Defined Elsewhere

Insight Myanmar · Oct 27, 2026 · 1h 56m

Episode #631: “Community for me is an other-making category.” Judith Beyer, a legal and political anthropologist and the author of Rethinking Community in Myanmar, uses an ordinary word to expose a long political inheritance. Her fieldwork in Yangon began with Muslim and Hindu individuals who presented themselves to an outsider first and foremost as members of ethno-religious communities. But the closer she looked, and the more acquainted she became with these individuals, the less stable this self-categorization became.

In her book, Beyer traces the category back through British colonial…