Ethnographic Study Of The Worship Of Sawmunhla In Myanmar

Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative provides a grand blueprint for the development of southeast Asian.As one of the most important countries along the Belt and Road route,Myanmar and China are linked by mountains and rivers,and are known to each other as "paukphaw",or fraternal brothers.Yet our understanding of our neighbor is always lacking.Therefore,it is necessary to study the sociocultural anthropology of Burma and Burmese nationality.Currently,domestic studies on Myanmar pay more attention to the influence of bilateral relations and their complex ethnic relations on China,with a lack of in-depth description of the social culture and cultural interpretation of the main ethnic group of Myanmar,which is exactly one of the important ways for us to fully perceive and understand this "neighbor".Since the military government took over the country in 1962,fieldwork in Myanmar has become so difficult that for half a century,anthropological studies of Burma and the Burman have been largely stagnant.Until 2011,when 50 years of military rule came to an end,foreign scholars began to enter the country to conduct fieldwork and re-examine some of the underlying issues.Since almost all Burman believe in Buddhism,and the Buddhism culture has become the most important part of Burman culture system,Buddhism in Myanmar has been paid close attention by the academic circle.At the same time,the Burman are also believers of the worship of nats.The worship of nats is clearly manifested in their daily life and has an important impact on the spiritual world of the Burman.However,a survey of domestic academic circles shows that there is still a lack of relevant research on the anthropological interpretation of the worship culture of the Burmese nats,and the understanding of the concept and practice of the worship of the Burmese nats is also very limited.It is in this context that this study intends to study the ethnography of the worship of nats of the Burman people.This study is based on my long-term fieldwork in Shwe Sar Yan village,a Burmese village in central Myanmar,focusing on a special kind of nat worship in the village--the worship of Sawmunhla.Firstly,this paper uses the analysis method of historical documents to collect,sort out and analyze the history and mythology of Shwe Sar Yan village and its Sawmunhla worship,and probes into the differences between different versions of history and mythology and the causes of formation.Next,it presents the spatial structure characteristics of the temple in the village,classifies the action subjects in the temple,and presents the ritual process of worship to the temple.It is an important content of this study to extract the characteristics of the worship ceremony of Sawmunhla.After repeated participation and observation of this ceremony,this paper believes that the worship ceremony of Sawmunhla has two characteristics,which are embodied in two forms of social drama.One is the deviant dramas in rituals;The other is the Shan(Burma’s Thai people)style drama during the ceremony.Using the theory and method of symbolic anthropology,to explore the implied symbolic meaning of the two main features of the worship of Sawmunhla,this paper holds that the characteristic of the deviant drama in the worship of Sawmunhla symbolizes the moral pressures that Theravada Buddhism has put on Myanmar people,which is a sense of dissatisfaction with "civilized",and on this basis,this article thinks the relationship between the Burmese Buddhism and the worship of the nat is a kind of mutual fusion in form while segregation in the concept structure.The characteristic of Shan drama in the worship ceremony of Sawmunhla symbolizes the "the uncivilized and civilized ethnic view" of the Burman people,that is,the concept of distinguishing the self from the other by civilization and barbarism.On this basis,this paper holds that the ethnic politics and ethnic conflicts in Myanmar are closely related to the "ethnic culture" of the Burmese people.At last but not the least,this study discusses the impact of the social transformation that Myanmar is undergoing on the worship culture of the nat of the Burmese people,and presents the tendency and trend of commercialization and entertainment of the nat worship in recent years.This paper discusses the dynamic,cause and background of the change of the nat worship of the Burman nationality,and analyzes its future development trend.