Performing Merng Tai: The Life and Arts of Khru Saangkham Jangyod
Born in Shan State in 1967, following General Ne Win’s bloody military coup d’etat, Saangkham Jangyod came of age during a time of profound unrest in Burma. Yet, despite enduring the uproars of civil war, forced displacement, and personal loss, Khru (teacher) Saangkham would become one of the most revered cultural practitioners of the Tai (Shan) performing arts repertoire. Today, Khru Saangkham teaches and performs traditional Tai dance, martial arts, music, and opera while living in exile in Northern Thailand. His mission is to train a new generation of Tai performing arts practitioners who will use art and culture as the foundation of a Tai nation, despite exile and continued suppression of their rights.
As a part of a grant from the Luce Foundation’s UC Berkeley’s 2024 Southeast Asian Lives Workshop and Grant, I traveled to Chiang Mai in May and June of 2024 to conduct a life history interview with Khru Saangkham. This project was a culmination of a decade of working with the Tai community in Chiang Mai, and after having been Khru Saangham’s student in the Tai performing arts modality, specifically learning the Kaa Tai (Tai dance) known as Kingkala, or the human bird dance. Khru Saangkham graciously agreed to be interviewed for this project and was encouraged throughout the interview process to decide what aspects of his life to emphasize and how to structure his narrative.
Khru Saangkham’s life history was narrated in four parts: 1. Learning, 2. Working, 3. Teaching, and 4. Envisioning. These aspects of his life reflected the unwavering path of learning he pursued from the age of five when he was ordained as a novice monk and learned the art of transcribing Tai and Pali scripts, along with the performing arts. As a young man, Khru Saangham disrobed and joined the Shan State rebels in their fight against the Sit Tat (Myanmar Military). Only to be marred by the tragedy of losing his father - and later mother - to the civil war, and fleeing to Mae Hong Son in Thailand where he found new challenges working in the Thai tourist economy. Eventually returning to his life’s calling, Khru Saangkham honed his skills in the performing arts - completely self taught - and began teaching and performing throughout the Thai-Myanmar border zone, even eventually being invited to perform for the Thai King in Bangkok.
This life history shows the centrality of the performing arts for displaced peoples to maintain a sense of nation while in exile. I gleaned profound insights from weeks of concentrated listening to and dancing with Khru Saangkham’s life history – a deeper understanding of Burma’s history, politics, and arts not usually furnished by the standard short-form interview or survey. Insights provided during this experience were like small beads of sweat falling from my dear teacher’s brow, becoming precious gems of advice, guidance, and wisdom offered to his students. From Khru Saangkham we also learn the importance of embodied, slow, and engaged methodologies when working with displaced and vulnerable research collaborators. Social scientists are adept at the arts of listening and recording. Khru Saangkham however, teaches us that there is a field that lies beyond the methods of scoping, prodding, and documenting. He teaches through embodiment–with dancing, singing, and practicing–in a way that promises to bring us closer to understanding how people create a full and meaningful life despite the challenges of war and exile.
Description of Materials
Grantee Bio
I am an Associate Professor of Global Politics at Cal Poly Humboldt. My scholarly work centers on how displaced peoples create a sense of nation while in exile with a particular emphasis on refugee politics in Southeast Asia. Through long-term and in-depth ethnographic research along the Thai-Myanmar border, I examine how minority refugees from Myanmar maintain trans-national networks through the use of performance, activism, and humanitarianism. My work has appeared in Political Geography, Critique of Anthropology, the Review of Human Rights, and in various edited volumes. My in-progress book manuscript, Aesthetic Nationalism: The Dance of War and Exile along the Thai-Myanmar Border, is based on embedded field research in Northern Thailand, where I conducted ethnographic and archival research with Tai refugees from Myanmar. My research has been funded by a Fulbright ASEAN U.S. Scholar Research Fellowship, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and The École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO). In 2022, I was awarded the McCrone Award for Most Promising Scholar at Cal Poly Humboldt. I currently serve as Co-Chair of the Burma Studies Group at the Association for Asian Studies.
Questions? Get in touch with Dr. Sebro at Tani.Sebro@humboldt.edu