Sublime Rock: Burmese Popular Music, Language Code Switching and Sentimentalism among Shan Migrants at The Thai-Burma Border

While economic strife and internal conflict continue to drive migrants and refugees acrossthe border from Burma into Thailand, one often uncounted aspect of this migration is thatof the Burmese media texts and popular culture artifacts consumed by ethnic nationalities inexile. While many theorists of popular media and cultural studies alike have tended to lookat the ways in which historically underrepresented groups might take their own renditions ofpopular musical forms and create symbolic acts of resistance, how, then can we understandpeople s relationships to dominant forms? Does the appreciation of a dominant form ofpopular culture necessarily imply subscription to dominant ideology? If popular music canbe proven to be a mechanism for the creation of identity and place, what, then does it meanthat Shan nationalists still listen to certain Burmese popular songs? Using ethnographic data gathered in a Shan community at the Thai-Burma border between 2004 and 2005, this articlewill provide an overview of the various ways in which popular culture texts circulate in theborderlands, and also the ways in which Burmese popular music is subjectively understood bymembers of one ethnic nationality community.