The gardener and the fisherman in globalization: The Inle Lake (Myanmar), a region under transition

As this literature portrait shows, Inle Lake has been a research object for many years, but it has never been studied in conjunction with the structural dynamics that have been taking place in Myanmar, South-East Asia, and in the whole world, while it is one of those very territories which anchor the country into globalization, one of those “gateways” of global flows into the country, its population and its culture. In other words, this extraordinary laboratory of globalization has never been put in the scale-nesting that link it to the world and its dynamics. To achieve such a task, the researcher in human sciences may wonder a few questions: To what extent is Inle Lake integrating more and more in a set of scales that connect it to the rest of the country, of Asia and of the world? What are the vectors of this integration: what are the pathways and nature of flows between the lake and those scales, and what are the networks and the stakeholders that build and organize them?

How does the globalization process impact the local scale through a reshuffle of the territory and its balance, a mutation of its economic system, a transformation of its landscapes and the ways of life of its inhabitants? To what extent can Inle Lake be defined as a region under transition, where tourism, often built by exogenous players and under transition itself, is considered as an alternative to the “traditional activities” that have been through hard times?