Constructing taohpwoh: Journeying through Pwakanyaw Christian model communities and its indigenous social paradigm

Abstract

My thesis is an historical and anthropological study of Pwakanyaw (also known as Karen) Christian communities, called taohpwoh, which emerged at the intersection of British colonisation of Burma and the collapse of the Konbaung monarchy. British colonialism and the resulting upheaval created the conditions in which Pwakanyaw Christians could construct a new form of sociality, which responded to and covertly rejected both colonial domination and the experience of marginalisation under Bamar Buddhist monarchies. The sociality that Pwakanyaw created through the taohpwoh movement involved acts of self-ascription, where membership was based on ethnicity and religion, and intentionally embraced hybridised practices, engaging with new forms of knowledge and translating them into Pwakanyaw epistemology and ontology. The taohpwoh model of community has spread across Pwakanyaw areas of Burma/Myanmar and neighbouring countries, enduring state repression, the creation of sovereign borders and decades of civil war and displacement.

In this thesis, I trace how taohphoh were created, maintained and expanded through the interlinked Pwakanyaw concepts of tana, a system of belief, and tama, practice, centred on the deity, Ywa. Through the interplay of tana and tama, taohpwoh members created their own form of value and agency that allows taohpwoh to manage individual and communal challenges, protect and care for members, maintain autonomy and proliferate. The interplay between tana and tama structures relationships between human and non-human, Pwakanyaw and non-Pwakanyaw, Christian and non-Christian. This study is based on an examination of little-examined writing by Pwakanyaw Christians from the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, as well as ethnographic fieldwork in two taohpwoh: one in the upper Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar and one in the Andaman Islands of India. This thesis uses translation to centre Pwakanyaw voices and concepts that have been marginalised in English and Burmese language studies, which contrasts with patterns of representation of Pwakanyaw Christians in the gaze of others as loyal subjects of British colonialism or presents their identities as inauthentic. By privileging Pwakanyaw knowledge and voices, I connect this study to the wider project of epistemic decolonisation. As a displaced Pwakanyaw person and taohpwoh member, this research is also a personal re-engagement with the taohpwoh of my ancestors, and I incorporate my own history and experience into this study, as part of an indigenous methodology. Show more