Editor’s Note Jane M. Ferguson This issue of the Journal of Burma Studies proudly presents a special collection of papers on the topic of progress and what the term might mean in relation to Burma/Myanmar studies. News reports and scholarly works on Myanmar politics in recent years, particularly following the State Peace and Development Council regime change, the elections, and the electoral wins of the National League for Democracy have used the moniker “transition” or “opening up” to describe the ongoing situation in the country. For this issue, instead, we solicited ideas around the broad—and value-laden—idea of “Progress for Whom? And for What?” This issue offers a variety of considerations of how the concept might be understood or animated at different political, social, and cultural moments. The term “progress” is surely not without its baggage; it should not be taken to represent any sort of clean escape from the broken record of transition. European colonial empires frequently justified their expansion through the promotion of ideologies of progress. Colonial officials stationed in Southeast Asia as well as advocates for empire elsewhere were often adamant that their roles as conduits of cultural contact with the West signified “progress.” The idea that contact would be of some unqualified benefit to those of the colonized “traditional” societies perhaps willfully ignored the disparities in wealth accumulation across empires. It also instilled a notion of positive historical time, which meant a measure of cultural distance between the West and non-West (Chakrabarty 2000: 7). In one study, sociologist Robert Nisbet suggests that “the idea of progress holds that mankind (sic) has advanced in the past—from some aboriginal condition of primitiveness, barbarism or even nullity—is now advancing, and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future. . . . It (progress) is inseparable from a sense of time flowing in unilinear fashion” (Nisbet 1984: 4). [End Page vii] For Burma Studies, discussions of Colonial-era notions of progress conjure up scenes from Rudyard Kipling poems. Colonial foresters in Burma, for example, saw the application of Western science and technology as a way to bring progress (and economic prosperity) to Burma; science would manage the forests better than people had done previously with local methods (Bryant 1996: 170). Although the pith helmet version of the juggernaut for progress has (almost) been buried in the past, Orientalist stereotypes of peaceful, simple livelihoods of farmers persist, as do the denizens of neoliberal economic integration. In economic terms, it was Latin American post-colonial scholars who started to point to a structural connection between Western progress and non-Western poverty (Owen 2005: 161). Where progress was lauded, however, it was not without its cynics. In the book Burmese Days, one of George Orwell’s characters noted, “They build a prison and call it progress” (Orwell 1962: 42). This notion of a progress toward a modern civilization emplaced in colonial contact zones of Southeast Asia, however, was not necessarily lost in translation. Prestigious locals meaningfully fused it with existing concepts. In the nineteenth century in neighboring Siam, for example, elites resignified the Khmer word charoen from meaning cultivating merit, Buddhist awakening, making (someone) happier to a word that meant worldly development and technological advance, in other words, secular progress (Thongchai 2000: 531). Secular modernity and progress became coterminous. Furthermore, the utility of progress as a term or concept has been identified at points in history in which there is a shift, a rupture between expectation and experience. This perceived gap between expectation and experience has only grown wider in modern times (Koselleck 1985; Kosselleck and Presner 2002: 128). But the term progress need not be the exclusive preserve of the powerful or those cynical of the elitist underpinnings of its usage. Social movements could reject their oppressors’ notion of progress and use it to galvanize opposition. Writer and orator Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and former American [End Page viii] slave, began his 1857 “West India Emancipation” speech with the words, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Within definitions of liberalism, progress is coterminous with “social change for the better” (Fawcett 2018: 10–11). News events and their treatment by people in power in Myanmar create...
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Mar 22, 2018
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