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Rethinking Community in Myanmar

Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon

Striking new insights into understanding community in Myanmar In this first anthropological study of Muslim and Hindu lives in urban Myanmar today, Beyer develops the concept of ‘we-formation’ to demonstrate that individuals are always more than members of wider groups. ‘We-formation’ complements her rich political, legal and historical analysis of ‘community’, a term used by Beyer’s interlocutors themselves, even as it reinforces ethno-religious stereotypes and their own minority status. The book also offers an interpretation of the dynamics of resistance to the attempted military coup of 2021.

328 pages | 52 illustrations (19 in colour), 7 maps | 5.98 x 9.02 | © 2023

Culture Studies:


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Reviews

“[This book is] of great value for those interested in Burma, its marginalized urban populations and their links with South Asia, or even current work in existential anthropology…. [it] accurately documents the history and dilemmas of minority groups (Shia, Tamil, Memon and Kalai) based on an engagement with the individuals who are supposed to constitute these collectives.”

Moussons

“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.”

PoLAR

"An important work not only because the populations of Indo-Burmese origin remain to this day truly left behind by Burmese anthropology, but also because by avoiding the identity impasse, the author crosses a threshold in the understanding of otherness through the emergence of new categories, of which colonial jurisprudence, from an emic point of view, constitutes one of the foundations."

Anthropologie et Société [translated from French]

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