Person: Beyer, Judith
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Rethinking Community in Myanmar : Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon
This is the first anthropological monograph of Muslim and Hindu lives in contemporary Myanmar. In it, Judith Beyer introduces the concept of “we-formation” as a fundamental yet underexplored capacity of humans to relate to one another outside of and apart from demarcated ethno-religious lines and corporate groups. We-formation complements the established sociological concept of community, which suggests shared origins, beliefs, values, and belonging. Community is not only a key term in academic debates; it is also a hot topic among Beyer’s interlocutors in urban Yangon, who draw on it to make claims about themselves and others. Invoking “community” is a conscious and strategic act, even as it asserts and reinforces stereotypes of Hindus and Muslims as minorities. In Myanmar, this understanding of community keeps self-identified members of these groups in a subaltern position vis-à-vis the Buddhist majority population. Beyer demonstrates the concept’s enduring political and legal role since being imposed on “Burmese Indians” under colonial British rule. But individuals are always more than members of groups. The author draws on ethnomethodology and existential anthropology to reveal how people’s bodily movements, verbal articulations, and non-verbal expressions in communal spaces are crucial elements in practices of we-formation. Her participant observation in mosques and temples, during rituals and processions, and in private homes reveals a sensitivity to tacit and intercorporeal phenomena that is still rare in anthropological analysis. Rethinking Community in Myanmar develops a theoretical and methodological approach that reconciles individuality and intersubjectivity and that is applicable far beyond the Southeast Asian context. Its focus on we-formation also offers insights into the dynamics of resistance to the attempted military coup of 2021. The newly formed civil disobedience movement derives its power not only from having a common enemy, but also from each individual’s determination to live freely in a more just society.
The common sense of expert activists : practitioners, scholars, and the problem of statelessness in Europe
In this article, I follow a group of professionals in their efforts to address the problem of statelessness in Europe. My interlocutors divide the members of their group into “practitioners,” on the one hand, and “scholars” on the other. Relating this emic dichotomization to Antonio Gramsci’s dialectical take on common sense, I argue against a theoretical reductionism that regards expertise and activism as two essentially different and mostly separate endeavors, and put forward the concept of the “expert activist.” Unpacking what I call the “practitioner–scholar dilemma,” I show that in their effort to end statelessness, “practitioners” take a reformist route that aims at realizing citizenship for the stateless, while “scholars” are open to a more revolutionary path that contemplates the denaturalization and even the eradication of the state. By drawing on Gramsci, I suggest that the impasse the group encounters in their work might relate more to the structural constraints imposed by the state within or against which they operate than to the problem of statelessness they are trying to solve. This article contributes to a body of emergent work in anthropology that explores the intersection of scholarly expertise and activism.
The State of Custom : Gerd Spittler’s “Dispute settlement in the shadow of Leviathan” (1980) today
In our article, we engage with the anthropologist Gerd Spittler’s path-breaking article “Dispute settlement in the shadow of Leviathan” (1980) in which he strives to integrate the existence of state courts (the eponymous Leviathan’s shadow) in (post-)colonial Africa into the analysis on non-state court legal prac-tices. According to Spittler, it is because of undesirable characteristics inherent in state courts that the disputing parties tended to rather involve mediators than pursue a state court judgment. The less people liked state courts, the more likely they were to (re-)turn to dispute settlement procedures. Now how has this situa-tion changed in the last four decades since its publication date? We relate his find-ings to contemporary debates in legal anthropology that investigate the relation-ship between disputing, law and the state. We also show through our own work in Africa and Asia, particularly in Southern Ethiopia and Kyrgyzstan, in what ways Spittler’s by now classical contribution to the field of legal anthropology in 1980 can be made fruitful for a contemporary anthropology of the state at a time when not only (legal) anthropology has changed, but especially the way states deal with putatively “customary” forms of dispute settlement.