In Myanmar’s Kalay Valley, a rice-growing region near the Indian border, farmers have long been subject to violence and neglect. Surviving the State considers how these farmers’ everyday, land-based practices enable them to endure successive authoritarian regimes. Through robust ethnography, Hilary Oliva Faxon describes how Burman and Chin smallholders treat land not only as a source of food, but also as a living thing entwined with the families it supports. She considers the centrality of land both to state efforts at control and to inhabitants’ ability to articulate claims, looking at how locals evade, obfuscate, and reinvent legal boundaries in the face of seizures, redistribution, and revolution. Providing a feminist ethnography of land politics, Surviving the State is a testament to the daily work of survival in the face of political violence.

Hilary Oliva Faxon is Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Science at the University of Montana.

Preface  ix
Introduction  1
1. Securing Subsistence  25
2. Making Meaningful Life  54
3. Learning Risky Rights  85
4. From Cultivating Ambiguity to Demonstrating Deservingness  115
5. Fleeing Home and Fighting Back  145
Conclusion. Seeking Justice  167
Acknowledgments  173
Appendix: Methodology  177
Notes  183
References  205
Index