ABSTRACT
Formerly known as Burma, Myanmar, is undergoing profound, rapid and uneven change. Economic reforms intersect with the political, with questions of identity, citizenship and belonging found at the heart of much of the communal violence seen in the early years of the 21st century. Despite increasing urbanization, Myanmar remains predominantly rural, both in terms of population, and economic activity. This book is about organizations of reciprocity in rural Myanmar, which are shaped both by conditions of precarity, and by Buddhistic principles of altruism, known as parahita. This chapter introduces the main themes of the book, which uses contemporary data to interact with James Scott’s seminal work ‘The Moral Economy of the Peasant’. Faced with the challenges and uncertainties of a post-agrarian economy, rural communities respond to precarious conditions in a variety of ways, including collective welfare efforts which express a form of moral economy. This forms the nexus of analysis, considering the ways in which these particular, localized responses to precarity are shaped by, and in turn re-shape, notions of citizenship in the context of post-agrarian economies. This chapter concludes with provides a brief summary of the main data sources and methods used for the research described in the book.
