The Flavour of Empire: Tea Production and the Ta'ang World in Highland Southeast Asia

Abstract

This is a thesis about why and how social formations endure in the face of cataclysmic political-economic changes. In particular, I focus on the centuries-old relationship between the Ta'ang (Palaung) people and the tea plant (Camellia sinensis), a relationship that endures despite decades of war, capitalist encroachment, and ecological collapse. My research employs collaborative ethnographic research methods, semiotic analysis, and insights from botany and biology to revise classic anthropological debates about highland-lowland political relations in Southeast Asia. Beginning from the Ta'ang cultural ecology of tea, I shift this debate from a focus on binary relations between "imperial" lowlands and "anarchic" highlands to an exploration of intra-highland political complexity.

The peoples who call themselves Ta'ang have been cultivating tea for centuries across the highlands of present-day Myanmar, China and Thailand. As lowland empires have given way to modern nation-states, as tributary relations have given way to capitalist economies, tea and Ta'ang have remained bound to one another. Although some Ta'ang people see tea as a burden, there is a recent movement, especially since Myanmar's 2021 military coup, to reframe the tea industry as a potential means to Ta'ang political-economic self-sufficiency in a federalized post-revolutionary Myanmar. This political-economic vision rewrites an exploitative relationship in emancipatory terms: tea cultivation, which has long tied Ta'ang farmers to predatory debt relations with lowland brokers, could be refigured as a way for Ta'ang people to profit from their own expertise and traditions. However, this political vision hinges on the reification of the Ta'ang tea cultivator as an ideal ethno-racial type. In this context, I ask how Ta'ang people navigate the tension between these two political projects, between emancipation (from debt relations, from racism, from Bamar hegemony) and reification (of Ta'ang people as tea cultivators, and the suite of stereotypes that go along with this image).

I answer this question with two main ethnographic findings, based on multi-sited and mixed methods research carried out in Myanmar, Australia and Thailand between early 2020 and the end of 2022. First, I find that Ta'ang people use myth-making and storytelling as a form of political theory. Myths (and people's commentaries on them) provide a way of expressing ideas about power: myths can be used to explain past and present subjugations, and also to theorize emancipatory political potentials, the casting off of overlords. Second, I find that ethno-racial reification in the Ta'ang world is a by-product of brokerage and mediation: the people most invested in reifying Ta'ang as a legible and clearly-bounded social order are those people who must pass in and out of it for one reason or another. These findings emerge from the present revolutionary moment in Myanmar, shaped by ongoing wars, the military coup, and the impact of the 2019 coronavirus pandemic.