Category Archives: Hinduism

Book Launch: Rethinking Community in Myanmar. 15th Int. Burma Studies Conference

At the 15th International Burma Studies Conference, hosted at the University of Zurich, (9-11 June 2023), I launched my book Rethinking Community in Myanmar. Practices of We-Formation Among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon.

Informal book launch in good company — while missing many from Myanmar

I wanted to celebrate the publication of my monograph: 10 years in the making if I count from the first days of fieldwork in 2012-2013. Good anthropological monographs take time and they are never the result of one indiviual only, even though writing can be a solitary process, particularly towards the end. I wanted to use the occasion of having over 200 Myanmar specialists gathering in one place, to say “Thank you” publicly to all the important people who could not be present in Zurich, but also to those who were able to share a glass of wine with me that day.

Great PhDs to be: Carolin Hirsch, Nickey Diamond, Benedict Mette-Starke, Sarah Riebel (plus book and me)

I set out by thanking my Muslim and Hindu interlocutors in Myanmar — there can neither be an anthropology nor an ethnography without the people ‘in’ (paraphrasing Tim Ingold). I owe them everything and I am glad that there will be an open access version of my book coming out towards the end of this year that will allow at least some of my interlocutors to download the book in Myanmar — I cannot bring it to them at the moment; not so much because it would be dangerous for me (it might be), but because I simply cannot take the risk of putting them into danger once I have left the country or their houses …

I then thanked my four research assistants — my KRA (Kachin Research Army) — and I explained to the audience of Burma/Myanmar experts that I profited enormously from them having conversations with my interlocutors about what it means to be a member of a minority in a majority Buddhist country. Listening in — as I am currently developing also in another context — is a methodologically fruitful approach to conduct fieldwork or carry out digital ethnography where fieldwork is not possible, because it decenters the anthropologist. What I am interested in mostly is “free-flowing talk” where my interlocutors do not try to guess what it is I want from them (in terms of what they might be expected to tell me), but where I can simply follow them having conversations with one another. Since all of my research assistants were Christian Kachin women, it was not religion they shared with my interlocutors (who were Muslims and Hindus), but the experience of being ‘slotted in’ as members of ‘communities’.

I also thanked my colleagues in Myanmar who had been professors of Anthropology at the University of Yangon prior to the attempted military coup in February 2021. Thanks to them, my PhD students received research visa, thanks to them, I had the opportunity of teaching and learning from young anthropology students, and thanks to them I learned a lot about the history of the discipline in Myanmar and about the history of the University of Yangon. I truly hope that one day they will be able to return to their professional jobs — which they cherished a lot, and to their students whom they loved.

None of these people could be with my family, my PhD students, and the other Myanmar scholars that day.

Thanking those who were there

I was happy to be surrounded by many friends, who had helped in different ways to bring this book to fruition: many of my colleagues had read draft chapters, some had written reviews or are going to write them. Alicia Turner gave some introductory words — she knows the book very well as she has written the most constructive and helpful review that made the final product so much better!

The managing editor of NIAS Press, Gerald Jackson, had come from Copenhagen to Zurich with his research assistant Julia Heinle and with a lot of amazing books on Southeast Asia and on Myanmar in tow. He took my book project on board and steered it smoothly through the production process in not even two years from the submission date!

Gerald Jackson and Julia Heinle (both NIAS Press) with the book and me.

My PhD students who are working on Myanmar, were all present, too. We discussed my material just as much as we discussed theirs. They all completed long-term ethnographic fieldwork in or on Myanmar and I can’t wait to see their own books!

And — last but not least — my family — who accompanied me from 2012 onwards and carried out their own research projects in Yangon: on the politics of cultural heritage in one case and on what it means to go to a local school in Chinatown in Yangon in the other case.

Thank you to everyone who was there that evening — be it in spirit or in the flesh — I am very grateful for the support I have received in the last decade. I hope the book will be useful to many.

We-formation. Reflections on methodology, the military coup attempt and how to engage with Myanmar today. Lecture in Paris, 16 May 2023

In this invited lecture, I will discuss my concept of “we-formation” in regard to three different topics: First, as anthropological theory and methodology; Second, as a way to make sense of the resistance against the attempted military coup and third in regard to the possibility of a public anthropology of cooperation in these trying times.

First, I will explore the concept in regard to its theoretical and methodological innovativeness, taking an example from my Yangon ethnography as illustration. We-formation, I argue in my book Rethinking community in Myanmar. Practices of we-formation among Muslims and Hindus in urban Yangon, “springs from an individual’s pre-reflexive self-consciousness whereby the self is not (yet) taken as an intentional object” (8). The concept encompasses individual and intersubjective routines that can easily be overlooked” (20), as welll as more spectacular forms of intercorporeal co-existence and tacit cooperation.

By focusing on individuals and their bodily practices and experiences, as well as on discourses that do not explicitly invoke community but still centre around a we, we-formation sensitizes us to how a sense of we can emerge (Beyer 2023: 20).

Second, I will put my theoretical and methodological analysis of we-formation to work and offer an interpretation of why exactly the attempted military coup of 1 February 2021 is likely to fail (given that the so-called ‘international community’ does not continue making the situation worse). In the conclusion of my book I argue that the “generals’ illegal power grab has not only ended two decades of quasi-democratic rule, it has also united the population in novel ways. As an unintended consequence, it has opened up possibilities of we-formation and enabled new debates about the meaning of community beyond ethno-religious identity” (250).

Third, I will discuss how (not) to cooperate with Myanmar today. Focusing on what is already happening within the country and amongst Burmese activists in exile, but also what researchers of Myanmar from the Global North can do within their own countries of origin to make sure the resistance does not lose momentum. In this third aspect, I take we-formation out of its intercorporeal and pre-reflexive context in which I came to develop the concept during my fieldwork in Yangon and employ it to stress a type of informed anthropological action that, however, does not rely on having a common enemy or on gathering in a new form of ‘community’ that has become reflexive of itself. Rather, it aims at encouraging everyone to think of one’s own indidivual strengths, capabilities and possibilities and put them to work to support those fighting for a free Myanmar.

You can purchase my book on the publisher’s website: NIAS Press.

Here’s the full programme of the Groupe Recherche Birmanie for the spring term 2023:

“Rethinking community in Myanmar. Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon” (NIAS Press 2023) has arrived!

‘Community’, I argue in my new anthropological monograph, was actively turned into a category for administrative purposes during the time of British imperial rule. It has been put to work to divide people into ethno-religious selves and others ever since.

Rather than bestowing on community some sort of positivist reality or deconstructing the category until nothing is left, my aim in this book is to shift the angle of approach: I acknowledge that community (for reasons that can usually be traced historically) feels real to and is meaningful for individuals. Their experiences and their struggles to engage with community are no less real. Through their own classificatory practices, my interlocutors — Muslims and Hindus in urban Yangon — demonstrate that they reason and reflect on symbols and meanings in their own culture as much as anthropologists do. But my approach goes beyond a social constructivist concern over how terms such as community are used, and also beyond a representational approach in which actors are subjected to culture as a system of meaning.

When I talk about the work of community (drawing on Nancy 2015), I reflect on the ways in which individuals accommodate ‘community’ in their acts of reasoning, meaning-making and symbolization. The way my interlocutors in Yangon see and talk about themselves has a historical context that begins in nineteenth-century England, encompasses British colonial India and later Burma itself, and extends into presentday
Myanmar. I then widen the emic perspective of my interlocutors and offer a novel way of describing how a we that does not neatly map onto or overlap with a homogeneous social group is generated in various situations.

What I call we-formation encompasses individual and intersubjective routines that can easily be overlooked, as well as more spectacular forms such as the intercorporeal aspects of the ritual march I described earlier. Attending to such sometimes minute moments of co-existence or tacit cooperation is difficult, but doing so can help us understand how community continues to have such an impact on the everyday lives of our interlocutors, not to mention on our own analytical ways of thinking about sociality.

You can purchase the book on the publisher’s website: NIAS Press.

Rethinking Community in Myanmar. New Book out soon!

Announced for November 2022 with NIAS Press:

Rethinking Community in Myanmar. Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon.

This is the first anthropological monograph of Muslim and Hindu lives in contemporary Myanmar. In it, I introduce 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 my 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. I demonstrate 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. I draw 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. Through participant observation in mosques and temples, during rituals and processions, and in private homes I reveal 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.

Paris 2019. Lectures, Conference, Keynote

Conférences de Judith Beyer (University of Konstanz), Professeure invitée de l’EHESS, Chaire sécable de l’Institut d’études de l’Islam et des sociétés du monde musulman

1. The force of custom. Law and the ordering of everyday life in Kyrgyzstan

In this talk, I offer a unique critique of the concept of ‘postsocialism’, a new take on the concept of legal pluralism, and a plea to bring ethnomethodological approaches into correspondence with ethnographic data. Drawing on a decade of anthropological fieldwork and engagement with Central Asia, I will focus on describing how my informants in rural Kyrgyzstan order their everyday lives and rationalize their recent history by invoking the force of custom (Kyrgyz: ‘salt’).
Although ‘salt’ is often blamed for bringing about more disorder and hardship than order and harmony, as I will exemplify with the example of mortuary rituals, it allows my informants to disavow responsibility for their actions by pushing a model of ‘how things get done here’ to the front. Invoking ‘salt’ enables actors even as they claim to be constrained by it, it opens up possibilities to conceptualize, classify, and contextualize large- and mid-scale developments in an intimate idiom. It also is a way to communicate to others that one is an expert in and of one’s own culture. An ethnomethodological perspective, as I pursue it, challenges a conception of social order as hidden within the visible actions and behaviours of members of society. Rather, it examines how members produce and sustain the observable orderliness of their own actions.

Le 12 mars 2019 de 16h à 18h – Université Paris-Nanterre, Département d’anthropologie, salle E105, 200, avenue de la République, 92001 Nanterre

2. The arrival of the Indian Other. On classifying minorities in Burma

Migrants from India have arrived in Burma from pre-colonial times onwards up until the Second World War. They crossed the Bay of Bengal out of personal economic endeavours, but having been categorized collectively by the British colonial state already before they embarked on the steamships to Rangoon, their collective identities travelled with them. Next to looking for work, other migrants relocated there to make use of parcels of land that were given to them as a reward for their services in the colonial apparatus or in the Indian army; yet others took up positions in the higher echelons of the administration in Burma. These people entered a Buddhist polity that had been shaped by centuries of hierarchical modes of royal governance – one which included Muslims and other ethno-religious minorities. This talk traces the different types of classifications and reclassifications that were projected onto and subsequently appropriated by ‘Indian migrants’ in order to shed light on the current situation of ethno-religious minorities in contemporary Myanmar, particularly in the city of Yangon.

Dans le cadre du Séminaire “Dialogues entre recherches classiques et actuelles sur l’Asie du Sud-Est“

Le 14 mars 2019 de 10h à 12h – EHESS, SR 737, 54, boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris

3. Accountability and justice in asylum claims. Debating the issue of Rohingya statelessness in British courts.

Accountability is a reflexive technique by means of which actors realize and lay claim to their actions. In order to be recognizable, accountability “depends on the mastery of ethno-methods” (Giddens 1979: 57; 83). If, as Garfinkel put it, “[a]ny setting organizes its activities to make its properties as an organized environment of practical activities detectable, countable, recordable, repeatable, tell-a-story-aboutable, analysable – in short, accountable” (1967, 33; italics in original), then so-called ‘screening interviews’ in asylum cases of stateless Rohingya are a challenge to this principle as they are defined by non-knowledge about the other. When UK border agents and Rohingya meet, their ‘membership’, which forms the basis of all co-production of action (and knowledge) in ethnomethodology, needs to be established ad hoc in the interview situation. What we can learn from those ‘first contact’ encounters and the subsequent travelling of a Rohingya asylum seeker’s file through the court system, is, I argue, how accountability is constantly being produced through interaction and how, as an important by-product of this production process, not only a ‘case’ is decided, but also the validity of the state’s own account is rendered plausible.

Dans le cadre de la conférence co-organisée par Yazid Ben Hounet et Judith Beyer “Claiming Justice after Conflict: The Stateless, the Displaced and the Disappeared at the Margins of the State”

Le 15 mars 2019 de 10h15 à 11h15 – FMSH, Salle A3-50, 54 Bd Raspail 75006 Paris

4. On little and grand narratives in Central Asia

In this keynote speech, I engage with the conference topic of “challenging” and even “disturbing” “Grand Narratives” through an investigation of the tradition of orality and the usage of oral history in Central Asia. These are two interlinked endeavours, as oral tradition has been investigated “as history” (Vansina) and oral history understood as “the voice from the past” (Thompson). Anthropologists (of Central Asia) investigate tradition as “a site of necessary engagement that aggregates people, … informs policy, public debates, law, and representation, and is – despite its often enough strategic inception – affectively powerful” (Beyer and Finke forth. in Central Asian Survey). Examples from Central Asia show how “oral tradition”, especially when mediated by state and media apparatus, can take on “grand narrative” qualities. Moreover, in contrast to how oral history has been treated in the past, namely as history “from below”, of “the everyday” and by “the little guys” (Graeber), thus as “little narrative”, as I will call it, it is worth exploring in what ways this method of ethnographic and historical inquiry has the capacity to yield “grand” results.

Dans le cadre de la Conférence “CASIO 2.0 : Disturbing Grand Narratives” organisée par l’EHESS et ZMO (Berlin).

Le 28 mars 2019 de 10h à 12h – PSL, Salle du Conseil, 60, Rue Mazarine, 75006 Paris.

Making sense of …

Communal sense. The making of ethno-religious selves and others in Myanmar

I am going to present my ongoing work on Myanmar at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz on December 6, 2018 at 5pm (Bischofsvilla, Otto-Adam Str. 5).

In my presentation I will give an overview of my book manuscript which is based on ethnographic data I collected over several long stretches of fieldwork between 2013 and 2018. The focus of my book lies on critically reinvestigating the category of ‘community’ in light of new material from Southeast Asian Myanmar. My study is geographically situated in Yangon, a fast expanding metropolis and the home of various ethno-religious minorities whose ancestors built the city when they were shipped across the Bay of Bengal by the British colonial forces in the 19th century. My informants, who are Hindus and Muslims, are often referred to as “Indians” in the literature or simply “Blacks” by the local Burmese population, but in their self-understanding, they are the true founders of Yangon. My interest lies in understanding how, in a local context of imperialism and ethno-religious nationalism, these people organize themselves as ‘members’ of groups that perform and are recognized by others as ‘communities’.

My theoretical aim in this book, and my contribution to wider anthropological and sociological debates, is to develop an alternative angle towards the category of ‘community’ that focuses on how and when exactly a collective ‘We’ emerges. In the social sciences the process of we-making has so far been analysed only as a by-product of the process by which ‘Theys’ are created (Appadurai 2006: 50). The concept of communal sense, which I am putting forward in my book, focuses instead on the successful establishing of community as an effect of we-intentionality (Walther 1923) which become ethnographically observable in moments of communitas, in the articulation of common sense and in the material anchoring of common goods.

Yangon Photography

Yangon, Myanmar

First impressions from Yangon, Myanmar where I will be based until May 2016. The city has changed a lot in the last two years since I visited, mostly in terms of transportation and mobile phone use. What has remained the same are the great street food eateries, the use of loudspeakers to convey religious messages, lottery ticket sales and other important or not-so-important events. I missed the people a lot and its great to find almost everyone in good health and spirits. Nothing beats fieldwork, really! J.