Session Name: The Frontier Where China Meets Southeast Asia: Reworking Ethnicity and Femininity in the Context of Multiple Marginalities
2 - Becoming 'Scarred Landscape' and 'Resource Frontier': A Case Study of Gold Mining Assemblage in Tachilek on the Myanmar-Thailand Border
Wednesday, July 31, 2024
14:00 - 15:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract Following Bruno Latour’s political ecology theory approach, this paper investigates gold mining backed by Chinese businessmen’s informal investment in Tachilek at the Myanmar-Thailand border in the past decade. Based on 16 months of fieldwork between 2017 and 2019 and subsequent follow-up interviews, I analyze how and why highland Myanmar is emerging as a “scarred landscape” and “resource frontier”. From the scales of global capital flows, state-building, local borderland society formation, and human-land relationships, I describe the gathering and entanglement, territorialization and deterritorialization processes of human and non-human elements such as land, ideas, capital, technologies, ethnic groups, and various social, economic, and political individuals in this mining assemblage.
Amid globalization and uneven development, creating multiple marginalities differently impacting on local livelihoods, polluting methods of gold mining have flowed into the border regions of Myanmar's highland, with lasting environmental harm. As the mountainous topography is valued as a commodifiable resource, it serves here as an agent actively generating and facilitating capital flows and thus affecting human societies in different dimensions. This complex entanglement of nature, capital, state, and society in the borderlands constitutes a window for (increasingly Chinese) “informal cross-border capital”. Myanmar’s highland frontier as a “resource” has been continuously yet indeterminately involved in the global economic system. The flow of foreign capital has been generating and strengthening the particularity of its local borderland society. In this complicated process, the mountainous socio-ecological landscape is gradually and unevenly changing and being changed, thereby continually sustaining marginalities.
.png)