Scared Stiff

An anthropologist looks for fear in today’s Burma—and finds it

Karaoke Fascism, Burma and Politics of Fear by Monique Skidmore. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia; 2004, P248.

Monique Skidmore’s Karaoke Fascism, Burma and the Politics of Fear is a complex ethnographic rendering of modern urban life in Burma under military rule. Skidmore, a medical anthropologist, lived in Rangoon during late 1996 and 1997 as a PhD student. She interviewed drug addicts, sex workers and the mentally ill to craft a picture of life lived in fear, with particular emphasis on the fringes: in urban environments and the people of the new suburbs on the edge of the city.

Despite the use of “fascism” in the title, it is soon apparent that Burma is not a fascist state, but rather an “incipient fascist state.” What this means, in Skidmore’s formulation, is the “never fully realized potential, always present in propaganda and the constant threat of violence, that is frightening in the extreme.” So, Burma is not a fascist state, but, according to her, it could become one and people are afraid of that.

Karaoke, likewise, is a device to let us know that Burmese seek a means of escape from the everyday poverty, fear and oppression that are both real and imagined. “The simulation is the reality,” a tidy way of describing Burmese “karaoke fascism,” which is Burmese “psychological survival strategies.” To illustrate this, Skidmore parades the trendy theorists of several academic disciplines: Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Taussig and many others.

Skidmore is a gifted writer, particularly in her evocative descriptions of the living conditions in the new towns on Rangoon’s outskirts. She defeats herself when she becomes theoretically pretentious and disturbingly voyeuristic. Her relaying of testimony from drug addicts, prostitutes, physically abused women and abortion patients borders on the unethical and intrusive. One wonders how these women felt about Skidmore’s obtrusive questions and whether they were left re-traumatized as a result of meeting her.

Metaphors are employed liberally: soldiers are scorpions, tanks are giant scorpions used by the state, prostitutes are black crows flying overhead and haunting Skidmore, most Burmese are “still as wooden puppets” through fear, and dusty construction workers are symbolically covered with the heroin that funds the new high-rises.

This is all very clever, but is it accurate? Factual errors abound: Aung San and the “entire cabinet” were not killed by a bomb in 1947 (several pages later it’s a hand grenade); Thamanya monastery isn’t in Southern Mon State (go looking in Karen State, east of Hpa-an); Aung San Suu Kyi wasn’t “released from house arrest in May 1996,” nor did the comedian Par Par Lay die in jail where he was imprisoned for telling a few jokes (he was released in 2001). When theorizing becomes more important than getting things right, then truth suffers, something most Burmese would be aware of.