Christina says I should write about my trip to Yangon (Myanmar/Burma) these last few days, as it is a city unfamiliar to the readers of Ethnography.com. Her impressions, and those of our readers are probably in the context of the international news about Myanmar which focused last year on the Rohingya refugee crisis in which some 800,000 fled to Bangladesh, and more recent fighting in the western province of Rakhine, which briefly made the news a week or two ago. …
Month: February 2019
Is Drumming Better than Prozac? An Anthropological Reflection
‘Mental health’ has been shown to be social and environmental, though we’ve heard of Prozac, and even music therapy led by professionals. Well-being may also be connected to collective, organized sound among ordinary people. I’d like to share a recent study in biomedicine, and draw these scientific conclusions into the anthropological realm. First, because I’d like to bring biomedicine into anthropological discussions, so that the medical system fathered by Hippocrates can meet other medical systems, particularly those of the immense continent of Africa.…
The Fortunate Failure of ‘Voluntary Repatriation’ For Rohingya Refugees
Reposted from The Irrawaddy, February 11, 2019
By TONY WATERS
In 2017 and 2018, between 600,000 and 800,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar following attacks and clearance operations targeting their villages and coordinated by the Myanmar military. The result is the world’s largest refugee camp, Kutupalong, situated in a low-lying corner of Cox’s Bazar District in Bangladesh. The camp is there because the Bangladesh government saw it as a humanitarian way to deal with the refugee influx and preferable to a military operation.
Who Influneces American Foreign Policy in Burma More? James C. Scott or John Rambo?
James C. Scott is one of the major social science writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His first book Moral Economy of the Peasant published in 1976, studied Vietnamese peasants, and how they resisted social change while being rooted in a different “moral economy.” In subsequent decades he expanded his work to include other countries of Southeast Asia. And still later in his 1998 book Seeing Like a State he described how state-directed planning in Tanzania, Brazil, China, and the Soviet Union worked—and did not work. …