questionWho wrote it down
An administrator, a doctor, a missionary, an archaeologist
What it is
Most of what is known about the stopped traditions was written by the people whose arrival stopped them.
The long version
Shway Yoe was Sir James George Scott, who wrote as a Burman and spent his career extending British rule over the Shan States. Leopold Glück was a doctor in occupied Bosnia. Ćiro Truhelka was an archaeologist in the same administration. Hose and McDougall were a colonial officer and a psychologist. The Gazetteer of Upper Burma is a government publication, and in the middle of a paragraph about Chin women's faces it stops to insult them.
This site uses all of it, because there is nothing else, and it names the writer every time. The detail is usually reliable and the frame usually is not — a measurement of a tool, a rate of work, a fee, an age, a sequence, these are the things an observer can get right. Why people did it, what they believed, what it meant: on those, the source is guessing about people it does not respect.
The Lanna volume in the corpus is the counter-case on this site, and that is why it is quoted at length: same region, same custom, written from inside it.
Connected to
- Shway Yoe The clearest case.
- Chin facial tattooing Where the contempt is on the page.
- Sak kha lai And the counter-case.
Named here by
- Chin facial tattooing The clearest case of the problem with the only sources there are.
- Sicanje Recorded by a doctor and an archaeologist, which is the usual pair.
- Shway Yoe And the problem with it.
- Truhelka and Glück The pattern.
- Exhibited The same problem in another medium.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | inference | ||
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- The Burman: His Life and Notions — scanned by the Internet Archive
- Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, Part I Vol. I — scanned by the Internet Archive
- Sicanje — Wikipedia (en)
- Salvage ethnography — Wikipedia (en)
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there