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Stephen Huard, "Calibrated Engagement: Chronicles of Local Politics in the Heartland of Myanmar" (Berghahn Books, 2024)
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- [00:00]
Stephen Hua
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk about. Welcome to the New Books Network. New Books in Southeast Asian Studies is sponsored by the ANU Southeast Asia Institute.
- [01:11]
Stephen Hua
The Griffith Asia Institute, the New York.
- [01:13]
Marshall Po
Southeast Asia Network, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre.
- [01:18]
Nick Cheeseman
Hello and welcome to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Nick Cheeseman, occasional contributor to the series and director of the Myanmar Research Centre at the Australian National University on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambre peoples. In this episode, which we're recording in October 2025, I'm talking with Stephen Hua, an anthropologist with the Institute of Research for Development, or ird, in France, about his book published this year titled Calibrated Chronicles of Local Politics in the Heartland of Myanmar. And this is the 17th volume in the Asian Anthropology series by Berghaan Books and it's available for free download from the publisher's website, which we've linked from the episode not the book takes a deep dive into the history and anthropology of village leadership in Myanmar's central dry zone. And with the exception of Ardeth Monk Thong Mung's doctoral research and publications, it's really the only extended study of village heads and their relations with their constituents in rural Myanmar for over half a century. Stephen, congratulations on getting this important work Published and perhaps we can start with a bit of background for listeners about how you got interested in village leadership in this part of Myanmar.
- [02:38]
Stephen Hua
Thanks a lot, Nick for the introduction and for having me here. Yes, sure, a bit of introduction. It all started during the so called transition. I was a master student at the time and I was fortunate enough to work for a French organization who decided to run a project on land issues. And we were able to go and do ethnographic work in different place. Where they did project, there was the delta and there was the dry zone around Moniwa. So I got a chance to get there and go every day in different villages and obviously had to meet with the different headmen that were from these different villages to talk and explore. And I got very interested in a couple of places and got very good relationship in one specific place where the headman was quite young and just got elected in 2012. So that's how I got into the villages and was welcome. But later on I came back and field work for long period of time and my friendship with this person enabled me to live with him and his family. So I had some kind of adopted family in Goji in around Moa Township.
- [03:52]
Nick Cheeseman
So you had access and Gojo, that research participant is really participant in the book as well as in the research. What was it that you were observing about headband that's you thought deserved the extended amount of time to observe, document and interpret, first for the purposes of a PhD project and then for a book. What intrigued you about what was going on that made you think I need to spend a longer time here looking at this stuff?
- [04:22]
Stephen Hua
It was lots of different topics. At the beginning I was interested on the grounding of the state and the impact of colonial structure on the place. And the dry zone being a place where they had direct administration was interesting for me. I also had a general interest into understanding local rural landscape and how they transform through time. Because often the place like the dry zone, Anya is described as a place that hasn't changed for a very long time as a reproduction of some sort of agrarian society. I grew up in a place like that and I know that it isn't true. So I kind of also wanted to describe why is it not true and the density of social relationship. I kind of dropped the project of looking at the grounding of the state and that was just an early idea and was more interested into like how people embody local institutions because I was living with them. And the institution of village headship was very interesting because it was a colonial device. But the person who embodied it is a villager. So what was his dilemma basically, and how he navigates daily life. Was a very interesting way for me to understand what's going on in villages. And how I can dive into the history of how one after the other replace each other, the memory about them. So it enabled me to dive into history through political institutions. And also look at the everyday dilemma that this person may encounter.
- [05:51]
Nick Cheeseman
And the book is structured in two parts. The one which is historical and the second anthropological. And you've already alluded to the importance of thinking historically for doing that anthropological work. But you really go way back. You go back to not just the colonial period, but to the pre colonial period. So why did you think it was necessary to go back that far, even before the British imperial invasion of Upper Burma, to do the work that you thought needed to be done to explicate and explore the qualities of village leadership and headmanship today?
- [06:29]
Stephen Hua
Because if we just look at the pacification campaign and the creation of the village system, it presented as a native institution, which is not so. My question was, so what were the kind of local institutions that we had in the countryside before? Because one of the things also I tried to challenge is the book is the idea of a colonial rupture. So what was the situation? What were the different institutions before that? So I get to this British Library archives to find some document about the administrators who were sent to pacify the countryside. I mean, there were soldiers and also decide who will be headmen or not create this kind of institution. And they create created report about what was going on. And the difficulty for them to find local institutions. The need to look at the pre colonial period was the Lake Combo was trying to understand the state of warfare that was at that time. Because the competition for office was very much something important during the late pre colonial period. And there was also another need to dive into that was to understand the origin or at least why the village were named in such a way. The origin of the village is often dating back to Anoyata or Olympia. Also the origin of how people see the landscape and name the pagodas. And the history around sacred space and so on. You have to dive into this pre colonial history to get some kind of idea about what was going on around that time.
- [07:57]
Nick Cheeseman
You conduct kind of a tandem historical and ethnographic study of two villages or two sites or one village, which is now located in what today is called a VI tracked a number of villages that are grouped together. One is Mimalung and the other is Goji. The latter being the one that you stay in. Why structure the work that way? What do we learn both historically and anthropologically from having the two villages juxtaposed with one another? Rather than concentrating on a single village, the one that you were located in.
- [08:33]
Stephen Hua
For instance, those two places, they were bound together by the very creation of the village system. They really don't like each other. So there is something interesting to look at in this kind of opposition. And they don't define their indigeneity the same way. They don't legitimate their presence in the landscape in the same way. So that was very interesting for me for one. But then dealing with history and ethnographical data is very complex about how we organize them. I adopted very basic chronological approach. It was the easiest for me. But there is a lot of problem also with that because you might have some kind of causal history, like one thing going, explaining the other. So you have a very nice line of evolution, which wasn't the. Wasn't on purpose. I've tried different ways of combining both. In the PhD I started with a little bit of ethnography first and then the. The history. But I always try to mix all of them together. So also about how people reflect on the past and give us idea about how the configuration of politics evolved and how different domains of engagement for local people were created and how this was like the density of everyday life.
- [09:47]
Nick Cheeseman
It is a multi layered study, that's for sure. And you yourself also write of this history as being sedimented. We certainly can't get into all of those layers in the short amount of time we have for discussion. But I would like to encourage you to say a little bit more about how these two villages are situated with a kind of animosity to one another and how that relates to the distinction that you make between Gorgi people being autoxinous and Mimalung people being a Loxanus. Perhaps for people who aren't familiar with those terms, you could give a quick gloss on them and then speak to how it came to be this way and therefore why the history is important for an appreciation of their current conditions and relations.
- [10:37]
Stephen Hua
This was really interesting. I was embedded in Gogi. The headman Kochio was able to navigate both, I mean most of the villages. So for him it was okay to go around. But since the beginning I started to have this feeling that they didn't like each other. And football matches and pagoda festivals, all these kind of things were a moment of intense rivalry, if not fight. And you have all these stories about other People are not very good and they are bad and they really. They are hunting too much. And this kind of things, like lots of accusations going on between one side and the other. So it was interesting trying to understand how they justify why this, how the village was created and who they would they are in some way. Goji was allegedly founded by people who moved from another place a bit south from it. It's called Jordan. And a few people left this place during a great famine, apparently, and they settled near a flat pound we call Gangoji. And so the name Goji was coming from there. And little by little get affiliated with different places around in terms of debt or so. But how you access land and started to become farming families on the other side. Mimilong, the name was interesting because it was related to the history of all the local and quite strong spirit. Not became a spirit. Actually. The village trek is called Mimilang, which would mean also we burned the horses. But they will say that, no, no, it's not that. It's Mimelot. It's not enough horses. And basically they were saying like the first settlers were people who escape with the local ruler of Hologne. Batuchuy was his name. When the king, it's often Anoyeta, but Anoyeta is Aristotle in this kind of stories. The king was trying to get that local ruler for different stories. So he escaped and finally killed himself in the Chinwin River. And later on, King Somu made him a gnat. But in his flight he stopped around. And apparently some soldiers had to stay in this place, in this kind of hideout because there was not enough horses or maybe because they burned the horses. This is how they explained the origin. So this is for one. And there is another part of the village was also renamed later on Mingalagong, the auspicious hills, by a royal astrologer coming from Mandalay. And they were saying that this pagoda was founded by this person. So they kind of legitimate their presence in the landscape as connected with a provincial ruler. They're not really from the land, but they have right to be there. They're connected with a local sovereign and they also connect themselves with the Mandalay capital. Also in terms of Buddhism later on. But people from Goji, the way they explained the presence of the different pagodas, they say, no, no, no, this pagoda wasn't built like that. What they're saying is not true. It was created by an alchemist who was traveling trying to perfect his art of alchemy. And whenever his will card will break down the fall on the ground. And pagoda will emerge in this narrative. We are way back in time here. They kind of posit themselves as part of a landscape that was almost pre Buddhist. So it's different forms of autoctony or indigenousness. Some are like we are from the land, we say from Goji. And the others are more like we are legitimate to be here because we descend from people close to local sovereign. So this gave us interesting ideas about the different forms of political landscape or at least justification of why people have different kind of opportunity or right to do things and the different status they have depending on who they are descending from. We need to do more work like this, I would say, to understand the different spaces that exist around the Anya area, because it's often taken as a whole, which is definitely not.
- [14:45]
Nick Cheeseman
So what are the implications of what you've just said for your thinking as an anthropologist about hierarchy and power today? You're pointing to the fact that these people are not in solidarity. You have one village that has a history or mythology of being closely related to the states and another that, on your terms, I like this expression, is playing the commoner's card that gets us some way to understanding why. If, if they understand one another on those terms, there will be an animosity. But then what are the implications for the kinds of everyday politics and power relations that you were interested in?
- [15:30]
Stephen Hua
The way that I tried to grasp the friction between these two spaces are the selection of the village headmen actually because it became a competition between both group, between both places. So who embodied headship at coming from which place will be revealing of the historical period, so to speak. So it's hard to do when we try to understand like the first, second or third headman, because it's way back in time. But the historical record exists to try to decipher what happened and how the village strike was shifted and rearranged at some point. Regarding the commoner card and barrier of obligation, it's just an hypothesis, but the idea was to think like, what about this pre colonial kind of status division which has not yet been described as some kind of form of hierarchy, as has been describing in the case of caste and so on. What if this kind of division between Amuddin and Adi, where our commoner and bureau of obligation was still something quite important in the way people see each other's status, especially when it gets revealed in times of crisis, because in day to day life you don't see that too much. And the history of the countryside, especially with the fight against colonialism and then the lensing Party engaging much more with rural population and then the disengagement with the slog, SPDC and so on. Those kind of structure. It's a bit difficult to see them. I was able to see them in the narratives, but then that's part of the work that should be done. And also trying to define a bit, perhaps a bit more what we say when we think that there is a. Or at least the Anya society is hierarchical in some way because it has been described as much more articulated around patron client mechanism, often based on some idea of charismatic leadership. And there are lots of problems with that. First problem is that whatever the period of time, whatever the context, it's always the same justification, the charisma of a person, which is a bit strange. My objective was to try to devise some kind of descriptive device that would allow us to kind of look at transformation of politics without resorting to kind of cultural explanation.
- [18:05]
Nick Cheeseman
And that device is calibrated engagement.
- [18:09]
Stephen Hua
Yeah.
- [18:10]
Nick Cheeseman
I think it's time for you to tell us what the title of the book means. A lot of books just have titles that are catchy and attractive, but this one is actually doing a lot of work. So fill it out for us, please.
- [18:20]
Stephen Hua
Yeah, yeah. So the genealogy of this was. Was started when I tried to understand what is the worst of the. Of the Big Man. What why some people are Luji Luca and others not. You know, how people evaluate this kind of worse. Like what do they do actually in day to day life? Like what are they doing? So it was kind of interesting because they will take care of village affairs and they will keep a distance with the state. They often hear that you don't deal with them and them meaning like the whole military, state bureaucracy, the whole thing together don't deal with them. Especially in times of more rapid development of how do you deal with the expansion of village with water access, with building new houses, with dealing with the dead, dealing with the ceremonies. And so the traditional institution get also important role in this moment of acceleration. But even though they were saying that they do it as it has always been done, they take care of the social affairs, the Lumouye. I felt also that this was historical. It was a take on local history. So the worst of leader was evaluated today was not the same what has been evaluated in the past. That's for one. The second thing was to make sense of the Kocho day to day navigation in the countryside. One of the important way for me to understand that was to describe a day in his life which made me think about okay, he Embodies a date institution that people don't really trust, that most men don't want to do. But there is no public space. So what are the different spaces there? Like where does a private start? And what are the layers of collectives, affairs that are present there? And so it was interesting to see how he would shift attention. How we dissembled in some aspect. How we deal with the legacy of previous headmen was very important. So how do you deal with memory of taking bribes or not when you make a land contract, for instance? Very important. So he was dealing with the history of also the absence and the violence of the military state. He was dealing with the legacy of person who were more exemplar in the past, a previous headman and the monk who created the monastery or so. So he was dealing with the old and the new old type. And it was in his day to day life, sometimes he was a bit more of a headman. And then at the time he was an uncle, he was an employer and so on and so forth. To describe that kind of things, because it's a lot about evaluating how do you deal with people. Simply put, what kind of obligation do you have? What kind of responsibility will you take on yourself? This was a fundamental political dynamics, I think not just in the. In Myanmar case. I think it's. It's true for many places. So that's why it's a descriptive device. What is interesting to look at for me, obviously as in it as an ethographer, are the interaction that people have, trying to describe the different interaction. But also look at what circulates, gift giving, exchange, transfer of things during a novitiate, a food exchange, help services, one good deserves another. All this kind of practice, like how they stabilize a sense of belonging or not, how far do you go in the collective relationship? How much responsibility do you take care for others in your personal life, in your family of origin, in the family that you create in the way that collective institutions are there also to help you produce this kind of belonging, connected also with your activities, your role as a farmer and the social stratification that there is also in the village that used to be divided between the Tantu, the farmers and my Thu, the laborers and so on. So looking at this kind of responsibilities, obligation transfer was much more productive. To understand what was the density of the local political landscape and how it got reconfigured through time.
- [22:30]
Nick Cheeseman
You also take some issue with approaches and you've alluded to these, but I want to be clear about them to approaches the hierarchy in Myanmar, in particular, Ward Keeler's work. He's working in a different location and had a different set of interests, but he offered an account of Myanmar society in which. Which there's, let's say, a preference for hierarchy. And your argument seems to be not to say that that's altogether wrong, but actually that the story is much more contingent than what Keiller is suggesting. An open invitation to you to comment and again to sort of advocate for calibrated engagement as an alternative.
- [23:19]
Stephen Hua
Ward is taking on the Dumont approach, which has been quite a lot criticized also by Greber, because what are we talking about when we really talk about hierarchy? Are we talking about the linear ranking of people or are we talking about the taxonomy of different groups or status group? And often the both have been conflated. In the case of Myanmar, it's not very clear what is the hierarchical system. There has been this linear ranking of the people behind the king and pledge and oath of allegiance will create that kind of hierarchy. But then you have a lot of different status group. Yeah, the kinship systems are bilateral in descent. You don't have clans and you just have families that try to become stronger and keep part of their name inside and so forth. So what kind of hierarchy are we talking about? It's obvious that in this Theravadin Buddhist society that male monks will be higher than the average commander men. This is kind of obvious. If we say that it's a hierarchical society, then when did it start and when does it end and how people actually challenge it. Because what we see also for a very long time in different kind of groups, but also after the coup at a much broader scale, is the challenge. How people are actually challenging this kind of language, this kind of practice and all the culture that is in it. They play with it and they reverse it and so on and so forth. So basically it's not because today, people today are different than people in the past. They get less obligation or less dependency and so on. Talking about hierarchy and not thinking that it could be challenging, it could be transformed, and that there is a fight for equality in the society is something that I don't really believe, but I still appreciate the kind of descriptive work and all the things we've been talking to each other with World of Killer several times on those things that I think it's still important to describe it.
- [25:21]
Nick Cheeseman
You mentioned the situation since the coup. And just for listeners, before we conclude we'll come back to that situation, there are a few other things, steps along the way, though. One thing That I want to note that your work does have in common with Ward Keelers is that its protagonists are almost entirely men or gendered male. There are no women heads in this region, and if so, why not?
- [25:46]
Stephen Hua
Where I was working, there was no example of women headmen. There was a few in East Maguire or South Mandalay, while a few examples have often been pushed forward. But as headman, it was very much male position, as were the position also of Luji Lugan. They trusted by the male ideology of being a steward, of being a guardian. So it took me some time. I was gender blind for so many for quite a lot of years. And it took me some time to realize that my contribution would be to describe this kind of ideology that cross through the different space. You are seen as somebody who could take care of village affairs. For instance, if you are already also a person who can take care of his family. If you are steward of the family property, then you could be a steward or guardian of village affairs. And these are the terms and so on and so forth that people were kind of using. So this idea of being a steward of something and of being responsible for some kind of collective was very much the way that the men justified why they should be legitimate authority. In terms of women being in charge of embodying local institutions, we have obviously also the leader of the Abilgaon unmarried women, which were kind of quite important in organizing those things, but will always be presented as a bit less important than the Kalatagaon. And even though you will have some very strong women who could impose decision on one of the biggest household compound of houses in a place, they will always be not pushed forward to become some leader of institution. You see those spaces opening much more in the different association. For example, in Lepadan the political involve village member who are quite vocal and push for that. You will see those kind of spaces here. But the case of village headman being a head woman, it's often given as an example of oh, it's possible, but I haven't been there. I don't, I don't see. And for me it's like saying like it's the same when we look at, oh look, for instance, in my country we have a woman prime Minister. We say, okay, I see a prime minister can be a woman. Or Margaret Thatcher could have been. Was also a prime minister in, in the uk but are we really addressing like the gender imbalance and all the. The justification of how power is divided there by saying that? I'm not sure my contribution will be more on the side of describing masculinities.
- [28:40]
Nick Cheeseman
You write that in the villages where you're located, the last men of power, and you alluded to them a little while ago, were in the 1960s. And that what we're left with today when we look at that head man at least, is not a person in a position of authority, but someone with certain specific ascribed powers and perhaps a political entrepreneur, if they're good at their job. So how do you come to that conclusion and what happened between the 1960s and the 2008 10s?
- [29:13]
Stephen Hua
Before going to the field, I did my homework. I was reading Nash because there was not too many ethnographic and so on. And one of the things that I kept hearing was that there is no more men of porn like that. So something happened to the men somehow in this area. Well, maybe it's only true for the place I've been, maybe it's not true from other places. But there was something that happened and I tried to understand it, why this local institution became somehow powerless. So it was about documenting the engagement and the disengagement of state bureaucrats inside the villages. Lensing Party being, for instance, for one, the different groups that were created, often empty shell, but of course not the different agricultural policies and with the different department, how much they kind of transform or not nationalization of black market, these kind of things. And how things shifted in the 80s and quite a lot in the. In the 90s with the slog coming up after the 88 movement, where you could see that the procurement quota and these kind of things were still asked, but the recording state there was was still kind of ongoing during the socialist, or at least early socialist period was kind of trapped. And forced labor started to build roads and dams and all these kind of things. And the headmen were just the one who had to provide this kind of form of labor or taking opportunities to get bribed and get rich on top of others. So you have lots of stories about this kind of things, of corruption and how the militarized forms of clientelism corrupted down to local institution and down to local population, and they had to deal with it. Maybe it's just an hypothesis. My guess is that disengagement of the state and localism, people being involved in the local affair, trying not to deal with a bigger power holder, was part of why there was no more men of Pon in different villages, Although at.
- [31:14]
Nick Cheeseman
Least the head men cannot be thought of or talked of that way. Gojo is not one of those. That's only one type of Leadership in the village. You've been alluding to Lu Chi, Lugong, the big men. And you note that this is a polysemic term. It registers many different types of personage in the central tri zone. And you refer by way of examples of specific individuals to three different types of Lu Qi. One is. I'll just mention them by name rather than by type, and you can fill in the details. One is Ulin, the other is Umong, and the other is Ute.
- [31:52]
Stephen Hua
I'll take them in order. So basically they represent also some traditional institution. Ulin being Kalatago, the head of the bachelor group, organizing the unmarried men for different kind of ceremonies. Basically, he's the one who is involved in organizing most of the collective events, weddings, novitiate, Chimpu, pagoda festival. He's there, so he has to be unmarried himself. And he's activating the different networks. He is recording who is giving what for what occasion. He is a living memory of how people engage in the collective in some way. The other one, Uman, was more like the wise elder. And he is the one who is called for wedding quite a lot, especially for discussing who will give what from the family of the future husband and the family of the future wife life. He's part of this kind of negotiating, trying to also remind people of the principle of living a good life, because he kind of is an exemplar himself. And he is also often the bidet Saya, the master of ceremony for this kind of moment. So he embodied that and people recognize that in him. So he. He's taking that kind of job. And for the last one, Ute, he's kind of a bit apart, but he is more of the Yami Yapa, if you like, even though he wasn't that old, but that he used to be a headman and he used to embody like the opposite of the previous one. So he's from Guji, and the previous one was from Mimi Long. And the previous one was very much accused of a lot of bad things, dispossession, bribes, and so on and so forth. And he was quite well known because he didn't take any bribe. And he will put people in the face of the situation that he will not do that, even with the township administration people or the land record department. So he will put people in difficult position by not taking anything. So his tenure as a headman was kind of really remembered. And he became Yami Yapa, the elder of space of living. And that was interesting to see him navigate those things. Being a headman and then changing and trying to stay away from the state, but still running things and basically settling conflicts, dealing with family dispute and these kind of things as well. So not really the things that everybody wants to do.
- [34:08]
Nick Cheeseman
And they're all playing critical roles in the village. How do they relate to Gojo in his role as head man, at least up until 2015, when there's an election? That's part of the discussion.
- [34:19]
Stephen Hua
Later in the book, he needed to talk with them to tell them about what was going on, because some of them are also part of different kind of committees. One being, for instance, the land committees for dealing with ongoing conflict with the process of land title delivery was going on at that time. All conflicts were coming back and he had to deal with them because so Ute, for instance, will embody how it is to be a good head man, so to speak. Uman will be the person who has a huge network and so did also Ulin. So he had to consult with them, especially for organizing the election, for instance. Those were the ones who start the collective organizing of any sort. If you want to organize something, you go through them. And they each kind of keep a different stance depending on the affair at stake. But for the election, for instance, Hulin was not really involved. Omang was there because his ability of navigating Mimi Long. There is no problem for him. But Hute decided to get away from any forms of election. At that time, he didn't even want it to be the official Yamiya Pa. Don't want to be close to anybody who embodied the state anymore.
- [35:29]
Nick Cheeseman
Before we started, I suggested if you want to read an ethnographic passage from the book, and we're running short on time, so I'm wondering if you would like to do that.
- [35:38]
Stephen Hua
Okay. So I will read a passage from my book about a day in the life of Kocho, and especially when he's meeting the village Lucci. In the afternoon, back from the field, we take a rest at Kocho's house. After an hour or so, I tell him that his uncle Ulin has asked for our help. He is currently rebuilding the roof of a shelter for his cattle. Building repairs are moments of collective help. In theory, everyone comes to give a hand. But in practice, it often displays relational engagement under the rubric of help. For this shelter, the roof made of palm leaves needs to be changed. Not that the main crops are harvested. Most villagers do such repairs before the peak of the summer hit. When we arrive there, a small group of men are bursting around. One of them splits leaves from branches with his machete. Another, holding his machete with his feet, slice the edges of the branch and soak them in water to make strings. The last one makes incision in the leaves to tie the strings that will eventually be attached to the bamboo structure. This scene is familiar. These men are the ones we met earlier at the premarital ceremony. U Lin, Kocho's anchor teacher of the village school and leader of the bachelor group, is accompanied by Ute, Kucho's brother in law and official elder, and Umang, the most respected elder, often officiating as master of ceremonies. They are the main village big men. To a certain extent, they represent a familial accumulation of leadership position. However, as most villagers are relative in some way, the concentration of leadership particularly reflects how a few farming families have managed to secure and gather through alliance and dissent. Land cattle know how to such an extent that being an accomplished farmer, Tanto is devalued status. When asked about what in their opinions make them a big man, a Luji, they always emphasize propriety and achievement. You guys aren't earlier in Moxas. I retort with a joke. I know it will work. That's because Kocho's is afraid of his wife they all love, whereas Coach will start slicing things in no time. I try in vain to make myself useful and finally give up and sit down. They take a break a short moment later and enter and start a casual discussion. We talked about the morning ceremony, the current change in government, the fluctuation of crop price, the next pagoda festival and so forth. I pour coffee, Ulin unpacks snacks. Ute offers Kocho a beetle shoe and Umang lights his cheerleade tea. Coffee smokes and beetle shoes are the ingredient of male society. The offering of any of these items follow basic understanding. A piana, which means what? Gunther deserves another the ethics of living together. To some extent, assistant help and offering follow a simple rule of reciprocity. It is highly relational matter, reflecting the state of relationship. In the same vein, us coming here to give a hand shows a degree of affiliation, for the place is saturated by big men at that time. I recall Nash, an anthropologist working in Dreiseund in the late 50s, said that this kind of men are not very popular powerful, he wrote. The Luji do not set style. They do not necessarily move anyone to emulation and they have no power. Only the recognized right to use moral suasion. One of the reasons these men are elderly people is that they do not overstate the vague but delicate line that separates individual responsibilities. I see Them as people taking care of village matters. They make village affairs a space of commitment. Whereas the worst of people is is gouged and just create a political order in the village. And yet the vague but delicate line is all that is on my mind at that moment. I ask, why do people call you the village big man? And they laugh. They say we are not. I retort, so why do you take care of the village affair? Who else would do it? A deep silence follows everyone gaze in other direction. After a minute that feels like an hour. Who monkeys me? It's not easy, young man. Kutchu smiles and we resume our petty discussion when they start talking about a land case and the issue. I'm not describing the full land case here, but the issue is that the previous headman is not going to give back the land that is he grabbed. And the cases drop again when Kucho says that the court has not settled anything yet. But the odds are in favor of Humeo, the heir sequence. With unspoken thought silence. Trying to fight a consensus was the only way for Kochio to not be at odds with the previous headman, with the farmers and with his superiors. It is the most common way of settling dispute. To put it simply, it's nearly impossible for headmen to engage the responsibility of previous one. Even if in theory a headman decided alone. Kocho simply couldn't take the risk or responsibility to rule on that matter by himself. And this is the point that on a day to day basis, he has to dissemble because he represents layers upon layer of individual and not simply his own authority via the institution. The stakeholders are too close. The past is too imbued with military style rule. The men of power, if they were officials in the past, play the card of outright invulnerability. If they fall, others will too. Kocho is just not big enough.
- [40:56]
Nick Cheeseman
So that passage has brought us all of those protagonists that we were just talking about. And in addition, it's brought us to one other thing that I wanted to ask you about before we wrap up. And it goes back to the start of our discussion because you mentioned that you got interested in the location through work that you were doing on land tenure and title, and you were just referring there to a land dispute. And actually a couple of chapters of the book had really taken up very much with issues to do with land. It may seem like an obvious or a foolish question to ask what's land got to do with it? Given that these are people who are tilling land. And yet I think still the question has to be asked that how does land relate to the specific story that you want to tell about calibrated engagement?
- [41:46]
Stephen Hua
I can think of at least two ways. One is more on the side of land governance and one is more on the who has the ability to play the rules to access or grab land at different period of time. And so the history of administrative and political change in the region are quite important in that matter. And the headman is central because he's the one who need to sign most of the things. When it was like the procurement policy, when it was changing the ownership on the land title and so on and so forth. So in terms of governments and administrative practice, land is a power tool, so to speak. Then in terms of the conception connected with land and in terms of, of property work quite a lot on the transmission of inheritance inside farming families. It was hard to understand the different type of land right that people have. And again, this idea of being a stewardship of property was much more relevant to understand the situation. It always comes down to one day, Cocho telling me like nobody owned this land. I was asking him about a piece of land, just asking too many questions I guess. But he said nobody owns it. But I knew that on paper they were belonging to his parents and it was also part of his future inheritance. But the thing was that land is taken within different generations and it's an asset that can serve for different kind of purpose. But there are too many claims around this as part of the wealth of a family and it's often entangled between at least three different generations. So of course individual property doesn't exist. And so it's interesting to look at how it has organized land relation in the long duration in this area. Even though there's been change in the land governance structure, even though there's been the cadaster and the land titling by the British and so on, you cannot find in the records this kind of process that entangled different generation. And maybe the last point about land is they used quite a lot of tenancy pattern and system in the dry zone. But one of the things that changed through time is like very large, not farming families, but owning families or big families that endure. The colonial period were owning land through debt. So they were not also on paper, their name didn't appear. But they're owning large estates through debt, actually through different forms of ownership. And this diminished quite a lot during the socialist and slog SPDC era and started again with the transition with a different form. So the ability of local farming family to trust local institutions also give them a way of becoming bigger, so to speak, in the local village. Track politics. Thank you.
- [44:26]
Nick Cheeseman
There's a lot more to discuss about that, but listeners will have to check out the book, which again to remind everyone, is available for download free of charge. If you haven't already done so, that's there. You can do that even while you're listening to the remaining part of this discussion. I want to bring us to the close by coming to 2021 and thereafter, as many listeners will know, the region where you did your research, the central dry zone, Sagan in particular Mogwai as well, is a region in which there's been a huge amount of armed conflict since the coup, especially through People's Defense Forces, local defense Forces, and other groups that appeared as if springing up out of nowhere and turning this part of Myanmar into a site of tremendous violence. What I'm really interested to hear from you about is how you think your book helps to explain what's happened since the coup, even though of course, the research that you did preceded it.
- [45:29]
Stephen Hua
I hope that the book could help on different aspects. Let's start with the one who would be interested. For scholars, it's just that the idea of calibrated engagement is a descriptive device. So if we can use it as a descriptive device for what the situation is evolving, we can keep trying to describe the transformation of rural politics and add because what's going on right now is another episode of an ongoing history, then I hope in general terms that the book is helpful because it actually just do that, just show that the region is not state space. It's not a traditional space. It's not just a place where life reproduce itself. It's a space where now we see different forms of regionalism or localism, sometimes to the extreme by different force. And this might have to do with trying to understand the way people conceive their legitimacy in dealing with their own affairs and their own territory, sometimes as small as area of a few village tracts. So the different forms are different forms of sovereignty. I don't know if it's the right word, but how different forms of sovereignty are at play in this area. We can connect it with the human power, but there is also all this, more than human or spirit, also sovereignty at play. The connection with this, what we refer, also with the different spirit spaces that are sometimes also put in motion by different groups. It's often connected with power in battles and so on, but it's still there. And it's an area has been also providing soldiers to different Kind of state army for some time times. And these connections are sometimes also made, sometimes not, but they are also. They are also made. Basically the book is just one take on one case that I try to understand not fully, but as much as I could. And so for me, I'm totally not surprised by the localism, the emergence of a lot of different groups. What is interesting is why other people are surprised by that and don't have the language to explain it. Because it was thought as a place that was just pacified, even though it was not. One way also of looking at the experience that people have from the state is also connected with this forced labor and disposition. The thing is that it's not at the same scale that we used to see. Like for instance, the forecut in different areas, land disposition has been very broad, but piecemeal. And families have different experience. So there is this ambiguity also of the military as the enemy and the military as the benefactor, as the chaes of Shin. So also this kind of divide between, well, let's call the green and red area and these kind of things also has a history to it. So the ability, for instance of the military to create client on the landscape is also important and how it runs deep inside the families, the intimate division. So all those things are quite important. And I'm hoping that the book can give some ideas about how things have transformed and therefore we have like ground to explore, being better informed to explore the current situation.
- [48:38]
Nick Cheeseman
Where two for you. Since the book's out now, are you continuing to do research in the central trison or looking at village leadership, or you're moving on to other things?
- [48:48]
Stephen Hua
Well, I'm trying to understand the effect of violence on life and the different forms of violence. And also this, what has been termed sometimes slow violence, but the environmental vulnerabilities that also comes with lots of resource extraction. And I'm trying to think like if my idea of calibrated engagement is an interesting idea, then I need to push further and see the limits in understanding why things happen like that in the dry zone since the coup. So if I am totally coherent with my work, I should also see how the configuration of politics transforms in the bay. I cannot go to Mari Wa, so that's difficult. Looking at transactions and transfer is also difficult. So I need to. I'm adapting the methodology and the way I can work to still try to understand the broader picture. But I'm not alone in this. Many people are interested about this place a bit more now. The more we are, the better it is because it's a lot to unpack.
- [49:47]
Nick Cheeseman
So thanks again, Stephen Wat, for this conversation about calibrated engagement.
- [49:54]
Stephen Hua
Thank you. Thank you very much for this opportunity.
- [49:56]
Nick Cheeseman
And thanks to everyone for listening. A reminder that if you found the conversation interesting and we've reached the end, so we hope that you have, then you can download the PDF of the book free of charge from the publisher's website. Linked from the show notes and also free of charge are hundreds of other podcast episodes on Southeast Asian Studies on the New Books Network website, including one of myself talking with Ward Keeler, who we were discussing a few minutes ago back in 2019 on his traffic in hierarchy, and another from the Asian Anthropologies series, Magnus Fisketcho, discussing his stories from an ancient land. And if you don't find these of interest, then don't worry, there are tens of thousands of other episodes and there's sure to be something that will be to your liking. So check out the website or find the New Books Network via your preferred podcasting platform. To date, it.