Transcript: Episode #220: Cursing Tyranny

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Host 00:29

thank you for joining us for the next hour or two in this episode of insight Myanmar podcast in an age of nearly limitless content we appreciate that you're choosing to take valuable time out of your day to learn more about what is happening in Myanmar it's vital for the story to be heard by people around the world and that starts right now with you.

Host 02:15

On this episode of Inside Myanmar podcast, we're joined by Elliot price a Freeman and we're going to be specifically discussing his book, which came out of many years of research and was just recently published, the book name is rights refused grassroots activism and state violence in Myanmar. Eliot, this is a long time coming. And I'm really excited to get into this book, it's very full, there's a lot there, we'll see how much we can pack in. And thanks so much for taking the time to talk about your work.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 02:44

Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Host 02:47

So let's get into the book title itself rights refused. I think that even the title of this is indicating somewhere of where you're going with your scholarship and what you're trying to express tell us what rights refused means.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 03:02

Yeah, so it's a kind of play on words a little bit, in the sense that, as we know, anyone who studied Myanmar for the past, you know, 60 years kind of understands that under a military government rights in a sort of substantive sense, meaning the entitlements or the material things that could be given to people that we tend to call rights have been refused or denied to the people of, of Myanmar. And but what I have found over the last decade or so working on this book, is that rights have a are more complex in in Myanmar, in the sense that they tend to presuppose a contractual relationship, a stable relationship between a governed population and the you know, apparatus of power that's supposed to be guaranteeing those rights. And that's something that their reality just doesn't reflect. And so when people do talk about rights, in Myanmar, many Myanmar people, or at least this is what I found in my fieldwork look a little bit of stance at that claim. So if someone says, you know, you have the right to not have this happened to you, people might say is that, is that really true? They might look at their own material realities and say, I don't really think I have this right. And so the rights refuse that I talk about this book aren't just the fact that these rights are denied to people. But the paradigm in which we assume that rights is liberatory and can actually help people gain the things that they want and the dignity that they probably that they deserve. They might also refuse those paradigms so it's kind of an operating into balence is one of the reasons why rights is so interesting in Myanmar. Is that the Burmese term "A Khwint A Yay", that is often translated as rights can also be translated as opportunities. And I don't think this is an accident of language in which in certain contexts, it means rights. And it's quite clear to everyone and other contexts, that means opportunities. So, for instance, " Lu A Khwint A Yay" means human rights. But "A Khwint A Yay Thamar" would mean opportunist, someone who takes advantage of a situation. So the " Lu A Khwint A Yay" definitely points in two different directions. And over the term of the research, I kind of found that a concept that we tend to split and keep separate in other contexts, so maybe the one that I'm most familiar with as an American, in which our opportunity is very different than a right, right? haven't really been split in the same sense in, in Myanmar, both in terms of the, in terms of the the reality that people live. And I think language tends to reflect that. So if someone doesn't have the opportunity to realize something, then they don't really have the right to. And so I spent a lot of time tracking how people talked about this in their daily lives, and how activists had to maneuver a situation in which they couldn't rely on rights, they couldn't fall back on rights paradigms to guarantee or secure their incursions into the public realm, against the military state. And so they had to improve other methods that were effective for them. Yes,

Host 06:37

and this is what we'll be getting into in this talk. And I just want to emphasize how important it is that we're looking at, and you specifically are bringing this to the readers or in this case, listeners attention of not importing an understanding of from another country of how we've come to see it and in in bringing that there, but trying to integrate where local paradigms and understandings occur. I think this is something that has all happened all too often. In the case of Myanmar, there's an anecdote that I've told several times before that's relevant here as well, where sometime probably 2012 or so the year is important in the anecdote 2011, I think it was, there was a Western trainer who came in to give a workshop and part of the talk and kind of what it hinged on, was the ubiquity of Coca Cola. And the whole talk hinged on just Coca Cola being this ubiquitous thing that was available everywhere. And that the the greater metaphor they were making, which I won't go into, it was pretty silly anyway, but it hinged on this understanding that Coke was this thing you can buy anywhere. But at that time in Myanmar, Coke was a luxury product, there was no Coca Cola Bottling plants, it was something you would have kind of an upscale places because it was imported from Thailand. And so it was this, like, if you had if you went somewhere they had a Coke, it was kind of a sign that it was, you know, a foreign product or something that was looked on and a bit more elite a bit more expensive. And so and there are so many incidences like this I encountered in my own life in Myanmar. But that was a moment I always glommed on to because it, it, it really seemed to symbolize and highlight a foreign so called expert coming in with, with an understanding of how things were in their country, and maybe how they were in the world. And referencing analogy without ever thinking to check if that was true there and everything just falling flat. Because Coca Cola in 2011 was not ubiquitous. So it's so important to know these local things and work within them rather than bringing your own paradigms and frames into it.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 08:37

Yeah, it's a really great example I can think about, you know, a lot of the I can think of similar situations that I've encountered in in Myanmar as well. And I think the challenge when you're doing research on a place that can seem quite, quite different, and is quite different, is to figure out, you know, the ways in which a place like Myanmar is different and take that local, different seriously. But also, keep in mind the sort of ways that it's also connected to the right, we'll try to do that as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Host 09:15

And so getting into that book, I understand from your preface that your research began, long before the coup during the democratic transition period. And then in the midst of your research and your writing the the coup takes place. And so the the way that one is confronting military oppression suddenly becomes much more acute in this moment, and so how did that change the nature of your study and understanding to have done this research and have it I want to say interrupted by the military coup, I don't know if interrupted is the right word. It could be enhanced and could bring out other things. But how did that change the way that you were digging into this?

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 09:55

Thank you for that question. It actually allows me to go back even further to the sort of the origin of the book, in a sense came back in 2003 and 2004 When I was just an undergraduate but and then I had finished my university and I moved to Myanmar at that point. So I lived in Myanmar in 2004, and five for about a year, a little bit more than a year. And so I got a sort of taste of what Myanmar was like before the transition. And then I did this, I finished I, I did a PhD work, then a whole decade later, in which I started to study some of the things that I had seen and in Myanmar a little bit more closely. And I think a lot of it emerged from the fact that Myanmar wasn't very well studied during the military years. And so there tended to be some tropes and some descriptions of reality that didn't match up to what I had experienced when I lived there. And so part of the reason for doing the PhD was just like kind of being this kind of how you describe the, the current, my current profession in general is kind of like being a nerdy detective, like, something doesn't seem that you read about me, it doesn't seem to match up with the reality that I had experienced living in there in Yangon for a year. And so I was trying to figure out, I was very compelled to try to figure out like what, you know, what explained the what really explained Myanmar. And so I was able to do this research during the so called transition period, which, for all of its faults, did give researchers like myself a lot more freedom to move around the country and to explore things. And I was lucky enough and so much of anthropological research, anyone who's honest, will tell you is just luck, I was working with a legal aid organization that actually collapsed due to some internal problems that it had. And so at this, at this point, November, think 2014, I was all dressed up with nowhere to go, so to speak, you know, I had this fieldwork time, but I didn't have a great project at this point. And I managed to fall in with a NGO pal of mine who was doing land grab research in Mandalay and Sagaing area and I tagged along and met the group of activists. And at that point, they just been kind of hired as handlers because they knew these communities who were having their lands grabbed. And they were kind enough and generous enough to allow me to kind of tag along with them for what became the next few years, not not all at once, but you know, a sustained period of time for for eight months, nine months with them, and then a longer term engagement with this group that continues to this day, that then led up to the coup, which of course, I think most people speaking honestly will say that it took us by surprise. And then the coup for all the tour has produced this pretty amazing response, as we know on the ground in the form of the appraisal, you know, the you know, the "A Yay Taw Pone", however you want to describe it, and I started to notice so many of the things that I had been studying during that period of 2014 to 2021, basically, from the small to the large. And what I mean by that is like little things like the three fingered salute I had observed in in 2014, or 2015, in a courtroom and in Dagon township in Yangon. When I started to see this everywhere, I had been studying these chains out type way, which were these cursing rituals that very cleverly use the sort of esoteric realm to kind of circumvent kind of secular realm domination to tell people who are stealing land, you know, you can, you can steal the land all you want, but there's a longer term cosmological karmic consequence coming your way if you're not careful. And then during the coup, I saw, I was observing, you know, dozens of these really creative Christian rituals pop up, you know, even to the point that at the start of the coup, one of the few people who was arrested we're not those protesters on the streets and the first couple of days, you know, cursing the sorry, cursing at me online, but someone who led the people's cursing ritual who was beaten say, in North Oka Lapa was was arrested, so it kind of showed the resonance for the people who are being cursed, in this case, the military junta, so the coup and the uprising against the coup was made legible by the research or I tried to make it legible, but through the research that I had done, and the coup itself and uprising helped throw into relief and make a little bit more clear. Some of the things that I had studied so the book is because Has the coup is such an important, you know, world historical event and certainly a huge one for for Myanmar. I wanted to make sure that my book had focused in granular and specific ethnographic terms on much of the work that I'm sorry, much of the action and that much of the things that had been done during this transition period, didn't just become, you know, old history. Right, I wanted to make sure that the coup which is in the uprising against it, which we're still going, going on, are kind of in conversation with the what had gone on during the so called transition period. And luckily, because the people who I had worked with were also in the streets and remain active in the underground resistance against the coup provided a sort of bridge between the two eras and allowed me to write a book that at least speaks to both, right?

Host 15:58

Yeah, there's so much in that answer, I can only pick one direction to go at a time, I'm juggling all the different things you through there. But the thing I want to touch upon of what you said is that we so we have these Touchstone moments and Myanmar, that everyone pays attention to 1988 2007 2021, just to name the last three. And I mean, even the years stand out with a cert, you just say those years, and anyone related to Myanmar, and Myanmar knows exactly what you're talking about. And especially many outside observers try to understand Myanmar through these pivotal events and highlight them. But what stands out is your work. And I'm also thinking of Delphine Schrank, who wrote the rebel of Rangoon, she was also honest with the podcast that I found, even though the, the direction that you to go are very, are quite different in terms of your intentions, there's something very similar, that I don't know if I've seen in many other books that are talking not about those Touchstone moments, but about this, or about the big actors, but about the spaces in between, and the smaller people on the ground that are giving shape to those bigger events in between them, and also supporting those, those bigger names that we know. And so I'm wondering if you also find this tendency to understand the country attempt to understand the country through these big events. And when so much attention is being paid. That way, what gets missed, when further attention is not being paid to those moments when it appears that nothing is happening above board, yet, actually, so much is continuing to happen below the surface, which actually explain those big events when you miss them.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 17:35

Absolutely. And I love that you brought up Delfines book, because I really feel like it's one of those books that got missed a little bit. And I tried to plug it whenever I can, because I think I read it back in 2015, or 16, I was really blown away by the sort of the detail and the nuance that that she brings to things and the sort of, you know that like just take the Saffron Revolution, like so many people repeat even though many scholars repeat a lot of stuff about the revolution, that is just simply factually wrong about, you know, they limit it to a discussion of the monks and miss the fact that the ADHS was in the streets, you know, walking to work because people couldn't take the buses anymore. And before that the group called the Myanmar Development Committee, led by kinjal, and goto and some of the other people who I mentioned in the book had been holding protests before. So there's this long history that led up to this, suppose this, like conflagration that emerged. And so really, from the outside, it seems like this was just, you know, pent up, aggression, aggression, pent up frustration, sorry, that that popped off at this particular time and then receded back into into stasis and complacency of living under military rule. But when you look at it from a sustained on the ground perspective, especially from the perspective of grassroots organizers, who are spending a lot of time in their communities, rather than, quote unquote, in the streets, then you, as you said so eloquently, and I almost don't have that much to add, you start to see the sort of the ways that these broader conflagrations these moments that we talk about from 88 to 2007 to 2021, can become a little bit more legible. I mean, I think one of the things that has to come through in the book is just how much of the life of an activist and a life of a normal person isn't about these contests with the steam. Exactly. There's so much that is preparing for those deciding when particular conflict particular protests is just this is not our fight. This is not our time to go back to prison. As I, I heard from them a lot and there was a lot of picking and choosing and and doing the organizing work that that allows people to get from from one day to the other, then also builds the sort of support and respect that then when things do come to a head, people will the people who are have been wronged whether they've had their land stolen or whether they are struggling to survive, whether they're trying to organize a industrial zone protest factory protest, then the these activists aren't just ones that swooped in from above, but they've been working with them for a long time.

Host 20:38

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that when, as I'm hearing you talk, it's it's making me think or remember, insights I had before with this, that when you just pay attention to those Touchstone events, you're you're kind of minimizing and demeaning, all the work that went into, you know, this wasn't accidental, this, this was, this was something that was not being paid attention to, especially by the West, but both yours and Delfines book in very different ways are describing those, the actors who dedicate their lives in ways that are maybe not as sexy or not, as, don't stand out in the same way, but that are in every way leading to something that is not accidental that has maybe not predicted in the shape of when or how, or what shape but is, is certainly with a very, very intentional mind state to what is it working, and what can work in its place, and what moments can bring about that change.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 21:32

Absolutely.

Host 21:35

And so another thing that you reference in your book, there's a number of phrases, and words and terms to unpack. The first one I want to bring is you have this phrase, quote, left to die made to live made to die left to live, in quote, but I wonder if you can unpack what this phrase means and where it came from and how it applies and is relevant to the, to the to the underground that you're studying in Myanmar?

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 21:59

Absolutely, yeah, this is getting into the Hurly burly of the theory a little bit, and I hope it the book doesn't drown in it. And that sense, but uses enough ethnography to illustrate some of these concepts. So the left to die made to live is actually comes from Michel Foucault's observations about changes in the way that power operated in the so called Modern period. So, to kind of gloss this, the earlier era under quote, unquote sovereign despotism, or or power was a situation where the king made people die, when they threatened him, but for the most part, let them alone to live. And so he starts this book Discipline and Punish with a grisly scene of an execution, in which someone had tried to kill a regicide, who was being executed. And so had this he had this kind of interesting inversion of this kind of classic paradigm of the way we think power operates, and says that what actually is being happened, as it were, the under what he called bio power, ultimately, is that people are kind of let alone to die in certain situations, and then made to live in the way that they're regulated, the way that they're enrolled into different projects, a way that there's, you know, the governed are trained and habituated into seeing themselves as certain kinds of subjects. Because as those subjects will live, they will allow the state and the broader apparatus to prosper. So he observed that this was a sort of interesting inversion in the way power worked in the world, or particularly the Western European world that he was studying. Now, what the reason why this is relevant for my work, and Myanmar actually is multiple fold, I think, and it's kind of a question of where to start sometimes. So I'm going to start with going back to the rights point it in the sense that when you're the rights paradigm kind of assumes that an individual autonomous actor who stands in a relationship to the state as a contractual rights bearing subject who has one vote and who grants the people who are or institutions that are ruling him, that the right to rule through, you know, the legitimacy of that particular relationship. Now, anyone who studied Myanmar knows that is not really a good way to describe how things operate in Burma, you know, just from the fact that we don't, for a long time, didn't even have elections, but just the fact that usually people aren't seen, not taken as the sort of foundations for the way governance should operate, unfortunately, and that's why I think a lot of activists will talk about power, power to the people as a way of We installing something that hasn't existed before, we need to get outside of the sort of liberal paradigm that assumes a rights bearing subject. And so Foucault provides this alternative paradigm in which people are mobilized and are regulated not as individuals, per se, but as part of these population groups, who are then fled to die or are made to live in the classic sense. And so there's a theorist called Partha Chatterjee, who is an anthropologist at Columbia, who studies the so called post colonial world. And he kind of argues that because of the way that the colonial world took individuals, or it's governed, not as individuals to be regulated through the paradigm of civil society, and one person, one vote that I just described, but rather as those sorts of masses, those population groups to be regulated, in a sense, all politics in the post colonial world are, to a certain extent, fall under this bio political paradigm in which people mobilize as population groups. Now, I found that to be very insightful for a place like Myanmar, and I started to think about the ways that this set of theoretical tools could apply to a place like, like Burma. And I think, what I what I found is that while one could describe the things in Myanmar as the regulatory governance paradigm in Myanmar as biopolitical, that also somehow gets things wrong a little bit, because it overstates the way that bio politics tends to want to make live. And that goes back to that expression that you mentioned earlier, the left to die made to live. And so I was really quite fascinated by this theoretical conundrum, which is that how can you have a sort of bio political paradigm in which masses are taken as the objects of, of governance rather than, you know, rights, very liberal individuals, but they're not promoted in, in the sense that their lives are not protected. They're, they're not made to made to live in a way that it seems like there's a concern of, excuse me of the state. And so I then inverted this expression one more time, instead of let to die made to live I kind of saw something in Myanmar as more like let to die made to die. And what I mean by that, without tending to macabre is that population groups in Myanmar are either made to die in the sense of, you know, perhaps protesting masses, the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities who have been the object of direct state violence over the last 67 years are then also exist in the same context with population groups of what we might call, you know, kind of unmarked, average Bamar populations who are more left to die, who are just kind of ignored, and who are not made an object of governance in an active way. And the reason why I wanted to focus on that is going back to, you know, my origin story, in a sense, where I felt like things that were written about Burma weren't really accurately describing the reality that I saw is that there's often an assumption that Myanmar state is totalitarian and it operates in an insidious way where it seeps into every, you know, aspect of people's lives. And when I lived in Myanmar, and spent a lot of time talking with Burmese people, I just didn't see that as a reality. Like the state was really horrible and did terrible things. But often it was a form of neglect as much as it was an active form of meddling. And of course, you don't want to get caught up in the state because it, you know, to kind of paraphrase a Burmese expression, you don't want to make small problems, big problems. At the same time, I think even the way that some scholars describe the relationship between the Myanmar state and its subject populations through the paradigm of evasion, maybe miss describes things a bit. And I'm not like dunking on people who use evasion. I've used it too. But I started to think about evasion and evasion kind of describes it only really works can only evade something which is trying to capture which is trying to enroll you which is trying to regulate you which is just trying to surveil you and I spending time in the what what is it's called the " Sin Chay Bhone", the sort of Peri urban areas of of Yangon. And I use that term, because the activists I work with spent time in North Okalapa, but also South Dagon, Shwe Pyi Thar and Hlaing Thar Yar. So it was kind of a Moveable Feast across tPeri urban areas. And one of the problems was not a state that was suffocating people, but a state that was just completely absent. And so you have this, you know, not so much too populations of those who are led to die made to die, because different individuals can move between them, unfortunately, with, you know, with rapid speed sometimes, but rather sort of different paradigms of rule that there are different. This is the sort of the logic in which some people become this direct object of violence, and other people become a sort of object of what we can call structural violence, violence, of neglect. And one of the challenges of the activists was to take this reality and kind of politicize it and take this structural violence, that one of the tricky, insidious parts of structural violence is the way that it convinces people that it is normal and maybe not quite so normal that they think that it is just, but they think that it is not something that can be intervened against. And so a lot of what the activists were doing was taking a look at normal material conditions and trying to re signify them right to say, this is not just something that is banal, that is like the Define state of life and must, but it's something that could be done differently. And here's how we could, we might imagine that,

Host 31:39

right? That's really insightful, when you do describe this kind of alternating view between the state having like either this ghostly quality of neglect, or this aggressive, overbearing nature of, of violence. And it's really a distinction between complete absence and assertive presence and noting that how the regime only recognizes people when it harms them. I mean, that's quite a tragic statement to understand. And I think, perhaps very hard to make sense for those who are listening to this from stable societies to even kind of contemplate what that means to live in a society like that. And that brings up another term that I think segues naturally into another term you present in the book, you've already referenced the term bio politics, I think, first maybe unpack bio politics for those listeners who aren't familiar, but then you add an adjective onto that blunt bio politics. And so in this, this nature of characterizing what this regime is, what it isn't what it means to live under it, what it means to resist against it. What what's the relevance of this blunt biopolitics? And what does that mean in terms of how it manages life and death, how it deploys violence, how it uses knowledge? Thanks.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 32:53

Yeah, that's a really good question. And thank you for reading so, so carefully, that you're able to chaperone this conversation in such a sophisticated way, probably more than I deserve, especially when I come up with terms like blunt bio politics, it's still make me cringe a little bit. But what I mean by blunt bio politics is that so I saw the way that you know, if we're operating outside of this rights based paradigm, a bio political paradigm in which I think it's very basic sense, describes the way that population groups rather than individuals are, are regulated, but then in the Foucault Daeun sense the things that he was observing in, in Western Europe, he observed different kinds of pair kind of like axiomatic definitions, or sorry, elements of what biopolitics would look look at. And the kind of key is that, I think two main keys is that the population groups that are taken as the object of governance are also protected and promoted and so life itself becomes this object to enhance so that the broader polity can flourish. And so, he observed this as Foucault observed things like censuses and public health administration's and productivity projects that then take an average sort of regulated subject as part of these populations and tries to enhance them. So things that hadn't been objects of knowledge before, the ratio of births and deaths, for the sort of how much people were, could be improved. These became objects of of governance itself. Now blunt biopolitics, even though I think, and I people can definitely argue against this. I argue that, you know, in Myanmar, we're operating under a sort of bio political paradigm. There are some key deviations from the way that bio politics operates first quite simply, the population groups aren't actively protected, actively promoted, in the same way that the sort of parodic Matic model of biopolitics would, would suggest. So the population groups don't become sort of recipients of active interventions on the part of the broader state apparatus that would try to promote them. And one of the reasons something that operates kind of, like dovetails with this is that, in part because the populations aren't actively promoted, they aren't really known. And I think one of the things that I'm trying to intervene against is a use of the biopolitical And Foucault Odeon sort of governmentality are argument that occurs in many other parts of the post colony that I think has been a little bit blithely transposed to the Myanmar context. And what I mean by that is that, in especially in the historiography and analysis of, of India, under the British, you saw these really ambitious projects of knowing the local population, so as to better regulate them through things like ethnological surveys and censuses and ways of taking, you know, old laws and trying to make them real as the original orientalists were doing there. And because Myanmar was a part of, of British India until 1937, people kind of assumed Well, same colonial project, same outcome, and hence, you hear a lot about how the census in Burma reified ethnicity and turn it into these, you know, ossified categories that people cannot no longer maneuver within, and it becomes their destiny, but doing fieldwork and watch, like, you know, paying attention to the way the State operates, it seemed like that form of knowledge power was more or less absent in, in Burma. And so they just give some pretty basic examples, like one of the key features of statecraft is knowing your population, so you can regulate them. But Myanmar is a country that doesn't have a biometric ID system. It has these map on tin, these ID cards that it insists people carry but the census of 2014 showed that they most people, not most, but many people don't actually even have these things. So it's so people aren't really well regulated, they don't even have last names, of course, quite famously, which, you know, James Scott and others have shown is not an accident of history, but rather a technology of governance. So you can, you know, lineages can be traced and individuals can be tracked down by the state when needed. And even that census that I just mentioned, that 2014, one was the first one that had been held since 1983, which in turn wasn't a very complete one. And so there was another one in 1973. And there wasn't one before that for a while, so that, you know, the way that Myanmar is known is very incomplete. And so as a result, this throws into relief, how we can think of the state, and it also has consequences for how people imagine their own lives. So there because the state doesn't exhaust this realm of regulation, you have people able to reimagine even the categories through which they are governed. And so like, I think one of the more important examples is that in a country where scholars often talk about the importance of Lu Myo, the Burmese term for you could say race or ethnicity even has been kind of remade at on on the ground, which you wouldn't think is possible if the state was robust, proactive, you know, insisting on certain categories and making them real and people's lives. So as an example, if you ask someone "Bar Lu Myo Lae", what Lu Myo Are you? You're depending on who you are asking. And depending on how the person in turn interprets your, your question, you can get really different answers. And one of the answers that I found most interesting is, you know, how often people returned. And I found this in the literature too. So it wasn't just me. answers about religion, to a question that was putatively about race or ethnicity. So when I asked "Bar Lu myo Lae", people would say, you know, Hindu, Lu Myo, Muslim Lu Myo, even Buddha Barthar Lu Myo, Buddha Barthar I think, is the most sort of Buddhist Lu Myo rather, I think that one's probably the most interesting because for marginalized subjects, Hindus and Muslims in Myanmar, they don't often have races that are available in low, you know, famous 100 List of 135. And one of the tragedies is the way that, you know, in the last 60 years, some of their Lu Myo are actually stripped from the list. There's a article by Mufti methane, where he shows that there were 144 Lu Myo, and many of those Lu Myo disappeared and went to 135, that we now know is the is the key number. Now, what's interesting about Buddhist people saying I'm a Buddhist Lu Myo is that they have those, for the most part, they have those categories available to them. But the state hasn't insisted that they identify with one and only one as Benedict Anderson, the famous historian in Southeast Asia, he said, You know, one of the things about the modern state in the census is that it made sure people no longer saw themselves as fractions, you know, no, no mixed identities. He said that the key of the census wasn't so much that it created new identities, but it forced white people to choose between a world that had been really fluid beforehand. Now, I see a lot of that fluidity still on the ground. And if you look at people's map on Tinder, that card that I suggested earlier that, you know, a lot of people don't even have, you'll see, especially for Muslim people, or people who seem like they come from South Asia as a scribe by the physiognomy that people that immigration officials will see in them, you will see like a huge number of fractions, you'll see a Lu Myo with written in hand scrawled on there that says, you know, Muslim, Bengali, you know, Pakistan, you know, and then maybe like Khamar or something else. And so as a result, you don't have this very aggressive regulatory apparatus that is taking an active role in people's lives. So to come back to that blunt, biopolitical point, you have, the state has basically given way to the polity to help kind of like regulate itself. And I think a lot of important ethnographic work that is emerging in this period of, of the transition, where people were actually able to go study how people live, is showing all these really interesting improvisational Ko Htu Ko Hta as Dr. McCarthy in his recent book, studies, the way people are forced to kind of support themselves. And so I don't know if I will go so far as to call this a bio politics because it doesn't. It's not quite that all encompassing and well organized, but under a blend by a political paradigm that people are not like, all left to their own devices, there are these interesting ways that people are supporting each other. But one of the challenges becomes to try to make that more political. And a lot of the like the book is arguing that the way that people have to take care of their own, sort of like bio political survival, as these population groups can then become the sort of gateway drug, if you will, into becoming more political, that almost everyone starts out in these civil society organizations from free funeral services to, you know, local education projects. Then, if we're lucky, they become radicalized and politicized at some point. And they start to make these things, turn these things into objects of politics and objects of organization that say, well, this doesn't have to be this way. So finally, to, to sum up, not sum up, but to finalize blood power politics, there's a sort of third paradigm, or sorry, third arm or a third aspect to it, which is that if you have a state that doesn't promote its populations, which doesn't really know them, it does. And also, this would imply that it's just basically not there. And one of the things that you identified a couple of minutes ago is that this isn't quite the way to describe the state either that's why emphasize some of its absence, it also can be radically present in the sense of, you know, committing genocide and a coup, some of the most sovereign acts imaginable. But I wanted to kind of think about the way that violence can become a sort of governance technique. And that emerges from a lot of the work that or research that I've been doing over the last five years since completing my dissertation and moving to Singapore. I've had a lot of more chance to work with the Rohingya community on that very tragic situation of the ethnic cleansing that occurred in 2017 and the long term attempt to erase the population from Northern Rakhine State. But one of the things that's really fascinating about this conflict. And I want to be very careful here. Not to say that until the violence occurred, Rohingya didn't exist. But I would say that I've stumbled at not stumbled upon but found a remarkable number of people who weren't aware of the ethnic Rohingya until they become became an object of mass violence in the part of the state that was trying to eliminate the ring. So there's a sort of brutal irony that the mat the very mass violence that was trying to eradicate the the mass actually gave help give the mass a noose, a new consciousness around it. And this is a sort of points to the way that violence itself can be productive of those same population groups that I was describing, as parodic Matic of a blunt assault, yeah, bio political way of regulating a population.

Host 45:54

Right. And other examples you give in the book have this kind of, for lack of a better word Hide and Seek of either either neglect or overt violence is how, in the early days of the coup, the SEC was sometimes displaying the bodies and their full glory, and sometimes hiding and disposing of them in secret. And just in general times, also the the fact that people must find a way to access goods and services from the state or by their own means, while preventing harm from the state in return, which is just insane. And and you're taught just a minute ago about how moving from being involved in some aspect of civil society into and then having that as a gateway that goes into greater political life. That actually, it's really interesting, because that echoes what, what came up in the comment in the previous podcast conversation with former US ambassador Scott Marcial, where at one point he was arguing, he was arguing in the podcast representing a view that he was bringing to Washington, in describing that some of the forms of engagement and democracy and in civil society and such they in Myanmar, they they took on a life and a character that didn't necessarily fit international development models. And so he was really arguing in in American engagement to support certain kinds of of civic engagement and civil society that did not fit democratic models of what they were used to seeing. But he was arguing this is the the shape it has to take. And if I remember correctly, I think we might have been talking specifically about post naugus And you know, noggin that was obviously a really important time. And that and I was there I saw it literally happy in front of me as a trainer at the American Center i i saw students and participants in the courses that I was leading, responding to that emergency that was happening in their civil society with no other intentionality than simply how do we get medicine or rice or whatever else has to be done. And then from there, that growing to greater agency and confidence and networking and other things. And and so but it's just interesting hearing you say that from a more academic side, which parallels so much of what Scott Marcial was describing from a diplomatic side. And just an emphasis and having this be on the radar, I think that you can also harkens back to the Coca Cola example that, you know, yes, you need to have international models that can be applied and that are useful, that are relevant. But then you also need to know damn well that there's no Coca Cola Bottling plant, Myanmar. And this is not this might Coca Cola might be ubiquitous and might be a sign of capitalism, in you know, 98% of the countries in the world. But at that time, Myanmar was not one of them. And so, you know, that's why it's so important to be able to correlate and bring those those international models into the particular reality, the peculiar reality that you find in Myanmar and understand what's manifesting. So you can so your either your policies or your studies or your engagement or whatever it is, in my case, it was training and it was education, are fitting into understanding what the context actually is, and not what the models or the academics or the policies are telling you. It should be.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 49:12

Yeah, that's brilliant. And I love that you brought up, Nargis and that sort of context because this is kind of I also worked in recovery. In August, I had a active tourist visa, I was living in Bangkok at the time, I had left Myanmar in 2005. But I still went back to visit friends and I was had a plan to go back to visit friends and they weren't letting real humanitarians in at the time and so I called up my old boss at UNDP. And I said, Could you use me and he basically said, Well, you're better than nothing. So I hopped on a plane and I spent the next month and Yangon working on early recovery programs for for UNDP and was and started to notice exactly this much discussed and observed point, which is that you know, the civil society kind of came into its own in these moments of crisis. And one of the sort of mild amendments that I make there is that I think civil society was kind of always there, we just weren't really able to see it. And so when there was a crisis like this, and this actually goes back to some of the themes we talked about the very start of the podcast is that, you know, if you are training your eyes, on the ground, you can actually see things that are probably there the whole time. And so what is really interesting about these civil society groups is the way that they are able to kind of shape shift go from being like a group that focused on funeral services, or, you know, we were a group that gets together to make music. And suddenly crisis hits him like, Well, we already have the sort of, to use a term, I don't love the social capital, you know, we have the trust network, we are able to work together. And so we can do some things that other people can't. Why don't we, you know, direct that to different ends. And I think what's really fascinating about the civil society angle is how, how much of the things that I observed and that were explicitly political had kind of emerged from the sort of the training that had come through working in non politicized contexts. So whether the sort of local organization that I tracked in the book called CDI kind of slowly incorporates young people into their projects and trains them and how to act in public to the sort of James diaper way, which I was talking about earlier, which I had assumed was some esoteric ritual designed by a monk in the forest in central Burma. And I'm a little bit of ashamed that my presumptions and I am in Mon Ywa area in Let Padaung the site of this major protest against this copper mine. And I'm asking my the activists you know, can I talk to the whoever's responsible for that and they start smiling at me and I immediately know I've stepped in it I immediately do something wrong. And they look back at our the guy who had been there the longest, the city slicker from from Yangon. He, you know, sheepishly admits that he was the one who came up with this idea, because he had worked for free funeral service before and so had kind of knowledge of these esoteric rites that other people didn't, and hence, could improvise within this sort of cosmological paradigm to design these these cursing, rituals. And so I thought, Ah, here even in these things that seems so different than kind of, you know, civil society, daily survival, you see the connection between hacktivism and, and, and I guess we could say, like, community supporting themselves,

Host 53:01

of course, the whole, you know, kind of Protestant Buddhism movement that came out in the mindfulness movement that came to Burma, there was this really awkward dichotomy that was of wanting to both in terms of the, the Western teachers that were bringing it, as well as the Burmese teachers that were, were wanting to present it as something that was was fit for the modern world, wanting to describe it as this, this this scientific, rational, logical endeavor. But, of course, there are all these things popping out of it. And even some of the early Buddhist scholars, you know, they, they, they categorized like a real distinction between the more supernatural parts, and then the traditional practice and the passion of fitting in there as well. But one of the more recent developments of the study of Burmese Buddhism is that this distinction, these these walls that these early scholars built, that were probably in line with the way that teachers are being represented, that the supernatural elements are all involved in every part of it. And I think that this is, I think that this is one of the misunderstandings that comes from outside observers looking at Myanmar is trying to build those walls, those categories, put things in different places, and not realize how it's all running together. And, you know, when you have when there's a discomfort with Buddhism, or meditation or the supernatural, you know, that the supernatural parts of this or that, it's, it might be tempting to say, Well, I'm not so interested in this. And I'm not really looking at this so much, but I'm just looking from this angle and at these things, well, that discomfort is going to come out in a jarring way in really obscuring and preventing and understanding of how this is fitting into common parlance and daily life and just integrating in many Burmese experiences with, you know, where all these things fit together. You can't take one thing out that you're uncomfortable with or that doesn't make sense, and then try to understand the other because you're always going to be playing catch up. And so it's just an insight bringing this background to what you just said. It's an insight that I'm just thinking of that, you know that you have you have this incredible interplay of the, of, of where these, this cursing practice is coming from and what this might mean in a supernatural or a Buddhist context. But then what does it mean? You know, how does that been understood? And then what does it mean? When you're putting into anti regime activity or a protest or, you know, having an agency or resistance, and where do all these things come together, and if there's not that appreciation, or comfort with, you know, where, where those supernatural beliefs are coming in and how they're being understood, then there's also not going to be a solid understanding of where they fit into something very worldly, democratic, you know, political. And so this is where I'm always hitting that on the podcast, when I talk is whether you're coming in from an angle of you know, human rights, or politics or ethnic rights, or Buddhism and meditation and spiritual endeavors, whatever it is. And that's what you care about, you can't just take one piece out of the Myanmar equation and say, you're just going to understand this because you end up with such an incomplete understanding that you know, nothing is going to make sense. Now,

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 56:05

there's a lot there that I want to pick up on. I mean, one of the things that, you know, on a basic level is even the question of like belief, it gets a little bit tricky. And is that sort of binary that I think you're also criticized critiquing? And one of the things in other words, like, you know, do you believe in in ghosts, do you believe that the cursing will actually curse them too many Hell's in their future life. And I think if we pay attention to the way that Myanmar people talk about these things, it gets even more complicated or kind of like, like breaks down that that that binary between whether you believe or not, and there's a part in the book where I'm observing people talk about their the change that type way that occurred against men online during the coup, and there's this, an online commentator put it, he said, I'm translating, I don't believe at all, in all of this, cursing this yada yada stuff relating to past lives. But if it will hurt the dictators, I will follow it believing Lee. And I love that line, because it speaks to the fact that, you know, what matters isn't really the belief, but how you act, you know, do you do in this case, he's acting as if he, he believes it is the same as as believing it, because it creates the sort of field of, of joint attention around this object. In this case, the the kirsteen have been online, whether he can be shamed, and everyone's paying attention. And I think people, like when I was observing these, these kirsteen rituals, and I was, unfortunately, it kind of like, you know, kind of trying to figure out like, well, do people actually believe this? And it took a while to kind of deconstruct my own pair and paradigms of analysis. And, you know, go to all the the main interlocutor in this book, you know, he he put it really well, he basically said, like, look, I you know, it's, it's not about really believe it or not it but it does make you feel a certain way. And that sort of returned to the way that it actually created sort of structures of feeling, as I think Raymond Williams put it is, is as important in, you know, sitting someone down and, and interrogating them about whether they actually believe and I think that speaks to the sort of efficacy of these, these rituals that and as a sort of weapon of the week, in a situation where it's hard to come right out and demand things from, from a state that, you know, it tends to ignore you and hasn't given you any rights, so to speak, when you can impact their potential future lives. No matter how much protective magic they do, there's still that sort of concern that the the temporality that they're existing in right now, or appear to be exhibiting right now of sort of secular realm domination, might not be relevant to these future lives. And so they're, you know, I heard people kind of imply that, you know, what the ritual does is it says, you can take the land, you can, you know, you can cool if you want a coup, but you can never eliminate this curse, you know, there's sort of this, this theme of haunting that exists in the, in the, in the book in which these other trajectories, these other potential ways of, of living, when exist as a sort of, as ghosts of that hot that the present. And this kind of speaks to this other theme in the book, it goes back to the title of a refusal, in which resistance as I theorize it in the book tends to kind of focalize these direct contests of sovereign power where these two entities the you know, the the activists in the state square off. But given that those kinds of contests can lead to annihilate Russian in a in a state and a military that doesn't really care about the terms of engagement when you know, it's not pistols at dawn, it's you know, we will absolutely destroy you. And as a result, you have this sort of Mesa this this mimicking of the way that the State operates as both absent and present. It's also the way that the activists have to be, you know, present, they have to pretend presents the state through those actions to try to get this absent state to, to actually materialize so that they can make their demands, but then they often have to de materialize, they have to evaporate into nothing less they get, they get destroyed. Yeah.

Host 1:00:41

And that that then connects back to the early thing we said about how a lot of outside attention is paid to the moments of appearance and of manifestation. And that's really ignoring all this stuff between the spaces and under the surface that we're highlighting here. But I also want to go to the cursing. That is You talk a lot just now about how in trying to measure and understand the the belief system of those that are enacting the curses, what can you say about the targets of those curses? To what extent did you find that we know that the military regime has long been just insanely superstitious in terms of its policies? And its and and how its conducted itself? Or to ensure its survival? To what extent do we find that they that their fear of the curses is based on a real fear of what will happen in in the afterlife or in future lives? And other realms? And to what degree? Is it more worldly in the sense of well, if these people believe it than just by them, believing it, it becomes a thing, we have to be strong and stand against it and show our power in resisting and crashing down?

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 1:01:50

Great question. I think one of the things the book doesn't do is provide a very actually any real insight into the sort of consciousness or reflection on the part of military leaders just because I didn't have that kind of access. And so it's all mediated through the people who I did spend a lot of time with them, and was asking, you know, okay, so how do you think that the military is taking this? And one of the things that's kind of funny about, you know, sort of, can the Subaltern Speak or, you know, can these rituals that seem like they're, they're coming from peasants actually penetrate the elite realms of generals is that we suspect that there is kind of a shared cosmological understanding of the, of the way that the world might work in terms of future lives and, and what will happen to people and the way that we, we know, this is by looking, not interviewing, you know, middle line and asking him what he thinks, although that would be great, but rather just kind of ADO seen, you know, kind of like taking the evidence from how they respond to these rituals. And, you know, in lepa, down when do, which I think, kind of, like, improvise this repertoire of contention that then spread to the rest of the country and was picked up during the coup, or at least that's kind of what I suggested in the book. It's hard to say that for sure, the way that the activists were then, you know, connected with by the objects of their cursing, whether they were the local head of the company, or whether they were the local commanders who are in charge with some of the more repressive actions against monks suggest that these things were resonating if you didn't care about them. You could just allow the people to do their silly ritual and then and then continue your your domination. But the activists were getting backchannel messages saying, you know, we're, we don't deserve to be cursed like this. And, you know, my, my wife is very concerned, like blaming it on the wife. And this is very shameful for us. And so this point of shame is interesting, too, because it speaks to the fact that this is a sort of public political event that that matters as much as it is a potential like cosmological one that has resonance on redounds upon your future lives. Now, this is very much like a public shaming that is particularly sophisticated and effective, because of the way that it does that shaming. So rather than using the IDIOMS OF THE secular, as we know the quote unquote secular has always shot through with this sort of what we might otherwise categorized as cosmological. You know, the suppose it West is, you know, imbued with its Christian foundations that and in Myanmar, you have a sort of Buddhist governmentality one could argue, and I think that too, while the if so the sort of messages that had just been like it's bad, you know, we have rights to this land and you shouldn't steal it. Well, the regime could say, Well, where are your rights when we when we steal the land, but when they use these other idioms, and they speak more to justice, sort of almost karmic universal justice, it becomes something that's harder to ignore. So in the sense that, you know, the micelle, gan protests, that was one of the ones I didn't study as directly in this book, but was the occupation of the habenula Park by a group of people that had their land stolen out and thing and Jonah, if I'm not mistaken, and who lived in this debates, again, this sort of protest camp for almost over a year, if I'm not mistaken, in 2014, and 15. You know, I asked them about their, their genes are that they were doing that I think they had learned from the people on lepa down, and they said, it's kind of like a trial, it's like, if we are lying, then we're going to be cursed as well. So they're, they're kind of like create public creating a sort of publicly staged ritual that, you know, in a country that had, you know, the day of Uber day, so more year, the, the rule of law that we hear so much about that, you know, is intoned by Aung San su chi. So often, I sort of ritual, I started out sort of public trial could actually adjudicate on these things. But because they didn't have any trust in those institutions, actually hearing them out, they kind of created their own, and put their own skin in the game and said, you know, this is, this is not just us, wielding the spirits against the military, and the people who stole our land, but you know, we're subject to it as well. And so it's a sort of a test of who's telling the truth and who is not. And I thought that was pretty brilliant way of creating politics out of in a situation that tends to deny people access to the institutions through which we think politics can be done. And so the, the brilliance of the, of the Chenza, is the way that it it really does call people into into action, I started into consideration that they might be being cursed. And this is where I talk about, like, how do you bring a weapon of the week out into the open? How do you if you know that yelling at someone is going to lead to harsh reprisal to the annihilation that I spoke about earlier, and were keeping it between you and your buddies in the village isn't going to do much? Either? How do you bring this sort of weapon of the week into the open and make sure it's still effective? Well, you do it by kind of tricking people into participating in it into feeling called by it. And so I call this sort of interpolation from below. interpolation, another perhaps needlessly fancy word that talks about that moment, when you feel called like when the policeman says he you and you turn around, because you think that you is you, which is a, an idea, brought forth by this guy named Athens there is tends to be what we think of as top down the policeman is a member of the state. But interpolation can happen from lots of different places. Otherwise, how would we ever have social changes, as Judith Butler, I think, really smartly points out. And so in this case, these these chains that type ways are these like subtle ways of getting people or encouraging people to see the conditions differently. It's like, you know, you think you're proceeding on a path of righteousness. And you can build that to pagodas with the money that you stolen from the people. But what if you're, you're being judged karmically in a different way, we're reminding you to maybe consider that. And so the chapter I have in the curses also shows, through Burmese political cartoons, a lot of this same sort of paradigm of, of interpolation where elites end up finding themselves called to see themselves differently, and maybe even to be different. And I think that shows one of the many different ways that activism, and protest has to happen in a place like Myanmar, were the kind of standard imaginaries of, of, you know, how protest plays out, though they can exist too. And there's a lot of the book is, you know, showing activists doing pretty brave and courageous things, you know, directly speaking truth to power, but there are also situations where that just doesn't work. And different methods are necessary, where you have to coax and cajole people who might otherwise be your enemies to start to see you as a, as a comrade. You have to coax and cajole people who are a part of this apparatus of the state to let you do your thing. And you have to maybe try to coax and cajole generals to see what they're doing in a new light.

Host 1:09:57

There's a lot there and it's also making me think of a couple of The terms you use as well as some of my own background and experience in Myanmar, I'll try to see where I can bring all these together. But it's really coming from a place of understanding, understanding two things coexisting I mean, one is the this lack of trust and state institutions, which I think really cannot be overemphasized enough for those that have grown up in countries, where however much we like to complain about them, and however much there are genuine flaws in them. If you're if you're in a place with more or less functioning state institutions, it's very hard to imagine what it's like to live in a society without them if you haven't done it's conceptually, it's very, very difficult. And I don't know how many years I had to live in Myanmar before and having frustrations that I would just complain, bothered with before I began to realize the institutional nature of, of what was happening, and then sometimes guiding other foreign or foreign friends that were there, into hearing their frustrations and putting into the context of their privilege of coming from places with functioning state institutions. But having that as one shade of understanding and another shade of understanding being the for lack of a better word, like kind of the the traditional Burmese Buddhist background, and some of the beliefs and practices that have gone into that. And, and where these come together and just to throw out some of the terms you use. And then to correlate some of some past podcast conversations I've had as well as my own experience. One term you use is the Asani, which is like a sacrificial figure and and that they're very much is a kind of correct way to sacrifice and you you put this in context, interestingly, both of in among communist communities and Buddhist communities, both of whom have can demand, you know, the right way to sacrifice the right way to be sacrificial to lead an austere life. And, and this also goes into, you know, we had one podcast guests we had on Philip Anna wit, talked at length about the culture of sacrifice that he was seeing in the end ug, and how he was noticed, he was he was commenting that the degree of sacrifice that one had, he noted that the degree of sacrifice that one had almost became a currency for the leadership and appointments they would have going forward. And certainly, you know, in my experience of seeing of Burmese friends and reading, history of different great monks and meditation teachers, that and just Burmese history in general, that there there is this sense that that I've seen repeated time and again, that when facing a difficult situation, whether it's societal community or individual, that falling back on, you know, a vow of truth of, of something that you can, which I actually find it in a personal and spiritual sense, I find it incredibly inspiring what what a vow of truth can be and the way I've seen it play out is that, you know, you you look at what in your life has been noble that you can claim as absolute truth, the greater nobility you can righteously claim, the more protection you're gonna have. But even if it's something I mean, when I found so inspiring, for my time around Burmese Buddhists is that this vow of truth can be the things that, you know, we wouldn't even think of, or I wouldn't even think of as wanting to claim as something like, you know, yesterday, I did not kill any mosquitoes, or this week, I have not told a lie or whatever you can clean to whatever you can say, or I have given, you know, $5 at a donation ceremony, and I did this with a pure heart. And if if these valid truths can can be stated and that there's not a shade of a variance of what you're valuing that truth for this can then be built upon another term, which is the emir, you know, the land of victory, which land land of victory can be anything from wanting to do well on a test or get a job promotion to you know, wanting to win a victory against conquering an enemy. And so it's this kind of resting back and falling back on this on on the sense of sacrifice. Sometimes the conversation with Filipina with developed, sometimes recognizing that the sacrifices being made were actually not very effective or appropriate for the goal that wanted to be achieved, but it was simply a mindset that I have to sacrifice I have to show I have to be a figure of sacrifice and sacrifice the right way and falling back on nobility taking a vow of truth of you know, what kind of sacrifice or nobility one can can righteously cling to and having it and having the land of victory where this is then claimed. And and then the final term to throw into this cocktail that you bring up is a PR the charisma and attracting the followers the having which is everything from having a clean and sweet smelling body to you know to, to to just which you know, in a Burmese Buddhist context to me just brings up so much of karma I mean all of this is is understood in karma and conversations I've had that you know how how charismatic you are and how and everything from body odors to intelligence to you know what, what doors open to you. I know this is a hodgepodge of things that no Throwing, I think where I'm trying to go with bringing this all together is this is is coming back to this lack of institutions that you can trust. So if you can't trust these institutions, what can you trust you can vow of truth. And the most powerful thing about a vow of truth in the way I've seen it enacted is that there's there's kind of nothing greater in this world and a vow of truth in an action which you, you, you you claim with, with it with a sense of power and righteousness that, you know, is true that no one can take away from you, which then gives, which then creates kind of a hyper morality protection that allows you to be successful in your endeavors going forward. And and so, you know, this is it's not I think it's not the sense that these characteristics have have manifested based on a lack of institutions, because I think they pre predate when these institutions came about. But I think that with given a an absence of good institutions that one can fall back on, which again, just cannot be cannot be emphasized enough for people that are coming from that background, when you don't have that in any sense to fall back on. And you're looking for something else? Well, this is the natural thing to draw upon, is this, this natural historic background of Burmese Buddhist thinking, that, that has historical precedents that has spiritual precedents of great monks and the stories and the tribulations that they go through, you know, just to give one example, because I think this fits a lot of different modes is that the the, of what what we're speaking to is the great les meditation teachers say I do but Ken, who was the teacher of Sn Glencoe who started this, this, this, this whole movement, that there's a story early in Uber kid's life, that he had an eye infection, and it was so serious that he couldn't, for six months, he couldn't even go outside, he was a minute government minister, and who knew and he couldn't even go outside because the eye infection was so serious. And he was also a healer, he practiced, he leaned on himself and on others, and he, he ended up eating, and I think something like a simple bowl of rice with with beans and lentils, that was salted, just like one bowl every day and taking a vow of truth and meditating, of course, and through this, this kind of vow of truth that he made, and through his own, probably his, you know, his own supernatural abilities of being a meditation master, he was able to cure himself. And when I heard the story, and I was working on a book that was what was associated with power Yachty, which is the the publishing house that's connected to Glencoe, they were very concerned about the story, because the story really contradicted the way that meditation was being presented through their organizational teachings, which was that it's not to cure everyday ailments, it's not magical. It's not, you know, this whole other thing, that it's this, this logical, mind body kind of relation. So what what in the world, you know, our teachers teacher, you know, seemingly miraculously cured himself of an eye infection, where in the world does this fit into the paradigm of meditation that we're presenting, and I showed them the original source, and then I talked through the context that this wasn't, you know, this was completely within the context of everything I understood about Burmese monks and kings and rulers and, you know, what, what that context was of facing a hard time and being austere, and, you know, taking these vows and the place of victory and these other things, and, you know, with that they, to their credit, they allowed it to, to remain in and be published with that background, but it just, it highlighted that story to me both highlights, the misunderstanding of, of outside communities and the way things are presented to them. And then integrating, integrating with what's happening in a local context, as well as what that local context actually is and how that's actually manifesting and coming about so no,

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 1:18:50

I've, I've a lot a lot to say about that. I think it's really insightful. Maybe maybe three things if I can remember them after I started. The first one is that the first point is just when you're not in an on, there's no like unmarked third person, you know, general subject who can present him or herself as like, you know, I have these rights because I'm a citizen of Myanmar. Right. And I think this speaks to the fact that the body becomes so important as the thing that can justify the the incursion into the public sphere, and people will, you know, rather than pointing outside of the context to their standing as Myanmar citizens, though, they'll invert that and point to themselves and sometimes literally, point to their, the scars on their bodies, not the metaphorical ones. But you know, though, they'll say, you see this here, you know, I had one guy take his teeth out, at one point to reveal a bunch of missing teeth. And, you know, he spoke about how this was given to him in prison, and he actually attributed it to to that way I think, and, you know, go to all the the main the main interlocutor and protagonist In the book, you know, was continually talking about these liver ailments that he had and these ongoing health problems that he attributed to his many years in Diodati prison. And so these people could point to those bodies, their own bodies is the thing that that, essentially, maybe not legitimate, because that's kind of like a word I tend to avoid, but at least they helped ground or justify what they're doing. And I think that points to all those, I guess more imminent, rather than than transcendent paradigms that you're speaking about, when you talk about the Asani and Ami, like you know, you, it has to kind of emerge from, from within. But the azione is really fascinating to in that sense it because people in, as I show in the book are constantly fighting over what is the actual, a correct as on a path, when is the culture of sacrifice truly sacrificial, and for the people, and when is it actually just for your own glory. And one of the, you know, even this activist group were one of the main leaders have kept going to present one of the purse, the members of the group, do rain, who didn't go to a prison as much, but was very, I would almost say contemptuous of the leader who kept going to prison, because he felt like this was not the appropriate sacrificial path. This was bringing him glory of, you know, being able to say he was kept going to prison, rather than doing what you need to do for the community. And so there's this sort of irony, in which the thing that seems from the outside is very courageous was actually seen by drain as a sort of almost cowardly act, the one that absorb like, you know, that shirks your responsibility, which is one of these themes that comes up a lot in the book or, you know, the activist constantly using this word doubt, one of responsibility or duty, like who will take the responsibility, or I will take the responsibility for this. And so the Azaan a path and the to sacrifice becomes an object of anxiety and intention and contestation, rather than just one that you can easily invoke. And so that complicates the terrain even further, and I think makes things much more interesting. Because it, it really politicizes things, otherwise, people could just be constantly, you know, claiming their Aczone, constantly claiming that they're the true true sacrifice, sacrificial, whatever the word would be. And instead, you know, people were bringing activists, we're bringing it back to the politics saying, Well, what is actually helping our cause? You know, is this the time for us to get arrested? What are the you know, the pros and cons of making this choice right now? Can Is this a time where there are no other options, then going back to prison? Or is this? Is it better to organize in in the community?

Host 1:23:02

Yeah, so we've been talking about some of the characteristics of the state and the way that plays out. And we've been kind of talking around the response to that, and the potentialities of responses that have been studied, it's really one of the core features of your book. And so I think, let's get into that directly. And the best way to get to that is to different is to bring out the differentiation between the terms of resistance and refusal, you know, the former or tactics and the ladder of strategy. So can you contrast, first the definition of these two terms, and then contrast what these two terms mean, in a real practical context of confronting state power in Myanmar? Sure.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 1:23:44

So I think, the turn to refusal, as has occurred in the literature, and I spent a lot of time reading these people who are bringing up refusal, who were highlighting the fact that, you know, resistance had kind of become become dead. And I, I was wondering why this was, and I think what I came up with as a sort of read theorisation of resistance and refusal a little bit, and the sense that resistance tends to be this like, head on confrontation with, with power, where there's a sort of mutual co constitution of those entities that are facing off with each other, the sort of resistor and the thing that's been resisted, kind of like come together in this in this contest. But that can be very dangerous for the reasons that I've described as with a state that doesn't mind annihilating you. But I also wanted to highlight that it's also difficult in the context of a state that also doesn't always appear there. So not only is this a state that can annihilate you, but sometimes this is a state that isn't there. And one of the things that comes up but not in the book are these moments when people are trying to mobilize against the state and find that it's just absent. And as a result, they are it's nothing is perhaps more depressing, or there probably are things but it is quite depressing when you finally get the courage to act. And you hold your your protest, and it doesn't signify, right you send in the you get together all your data and you send in the letter to the to the state that says, you know, our land was stolen, please give it back. And you don't even get a response that says, Yeah, we don't care, then the lack of care is so immense that in complete that it doesn't even warrant a response. And so a lot of a lot of what I'm kind of characterizing as refusal are those, the sort of paradigm in which that direct contestation isn't foregrounded, but rather, the sort of concern about promoting and organizing the bio political the population groups life ends up becoming central both so that they can ultimately forge acts of resistance that will signify that we'll get a response. And also so that they're just able to continue to see or not, or maybe even suddenly see their lives as, as political. And this goes back to that, that earlier point about, you know, outside of the rights paradigm, everyone is a member of a population group. And one of the things that I actually found to be interesting about Myanmar is that it takes a heck of a lot of work to even construct yourself as a population group. So we would assume that if you don't fall into a liberal rights variant subject and you're a part of this, you know, you're a farmer, or you're a student, or you're a member of an ethnic group, or, or many of these things at the same time. But what I found is that a lot of these groups of farmers, for instance, who were writing letters to try to get their land back, were failing to kind of constitute themselves as population groups who could be listened to. So there's this sort of realm that falls outside of the population group, the sort of mass of, of humanity here in Myanmar, that takes a lot of organizing, to get them to be able to make their claims on in this case, the state and get the state to consider giving redress. So a lot of the time spent during the fieldwork period was sitting with farmers and going through their documents. This is the activists and getting the chronology straight and rewriting their letters that they would send to the officials and making sure the right people were copied, and making sure that they wrote them to index or to point to the fact that the activists were looking out for them, so they couldn't be so simply ignored. And so all this work that gets put into constituting the resisting subject is kind of what I described as under the paradigm of a refusal, all this extra stuff that might get missed, as we've been talking about throughout the podcast today, if you only focus on those moments that they seem to pop up out of nowhere. I think a lot of times, you know, the, the weapons of the weak paradigm tends to presume that the there's the public transcript that is spoken out loud and tends to be very adjacent, and underneath the surface. And I hope this isn't too patricide, all of my mentor, and, you know, dissertation committee member, James C. Scott, who wrote about the the public transcript and the hidden transcript, that he describes the hidden transcript as being pretty legible, everyone kind of understands the conditions of their exploitation. And so when the political opportunity changes, then they're ready to snap into action. And he calls us in for politics and talks about how these things, sometimes it is like wildfire when people who have been repressed than an emerge. And I don't think that's untrue, to describe some empirical situations, but in Myanmar, at least, it seemed like it took a lot more work to get people to understand their conditions as potentially political and actionable. And that, I think, is why I use this sort of refusal paradigm because resistance seemed to presume a little bit too much about the resisting subject. And about that as which is being resisted against this. In this case, we might call it the state with a you know, with in air quotes, because the state is always much more complex than than than just that

Host 1:29:42

term. One question of how this dynamic of how are how are you gearing up a population to fight back when they're just barely trying to survive with the level of poverty and other challenges that they're facing is one and then another kind of weird, contradictory dynamic If that you're bringing up is, is the sense of how do you a state that ignores you, except when they're punishing you? How do you how do you somehow, you know, try to awaken the bear to manifest so that so that that you then can resist or repel it? And it's it's these contradictory things that I think it's it's a simplified view that has come on past conflicts and Myanmar impasse Touchstone points don't really recognize the complexity that that has been dealt with. And on top of that, I'm wondering, in your study, I think that we we definitely hold the sense of the military as being this big, bad oppressor that rightly so given its its conduct, but where does the transition years fit into this, and I know that the, what's often been argued that the the NLD never really had proper power that they, they always they, they, they couldn't do everything they wanted, they were also playing games to try to make sure what actually happened would not happen. And so that might be some of the things they were doing or not doing or sometimes attributed to the larger games they were trying to play. But in looking at how we know as the military is this, the regime in its present incarnation as well as previous decades as the kind of terror and horrible things and atrocities that they did, where this is definitely an oppressor that you have to look at how and where and how you resist and where and how you refuse. But then when the NLD comes in, how does that dynamic change in those policies that are that are coming out? And I'll just throw one thing out before I ask the question, because it just came to mind. We had one podcast guest we had on earlier was Bobo who was a member of generation wave. And when I asked him this question, I love his answer. And I mean, I'm always quoting the wisdom of my guests to try to get these points. And I'm very privileged to have all these conversations. But I remember I love his answer. His answer was like, activist who would activist to and governments do what governments do. So like, even though the NLD was, was a better actor, in many ways than the previous military, he made clear that like, activists continue to do what activists do, and governments continue to do what governments do. And that's the way we continue relating, and it wasn't quite so life threatening or dire. But like, hey, that dynamic was was there in the blood, and that it continued for what it was. And so I'm wondering, also, what you found, when you looked at tactics and relationships as the governing body changed? Yeah,

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 1:32:35

a lot there. I mean, I can even start by saying that what you kind of point to is the fact that the state in an air quotes is a tricky kind of entity to refer to, in that sense, because I think Myanmar people tend to view many different levels of, of the state and activists are able to operate because they understand that too. So when they're interacting with a frontline, you know, police officer or local clerk, they don't see that in the same way as they would a general which of course, sounds kind of kind of obvious, but in the sort of barbarian sense of, of the state as the sort of entity that operates to, you know, you know, homogenously control space within a delimited territory. It it deserves pointing out that when they encounter that state agent, everything is in play, like that person's state pneus is can be very easily displaced. And that actually is what allows these protests to exist in the first place, they will, you know, intimidate and threaten the local police officer who comes and says, you know, you can't be doing this, they'll say things like, you know, I've gotten, I've spent more time in prison than you've been alive, they're things that have been done to me that, you know, everything that you can imagine has been done to me. So there's nothing that that you can do to threaten me. And even when I retell those kinds of stories, the hair bristles on the back of my neck because of the sort of the charged atmosphere that they're able to construct by referencing the history of their own sacrifices to go back to the earlier point. And as a result, it's not like they immediately turn that local official into a committed revolutionary but what the what usually is an act it is, is a sort of willingness for that official to maybe call his usually his his superiors, or to at least, allow the action to go on for a little a little while before intervening. And that gives the activist the space to create this sort of what I would call schematically in the book, these horizontal actions, or actions with horizontal effects were actions against the state would be vertical ones kind of up to the state using these spatial metaphors that I know as an anthropologist I'm supposed to a stew. But I'm relying on it because I think it helps people visualize these horizontal actions kind of help communicate with people who are like, Oh, this is interesting. We don't see this every day. This is definitely different than what I'm used to, maybe I should pay attention and see what the message is. So then the state is always a little bit disaggregated, as it seemed, through the actions of activists and normal people, and as you rightly say, it then changes significantly with the transition. I remember coming back to Yangon in 2016, after the election, because I had gone back to, to New York, to write up my dissertation, I kind of expected the activists who I worked with to be really excited about this new era that was dawning and they were more depressed than I had ever seen them, you know, they had talked about calling up the their contacts at the NLD and said, okay, like, what do we do? How do we how do we go to work, organize, reorganize the society that had that is so out of out of whack, and that the transition years? Were also, I think, and this is something I haven't mentioned yet, and I really don't want to neglect it is the way the political economy was changing during these years, not immediately after 2011. I think it started probably in 1990, after the Slark replaced the bspp. But you had this sort of new liberalisation of of the, of the political economy that made daily life a lot more precarious for people. And so you have these, this vertiginous feeling in which wealth was accumulating, and there were signs of it in a place like Yangon with glittery and shopping malls and, and new cars, but people were having their lands grab lands grabbed my hands grabbed and not getting their land back and finding it harder to reproduce themselves at a at a daily level, the landless, were much worse off. And migration was becoming even more intensive and exploitative, as people found themselves like, pushed out to these natural resource extraction zones that used up the land and used up their own bodies before they had to go on to the next ones. And so there was this ambiguity, and feelings of ambivalence that occurred in the transition in which the activists felt like they had a lot to offer, because they had been organizing in these local communities for a long time. And they said, Okay, so what do we do to make sure that this transition is just for all, and they received message back, you know, quote from from the lady herself, but you know, who knows if it actually came from her, but basically saying, like, you know, you guys played your part, you did your thing. You Your role is silent. Now, you know, and as, as she wants famously put it, when she was asked why the NLD was running candidates, who are, you know, from Yangon, in constituencies Far, far away, she told the complaining public, you know, your role is to vote for the flag. And we will take responsibility for actually governing, which I think speaks to her imperious and authoritarian understanding of what democracy is, it's very not, 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, you know, benighted and not quite smart enough to look out for, for themselves. And this was anathema to the activists. And so after going through a period of time, where they, they wanted to give the NLD a chance to make better decisions when it came to engaging the grassroots both at the level of policy, but also at the level of, you know, taking advantage of this really strong muscle that had been built over the years to, for people to look after themselves and the activist work that had been done. They eventually said, to kind of go back to Bobo, you know, activists are going to do what they do. And so they proceeded to do all the things they did by trying to hold the NLD to account for the version of itself that they, they thought it could be. Now this did kind of like change the way that they, you know, refused or resisted or whatever term we want to use a little bit because it, it tended to be they wanted to give the NLD a chance, and they're there, I think they were probably less radical at that period than they certainly are being right now. But at the same time, they were, you know, able to focus on the things that they they knew were, you know, the challenges that weren't being addressed. And so this is land grabs, this is daily life in the peri urban zones, and this is, you know, industrial actions and strikes that occurred in the, in the factories that in which people were being treated really, really poorly. And like, I think, good to go to your broader point about whether the transition was cursed from the start because of this die archaic relationship, this sort of split relationship between the military and the, the NLD trying to govern and no one really having having trouble what I actually one of the things I was most struck by And the coup was how this dire key had actually seemed to kind of meld into a singular kind of elite rule and, and a sort of what I call it an in an article with, with pure and lat, who's a historian who's based in Yangon. Now, I sort of consolidation of a certain kind of class consciousness on the part of sort of bourgeois elites, whether they be of the, of the military, the red or the green. And I think what was most striking about the coup is the way that the military was willing to, to undermine that relationship, for other goals that I think are still kind of inscrutable, and could boil down to, you know, if activists are going to activist and governments are going to govern, or maybe military men are going to military. And there there's a sort of libidinal desire to, for the contest, and for the, for a war that can't be underestimated. And I think, of course, complicates rational, or sort of kind of classically rational analyses of why the coup occurred.

Host 1:41:07

Right. So from here, I'd like to go to a point that you brought up in the very start of the conversation, we didn't go there right away, partly because there were other directions, and partly because I thought it was rich to explore some of these things first, and have the context for then going into what is such a rich and important topic. And that is how so much of your book is looking at linguistic differences and how they're playing a role in cultural conceptions of political and civil understandings. And perhaps there's no more important word to begin with, than the English word rights. And you did go into this at the beginning, you you broke this down and talked about the different translations and where responsibility comes in the, the kind of vagueness and nuance of, of of what things could mean. But I think it's important to revisit this and spend and invest a bit more time given the context that we've now covered leading up to this, if you can remind us and go into some detail of the various ways that the English word rights can be relayed in Burmese, according to different contexts, different meanings, different connotations, and those different interpretations that they carry.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 1:42:13

Sure, thank you for that opportunity. I think that also will preface this by talking a little bit about my own linguistic acumen or rather lack thereof. And perhaps this is just on my mind, because I was in chaos, the last couple of days, conducting fieldwork in Burmese, a huge number of Burmese people, Burmese speakers in in Malaysia by by the way, which I hadn't expected until I until I moved here. And this is for a second project on on Rohingya lives in the sort of diaspora as they've been forced out of Myanmar. But I've been I was lamenting the way my own Burmese has has slipped. But I also don't want to overstate the my linguistic abilities. And I think the way that I was taught inadequate as a Burmese speaker, actually, kind of felicitously brought up some kind of interesting cross linguistic insights, because I often had people toggling for my benefit between Burmese and their understanding and their version of English. And I was able to hear some of these weird ways that English words were used that made me think, oh, maybe this word that I think has a stable content is actually being used in quite different ways. So to give an example, one day gotoh said to me, oh, tonight, I just checked tonight, we'll have the you will have the right to meet with song. And I was very confused, because so on a lovely person, but not a particularly like eminent one, whose schedule is very, is one would need a right to actually visit him. And so I think what I realized in that moment, and then he goes on, I talked about it for a long time afterwards is that his brain kind of like was thinking in Burmese, if you will, and had kind of thought about equate EA this term that can mean rights or opportunities. And so then he translated it into English and it came out as rights even though in my mind, opportunity would have been more appropriate. And I I think like those are the kind of my ears were perked. perked my ears were, you know, kind of attuned to those linguistic uses. And I tried to kind of construct what we call a corpus of, of, sort of language and use that showed all the not all but many of the different ways in some of these terms can be used, and then try to derive some conclusions from them. And so to go back to, to the kind of overarching point, one of the things I found was that the word, the phrase acquaint AE which uses that root quit, which can mean as much as an entitlement and as little as like a permission or a chance tends to translate into this term that I kind of Describe his rights slash opportunities, you know, because it's difficult to really call them one or the other. And depending on who uses them, they will they will shift along that maybe spectrum we could say. So I remember talking to Ivan paion, the son of the surge pawn who owns much of Yangon and link Taya and him telling me, you know, there's no problem with rule of law. There's no problem with REITs and in Myanmar, and I remember thinking in reflection later, well, yeah, from his class position, he must see things that way. And I think things can solidify into something that approximates what we might call a right when you're constantly experiencing things as a right. And this is where I use what I call in the book, the semiotic anthropological paradigm, which I think is an in a sense, like, it sounds more intimidating than it needs to it just means that where we sometimes tend to think of things descriptive, like we describe a situation as you know, the losses this are the losses that a semiotic paradigm, or maybe just an anthropological one, will pay attention to what actually happens and, and looks at the way that the outcomes of different interactions in the world, then sediment through repeated interactions and experiences into a sort of worldview. So Ivan Pong was experiencing his world as being one with pretty stable expectations that the things that could happen to him, that kind of like almost becomes a right. But when you get something now, but the next time you don't get it, and the third time, you don't get it in the fourth, then to describe something as a right seems to almost fall apart in terms of your experiential understanding of something. And what are the things I put in? As I put it in the book? How many times does a rule have to be broken before it breaks forever? That fourth time, the fifth time? Can you continue to be told you have rights but not actually experienced them? Can you still believe in writes as a sort of transcendent pair of paradigm that operates outside of the context of use, and I argue that a Myanmar you don't, and I spent a time in chapter five, I believe the book kind of showing this long history of experience with power and in Myanmar and show how, even though terms like equate EA, are used and translated, sometimes in important documents, whether they are constitutions or landlords as rights in English, and vice versa, people will hear that term and reflect upon their their own lives and say, well, this seems a lot more like opportunity than it does, as a right, what are those sorts of 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. And so in the book, I look at all these different contexts and, and examples, hopefully, less interviews and more kind of engagements between Burmese people themselves as they talk these things out. And there's a particularly brutal example, late in the book where different Myanmar, Muslim, and Rohingya people are talking about fighting against the 1982 citizenship law. And one of the characters is talking about fighting for rights. And another character says, you know, why you talk, we're the most exploited and marginalized minority in the country, we can't go out here and demand things like right, we are the beggar in the corner. If a beggar demands rights, they're more likely to get kicked than to get any food. I'm paraphrasing, right now, we need to be a little bit more reasonable about what we can expect. And so gosh, this is like, quite effective for me. You can see how it cuts both ways. And what I mean by that is that by evoking rites that you don't yet have you can perform them into existence. And that's one of the really amazing things about rights claims. And I think one of the reasons why, you know, theorists like Judith Butler and chakra NCAA highlight the ability of these paradigms to be appropriated by people to whom they don't yet belong, and used and say, like, look we belong to, we can claim these things the same way that that you that you were able to, why are we excluded? But at the same time, as this anecdote highlights, there's a risk in claiming things which you don't yet have. There's a risk in, in claiming a right and then exposing yourself to the failure of that right. Just reinforces the position that you perhaps haven't performed your way out. don't have yet. And it also risks the reactionary violence as you know, people are seen as claiming rights they don't have. And this was something that came up again and again in my time asking about the UN, and looking at discourse on the Rohingya conflict. And of course, there's a huge amount of just plain old fashioned racism on the part of Myanmar people towards Muslim individuals, and we're hanging in particular, but it was very interesting how often it was couched in the terms of taking a query that they didn't deserve. So rather than seeing this as a conflict in which these are people who are being slaughtered, and these are people who are 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 jumping in line is Miss Momo fountain cartoon had it, in which there are all these other problems in the country. And the Rohingya were kind of dem sorry, focalize in their own and risking the sort of up ending the transition as a as a result, I was lucky enough to work with people who were aggressively anti racist and worked with Muslim communities in Mandalay and Yangon, you know, in the sort of ad hoc, that then became more institutionalized protection schemes that emerged when rumors would circulate. And they would go out onto the streets and say, Hey, everyone, this think about who benefits from this kind of violence? And think about your your neighbors, your Muslim neighbors? Do you think they actually did this? Or is this the black hand behind the scenes operating? But even they had a sort of contempt, or at least a sort of suspicion about Rohingya? Because they said, Well, where are the Rohingya in the streets? Where are they working with us? Where are they working for the broader people, they're only working for themselves. And of course, that was a huge blind spot, because the Ranga were excluded from from participating and then being blamed for their own exclusion, essentially. But it does kind of speak to the fact that alternative idioms that are then rights can be used, but only if you're able, you're given the opportunity to use them. And the Ranga were stuck in this really tough situation in which they were so far outside of have sort of seen so far outside of Burmese kind of cultural life and experience, they weren't really able to develop those bonds of solidarity. And there's so many reasons for that, that, hopefully, I'll, I'll get into in another book. And so to loop back to make one final point about the linguistic stuff that I think bears a little bit of emphasis is that there have been many critiques of rights that have existed in, in critical literature. And I, when I describe this book as a critique of rights, I can almost feel like my interlocutor is rolling their eyes, like, oh, we need another one of those. But what I think two things that I tried to really focus on here that I think makes us a little bit more interesting than a classic like, this isn't the appropriate paradigm for a post colonial population. And the first is the sort of linguistic analysis in which I was by attending closely to how people talked about things like a queen year, and how the sort of grammar and syntax that they used, I was able to compare that with the grammar and the syntax of the way that people maybe, you know, said advisedly, the West talk about rights. And one of the things I, I found quite striking is how often people in the West will describe their rights as possessions, and not just as possessions but as inalienable possessions or possessions that they have, even when their rights are, are being denied to them and things. Think no further than the Beastie Boys talking about, you have to fight for your right to party. I think I slipped into a footnote in the book. And this is this is something that's been identified in the literature. It's called the possession paradox. How can you possess something that you don't have, but I don't think people take the weirdness of this seriously enough. And I think what the comparative method can do, is thrown to relieve house, something we take for granted, fighting for your rights that you don't have at this moment is so strange when you look at Burmese grammar and syntax, where they don't talk about rights that way, right, so much more alienable possessions, they're not like arms and mothers that when you lose them, you still talk about them as if they're yours. So if my mother dies, she's still my mother. My mother's doing very well and quite wonderful person. My, my arm is mine, even after it gets severed in a car accident because it's so important to my very being as a as a as a person. Now, my rights are so important to me as a political person and in America that I would describe, you know, my rights being denied. Now Burmese people and of course there's exceptions and it's This is not unequivocal. But I find alternative ways of describing rights or acquaint you in in Burmese rights can be stolen there are, they can be carried off that you can get more rights than someone else rather than everyone having an equal number of rights and equal amount of rights and just having the access to those rights denied. And as a result, the I think, because Burmese people also don't talk about them as inalienable as connected to their person. They also don't vocalize them as much. And so this is a another kind of intervention, which is to remind people that describing the political world is organized through this particular political technology of rights. It's not necessarily how people use them. And I think we can gain a lot by looking at alternative ways that, that they use these these phrases.

Host 1:55:56

Yeah, so there's a lot there and things I was going to pick up on, certainly that story with the Muslims, and when that you quote, where they seem to have a choice between when they're looking at how they can, how they can gain more protection or integrate more into society, that they have this choice between either demanding rights or drawing pity and that this dynamic and in looking at how they should proceed that it seems that trying to claim their rights or or voice out their rights is more threatening than, than trying to draw pity so that they're not harmed. And but then you go into describing some of the circumstances around that, you know, the right to claim you have a right to claim and not a right to have, that this sense of, of cutting in line that there's, there's a there's a cartoon that that you you feature in the book about different groups that are that are cutting in line to get what's theirs from the state, from those that maybe have more of a have, they feel they have more of a right to those services. But you know, the phrase that really stood out to me in the book, and that you just talked about now as well, is that you talk about how rights are not considered an alien, inalienable in Myanmar. And that really struck me It struck me I'm having almost like a mental block, like when I read it, and when you're talking now, it's like no matter how many times I hear this point, I can't quite there's something in my mind that's not grasping it. And I think the reason why is that I'm so used to the collocation of an English of an alien inalienable rights. That's just something we always say together inalienable rights, that if you you bring up the thought experiment, that rights might be alienable I don't even know what alienable means. Because, you know, I'm so used to this understanding of inalienable rights. It's almost like if someone were to ask me, what's the, the opposite of disheveled? You know, I kind of shuffle resistance, you know, it's not shuffle over like, I don't know. So like, you know, I never even really knew le Annabelle was a word because it just it was like an illegal rights. That's the way I think about it. And so it's, you know, it's just, and we talk about coming from stable societies and trying to understand different different functions and ways that states operate away from our own. And certainly, you know, that the lack of a trust in state institutions is something that I never could have understood. Conceptually, and, and even not being as impacted as a member of that society. And all the years, it took me to really understand what the product and consequence was of, of state institutions that weren't functioning the way that I had always assumed they basically should. Same thing with this, you know, it's it's conceptually very hard for me to understand how how a right cannot be ineligible. This is just something I'm growing up thinking and but one of the things that one of the frameworks that you present, which is not nude yearbook, and has been referenced in terms of Myanmar, and it's such an insightful and yet tragic understanding to come to, is this, this conception that rights in Myanmar can be seen as finite. And I think that's something that we can grasp, conceptually, even if we don't have lived through it. I mean, that's very different from the sense that there is there's only so much to go around. There's only so much of this commodity. That's a very new thought. It's a thought I understand, unlike an illegal rights, which I still are alienable rights, which I still don't really understand, I don't I can't really wrap my mind around how that actually feels and how that looks. I can understand as tragically as it is that there's this sense that there are that rather than rights being this natural phenomenon that exists that we all should have access to and should honor and should ensure that the people unlike us have the same privileges and access and rights that we do. Taking that understanding and changing it instead to there's there's a finite number of of how one can be safe and protected from the state and have rights and privileges within that state that there's there's only so much to go around. It's not very much And it needs to be cleaned aggressively and with shrewdness and with different strategies and, you know, kind of kind of these clever different approaches that can, that can swipe in and take something before the other person does. And okay, this might not be the best way, but this is the system we're all playing. So you don't play, you lose. But, but there's this, this, this, this finite group there, and that, you know, that, that someone else is going to get it if you don't, and, and that, and so that's where the cutting in line analogy comes that if you're waiting in line for this finite resource, which happens to be rights, and, you know, by whatever feature international media attention, or, or, or, or some, some highlight on some minority group that they're going to swoop in and take something which you have been waiting patiently for. And this is just, I mean, this is such a foreign way of understanding for me, and maybe for some listening that there, there is the sense that there is a finite number of rights to go around. And because it's finite, you'd better get what's yours. And you'd better make sure that your family, your community, your group gets what's yours before others. And, you know, this is important as it is to understand this, I guess the question comes, what do you what do you do with this? Can you? Can you hope to change it? Or how do you work within it? Or or, you know, maybe you don't come with a predominant view of one's view of rights being, you know, being something you're trying to convert to? But I don't know, is it something you try to convert people to? If it's a, if it's, if you see it as a greater good in the world? I don't know how you, you know, I think first is just understanding the truth that it is subjectively it is seen as a finite thing and not denying that or battling against that. But then once you see that, for what it is, where do you go from there? You know, how do you because if it's a zero sum game, it's never gonna end up? Good. So, you know, and if activists are also bringing this understanding, you know, where do you where do you go and trying to create a more equitable society, it's hard to wrap your mind around. Yeah,

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 2:02:03

I mean, you've kind of outlined like, the sort of what is at stake in this, and I think that the finite rights that you describe, I think, can sometimes be well conveyed through an A concept that comes from economics, oddly enough, economics can be helpful sometimes. And that's the idea of a public good and a public good described technically, is something that's non rival, right. So like my use of it doesn't impede your use of it. And non excludable, like that extra person accessing it doesn't, doesn't matter, it's very difficult to exclude someone. So think about something like national defense, the extra person who is defended by the military, who's keeping the bad guys out, if we can accept that thought experiment, doesn't really affect the ability to keep the bad guys out. And no one can be excluded from it, I, you know, I can't decide to have the, you know, gun not shoot this person, or like, air, air is a nice public good, right, everyone can use it, no one can be excluded from it, and the extra person using it doesn't affect it. And so we kind of imagine, right, in that sense, is that everyone enters the set of citizens who enjoy the rights that are there as as you know, part of being citizens, and then the extra person who enters into the system doesn't affect anyone else's, and no one can be excluded from it. Now, we kind of know that that hasn't been the history. And as you describe all historically, marginalized populations have been increasingly incorporated into this paradigm, at least at the level of disarray, or maybe symbolic recognition as being folks who can be brought into the fold. And that the question is, what do we gain by perceiving a system that operates otherwise, in terms of finite resource resources, and finite rights, where people see the extra person entering the system is threatening the ability for me to realize it, and wants to devise ways to exclude an extra person from actually using these things? Now? I'll start by saying that I wonder how different that alternative dystopian system actually is to the you know, you've used the phrase stable societies that in the west and I think like one of the things that makes the one of the objectives of the book is to try to show this thing that seems quite different than our conventional wisdom at the situation and hearing in Myanmar, and then use that to throw to make strange the system that the conventional wisdom itself back in those supposedly stable societies and I wonder how stable they are. And I think there's a sort of disjoint juncture between the the rhetoric and the discourse and the symbolic realm and the disarray realm, all these things that describe the way things are supposed to be, and then how things play out on the ground. And so I wonder, um, Is Myanmar or Myanmar in the United States, for instance, more like than they would seem our rights more like opportunities in America than we would want to acknowledge. And so and this goes back to the political economy point as well. So as you have, you know, more and more people being incorporated at the level of like the symbolic level or the judiciary level, yes, more rights for, for historically marginalized groups, you that's a sort of incorporated aspect, the same time this machine is, as it's incorporating more and more people, it's also spewing others out, it's injecting others from the realm of those who can actually realize those those rights. And I argue in the conclusion that this kind of generates a particular ly weird kind of, of onwy, or frustration in which we have been kind of habituated into using this particular way of describing our relationships with with power, you know, through this technology of rights. And as you describe it, it's hard to think outside of the paradigm of inalienable rights. But then if we look at the way that our our lives sometimes play out, and we can, you know, compare those lives with people who have more class or racial privilege or gender privilege or sexual privilege than then the rest, then we can ask, Am I realizing these entitlements have my accessing these resources because of rights or because, you know, as an unmarked citizen, the same way someone else's, or these mean merely special club goods? To go back to the public good speak, you know, it's special things that I get to access because I'm a member of this special club within the club, you know, the, I'm, in my case, a sis white man have a high class status, when I am able to walk into a public building, or am I and I'm able to get the state to do the things it's supposed to do when I encounter it at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the, you know, the customs department when I come back in the country? Am I accessing those things? Because I'm just a citizen, just like any other one, or am I benefiting from privilege? And I think it's an interesting mix of those things. And so then the question becomes, what do we gain or lose by holding on to a rights paradigm in a context where it seems like perhaps not, you know, have to completely throw it out the window, but it seems like the rights themselves are decreasingly doing some of the work. And I think it cuts both ways. I think it can be liberating, but it also can be perhaps the mobilizing. So when people and this goes back to the Myanmar fieldwork, when people know that they don't have a right to something, it takes a lot more work to get them to mobilize for it. Because they, it's dangerous to fight for something you know, you don't have. And it can make things worse for you, as illustrated in the anecdote about the Muslim Burmese person who described themselves as the beggar who shouldn't demand rights risk getting kicked as a result. So it can be demobilizing in that sense, but it can also be, and it can also be dangerous in the sense that, you know, outside of a parent rights paradigm, you have these civil society mobilizations that aren't always very pretty, that aren't always ones that we want to endorse, as being wonderfully outside of the state and, and hence laudable for that reason, like Mahabharata, and other right wing, Buddhist movements are kind of like civil society movements that are able to flourish outside of the rights paradigm, and you could quite profitably analyze them as being devoted to stripping belonging to other members of the polity and reformulating one along much narrower and more exclusionary lines. So those are certainly the risks there, but they're liberating in the sense that an in the sense that it does, provide people with a sort of compelling them or encouraging them to think improvisationally and to think about all the different things you can and need to do to change the conditions that are before you. Because if, you know, outside of the rights paradigm, or within it, rather within a paradigm in which, you know, improvisation is possible, make victories might never be forever achieved, but losses aren't forever either. And so I sometimes observe actions in the West, kind of sometimes resorting to or devolving into people getting mad that they didn't get their rights and then going home and complaining about it. But when you don't ever presuppose you have rights in the first place. You never get caught in that kind of downward spiral of demobilization. You know that if you want something you kind of have to go out and create it. So it takes a lot more work, but it also it can be hopeful at the same time. I think that there was this It just speaks to this moment that occurred and in a in America with, you know, making America great again, this nostalgic moment go back to a point where people were enjoying privileges that they hadn't earned. They were benefiting from the sort of outcomes of, of occupying and and displacing a native population and benefiting from the vestiges of a political economy based on colonialism and slavery. So as a result, this this past that people want to go back to was, was essentially, as you say, coddled by a particular set of accidents of history, and the rest of the world looks at that with I think appropriate levels of of derision.

Host 2:10:49

Yeah, so we're in the middle of this conversation, looking at rights. And this is a big topic, a thorny topic, and even giving what I thought might be adequate time towards not the very end of the interview, I think it's probably been about 45 minutes or so we've just been on the subject of rights, but it's, it's, you know, there and how important it is, and also, the distinctions that have to be made between these different cultural conceptions of rights that we're still getting into that we, we, there's still some ways to go as well as topics outside of this that I've written down in my notes from a book that's just chock full of points that, again, recommend listeners to check out rights refused is the name of it, to be able to dig into this in depth. But I think what I would suggest is pausing year because we've we've been going with some great momentum, and it's been wonderful. But once we're past the two hour mark, I think our minds as well as the minds of our listeners might be losing some of that sharpness. And so I propose to put a bookmark where we are now and look at coming back and being able to pick up some of these topics as well as additional topics in a second part of this conversation and continue.

Elliott Prasse-Freeman 2:11:59

Great. I really welcome that if I've loved this conversation, and I would appreciate it continue. Thank you so much.

Host 2:12:17

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