1Justine Chambers’ Pursuing Morality, alongside Stéphen Huard’s Calibrated Engagement (2024), stands as one of the rare, and likely one of the last field monographs for some time, given the inaccessibility of Myanmar since the regime of terror established by the Burmese junta in the wake of the February 2021 coup d’état—compounded by the earthquake of March 2025. While the Plong (Pwo) Karen of Hpa-An and its surrounding region are the focal point of analysis, the entire structure of the book revolves around the pursuit of morality—both in terms of self-introspection, and the relation to others and to the supernatural—in a context marked by accelerated globalisation and ongoing conflict with the Burmese central power. Though this pursuit of a particular form of ethics—or “moral turn”—as it manifests in daily life forms the guiding thread of the study, the book is less an ethnography—in the traditional sense of an ethnic monograph—than an anthropology of social change. Given Myanmar’s inherent structural instability, the resilience of ethical values is subject to heightened political and economic contingencies.
2Beyond its remarkable epistemological depth—an epistemology of the living—, the humanism that permeates the analysis is one of the work’s most striking features. In many respects, Justine Chambers aligns with the ethno-psychological approach shaped, in the case of Myanmar, by the work of Melford E. Spiro in the 1960s, and continues the tradition of the “Practical Buddhism” initiated by Stanley J. Tambiah in the 1970s. Two authors to whom she expressly refers from a methodological point of view, while focusing the analysis on “an insight into people’s private moral dilemmas and their navigation” (p. 10). Indeed, one of the major strengths of the study lies in the methodological choice to move away from Western categories and the customary currents of social anthropology—something Justine Chambers achieves all the more effectively as she masters their theoretical intricacies—favouring an emic perspective: the way the Plong themselves perceive and categorise reality, their behavioural norms, what holds meaning in a society in flux, and how they articulate change with tradition. Considered in all its polysemy and across the various spheres of the social, the concept of morality emerges as the focal point of the analysis. One of the work’s major accomplishments lies in the fact that the immersive approach serves a theoretical ambition, rather than the reverse. This lends the argument a persuasive force, never overwrought, and draws the reader into this quest for a morality that is at once personal and societal. Through her close relationship with interlocutors and her finely honed grasp of conceptual frameworks, Justine Chambers introduces into this “anthropography” (Robinne 2021) of social change a dynamic of resilience in which ethical values find their fullest expression.
3Her remarkably nuanced analysis of vernacular expressions juxtaposes the concepts of thout kyar—understood here, reductively and without capturing the full nuance explored by the author—as “rules for living” in a secular sense; thila as “moral conduct” and parami as “moral attitude” in their Buddhist meanings. This intricate constellation of moral conduct is deliberately not examined through the lens of classical social anthropology—such as Emile Durkheim’s concept of a “pre-given set of rules” or Michel Foucault’s notion of “ethical subjectivity”, among others expressly referenced. Instead, Justine Chambers’ project is firmly rooted in the endogenous construction of the ethical sphere. The Buddhist domain presents itself to the author not as an exegetical object—though the refinement with which Buddhist moral values are discussed might suggest as much—but rather as a framework through which she orients her analysis toward the ethical determinism of the self, the relationship to others, and the connection to “more-than-human entities.” Considered consubstantial with the social relations within Plong society as a whole and holistic by nature, this dimension permeates the entire book. Broadly construed, ethical values are particularly closely correlated with Buddhism insofar as social relations—especially in their most mundane and daily forms—are concerned. And perhaps this is the author’s true feat of strength: interrogating modernity by intertwining a retrospective gaze with the imaginative possibilities of a future world, as interpreted by a wide array of interlocutors across generations, genders, and social strata. Framed through the lens of ethics, this oscillatory journey lived from within fluctuates between uncertainty and necessity, an unstable balancing act upon which moral values must navigate. In the manner of Hayashi Yukio’s Practical Buddhism Among the Thai-Lao. Religion in the Making of a Region (2003), Pursuing Morality does not treat Buddhism as its object of study; rather, as a mediating force amid social change, the moral values carried by Buddhism emerge as a source of ethical response to the most quotidian of concerns.
4The vernacular notions of morality and the “daily pursuit of morality” are explored with great subtlety in the prelude and revisited more extensively in the introduction. The dialectical depth of these two preambles during which ethical notions are examined in all their vernacular nuances perhaps did not require such emphatic repetition of “morality” in the chapter titles, where the occurrence at all costs of the term does not appear to be absolutely necessary with regard to the progress of an otherwise very convincing demonstration. For the ethical values—both Buddhist and vernacular—already convincingly structure the seven chapters of the book. The demonstration is all the stronger for its illustrative use of local personalities, each of whom lends a poignant, human dimension to the analysis of “the multiple ways in which Plong Buddhists broker, traverse, enact, cultivate, defend and ultimately pursue moral lives” (p. 14):
5Chapter 1, “Karen: A Moral People on the Frontiers of a Violent Military State,” recounts, through figures of “strongmen” and morally influential personalities such as the monk U Thuzana, the project of revitalising Plong Buddhism amid internal divisions and a contentious relationship with the Burmese central government.
6Chapter 2, “Brokering Morality in the Buddhist Moral Universe,” demonstrates through the figure of a charismatic monk and his disciples (donators) that morality cannot be reduced to an individual quest for liberation through Buddhist giving (ahlu); rather, the nature of the gift/counter-gift dynamic—or, as would say Tambiah (1968) “the ideology of merit and its social correlate”—intrinsically links donors to society and shapes society’s perception of individuals.
7Chapter 3, “Traversing Morality in a Changing World,” draws on life stories that illustrate the moral dilemmas faced by youth—torn between visions of the future, the vulnerabilities of modern life, and the preservation of ethical grounding.
8Chapter 4, “Enacting Morality: Coming of Age on Shifting Moral Ground,” uses the example of young Nan Soe and her relationship with her grandmother to illustrate the principle of navigating “moral plural lives” while maintaining ethical continuity.
9Chapter 5 (while incidentally asking ourselves to what extent growing old is akin to decline?) “Cultivating Morality in an Age of Decline,” traces the path of the elderly charismatic leader Hpu Takit, founder of a local Buddhist sect and his hold over the village community, and how “devotees see themselves as moral agents, not only in their selves, but also in the sense of that they have power over wider Plong society” (p. 140).
10Chapter 6, “Defending Moral Community: Buddhist Nationalism and Plong Moral Identity,” begins from the observation that people respond to change differently depending on social class, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, and the influence of various moral authorities. The monk U Kawidaza, close to the military junta and local leader of the Buddhist nationalist movement Ma Ba Tha, serves as a case study.
11Chapter 7, “Pursuing Morality in the Midst of Crisis,” concludes the book by examining the pursuit of morality under the regime of terror imposed by the Burmese junta since the February 2021 coup.
12As is clearly demonstrated, morality constitutes the red thread of the book—not through repetitive variations on a single theme, but as a journey or a “pursuit”: “I use the word ‘pursuit,’ as morality is seen and understood by Plong Buddhists as a ‘doing’ word,” Justine Chambers writes in the opening (p. 2). The quest of morality is described as one of the most intimate concerns of every individual, to the extent that it becomes the regulator—if not the operative mode—of Plong society. This pursuit inevitably involves distortions, adaptations, even contradictions, in response to the upheavals of modern and contemporary history: an unfinished democratic opening, a globalisation process indifferent to ethical concern, recurrent interethnic conflicts, now compounded by the struggle for survival under a predatory military state.
13The demonstration is even more impressive as the focus on the “moral turn” casts new light on social change in the tumultuous context of contemporary Myanmar. It is the very nature of such a foundational work, with wide theoretical scope, to provoke reflection. Two observations—consubstantial with one another—resonate once the book is closed, so powerfully does the ambivalence between tradition and emancipatory desires echo beyond the Buddhist-Plong-Karen taken as a case study. First, one might wonder whether the dual role of mediation and regulation attributed in analysis to vernacular moral categories is not overdetermined, in proportion to its idealization in society? Ethical values are recurrences in individual discourses as well as in the collective imagination, to the point however of seeing in them the operating mode—at the very least an adjustment variable—of the social order? Second, a subtle sense of unease arises regarding what could be perceived as an excessive essentialisation of the Plong-Karen Buddhists—especially given that these dynamics of social navigation resonate elsewhere in comparable heterogenous landscapes (Robinne 2019) and reveal their universality as vulnerabilities intensify.
14Yet such remarks in no way detract from the ethnographic quality and theoretical reach of the book, for it is precisely the hallmark of a work of reference to give rise to such questioning. In a context where the Plong, like the Karen as a whole, are historically swept into a conflictual maelstrom, Justine Chambers’ tour de force is undoubtedly to highlight the quest for morality as a point of balance in a society under strain—much like the wider civil society of Myanmar itself.