Download or read book Myanmar Historical Commission Conference Proceedings written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers presented at the conference.
Download or read book A History of Myanmar since Ancient Times written by Michael Aung-Thwin and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A History of Myanmar since Ancient Times, Michael Aung-Thwin and Maitrii Aung-Thwin take us from the sacred stupas of the plains of Pagan to grand, colonial-era British mansions, revealing the storied past and rich culture of this country. The book traces the traditions and transformations of Myanmar’s communities over nearly three millennia, from the relics of its Neolithic civilization to the splendors of its pre-colonial kingdoms, its encounters with British colonialism and the struggles for the republic that followed the end of World War II. The authors also consider the complexities of present-day life in Myanmar and examine the key political events and debates of the last twenty-five years that have brought the world’s attention to the country. By exploring current developments within the broader patterns of Myanmar's history, culture and society, they provide a nuanced perspective on the issues and questions surrounding Myanmar’s future. This updated edition considers the changes that have taken place since the elections of 2010, the reforms that the civilian government introduced, and the ramifications of the country's new international status. It also assesses the implications of the 2012 by-elections, the ensuing political dynamics among various stakeholders, and the continuing socio-economic challenges facing Myanmar in the twenty-first century. The most comprehensive history of Myanmar ever published in the English language, this book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Southeast Asian history and will surprise, challenge, and inform in equal measure.
Download or read book Myanmar in the Fifteenth Century written by Michael A. Aung-Thwin and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the great kingdom of Pagan declined politically in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, its territory devolved into three centers of power and a period of transition occurred. Then two new kingdoms arose: the First Ava Dynasty in Upper Myanmar and the First Pegu Dynasty in Lower Myanmar. Both originated around the second half of the fourteenth century, reached their pinnacles in the fifteenth, and declined before the first half of the sixteenth century was over. Their story is the only missing piece in Myanmar’s mainstream historiography, a gap this book is designed to fill. Renowned historian Michael Aung-Thwin reconstructs the chronology of this nearly two-hundred-year period while challenging a number of long-held beliefs. Contrary to conventional histories, he contends that Ava was the continuation of an old kingdom (Pagan) led by its traditional ethno-linguistic group, the Burmese speakers, while Pegu was a new kingdom led by more recent arrivals, the Mon speakers. Although both kingdoms shared many cultural components of the “classical” Pagan tradition, Ava was inland and agrarian, while Pegu was maritime and commercial, so that each was shaped by very different geopolitical and economic environments. In that difference rests the dynamism of their “upstream-downstream” relationship, which, thereafter, became a regular historical pattern in Myanmar history, represented today by inland Naypyidaw and “coastal” Yangon. Original in conception and impressive in scope, this well written book not only fills in the history of early modern Myanmar but places it in a broad interpretive context based on years of familiarity with a wealth of primary sources. Full of arresting anecdotes and colorful personalities, it represents an important contribution to Myanmar studies that will not easily be superseded.
Download or read book Post Colonial Society and Culture in Southeast Asia written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bagan and the World written by Goh Geok Yian and published by ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The archaeological site of Bagan and the kingdom which bore its name contains one of the greatest concentrations of ancient architecture and art in Asia. Much of what is visible today consists of ruins of Buddhist monasteries. While these monuments are a major tourist attraction, recent advances in archaeology and textual history have added considerable new understanding of this kingdom, which flourished between the 11th and 14th centuries. Bagan was not an isolated monastic site; its inhabitants participated actively in networks of Buddhist religious activity and commerce, abetted by the site’s location near the junction where South Asia, China and Southeast Asia meet. This volume presents the result of recent research by scholars from around the world, including indigenous Myanmar people, whose work deserves to be known among the international community. The perspective on Myanmar’s role as an integral part of the intellectual, artistic and economic framework found in this volume yields a glimpse of new themes which future studies of Asian history will no doubt explore. span, SPAN { background-color:inherit; text-decoration:inherit; white-space:pre-wrap }
Download or read book Buddhist Art of Myanmar written by Sylvia Fraser-Lu and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning showcase of exceptional and rare works of Buddhist art, presented to the international community for the first time The practice of Buddhism in Myanmar (Burma) has resulted in the production of dazzling objects since the 5th century. This landmark publication presents the first overview of these magnificent works of art from major museums in Myanmar and collections in the United States, including sculptures, paintings, textiles, and religious implements created for temples and monasteries, or for personal devotion. Many of these pieces have never before been seen outside of Myanmar. Accompanied by brilliant color photography, essays by Sylvia Fraser-Lu, Donald M. Stadtner, and scholars from around the world synthesize the history of Myanmar from the ancient through colonial periods and discuss the critical links between religion, geography, governance, historiography, and artistic production. The authors examine the multiplicity of styles and techniques throughout the country, the ways Buddhist narratives have been conveyed through works of art, and the context in which the diverse objects were used. Certain to be the essential resource on the subject, Buddhist Art of Myanmar illuminates two millennia of rarely seen masterpieces.
Download or read book Traditions in Current Perspective written by Myanmar Historical Commission and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Myanmar written by Adam Simpson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of mismanagement and direct military rule, Myanmar’s contested transition to a more democratic government has rapidly shifted the outlook in this significant Southeast Asian nation. Since 2011, the removal of Western sanctions and new foreign investments have resulted in high rates of economic growth and an expanding middle class, albeit from a very low base. In a result unthinkable a few years earlier, former political prisoner and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), formed a national government in early 2016. However, despite significant political and economic reforms since the liberalisation process commenced, the transition to civilian rule remains constrained by the military’s 2008 Constitution, which guarantees that it operates unfettered by civilian oversight. As a result, although some ethnic conflicts have abated, others continue to fester and new conflicts have erupted. With a daunting task ahead the NLD government has made some progress in removing the vestiges of repressive military-era laws but many remain untouched and some of the practices of the new government provide unwelcome reminders of its authoritarian history. This timely Handbook describes the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of this crucial period of transition in Myanmar. It presents explanations for contradictory trends, including those that defy some of the early narratives about the comprehensive transformation of Myanmar. The Handbook also considers the impact of major environmental, strategic, and demographic trends which help underscore that Myanmar’s development will be an ongoing task. In addition to introductory and concluding chapters by the editors, the body of the Handbook is divided into seven core sections: • Fundamentals • Spaces • Cultures • Living • Governance • International • Challenges Written by an international team of scholars, with a mix of world-leading established academics and talented emerging researchers, the Handbook provides a rigorous scholarly overview of Myanmar’s politics, economics, and society. As Myanmar opens to Western businesses and government agencies, this is an invaluable reference book that will provide a foundation for further research and offer the first port of call for scholars, students, and policy makers working on Myanmar and Asia.
Download or read book SRI KSETRA Modern Pyay written by Andrea Pistolesi and published by PadPlaces. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The images captured by Andrea Pistolesi, of an unusual landscape of the precious archaeological and monumental heritage of Myanmar, suggested the initiative. To present to a wider public a little known aspect of the history of urbanisation in Southeast Asia: the cities of the Pyu culture. An extensive photo gallery and a precise archaeological presentation are a pleasant introduction to one of the best preserved areas of Burma, the modern Myanmar.
Download or read book Buddhist Law in Burma written by D. Christian Lammerts and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Burma and neighboring areas of Southeast Asia comprise the only region of the world to have developed a written corpus of Buddhist law claiming jurisdiction over all members of society. Yet in contrast with the extensive scholarship on Islamic and Hindu law, this tradition of Buddhist law has been largely overlooked. In fact, it is commonplace to read that Buddhism gave rise to no law aside from the vinaya, or monastic law. In Buddhist Law in Burma, D. Christian Lammerts upends this misperception and provides an intellectual and literary history of the dynamic jurisprudence of the dhammasattha legal genre between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based on a critical study of hundreds of little-known surviving dhammasattha and related manuscripts, Buddhist Law in Burma demonstrates the centrality of law as a crucial discipline of Buddhist knowledge in precolonial Southeast Asia. Composed by lay and monastic jurists in prose and verse, in Pali, Burmese, and other regional vernaculars, dhammasattha were intended for use by judges to guide the adjudication of legal disputes. Lammerts argues that there were multiple, sometimes contentious, modes of reckoning Buddhist jurisprudence and legal authority in the region and assesses these in the context of local cultural, textual, and ritual practices. Over time the foundational jurisprudence of the genre underwent considerable reformulation in light of arguments raised by its critics, bibliographers, and historians, resulting in a reorientation from a cosmological to a more positivist conception of Buddhist law and legislation that had far-reaching implications for innovative forms of dhammasattha-related discourse on the eve of British colonialism. Buddhist Law in Burma shows how, despite such textual and theoretical transformations, late precolonial Burmese jurists continued to promote and justify the dhammasattha genre, and the role of law generally in Buddhism, as a vital aspect of the ongoing effort to protect and preserve the sāsana of Gotama Buddha. The book will be of value to students and scholars interested in the rich legal, intellectual, and cultural histories of Buddhism in Burma and Southeast Asia, or in the historical intersections of law and Buddhism.
Download or read book Old Myths and New Approaches written by Alexandra Haendel and published by Monash University Publishing. This book was released on 2012-08-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old Myths and New Approaches: Interpreting Ancient Religious Sites in Southeast Asia brings together recent research by leading experts on Southeast Asia in the pre-modern era. The authors examine sites from early and Angkor-period Cambodia and Vietnam, on the mainland, to temples in Java and Bali, and discuss many different aspects of these sites’ uses and functions. This comprehensive, innovative and interdisciplinary work will be invaluable to scholars and students of historical Southeast Asia.
Download or read book The Journal of Burma Studies written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wider Bagan Ancient and Living Buddhist Traditions written by Elizabeth Moore and published by ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wider Bagan: Ancient and Living Buddhist Traditions is the first book to define the area outside the renowned Buddhist capital where vestiges of Bagan era cultural traditions can be found. From nearly six hundred attributes inventoried in Wider Bagan, thematic and geographical analysis of the Wider Bagan data reveals a related but different trajectory from that of the capital. The Sasanā of the court was honoured, and though its economy profited many places across Wider Bagan, local resilience was foremost. While the capital and Wider Bagan existed in relation to each other, their aims and narratives differed. Much has been written about Bagan, but little attention on the ground has been devoted to areas beyond the capital. These places have stories to tell—ones of the past and of the present—that are narrated in this book. "Wider Bagan is the most important recent publication on Myanmar’s past. Tracing Bagan’s ideational and material legacies, it recovers how this kingdom’s successors related to their heritages. Meticulously researched, beautifully illustrated, studded with clear maps, tables and outlines—Wider Bagan reveals these legacies’ custodians—inhabiting territories stretching as far as Yunnan and Bengal. Multiple topics are examined also in light of local scholarship, often ignored due to linguistic limitations. The resulting evocations of times and places make Wider Bagan an enduring guide to people’s lives—also in the larger scheme of things—like the community tracing its founding to the Buddha Gotama’s grandfather. No one interested in Myanmar’s complex past and fractious present can ignore the author’s conclusions."—Lilian Handlin, Member of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences CAMLab. "In her detailed survey of hundreds of sites in the Ayeyarwady River basin, Moore and her collaborators have revealed a long-suspected, but hitherto undocumented, rural cultural landscape with origins well before and persisting long after the political heyday of metropolitan Bagan in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. During their investigations, the authors had numerous encounters with local scholar-archaeologists who identified frequently overlooked physical attributes that define the local cultural landscape. In mapping these attributes, the authors reconstructed a narrative of local resilience that speaks to a long local history of diversity and adaptability over an extensive region, where other scholars—working mainly from historical chronicles—had observed only a rigid hegemony emanating from the political centre at Bagan. Moore’s innovative methodology breaks new ground for the study of early urban formations, not only in Myanmar but throughout mainland Southeast Asia. This research contributes to a building body of evidence that suggests a fresh paradigm to replace the long-standing concentric circle model most often used to explain state formation throughout the region. In this new paradigm, the contradiction between urban and rural settlements is dismantled as the stories of the smaller villages and towns re-enact the iterative process between places, communities of users, and social memory of Wider Bagan, demonstrating, in the process, an ecology of resilient settlement that has endured through generations of political, social and economic upheaval."—Richard A. Engelhardt, UNESCO Chair Professor of Cultural Heritage Management and Regional Advisor for Culture in Asia and the Pacific
Download or read book Essays in Commemoration of the Golden Jubilee of the Myanmar Historical Commission written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributed articles predominantly on historical related topics of Myanmar.
Download or read book Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia written by D Christian Lammerts and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of historical Buddhism in premodern and early modern Southeast Asia stands at an exciting and transformative juncture. Interdisciplinary scholarship is marked by a commitment to the careful examination of local and vernacular expressions of Buddhist culture as well as to reconsiderations of long-standing questions concerning the diffusion of and relationships among varied texts, forms of representation, and religious identities, ideas, and practices. The twelve essays in this collection, written by leading scholars in Buddhist Studies and Southeast Asian history, epigraphy, and archaeology, comprise the latest research in the field to deal with the dynamics of mainland and (pen)insular Buddhism between the sixth and nineteenth centuries C.E. Drawing on new manuscript sources, inscriptions, and archaeological data, they investigate the intellectual, ritual, institutional, sociopolitical, aesthetic, and literary diversity of local Buddhisms, and explore their connected histories and contributions to the production of intraregional and transregional Buddhist geographies.
Download or read book Ancient Southeast Asia written by John Norman Miksic and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Southeast Asia provides readers with a much needed synthesis of the latest discoveries and research in the archaeology of the region, presenting the evolution of complex societies in Southeast Asia from the protohistoric period, beginning around 500BC, to the arrival of British and Dutch colonists in 1600. Well-illustrated throughout, this comprehensive account explores the factors which established Southeast Asia as an area of unique cultural fusion. Miksic and Goh explore how the local population exploited the abundant resources available, developing maritime transport routes which resulted in economic and cultural wealth, including some of the most elaborate art styles and monumental complexes ever constructed. The book’s broad geographical and temporal coverage, including a chapter on the natural environment, provides readers with the context needed to understand this staggeringly diverse region. It utilizes French, Dutch, Chinese, Malay-Indonesian and Burmese sources and synthesizes interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives and data from archaeology, history and art history. Offering key opportunities for comparative research with other centres of early socio-economic complexity, Ancient Southeast Asia establishes the area’s importance in world history.
Download or read book Traditions in Current Perspective written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chiefly on Burmese civilization.
