Minding Frontiers or Frontiers of the Mind?
Burmese and Philippine explorations
The problem of the frontier is at the heart, in one form or another, of much policy and scholarly activity in and about Southeast Asia. It is not hard to see why this is so. For one thing, much political, and indeed, cultural energy is devoted to defining and debating the social and biophysical contours of this or that national 'imagined community'. For another thing, the frontier has become associated with the quest for individual and group 'ethnic' identities often at odds with these national communities. A major concern in my own work in both Burma and the Philippines has been to probe precisely the sorts of political and cultural tensions that arise in relation to natural resource management when people take frontiers seriously.
* By RAYMOND L. BRYANT
The deadly serious nature of frontiers is nowhere more evident than in the case of Burma or Myanmar. Indeed, the politics of naming involved here is, itself, evidence of the attempt to redefine frontier imaginings through the choice of culturally loaded words. My interest in the question of frontiers in the Burmese context was prompted mainly because of the historical and contemporary linkages between notions of frontier on the one hand, and intensive natural resource extraction on the other hand. I began to realize that the right to log or even to manage the 'sustainably' of the forests could not be separated from broader questions of national and ethnic identity. Indeed, such identities were partly constituted in and through natural resource management (see: Bryant 1996, 1997).
In the case of the Karen, for instance, the fifty-year-plus quest for an internationally recognized homeland of 'Kawthoolei' can be understood as a 'conventional' secessionist struggle based on ethnic affiliation. Yet the attempt to carve out a new imagined community at the interstices of the Thai-Burmese border has been a direct challenge to official notions of frontier and nation-state that no Burmese state has been able to accept. The right to control and use natural resources has been an inseparable part of this process. Thus, the promotion of Kawthoolei is in part about the assertion of the right to manage natural resources on behalf of the Karen people a people whose very identity is partly constructed around a forest-based way of life. Natural resource practices within Kawthoolei were simultaneously a vital source of revenue for the war effort, an affirmation of cultural identity, and a demonstration of sovereignty claims. In contrast, the militarized Burmese state has vigorously and, apparently, successfully sought to eliminate all trace of Kawthoolei, in part because official Burmese national identity cannot be separated from a long history of frontier-based natural resource exploitation. Accordingly, I read the Burmese military onslaught on Kawthoolei as being a multi-faceted endeavour that has been partly strategic (facilitating army access to the border region), partly economic (ensuring logging revenues replenish Burmese and not Karen coffers), and, not least, partly cultural (eliminating a rival claim to this frontier region).
In recent years, I have turned my attention to the politics of natural resource exploitation and conservation in the Philippines. There, I have found some similar processes of frontier creation and contestation as issues of politics, identity, and natural resource control swirl around each other.
What I have found to be most intriguing, though, is how questions of biodiversity conservation have become associated with frontier imaginings so as to create 'biogeographic imagined communities' across the Philippines (Bryant 2000). Here, instead of often destructive natural resource exploitation as the leitmotif of 'nation-building' endeavours, we have a more complex discursive agenda centred on notions of 'biodiversity' and 'conservation' which are, in turn, linked to the perceived national or even global good. And yet, such top-down 'born-again environmentalism' has rarely found full favour with local communities living in frontier areas. Instead, many local communities have sought to redefine 'biodiversity hotspots' into their own terms of reference as 'ancestral domains'.
This difference is both instructive and important. It is instructive both because it reveals that many local communities are well aware that the recent push to conserve biodiversity is often no more than 'old wine in a new bottle' traditional frontier politics with an environmental twist and their simultaneous recognition of the central role of discourse in articulating the new phase of frontier 'development'.
Thus, and as I have seen in various parts of Palawan and Luzon, ancestral domain is commonly an assertion of ethnic and cultural identity as well as being a particular ethos of 'sustainable' human-environmental conduct linked to local management and control. The differences symbolized in contrasting notions of 'biodiversity hotspot' and 'ancestral domain' are also important because they have rapidly moved to centre-stage in the political and ecological struggles that characterize modern Philippine politics.
To understand the modern record of natural resource exploitation in countries such as the Philippines or Burma it is vital to appreciate the many ways in which 'frontier' thinking helps to bolster nation-building efforts that are so often (literally) fuelled by natural resources. Yet it is also to understand that notions of frontier and imagined community are themselves partly constituted in the light of knowledge and desires linked to human use of the biophysical environment. In this way, and as my research seeks to show, the social construction of nature and of political identity are inevitably linked through a notion such as the frontier in a way that has profound consequences for social action and thought.
References
Bryant, R.L., 'Asserting Sovereignty through Natural Resource Use: Karen forest management on the Thai-Burmese border', in R. Howitt (ed.), Resources, nations and indigenous peoples, Melbourne: Oxford University Press (1996), pp 32-41.
Bryant, R.L., The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma, 1824-1994, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press (1997).
Bryant, R.L., Politicized Moral Geographies: Debating biodiversity conservation and ancestra domain in the Philippines, in Political Geography, 19 (2000), pp. 673-705.
Dr Raymond L. Bryant,
Department of Geography, King's College London, United Kingdom
E-mail: raymond.bryant@kcl.ac.uk