Matt Schissler Such established strategies for accessing and disseminating information are not passive or thoughtless reflexes, nor are they evidence of low levels of formal education. Quite the opposite – they are highly refined, carefully developed skills for surviving under, and sometimes resisting, an authoritarian state. Maintaining plausible deniability was a mechanism for containing and controlling risk; with this maintained, one could push the boundaries of safety and acceptability. Christina Fink describes, for example, a strategy used during the 1980s in which student activists used seemingly innocuous book sharing networks to establish precarious, but no less important, feelings of collective solidarity. After finishing a given text, the reader would add a short comment and the name of their hometown, and then pass on the book. “For those who had developed political ideas,” noted Fink, “knowing they had similarly-minded peers in other parts of the country was very important. They often felt isolated among their own school mates.” One need only glance over the geography of previous readers to feel the presence of a community; but one need not take risks to do so, beyond possessing a piece of nondescript literature.43 In another more overtly political strategy, students distributed pamphlets by placing them in stacks on the top of buses, to be scattered as the vehicles pulled away.44 Sharing pamphlets is the crime of the distributor, not the passive user who stoops to pick up an unknown piece of paper – or scroll across a comment posted on Facebook. The second established practice that is likely to align with new communication technology is the longstanding salience of rumor in Myanmar, not as gossip but as a way to convey information word-of-mouth, outside of formal media or any organized authority.45 Anointing this the “dominant form of discourse” during life under authoritarian rule, in 2003 anthropologist Monique Skidmore described rumor as a way to build community and a sense of intimacy, and a way to provide clarity and make sense of a world that could otherwise seem unintelligible and opaque.46 Perhaps most importantly, rumor could enable decision making within extraordinarily difficult circumstances. “Rumors are extremely important,” she noted, “because they are one of the few forms of mundane information that allow individuals and families to speculate on outcomes, to gamble on courses of action, to assess options, and to weigh probabilities.”47 It is no wonder, given long-standing media censorship and state propaganda, that people in Myanmar developed other approaches for transmitting and sharing information.48 I have witnessed this latter use of rumor first hand, particularly at tense and bewildering moments. On March 20th 2013, for example, a mob of at least 1,000 people rampaged through the Muslim area of Meiktila, a town in central Myanmar; later, we would learn that at least 44 people had been killed, including some 20 children massacred in a school49, and more than 10,000 people displaced50 and 800 43 Ibid., 184. Ibid., 188. 45 This draws upon a definition of rumor, contrasted against legends, myths, gossip, hoaxes and conspiracy theories, offered in Pamela Donovan, “How Idle Is Idle Talk? One Hundred Years of Rumor Research,” Diogenes 54, no. 1 (February 1, 2007): 62, doi:10.1177/0392192107073434. 46 Monique Skidmore, “Darker Than Midnight: Fear, Vulnerability, and Terror Making in Urban Burma (Myanmar),” American Ethnologist 30, no. 1 (2003): 13, doi:10.1525/ae.2003.30.1.5. See also, Monique Skidmore, Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 45. 47 Skidmore, “Darker Than Midnight,” 13. 48 This is consistent with one of the most common explanations for why rumors spread and are relied upon, though this is not the only reason. See, Donovan, “How Idle Is Idle Talk?”. 49 Physicians for Human Rights, Massacre in Central Burma: Muslim Students Terrorized and Killed in Meiktila, May 2013, http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/reports/meiktila-report-may-2013.html. 50 A year later, more than 3,300 remained displaced. See, Si Thu Lwin, “A Town Stained in Blood Takes Tentative Steps Toward Peace,” The Myanmar Times, March 21, 2014, http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/nationalnews/9924-a-town-stained-in-blood-takes-tentative-steps-toward-peace.html. 44 10/13