Presented in person and online. Zoom details below.

Myanmar and the dissonance of salvation

For about a decade prior to Myanmar’s February 2021 coup, there was a sense that the country was being saved. The “transition to democracy” was drawing an end to fifty years of military rule. For its small community of Pentecostal Christians, Myanmar’s salvation meant something else too. Not only was God bringing Myanmar from dictatorship to democracy. He was also, or so it was thought, bringing its population to Christ. Even before the coup, however, evidence mounted that the rupture might still be some way off. This talk is about the dissonance of salvation—as a promise, project, and problem. It is about living through a quickening moment when you are being told that everything is changing, even as it seems, plainly, that much is staying the same. And it is about the ways in which so much of contemporary political life might be shot through with questions of salvation: Who will we save? Who will save us? And how? 

Speaker:

Michael Edwards is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney whose research focuses on religious life, media ecology, and political change. His first book, Real Change: Myanmar and the Dissonance of Salvation, has been selected for the Atelier series at the University of California Press. His articles have appeared (or are forthcoming) in venues including JRAI, American Anthropologist and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/84128620477?pwd=fRLFaoWlZw7kKJzZZWlCIavoO2pHOX.1