Striking new insights into understanding community in Myanmar In this first anthropological study of Muslim and Hindu lives in urban Myanmar today, Beyer develops the concept of ‘we-formation’ to demonstrate that individuals are always more than members of wider groups. ‘We-formation’ complements her rich political, legal and historical analysis of ‘community’, a term used by Beyer’s interlocutors themselves, even as it reinforces ethno-religious stereotypes and their own minority status. The book also offers an interpretation of the dynamics of resistance to the attempted military coup of 2021.

Judith Beyer is Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Konstanz. She specializes in legal and political anthropology and has long-term ethnographic field experience in both Southeast Asia and Central Asia. In Myanmar, her research focuses on ethno-religious minorities, community, activism, statelessness and the state.

— Moussons

— PoLAR

— Anthropologie et Société [translated from French]

“In her profoundly ambitious and creative book, she places at the center the individuality of the Muslim and Hindu interlocutors who compose their respective communities and the consequential belonging in Myanmar…. This book is an original and timely study on ethno-religious minority groups, about whom there is limited in-depth knowledge, based in a country that continues to be largely overlooked in research.”

— Conflict and Society