[Anthropgrad] Seminar Friday August 3rd

[Nelia.Hyndman-Rizik at anu.edu.au]

Hi all,

We have a seminar this Friday the 3rd of August at 3pm in the Milgate Room,
AD Hope.  The presenter for this week is Amporn Jirattikorn.

She is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin
and is currently a visiting fellow in the department of Anthropology at
RSPAS.

 

The Title of her presentation is:

 

"Pop Music, Migrants, Prisoners and the Notion of Exile of the Shan in
Thailand"

 

Abstract:

 

My project draws on eighteen months of ethnographic work with the Shan
migrant community in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I focus in my research the
relationship between transnational media texts and a condition of
exile/displacement, examining how they combine to influence, shape, and
condition new social identities. In terms of media texts, I look at Shan
popular music and the VCDs and cassettes used to disseminate it as primarily
cultural forms that spill across Burma's borders and are consumed widely by
Shans living Thailand. In terms of displacement, I discuss two different
forms of displacements: migrant workers and exile prisoners who migrate to
seek work in the new land but end it up in jail for drug offences. In
exploring how displacement and deterritorialization shape the social
construction of identity, I trace the very meanings Shan migrants and
prisoners are able to give to their own lives and fortunes through popular
music. I show how music play an important role in re-imagining national
community at a deterritorialized, unordinary transnational level. Comparison
of the prisoners and the migrant workers's interpretation and engagement to
popular culture reveal differences in the meanings that people ascribed to
national and ethnic identity, to notions of home and homeland, and to exile
as an experienced condition.

 

 

Hope to see you there,

 

 

Nelia Hyndman-Rizik

PhD Candidate

School of Archaeology and Anthropology

The Australian National University

mailto:nelia.hyndman- <mailto:nelia.hyndman-rizik at anu.edu.au>  rizik
@anu.edu.au

mailto:nelia.n at bigpond.com

Mobile: 0437 600 157

 

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