I recently did a podcast episode with Joah McGee from Insight Myanmar about my book Rethinking Community in Myanmar (published by University of Hawai’i Press, 2024). In the book, I call “community” a ‘category of empire.’ I use this proposition to unsettle one of the most ordinary concepts – not only in Myanmar, but in academia as well: “community” usually implies a bounded ethno-religious group, with membership that seems ‘natural’ precisely because law, property, administration, and everyday speech have made it so.
During long stays among Muslim and Hindu residents in Yangon, as I spent time with families and listened to the trustees of religious institutions, I explored the question how members sustained these ethno-religious “communities” in an ethno-nationalist Buddhist state and how do they understood belonging. Complementing my fieldwork, I also investigated the historical trajectory of the category ‘community’ which I trace back to British India and colonial Burma, where legal engineering helped turn religion into an administrative way of classing people into bounded groups.
Migrants from India arrived with distinctions of region, class, profession, language, and wealth, yet colonial rule tended to organize them by religious categories. Land grants for mosques, temples, and shrines helped materialize this ethno-religious categorization in place: so-called sacred or “green” property could be held on behalf of a religious group, and so trustees of these sites acquired the power to speak for that group. The buildings in these sites thus did more than shelter worship: They fixed collective identities into the city and transplanted legal structures that remain consequential to this day, including Personal Status Laws that govern matters such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance.
My current work follows the category ‘community’ beyond Myanmar. British law firms began asking me to prepare country-of-origin reports for asylum cases involving Rohingya applicants, often around a deceptively simple question: is this person really Rohingya, and therefore really stateless? I defer this binary question and approach the problem differently: Rather than treating ethnic identity as a stable essence waiting to be verified, I inquire how these applicants for asylum would likely be categorized by officials in Myanmar or Bangladesh and what that categorization would mean for their safety and legal status. The same anthropological curiosity I brought to temples, mosques, land titles, and family histories now enters European asylum tribunals, where the state still demands a one-dimensional answer to who a person is before deciding where that person can belong… Listen to the entire episode here.
