Taking Dumont to Southeast Asia

Louis Dumont’s analysis of hierarchy in South Asia provides insight into how hierarchical assumptions inform social relations in Burma. Although Burmese society lacks caste, it still organizes everyone’s social relations on the principle that individuals enter into relationships because of their differences, and every relationship will place one person in a position of superiority, the other as subordinate. Benedict Anderson’s work on charisma in Java complements Dumont’s work by showing how assuming that power comes from above encourages people to subordinate themselves to concentrations of power. Marina Warner’s analysis of tales makes it clear that people who are structurally weak have no choice but to try to establish themselves as dependents of powerful others. Kapferer’s work in Sri Lanka provides further guidance for adapting Dumont’s analysis of hierarchy to other contexts outside India.

Hierarchical Habits

In the absence of kinship-based corporate groups, Burmese society enjoins everyone to demonstrate their awareness of their relative status in any encounter by means of linguistic and bodily signs of deference or assertiveness. The Southeast Asia-wide emotion of “shame” arises when someone fails to act appropriately in light of their status relative to others in a given encounter. Because so much rides on the performance of status-awareness in interaction, face-to-face encounter comes to be seen as a site of great risk. At the same time, efforts to improve impressions of one’s standing motivate a great deal of people’s activity, as illustrated in the Burmese educational system’s competition-based practices.

Masculinity’s Others

Men’s superior status within Burmese society places women, nuns, and trans women in positions of subordinate status. Debate about women’s “relatively high standing” in Burmese society is best resolved by considering the hierarchical understandings that make subordination appropriate rather than oppressive in the views of many Burmese women. Women’s subordination stems from and allows for their greater readiness to forge attachments. Nuns arouse ambivalent reactions because as religious their choosing autonomy makes sense but as women it does not. Trans women are disdained because they give up the greater prestige and autonomy their biological sex makes readily available to them. But they are tolerated because they respect gender categories and behave in accordance with their feminine, thus subordinate, status.

Taking Autonomy and Attachment Further Afield

Cultural comparison stirs debate because it leads too easily to simplification and stereotyping. Yet it seems worthwhile to note and reflect upon affinities among many Southeast Asian societies. Even beyond the region, the existential contradiction between our desires for autonomy and attachment provides a fruitful analytic approach to much we observe in people’s thinking and behavior. Works by Marx, Durkheim, and Weber can also be looked at from this angle. So can much popular culture, as illustrated by a number of international films that play on the tension between the allure of forming tight bonds and the fear of feeling too tightly bound.

Masculinity

Connell’s famous account of “hegemonic” masculinity requires some qualification in light of the fact that in Burma a man wins respect by fulfilling either of two roles: as a male householder or as a Buddhist monk. More telling in Burma gender ideology than masculine vs. feminine is the less intuitively obvious but crucial distinction between autonomy and attachment. Masculine prestige stems from displays of autonomy. Because sexual relations imply at least some compromise of autonomy, in the need for a female partner, the monk’s sexual continence means that he enacts autonomy more thoroughly than male householders, justifying his greater prestige and explaining the prominence his asexuality holds in all accounts of his role’s obligations.

Meditation

Many Burmese Buddhists consider meditation the most praiseworthy activity one can undertake as a pious Buddhist, whether religious or lay. This chapter suggests that meditation’s prestige stems from its model of overcoming vulnerability in interaction by withdrawing from it. The chapter relates the course of a ten-day meditation retreat based on the currently more prestigious “insight” rather than “concentration” meditation tradition. It analyzes the prominence of meditation in contemporary Burmese discourse as reflecting the great value placed on autonomy, particularly for males. By instantiating the cessation of interaction, meditation models a condition of invulnerability and serenity that achieving detachment proffers.

Discretionary Attachments

Focusing specifically on the tenor of the social relations to be observed among monks and novices in the monastery described in Chapter Two, this chapter describes the fairly attenuated degree of attachment that characterizes relations among the monastery’s residents: among themselves and with their lay supporters. Buddhist injunctions to minimize one’s attachments in this world complement a gender ideology that idealizes masculine autonomy. As a result, fluid, polite, but low-intensity relationships are the rule among the monastery’s residents, particularly as they grow older.

Everyday Forms of Hierarchical Observance

This chapter illustrates the way hierarchical understandings shape what happens in three everyday situations in Burma. Interaction among drivers, motorcyclists, and pedestrians on Burma’s roads shows hierarchy at its simplest, in the inequality that obtains among participants who nevertheless seize any opportunity that presents itself for getting ahead. At Buddhist sermons, listeners, mostly women, make enthusiastic display of their subordination to monks, demonstrating the appeal of taking up subordinate status relative to a highly respected other. In tea shops, arrangements for placing orders and paying for them enable customers to enjoy the privileges of higher standing without being in any way entangled in ongoing relationships, even momentary ones, with their servers, thus illustrating the principles of free market exchange.

Introduction

Interaction among drivers, motorcyclists, and pedestrians on Burma’s streets introduces the simplest version of hierarchy as it shapes a series of encounters among unequal but still recognized participants. Hierarchy provides a guiding thread through the outline of the chapters that follow.

Gaining Access to Power

Because social relations imply an individual’s vulnerability, ways must be found to protect oneself. Two possibilities present themselves: amassing power in oneself in order to make oneself resistant to outside attack; or subordinating oneself to concentrations of power (whether human or otherwise) from whom one will gain protection. This chapter enumerates some of the measures taken to foster invulnerability, including the use of amulets, daily Pali recitation, tattoos, and organized readings of particularly powerful Pali texts. It also describes the relations some people enter into with spirits (nat) and Buddhist saints (wei’za), entities whose power is believed to be available to supplicants who demonstrate their fealty to them, but who arouse considerable ambivalence among other, orthodox and reformist Burmese Buddhists.