Organizer: UC Berkeley Center for Southeast Asia Studies

Description:

How are political cartoons similar to occult cursing ceremonies, and what can both tell us about acts of resistance/refusal in a context where subjects lack the rights to secure their interventions? The talk develops Judith Butler’s conceptualization of catachresis and applies it to Burmese political cartoons, exploring how they stage elite Burmese subjects mishearing everyday speech. These cartoons present the mishearing as resulting in interpellations that are framed as emerging from elites' own anxieties: they not only interpret the misheard words as an accusation levelled at them, but by so doing, they betray their shame about having committed the accused transgression. The talk then shows how catachresis applies to activist-led occult cursing rituals which hail spirits to come to judge the rightful owners of stolen land. While appearing aggressive and confrontational, these rituals actually rely on similar logic to the cartoons: by mediatizing and circulating the events, protesters seek to create a field of joint attention in which state elites are not only interpellated but come to realize they are being interpellated. Catachresis occurs when the elite entertains this alternative domain of power as implicating him (rather than dismissing the curse as a desperate tactic). The talk concludes by reflecting on the necessity of such manoeuvres in the context of the February 2021 military coup, examining the profusion of cursing ceremonies in the ongoing uprising in Myanmar today, which act as part of a general refusal of the military state’s attempt to monopolize the symbolic realm.

Speaker:

Elliott Prasse-Freeman received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Myanmar and has a book in review on Burmese subaltern political thought as adduced from an extended ethnography of activism and contentious politics in the country’s semi-authoritarian setting. He also has a book project on Rohingya political subjectivity amidst dislocation and mass violence. His work has appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Anthropological Theory, and Journal of Asian Studies, amongst others

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