In part because a single colonial project eventually formally incorporated Burma as an appendage to British colonial rule of India, Burma scholars persistently draw on historiography and anthropology of India to assert that ethnic categories in Burma were “reified” and hierarchized by colonial governmentality and ensuing postcolonial statecraft. This article disputes such assumed equivalences, re-theorizing “reification” through the concept of governmentality to distinguish modes of regulation and the kinds of social responses incited, suggesting that India and Burma stand as respective exemplars of distinct governmental forms. Specifically, scholarship represents Indian population groups (of caste, tribe, ethnicity, etc. permutations) as being reified by dense and reinforcing applications of knowledge/power. Even when these various and interlinking regulatory apparatuses “fail” to accurately describe social reality, they interpellate a response from subject populations, a process that operates to dialectically reinforce the categories. Conversely, similar governmental apparatuses desultorily implemented in Burma have operated differently. While they have succeeded in making South Asian and Muslim subjects into Burma’s self-perceived constitutive outside, governmentality has “doubly failed” on its taingyintha (indigenous) subjects. Poor knowledge of these Burmese peoples has foreclosed intensive projects of knowledge production, leading to “misinterpellation,” a form of metapragmatic awareness in which subjects recognize that discourses misdescribe them, and then strategically maneuver with(in) those labels. Ethnic emblems become hollow integuments navigable with comparative ease, as individuals modify their particular bodily and dispositional indices. The article concludes by encouraging comparative postcolonial governmentality studies that would delineate particularities in a concept (governmentality) that often remains unnuanced.

部分原因是单一的殖民计划最终将缅甸正式纳入英国对印度的殖民统治，缅甸学者坚持不懈地利用印度的史学和人类学来断言，缅甸的民族类别被殖民政府和随后的后殖民统治“具体化”和等级化。治国之道。本文对这种假定的等价性提出了质疑，通过治理性概念重新理论化了“物化”，以区分监管模式和所引发的社会反应类型，表明印度和缅甸各自是不同政府形式的典范。具体来说，学术代表了印度人口群体（种姓、部落、种族等排列）通过知识/权力的密集和强化应用而具体化。即使这些不同且相互关联的监管机构“未能”准确描述社会现实，它们也会询问主体群体的反应，这是一个辩证地强化类别的过程。相反，在缅甸杂乱无章地实施的类似政府机构却以不同的方式运作。尽管他们成功地将南亚和穆斯林臣民纳入缅甸自认为的外部构成部分，但政府在其自身的治理方面却“双重失败”。tainyintha（土著）科目。对这些缅甸人民的了解不足，阻碍了知识生产的密集项目，导致“误读”，这是一种元语用意识的形式，主体认识到话语错误地描述了他们，然后战略性地利用这些标签。随着个体改变其特定的身体和性格指数，民族标志变得相对容易操纵的空心外皮。文章最后鼓励比较后殖民治理学研究，这些研究将描绘一个常常不细致的概念（治理术）的特殊性。