Community Welfare Organisations in Rural Myanmar

Mike Griffiths has been conducting research on rural development and social protection in Myanmar for over 15 years, regularly advising the national government on poverty reduction strategies and social policy. He is currently working as lead researcher for the Yangon based Social Policy & Poverty Research Group (SPPRG), which has a particular focus on conducting research relevant to emerging government policy. This book is based on his recent PhD thesis, which studied on traditional social protection organizations in Myanmar. Dr. Griffiths teaches multi-disciplinary research methodology at Mandalay University in central Myanmar, and at the University of Yangon, as well as continuing as a Research Associate at the University of Hull.

• 1. New moral economies of the peasant: rethinking Scott in 21st century Myanmar  2. States of being: a brief background to contemporary Myanmar  3. Widening circles: rural transformation in contemporary Myanmar  4. Precarity and the post-peasant experience  5. Emergent Associations: the assemblage of precarity  6. Performing Parahita : ecologies of redistribution  7. Buddhism, Parahita and the Other: the boundaries of emergent welfare  8. The moral economy of welfare: post-peasant politics and citizenship  Index

"Community Welfare Organisations in Rural Myanmar provides an original and timely analysis of Myanmar at the cusp of change, engaging with important themes of precarity, post-agrarian change and citizenship. Through extended ethnography, Michael Griffiths gives a rarely seen, in-depth account of Myanmar’s political and societal transitions, which readers will find both absorbing and insightful." – Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, National University of Singapore, author of Citizens in Motion "The waves of change washing across rural Myanmar, positive and negative, are quite easily identified. But local-level societal responses to such changes are frequently missed. In this rich, well-timed and important book, Michael Griffiths explores the role of emergent reciprocal parahita organisations in protecting livelihoods in the context of considerable precarity." – Jonathan Rigg, Chair in Human Geography, University of Bristol