that the Burmese sources talk about origins, they say that Thalana was the first Burmese kingdom. And, right, Luce didn't like that idea. Something else that I learned recently, which I think is really fascinating, is in the 19th century, there was this assumption that the world was not that old. This comes from a biblical perspective. The world had only been around for a few thousand years, so how do we account for the great diversity of people and languages we find all across the planet? There's a great diversity of physical appearances. I'm not saying that Luce or any, in fact, any of these British scholars who I've mentioned necessarily believed that in a biblical sense, but this is sort of an idea in the air. So one way to understand why there's such great diversity is that people migrated from somewhere else. And if you think about this, something else that was going on at the time was a great interest in the Indo-European languages, English and all the languages that are spoken, most of the languages spoken in Europe, and the time before the Age of Discovery were spoken all the way from Iceland to Bengal. So the idea is there with the Indo-European languages is that there was a great migration, and that's how we understand that's why there's such a widespread, there's such a large swath of the planet that was covered with these speakers. And also related to that is the idea of the Urhaima that there was this homeland somewhere where they all moved out from in this great migration. And if any of you are familiar with Indian history, this is a central trope in Indian history that the Indo-European speakers, the Indo-Aryans as they were called there, moved in in great mass and pushed the Dravidians out into the southern part of South Asia. And also migration was central to contemporaneous European historiography. We know that there's this idea of the period of migration, the idea of Germanic speaking people somewhere between the fourth and the sixth century which caused the downfall of the Roman Empire. So again, migration was this idea that's in the air. So, oh here, my first slide. This is a, these are some of, oh, there's actually two slides. These are some of the loose, in which loose talked about the idea of migration. This is not an exhausted list. But as you can see, let's see, 1953 to 1965, actually some, as I get into this one, well, Jocelyn, the coming of the Bermans, he started thinking about this in the 30s. So, migration was something that he spent, migration origins was something he spent several decades thinking about, not much as yet. So, when loose starts writing, first of all, he takes certain things as given. It's a given that Burma is this place, it's a site, it's a subject. And Burma specifically, as we understand it today, this country that has these international demarcated borders. And he also tapes as given the so-called historical races, the Mons, the Bermans, the Shans, the Buu. And historical, again, means that, I mean in the sense that they have historical records to support their existence. These are, this is opposed to people who don't have, that those kind of records like the Kachins, or the Chin and the Karin. And I think Loos was, wanted to create a national history. And I mean this in two senses. First of all, in the sense of a history for all of Burma, I don't think, I'm not sure if he ever said this explicitly. And I don't think he had as explicit a project as someone say, as Harvey did, who very much wanted to write narratives which Burmese schoolboys would read in readers and things like that. And again, so he's looking for answers to the questions of how and when the various people, these various historical races appeared in Burma. And the answer and the methodology that he employed to get these answers differed a little bit for each of the groups that he talks about. We're talking into a moment. And as I said, local sources do not talk about origins or don't answer these kinds of questions that he wanted to know. So in order to get the answers, what he did was, first, one of his main strategies was to look at language. So language is the way to classify people, but it was also a way to understand the past. So he would look for shared words and loan words. And in his thinking, not unreasonably, loan words can indicate who arrived in Burma first. With the idea that people who came in later and often were at a lower stage of civilization when they came in, would borrow words from those who were there first or earlier. And these borrowings can tell you about food, they can tell you about agriculture, but they can also tell you about things like the level of cultural development, about art and architecture. And his other strategy, Luc's other strategy when he was trying to reconstruct this past was to look at Chinese sources, with especially this one called the Manchu, which I will get into in just a second. So I'm gonna, I spent a little bit of time talking specifically about the article, Old Chelsea and the Coming of the Bermans, and then I'll make reference to a few other articles that he wrote. So this, Old Chelsea and the Coming of the Bermans, Luc wrote in the 1950s, but was based on ideas that he'd been knocking around since the 1930s. Again, this is, as far as I know, really the only piece of scholarship that I've seen that really addresses, by anybody, that really addresses this question of where do the Bermans come from, where do the language come from. Luc's points out in this article that there is this period for which we don't have good evidence. So Burmese writing only appears in the 11th century, but as I understand, art, archeological, sorry, art historical and archeological evidence points that have gone in places like that were already established in the 9th century. So there's about this period, Luc was saying from the 9th to the 11th century that we don't have Burmese sources to tell us what was going on. So he made extensive use of this, the Manchu, which means something like the Book of the Southern Barbarians, which was written in the 9th century by Fan Chuo. I don't know how you say that. And it's a description of the Nanqiao Kingdom and the people associated with it and their neighbors. No Nanqiao, students come up very well. So if this is Burma here, Nanqiao is up north of Kunming in what is Yunnan. So it's not that far away. Now scholarship on Nanqiao has changed in the past decades, but the idea is that you have this kingdom up there from the 8th to the 9th century that was ruled by people who were probably related to either the Bai people or the Yi people. And the Yi are still a very large nationality in Yunnan and parts of Southern China. And their language is somewhat related to Burmese, but yeah, it's not very close, but close enough. And there's this idea that under this kingdom there were many people, many different ethnic groups, very different speakers of different languages who were associated with it. Maybe they were under the control of Nanqiao. Maybe they were sort of mercenaries for Nanqiao. So Louis reads the Manchu as providing information about what he calls the Proto Burmans. They were one of the peoples that he says we're living around Nanqiao and he ends up reading a section of the text and decides that some of the words that he finds in it are actually Burmese words. So for example Man, he reads as being the same word which in modern Burmese is pronounced for me, but we know that several hundred years ago was pronounced for Man before some sound changes of modern Burmese. And okay, we'll look at that text in a minute. His idea was that we know that Nanqiao attacked the Pew city-states of Lower Burma. And so he thinks the Proto Burmans went along on these attacks and knew how to get to the Irawati Valley. So when Nanqiao finally collapsed in the ninth century, they decided to be free of their masters who Lu says they hated because they wished to be free of the Nanqiao yo. What I find, oh, here, let's look at this. So if we read this description, they live in multi-storied houses without city walls, sometimes painting their teeth, they dress in untreated cloth. It sounds very much like something Southeast Asian, right? From a thousand years ago, whether this is what Burmese people were doing or looked like, we don't know, but it's, you know, you read this and, Lu's wasn't pulling something out of thin air, right? I think there is something suggestive about some of these descriptions. What's fascinating about Lu's article is that he provides an extremely detailed geographic path that he thinks these proto-Burmans took all the way up from Nanqiao down to Jiaosei. No, Nan, is there a pointer or something? There's no pointer. I apologize, this isn't the best map, but from what I can work out, basically he thinks that the proto-Burmans lived between this, it's a call, the Namaika River, which is up, up near Michina, and between there and the Mekong, so it's somewhere up here. And then they came down, he has the exact, he has the exact path mapped out, and they go through this path, they go through that path, they go through Siwa, they cross the Migni here, then at Laksak, they turn down this way, and then, let's see, where's Mandalay? So at some point, they end up around here, and then they get spit out on this end, and so they end up at Jiaosei. And as I recall, the Gaud is actually north of there somewhere. That was the original idea that the British sources talk about. What are you saying? No, this is where the proto-Burmans popped out. So. So, next, I'm going to have a quick picture. And just to complete the picture of what Luce was doing when he was talking about migration. He, when he talked about some of the other ethnic groups, he also read the Yuanxi, a history of the Mongol rule in China, and that was a particularly important source for his discussions of the Shaans. He had a lengthy two-part article from 1958, 1959, called the Early Siyam in the Shaan, in Burma's history, and he also argues they were up there in Yunnan, and he worked out a path that they took from Yunnan into Burma. And similarly for the Mons, he had a slightly more complicated, elaborate theory, a civilizational theory, that the Mons were part of the development of wet rice agriculture. And he argued that until a particular ethnic group developed wet rice agriculture, they weren't very civilized, and the Mons crossed that barrier, the Rubicon, as he called it, fairly early on, and so then he was, unless you crossed the Rubicon, you never made it to this higher level, something like that. So he traced, in this article, he compares lots of vocabulary lists from various languages of Burma, and so he argues that the Mons were there first in Burma, and that all these later groups adopted vocabulary from them. All right, so this is the point where I will step back for a moment and think about, well, how do some of Luz's ideas hold up to more recent scholarship? And I'm not the first to do this. One of the first, or more recent, attempt to sort of historicize or critique some of Luz's arguments were in Michael Ong Dwin's 2005 work, The Mists of Ramana, but that book wasn't very well received in a lot of quarters. And I would also point out, as I think I've said before, within Burma, Luz's ideas are still very important and often not at all critically accepted, I'm sorry, not treated to any sort of critique. And that's especially true outside of academia. So people still quote him. And I wanted to point out that this is true also in international scholarship. There's somebody, I think it was either Rani Lapala or David Bradley who quoted this elaborate pathway of the proto-Bermans from Yunnan into the area of central Burma that I was mentioning. If any of you know who that is, I don't know if John said who it is, I can't remember which article it is. I've been quoting it now for a couple of years and I don't have to look it up. All right, so, I just have a few points. The first, the idea of migration itself, in more recent scholarship, was talked about, has brought some new ideas of understanding migration. Luz and many other people were understanding migration as large numbers of people moving in sort of hordes across the plains. Another idea, more recent scholarship has talked about the idea of elite replacement, or sorry, elite spread. And for a good example of this is modern day Turkey or Anatolia. And what happened in Turkey is that a small elite group came to sit upon a conquered population. So, speakers of a variety of Turkish speech came from Central Asia and to Anatolia. So the genetic profile of most modern Turks shows that only a small amount of their DNA came from Central Asia and that most of the people are Anatolian. In other words, the language moved but most of the people didn't. So, closer to home in Vietnam and Laos, a French anthropologist, Georges Condoninas, studied the relations between Thai speakers, or Thai speakers, the speakers of the Thai languages, white, Thai, black, Thai languages like that, and Austro-Aziatic speakers. And so, Austro-Aziatic includes languages like Vietnamese, Mon, Khmer, but he was studying specifically many of these upland people, very small groups. And he found that the Thai languages, including, I think, Sean, spread because of, in part, primogenitor. So, we have this in, I think, Anglo-Saxon history. The idea that the eldest son inherits everything and all the other sons get nothing. So, they are encouraged to move out. So, in the context of upland Southeast Asia, you would get small bands of people moving to settle new valleys where they could start wet rice agriculture. So, what happens is, just as I was describing with the Turks, you get a small elite sitting on top of another population who, over time, adopt the language of their conquerors. And this is a process that you can still observe in the 20th century. And this is Georges Condoninas himself. I love this picture because I think it represents a particular moment in anthropology. I'm not trying to make fun of him, but it was really a way of sort of participatory research. He himself, I think, was of partial French, Portuguese, and Vietnamese who extend ancestry. He was very famous. I think he only died fairly recently. So, I just want to say that there's other ways of understanding how language moves that justice idea of the mass migration. The other thing I wanted to talk about was Chinese sources. And I'm not an expert. Nathan can tell us something more about Nathan. Nathan, Nathan, you can tell us more about Middle Chinese and the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. It's a slightly complicated discussion, but if you look at the Manchu as written in Middle Chinese, right? Which doesn't sound like modern Chinese does. And if you understand, as we do now, more about the reconstruction of Middle Chinese, you can understand, you can get a clearer sense of the kinds of sounds they were trying to represent at the time. So, foreign place names would often be represented in these texts. And even though we've got a better understanding of what these things sound like, you can still see that Loos was just, there was a lot of conjecture in what he was saying, you know, oh, when they mentioned these people, when they mentioned those people, those are clearly the Maums, or they're clearly the Khmeres or something like that. It's not at all that simple. And as this text, this quote, which I'm gonna go back to for a second, suggests, we have to keep in mind that Chinese sources are written from a Chinese perspective. What does that mean? Well, the Chinese saw themselves as central, superior, civilized, the center of the universe. And they're talking about these barbarians who are wild, uncivilized, dangerous, threatening, living at the periphery of their kingdom. And there are all kinds of texts, not just the Manchu, but the Chinese wrote all kinds of texts about their people who lived on their frontiers. So for example, the Manchu can be extremely detailed. It can give you seemingly precise descriptions of clothing, of hairstyles, of ornaments, you know. Yeah, here we get something about the painting of their teeth. And then it can be extremely vague about places and times. And the names that they give you are based on Chinese perceptions. Oh, it's the people who wore white clothes. It's the people who wore dark clothes. It doesn't say what they themselves called themselves, if that makes sense. So, I mean, on the other hand, it's clear that the linguistic descendants of the peoples that the Manchu were talking about are still in the area today. I think a good analogy might be is if we looked at Roman descriptions of Germanic tribes along the Danube or Celtic tribes in Gaul, we know there's a connection, but we can't say, oh, look, they were talking about the French. They were talking about the Germans. You see what I'm saying? I think it's a very similar leap that Luce was making. They think, they have some visuals. Yes, so this is the way that these people would be, that this Chinese scroll from somewhere in the 19th, sorry, the 9th or 7th century would just represent people from the southern frontier. I mean, you could sort of see some similarities, but then to say, that's the same as a human today. Maybe it's just not possible. The last main section I wanted to talk about has to do with the idea of race, which I've talked about before, but I think it's important to understand how race as a construction has really influenced, was really influencing what Luce was doing, but it's also one of the places that things can sort of fall apart, can come apart if we understand, if we can contextualize it better. So, I think how people identify, how they understand themselves changes over time, it's not a given, and I think if, all right, let's start again. Luce was following British ideas, and so he was talking about language as indicating race. So where there's evidence of a language he argues, we can know the people. But I think that's only true in a more limited sense. We can know about a lineage, or we can know about ancestors, like I was just explaining here. But the question of when this woman became what she is now, and who decides that point, it was in 1850, no, it was in the sixth century, no, it was in 1572, that's a political question. So to make that clear, let's think about what we understand about how people understood themselves and difference and community and identity before the colonial era. And this is not just true in Burma, but it's true in a lot of places. So, ideas and practices varied a lot. People understood themselves in terms of kinship, in terms of political allegiance, which could mean ties of loyalty, ties of submission. It could be in terms of religious affiliation. It could be in terms of geography, the people who lived here. People's identities were often contingent. They were contextual, especially when people are multilingual. So that means that in one context, you might identify yourself one way, but when you're speaking another language or talking to other people, you might also identify with them. Also, there was a total ecosystem of identities so that they were often relational. So what do I mean by this? We can still see this today, or see this until the recent past in Burma. You have Leech talked about the kinships and the shans and how in certain circumstances the one could become the other. But we can also understand that they understood themselves in relation to that other. Oh, we are the people who do this, but they're the people who do that. We wear this, they wear that. They live there, we live here. They raise that kind of rice, we do this kind of agriculture. They do that religious practice, we do this religious practice. So it's very much, it's not just a singular unit understanding themselves as sort of existing and avoid, but always in relation to other groups and other people. Now, if that isn't quite making sense, think of it this way. Let's look at how race and ethnicity work today. Ideally, people have a united, single identity. There is one person, people. There is the Mont, the Bermans. They speak one language. They have a common history, they have common ancestors, and they should have unique cultural practices, ideally not shared with any other group. They ideally should live in one territory, and there should be other people in that territory. So it's a coherent entity, and it's essentialist. There's some sort of essential spirit to being a member of this group. Now, it doesn't take any thought to realize that that really doesn't work in Burma, or actually most of the world outside of a limited part of Western Europe, people are just so mixed together. And I would just point out that what we see in Burma today is that these two different ways, or two different schemes, are sort of in tension with each other, that you've got sort of the ideological idea that we Bermans, we Monts, we Shans, we whoever, should all be separate and not mix, for example, not mix with other races against these older practices. All right, so in the final section I just want to talk about some of the, I just wanted to show a few examples of ways that the idea of migration still has a lot of influence in local intellectual contexts. Migration is really well established in local self-understandings. For example, in writings among Shans, Chin, Rakhine intellectuals, they often, when they talk about their past, they often talk about a migration. And this is just the first page of an article that an amateur historian, who I knew, Nike Monlay, who was the director of the Mon Cultural Museum in Malinian, wrote in a Dui Amin magazine between 2013 and 2014. And you don't need to read the Burmese or to even be able to see this that clearly, to see that the actual title is the Mon Migration and he uses the English word migration to describe the process. And then here you can see he's quoting people like Luz, Christie, Pauly Blank, and all these various sources. And he's recycling a lot of these ideas to make this very lengthy argument about where the Mon's came from. And another, this comes from a 1990 Facebook on the history of the Zou people, the Chins. And he doesn't cite a source, but all these lines, if you read the text, they represent different ideas of mostly 19th and early 20th century scholars of where the various ethnic groups came from, which is usually Yunnan places in China, into Burma and how they moved around. This is just another one. So you first get the people coming way over here in Kashmir, then they go through what's now Mongolia, they end up in Southern China, and then from Southern China they go from Yunnan and into Burma. And some of the sources that they're, like I said, some of the sources they're quoting are quite old. The final one is from the races of Myanmar or it's called Braces of Myanmar and Waves of Migration. And this is from Sion Tron's history of the Shan State from 2009. And he's just got them all in there. He's got the Proto-Bermans, the Muso Lolo people, the Kachins, the Mon-Communers, and the Thai-Chinese. For example, Thai-Chinese, that's not even a, it's no longer an accepted idea that the Thais and the Chinese have a shared language. So he's basically quoting somebody from 1933 to make this argument. Now, I just want to point out, there's a lot you could say about how Burmese intellectuals and scholars argue and how they use evidence and what they're doing when they present this kind of information. But I think the most important thing is to think about how they're very concerned with establishing their presence in the country from as early a time as possible to show some kind of ancient lineage to show that they can sit at the table with the big historical races, like particularly the Burmese, but also the Shan's and the Mon's, and that they can claim antiquity for the people. So Sion Tone, for example, cites some very early speculations that were made in the late 19th century that the Shan's were a race that were formed 2000 years ago and that they'd been in the region ever since then. So in conclusion, I would just say, you know, we can think about migration as a trope. We can think about it as a reality. We can think about it as an idea, as a way to understand a historical process of the spread of languages and people. But at the same time, I think it's important to separate out language and people. And locally, migration has become a crucial element following the ideas of loose people used to understand themselves. And so I think it's actually not gonna be very easy to displace it. And I just wanted to point out that it's not just in Burma that you find this. The American anthropologist, Robins Burling, spent a lot of time in Northeast India amongst people like the Gallo and some other speakers of Tibetan Burma languages. And he found that this is an extremely common question in the region, where did my tribe come from? And so he wrote this essay called, where does the question, where do my people come from, come from? Why is there this notion that we all came from somewhere else? And I also wanna say, I may have tried to make it sound like migrations aren't important. And I think that's actually not true. I just mean it in a very sort of specific sense that loose was arguing. There is actually some really interesting stuff coming out of research having to do with the South China expansion. This idea that maybe around 2000 years ago in Southern China, many of the ethnic groups, sorry, the languages that are spoken in Southeast Asia were originally spoken there, but they were pushed out with Han expansion. All right, and I'll leave it at that. So thank you very much.