Reviewed in this essay:
Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality, and Resistance in Myanmar. Gerard McCarthy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023.
Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon. Judith Beyer. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2023.
Reviewed by Elliott Prasse-Freeman, National University of Singapore
James Scott’s now famous The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) advanced several influential arguments, most indelibly that hill dwelling Southeast Asian peoples were not “backwards” remnants of a premodern past, but sophisticated political actors who chose to evade lowland state exploitation. This provocative thesis included two corollaries – first, that this story mostly describes the era before the colonial encounter, after which states expanded homogenous control over their territories; and second, that those who had not earlier fled to the margins essentially capitulated to state domination, becoming docile cogs in contemporary state machines.
As Myanmar’s collective revolution against the February 2021 military coup continues to rage, those two assumptions warrant renewed scrutiny. The current revolution is being led not just by urban students and workers, nor only by ethnic armed organizations who have long fought the country’s military regime, but also by lowland Anyatha (“upriver people” – from Myanmar’s dry zone), who have not typically involved themselves in national politics. Moreover, the fury of their rejection of the coup is not, according to experts of the region, directed towards a broader national project. As anthropologist Stephen Huard has it, based on his extended ethnography of Anya areas, villagers there have devised institutions that “resist state formalization” and empower leaders who “buffer… officials’ demands while keeping villagers at a distance with the state” (2019:48).
An ambivalence over both the desired normative role and the empirical reality of the state hence emerges within the heart of lowland Myanmar. This ambivalence is clarified by two new ethnographies on Myanmar – Gerard McCarthy’s Outsourcing the Polity and Judith Beyer’s Rethinking Community in Myanmar – which demonstrate how the state’s presence is perpetually attenuated by its absence, throwing into relief questions about the state and Burmese people’s navigation of it. Indeed, anthropologists have long been inspired to understand the state by looking at its margins; but what if the state itself is somewhat marginal? How to describe that kind of rule?
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McCarthy’s Outsourcing the Polity examines governance in Taungoo, a mid-sized city in central Myanmar, exploring the ways in which “welfare” – the (re)distribution of resources to address collective problems – has been enacted since 1990 (the moment when a putatively socialist military state was reorganized as an authoritarian neoliberalism). McCarthy finds that a “non-state welfare regime” emerged as the military-state effectively outsourced many typical state functions to the polity.
McCarthy’s ethnography traces various support networks that buttress this system. Specifically, “crony” elite businessmen, middle-class (self-described) “democracy activist” foot soldiers, and underclass peasants each constitute key nodes in chains of patronage. The cronies are enrolled by regional military-state leaders to take on welfare duties in exchange for freedom to extract resources (such as appropriating land) and to run monopoly capitalist operations. These tycoons fund disaster relief teams, municipal waste disposal, blood donation drives, and even vast cultural festivals. Average subjects can partake in these services in different ways and in varied temporalities: an individual may receive one-time humanitarian aid during a moment of need, benefit from weekly street cleaning, and engage in the collective effervescence of annual Bamar-Buddhist revival celebrations. Activists provide not just the logistical ligatures binding the networks together, but also generate much of the affective investment in these forms of non-state support (more on this below).
It was not always this way – at least, according to McCarthy’s account. Yet, while he declares there to have been a “rise and fall” of both “interventionist welfare capitalism” after independence (1948-1962) and “military socialism” (1962–1988), McCarthy provides little evidence of any “rise” in material terms from which any ensuing fall could descend. Every plan McCarthy presents as evidence of elite will to foster a welfare state from 1947 to the time of the explicitly neoliberal turn of the 1990s is followed with an acknowledgement either of that project’s failure or, more significantly, its lack of implementation: the independence regime’s “social footprint and welfare role did not expand as envisaged” (42); the Social Security Board was “never a major part” of the military-state’s apparatus (48), while cooperatives and credit remained “insufficient” for farmers (49). The military-state instead presided over “rampant inflation, shortages of basic supplies, and repeated demonetizations” that undermined what McCarthy takes as its intended ability to deliver “a fair and redistributive welfare regime” (61). “Welfarism” hence exists somewhere between a promise made and a process vaguely pursued; it is not shown to be an outcome manifested – at least as delivered by “the state” itself.
This point is worth belaboring because as it stands, for McCarthy’s argument to work, the previous three decades (1990-2021) must constitute a radical departure – a revolution – in governance and corresponding political culture in Myanmar. Burmese people, McCarthy asserts, effectively went from benefitting from state welfare from 1947 to 1988 to, in the wake of state retrenchment, developing entirely new political institutions, cultural norms, and modes of survival. This simply does not accord with the ethnographic record, which emphasized the importance of village self-reliance during the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, McCarthy’s argument that entirely new modes of sociality were generated often relies on meagre evidentiary sources – for instance, we are told that collective responses to two natural disasters separated by seven whole years were sufficient to “establish… the social role of non-state actors and popularize… a notion of social duty to distant others” (119).
Instead, it seems more likely that the self-reliance that McCarthy brilliantly renders in his ethnography has been a part of Burmese social life for centuries (returning to Scott: rather than his binary of anarchist hills versus pliant lowlands, we can see villages too as long having been sites of self-reliance and resistance to state coercion). While the state did retrench in the 1990s – and by 2002 it had “one of the smallest tax takes anywhere in the world” (65) – we might instead interpret this as a change in degree rather than a qualitative rupture.
This reorientation has further analytical consequences. For McCarthy, the absence of the state means that welfare provided by the polity, given that it is delivered in a non-systematized way, is inherently sub-optimal and compensatory for that absent state. Further, its “partiality and contingency… can worsen the geographic and social exclusion of minorities… and the needy” (117) who “have a limited right to demand specific support from donors” (118). While this may be true, one can swap “non-state” here for “state” – both in Myanmar and, likewise, in most places globally – and the analysis would remain sound: the political reality is that the needy have limited “rights” to make claims on state and non-state institutions alike. But McCarthy’s normative liberal presuppositions, in which states are categorically impartial, delivering resources rationally rather than randomly, cannot accept such blurring. Hence, his recommendations become a form of begging the question: McCarthy suggests that “democracy activists [should] seek… to constitutionally enshrine rights to redress for past injustice or clarify the redistributive obligations of the state to citizens” (139), not recognizing that in a context where such citizen “rights” and state “obligations” are absent, such solutions cannot be simply spoken into existence.
This prescriptivism is unfortunate, as it elides some the book’s most fascinating findings: the quasi-anarchist values generated in the penumbra of the absent/present state. Returning to the activists mentioned above, McCarthy finds that their motivation to assist others was grounded in a “spiritual and civic idea that supporting the destitute would alter the social consciousness… of donors and volunteers” (108). Going further, McCarthy adduces a conscious project that would make anarchists from Bakunin to Graeber proud, in which the culture of non-state welfare was “reinforced by a normative ideal of freedom in which bonds of reciprocity generated through charity and philanthropy helped to revive the kind of ‘free’ political community that was imagined as existing before autocratic rule and colonization” (147). And yet, if this is an “anarchism,” it is one committed to social hierarchy in which the poor must be deserving and properly obeisant to warrant aid (chapter 6). Returning to the current uprising, a question is how these values – hierarchical anarchism? – might inform the current diffuse rebellion and whatever form of politics may emerge if the revolution is achieved.
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While McCarthy’s book outlines how certain political idea(l)s emerge for members of the majority ethnicity (the Bamar), Beyer’s Rethinking Community in Myanmar shows how some of the country’s non-normative political subjects – Muslims and Hindus of South Asian descent who neither qualify as Bamar nor as minorities officially ratified as the country’s “sons of the soil”– navigate Myanmar. If McCarthy examines welfare beyond the state in towns and villages, Beyer inquires into the consequences for ethnogenesis and ethnic reproduction in Yangon (Myanmar’s largest city, economic hub, and erstwhile capital), when the state is largely disinterested in regulating, classifying, and ordering its subjects.
Rethinking Community in Myanmar focuses on “so-called ‘Burmese Indians’” – South Asian Hindus and Muslims – about whom much has been assumed but little shown through ethnographic exploration (2022:9). To make sense of how individuals of these population groups understand themselves, Beyer develops an analytical vocabulary to differentiate acts of what she calls “we-formation” from acts of “the work of community.” We-formation occurs “when individuals happen to be in the same place at the same time, bringing with them a certain momentary disposition, and exposing themselves to sensory and intercorporeal experiences” (5) that may co-generate ephemeral collectivities. By contrast, the work of community intervenes when the “pre-reflexivity” of “we-formation” ends – when those once-inchoate collectivities cease merely “existing themselves” (to use her Sartrean terminology) but are instead ascribed “abstract or classificatory terms” (20). Beyer’s project is thus to take a “co-constitutive approach to individuals who navigate the in-between of a we, on the one hand, and ‘community’ on the other” (ibid) – because “community significantly shapes an individual’s experience and sense of self, but never entirely” (9). By tracing how the two forces – the becoming of “we-formation” versus the being of community – interact to shape the lives of these populations, Rethinking Community in Myanmar also reveals additional contours of Myanmar’s absent/present state.
The book begins on the “community” side of the equation, asserting that state governmentality in Burma – from British colonial rule through the country’s post-colonial governments – has constructed Burmese Indians as a coherent “community.” Developed “for administrative purposes during the time of British imperial rule,” Beyer insists that community “has been put to work to divide people into ethno-religious selves and others ever since” (5). Despite these claims, however, the book relies largely on evidence from comparative cases across the British Empire (Benares and Tamil Nadu) that are of questionable relevance to Burma. And when we do observe the British in action in Burma, it does not appear that they “skillfully crafted” (249) communities – one chapter focuses on how the colonial state fostered a community out of a single family, which is hardly a useful category (as the book demonstrates). More importantly, while Beyer asserts that the Raj deployed a “divide-and-rule policy[,]… all-encompassing documentation and administration of the populace[,]… [and an] overemphasis on collective religious identity” (34), we are not shown how these particular governmental apparatuses do the work of excluding Burmese Indians in their everyday lives.[i] While these people are indeed officially excluded from many affordances of citizenship, that de jure distinction often dissolves in reality, as demonstrated by Beyer’s careful ethnography.
The city itself is central here. Take housing, what Beyer insightfully identifies as a “practice” done by those living it (60). Because many Burmese Indians have long lacked formal citizenship documentation – as they do not fulfill the membership criteria of Burma’s racialized state – they are technically denied eligibility to purchase property, as Beyer reminds us early on (17). Yet, despite such apparent restrictions, the book features an array of housing practices in which various Burmese Indians enact ownership – performing the paradox of il/legal property possession in Yangon across several modalities: Burmese Indians as individuals, in corporations, and as collectives (jamaat) have played a “significant role in building the city from the ground up” and continue (whether through their construction companies or individual initiative) to rebuild it (60). For instance, one jamaat “owns eight buildings in downtown Yangon”; one of Beyer’s central interlocutors – Auntie Amina – not only purchases property (85) but then is able to engage with the state to “obtain a permit to renovate and open… a guesthouse” (86).
These housing practices are in part enabled through the kind of mutual self-aid discussed by McCarthy, as wealthy Burmese Indian business leaders have funded social security programs, education tutoring, and medical care for the destitute, while also supporting business start-ups and co-funding a new line of municipal buses to enable better transportation for all. They also sponsor cultural festivals, which often involve street processions that “turn – at least momentarily – part of Yangon into their own place” (124). Relatedly, these individuals’ investment in upkeep of various religious buildings transforms them into potent mediating objects for “shap[ing] [individuals’] selves in relation to and as part of a we” (154-55). Burmese Indians, seen by the polity as not belonging, and lacking official citizenship status, nonetheless weave themselves into the fabric of Yangon life. They accomplish this through what is not quite engagement nor evasion of the state, but by their distancing themselves from it.
What then accounts for what Beyer observes as Burmese Indians’ almost-desperate over-identification with “communal” categories that the state does not appear at all interested in reproducing? One theory is that it is the very lack of recognition (by both the state and polity) that breeds identificatory Burmese Indian responses. One interlocutor, when asked by Beyer to ponder how the Buddhist majority sees him, responds with a slur for South Asian people: “‘To them, we are only kalar now’” (237). The less intense the governmentality, the greater degree to which individuals engaged in we-formation could avoid the state’s “work of community” – its ability to categorize and regulate. But they are left massified as a constitutive outside – the dark Other against whom the in-group can construct itself. This exclusion might spur a dialectical relationship between recognition and identification: when those enacting a “we formation” are denied recognition, they may pursue their own “work of community” as a compensatory move. After all, reification might be preferable to bigotry and erasure.
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David Graeber, writing about similarly vexing states, once asked: “If many political entities we are used to seeing as states, at least in any Weberian sense, are not, then what are they?” (2004:68). Scholars are increasingly identifying these states by their “absent presence” (Bainton and Skrzypek 2021; Bächtold 2023:10; Prasse-Freeman 2023), defined by temporal, spatial, and institutional contingency. Mariane Ferme, in reflections on statecraft in Sierra Leone, has proposed that political subjects in such contexts are “more at home in the ‘control’ models of the state espoused by Deleuze and Guattari – who see the state as an apparatus of capture, integrated more as a network than an organism” (Ferme 2004:89). This is suggestive and useful, because while classic states hew to an “arborescent” model of power, in which actors pursue capture of hierarchical structures but in so doing make themselves vulnerable to attacks (whether through physical violence or political claims), these states appear more “rhizomatic,” in which domination is forfeited as political strategy, but as a result, the ability of counterclaims to be advanced is duly undermined. To wit, when these states affix to themselves corporations, NGOs, militias, community-based organizations, and so forth they both mobilize those entities’ resources and competencies, and displace themselves as responsible actor. Their weakness becomes a strength.
And yet, Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of control depended on sophisticated networks of regulation, metabolism, and calibration, such that even without direct coercion subjects could be enrolled into practices and led toward certain ends. By contrast, the state in Myanmar is reactive and violent – an assemblage without control, an out-of-control assemblage, one that makes anarchism both desirable but difficult to achieve. McCarthy and Beyer’s ethnographies help us perceive how people live within it, how they struggle against it less by engaging it than by keeping their distance. This allows us to return to the revolution raging now: perhaps it should be seen not as a singular movement, but as a plurality of rebellions, ones whose ultimate goals remain themselves highly indeterminate.
References Cited
Bächtold, Stefan. “Blackouts, whitelists, and ‘terrorist others’: The role of socio-technical imaginaries in Myanmar.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding (2023): 1-21.
Bainton, Nicholas and Emilia Skrzypek, eds. The absent presence of the state in large-scale resource extraction projects. ANU Press, 2021.
Ferme, Mariane. “Deterritorialized Citizenship and the Resonances of the Sierra Leonean State,” in Veena Das and Deborah Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of State, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press (2004): 81-116.
Graeber, David. Fragments of an anarchist anthropology. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004.
Huard, Stephen. Beyond the village headman: transformations of the local polity in central Myanmar (1750s-2010s). Diss. University of East Anglia, 2019.
Prasse-Freeman, Elliott. Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar. Stanford University Press, 2023.
[i] Divisions can be attributed to racial capitalism more so than colonial governmentality.