Peace and Conflict studies

Popular conceptions of Buddhism in Myanmar are largely based on religious practices of the ethnic Bamar majority. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in south-east Myanmar, this paper examines the multiplicity of Buddhist religious practice at the base of Mt Zwegabin, in Hpa-an, Karen State. Employing an anthropological approach which sees religious beliefs and ritual practices as a symbolic medium through which social identity is imagined and constructed, this paper highlights the interaction between traditional Karen customs and more orthodox forms of Buddhism by exploring the religious Karen gaing formed by PhuTaki in the 1990s. Research on Karen esoteric cults has often positioned them as a reaction of a minority ethnic group, or resistance to, the politically centralised lowland state (Gravers 2001, 2015; Hayami 1996; Stern 1968). However, taking the emphasis away from the ‘millenial’ aspects of their beliefs, I instead draw on literature from Vietnam on spirit and deity possession  (Endres & Lauser 2012; Taylor 2004, 2007), which emphasizes the hybridity and interwovenness of differentiated religious practice in the search for ‘alternative modernities’ (Gaonkar 2001, Knauft 2002). By examining the hybrid religious beliefs and practices of PhuTaki followers, I highlight how the synchronised tempo of socio-economic and religious life assures the reproduction of Buddhism and Karen traditions as a stable reference point, an ‘alternative modernity,’ in an ever changing world, regional and national context.

After decades of ethno-national conflict, military rule and economic stagnation, Karen people in south-eastern Myanmar are experiencing momentous social and cultural change. Some of the most significant of these changes affect young people. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Hpa-an, the capital of eastern Karen State and former site of one of the most enduring civil conflicts in the world, this paper offers an introduction to the lives of young Plong Karen people and the multiple moral worlds they attempt to navigate as they come of age.In this seminar, I explore individual experiences of being a rural Karen youth in Hpa-an, and examine the different moral spaces young Karen people traverse in the constitution of selfhood and moral subjectivity.
 
Coming of age in a historical moment mediated by increasingly sophisticated media, economic change, and also deepening social inequalities, young people in Hpa-an are subject to a number of competing visions. On the one hand their identity is intertwined in strong rural social norms, customs and a celebration of ‘traditional’ notions of Karen identity. On the other hand, they are drawn into urban, transnational and mediatised global spheres where value aspirations that emphasize individuality and personal transformation are tinged with an aura of possibility and danger. In Hpa-an, as in Myanmar more broadly, a Buddhist religious cosmological imaginary also heavily frames local culture and subject formation, colouring most aspects of quotidian social life.
 
In documenting the life choices, actions, and socio-moral evaluations of one Karen university student, I draw on the burgeoning literature from the anthropology of moralities (eg Laidlaw 2002, Robbins 2004, Heintz 2009) to demonstrate how young people are embracing new practices and tropes of identity formation, in a way that recognizes the “plurality and creativity of moral discourses” (Heintz 2009: 2). By exploring these questions, I seek an insight into the complex moral terrain contemporary Karen navigate in south-eastern Myanmar and the everyday moral paradoxes young Karen people confront as they come of age. I show how youth serves as an arena in which the contradictions between conflicting visions of moral selfhood may be engaged, ideally promising reconciliation and transcendence but also inviting experiences of internal conflict and contradiction.

People’s understandings of themselves and the future always contain a dimension of hope. This paper seeks to theorise how young Karen people perceive and imagine their futures but also to unravel the potentialities of what is made possible for young people in this particular ‘moment’ of Myanmar’s history (Moore 2011: 22). In doing so, I unveil how some of the changes in Myanmar have impacted youth hopes and identity in a way that views them as participating in and perhaps accelerating technical adaptation to the changing economic, social and political context. Further to this, I extend Miyazaki’s (2004) concern with hope as a "method of knowledge production" and examine how the latest social and environmental transformations are changing young people’s aspirations for the future, specifically focusing on the increasing migration to Hpa-an for educational opportunities, new forms of knowledge and, generally, an improvement in living conditions.

Domains of ethics and morality are deeply embedded in a complex array of norms, values, historical experiences and social institutions. In discussing the recent interest in these subjects, Sherry Ortner calls for anthropologists to position their work as being “in active interaction” with “larger contexts” of power and inequality rather than in opposition to those aspects of social life (2016: 65). This paper examines local systems and hierarchies of morality in and around Hpa-an, Karen state, Myanmar and how these come to shape and inform local values and the boundaries around what is ‘good’ and moral within a Buddhist cosmological framework and social reproduction at large. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2015-2016, this paper demonstrates the significant degree of moral flexibility and contingency within Karen Buddhist peoples’ lives as they navigate Hpa-an's numerous overlapping and competing social, moral and political authorities. The paper concludes with observations about the socially-situated nature of morality and wider debates within anthropology surrounding the question of ‘ethics’ in what is an increasingly globalised and changing world.

Within anthropological scholarship studies on the Karen have for many years been defined by the contrasting tautology between lowland and highland peoples, and indeed the ‘everyday forms of resistance’ at the heart of local lifestyles and cultures of Southeast Asian highlanders (Scott 2009). The opening up of Myanmar and Karen state to long-term fieldwork enables us to reconsider these taken for granted categories against the background of a constant flow of peoples, goods, ideas and systems.

Drawing on preliminary observations from my fieldwork in Hpa-an, the capital of eastern Karen State, this paper seeks to raise questions about the Karen and provoke new understandings of the shifting locations of identity across time and space in a way that crosscuts the axis of hills and plains. Following on from Andrew Walker’s view that we live in world characterised by “connections and flows – of goods, information and people” (1999: 12) in this paper I will provide a snapshot into the socially and spatially connected lives of Plong Karen living in Hpa-an and its surrounding districts, and what I suggest is a ‘culture of migration’ (Cohen and Ibrahim 2011). In a life that has always been intrinsically connected with the outside world through trade, education, religious networks and employment, this paper focuses on how the Plong Karen see themselves in ways which challenge proximal categorisations of identity, ethnicity and citizenship. It also adds to debates on globalisation, hybridity and cosmopolitanism, by drawing attention to the inexorable linkage of the local and the global that characterise Southeast Asia’s borderlands (Jonsson 2014; Sadan 2013; Walker 1999).

After decades of ethno-national conflict, military rule and economic stagnation, Karen people in south-eastern Myanmar are experiencing momentous social, political and cultural change. My thesis contends with questions of morality and goodness at the forefront of this experience. Drawing on sixteen months of participant observation in Hpa-an and its surrounding towns and villages, my thesis offers an insight into the complex and modernising worlds of Plong Karen people and the multiple ways they understand and pursue good or moral lives. In this seminar I discuss the meanings, myths, and embodied performance of Buddhist Plong Karen morality and the ways these shape personhood and subjectivity in contemporary Hpa-an, the capital of Karen State, Myanmar. My research adds to the growing anthropological literature on ethics and morality, especially the relationship between what what Durkheim calls “moral facts” and the human capacity for creativity, freedom or moral agency (Keane 2015; Laidlaw 2002, 2014; Lambek 2015, 2010). I focus particularly on contradictions and disjuncture in moral frameworks in order to expose the creative and often paradoxical ways that people navigate everyday life. As I highlight, the increasingly ambiguous and fragmented socio-moral worlds within which Karen people now find themselves are producing new cultural movements, moral subjectivitities and imaginings of a moral future.

This report provides an in-depth understanding of customary land dispute
resolution in Kayin State, Eastern Bago Region and Shan State and its
interaction with the formal statutory Government of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar system. A participatory community-based research approach was used to understand customary practices concerning land, including how land title is defined, enforced and how land disputes are contested, negotiated and resolved at the community level.

Based on the perceptions of local people and village leaders in the three research sites, the report identifies current practices as well as prior work on this topic in Myanmar and seeks to identify ongoing dispute resolution mechanisms and practices used by communities in ethnic nationality areas with a view to informing policy and programming on restitution. Key to this analysis is the question of what a genuine restitution process might look like in Myanmar and how customary practices might be integrated into it.
Furthermore, if a genuine restitution process was established, what realistic capacity is there to integrate customary dispute mechanisms and authorities into it.