ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines one way of defining minorities in Burma, and discusses some implications of that definition. The study of minority groups, mostly by American scholars, has reached the point where one sociologist, Graham Kinloch has proposed a theory of minority group relations. According to Kinloch, minorities are created by majorities. In the process of nation-building, during which, for example, the notion of minority in Burma changed, as one group defines itself as a nation those outside the group become minorities. Although historians of pre-British Burma have studied ethnic groups, they have not studied minorities in Kinloch's terms. In British and post-Independence Burma, minorities were and are numerically inferior groups. The case of Papaw Gyi indicates a trend in the history of Burma which is perhaps as old as the eighth or ninth centuries, when the Burmans themselves moved out of the hills.
