This oral narrative was collected by the students exploring the word concept - belief

“There are many beliefs that are linked with Taunghtaman lake and Taunghtaman Bo Bo gyi, our guardian spirit. I was told by my grandparents and we also believe that strangers who visit U Pein bridge should not shower in Taunghtaman lake because the bather will take the place of the one who died before him/her.

According to another belief, if someone misuses the word ‘kyar/tiger’ (an animal which killed the guardian spirit) and then visits the lake... that person dies.

Another female MA student is Ms. Myo Thandar Soe and she began the introduction of cultural anthropology in her presentation.

This was the first field trip for us and there were many new experiences for us. All of us as first-year anthropology students had never experienced this kind of field trip; and we asked ourselves, ‘What are we going to do?’ We motivated ourselves by asking the question, ‘If we are afraid to ask questions, we will know nothing’.

This oral narrative was collected by the students exploring the word concept - belief. 

The seventy-two year old father of the fried-fish seller told us the following story related with the establishment of the U Pein bridge:

"I left the monastery long time ago but I remember what I learnt about the history of the U Pein bridge"

အင်းကအော်ညီး ဆောက်လုပ်ပြီး၊ ဉီးပိန် တံတားကြီး

အင်း၀ရေငံ တွင်းဂျီးစော်နံ၊ တောင်သမန် ရေချိုတွင်း သောက်ပါလေ့ ကို ရန်ကင်း ဘေးရန်က ရှင်း

ဘရူရာဇာ (ထန်းပင်) မည်သော ထန်းပဒေသာပင်များ ခြံရံလျက်ရှိသောနေရာများကို ရွေးချယ်ခဲ့သည်။

In (2019-2020) academic year, I teach general anthropology (Anth-1101) to first year students. My idea is to combine the classroom and field trip to show how the concepts of general anthropology that they learned in the class can be connected with "code words" outside of the class room, to begin to show them how to analyze field notes and connect them to theoretical concepts.