‘Power-Hurt’: The Pains of Kindness Among Disabled Karen Refugees in Thailand

ABSTRACT

In this paper I show how, for many Karen living as refugees in ‘temporary-shelter-areas’ in Thailand, acts of care and kindness often slipped into something painful and controlling. Drawing on fieldwork among Karen refugees disabled by landmines I show how asking for and receiving help was almost always accompanied by the visceral sensation of ana, literally, ‘power hurt’. On the one hand, ana was the force driving the circulation of care and kindness, provoking people to help others. On the other hand this circulation also carried with it the constant potential to compromise not only the recipient’s but also the donor’s ‘power’, which was understood as their capacity to have an effect on the world. In this manner ana may offer us with a way to grasp the ethical-affective basis of a social arrangement that slips smoothly between lateral solidarities and vertical hierarchical relations allowing egalitarianism and hierarchy to co-exist.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• Karen
• disabilities
• Thailand
• egalitarianism/hierarchy

The monsoon season has finally descended upon the border area as my motorbike picked its way down the long and bumpy dirt track leading to deh htaw (boarding house or care home in Sgaw Karen) that has been transformed into a veritable torrent by the rains. I consider turning back but this is the only road that leads here and it may be my last chance to visit.

When I finally arrive at deh htaw – which sits atop a hill slightly away from all the other buildings in the area – as I enter the dark and dank building it is typically silent, and nobody stirs. I make a beeline for the stairs down to the lower level where I find Hah Luh and Aung in their usual positions sat on a bed. Hah Luh found that in this exact spot there is a small through draught making it slightly less stifling here. I sit down beside them and we begin to chat. After a short while we come back to yesterday’s topic about their previous lives as soldiers. Both men are particularly loquacious today and eagerly tell me about their experiences in Southeast Myanmar.

As Hah Luh narrates the story of how he came here, and of how the Myanmar army, the Tatmadaw, had orders to shoot-on-sight in the area where he lived, he slices a betel nut with a small pair of cutters, places it on a betel leaf together with some tobacco and lime, before folding it into a small quid. Without saying a word he then places it gently into the crook of Aung’s shortest amputated arm and helps him guide it into his mouth before preparing a new quid for himself. The deftness of this social interaction is all the more impressive to me given that both men are totally blind.

As we continue chatting I try to inquire as to what life was like when they first arrived here at deh htaw. I have recently been told that Hah Luh had refused to eat, drink, and sleep for the first weeks that he was here and I am eager to hear about how he himself describes this period. His reply is terse and sharp, making it clear that he has nothing more to say on the subject:

Here it is not really a problem. Everyone speaks Karen so it is not difficult. Also I did not have to ask for help as I could learn everything by myself.

After a short silence Aung softly interjects:

When I first came here I missed my friends and the place I was born. Most of the people who stay in the camp cannot go home, so have to be looked after and supported, living in poverty. There are few chances to do what you want as you are under the control of others, so you just have to be satisfied with the situation. People outside may have more freedom but people in the camps have to be satisfied

There are many ways to tell the story of how these two men disabled by mines came to live together in this small care home in a refugee camp in Northwest Thailand, with almost endless tangents that could be taken along the way. In this paper I focus the story around what Aung hints to at the end of this ethnographic vignette, that to live in a care home in a refugee camp and be looked after by others is to place one’s life under their control.

I explore how, for the people living with disabilities I came to know during fieldwork in a refugee camp in Northwest Thailand in 2013, not only were their bodies constantly racked with aches and pains but, in accepting kindness and care from others, they also felt their ‘Power’ chronically being hurt. This sensation of pain that accompanied acts of kindness and care was expressed in the affect, ana, which literally translated means, a: ‘power/strength’, na: ‘suffer pain or be hurt’ in the Burmese language from which it is loaned to S’gaw Karen¹. In attempting to unravel this I approach a, this power/strength, in various ways. I found that people often talked of it as a form of existential power, as in one’s ability to act in the world (Jackson 2002; 2011; Rapport 2003). This resonates strongly with the ‘social model of disability’ where dis-abilities are understood as deeply relational, situated not purely in the body but co-created by social and material conditions that dis-able bodies and minds (e.g. Ingstad & Whyte 1995; Eide & Ingstad 2011; Ginsburg & Rapp 2013). Moreover, in exploring the nexus of care and disability this paper follows and builds upon notions of ‘complex dependency’ (Simplican 2015).

From this perspective ana could be construed as an ethical affect that drove people to avoid situations that may injure another person’s power/strength, often endangering their own in the process. However, as I began to explore this more in depth I found that this power/strength, resonated with what have been described as ‘southeast Asian forms of power’ (Chua et al. 2012: 1). In these descriptions, as opposed to many philosophical and social science accounts, power is not grasped as something abstract, heterogeneous, limitless and morally ambiguous but as an existential reality that is homogenous and finite, anteceding questions of ethics (Anderson 1990: 19–23). In many ways power/strength resembles more what Shelly Errington calls ‘potency’, a cosmic energy that is at once both an existential and political force, its signs being coeval with status and hierarchy (Errington 2014: 10). The very possession of power lends a person with authority and legitimacy since, as Anderson puts it. ‘power is’, full stop (1990: 23).

Following these lines, in this paper I intend to unsettle given conceptions of kindness and care as benign gestures, to investigate how they may equally be seen as alternate ways of augmenting the donors own (political) power and diminishing that of the recipient² – in order to take ‘control’ of them as Aung put it – acting as pathways for the movement of locally legitimate authority and governance through the camp and beyond. As we shall see, this becomes particularly salient in the lives of those most dependent on others. Those most dependent then act as a limit case to elucidate a more general but subtle tendency for kindness and care to slip smoothly into power and patronage and back again. In this way, we can begin to glimpse how the circulation of these ethical affects may have also provided the underpinnings of a process that tied people to hierarchical arrangements and enliven obligations such that they seemed to willingly submit themselves to others, whist maintaining a sense of egalitarian relations. However, to begin to tell this part of the story I will first need to take a step back and offer a short contextualisation of the situations that drove these men and hundreds of thousands of others from the places they were born in Burma/Myanmar to the refugee camps in Northwest Thailand.

Spectres of Colonialism Stalking the South-Eastern Hills

The small care home, deh htaw, where both Aung and Hah Lur resided can be found in one of the sprawling refugee camps that lie along Thailand’s western border with neighbouring Myanmar/Burma. The South-eastern fringes of Myanmar, formerly Burma (the place where Aung and Hah Lur were born), that are adjacent to the camps in Thailand have been entangled in chronic civil-war for close to 70 years, leading hundreds of thousands of people to spill across its borders into Thailand.

As many scholars before me have shown, the contours of this conflict first began to congeal through encounters between the indigenous peoples of this area and Baptist missionaries from the United States, with British Imperial forces hot on their heals, at the dawn of the 19th century.

At this time this area, nestled in the uplands between the Siamese (now Thai) and Burmese lowland states – what James Scott may define as ‘non-state-spaces’ between states – was host to a blistering array of linguistic and ethnic difference (Scott 2009; South 2008; Gravers 1999). In their initial encounters, these early missionaries and British Imperial officers began to curry favour with the subaltern and largely animist peoples of Southeast reaches of the Burmese state, mixing their messages of spiritual salvation with one of political and economic salvation and forging strong ties with them in the process (Hayami 2004; Gravers 2007; 1999; South 2008; cf. Salemink 2015). As the British empire moved to colonise all of what is now the Union of Myanmar they received large support from these subaltern and newly Christianised upland groups of the Southeast, intensifying these ties and reconfiguring them into ‘loyalist’ relations (Smeaton 1920; Christie 2000). As the British took power they began, following the missionaries, to designate these groups as a separate ‘race’, the Karen, and gave them central positions in the new colonial regime in return for quelling anti-colonial unrest, largely emanating from the lowland Burman speaking majority (Marshall 1922; Gravers 1999). By utilising the ‘loyal Karen’ to supress rebellions from other groups a wedge was driven between these upland subaltern peoples and those from the lowland states whose relations had previously oscillated between amity and animosity – between these upland groups actively seeking patron-client relations in the tributary hierarchies of lowland states and ensconcing themselves in the hills (Graves 1999). This new political configuration was closely followed by steadily increasing eruptions of inter-group violence. In response to this the peoples of the Southeast began to rally around the notion of a shared belonging under an exonym ‘Karen’ to form Burma’s first ethno-national political organisation, daw k’lu, ‘every group of people/clan’ (the closest any of the bundle of languages included in this term come to the term nation), or the Karen National Association (KNA, latter Karen National Union, KNU) in 1881 (Christie 2000: 105; Buadaeng 2007: 77; South 2008: 17). As the intergroup violence intensified the leaders of the KNA began making demands to their sovereignty, articulated in calls for an autonomous Karen state to be named Kawthoolei, which they argued was needed to shelter them from the growing conflict (San C. Po 1928).

As a result, in the wake of Second World War, when the country successfully petitioned for its independence from Britain, they continued to be haunted by the spectres of colonialism and Baptist proselytising. Upon the eve of its independence in 1948, the newly minted Union of Burma, unable to agree on a federal solution, folded almost immediately, collapsing into civil war along almost exactly the fissures of ethnicity and religion harrowed into the landscape by nearly a hundred years of colonial rule.

In the upheaval of these times, as inter-group violence reached a crescendo, the KNU and its armed wing the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA, whom both Aung and Hah Lur served with prior to their injuries) declared revolution in the beginning of 1949. They soon made significant territorial gains, especially in the Southeast highlands that border with Thailand. In what they referred to as their ‘liberated areas’, the KNU took over many of the functions of the state becoming an insurgent ‘para-state’ (South 2008: 38): the vision of an autonomous Kawthoolei becoming an everyday reality. The KNU quickly gained hegemony of the markets not only of protection but also of health, education, forestry and agriculture such they came to be known as the ‘mother’ and protector of the peoples of this area, affording their governance with a great deal of authority.

However, as the war wore on this hegemony was not left unchallenged. By the 1960s a resurgent Tatmadaw began to wrestle back control through a bundle of counterinsurgency strategies collectively known as the 4-cuts (Smith 1991; South 2008). These 4-cuts aimed to sunder lines of food, personnel, communication and money between the KNLA and their civilian bases of support by razing thousands of villages on these borderlands to the ground, saturating the ruins with landmines, and forcefully resetting their inhabitants to areas under strict Tatmadaw control and surveillance (KHRG 2001; 2009; South 2008; Smith 1991). This had a profound effect on the Karen peoples of the Southeast. By the mid-90s these counter-insurgency strategies had greatly eroded KNUs ability to care and protect the people in their liberated areas such that half a million civilians became internally displaced and hundreds of thousands more fled across the border in waves into Thailand and into mushrooming refugee camps.

As the population of these camps swelled it became increasingly apparent that the Royal Thai Government (RTG) had little intention of stepping in to assist these people, often pushing them back over the border and into the Tatmadaw’s guns. Having never acceded to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention the Royal Thai Government has actively avoided referring to these women, men, and children crossing the border from Myanmar/Burma as ‘refugees’ in its rhetoric, preferring ‘people fleeing fighting’ and the places they are encamped as ‘temporary shelter areas’ (Tangseefa 2007: 234). Moreover, in refusing these people refugee status and offering exceedingly limited pathways to Thai citizenship, the Royal Thai Government inscribed them as ‘outside’ the law making them largely unable to seek legal protection, lawful employment or even the right to fell trees or cultivate small gardens to build more than rudimentary homes and livelihoods (Tangseefa 2007: 234).³ Somewhat parallel to migrants from East Flores living in Sabah, these women and men had become ‘stuck’ (Allterton, this issue), unable to either return home due to chronic armed conflcit or to build any kind of future here in these temporary shelter areas.

In these camps that Tangseefa (2006), following Agamben, calls ‘spaces of exception’, to maintain its sovereign duties of protecting and caring for its people the KNU began to cooperate with a slowly growing web of transnational Baptist church and non-religious humanitarian organisations in order to provide food, shelter, and education to over 100,000 refugees that resided on the Thai side of the border. These ‘uneasy pairs’ as Alexander Horstman (2015) terms it, of humanitarian and ethnic armed groups, led to numerous accusations that the refugee camps in Thailand, like those in Congo in the mid-90s, had become militarised, making them the new staging posts of the civil-war. The KNU/KNLA were seen wield their authority to mobilise the inhabitants in supporting their militant objectives (McConnachie 2012; see especially UNHCR 2006; South 2007: 62–63; 2011: 4). However, as Kirsten McConnachie (2012) shows, this figure of the ‘refugee warrior’ has little resonance with the way the refugee camps in Thailand were governed, at least during the period of her research, by civilian structures that were largely independent from the KNU. As she demonstrates in her monograph Governing Refugees, the day-to-day affairs of the camps were handled by camp leaders and NGO organisations that had at best rather tenuous relations with armed groups such as the KNU/KNLA (McConnachie 2014). Indeed, during my time in the camp I came to learn that the people living here were mostly left to their own devices, by both the Thai government and the KNU. Most of the everyday governance was delegated to ‘section leaders’, elected in each administrative zone of the camp who, in most situations, had little de-facto authority. In this way they resemble the position of the headman in the egalitarian gumlao ideal political systems Edmund Leach described in the Kachin highlands of what is now Myanmar (Leach 1954: 199). Following on from this, in the sections that follow I interrogate the prospect of viewing everyday governance in the camps in Northwest Thailand, akin to Leach’s gumlao-gumsa flux, as constantly cycling between egalitarian and hierarchical political systems. I do this by exploring the liveworlds of those most deeply dependent on the circulation of care and kindness from others, almost exclusively fellow Karen.

Hierarchy or Living ‘Like a Family’?

The care home where we first met the two broken soldiers was set up to house those most profoundly injured, almost exclusively by landmines, whose families, for whatever reason, were unable to care for them themselves. Although the organisation running the care home, the Karen Handicap Welfare Association (KHWA) was nominally a KNU affiliate, neither the carers nor the organising committee had any formal ties to the ‘mother organisation’, the KNU, and received little more than ‘a little money for curries’ on the rare occasions an official from the KNU actually visited. All the members of the organising committee, elected every two years, were however, closely affiliated with the local church, as either pastors or at the least avid churchgoers. As a result, the day-to-day needs of rice and a roof over their heads were mostly met by daily rations received from an NGO The Border Consortium (that began its existence as a loose federation of transnational church organisations), subsidised by the local church and occasional donations through American Baptist networks. However, all ‘short-term care’ (Allterton, this issue) was administered and distributed by fellow S’gaw speaking Karen who formed the overwhelming majority in this part of the camp. These carers would, despite Hah Lur’s claims to the contrary, cook all the meals and help many of the men to dress, shower, navigate whenever they stepped foot outside the care home and, from time to time, even to eat.

As my time in this care home wore on residents would regularly impress on me that they had never felt forced to do anything since coming here, neither by camp authorities, carers nor their former military leaders. As two former soldiers from the KNLA residing in the care home stressed, although some of the other residents had been quite high ranking officers in the revolution ‘it is like a brotherhood. We care for each other like a family’. He went on to add ‘we are all human so we must help each other’. These lateral solidarities were something I witnessed extensively. Those without arms spooned rice into their mouths by those with one or two arms to spare, the blind men were led to church by those with some sight, and tobacco, betel, tea and food were shared freely. This dovetails with a common theme in the academic literature that Karennic speaking, and upland people in general, are strongly egalitarian and politically decentralised, with social differentiation found largely only in the deference, shown along the vectors of age and perceived knowledge (Marshall 1922; Andersen 1980; Hayami 2004; Rajah 2008). As Kirsten Ewers Andersen (1980) has demonstrated among Phlong speaking, and Ananda Rajah (2008) among S’gaw speaking Karen in Thailand, those who were older and/or religious leaders were shown greater deference on account of their perceived superior access to socially valuable knowledge such as social history and knowledge of magic.

Among the Karen people I came to know in the camp this sense of being ‘like a family’ was achieved largely by extending the network of relatedness beyond the immediate mother-child ties in a manner parallel to that seen across Southeast Asia (Hayami 2012; cf. Carsten 2000). In this way a strong deference was shown to older men who were ones kyaw (older-brother), dee (uncles), or hpu (grandfathers) who one should speak ‘carefully’ to and not joke (too much) with. Between brothers one can speak freely but, ‘if the elder brother corrects something then the younger brother must listen and show respect’ I was told. Much the same was the case for thramu/thara (female/male school or religious teachers). They were accorded with more respect such that one was expected to listen to them more attentively by merit of their education and thus, greater knowledge. However, as the men in the care home constantly stressed, this relation never went beyond one of deference and at no point did elders or thramu/thara attempt to coerce them into anything they ‘did not want to do’. These were seen as intimate, familial obligations. In the same way people living in the neighbouring area were also included in such familiar relations, ‘as brothers and sisters’, akin to how Leach describes the gumlao ideal system as one where people were of equal rank (Leach 1954: 200).

Other than the deference shown to one’s elders there were few apparent markers of hierarchy. Intrinsic to this deference, however, was the difficulty in refusing requests made by one’s elders or thramu/thara, of which status I too was accorded. When they made a request, as my field assistant Saw Paul phrased, ‘[it feels as if] the words will not come out of your mouth’ to decline them. When I asked him to elaborate on this he informed me that it was what in S’gaw Karen is known as ‘anade’, or simply ana.

As I began to delve into the entailments of this affect I found that my other field assistant Htein Soe, had been consistently interpreting it for me as ‘having sympathy for’ others. This dovetails with how Ah Dee, a bright-eyed man almost bubbling over with enthusiasm and somewhat of the local expert in matters of Karen traditions, described this affect to me. For him ana is a ‘concern for the other person’ that they may feel bad, that one may ‘break their heart’. The feeling of ana is then a sense of concern that both motivates people to help suffering others, somewhat parallel to sympathy, but can also cause difficulties in asking for things and refusing certain requests out of a fear of hurting their feelings. In this manner we see how imbalances in relations between people in the care home and beyond were constantly grasped as emanating from a sense of care and concern for other people, to not ‘break their heart’, rather than from their authority. This rather apolitical understanding of ana as an affect that constrained a person’s capacity to refuse certain demands made on them out of a fear of ‘break[ing] their heart’ became clearer when related to foreign missionaries. In these cases people would rather avoid the unwanted advances of their aggressive proselytising than refuse them outright.

Moo, a young woman living by the care home who lost her left leg to a landmine at an early age, for example, was often visited by a group of Korean missionaries. On one such visit they forcibly clasped her hands together such that she could confess her sins, before going on to lecture her on why it was wrong, and frankly childish, for her to worship and feed a picture (of the Buddha). Despite these unpleasant experiences, she accepted the missionaries into her home time and time again, on each occasion listening patiently to what they had to say. When I asked her why she did this she said, ‘we have to say yes. You can't avoid it and can't escape it, so you have no choice, even if you are not interested’. Similarly, her neighbour Htoo Heh who had also lost a leg to a landmine, despite being a devout Buddhist would also listen patiently to what missionaries had to say. When I asked him what he says to them he replied, ‘I say thank you’, or that he believes in God until they stop asking questions⁴. As my field assistant Htein Soe advised me on many occasions, ‘sometimes the best way forward is to go around and tell a little lie’ holding out his hand and tracing elliptic path across his palm with his finger. Karen Christians/Missionaries were given much the same treatment. When they invited Htoo heh to pray with them in church, as he told me, he would say ‘I will follow in a minute’, but then perhaps I would not go’ as is the indirect ‘Karen way’. Again, we see that people grasp this seeming subjugation to others as stemming from sensitivity to not ‘break their hearts’ that is addressed by going round rather than refusing them out right. Having imbricated cosmologies, however, seems to make this ‘Karen way’ of refusal go smoother with them, Karen Christians often desisting from asking after the first few brush-offs. This indirect ‘Karen way’ is reminiscent of James Scott’s notions of ‘everyday resistances’ to coercion (Scott 1985) and evasion as a subaltern strategy (Scott 2009) that allow groups to remain essentially egalitarian.

However, as Htoo Heh impressed on me, for the men in the care home living with more severe disabilities, all being blind, it is much harder to say ‘I will come in a minute’ as, for one thing, they often required help from the person inviting them to walk to their house or the church. This made it much harder for them to evade others demands, and as we shall see, often placed them in situations in which they often have little choice but to acquiesce. Thus, as we have seen, although ana strongly shaped the lifeworlds of the majority of the Karen people I met in the camp and beyond, dwelling on these limit cases of those most profoundly dependent on others helps us delineate the more insidious entailments of this affect.

This understanding of ana[de] resonates strongly with Christine Fink’s concise, if not rather unelaborated, definition of this affect in Burmese as ‘a feeling of obligation that makes one act in a restrained way’ (2001: x). She later builds on this definition, adding that anade is a ‘wish not to impose on others’, and to consider others’ feelings (2001: 120). Sarah Bekker (1981), on the contrary, delves in to anade in far greater depth dedicating a whole essay to this phenomenon both among the Burman majority and other groups such as the Karen. Largely in line with Fink, she defines anade as a consideration for the general and psychological welfare of others, demonstrating this clearly in the etymology of the word in the original Burmese as: a, ‘personal strength, power’; and na[de], ‘hurt’ (Bekker 1981: 37 fn 3). Moreover, Bekker argues that anade arises in face-to-face interactions, such that there is a perpetual ‘sensitivity’ that the other’s power/strength is being, or potentially could become hurt. As she demonstrates, anade sometimes manifests itself as ‘a quick rush of sympathy which causes a person to do something immediately for another’s welfare’ (Bekker 1981: 21 my emphasis). This is especially the case in relation to kin and kith (Bekker 1981: 20–23).

Yet, as we have seen among Karen living in the camp, ana[de] also involves a responsibility to others, to not ‘break their heart’ by refusing them. When struck by the feeling of ana, this responsibility and sensitivity to the other can cause the ‘words to get stuck in the mouth’ of the people I met, leaving them powerless. As Moo put it ‘You can't avoid it and can't escape so you have no choice’ This was her ‘power-hurt’. Indeed, the a in ana can be translated as strength, force, power, but also as one’s resources or to be free⁵. In this manner, responsibility to others often comes before oneself, and thus, involves a sacrificing of one’s own power, or even freedom, for others. In this way, ana appeared to go beyond a feeling of sympathy, a feeling-with or suffering-together, to encapsulate an ethical affect. To explore this further, however, I will first need to talk about shame.

The Pains of Shame and Ethics of Ana

In many cases I found that ana was deeply entangled with may hsgha, which can be understood as an affect somewhere between shame and shyness. This shame-shyness bears a family resemblance with malu in Malay (Goddard 1996; Lindquist 2004), hiya in Tagalog (Rafael 1988), and lek in Balinese (Geertz 1973). Many of the injured women and men I met would describe themselves as feeling may hsgha from the looks their injured bodies received from others.

As Moo told me, as we sat on her porch sheltered from the scorching midday sun one summer’s day, ‘I don’t want to go back to see my uncle and aunty or to see new people as I feel may hsgha. There are whispers and gossip all around, and I feel may hsgha’. She attributed this mostly to her fear that people, meaning other Karen, would ‘come and look at my leg. They may think I am a person with no legs at all’. Thinking for a moment she added, with a large smile fixed upon her face: ‘it’s ok with blind people’. This seemed to equally apply to foreigners as she would often sit with me with the stump of her amputated left leg cooling in the breeze, no once showing signs of feeling may hsgha about this.

Following William Reddy it would appear that this feeling of shame ‘derives from thoughts about how one is seen by others. Thus, shame can lead to withdrawal coupled with action aimed at managing appearances’ (Reddy 1997: 347; cf. Lindquist 2004). However, as Moo emphasised, this feeling was most acute when around children who, more than adults, could themselves become may hsgha when she took off her prosthetic leg. Specifically, this sensation arose around others who both could see and who had overlapping cosmologies, that is to say other sighted Karen. This led her to not only avoid situations that could potentially provoke may hsgha in herself but also those in which other Karen in her proximity could be struck by this affect. As a young father, when talking about his discomfort in taking off his prosthesis in public put it, ‘we must have ana for others’. Thus, may hsgha, like ana is an ethical or ‘moral affect’ (Rosaldo 1983: 136) that arises not only from the potential of being shamed but also from eliciting this in others. Indeed, as Vincente Rafael so lucidly puts it, to feel hiya, shame-shyness in Tagalog, is to be vulnerable (1988: 126). I would add to this that in may hsgha there is a realisation of a shared vulnerability, which demands a constant balancing act between one’s responsibilities to others and to protect one’s own power/strength from shame.

This manner in which these people experienced may hsgha resonates with a more existential understanding of shame that does not necessarily come from a feeling of guilt or wrong-doing but is substantiated in the gaze of the other. In being fixed by her or his gaze and reduced to an object one feels isolated, exposed, categorised and judged (Sartre 1977: 221–222, 288–291). It was situations where other people came to see their amputated legs, their gazes, that generated these feelings of may hsgha. Indeed, as another woman, Nah Deh, visiting from a different section of the camp who had been injured when forced to porter by Burmese army soldiers, told me: ‘I don’t go back to my parents and brethren. If they see that I am missing one part of my leg, they will look down on me’. This isolating, exposing and objectify gaze, as Michael Jackson (2002) points out, can lead to a sense of ceasing to be a subject for-oneself and becoming an object for the other, losing one’s sense of having an effect on their world. Thus, for the people I met, shame is often felt to injure strength-power in stripping the person of their sense of having an effect on the world. This then raises the potential of what can be termed a ‘social death’ (e.g. Jackson 2002; Biehl & Locke 2010) in the sense that shame holds the capacity to rob a person of all sense of having the strength-power to act on their world. As Aung so succinctly put it ‘killing the body is not the only type of killing. If you disgrace or abuse someone, it’s like killing’. Lindsay French demonstrates something similar in the refugee camps in eastern Thailand among Cambodians in the 90s. Here she found that if one causes another to ‘lose face’ in public, then one ‘kills’ them (French 1994: 85). However, for these Karen women and men this sense of shame and impending social death cannot be understood outside of the very particular situation into which they were thrown. Most people came from subsistence farming and conflict-racked communities steeped in centuries of colonialism and missionary work. It was this particular set of circumstances that led them to their current position of being ‘stuck’, between protracted civil war and indefinite interment in these temporary shelters.

From what we have seen ana appeared to be an ethical affect that was felt as a strong bodily discomfort that arose in situations where either the person or others in their proximity had or could potentially become may hsgha. Again, we see this sense of a shared vulnerability was especially apparent in the Karen context of chronic conflict, prolonged internment in refugee camps and bodies disabled by landmines. These circumstances often led people to hurt their own power in acquiescing to other people’s requests so as to avoid ‘breaking’ their heart with may hsgha, preferring instead to bear the brunt of this themselves. As Bekker stresses, ‘anade requires that the interests of the other person be put above one’s own’ (1981: 20). As I have shown this was especially the acute in those most severely injured, who were not always able to follow the indirect ‘Karen way’ of asking for help and refusing a request without hurting other peoples’ power/strength. From these limit cases it possible to catch a glimpse of the way many people in the camp were continually forced to face down a moral paradox. On the one hand, they faced the ethical imperative to not to hurt other peoples’ power/strength by refusing their requests or making demands on them, putting the other’s freedom before their own. Yet, on the other hand, those most severely injured also had an existential imperative to survive physically and socially, to find food and shelter, while still avoiding hurting their own power so much that they risk a social death.

In this light, the moral paradox presented by ana would appear to constantly split people between their ethical imperatives to others, and their existential imperative to themselves (cf. Critchley 2008). Along these lines it would appear that the political regime of the care home and the surrounding camp more generally resembled a kind of affectionate governance where people lived ‘like a family’ and day-to-day affairs were constantly refracted through the lens of kin-like relations and ethical responsibilities to others rather than relations of authority and/or of power in Weber’s sense (Weber 1978).

Following these lines of though we are led, time and time again, back to Leach’s (1954) watershed work on Political Systems in Highland Burma. The ‘political systems’ in the camp bore a strikingly resemblance to the Kachin gumlao ideal model of society, where egalitarian relations are forged through a ‘fiction’ of shared clanship, that stands fundamentally opposed to the strictly hierarchical Gumsa ideal model of society (Leach 1954: 209). Yet, as Leach goes at lengths to stress, these were ‘ideal models’ which, while appearing fundamentally opposed, were both full of inconsistencies, being interdependent and, as such, in continual flux – constantly exchanging places (Leach 1954: 203–204). We saw something similar in how in pre-colonial times the peoples of the southeast highlands oscillated between becoming part of tributary hierarchies and ensconcing themselves in the hills. Thus, in the final section, focusing more on the practices of ana, I explore more critically how relations slipped smoothly between lateral caring and intimate solidarities and more vertical hierarchical ties. I do this by reassessing the notion of power, and the role of affect and ethics in camp governance.

Big-Elephants and the Other Face of Ana

From what we have seen thus far, the Karen people I came to know in the camp appeared to grasp the a, ‘power/strength’, in ana, less as something political and more – following Bekker’s translation of ‘personal power-strength’ (1981) – as what Nigel Rapport (2003) calls ‘existential power’. In this understanding, closely allied to Jackson’s (e.g. 1998; 2002; 2011), power is seen as a person’s sense of control along the lines of ‘the extent to which individuals can be said to be responsible for determining the interpretations they make and the actions they take’ (Rapport 2003: 5). In this way, when people felt ana this was the sensation of their own power becoming hurt, of being robbing of the sense of having an effect on the world (cf. Jackson 2002). As Moo put it ‘You can't avoid it and can't escape, so you have no choice’. These discourses on ana as an ethical affect that arises from lateral intimate ties and a concern for hurting people’s ‘existential power’, however, often became complicated by cases where this appeared to be commensurable with concerns for hurting other person’s power in a more vertical, hierarchical sense.

The commensurability of personal and political power first became apparent to me during an interview with a Burmese man, Da Htein who had lost a leg to a landmine when working on the border to support his family. After we had exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, my field assistant Saw Paul suggested he sit on the floor and that I sit on the bench together with Da Htein. However, thinking this spatial arrangement would make interpretation rather cumbersome, I suggested that Saw Paul sat on the bench while I sat on the floor in front of the other two men. As we sat and chatted, Saw Paul looked across and suddenly became quite crimson in the face, shifting his weight from one buttock to the other, before emitting a half shout ‘Anade, Anade!!’ He only relented when Da Htein hitched over on the bench to make room for all three of us to sit. Where else Da Htein seemed unfazed by this commotion Saw Paul explained his reaction as being due to how terribly shameful, may hsgha, it was for me to sit on the floor below them like that since spatial topographies often mirrored hierarchical ones (cf. Ortner 1978: 74–78).

Despite demonstrating how ana[de] was expressed bodily and how it ties into feeling of meh hsgah, this episode hints to how ana is inextricably entangled not only with a person’s personal/existential power but also her or his power in a more vertical/ hierarchical sense, what we might call their political power. This gestures towards another, more conservative face of ana: the ethical obligation to protect the other’s standing in the social hierarchy.

To begin to grasp this understanding of power we will need to go back to how power has been conceived more generally in Southeast Asia. One of the first attempts to forward the idea of specifically Southeast Asian forms of power was by Benedict Anderson in his essay The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture (1990). In this piece he draws on his many years of fieldwork and extensive archival research to demonstrate that the manner in which people in Java grasped power could not easily be subsumed under readily available theories developed largely in European and American academic institutions. He found that in Java power was grasped as ‘concrete, homogenous, constant in total quantity, and without inherent moral implications’ (1990: 23). To this end, what is at issue is not the legitimacy of power but the problem of accumulating and conserving it, with no sharp divide made between personal and political power (Cannell 1999: 8). This is what Shelly Errington calls ‘potency’, which she insist must be cast in local forms (2014: 10). But how then was this power-strength accumulated among these seemingly egalitarian people in the camp?

Much of the literature from across Southeast Asia shows that power here is grasped as a finite and concrete phenomenon, accumulated by absorbing or co-opting other peoples’ power. Usually this is achieved not through forced appropriation but by creating intimate ties with people in the form of patron-client relations such that they allow themselves and their power to be accumulated (Scott 1977; Rafael 1988; Anderson 1990; Cannell 1999; Jordt 2007; Errington 2012). The most clear cut example of these processes could be found among the former soldiers injured by landmines who had few chances to ‘go around’ and evade requests from others than many of the other people living in in the camp. As we have seen, they serve as the limit case of these processes.

Speaking to one of the oldest men, an ‘uncle’, at deh htaw one day, he told me how his wife left him when he was injured, leaving him with two ‘very naughty sons’ who constantly pestered him for money and stole from him when he refused. Due to this he rarely went home adding, ‘there are a lot of men who do not want to stay here. Some may not want to sing and learn the bible, but they have to if they are living in this building’. He lamented how there were few opportunities to go out when one lives here, as three days of the week are taken up by bible studies and choir practice. When teachers visit they have to follow the lesson and diligently learn since, ‘If you stay here you cannot refuse. Everyone, even Buddhists have to join in as you can't say no’. I then asked if he is Christian, to which he replied: ‘When I was younger I was a Buddhist, and I remain one now’ but ‘as long as you stay here you have to follow the others’. As Aung had explained, there was no direct coercion from the teachers to attend classes or visit peoples’ houses to pray for them but, ‘If I refuse it is not good and others may not be happy with me’, so he tried to attend even if he felt unwell. For Aung this feeling of not being able to refuse was, like many others I met in the camp albeit to a greater degree, a feeling of ana in his heart-mind (tha) that was ‘sometimes strong, sometimes weak … to not be able to do anything is like being almost dead’.

At this conjuncture we begin to see how relationships between the men in deh htaw and their fellow Karen carers, though based on intimacy and ethics, could at times slide into more patrimonial and hierarchical configurations. In these instances power/strength came very close to how power is conceived more generally in Burma/Myanmar through the term ana. While looking like ana[de] when transliterated into the latin alphabet, this term comes from the Pali word ānǎ and translates as power/authority. As both Ingrid Jordt (2007) and Gustaaf Houtman (1999) show ānǎ is the power of authority that can be built through influence (awza), which act as ‘spores of community’ (Jordt 2007: 194). As Jordt demonstrates was the case for the military Junta that officially ruled Burma/Myanmar for 48 years, ānǎ can be generated by acts of charitable giving that co-opt and absorb Buddhist cosmological notions of kingship by positioning oneself as a ‘big elephant’ (2007: 132). These so-called Big Elephants, much like the Big Men of Melanesia and Africa (Sahlins 1963; Utas 2012), collected networks of dependent clients whom they have influence over. This influence could then be converted into local legitimate (political) power.

In this light we see how, on the one hand the circulations of ethical affects in deh htaw and beyond generated this strong sense of lateral solidarity and intimacy that people expressed as ‘living like a family’ where obligations to one another were cast as intimate ties. However, on the other, as long as a person stayed under deh htaw’s roof, receiving shelter and food whilst being unable to repay this kindness, they also lived under what Marshall Sahlins has termed the ‘shadow of indebtedness’ (1972: 208) to those who care for them. This deep-seated sense of indebtedness constrained people’s relations to their donors, and thus, for the women and men of the camp their sense of both their power/strength and their freedom was diminished. This goes to the heart of the ana where they felt their power/strength was chronically hurt such that they ‘cannot refuse’ and had to submit to others. Indeed as Marcel Mauss puts it ‘the gift not yet repaid debases the man who accepted it […] charity wounds him who receives’ (1966: 63). Thus, the circulation of kindness and care often had the effect, wittingly or not, of putting recipients in positions of indebtedness that simultaneously injured their power while shoring up the donor’s own. This lead to the emergence of strong vertical or hierarchical ties between people and these ‘big elephants’ like the carers, missionaries, NGO workers and anthropologists that transect the more horizontal lines of solidarities. This bears a striking resemblance to the ‘unbalanced reciprocity’ that Mckay (this issue) shows is generated between Filipino migrants and leftist groups to pull them into participating in the ‘movement’.

Drawing these threads together we see how the circulation of care and kindness generated intimacy in the sense of ‘living like a family’, yet, it also served to blur the line between intimate responsibilities and political commitments. Ana emerges as the ethical-affective basis for social arrangements where relations could slip easily between egalitarian and hierarchical configurations. People’s seeming willingness to submit themselves to others was not borne out of coercion but rather out of strong held feelings of concern and responsibility for the others strength-power. In this manner, these findings resonate strongly with Alpa Shah’s (2013) notion of the ‘intimacy of insurgency’ and point to how political commitments can be generated through a sense of intimacy between people and their leaders. Thus, we may view the ethical affect of ana as one of these ‘spores of community’ that dispersed through the camp, helping tie people together in bundles of lateral and vertical solidarities that could easily slip between one another and exchange places.

Returning to start of this paper we see how the two men’s rather differing perspectives on their lives in the camp quite succinctly illustrate the indeterminacy of both care and of control. As my explorations into the affect of ana seems to suggest, in this context of chronic armed conflict and internment, as was especially delineated in the lives of Karen disabled by landmines, gestures of kindness emerged here as gestalt like figures. They could equally be perceived as benign ethical-affective acts, or as part of coercive efforts to capture people’s power and bring them ever more ‘under the control of others’. This productive indeterminacy then allowed egalitarian and hierarchical relations to co-exist side-by-side, interlocked in a constant swaying dance through the camp.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant (Project code: A21988) from Danida in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Notes

1 This was the translation/etymology offered by my respondents, confirmed by several dictionaries.

2 In this manner, Power bears more than a passing resemblance with the notion of affect (e.g. Clough 2007: 1–5).

3 The situation in the camps has, of cause, changed considerably in the intervening 11 years since Tangseefa wrote this chapter. The RTG has begun offering limited infrastructural support to the camp and even Thai citizenship to a select few, yet, funding has dwindled, leading to severe ration cuts and new refugees continuing to be turned back at the border.

4 This was conveniently not a lie. As he explained, in S’gaw Karen the same name, Y’wa, is used to refer to the thoo koh (Karen animist) creator deity, Buddha and Jesus, so “when they ask me if I believe in Y’wa I can just say yes.”

5 http://www.sealang.net/burmese/dictionary.htm search for