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The Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, the Culture, Mind, and Brain Program, and the Global Mental Health Program are pleased to invite you to their next Seminar series:

Dr. Seinenu M. Thein-Lemelson, (University of California, Los Angeles), will present

Becoming Naingkyin: Sacrificial Rites and Rituals of Resilience in the Burmese Democracy Movement

The talk will take place Thursday October 8 from 3 to 5 PM EST via Zoom.

Please register

Abstract

The Burmese democracy movement and the community of political prisoners (known colloquially as naingkyin) that comprised it had a profound impact upon the trajectory of modern Burma, yet their contributions have been overlooked by scholars. What little scholarshipexists on the democracy movement ignores the naingkyin鈥檚 culture, psychology, and subjectivity. Based on a seven-year, multi-sited ethnography, I document how naingkyin: conceptualize moral personhood; construct their identities; perform rituals; maintain anannual calendar of commemorations; sustain social relationships; engage in caregiving; provide one another with social support; monitor each other鈥檚 status; produce intellectual and artistic content; derive meaning from their own suffering; document their ownhistory; and participate in material and monetary exchanges. Each one of these elements of their complex cultural system is shaped to a large degree by an indigenous concept known as anitnah, which resembles the English term of 鈥渟acrifice.鈥� In this talk, Iuse person-centered, experience-near accounts to render the naingkyin鈥檚 journey through the interrogation centers and prisons. Rather than viewing their encounters with political violence as resulting in what Western psychiatrists would identify as "trauma",naingkyin view themselves as having undergone a necessary rite of passage (Van Gennep, 1960; Turner, 1969; Herdt, 1998). Those who traverse the liminality of the interrogation centers and prisons experience a sacred transformation of the self. This new selfthat is reborn is not considered to be afflicted, but made purer through the sacrificial act. I give a broad overview of notions of 鈥渕ental purity鈥� in the Theravada Buddhist canon, as well as in normative understandings. I describe how lay beliefs about mental purity are extended through emotion and symbolism into the political domain. For naingkyin and their supporters, anitnah is crucial to judgements about political legitimacy and imaginings of the Burmese nation state.