This episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies features Stéphen Huard talking about Calibrated Engagement: Chronicles of Local Politics in the Heartland of Myanmar (‎Berghahn Books, 2024), in which he takes a deep dive into the history and anthropology of village leadership in Myanmar’s central dry zone, or anya. In it, Stéphen develops “calibrated engagement” as a category to describe relations among headmen and big men, or lugyi, from his observations in two villages near Monywa. Though the book was researched prior to the military coup of 2021, it offers material with which to make sense of both why and how people in the dry zone formed new armed groups along what Stéphen calls an internal frontier; organising in ways that resist not only dictatorship but also scholarship which reduces politics in upper Myanmar to a lowland-highland dichotomy.

The book is available for download free of charge via the publisher’s website.

Like this interview? You might also be interested in Ward Keeler talking about his Traffic in Hierarchy, or Magnus Fiskesjö on Stories from an Ancient Land.

This interview summary was not synthesised by a machine. Unlike the makers and owners of those machines, the author accepts responsibility for its contents.

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