Heritage, Politics and Liminality: Culture and the Crisis of Authoritarian Transitions in Myanmar (Contemporary Liminality)

This book delivers a fresh approach to understanding cultural heritage amid an underexplored yet dynamic global force: the uncertainty of political transition. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, transition has defined geopolitics across the globe - from a sharp rise in hybrid authoritarian-democratic regimes to the advent of post-truth politics and the accelerating threat of technological warfare.As the past is constantly renegotiated to suit the ever-changing needs of the present, cultural heritage emerges as both beacon and battleground.Employing the versatile concept of contemporary liminality from political anthropology, this book provides critical heritage studies with a new lexicon for understanding how different political groups wield cultural heritage as a tool for navigating the uncertainty of transitional crisis in their quests to legitimate power.Drawing on a synthesis of two centuries of overlapping political transitions in Burma, and interviews from military comma