Post-independence State Research Articles

Wandering abroad: British law, Irish independence, and Beckett’s vagrants

If there is something approximating a Beckettian social type it is doubtless the vagrant or tramp, those ostensibly idle and disorderly individuals. But too often (and for far too long) these figures have been understood only in terms of a metaphysical or metaphorized “homelessness”, as exemplars of existential despair, psychoanalytic banishment, modernist alienation or even a precondition of the posthuman condition articulated in his later work. This essay instead locates these figures in relation to the legal legacy of colonialism in post-independence Ireland, precisely to demonstrate how Beckett’s writing relates to this discourse. Most relevant in this regard is Section 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act passed by the Westminster Parliament – and still in force during the Irish Free State era – which indicates that the following classes of people shall be deemed “rogues and vagabonds”: “every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or wagon, not having any visible means of subsistence and not giving a good account of himself or herself”. In all its particulars, the definition closely applies to the many vagrants found in Beckett’s fiction and drama, especially the narrators of his four nouvelles, whose very existence seems to be at odds with the legal ideology of the post-independence state. Acknowledging this legal legacy is key to recognizing the political significance of contradiction, aporia, and misunderstanding in Beckett’s writing, which disrupts the authority of such discourses (taken to be non-contradictory, systematic, and self-evident) not just to assert and maintain legal identities, but to separate some individuals from the ranks of legitimate subjects of the bourgeois nation-state.

The Silence of the Postmemory Generation in John McGahern’s Short Stories

This essay argues that McGahern embodies a tension between nostalgia and anti-nostalgia through the silence of characters of a postmemory generation. Although McGahern neither pushes the limit of his works to the realm of political emancipation, nor pursues therapeutic working-through of trauma, he is an artist whose quest for postmemorial dynamics functions both anti-nostalgically as a traumatic symptom of the authoritative post-independence state, and nostalgically as an aesthetic strategy to reinvent the past. First, he describes silence as generational, representing both the space for a tentative truce between the generations and the means by which the postmemory generation can establish its critical identity. Second, McGahern's silence enables his postmemory-generation characters to reinvent the past. On the one hand, the silence reveals intragenerational memory war among members of the later generation as they form different versions of the past. On the other, the silence serves as a creative space for reflective nostalgia to reimagine, and cope with, the trauma of the past.

Moderasi Beragama di Kalangan Milenial Dalam Rangka Merajut Kebinekaan

The religious moderation campaign for millennial faces many challenges. The facts on the ground show that the phenomenon of radicalism is deeply rooted. The moderation program offered by the government has lost its reputation with the radicalism movement which is packaged attractively and in accordance with current trends. Through a qualitative approach and a radical paradigm of humanism, this study then tries to explore the root cause of the strengthening of radicalism and how complexities are faced by the discourse of religious moderation. This study then found several conclusions including, First, the moderation movement has been less fast and less attractive to millennial compared to the opposite movement. Second, the geneological roots of moderation and radicalism are not finished and are related to the relationship between religion and the post-independence state. Third, the influence of transnational radicalism. Fourth, socio-political-economic factors, including poverty, state violence, legal injustice, political instability, racial issues, militarism and so on. The only opportunity that the discourse of religious moderation has is the preindependence cultural roots, through strengthening cultural values, Islamic treasures (intellectual Islam) and the welfare economic movement. If such opportunities are not utilized, the movement and discourse of religious moderation will run aground in the middle of the road.
 Keywords: Religious Moderation, Millennials, Islam, radical humanism

Finance, Investment and Decolonisation in Nigeria

Abstract Given the relative scarcity of capital and the small volume of savings in most African economies at independence, the establishment of stock exchanges and their regulation showed that several countries considered them as strategic financial intermediaries for channelling capital to their national, and even regional, economies. This article examines the Lagos Stock Exchange’s formative years as a political process of Nigeria’s decolonisation and the First Republic. Originally incorporated as a private limited liability company on 15 September 1960, and as the first stock exchange in West Africa and the region’s largest economy, the new financial intermediary defined the relationship between the post-independence state and the growing capital market during a period of considerable political and economic changes. The role of the post-independence state and state-owned enterprises in facilitating the trade on the Lagos Stock Exchange broadens the analytical scope of this investigation to identify the sources of Nigeria’s development finance. While significant efforts were taken to grow private individual participation in the share trade and ownership, the early years of the Lagos Stock Exchange were ultimately marked by the dominance of institutional investors such as state-owned enterprises and private commercial banks.

Historical Complexities and Transformations of Refugee Policies in Kenya and Tanzania

This article discusses the history of hosting political refugees in Kenya and Tanzania. It argues that refugee hosting is not merely a humanitarian act, but a complex interplay of domestic interests, political ideologies, and foreign policies. The intertwinement of economic, social, and political factors creates situations in which refugee-related policies and their implementation are fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions that explain varied reactions to refugees from different politiconational backgrounds. Tanzania and Kenya, at various points in their history of hosting refugees as postindependence states, have alternately embraced and rejected specific refugee communities, showing how refugee hosting is not exclusively about the principles of humanitarian law. Reactions to political refugees in Kenya and Tanzania have crystalized in recent times into stringent regimes, as domestic and foreign-policy interests are increasingly formulated in ways that exclude refugees.

Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled by Nicholas Allen

<i>Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled</i> by Nicholas Allen

Deliberations in Dance: Affecting Publics and the Politics of Ethnicity in Guinea’s Nascent Democracy

AbstractGuinea’s postindependence state (1958-84) discouraged ethnic identification in favor of national solidarity. In the decades since, ethnic groups have increasingly been mobilized as political interest groups in Guinea, a phenomenon that has been especially visible in recent multiparty elections. At the same time as ethnicity resurfaced as an explicit political force, young performing artists in Guinea’s capital city Conakry were inventing genres of dance and urban ceremony that de-emphasize ethnicity as a marker of belonging. Cohen engages with an interdisciplinary literature on publics to describe how the aesthetic practices of non-elite African youth constitute a crucial form of political engagement.

Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang by Janet Carsten

Reviewed by: Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang by Janet Carsten Jenna Grant Janet Carsten. Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 256 pp. Janet Carsten's Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang opens in an operating theater during a triple bypass surgery. The reader encounters the technological complexity of the procedure, which depends on a heart-lung machine to ensure the transmission of oxygenated blood to the body and the removal of carbon dioxide while the heart is stopped. The scene conveys a sense of the embodied expertise of the professionals involved—nurses, perfusionists, anesthetists, and the cardiac surgeon—who perform their tasks seriously and in quiet, casual sociality, talking shop and talking holidays. This counterbalance of life and death with the everyday, which Carsten maintains elegantly throughout the book, brings forward the significance of blood for anthropological inquiry. Blood has unique material properties—"striking color, liquidity, warmth while in the body, its smell, and the way it solidifies and changes color when spilled" (6)—and capacities of animation, namely sustaining life and bringing back to life those at the brink of death. Carsten argues that blood's material properties and its animating capacity are key to its elaboration as a metaphor in diverse domains, including kinship, religion, ethnicity, politics, and morality. Thus, blood, as both metaphor and material, is central to understandings of social and biological life. Blood Work explores the everyday labor of maintaining life through the donation, screening, labeling, cross-matching, and transfusion of blood in private hospitals in Penang, Malaysia. Siting an ethnography of blood in the pathology lab is an inspired choice as it foregrounds mid-level, often neglected actors in the hospital hierarchy—technologists, technicians, and managers, who tend to be women and Chinese Malaysian. (Malay, [End Page 483] the dominant ethnic group in Malaysia, are favored in education and employment; Chinese Malay constitute a slight majority in the population in Penang, though quotas favoring Malays still apply.) Blood work is both risky and boring, existential and technical. It must be carried out in minute exactitude. Rather than focusing on facts produced by heroic scientists, Carsten's laboratory study centers around spaces, people, and practices in the lab, including discourses and practices of blood, but it also encompasses much more—sharing food and exchanging gossip about weddings, scandals, and elections. As it turns out, a blood lab in Penang is an interesting place to learn about social relations, gender, religion, and ethnicity in Malaysia. Thus, Blood Work is also about contemporary urban life in Penang, conveyed with a historical richness and ethnographic sensitivity that only decades of sustained engagement allow. Penang's cosmopolitanism is shaped by its long history as an entrepôt, its religious and ethnic diversity, as well as its colonial and post-colonial classifications of citizens that, at times, conflate ethnicity, nation, and religion, as demonstrated by the categories on a statistical report on blood donors: "Chinese," "Indian," "Muslim," "Other" (42). Ethnicity shows up in jokes and repartee, discussions of weddings and funerals, and the pragmatism behind desires to diversify the lab so staffing is easier over various religious holidays. Ethnic diversity is part of Malaysia's self-narration of nationhood.1 Penang also has a lot of medical facilities, which are emblematic of the technocratic development policies under Prime Minister Mahathir and the post-independence state more broadly. Most staff in the lab were married women in their 30s with young children. Many were first generation college graduates and thus were representative of demographic trends toward increased opportunity for education and women's entry into the paid workforce. Carsten argues that social processes that have marked Malaysia are encapsulated in the spaces and trajectories of staff in the lab. The book moves from blood donation events (Chapter 1) to the laboratory spaces and the people who work there (Chapter 2) to the types of "blood work" carried out in the lab (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 explores the practices that make these spaces sociable and the sometimes-metaphysical anxieties that accompany efforts to demarcate the lab from the outside world. Analysis of the permeability of society and the institution of the hospital is...

The Struggle for Independence in Guinea-Bissau

The realization of the process of armed struggle for national liberation in the so called Portuguese Guinea and, consequent unilateral proclamation of the State of Guinea-Bissau in September 1973 was possible from outside the Guinean borders, through an important and strategic contribution made by the Republic of Guinea- Conakry which in 1958 had already achieved national independence. This article intends to observe the capital of the neighboring Republic of Guinea as a symbolic structuring space in the construction of ideological antagonisms based on the sociocultural and political dispute around "unity and against unity" within the African Party for Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The fundamental purpose is to understand the extent to which the environment generated in Conakry contributed to the cohesion or weakening of the recommended desiderates, but above all to the legacy of inherited conflicts that influenced the post-independence state building process in Guinea-Bissau. It is worth mentioning that the empirical framework is the PAIGC, the sociopolitical segments that make up its internal structure and other protagonists of the process.&#x0D; Keywords: Conakry, PAIGC, Unity and Conflicts, Guinea-Bissau.

Reflecting on Kejawen: Javanese Esoteric Teachings in Indonesian National Development

Kejawen as a concept of spirituality arose out of ancient Javanese society. Many Western scholars have used the term ‘Javanese mysticism’ to refer to Kejawen teachings, which focus on inward rather than outward religious expression and feeling. Kejawen teaching offers an esoteric understanding of religion and spirituality, one that seems to circulate mainly outside formal religious traditions. This paper demonstrates the significance of Kejawen teaching in spiritual, psychological, and social development in Indonesia, suggesting it has especial relevance to issues of peace and violence. Placing Kejawen in its context, this study shows that the national development in Indonesia after independence was influenced by the esoteric ideas of Kejawen, as portrayed in the national motto “unity in diversity”. This expression resembles the post-independence state ideology of Pancasila. Through analysis of key nationalist texts, themes linked to elements of Kejawen teachings are identified and analysed in this study. This is done by analysing key texts, including Soekarno’s independence speech, Pancasila, and other relevant materials from various available sources. The reader will find out more about the need for comprehensive symbolic and resource-based recognition of Kejawen teachings in Indonesian society.

Moderasi Beragama di Kalangan Milenial Peluang, Tantangan, Kompleksitas dan Tawaran Solusi

The religious moderation campaign for millennials faces many challenges. The facts on the ground show that the phenomenon of radicalism is deeply rooted. The moderation program offered by the government has lost its reputation with the radicalism movement which is packaged attractively and in accordance with current trends. Through a qualitative approach and a radical paradigm of humanism, this study then tries to explore the root cause of the strengthening of radicalism and how complexities are faced by the discourse of religious moderation. This study then found several conclusions including, First, the moderation movement has been less fast and less attractive to millennials compared to the opposite movement. Second, the geneological roots of moderation and radicalism are not finished and are related to the relationship between religion and the post-independence state. Third, the influence of transnational radicalism. Fourth, socio-political-economic factors, including poverty, state violence, legal injustice, political instability, racial issues, militarism and so on. The only opportunity that the discourse of religious moderation has is the pre-independence cultural roots, through strengthening cultural values, Islamic treasures (intellectual Islam) and the welfare economic movement. If such opportunities are not utilized, the movement and discourse of religious moderation will run aground in the middle of the road.

Constructing gama or ūr amidst inescapable ethno-national politics: Everyday experience of Pānama people living on the Eastern coast of Sri Lanka

Despite the undertakings of the colonial administration which took into consideration the caste system in their census and gradually gave much prominence to creating ethno-religious categories through scientific enumerations and linked them with the political administration of the country and shaped by the majoritarian democratic model, the caste too survived in Sri Lanka. The formation and mobilisation of ethnoreligious political categories contributed towards creating an ethno-religious nationalism and multi-ethnic people engaged in a competition to obtain a better share of the post-independence state. This power competition eventually created victorious as well as defeated feelings within the communities, which were eventually translated to ethno-national tensions and conflicts in Sri Lanka. Against this backdrop research was conducted in the Eastern coastal area in general, and Pānama in particular, suggested that people of rivalry ethnonational groups had developed traditional long-term connections and disconnections through caste lines which ultimately created a “community” identified as gama in (Sinhala) or ūr (Tamil), with a social equilibrium. The ethnographic data collected in this village from 2010-2012 suggests that the people with Sinhala and Tamil ethnic origins (as discussed in today’s context) were linked (and delinked) in relation to religious, cultural, economic, social, and political norms. This aspect was ultimately instrumental in constructing one whole village or a system in which all can live. The village possessed several caste groups; namely, Goigama, Vellālar, Baber, Dhobi (washerman), and Padu. The Goigama and Vellālar caste were accepted as the castes commanding the highest status, while Barbers came in the second place followed by washermen in third and Padu taking the final place in the social structure of the village. The Goigama caste is part of the Sinhala social system, while Vellālar belongs to the Tamil social system. Similarly, both the Barbers and Washermen represented Tamil social system, while the Padu group represents the Sinhala social system. To describe further, both the Sinhala and Tamil social systems had combined and created a hybrid unique system which included members from both the Sinhala and Tamil ethno-national groups, to construct a home or the village.

Politics lost in translation: the African concept of time as a method to understand African conflicts

Purpose This paper aims to explore John Mbiti’s concept of African time in line with the studies on the crisis of the post-independence African state. Then, how this concept offers new analytical spaces for understanding the modern nation-states inconveniences in African contexts. Design/methodology/approach The paper analyses the Mbitian African concept of time in light of the works on post-independence African state and communalism. Findings By using the Mbitian concept of time politically after explaining African communalism and African concepts of personhood and destiny, the paper reached a conclusion. This conclusion claims that due to the highly existential nature of the African concept of destiny and the past-oriented feature of the African concept of time, Africans cannot be restrained by any supernatural claim or any futuristic promises that are irrelevant to their context and cut from the communal values of ancestral past. Africans do not think supernaturally or bet for the future. However, those futuristic and supernatural claims that cannot restrain the African subjectivity – ironically – characterize the modern nation state with its “progress orientation” and “social-contract” metaphysics. Unfortunately, this radical difference in perceptions between the past-oriented African temporality and the future-oriented modern state temporality rendered the post-independence. African state dysfunctional and unable to operate as a medium for authority. This, consequently, opened the door for informal conflict and strife. Originality/value The paper is novel with regard to offering a new theory on the conceptual problems of the nation state in African contexts.

Re-thinking the state in Africa through Gabon’s aesthetics of governance

ABSTRACT This article discusses Gabon’s post-independence state to query prospects for the postcolonial state in Africa. The modernist aspirations of that post-independence era sought to transform Gabonese society through the built environment – architectural design of buildings, layout of roads, landscapes – and attempted to materialise counter-colonial social forms in ways not necessarily reducible to (though certainly in line with) the interests of elites and monopoly capital. As such, the cosmopolitan humanism contained in that that era’s aesthetics of governance lends insights into the possibilities for re-thinking the state in light of subsequent history. Attention to the aesthetics of governance may optimistically open up radical possibilities that transcend governance as mere policy/policing in ways that speak to class, environmentalist, and feminist concerns of past and contemporary political activists.

The Small Matter of “Sellouts”: Chiefs, History, Politics, and the State at Zimbabwe’s Independence, 1980–1985

This article explores the relationship between chiefs and the state in Zimbabwe's immediate post-independence years. Focusing on the period 1980 to 1985, it discusses how the advent of independence in 1980 engendered tensions between the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) government and chieftaincy. Through a series of legal and policy instruments, the new government transferred the little power chiefs had over grassroots land and judicial processes to bureaucratic and party functionaries. Literature has largely emphasised the state's “socialist,” modernising, and democratising agenda to explain this emasculation of chiefs. However, this article foregrounds political motivations, whose base lay in colonial history, and argues that this was also a punitive response against chieftaincy's entanglement with the colonial state, particularly in the era of mass nationalism. Using archival records, newspapers, interviews, and parliamentary debates, the article demonstrates continuity in the manner in which the post-independence state related with chiefs: as in the colonial era, the relationship continued to be defined by the political interests and strategies of the governing regime.

Change and continuity in Ghana’s intellectual history: From late 19th century to the eras of decolonisation and independence

ABSTRACTThis article explores intellectual growth and development in Gold Coast/Ghana from the late 19th century through the period of decolonisation to the emergence of the country as a post-independence state. It begins with a brief description of some of the key texts written within each of the three periods. Then with focus on three key intellectual historians, Carl Christian Reindorf, Kobina Sekyi, and Kwame Nkrumah, it examines the changes and continuities that characterised specific texts produced across the periods, using three themes as the connecting threads. The article explains that the early intellectual efforts provided a conduit for further intellectual explosion, particularly, within the domain of historical study.

Our Fighting Sisters: nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954–2012

Between 1954 and 1962, Algerian women played a major role in the struggle to end French rule in one of the twentieth century’s most violent wars of decolonisation. This is the first in-depth exploration of what happened to these women after independence in 1962. Based on new oral history interviews with women who participated in the war in a wide range of roles, from urban bombers to members of the rural guerrilla support network, it explores how female veterans viewed the post-independence state and its multiple discourses on ‘the Algerian woman’ in the fifty years following 1962. It also examines how these former combatants’ memories of the anti-colonial conflict intertwine with, contradict or coexist alongside the state-sponsored narrative of the war constructed after independence. Making an original contribution to debates about gender, nationalism and memory, this book will appeal to students and scholars of history and politics.

West African Women and the Development Question in the Post–World War II Economy: The Experience of Nigeria’s Benin Province in the Oil Palm Industry

West African women as typified by the experience of women in the oil palm industry in Nigeria’s Benin Province participated actively in the transformation of the post–World War II economy. The role of the women in the oil palm industry in West African societies has not been given detailed attention in the historiography of the region. This study historicizes the process and its impact on the development of the women in the post–World War II economy. It finds that the colonial policies that facilitated and transformed the role of women in the oil palm economy did not only establish, but also sustained their exploitation and underdevelopment. It therefore recommends that the structure of the oil palm production that was inherited from the postwar colonial economy by post-independence West African states, including Nigeria, should be radically restructured to meet the needs of women in resolving the economic crisis in the region.

The Boy Is Gone: Conversation With A Mau Mau General Huttenbach, Laura Lee P.

Reviewed by: The Boy is Gone: Conversation With a Mau Mau General by Laura Lee Huttenbach Ishmael Irungu Munene Huttenbach, Laura Lee. 2015. THE BOY IS GONE: CONVERSATION WITH A MAU MAU GENERAL. Athens: Ohio University Press. 251 pp. $28.95 (paper). Much has been written about the Mau Mau, the armed liberation movement in central Kenya that played a central role in the country’s independence from British colonial rule. Historians and political scientists have analyzed its effects during colonialism and postindependence state formation. Deviating from academic analysis of it by university intelligentsia, Laura Lee Huttenbach’s book The Boy Is Gone: Conversation with a Mau Mau General presents a lucid personal account of the movement through the prism of a biographical account of Japhlet Thambu, a well-known retired general. The title of the book epitomizes Kenya’s evolution, from the childhood innocence of precolonialization to the complexities of adolescence, adulthood, and middle age (as evident in colonialism), the liberation movement, and the postindependence epochs. The running motif in the biography is one of personal, community, and national betrayal. Huttenbach divides her account into five sections, through which she weaves Thambu’s life into the fabric of Kenya’s precolonial and colonial history, the resistance, and its contradictions to the promises and risks of independence. The first section, “How I Grew,” describing Thambu’s life in the early twentieth century, describes precolonial Meru society, steeped in tradition and governed by robust social mores. Tribal wisdom and practices in governance, agriculture, medicine, manufacturing, and religion reveal an orderly, self-sufficient society, well-equipped to manage natural calamities. Incipient colonial penetration through taxation, schools, and Christian missionaries did not violently disrupt this way of life. Some elected to become [End Page 109] Christians, while others, like Thambu, opted to go to school, in a subtle betrayal of tribal life. The second section, “Black Market,” looks at how Thambu’s ingenuity permitted him to find accommodation in the emerging colonial economy. He became a successful teacher, married an uneducated girl, and began a family. Quitting teaching, he became a successful black-market timber merchant—a lucrative occupation for those seeking quick fortune. Adaptating to the colonial economy required negotiating cultural imperatives and modernity needs, including the education of girls: “so educate girls, educate boys—they are the children of the country” (p. 34). Thambu succeeded as a teacher because, as he believed: “Teaching is not a business. It is a body-building—a culture-building. … What you build—they can become the business people and run hotels or rule the country” (p. 35). The seeds of protest began to germinate as he resigned from teaching over racial discrimination, just as the independent African school movement was gaining ground, the Kikuyu Central Association’s political party was launched, and the African carrier corps from the second world war returned to energize the rebellion. In the timber trade, we see the genesis of the culture of corruption in Kenya’s police force. In Thambu’s resignation from teaching, we see how local jealousy and betrayal converged to thwart promising professional growth. “The Forest,” the third section, delves into the Mau Mau as a military organization and the war it fought. A scaffolding of interrelated human interactions is captured in a cinematographic vision that defines the heightened war of political liberation. Mau Mau is seen as a well-structured, hierarchically organized, and strategically focused fighting machine, rather than a ragtag army of bandits. Recruitment and promotion was a multifaceted web of rituals involving oath administration and pledges of allegiance to the cause of liberation. Thambu’s magnetism, education, and hard work propelled him through the military ranks to become a full general; however, military life in the forest is anchored in indigenous knowledge, as well as practices and a network of undercover collaborators in the villages. Betrayal ran deep, both within the Mau Mau and its antagonist, the home guards. Cordial family relationships and communal bonds gave way to suspicion, hatred, and violence. In the end, military activity was insufficient to guarantee independence, as “toward the end of 1955, practically everybody, even the big people left the forest. By then, even [I] myself got...

Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma

Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma. By Mandy Sadan. Oxford: Oxford University Press (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph), 2013. Hardcover: 49pp (including Bibliography, plus front and end material). This is one of the most important books on the history, anthropology and politics of Burma/Myanmar to be published in recent years. (1) Mandy Sadan traces the emergence and transformation of the ethno-national identity over two centuries, from the precolonial period through to the present, in northeast India, southwest China, and northern Myanmar. Sadan's account is based on archival material, particularly from the British ex-colonies, combined with profound cultural and linguistic insights derived from fieldwork among the Kachin. She mobilizes outsider and insider sources--including texts, photographs and material culture, and many first-hand primary interviews--to sustain a critical interrogation of what it has meant and means to be (and be perceived as) Kachin, in different historical and geopolitical contexts (including at the broadest level, which is covered in Chapter 5 Southeast Asia in the Cold War). A wide range of theoretical approaches are mobilized, without losing sight of the peoples' particular lived experiences. The critical interrogation of implied and explicit positions in relation to identities and interests is balanced by a deep sympathy for her subject. Some scholars of ethnic politics in Myanmar (e.g. Robert Taylor passim) have suggested that, because categories of ethnic identity (e.g. Kachin) can be shown historically to be arbitrary constructions but are often treated in discourse as natural and essentialized, such self-identifications are somehow inauthentic or at best anachronistic. While carefully exploring the positions and interests involved in the emergence of identity, Sadan never belittles her subject, but seeks to unpack these dynamics in a manner which is fundamentally sympathetic to this complex and multifaceted society. This is evident in her treatment of how the Kachin ethnonym is claimed by (or for) non-dominant subgroups. As with other ethnic nationalities in Myanmar, defining elements of identity tend to be derived from the characteristics of a particular subgroup--in this case the Jingphaw. While elites from other subgroups (e.g. Lisu and Rawang) have sometimes preferred to use more locally specific designations and markers, the identification of Jingphaw as characteristic of a pan-national identity seems to be quite widely accepted. The analysis here is deeply empirical rather than theoretically driven. Sadan explores formative literatures on the Kachin, including Edmund Leach's hugely influential (but not unproblematic) Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) and the work of Jonathan Friedman. She is critical of scholars (including James Scott) who have devised macro-theoretical anthropological-political frameworks on the basis of case studies, and often seem more interested in the resulting theoretical superstructure than in grounding their insights in the lived realities of communities. The closest Sadan comes to meta-theorizing is her argument that socio-political constructions can be regarded as fractile. The fractile metaphor illustrates how and other local polities and societies reproduce at the micro-level elements of macro-level (e.g. courtly) structures, for example, regarding patron-client networks, and the symbolism of power. This theme is accompanied by insights regarding how (Kachin) local actors have sometimes been able to game such systems, gaining the upper-hand in material and symbolic relations with ostensibly more powerful actors (precolonial Burmese kings, British colonial actors and, more problematically, the post-independence state of Burma/Myanmar). …