10/9/2019 12CDEA03 https://iias.asia/iiasn/12/Regional/12CDEA03.html 1/4 Forum Forum Burma or Myanmar? The Cucumber and the Circle By GUSTAAF HOUTMAN At almost three times the size of England, Ireland, and Scotland combined, and with a population of over forty million speaking well over a hundred distinct languages, Burma cries out to be studied. However, conferences dedicated to this country - now often referred to as Myanmar since the regime's Burmanization of place names in June 1989 (its capital is now officially known as Yangon) - have been extremely rare. There are three reasons for the neglect. First, though the situation has eased recently, entry visas have rarely been granted to scholars since the 1962 military coup, which means that few foreign scholars have been able to do fieldwork in Burma. Second, scholarly activity worldwide in relation to any one particular country is proportionately related to the potential strategic and economic interests in that country. This, in turn, is greatly affected by the interests that country's government perceives in the outside world. When the military regime nationalized economic activity in Burma down to retail level in 1963, it also greatly reduced its economic ties with the outside world. Though in its early phases there were advocates, such as E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977), a critic of conventional macro-economic theory and one-time advisor to the Burmese regime, intellectuals nowadays find little inspiration in whatever ideology the Burmese regime may have left. When a country is active in international trade it also has an interest in sponsoring and encouraging academic studies, of itself and of other countries, a step which is accompanied by exchanges and the emergence of academic specialists. Soon after the coup, the presses were nationalized and strict censorship laws were introduced, all of which are still in place today. The regime's insular silencing of academics over a period of three-and-a-half decades has been reciprocated by the world's universities, resulting in a rapid decline in Burmese Studies since 1962. The third reason has to do with the way we teach and rear academic specialists are reared. With coursework tied to student demand, the 'smaller' countries are not pursued as subjects in and of themselves as they do not fill classroom seats. Unlike Japan, neither Britain, the old colonial presence in Burma for one-and-a-half centuries, nor America, any longer permit themselves retention of full-time academic specialists of Burma. There are, of course, good reasons for not confining scholarship to national borders, as narrow regional scholarship tends to feed narrow nationalist sentiments. Nevertheless, this is how Burma specialists have been unemployable in that capacity in the 1970s and 80s as more avenues were lost in the field of Burmese Studies than were gained. It also explains why a substantial proportion of scholarship on Burma today is carried out by a handful of enthusiasts, often with non-academic related professions such as diplomats and journalists whose lives were once briefly touched by Burma. Numerological play