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"We are Like Water in Their Hands" - experiences of imprisonment in Myanmar
Abstract and Figures
Prisons are institutions through which states exert social control and deprive citizens of rights; where entitlements of citizens are limited to the bare minimum deemed acceptable to a given state. Therefore, prisons are institutions which reveal core aspects of the relation between a state and its citizens. In authoritarian regimes, as Myanmar was in a very recent past, prisons are places in which people are subjected to extreme punishments. In the postauthoritarian state of transition Myanmar is currently in, legacies of past regimes linger and show their face in various forms. By studying experiences of imprisonment, this study approaches experiences of subjects whose lives are under an intense state control. As it explores their experiences, it takes the temperature of
the transition as it explores what changes have occurred and what legacies remain from past political regimes.
Until recently, Myanmar was closed off to the world while under military dictatorship. For the last decade, however, major changes have occurred and a political space has opened up in which it has become possible for researchers to do empirical research within the country and in which the first ever prison research project could be launched. This dissertation is part of the project Legacies of Detention in Myanmar, which explores how practices in Myanmar prisons today are shaped by legacies from past regimes.
This dissertation focuses its attention on those who have gone through prisons as it analyses experiences of imprisonment in Myanmar. To do so, it builds on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with former and current prisoners and an action research project conducted with four former political prisoners and photographers.
The dissertation poses the research question: What experiences do prisoners in Myanmar go through and how are they affected by such experiences? This question is addressed through four publications. Paper I shows how penal practices of today are affected by legacies from the past through an ethnographic history of the practices concerned with fetters, convict officers, amnesties and torture. Paper II shows that access to experiences of imprisonment depend on other factors than physical access to prisons. Paper III shows that liminal experiences in prison can lead to positive development or suffering, depending on the presence or absence of guidance and communitas and on whether these experiences are forced or voluntarily. In doing so, it shows that solitary confinement represent structural violence, which can lead prisoners to become ‘unhinged’ from a sense of self and reality. Finally, Paper IV discusses the role of recognition in post-liminal
re-integration of former prisoners and their opportunities to reestablish their lives after release.
Through these papers and the synopsis surrounding them, the dissertation shows that prisoners go through liminal experiences which can affect them in various ways. Through theory on liminal experiences, the dissertation has identified inadequacies of prisons
that make them inherently harmful institutions. Prisons represent forced liminal experiences, in some cases without the guidance of a master of ceremony and a communitas with whom to go through liminality. Furthermore, upon release, when prisoners are supposed to exit liminal experiences, the lack of proper post-liminal rituals
that enable parity of participation through recognition, prevent prisoners from re-establishing their lives and becoming the lawabiding citizens prisons are supposed to mould them into. In addition, the empirical contribution on prisons in Myanmar
shows that legacies from the authoritarian past are still practiced within prisons in Myanmar. As a prism on the state, the prison suggests that, while in transition, Myanmar has not completely left its authoritarian past behind. This suggest either a need for further
reform if authoritarianism is to become a thing of the past, or itreveals a symptom of the shortcomings of the current disciplined democracy, which can lead to a return to authoritarianism in the future of Myanmar.
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... It can be hard for newcomers to fi nd their place in the prison hierarchy (Gaborit 2020). While detained, the activists did not only have to deal with the formal authority of prison staff , but also with the orders from the prisoner in charge of the bathroom. ...
Since the military coup on 1 February, more than 800 people, including children have been killed and more than 6,000 people have been arrested. The death toll and number of incarcerated women is sharply increasing during the crack down on protesters by security forces; yet, li le is known about the specifi c challenges and opportunities encountered by women activists while imprisoned. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with fi ve women who have been detained in connection with the military coup, this report sheds light on the torture, sexual harassment and poor prison conditions that they face.
... Liminality is not an unknown concept in prison studies (Gaborit, 2020). In some cases, the word is used without its theoretical definition by researchers who have identified it as suitable to describe what they see in prisons (see for example Guenther, 2013). ...
This article takes as its starting point the similar, yet differing, experiences of hearing voices among prisoners in Myanmar. It discusses why the experience of hearing voices described by prisoners is regarded as an occasion to share compassion when it occurs during meditation retreats and as torture when it occurs in solitary confinement. The article uses the concept of liminality to make sense of variations in these spiritual experiences and focuses on three factors: the presence or absence of communitas; a master of ceremony or other guidance; and whether the experiences take place at the volition of the person or is forced upon him. This leads to the conclusion that solitary confinement, due to its forced nature and the absence of communitas and guidance, represents a situation in which the prisoner is at risk of prolonged liminality and social harm which can unhinge him from his interrelational self.
This article explores what air means and entails in penal settings and examines how carcerality attaches itself to air. With inspiration from social science approaches to the study of air, I propose that the lived experience of prison air can be fruitfully analyzed through the notions of breath, smell, and wind. This point is explored through two incidents about prison air drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar. Together they illustrate a shift in Myanmar penality from a martial logic of destroying the enemy towards an internationally infused rationality of control and care. The first is a tale of an imprisoned engineer’s subversive effort to improve the air quality in prisons; the second, the design and building of tuberculosis wards in prisons that aim to bring prison air in line with international standards. The analysis of these incidents broadens the analytical sensorium of prison air by drawing attention to, on the one hand, a basic empirical and affective sensing of air, recognising air as a scarce and coveted resource that prison actors’ appropriate to survive. On the other hand, attention is drawn to the possibility of sensing with air, whereby the discourses, technologies, rules, and practices of air can be utilized as entry points for the analysis of prison governance and the transitional dynamics of penality.
While in the 1980s, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) III created the diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social scientists like Veena Das were foregrounding the cultural or contextual processes that were shaping the intense distress of the survivors that the psychiatric model excluded in the study of disaster survivors. As widely held, Das’ work on violence-hit humans, particularly, ‘Our work to cry: Your work to listen’, that is, a chapter in her book, Mirrors of Violence, remains one of the cornerstones in making social scientists realise the precedence to be given to the meanings and subjective experiences of trauma events from the perspective of the survivors. In this article, we attempt to highlight how this work of hers contributed to a paradigm shift in the field of trauma studies by illuminating: (a) the ways in which this shift entails focusing on the experiences of suffering shaped within the cultural and socio-political context, (b) the need to transcend the psychiatric model and (c) how ethnographic fieldwork enables the researcher to focus on the nuances of the everyday experiences of the trauma survivors.
This book constitutes a critical case study of the modern search for public sector reform. It includes a detailed account of a study aimed at developing a meaningful way of evaluating difficult-to-measure moral dimensions of the quality of prisons. Penal practices, values, and sensibilities have undergone important transformations over the period 1990-2003. Part of this transformation included a serious flirtation with a liberal penal project that went wrong. A significant factor in this unfortunate turn of events was a lack of clarity, by those working in and managing prisons, about important terms such as ‘justice’, ‘liberal’, and ‘care’, and how they might apply to daily penal life. Official measures of the prison seem to lack relevance to many who live and work in prison and to their critics. The author proposes that a truer test of the quality of prison life is what staff and prisoners have to say about those aspects of prison life that ‘matter most’: relationships, fairness, order, and the quality of their treatment. The book attempts a detailed analysis and measurement of these dimensions in five prisons. It finds significant differences between establishments in these areas of prison life, and some departures from the official vision of the prison supported by the performance framework. The information revolution has generated unprecedented levels of knowledge about individual prisons, as well as providing a management reach into establishments from a distance, and a capacity for ‘chronic revision’, that was unimaginable fifty years ago. Another major transformation – the modernisation project – brought with it a new, but flawed, ‘craft’ of performance monitoring and measurement aimed at solving some of the problems of prison management. This book explores the arrival and the impact of this concept of performance and the links apparently forged between managerialism and moral values.
This is the first book to provide a broad overview of the ways in which Buddhist ideas have influenced political thinking and politics in Myanmar. Matthew J. Walton draws extensively on Burmese language sources from the last 150 years to describe the ‘moral universe’ of contemporary Theravada Buddhism that has anchored most political thought in Myanmar. In explaining multiple Burmese understandings of notions such as ‘democracy’ and ‘political participation’, the book provides readers with a conceptual framework for understanding some of the key dynamics of Myanmar’ ongoing political transition. Some of these ideas help to shed light on restrictive or exclusionary political impulses, such as anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalism or scepticism towards the ability of the masses to participate in politics. Walton provides an analytical framework for understanding Buddhist influences on politics that will be accessible to a wide range of readers and will generate future research and debate.
This book breathes new life into the study of liminal experiences of transition and transformation, or ‘becoming’. It brings fresh insight into affect and emotion, dream and imagination, and fabulation and symbolism by tracing their relation to experiences of liminality. The author proposes a distinctive theory of the relationship between psychology and the social sciences with much to share with the arts. Its premise is that psychosocial existence is not made of ‘stuff’ like building blocks, but of happenings and events in which the many elements that compose our lives are temporarily drawn together. The social is not a thing but a flow of processes, and our personal subjectivity is part of that flow, ‘selves’ being tightly interwoven with ‘others’. But there are breaks and ruptures in the flow, and during these liminal occasions our experience unravels and is rewoven. This book puts such moments at the core of the psychosocial research agenda. Of transdisciplinary scope, it will appeal beyond psychosocial studies and social psychology to all scholars interested in the interface between experience and social (dis)order.