CHAPTER 6

Armed Rural Folk

Elements of Pre-colonial Warfare in the

Artistic Representations and Written

Accounts of the Pacification Campaign

(1886–1889) in Burma

Michael W. Charney

Introduction

A

lthough there are still occasional references to the primacy of the
village in Southeast Asian life,^1 attributing too much importance
to the village as the basic unit of pre-colonial life in the region
is not just unpopular, it is becoming seen as at best anachronistic and at
worst misleading. This change has been underway for some time. In the
late 1970s, Samuel Popkin highlighted the agency of the individual as
opposed to the village community and as the moral economy approach
has steadily lost currency since, the notion of the Southeast Asian village
as an autonomous community has been increasingly viewed by scholars
as a creation of colonial officials and scholars in an effort to legitimize a
convenient administrative device for maintaining order and extracting
taxes and labour.^2 Admittedly, Anthony Reid has made the case for in-

1. On more recent assertions that the village remains at the core of various Southeast
   Asian societies, see G. W. Fry, “Higher Education in Vietnam”, in Yasushi Hirosata
   and Yuto Kitamura (eds), The Political Economy of Educational Reforms and Capacity
   Development in Southeast Asia: Cases of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (New York:
   Springer, 2009): 240.


2. This point draws upon Jonathan Rigg’s detailed discussion in idem, More Than
   the Soil: Rural Change in Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2014): 29–37, pas-
   sim. Popkin’s arguments were made in Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant: the
   Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California