Relational places of ethnic Burman women migrants in the borderland town of Tachilek, Myanmar

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation based on the testimonies of ethnic Bamar or Burman women migrant workers in the ethnically diverse ‘borderland’ town of Tachilek, Myanmar and interviews with their relatives in the home village in the central Burman heartlands. We examine how the concept of relational places, here involving a village in the central Mandalay Division and a town in the Myanmar–Thailand borderland, is related to differential power relations affecting the women migrants. We focus on the ways that gender identity and social position are limited by the relational places of community elders and the migrant women themselves, and suggest that the relational places of migrants in Myanmar are constructed through the nexus of varied forms of state control in both the central Burman heartlands and the multiethnic borderlands of the country.