Burma: The State of Meditation (Jordt's Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism andthe Cultural Construction of Power )Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Powerby Ingrid  JordtReview by: Alan KlimaCurrent Anthropology, Vol. 49, No. 6 (December 2008), pp. 1129-1130Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/592437 .

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1129

Books

Burma: The State of MeditationAlan Klima

Department of Anthropology, University of California,Davis, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616, U.S.A.(aklima@ucdavis.edu). 9 VI 08

Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and theCultural Construction of Power. By Ingrid Jordt. Athens:Ohio University Press, 2007.

One of the most important things about this book is just howterribly needed it is. There is no other book that takes a cold,hard look at the relation of modernist meditation movementsin Burma to the military regime. This is critical to under-standing the operation of power within Burma, somethingfor which we have little knowledge informed by the com-plexities of anthropological fieldwork. Western aficionados ofBurmese modern meditation know little of its cultural andpolitical context. The movement Jordt studies here is arguablythe most influential of any on Western Theravada Buddhism,and it is the most widely propagated across national bound-aries within Southeast Asia.

This book is based first and foremost on a minor miracleof access: the many years that the author has spent in Burmaas a meditation student. Jordt started out not as an anthro-pologist but as a meditator who for years was involved in themain center of Burmese modernist meditation in the MahasiSayadaw tradition. As a result, she was able to get to knowthis meditation movement from the inside out and to becomethe acquaintance and sometimes friend of many in a uniquehistorical generation in Burma, the displaced elite from thefirst nationalist period. These people, who under better cir-cumstances might still be running the country today, turnedto a life of meditation as a result of the series of increasinglybrutal military regimes that have dominated the country since1962.

The main question the book poses is one on many people’sminds these days: how does a military regime remain in powerfor over 40 years while being hated by a large majority of itssubjects? Jordt answers this question by exposing how thequestion itself is misinformed, how it presupposes an absoluterift that exists only when thinking in one dimension—thatof habitual political thought. There is, however, a Buddhistcosmological level where far more is shared between the sidesthan is apparent to outsiders who bring their own interpretiveframes to bear on the situation.

It is not as though Burmese Vipassana meditation move-ments are supporters of the military regime, nor are they inany kind of absolute political opposition. Jordt chooses to

explore, in particular, how cosmological and soteriologicalnotions of Buddhist polity inform the political situation in away that cannot be accounted for with an assumption thatpolitics must always involve a question of democracy versustotalitarianism. The place of the mass lay meditation move-ment in this Buddhist-nuanced account of state formationand legitimacy may not be what every reader is hoping for;recent events of the monks’ demonstrations most likely havecreated interests that are slightly different from what Jordtaddresses. The lay meditation movement is not coextensivewith the whole of Burmese Buddhism, although Jordt seemsto want to say that this movement is the most important andthe most revealing of power dynamics in the country. Oneinsight that translates from her work to the recent events inBurma is that if she is right, and the legitimacy of the regimeis intimately tied to its role as protecting and propagatingBuddhism, then the regime is probably in considerable troublenow and must do a lot of work to convince people that theaffected monks were not properly Buddhist.

Jordt does convincingly show that the mass lay meditationmovement has over the course of the past 60 years beenextremely important to forming a modernity in Burma, aform that is still up for grabs for two reasons, as she pinpoints.First, a stable state that people can believe in has not reallyever formed in the way that it has in other countries, and theonly form that even began to catch hold was a sort of Buddhistutopian state based on mass meditation, which was derailedby military coup but continues side by side with the state inthe lay meditation movement. Second, the Vipassana medi-tation movement itself is particularly immune to fixation intoideological orders, whether of democracy or others, becauseit is in its essence based on a nonconceptual epistemology.Some anthropologists, wedded to certain theoretical ortho-doxies, will be unable to assimilate the latter as a possibility.Nevertheless, most of the rest of the arguments will not rufflefeathers. Jordt takes the reader through a history of MahasiSayadaw meditation as a lay Buddhist movement (much ofit informed by her close observation); an ethnographic ac-count of how institutions are founded, funded, and run andtheir relationships to public demonstrations of support suchas those performed by military and public alike; an accountof the progress of insight in modern Buddhist meditation thatpushes a little at the boundaries of anthropological episte-mology (but does not take on the equally deficient critiqueof religious experience in Buddhist studies); and a discussionof the unique intellectual origins of the nation-state in Burmaamong a host of other things that are imbricated with Bud-dhist cosmological and soteriological notions and practices.Jordt ends with some musings that Buddhism and politicallife will probably take on new forms that will be problematicfor the settling of power and legitimacy questions in the fu-ture. The musings are eerily prophetic, considering when theywere written.

The book raises an issue in anthropology that few others

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1130 Current Anthropology Volume 49, Number 6, December 2008

venture into: the fact that a serious interest in cosmologyseems somehow out of place in the poststructuralist criticalworld. Cosmology is perhaps the “worst” kind of “culture”because it describes distinct systems of understanding howthe universe operates and is ordered and that cohere by virtueof powerful principles internal to themselves. Basing a realistsocial scientific diagnosis on the structuring influence of cos-mological beliefs is considered out-of-date in anthropology,and this may result in a deliberate blindness that is particularlydebilitating when considering situations such as Jordt is ex-ploring. While directly addressing this problem with only afew cursory and dismissive gestures aimed at contemporarycritical theory, the book, by example, does prove its point bydemonstrating how modern Buddhist cosmology helps ex-plain the dynamics of legitimacy in a way that other ap-proaches cannot. Jordt’s analysis is delivered in a traditionalanthropological manner, invoking plain facts in support of asober analysis of the structures of Burmese culture. The ex-perience of Vipassana meditation does not seem to have dis-placed the normal ways of writing and thinking through an-thropology. For that reason, it will probably be a book whosemain interest will be to those who have an empirical interestin Burma, Southeast Asia, and Buddhism. But for every oneof those people, it is an absolute “must read”; you simplycannot learn any of this any other way, and it is our uniquefortune to get this information from someone as responsiblypositioned as the author.

Globalization Seen from ElsewhereJohn Harriss

School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University,515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B5K3, Canada (jharriss@sfu.ca). 8 V 08

La Mondialisation Vue d’Ailleurs: L’Inde Desorientee. ByJackie Assayag. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2005.

The core of the intellectual vocation of the anthropologist hasalways been to hold up one society as a mirror to anotherand understand difference. In La Mondialisation Vued’Ailleurs: L’Inde Desorientee, Jackie Assayag aims to tacklethe understanding of globalization (aptly translated intoFrench, he argues, as mondialisation) in this way, drawing onhis many years of ethnographic research in India and hiscatholic reading of a mainly anglophone literature. He wantsto decenter the perspective from which scholars have habit-ually regarded globalization. He is surely right in arguing thatin many treatments of it, globalization is regarded in such away as to imply that there is a center of the world and thatit is in the West, in Europe and the United States. What“globalization” is then taken to mean is the progressive ex-pansion of this center through the processes of integration ofother parts of the world into a global economy, thus bringing

about social and cultural changes that are labeled as “West-ernization” or “modernization.” Assayag reverses the gaze,helping his readers to regard globalization from another per-spective—that of the wide-ranging transformations that aretaking place in India.

In pursuing this intention, Assayag develops a central the-oretical argument that modernity and globalization are notproduced by the West but rather are the complex results ofinteractions with other social and cultural worlds (in which,as he says at one point, transformations result from choicesmade by political and economic elites). The processes of glob-alization form and are formed through local mediations andfilters (and, by implication, through local structures and re-lationships of power). Consequently, Assayag argues, glob-alization is certainly to be seen as a universalizing process butone that continuously reinvents difference. This is far frombeing an entirely original argument, of course, and it is onethat is prefigured, for instance, in Shlomo Eisenstadt’s “Mul-tiple Modernities” (2000), which Assayag does not cite, andin Berger and Huntington’s Many Globalizations (2002),which he does. Furthermore, the argument that he is coun-tering has come to appear—so few years after he wrote aboutit—much less credible, even in popular writing, because ofthe recognition of the expanding power of China and India.

The world is less centered than it was in the West. Thestrengths of the book lie in Assayag’s application of his centralargument to India. As he says, Indian society and the Indianpolity are reconfiguring themselves under the impact of glob-alization. L’Inde Desorientee is perhaps an unfortunate andsomewhat misleading subtitle, however, because it hardly con-veys the purpose with which India’s political, bureaucratic,and business elites have been reinventing their country duringthe past 20 years. There has been no “grand design” at allcomparable with that which underlay the invention of mod-ern India as a democratic, broadly socialist, secular, federalrepublic in the constitution declared in 1950, but the con-temporary reinvention of India under the impetus of eco-nomic liberalization and the social and political forces asso-ciated with Hindu cultural nationalism is the result of theagency of the elites, nonetheless. Far from being “disoriented,”they have shown considerable clarity of intention, even if thedirections in which they want to move their country are op-posed by some.

The analysis proceeds through the study of four specificthemes. The first concerns “the political economy of womanand nation,” and the substantive part of the book opens withan entertaining account of the controversy over the stagingof the Miss World contest in Bangalore in 1996. This became,Assayag shows, an arena for contestation over the claims ofWestern modernity on the one hand and ideas of “Indianness”on the other. The theme is pursued through a historical andcultural exploration of different models of womanhood andthe role of female imagery in the imagining of the nation andthen through the story of the development of the beautyindustry and a culture of “beauty.” Here and throughout

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