unlike its neighborhood countries, there has not been a lot of anthropological studies in Myanmar. Hlaing reminds us that it is crucial to recognize that what we today understand as the country of Myanmar is not the same areas as what was discussed in earlier work. There are socio-political entities that have “evolved” into what we now know as a country, and that today’s Myanmar is in many ways a product of British colonial construction. “In fact, until the European era, Myanma Pyi did not refer to a nation but merely to the territory where the Myanma people, the ‘Burman,’ lived and were dominant” (Hlaing, 2008, p. 240). He further writes that Myanmar´s contribution to the development and growth in the anthropology was mainly as “Burma as a system” rather than “Burma as a place.”2 The first significant contribution to the study of Myanmar was by Sir James Scott with; The Burman: His life and notions (J. G. Scott, 1910). This book is a result of Scotts work as an administrator and his background as a journalist in the British colonial times. The work presents an in-depth interpretation of the “Burman ways” and society, addressing topics from language, family, medicine, cosmology and so forth. Following Scott, there were not conducted any proper and truly anthropological work until Edmund Leach´s Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Leach, 1954) that was the first real attempt to get a broader picture of Myanmar. In fact, it is only after the Second World War that one can find truly academical work from Myanmar (Hlaing, 2008). Leach´s work in Kachin state aims to show how other groups differentiate the Kachin people as Shan and Burmans through more than languages and culture; they are primarily differentiated by a framework of political ideas (Sadan & Robinne, 2007). Leaches argument is of a system of inter-ethnic relations that goes beyond the Theravada Buddhist civilizations (Hlaing, 2008, p. 243). His works has been an important contribution to the political anthropological work, as well as to historians such as Michael Aung-Thwin (Aung-Thwin, 1985; Aung-Thwin & Aung-Thwin, 2013). Hlaing explains how Myanmar’s independence in 1948 weakened the British colonial interest in the development of anthropology in and of the country. Beside Leach, American and French anthropologists continued this work. (Hlaing, 2008, p. 245) However, the famous George Orwell´s first novel, Burmese Days from 1935 (Orwell, 2009) is worth mentioning. It 2 In this section I use the name «Burma» when referring directly to other literature using «Burma» rather than «Myanmar». Every other mentions of the country will be as «Myanmar», in line with the rest of this thesis. 21