Necroeconomics: dispossession, extraction, and indispensable/expendable laborers in contemporary Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Through ethnography of de-agrarianization and extraction in Myanmar, the article shows how threshold subjects – poor laborers uncertain whether they are relatively or absolutely unnecessary to the social system of profits and distribution – become vulnerable to the necroeconomy, a system of value extraction constituted by combining extraction processes that spatially, mechanically, and politically require death-making; willing laborers driven by debt, dispossession, and existential desperation; and biopolitical abandonment (by states or corporations) of subjects to the carnage of extraction. The article considers what politics may be inhabited by the threshold subject, given s/he is both simultaneously surplus and essential to social reproduction.

KEYWORDS:

• Surplus populations
• debt
• extraction
• supply-chain capitalism
• de-agrarianization
• Myanmar

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Sayres Rudy, Geoffrey Aung, Izzy Rhoads, Shae Fydenlund, Marshall Kramer, Jasnea Sarma, Hilary Faxon, Stephen Campbell, and JPS's anonymous reviewers for indispensable comments. Thanks also for opportunities to present earlier versions of this article at: the 2016 Burma Studies Conference, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (December 2019; Singapore), and the 2021 American Association of Geographers annual conference. Special thanks to Minzayar Oo, who not only provided the photos but also reflections on the conditions in Hpakant, and, of course, to 'Yang' and his crew, who granted me access to their lives and insights into them.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Researcher Tar Yar Maung has aggregated more than 2000 deaths recorded by media and argues that this is an undercount (2019, 48–49).

2 Global Witness (2015, p. 78).

3 24 June 2015.

4 Mine owners reportedly prefer non-locals (Global Witness 2015, 75).

5 Even the World Bank (2014, 13) expresses scepticism at near-term structural transformation.

6 Even slavery is temporary today: people flow in and out of enslavement (Bales 1999, 14).

7 Although Haskaj never articulates how death realizes exchange value as a commodity.

8 Rhoads (2020) describes analogous phenomena in urban areas.

9 I tracked this phenomenon in two different Dry Zone locales: Kyautse and Mattaya.

10 Author's translation from Burmese.

11 The promotion of ‘Special Agricultural Industrial Zones’ (Thame 2017, 35) suggests a model that industrializes monoculture, a form of death-making in itself, arguably.

12 More generally, the replacement of peasant cultivation with SEZs that traffic in agro-petroleum products demonstrates the general environmental necrifrication of the broader environment.

13 For a case beyond Myanmar, see Pradella and Cillo 2020; for history of how unfree labor haunts the formal labor contract, see Taussig 1987).

14 Tyner (2019, 94–100) has demonstrated the obscene case, unsurprisingly found in the USA, in which firms can hold policies so as to benefit from workers’ death.

15 I thank Laur Kiik for stressing this point (personal communication, November 2020).

16 For corroboration, see Moller (2019, 123).

17 For corroboration, see CNA (2016).

18 Interviews, August 2020; interview with Yay, July 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation; Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Elliott Prasse-Freeman

Elliott Prasse-Freeman is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology/Anthropology department at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Myanmar, and has a book in review on Burmese subaltern political thought as adduced from an extended ethnography of activism and contentious politics in the country's semi-authoritarian setting. Prasse-Freeman also has a book project on Rohingya political subjectivity amidst dislocation and mass violence. His work has appeared in Current Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, and Journal of Asian Studies, amongst other journals.