Huard, Stephén. Calibrated Engagement: Chronicles of Local Politics in the Heartland of Myanmar. Berghahn Books, 2024.

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For decades, the heartland of Myanmar has been configured as a pacified space under military surveillance. A closer look reveals how politics is enacted at distance with the state. Calibrated Engagement weaves together ethnography and history to chronicle the transformation of rural politics in Anya, the dry lands of central Myanmar. The book presents situations as varied as local elections, inheritance transmissions, land conflicts and ceremonies, to show that politics is about how people calibrate the way they engage with each other

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“This is an incredibly important piece of scholarship … not only is this the first village study of lowland Myanmar (with Ardeth Thawnghmung’s Teak Curtain exception) in 60 years, but we have never before seen a text that develops a diachronic account of Burma’s villages over time.” • Elliott Prasse-Freeman, National University of Singapore

“Huard not only delivers the first ethnographical account of a rural village in Central Myanmar since Manning Nash and Melford Spiro’s studies in the sixties … he also writes a lively history of the making of the local rural society. Easy to go through, infused with the author’s empathy for his hosts, the book is well written.” • Brac de la Perrière Bénédicte, Centre Asie du Sud-Est-EHESS

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