"For quite a long time during the nineteenth and twentieth century, ethnicity was defined by cultural and racial criteria supported by the underlying assumption that cultural characteristics were markers of a fixed identity. People could thus be divided and subdivided into essentialized ethnic categories. It is this ?culturalist” and racial understanding of ethnic identity, read back into history and widely spread in Myanmar, that has led to the formulation of the so-called list of 135 ethnic groups, a list that reflects political choices based on ethnic, cultural and historical criteria. These groups are hierarchi zed and co-exist in a multi-layered context that is determined by historical precursors, socio - economic environments and changing political conditions. Some are arguably more dominant and prominent than others. In Myanmar the constitutionally defined ethnic categories are often said to derive from the colonial state. But one may as well trace the concept of such categories back to various lists of 101 peoples found in precolonial Myanmar, Rakhine and Mon texts.1 While ethnicity is a rigid concept that dominates political and social relations in Myanmar, contemporary scholarship would not support the inflexibility of such categories, because it rejects the ?reification of ethnic distinctions” and the ?obscuring” of processes of ethnic change.2 Anthropological research tells us that ethnic identity is not intrinsically given and fixed, but subject to change as much as society as a whole is nowhere fitting a once-for-all model. Identities undergo transformation, as people migrate and adapt to new places, to socio-economic change and to cultural challenges. The close observation and analysis of such changes is precisely one of the objects of social studies in general and historians, in particular, have been interested in identities that fade and new collective id entities that take shape. Collective self-awareness and cultural markers form the visible and vocal parts of novel identities, but it is the creation of new political borders (or state-building) and the emergence of divisive political projects that appear, at hindsight, as the key determinant factors. When the formation of identities is analyzed, the deeply political nature of this process cannot escape our attention. Identity, in the view of modern scholars, is not merely a naturally given, but it is very m uch written into a collective, open-ended historical experience, both construed and fluid. This does not mean though that newly emergent identities will automatically take hold, go socially and legally uncontested and obtain recognition. The issue can be highly controversial. When social scientists focus, for example, on the building of a collective national identity in the State of Singapore, a relatively new country, or the issue of recognition of the Palestinians as a nation, they face such highly complex, historically individualized and eventually contested contexts..."