“TAKE OUR LAND:” Fronts, Fraud, and Fake Farmers in a City-to-Come

Abstract

Focusing on demonstrations held outside Yangon, Myanmar, in favor of urban development, this article intervenes in the binaries of “truth” versus “falsity” and the “genuine” versus “fake” to advance anthropological theorization on demonstration, speculation, and spectacle. The article traces contrasting claims about “real farmers” and their “genuine desires,” as marshaled by both supporters of a large-scale urban project and those who oppose it. It argues that the notion of “the front” helps illuminate the strategic and pragmatic frames in which spectacles are staged, as well as amid the “economy of appearances” that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argues are generated by transnational investment. Narrating the flattening of social relations and political motivations by project-affected residents, the notion of the front displaces simple binaries by emphasizing a conjuring of self and locality increasingly widespread when residents are, themselves, absorbed into the speculative land markets that large-scale investment creates.