ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter situates Myanmar’s enduring liminal crisis within a broader reflection on what it means to inhabit a global ‘meantime’ – this 21st-century, hypermodern era that promised transformation but has delivered instead prolonged uncertainty, unresolved transitions, and converging crises in politics, warfare, technology, and the environment. Drawing on material and affective data from the Myanmar case, the chapter revisits the entanglement between cultural heritage and liminal crisis, foregrounding the central paradox occurring between these forces: heritage is strategically employed to amplify or prolong the crisis while at the same time opening pathways for escaping it. Connecting these findings to global politics, the Myanmar case illustrates how the kinetic interplay between heritage and transition can tip towards combustion, igniting schism, promoting exclusion, and legitimising coercive power and state violence. Yet, it can also offer strategies for survival, anchored in past learnings, shared traditions, and the enduring human drive to imagine futures beyond crisis, animating and advancing such aspirational world-making.
