Episode #220: Cursing Tyranny
“’Rights’ are more complex in Myanmar,” explains Elliott Prasse-Freeman, “in the sense that [while] they tend to presuppose a contractual relationship, a stable relationship, between a governed population and the apparatus of power that's supposed to be guaranteeing those rights, that's something that their reality just doesn't reflect [in Myanmar].”
Prasse-Freeman joins the podcast in a very erudite discussion about his recent book, Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar, which is the culmination of many years of fieldwork. He notes that in the West, the concept of “rights” is interpreted within a paradigm “that ‘rights’ is liberatory and can actually help people gain the things that they want, and the dignity that they deserve.” But this is not what he found to be the case in Myanmar. “I spent a lot of time tracking how people talked about this in their daily lives and how activists had to maneuver in a situation in which they couldn't rely on ‘rights.’ They couldn't fall back on a ‘rights paradigm’ to guarantee or secure their incursions into the public realm against the military state.”
Prasse-Freeman first visited Myanmar in 2004, and then returned during the transition years, when he found that his lived experience there didn’t quite match what he had read about the country, much of which had been penned by academics and journalists who had only limited access. So calling himself a “nerdy detective,” he began to delve deeper. “I was very compelled to try to figure out what really explained Myanmar,” he notes. With this goal in mind, he accompanied a local, legal aid group that was trying to prevent the rampant land grabs going on at the time to learn more about their perspective. This was to be a very fruitful experience; he encountered the use of many symbolic actions that, years later, would end up playing an important role in the resistance movement following the coup. For example, he first witnessed the Hunger Games-inspired, three-finger salute in a Dagon courtroom, way back in 2014.
Another of these symbolic actions is the “cursing ritual,” which builds on the Burmese Buddhist belief in planes of existence. Because the military has been too strong to fight in the secular realm, activists instead choose to operate in an esoteric plane, where the playing fields are more level. By leveling curses that are believed will impact the future lives of military leaders and their families, it serves to strengthen activists’ resolve, as it evokes the belief that the military’s dominance in this current incarnation will eventually come to an end when their life is over. Because the military is known to be quite superstitious, this gives further strength and impetus to these rituals, and thus power to those who use them. In fact, one well-known fortune teller was deemed so dangerous that he was personally targeted for arrest shortly after the 2021 coup. As Prasse-Freeman says, “When you can impact their potential future lives, no matter how much protective magic they do, there's a concern that the temporality that they appear to be existing right now, the secular realm domination, might not be relevant to these future lives.”
He also describes how his book provides a kind of background context regarding the years of grassroots activism that have often been overlooked in the West, perhaps similar to Delphine Schrank’s The Rebel of Rangoon (which was discussed on a previous episode). “The people who I had worked with in the streets, and [who] remain active in the underground resistance against the coup, provided a sort of bridge between the two eras,” he notes, adding how “all this extra stuff might get missed… if you only focus on those moments [of big events] that seem to pop up out of nowhere.” Therefore, like Schrank, he criticizes those who limit their analysis to touchstone incidents in Myanmar’s recent history, and their focus to primarily major figures, rather than going deeper into grassroots activities. He points out “just how much of the life of an activist and the life of a normal person isn't about these contests with high stakes. There's so much that is preparing for and deciding when a particular conflict or particular protest is just, like, ‘This is not our fight.’”
In attempting to explain the nature of the political situation in Myanmar, specifically how the military has retained power for so long, Prasse-Freeman lays out a framework where 1) overall, the state is negligent, 2) “rights” as we understand them don’t really exist, and 3) there is little sense of unity within the population. To explain this further, he draws on philosopher Michel Foucault's words, “made to die, left to live.” This refers to how kings in the past typically let people alone in their lives (besides collecting taxes, or conscripting for war) unless they perceived a threat, in which case the state killed. However, Foucault says that the modern state operates in a way that inverts that phrase (“made to live [as the state wishes], left to die”), as most governments now regulate people’s lives, socializing them in ways that because of how they live and work, the state prospers.
Along with this, there is usually a kind of social “contract” where in exchange for submitting to state regulation: the vote. Individuals grant the state their legitimacy through the vote, and in turn are willing to voluntarily submit to the state’s expectations and control. This is something we in the West are quite familiar with. But Prasse-Freeman says, “Now, anyone who's studied Myanmar knows that that is not really a good way to describe how things operate in in Burma!”
So, to illustrate the power dynamic here, he draws on the thinking of Partha Chatterjee, an anthropologist who specializes in studying the post-colonial world. Chatterjee argues that “the colonial world took its governed not as individuals to be regulated through…[that reciprocal agreement of) ‘one person, one vote,’ but rather as population groups to be regulated.” As the colonial world developed into the post-colonial states, people in those states now mobilize as population groups. “[T]he masses are taken as the objects of governance rather than rights-bearing individuals, but they're not promoted in the sense that their lives are not protected.” In Prasse-Freeman’s view, this perspective accurately describes the Burmese military regime’s enactment of power dynamics.
Given this, labeling Myanmar as a totalitarian state certainly seems like the logical conclusion, and this is the fallback position of much writing about the country. However, Prasse-Freeman believes this an inaccurate characterization, which leads to the third feature of his framework: what he sees is more “a form of neglect as much as [an] active form of meddling.” In other words, this “was not a state that was suffocating people, but a state that was just completely absent.” Of course, at any moment, this can rapidly change to “made to die,” by targeting victims with acute forms of violence, as has been seen with the Rohingya, along with many other ethnic and religious minorities.
The grassroots activists he studied, therefore, had to find a way to navigate this changing and precarious reality, while at the same time trying to push for progressive changes within society. However, this is certainly no easy feat given the nebulous nature of the Burmese state beyond its repression, violence and greed.
In examining the critical question of ethnic identity, Prasse-Freeman starts with the census. In Colonial times, the British used the census in India as a means to categorize the population, to better be able to control it and administer governance. But although one might assume that being under Colonial control, the census in Burma would have yielded the same types of information, Prasse-Freeman says that in fact, it did not. “It seemed like that form of knowledge-power was more or less absent in Burma,” he says, noting that successive military regimes didn’t do much better in knowing their population, either. A by-product of this was that people have been able to form more fluid and flexible identities.
Prasse-Freeman explains that “the way that people have to take care of their own bio-political survival, these population groups can then become a sort of ‘gateway drug,’ into becoming more political. Almost everyone starts out in these civil society organizations, from free funeral services to local education projects. Then, if we're lucky, they become radicalized and politicized at some point.” (Interestingly, former US Ambassador Scot Marciel made a parallel argument during his interview, when he noted how he was pushing for US funding during the transition period for Burmese civil society organizations that fell outside the more traditional “political” rubrics that the government usually looked to support.) To Prasse-Freeman, the clear movement from a civil to more overtly political society was nothing less than “shape shifting” taking place before his eyes! “You see the connection between activism and a community supporting themselves,” he notes.
From there, Prasse-Freeman returns to those cursing rituals. He says he came to realize that its power is that “it does make you feel a certain way.” He explains how it is a “weapon of the weak, in a situation where it's hard to come right out and demand things from a state that tends to ignore you and hasn't given you any rights.” As noted above, it is a way of staging a confrontation in another realm than the physical, which given the pre-coup power dynamics, would lead to annihilation. Not only is staging these cursing rituals a public spectacle that undermines the state’s temporal authority, activists realize that they’re staging a kind of trial that circumvents the more traditional “rule of law” structures which aren’t known to work very well in Myanmar anyway. “You can build lots of pagodas with the money that you stole from the people,” he notes, adding that these rituals then ask the question; “But what if you're being judged karmically in a different way?”
Prasse-Freeman finds Burmese activists carefully considering which pathway of protest is most needed for the current moment, while knowing that at some point, great personal sacrifice will eventually be demanded of them. It requires careful consideration to decide “when is the culture of sacrifice truly sacrificial for the people, and when is it actually just for your own glory.” Like Philipp Annawitt referenced in a prior podcast interview, that “culture of sacrifice” continues to dominate the democratic movement today, with leadership roles often bestowed not according to meritocracy, but rather the amount of personal suffering one has already endured through a person’s activism over the years.
Prasse-Freeman distinguishes between two kinds of anti-regime acts. One he calls an act of “refusal.” In other words, one avoids direct confrontation and instead supports various prosocial, community-based society initiatives around things the state is unwilling or unable to support. The other he calls an act of “resistance,” when it the time is ripe to physically protest. “When the political opportunity changes, then they're ready to snap into action,” he explains, which may well describe the sudden organized nature of the anti-military resistance in the days immediately following the coup.
In the face of a tyrannical military regime, the lines of “good versus bad” become very clear; however, the transition years were more ambiguous. For example, while there were obvious improvements made during that period, they didn’t extend to all members of society. But when activists tried to deliver this message to Aung San Suu Kyi, they were thanked for their contributions…and then basically told to back off. “It's very much not a people's democracy, but rather an elite, technocratic one in which the smart people look out for the people who are who are benighted and not quite smart enough to look out for themselves. And this was anathema to the activists.” While activists of that time were somewhat sympathetic to the NLD’s struggles in its delicate balancing act with the military, and so less radical in their approach, over time their patience waned. This harkens back to a recent podcast conversation with Bobo, a member of the Generation Wave group that Prasse-Freeman also studied, in which Bobo commented about the transition period, “Governments are always acting like a government, and activists are acting like activists.”
Prasse-Freeman closes the discussion by looking closely at the word, “rights.” In Burmese, this carries a variety of connotations, such as “entitlement,” “permission,” “chance,” and “opportunities.” He describes how a Burmese person might relate to “rights” more in the sense of “opportunity.” As he puts it: “What are the conditions and contexts that would need to exist for this opportunity to materialize, and if I don't have those contexts and conditions, then perhaps this opportunity is not for me, this opportunity is for someone else, someone who's lucky or someone who has more privileges already, who can enjoy these kinds of things.” In other words, having “rights” is not understood in Myanmar as a fundamental condition that all people should enjoy, but rather as a zero-sum game that communities compete against each other for. More marginalized populations, such as the country’s ethnic minorities, must compete the hardest—and against each other—to get even a small slice of the remaining pie. The distinction in how these terms are understood in different cultural and linguistic ways was never more evident than during the Rohingya crisis. “Rather than seeing this as a conflict in which these are people who are being slaughtered and having citizenship rights denied, and it seems very basic to give them these things, many times I saw Myanmar people describe the Rohingya as essentially skipping the queue!” And going back to that “culture of sacrifice,” even as many of the Bamar activists Prasse-Freeman worked with “were aggressively anti-racist and worked with Muslim communities,” some Bamar activists quietly questioned how hard Rohingya communities had been working—and how much they had sacrificed—to claim their “rights.” This was particularly ironic in the case of the Rohingya. As Prasse-Freeman dryly notes, “The Rohingya were excluded from participating, and then being blamed for their own exclusion, essentially.”
Prasse-Freeman also points to how in the West, we think about “possessing” rights; indeed, rights often are described as “inalienable.” But it is not seen that way in Myanmar, where, rights can be stolen, you can get more of them than someone else; it’s not seen as equitable, since everyone does not have an equal number of rights, and access to those rights can be taken away. But rather than seeing this as a totally different paradigm than in the West, Prasse-Freeman suggests that historically marginalized groups around the country face a similar situation. “I wonder, are Myanmar and the United States more alike than they would seem, are ‘rights’ more like ‘opportunities’ in America than we would want to acknowledge?”
However, there is an unlikely silver lining that he acknowledges as well in closing. “When you don't ever presuppose you have rights in the first place, you never get caught in that downward spiral of demobilization. You know that if you want something, you have to go out and create it! So it takes a lot of work, but it can also be hopeful at the same time.”