ИСТИНА

The paper examines integrity and management of documentation on cultural objects in Burma and explores the process of ongoing systematic destruction of their evidentiary value, the process that I call “un-documenting Burma.” The presentation uses the lens of a case study of manuscript collections at Burma’s premiere public library, yet the quality of documentation observed there reflects a wider social phenomenon conditioned by the ways in which scholarly resources are accumulated and how knowledge on history and culture is produced in Burma. Similar dynamics could be found in other libraries and museums, private collections, in the fields of Burmese epigraphy and archaeology, as well as in publication of primary sources. I argue that the process of “un-documentation” was initiated by colonial scholars in the 1880s, has been influenced by weaknesses in indigenous practices of record production and circulation, and exploded at a much larger scale in independent Burma after 1948. Exploring the trajectory of manuscripts at the BFL/NL exposes such features of colonial accumulation of knowledge resources as the separation of cultural objects from communities that created and curated them in the pre-colonial period, concentration of decision-making and goal-setting roles in the hands of external agents, and understanding of these objects as the symbols of a reified and decontextualized culture.