Keziah Wallis

University of the Fraser Valley | UFV · Department of Social, Cultural and Media Studies

The geography of New Zealand is steeped in history. Echoes of the past surround us with every footstep as we make our way across the land. This chapter explores the ways in which New Zealand engages with colonial history through a journey down the Great South Road. An earlier version of this chapter was published as 'How We Remember Difficult Histo...

‘What a nation or society chooses to remember and forget speaks to its contemporary priorities and sense of identity. Understanding how that process works enables us to better imagine a future with a different, or wider, set of priorities.’ History has rarely felt more topical or relevant as, all across the globe, nations have begun to debate who,...

Keziah Wallis (Kāi Tahu) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Fraser Valley. She is a social anthropologist whose previous work has focused on the ways that religion, culture, and gender intersect in the production of connectedness in contemporary Myanmar. Keziah’s work involves the integration of experiential, feminis...

This article explores the complexities of film authorship in relation to the 1972 film House Made of Dawn. Produced and directed by Richardson Morse, a non-Indigenous director, House Made of Dawn occupies a somewhat awkward position within scholarship on Indigenous Cinema. Using the film as a case study, this paper draws on Barry Barclay’s idea of...

This article explores dimensions of Bamar engagement with supernatural beings known as nats in rural Lower Myanmar. Scholarship on these figures has to date predominately focused on their urban and Upper Myanmar expressions, and therefore on the well-known pantheon of the Thirty-Seven Min. Despite their prominence, the nats of the Thirty-Seven Min...

Indigenous creators are currently using virtual reality (VR) tools, techniques and workflows in wide-ranging geographical locations and across multiple VR formats. Their radical adaptation of this new technology folds together cultural traditions and VR’s unique audiovisual configurations to resist dominant, particularly colonial, frameworks. Withi...

Yeseq, or the connections of kan (P. kamma) formed between people who pour water together as part of shared merit-making, is a fundamental part of Bamar inter-personal relations. Based upon ten months of immersive fieldwork across two main fieldsites---Yangon, the largest city and former colonial capital, and Shwe Tan, a medium-sized village in the...

Social welfare organisations in Myanmar are frequently created and participated in by Burmese Buddhists and operate as forms of civil society. This paper explores the Buddhist motivations of members of such civil society organisations in participating in such social welfare projects by examining their relationship to Burmese traditional merit-makin...

A cursory glance at the study of religion in Myanmar suggests a field in which Buddhism as a dominant political force and the sangha as the bastion of the faith are the key focus. Such views, however, do not adequately address the popularity of Theravada Buddhism to Burmese women and subsequently reinforce Western Eurocentric notions regarding gend...

The changing role of religious ritual amongst diasporic Southeast Asians has been the subject of multiple research projects. Scholars such as Chean Rithy Men (2002) argue that the disappearance of these rituals is linked to the lack of availability of specialists required and the loosening of social networks, these explanations do not explain why s...

Scholarly work on Burmese religion has predominately followed the path set by Melford Spiro whose seminal research split Burmese religious practices into two separate and distinct religions: Theravāda Buddhism and Burmese Supernaturalism. This split has been challenged by more recent scholars working in the field of Burmese religion, most particula...

In today’s digital age popular culture plays an ever-increasing role in the construction of identity. We use it to search for role models as well as guidance in the ways of performing individual identities which mark us as members of a collective whole. For minority groups, such as the Chinese diaspora, privileging of whiteness in mainstream media...