Along the China-Myanmar border lives an ethnic minority called Blang.These communities retain a great degree of autonomy and self- governance, but they are impinged upon from all sides by powerful invisible others, such as ghosts, gods, and the state. Daniel’s dissertation discusses how Blang communities interact with these powerful others. It asks and attempts to answer a very fundamental question: how do people interact with things they cannot see or touch like ghosts and the state?
The dissertation details several techniques and technologies employed to make these interactions possible. Because they cannot be grasped, they are materialised, making the intangible graspable.
Infrastructural technologies are employed by both humans and nonhumans to overcome distance, both spatial and ontological. The dissertation also investigates the competing ordering regimes of Blang communities and the state, at every level from the body to the cosmos. In Blang communities violence—though prevalent—is to some extent inhuman, and as we shall see both ghosts, gods, and the state employ violence in order to make humans acknowledge their agency and desires. According to Blang theories of possession, when a ghost enters a person, it transforms embodied perception making them see the world as the ghost does. When the state first entered the Blang Mountains in 1953 only its cadres considered Blang communities Chinese, now people see themselves as the state sees them. Is Chineseness, is citizenship then not in a sense a form of possession? Finally, the dissertation investigates how the current state differs from its predecessors and what its arrival has meant for human relations.
Daniel Mohseni Kabir Bäckström has succesfully defended his thesis.
Trial lecture
Designated topic "Animism, Ontology, and the Immaterial across Southwest China and Southeast Asia"
Evaluation committee
- Associate Professor Hans Steinmüller, London School of Economics (first opponent)
- Dr. Katherine Swancutt, King's College (second opponent)
- Professor II Anna Lisa Ahlers, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati
Supervisors
- Associate Professor Koen Wellens, University of Oslo