TH #10 The Mean Time

Towards Home #10

The Mean Time

April, 2002

He will find some refuge in his music
And a long shot that they will reconcile
The meantime is a mean time and he knows it
‘Til the day he's back upon the pile
-- John Gorka, “The Ballad of Jamie Bee”

I was born in 1968, the youngest of eight children. My parents had trees planted (or named) for the first two kids. We had Lauralee's tree outside the back door and Mark's tree at the end of the driveway. Perhaps they foresaw the six more coming and decided against cultivating a forest on the small plot of land surrounding the house. As I grew up in that house, the photo-essay book, 1968, frequently caught my attention. I assumed the book was part of an annual series and that my parents had bought the book to mark the year of my birth, not because of the important world events of that year – political assassinations, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement. I was confused that another seven in the series for each of my siblings did not appear on the bookshelf. I considered the possibility that they had switched from trees to books (a logical progression), but that would have left five missing.

The book fed my youngest-child arrogance that I was the center of the world, and my existence was relevant to all things. It has been a hard lesson in humility to recognize that I have only a small role to play in the world. Still, visions of ... not grandeur exactly, but of relevance, of doing something significant, have never really left me. Neither has the angst of wondering what my role should be. What has become much clearer is that I enjoy doing anthropology, and I'm hooked on the Burmese struggle for democracy and how they make their history in the context of that struggle. For the first time, I know what I want I want to be working on five years from now: how communities deal with past human rights abuses, or transitional justice, from an anthropological perspective.

With this long-term goal vaguely in mind, last June I launched a new project on transitional justice. After taking the time to read up on the recent developments around the world (plans for trials for Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia, a war crimes court in Sierra Leone, the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague), I got busy with designing a project that would respond to the needs of Burmese communities when there is a transition to democracy there. My focus has been on (1) trainings to share information about these various transitional case studies; (2) research to bring perspectives from people affected by human rights abuses to the attention of policy makers when they go to the negotiating table with the military and start talking about amnesties and reparations; and (3) coordinating the efforts of various groups documenting human rights abuses so that the data can be brought together in a unified format, making it stronger than each organization's individual set of information. Once I had this design worked out in my head, I set it to paper and started meeting with potential funders and human rights organizations to inquire about support for my initiative. I knew this process would take a long time and would wear me thin, but I had no idea how raw it would make me. Now, ten months later (all salary-less), I am waiting to hear decisions about three proposals that I have pending with various funders. While I have been plenty busy during this planning stage, it has taken its toll. As John Gorka sings, "the meantime is a mean time."

One of the issues that confounds me the most here is figuring out my role as a Westerner involved in the Burmese struggle for democracy and human rights, and communication is a key factor in that role. How to negotiate communication norms that respect the importance of "saving face" continues to baffle me. Thai and Burmese friends always seem to be practicing a delicate linguistic dance of never embarrassing someone in public, and in my view, honesty gets sacrificed. A friend told me the other day about an interaction that illustrates this dance. During a visit to a village, she had to hang her sarong up to dry, and she was not clued in that it is inappropriate to put some women's clothing in a place where others could walk under it. This practice comes from a Burmese superstition – still widely followed if not wholly believed – that walking under a woman's lower garment takes away a man's power. (There are also some very progressive things going on regarding women's rights here, but the complex attitudes toward women is a topic for another issue of the newsletter.) So my friend asked, "is it okay if I hang my sarong here?" pointing to the rail of a balcony under which people frequently walked. Her hosts apparently thought it would embarrass her to say no, so they said it was okay. The first chance someone had, they tried to slide the sarong down to a less trafficked area. Then when my friend left the room for a few minutes, someone got up and moved the sarong to a more appropriate place. She realized later that her question should have been, "where would be a good place to hang my sarong?" Yes-and-no does not work too well in many instances. While I can learn some of the linguistic tricks, I think I'll never be able to fully adapt to not getting a direct answer to a direct question.

The problems that come with cross-cultural communication will be particularly challenging in leading a project on such a politically sensitive issue as transitional justice. I am still developing the skills to work within the communication norms of Burmese societies, and my decision-making will depend on feedback from the groups I'm working with. My original idea was that once the funding was secure, I would hire a Burmese colleague to co-direct the project with me, and I would gradually withdraw from the leadership role on the project. The Catch-22 is that while my Burmese colleagues have the same capacity as anyone to work on these issues, very few Burmese have exposure to issues I studied in graduate school to be able to effectively give the project some direction.

This dilemma is leading me to step back from launching my original plan, a large project on transitional justice, with a five-year vision of building up an organization to address transitional issues. Instead, I am keeping my own five-year goal of doing anthropological research in mind and initiating this project with an openness to where it takes me. I want to ensure local ownership of the project, but I remain torn by this contradiction of not wanting to impose my vision on a local situation versus my internationalist humanism that tells me that I should have as much concern for a displaced Burmese villager as I should for a homeless person on the east side of Indianapolis. I have the interest, knowledge, and dedication to share what I've studied and that comparative perspective has given me a vision for how to solve some problems, to create a project that will strengthen the voice of people who have suffered because of military abuses.

The answer, of course, is to live with that tension, to situate myself between these two contradictory truths. At least I'll be in good company. This liminal space is where most anthropologists end up.

The field of anthropology has fostered some great euphemisms for what-anthropologists-do: snowball sampling, unstructured interviews, and participant observation, for example. To clue you in: snowball sampling means you get the guy you're talking to to suggest somebody else to talk to, such as his friend next to him at the bar; unstructured interviews are one-on-one discussions without a set of questions, just an idea of a topic, not unlike most discussions non-anthropologists might have; and participant observation ... well, that's just hanging out – you go to a festival, check out the music, eat some food, talk to people.

At least that's how it looks on the surface, and to a hard scientist who likes numbers and structure and statistics to analyze, such methods may seem a bit fluffy. But the idea is to blend in a little, not interrupt the social flow. Of course, one's participation does affect the social dynamic, but by not coming in and controlling the setting, by mixing, one can minimize the changes. There's also a method to all this hanging out and discussion madness. In one's mind, a set of questions or ideas is rolling around, like "how do the people I'm talking with understand the cause of their suffering? Karma? Military abuse of power? Something else? A combination of them all?" Instead of doing a survey and asking fifteen people what they think, you join conversations just as you would in other settings, but you train your ear to pay attention to those issues that you're interested in or you prompt, in a natural-flow-of-discussion sort of way, people to talk about those issues. Anthropologists learn to be both locals and outsiders, and at the same time they are neither.

My colleagues from Burma also live in a liminal world, in exile but constantly attentive to what's happening inside Burma, in a meantime of anticipation. Some colleagues come from families that have been on the run for decades because of their struggle to gain rights for themselves as ethnic minorities. Some students left Burma after the military's brutal crackdown on the popular uprising of 1988 and the unrecognized elections of 1990. Many of them came from the cities of Rangoon and Mandalay and joined with the ethnic minority armies on the Thai-Burma border with the hope of overthrowing the regime. After a series military defeats in the mid-1990s, their strategy turned to encouraging another popular uprising in 1998 and 1999. When people did not take to the streets and the armed struggle became a guerrilla movement of self-protection, morale within the pro-democracy movement reached a low point and there seemed to be a lack of vision.

Gradually, a longer-term approach to promoting democracy started to emerge, and a lot of individuals and organizations started thinking about what they would do once they are able to return to Burma. They began to initiate activities to prepare themselves: education, comparative analysis of government systems, and conflict transformation projects among groups located along the border. At the end of 2000, opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the military junta began closed-door discussions about a potential dialogue. Hoping that these talks lead to a democratic transition, my colleagues are starting to think more concretely about what roles they could play in the transition in addition to how to provoke the dialogue, if not a revolution. We don't talk about it much, but I imagine it is rough for them to feel like outsiders in a significant aspect of their own struggle. Will all the work they have been doing for the last decade be relevant if they return to Burma during a transition?

Perhaps one benefit of the long struggle is that the movement has matured in exile. The people outside of Burma have adapted to the changes, and their flexibility is an indication that their contribution will be significant, that when they return home one day they will be able to negotiate roles for themselves that utilize that maturity. As the presses (a.k.a. Laura’s and Andy’s computer) were getting ready to roll on this newsletter, I received word that my project will receive one year of funding from the U.S. Institute of Peace. It has been a long wait, and I am relieved to have some stability for this project. I hope that, like the exiled democracy movement, the mistakes and preparations that I have made will become assets in my own attempt to figure out my role. And I hope that in Burma they will soon be able to write a book about the year a peaceful, democratic government sent the soldiers back to their barracks.