Nats in the Land of the Hintha: Village Religion in Lower Myanmar

Abstract

Nats in the Land of the Hintha:Village Religion in Lower Myanmar Keziah Wallis (bio) Introduction1 When I first arrived in Myanmar in 2012, I had fairly well-developed expectations of the kinds of lived religious practices I would see.2 Fresh from completing a class in Religions of Southeast Asia, I had spent time reading the literature by Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, Melford Spiro, and other scholars on the complex relationship between Buddhism and the nats (နတ်).3 What I found in Yangon largely conformed to these expectations. It was only when my fieldwork shifted from the urban space of Yangon to a village in the Bago region that I found these expectations fundamentally challenged. As I grew more familiar with the location, [End Page 193] I found significant differences between what my participants told me and what I read in the academic literature on the nats. It was not only the academic literature that seemed to contradict my experiences in the field. Yangonbased participants were often shocked when I described the rituals I had attended in the village. I came to realize that there were multiple distinctions separating the lives of my village-based participants from those depicted in the literature on the nats. First, my participants were Bamar living in contemporary rural Myanmar and not the rural Myanmar of the anthropologists working in the 1960s. Second, unlike the urban-based spirit-mediums (; nat-kátàw) of Brac de la Perrière's research, my participants were not religious specialists. The few who did live in Yangon had only moved there within the past fifteen years. Perhaps most importantly, my participants were from Bago in Lower Myanmar; the majority of research on nats—with the notable exception of Brac de la Perrière's work—has taken place in Upper Myanmar. While Bago today is included as part of myanmangainngán (), historically the space has been predominantly Mon. The city of Bago was founded by the Mon in the thirteenth century as the center of the influential Ramaññadesa Kingdom. The city was also the center of the Taungoo Empire, founded in the sixteenth century by Tabinshweti-min who had ties to the Bamar court at Ava and ostensibly "became Mon" in order to rule from the Mon city (Shorto 1961:68; Lieberman 1978:457). Inscriptions at Thaton locate Bamar presence within the Mon political center in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Stadtner 2008:202) and suggest long-standing connections between Bamar and the Lower Myanmar region. While Bamar migration to Bago would have [End Page 194] undoubtedly occurred during Tabinshweti-min's reign when it was the center of the Bamar court, the widespread Bamar settlement of the region did not begin until the eighteenth century (Lieberman 2003:1:203). The pattern intensified during the Konbaung era (1752–1885) as Bamar people migrated south to work in the British control delta regions (see Adas 1974:chap. 2). According to the 1983 Population Census, Bamar made up 88.9% of the population of Bago (Ministry of Home and Religious Affairs 1987:I–14). While the data on ethnicity for the 2014 census have not been released, this ratio is unlikely to have changed substantially. Primary research for this paper took place in Shwe Moe,4 a medium-sized village which exemplifies the dynamics of identity in Bago. The Shwemawdaw pagoda, one of the premier Mon Buddhist sites in Myanmar, is visible from the village's southwest fields. All thousand residents of the village identified themselves as "only Bamar."5 Residents' pride in their "only Myanmar" (read Bamar) heritage was often distinguished with the neighboring village which shares the same village tract and is comprised of Mon and Bamar inhabitants. Despite expressing an explicitly Bamar identity, close conversations frequently revealed more complex ethnic heritages, and many residents saw themselves as the descendants of Bamar men who migrated from Upper Myanmar during the early colonial period and married Mon women already living in the region (see also Brac de la Perrière 1996:57). There is historical evidence to support this narrative of Mon-Bamar heritage. Konbaung policy of the...