Bertil Linter on Aung-Thwin's Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Burma

Bertil Lintner in critiquing a recent collection of articles Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Burma notes of Aung-Thwin's work:

Takatani’s conclusion is as flawed as some writings of another academic, Michael Aung-Thwin, whose "Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Burma" (a quoted source in this book) states that the three Shan brothers who founded the 14th-16th century Ava dynasty may not have been Shan at all, because the title sawbwa was “used to refer to both Kachin and Shan chieftains and possibly those of other hill peoples as well.”
Sawbwa is just a Burmese corruption of saohpa, “lord of the sky” in Shan, and with no meaning in any other language. If the three brothers were sons of a saohpa, they were indeed Shan. Kachin chieftains are called duwa, not sawbwa or saohpa, and the chiefs of “other hill peoples”— the Shan, by the way, are not a hill people but archetypical valley dwellers—never had that title unless they had adopted Shan culture and customs, such as the Palaung saohpa of Tawngpeng State. What would have been more interesting to examine is what it meant to be Shan in the Middle Ages, centuries before the notion of the nation state was conceived.

Bertil Linter makes a good point here. This is the reason I refuse to use the term "Shan" in my writing. The so-called "Shan" were actually part of a much larger group, the Tai.

A close reading of the Burmese chronicle and inscriptions shows that a lot of Tai statelets or chieftainships pass in and out of Burma's radar (or more accurately the kingdom of Ava) during the period 1348-1555, so being designated as "Shan" is really a meaningless historical accident, meaningful only within the Burmese court of a given era. All these groups were Tai in some more fundamental sense for hundreds of years.