This week’s installment is not particularly old, but it’s fascinating: an ethnography of Yangon’s deaf community and their struggle for what author Ellen Foote calls “linguistic citizenship.” We only have the introduction, unfortunately, but see here for it, and for all the other cuts in our series.
Foote, Ellen. Sign Languages and Linguistic Citizenship: A Critical Ethnographic Study of the Yangon Deaf Community. Routledge, 2020.
This week’s New Pubs features Buscemi on blunt biopolitical rule by Myanmar’s EAOs; Saha applying the lens of racial capitalism to the Saya San rebellion; and Bakali examining the Rohingya genocide thorough War on Terror logic.
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
This week’s New Pubs features Matelski et al on civil society’s efforts to document human rights violations; Ferguson on Win Oo, the rock star who shook it like Elvis, appropriately, during the BSPP era; and Islam et al on Rohingya mistrust of medical services in Cox’s Bazar refugee camps.
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
Given the incredible involvement of anya အညာ in the current revolution, we wanted to devote a few instalments to understanding the area. This week two articles on the formation of anya and its people, with Myo Oo on colonial boundary making, and Michael Aung-Thwin’s conception of anya as heartland.
Myo Oo. “Making Anyatha (Upper Lander) and Auktha (Lower Lander): Crossing the Introduction of the Colonial Boundary System to British Burma (Myanmar),” Suvannabhumi 13.2 (July 2021):135-164.
Aung-Thwin, Michael. “Mranma Pran: When Context Encounters Notion”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 39, no. 2 (June 2008): 193–217.
See here for these pdfs and for all the others in the series.
The Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.A. seeks applications to its doctoral program in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies and to its new cross-disciplinary PhD in Genocide Studies. Applications from any country are welcome. Admitted students will receive five years of full funding, including a living stipend and a research bursary of $5,000/summer.
See here for more details / to apply.
This week’s New Pubs features Forsyth and Springate-Baginski asking “who benefits from an agrarian transition when its done under violent conflict?”; Crouch analyzes how the courts are militarized in Myanmar; and Simpson outlines new avenues for online repression post-coup.
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
Beyer, Judith. Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon. NIAS / Hawai’i U Press, 2022
This is the first anthropological monograph of Muslim and Hindu lives in contemporary Myanmar. In it, Judith Beyer introduces the concept of “we-formation” as a fundamental yet underexplored capacity of humans to relate to one another outside of and apart from demarcated ethno-religious lines and corporate groups. We-formation complements the established sociological concept of community, which suggests shared origins, beliefs, values, and belonging. Community is not only a key term in academic debates; it is also a hot topic among Beyer’s interlocutors in urban Yangon, who draw on it to make claims about themselves and others. Invoking “community” is a conscious and strategic act, even as it asserts and reinforces stereotypes of Hindus and Muslims as minorities. In Myanmar, this understanding of community keeps self-identified members of these groups in a subaltern position vis-à-vis the Buddhist majority population. Beyer demonstrates the concept’s enduring political and legal role since being imposed on “Burmese Indians” under colonial British rule. But individuals are always more than members of groups. The author draws on ethnomethodology and existential anthropology to reveal how people’s bodily movements, verbal articulations, and non-verbal expressions in communal spaces are crucial elements in practices of we-formation. Her participant observation in mosques and temples, during rituals and processions, and in private homes reveals a sensitivity to tacit and intercorporeal phenomena that is still rare in anthropological analysis. Rethinking Community in Myanmar develops a theoretical and methodological approach that reconciles individuality and intersubjectivity and that is applicable far beyond the Southeast Asian context. Its focus on we-formation also offers insights into the dynamics of resistance to the attempted military coup of 2021. The newly formed civil disobedience movement derives its power not only from having a common enemy, but also from each individual’s determination to live freely in a more just society.
See all of our future pubs here.
This week’s New Pubs features Mostafanezhad et al on the emotions involved in China’s BRI operations in Myanmar; Ngeow on the PLA’s pursuit of the KMT in the golden triangle 1960-61; and Croissant analyzing the survival of the praetorian state in Myanmar.
As always, see our Recent Publications page for all of the citations and for past weeks.
This fortnight features an article that conducts an efficient assessment of the BSPP’s socialist credentials. Authors Fenichel and Khan find a surprising amount of state absence for a so-called socialist state: “public ownership is largely absent in the dominant agricultural sector and does not affect about 80% of the labour force in industry” (821), which remained effectively in private hands. Outcomes for health and food security were not terrible, but perhaps this is because the state lacked ambition.
Fenichel, Allen, and Azfar Khan. “The Burmese way to ‘socialism’.” World Development 9.9-10 (1981): 813-824.
see here for all the Deep Cuts.
Burma Studies Group 