- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: W&N; 1st edition (1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0297822942
- ISBN-13: 978-0297822943
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 99,244 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Product Description
A powerful book documenting, in stunning photography, the 34 different tribes ofBurma, most of whom have never before been photgraphed.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
If you are interested in Burma/Myanamar and like coffee table books I'd get it - well I did! - but otherwise I wouldn't really bother. It's not that well produced and while printed in 1997 I'd have guessed it was a generation earlier; basically it lacks quality and style and the cover belies the inside. It's expensive too.
Format:Hardcover
This is a `coffee-table book' of photographs of the 30 or so different ethnic groups in Burma, framed by sparse but intelligently written text and running to 236 pages. It was published in 2001, so the photography mostly dates from the 1990s.
A critical reviewer on the amazon.com site has commented that some of the pictures were staged - i.e. people dressed up for the occasion. If true, this does not make the images any less authentic. I personally travelled widely through the Golden Triangle region in the 1990s and can confirm that most of these people notably the various tribal Hmong, Akha, Lahu and Keren did in fact wear elaborate tribal dress precisely like those pictured in Diran's book, every day. Akha, Hmong and Lahu women woould come down from the hills to the markets in places like Pak Beng, Mai Sai (where the border crossing between Myanmar and Thailand was open) and the hill villages around Kengtung. Devotion to wearing tribal dress was especially true of the women whilst the men would more often work in jeans and T-shirts bought in these markets. Some of the people I met especially in NW Laos and NE Myanmar had never met westerners, and I think Diran's book is very authentic and brings these people to the attention of a wider audience with honesty and sensitivity. He does not dwell on the Myanmar military government's genocidal war against some of these people, notably the Keren, but does not completely neglect to mention it either.
The book concludes between pp196-233 with a 37-page `Ethnographical History', written by Gillian Gibbs and Martin Smith. This text contains around 70 monochrome photographs from the James Henry Green collection or the British Library, of the peoples of this region photographed in the 1920s.
Diran's book is a very good example of its type: accurate, sensitively written, good photo selection and first class production values. He obviously put in a lot of work here, to good result. The only downside is that it seems to be very expensive on Amazon: I got mine in a London bookstore a few years ago for GBP9.95 (it still bears the price sticker), but prices on Amazon currently run much higher than that.
A critical reviewer on the amazon.com site has commented that some of the pictures were staged - i.e. people dressed up for the occasion. If true, this does not make the images any less authentic. I personally travelled widely through the Golden Triangle region in the 1990s and can confirm that most of these people notably the various tribal Hmong, Akha, Lahu and Keren did in fact wear elaborate tribal dress precisely like those pictured in Diran's book, every day. Akha, Hmong and Lahu women woould come down from the hills to the markets in places like Pak Beng, Mai Sai (where the border crossing between Myanmar and Thailand was open) and the hill villages around Kengtung. Devotion to wearing tribal dress was especially true of the women whilst the men would more often work in jeans and T-shirts bought in these markets. Some of the people I met especially in NW Laos and NE Myanmar had never met westerners, and I think Diran's book is very authentic and brings these people to the attention of a wider audience with honesty and sensitivity. He does not dwell on the Myanmar military government's genocidal war against some of these people, notably the Keren, but does not completely neglect to mention it either.
The book concludes between pp196-233 with a 37-page `Ethnographical History', written by Gillian Gibbs and Martin Smith. This text contains around 70 monochrome photographs from the James Henry Green collection or the British Library, of the peoples of this region photographed in the 1920s.
Diran's book is a very good example of its type: accurate, sensitively written, good photo selection and first class production values. He obviously put in a lot of work here, to good result. The only downside is that it seems to be very expensive on Amazon: I got mine in a London bookstore a few years ago for GBP9.95 (it still bears the price sticker), but prices on Amazon currently run much higher than that.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Eventually I just had to shell out the money for this book, the pictures are so nice. Lots of them are posed photos of people in their best clothes, and it would have been nice to have a few more of everyday life. But I understand his difficulty. In most parts of Myanmar if get your camera out models will appear and volunteer, especially children. But they are more shy in tribal villages, and wanted to dress up before you could photograph. Not just of interest to the ethnographer, also to people with an interest in textiles, body adornments, etc.
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