An encompassing top-down transformation that has left no sector of society untouched has returned Myanmar into the fold of the world community. After decades of isolation, international relations are being revived, and cooperations in business and development as well as tourism are beginning to flourish. This controlled democratization has rendered former interpretive dichotomies such as “bad junta” vs. “good opposition” obsolete. At the same time, no one coherent image of the reformed nation and its citizens has yet emerged, and internally as much as externally, Myanmar identity seems in need of redefinition.

For many of the diverse actors involved in contemporary Myanmar, (cultural) heritage has become a major discursive means to frame the ongoing changes, and to link their current social and material environment to various elements from Myanmar’s (or Burma’s) troubled and fractured history. This heritageization is especially prevalent in Yangon, the former capital of the nation with its remarkable colonial buildings and its proverbial diversity. But heritage as a label and practice is visibly extending its reach throughout the country: heritage tourism is marketed, and ethnic minorities try to assert their individuality just as a harmony-oriented image of “unity in diversity” is made manifest in folklorized themeparks. These diverse projects are neither coherent nor in alignment as they struggle over how to portray colonialism, ethnic and religious diversity, and the decades of military dictatorship.

As a cultural and economic resource, as a cornerstone of nation-building and civic education, as a significant factor for tourism and international attention, heritage in Myanmar is inherently political. This research project seeks to assess a number of contemporary heritageization processes in Myanmar, and examines their respective impact on identity and integration in various sites. Methodologically, the approach builds upon the axioms of critical heritage studies and focuses especially on the interplay of the rhetorical and the material, of the individual and the categorical, and the aesthetic and the pragmatic. In their struggles over which past should matter today, the actors involved not merely reveal what they value, but create a value of the past in the first place. As symbolization, social memory and imagination coalesce into narratives and even more material markers, the struggle over the global representation of Myanmar as well as the country’s self-image intensifies.