I posted a sound-bite from my recent fieldwork in Myanmar on Allegra this week.

Here is the full text:

On December 2nd 2015, the Shia community in Myanmar celebrated Arba’een – the fourtieth day after Ashura. I recorded this martyr song around midnight in Myanmar’s former capital Yangon where I have been carrying out 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2016. That night, men and women joined a downtown procession of a tomb replica of Imam Hussain, the grandson of Mohammad. The Arba’een celebration is one of the largest Muslim celebrations worldwide, attracting around 25 million people in Karbala (Iraq) in 2015 alone.

In Yangon, however, the Shia community is very small. There are no official numbers; community leaders usually count the attendance at Ashura and Arba’een, the two most important memorial events of Shia. “We might be around 6000 in Myanmar,” one elder said, “but in Yangon, maybe around 3000 only.” During the yearly mourning period, which lasts for two months, the community gathers regularly in their two mosques in the downtown area. Women and men as well as various youth organizations have their own duties to perform and they organize seperate festive events. In 2015 and 2016, every week another donor came forward to pay for food to be prepared in the mosque on Fridays after juma, the weekly prayer meeting. The cooks, who are employed by the board of trustees of the mosque, prepared rice and chicken dishes for everyone and people took turns eating, making sure they finished their plate quickly to make space for new guests. Next to community members, also Buddhist monks, neighbours of various religious backgrounds, Sunni friends and the occasional tourists, who happened to pass by, were invited. Afterwards, milk tea was being served outside and people hung out to chat with each other.

In the basement of the Shia mosque food is being served after prayer (Photo by Judith Beyer)

The Shia community in Myanmar traces its origin back to either Iran or to India. Community members are well aware of each others genealogical backgrounds and frequently point to differences in their physical appearance to indicate the geographial origin of their great-grandparents who all had been brought from India to Burma (as the country was called until 1989). From 1840 onwards, the British colonizers had shipped thousands of “Indians” across the Bay of Bengal to help them in the administration of their final addition to the British Empire. Muslims from India had been under colonial governance already, they often spoke English well and knew how to interact with the British authorities. Rangoon, as the small town by the Andaman sea was called back then, quickly turned into an “Indian city” and was composed of people referred to as kula lu-myo in the Burmese language, literally “people who have crossed over” (meaning journeyed from India to Burma across the Bay of Bengal).

Members of the Shia community applied for a free land grant from the East India Company, an English, later British trade company that operated in India and Burma from the mid-18^th century onwards. Their request was granted and two mosques were erected, both in the downtown area. Next to the two Shia mosques, Sunni mosques, Hindu temples and Christian churches were established in this period, turning Yangon into a multireligious place.

Although Myanmar is a de facto Buddhist state in which the majority of its population practices Theravada Buddhism, Yangon has retained its plural religious landscape until today.

On Arba’een, the downtown procession passes the golden Sule pagoda (Photo by Judith Beyer)

Community. Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives on Vergemeinschaftung

Project Seminar (4 SWS with Fieldwork Component, in German); University of Konstanz

The English term ‘community’ has been established in the German language as jargon. It is usually used in combination with various adjectives and thus covers a wide range of meanings: communities can be imagined, virtual, indigenous, radical, religious, sustainable, or alternative, to name just a few examples.

But what exactly do we mean when we use the term in the academic context? What are the important shifts in meaning that have occurred in the last two centuries, and why is the notion still relevant today? After reading classic and current literature on the topic, students will carry out fieldwork in the Konstanz area with a group that identifies itself as a community. Using ethnographic methods such as participant observation, the aim of this course is to collect, interpret and analyze data from one’s own fieldwork in order to gain a better understanding of how social organizations and social relations are being achieved, maintained, and challenged. The course is accompanied by a methods training, data sessions, and a final meeting in which students present and receive feedback on their field report.

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
Seminarraum, Villa Jaffé, Wallotstraße 10, 14193 Berlin

Audio file zum Vortrag:

Ein Problem der Ethnologie besteht darin, „den Staat“ zu fassen, da er sich der herkömmlichen ethnologischen Methodologie entzieht: Er kann „an sich“ nicht teilnehmend beobachtet werden. Der Staat ist eine politische Leitkategorie, eine Fiktion, die von Menschen kontinuierlich hervorgebracht und erhalten werden muss. Eine Anthropologie des Staates muss daher eine tangentiale Herangehensweise an dieses vielschichtige Phänomen wählen. In meinem Vortrag stelle ich dar, inwieweit Verfassungspolitik eine geeignete Möglichkeit bietet, die performative Hervorbringung von Staat in Momenten zu beobachten, in denen er qua verfassungsschöpfendem Akt, oft nach einer Krise, neu konstituiert wird. Eine ethnologische Sicht auf Verfassungspolitik nimmt die Prozesse und Strategien von Akteuren in den Blick, die in Bezug auf „die Verfassung“ handeln. Der Vortrag fokussiert die politische Teilhabe von Nichtexperten an der Konstituierung staatlicher Ordnung und untersucht den Einfluss zunehmender Globalisierung auf nationalstaatliche Prozesse.

Judith Beyer ist Juniorprofessorin für Ethnologie an der Universität Konstanz. Sie hat Ethnologie, Öffentliches Recht und Slavistik in Tübingen studiert und am Max Planck Institut für ethnologische Forschung in Halle (Saale) mit einer Arbeit zu Rechtspluralismus im zentralasiatischen Kirgistan promoviert. Ihr aktuelles Projekt untersucht Land- und Eigentumsregimes religiöser Minderheiten im südostasiatischen Myanmar. Judith Beyer ist spezialisiert auf Themen der Rechts- und Politikethnologie und forscht zu Staat, Staatenlosigkeit, Verfassungspolitik und Autorität. Sie interessiert sich für Ethnomethodologie, oral history und die Verwendung von Photographie in Forschung und Lehre.

Panel at the German Anthropological Association (GAA), Sept 30 – Oct 3 2015, Marburg, Germany

Organized and chaired by Judith Beyer

Introduction

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Crisis is a temporal concept, indicating a turning point (from the Greek krisis). Its use suggests that it alternates with stable states of being-in-the-world that are predictable and calm. Whereas the anthropological literature of the 1950s and 1960s analysed crisis and conflict in congruence with models of harmony, anthropological research in the last decades has emphasised war, violence and trauma as “existential experiences.” In this body of literature, attention has shifted away from understanding “mounting crisis” as a phase in a sequence of events aimed to restore social equilibrium (Turner 1972). Rather, recent approaches discuss the “ontological alienation” of persons whose bonds “to the everyday world have become stretched, distorted, and even torn; sometimes irreparably so” (Lester 2013). Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bodoni (2014) have recently classified “the present crisis” as a crisis of agency and of territorial sovereignty. So is crisis a concept of particular Western thinking and acting – an expression of modernity? Eric Wolf (1999) approached crisis differently, arguing that crises are part and parcel of social life everywhere and that the distinction between normality and crisis is to a large extent fictitious.

Drawing on classical and recent anthropological analyses of crisis for our own research, this workshop seeks to explore the equivalents of the concept from emic points of view. How do our informants conceptualise and word their often precarious ways of living? When do they experience moments of “judgment,” “separation” and “choice” (all synonyms of crisis) in their personal lives? And how do their personal or collective “crises” relate to a more permanent state of exception that increasingly presents itself as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics (Agamben 2003)

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Presentations and Abstracts

Annett Bochmann

Universität Siegen

State of Exception versus Local Accomplishments: Producing a Public Bureaucracy during Distributing Rations in a Refugee Camp

Based on audio-visual data I examine practices of the ration distribution in a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand, looking at how food is distributed and how camp inhabitants themselves generate the ‘distribution event’ as a form of a public bureaucracy in its strict sense and miniature examination. These practices exemplify how camp residents generate and maintain a stable social order and rules for the camp.

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Patrice Ladwig

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Dystopia, future-Buddhas and messianistic thinking. States of exception in Southeast Asian Theravada Buddhist millennial movements

By analyzing historical and contemporary material from Buddhist millennial movements in mainland Southeast Asia and their backgrounds in Buddhist cosmology, this presentation discusses possible connections between concepts of states of exception and Buddhist millenarianism as a sign of social crisis.

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Theodoros Rakopoulos

University of Bergen

From a “crisis” concept to a concept in crisis? The solidarity economy in Greece

The uses of solidarity as a concept have been exacerbated by the crisis but its analytical validity has not undergone thorough solidification. The rise and current hibernation of the solidarity economy movement is the main case in point to unpack the tensions in the interplay between the local and theoretical aspects of the notion. Referring to my ethnography, I shall elucidate this interplay and explore the movement’s prospects, especially in the current, more friendly, political framework.

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Dorle Dracklé

Universität Bremen

Crisis and insecurity: politics, bureaucracy and virtual economy

“Há crise” (“We are living in a crisis”) expresses a general feeling in southern Portugal. In this poor region, people see their lives threatened by the current changes. “Há crise” describes precisely this moment of insecurity and menace, vacillating between various political, bureaucratic and economic strategies and plans for the future.

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Tommaso Trevisani

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

From rasval to restrukturizatsiya: Metamorphoses of workers’ identity crises in Kazakhstan’s former Soviet steel town

Since early post-Soviet years of disruption and hardship, industrial workers’ sense of crisis underwent a change towards more individualized discomfort with their social conditions and work identity. Today’s workers’ understandings, reactions and choices, show discontinuity with the past crisis.

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Monica Vasile

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

The Crisis: rhythm and turning points

The paper will explore crises as turning points in relation to rhythm. Lives and work can be perceived as rhythmical, but the rhythms are seldom regular over long spans of time. Taking the example of timber traders in the Romanian Carpathian Mountains, it will be shown how the economic crisis that peaked in 2008 changed trade practices.

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Silke Oldenburg

Universität Basel

Crisis – everywhere or nowhere? Goma’s ‘normal state of exception’ as horizon

Goma in Eastern DRC is a context where critical events have turned into ‘critical continuities’ (Vigh), where crises and ordinary life seem to be interchangeable. This is the background for young people’s comments who often state that they either don’t know “real peace” or that the situation is “just normal