Around five million people across Southeast Asia identify as Shan.
Though the Shan people were promised an independent state in the 1947
Union of Burma constitution, successive military governments blocked
their liberation. From 1958 onward, insurgency movements, including the
Shan United Revolution Army, have fought for independence from Myanmar.
Refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands fled to Thailand to
escape the conflict, despite struggling against oppressive citizenship
laws there. Several decades of continuous rebellion have created a
vacuum in which literati and politicians have constructed a virtual Shan
state that lives on in popular media, rock music, and Buddhist ritual.
Based on close readings of Shan-language media and years of ethnographic
research in a community of soldiers and their families, Jane M. Ferguson
details the origins of these movements and tells the story of the Shan
in their own voices. She shows how the Shan have forged a homeland and
identity during great upheaval by using state building as an ongoing
project of resistance, resilience, and accommodation within both
countries. In avoiding a good/bad moral binary and illuminating cultural
complexities, Repossessing Shanland offers a fresh perspective on
identity formation, transformation, and how people understand and
experience borderlands today.