Mandala logic: mytho‐praxis as vernacular political theory in Myanmar

Abstract

This article argues that myth‐making is a form of vernacular social theory, a way of producing conceptual arguments about how social formations work and what is at stake in them. I focus on a myth from Myanmar, the Myth of the Tea Seeds, and its attendant ritual complex, which culminates in an annual religious festival in the highland town of Namhsan. Drawing on the so‐called ‘mandala model’, a classic historiographic approach for the study of Southeast Asia, I show how Ta'ang and Burmese people navigate sedimented trans‐regional power relations, and how highlanders and lowlanders alike engage in acts of retelling, exegesis, and critique that test the limits of the myth as a theoretical tool. What emerges is a picture of core‐periphery politics that looks less like a dialectic of coercion and evasion, and more like a system of antagonistic mutual dependence. Here, mythology is contested ground, a site for interrogating the relationship between abstract social theorization and lived social relations amidst long local histories of accommodation and struggle.