The secular/religious construction of neighbourhoods in Mandalay, Myanmar: Dhamma‐youns and wards

Abstract

This article examines the entangled secular/religious construction of neighbourhoods in Mandalay as dynamic, people-based and relational processes that are centred in dhamma-youns (dhamma halls) which work within and across administrative ward boundaries. Cities in Myanmar have not followed the trajectories of urbanisation documented in the global North and its socio-spatial relationships are inextricably bound to the Theravadin Buddhist lifeworld. This entanglement requires attention because international development aid promoted purely secular forms of urban governance between 2011 and 2021, and Buddhist morality remains salient after the February 2021 military coup d'état.

Who is a neighbourhood? Studying a thing that isn't a thing in Southeast Asia

“…In highly contentious urban spaces in Southeast Asia, researchers have documented cases where the very existence of a ‘neighbourhood’ can be contested because they are rendered invisible by elite modes of seeing (Nam, 2012; Harms, 2014; Ortega, 2020), thus requiring work that envisions neighbourhoods from the perspectives of communities themselves (Padawangi et al ., 2016). As Jayde Lin Roberts notes in this special collection, building from research carried out in Mandalay (where the gulf between what the military regime thinks about neighbourhoods and what residents think is vast), top‐down categories are not as important as ‘dynamic, people‐based processes that cohere around dhamma‐youns (dhamma halls)’, which are Buddhist‐inspired community centres ‘built and maintained by local residents’ (Roberts, 2022). These observations from Southeast Asia align with research in North America as well, where scholars of ‘neighbourhood effects’ have noted that the very unit of study cannot simply be defined by government‐imposed categories, such as Census tracts, but should attend as much to the ‘micro‐dimensions of neighbourhood interaction’ and ‘neighbourhood social processes’ as to categories found on a map (Sampson et al ., 2002).…”