Ardeth maung thawnghmung biography definition and examples

In Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar , Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung evokes how ordinary Burmese people get by in an environment hostile to their wellbeing. With her biography comes empathy and access. She develops an emic list of coping strategies by engaging with more than three hundred research participants between and These are organised along two axes.

Do strategies accommodate these constraints loyalty , escape them exit , or exert a pressure for change voice? The second axis refers to the effect of individual strategies on society at large. Ultimately, she contends, most coping strategies are self-defeating and anathema to fostering democratic outcomes. It unites the political, economic, psychological, and social aspects of coping under a common framework.

It therefore speaks to scholars across the board, who are interested in Myanmar and the interplay between resilience and precariousness more generally. Amongst the strategies that the author explores, some—to my knowledge—have gone relatively unremarked in Anglophone literature. Sections on borrowing and pawning pp.

All errors are mine.

Such insight is critical to a country that is predominantly understood—in both academic and policy worlds—through the failures of its leaders, resulting in millions of foreign dollars spent on strengthening its democratic institutions. Everyday Economic Survival asks us to consider instead the relationship between the humdrum of everyday life and sweeping reform.

Two aspects of this trade-off left me wanting. The uneasy relationship between the individual and the collective remains underexplored throughout. The self-defeating nature of most coping strategies holds that what benefits the individual in the short term, ultimately recreates an environment that is hostile to society at large.

Do people weigh their actions against the wider social fabric, and how do they explain whether or not this is the case?