Huard, Stéphen.Calibrated engagement: chronicles of local politics in the heartland of Myanmar. 336 pp., bibliogr. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2024. £104.00 (hardback)

Stéphen Huard's Calibrated engagement is, in many respects, a classical ethnography par excellence. For decades, Myanmar's ethnographic record has largely centred on its upland peripheries, shaped by both the logistical challenges of fieldwork under military rule and enduring scholarly interest in state evasion. By contrast, Huard offers a rare and richly textured account of the Bamar-dominated Dry Zone, the heartland of the Myanmar state, drawing on seventeen months of fieldwork during the country's brief democratic ‘transition’. The book traces the longue durée formation of political institutions and local authority in a region typically seen as the state's heartlands. It offers a detailed historical and ethnographic account of how the institution of village headmanship emerged as a durable mode of governance. Central to this account is a locally articulated ideology of autonomy, kotukota, glossed as ‘rising by and for oneself’ (p. 116), which underpinned strategies of avoidance, selective engagement, and manipulation of state actors. Huard is especially effective in showing how villagers cultivated authority figures, lugyi, or ‘big men’, who managed relations with state agents while remaining embedded in village life. These figures did not merely act as intermediaries, nor did they rely solely on the kind of charisma or moral surplus often attributed to earlier models of Southeast Asian leadership. Instead, their legitimacy rested on practical effectiveness, reciprocity, and a form of situated moral authority. Everyday exchanges, rather than solely Buddhist merit or heroic prowess, becomes the terrain where power is assessed and enacted. Through his concept of ‘calibrated engagement’, the ongoing negotiation of influence and obligation in ambiguous and often hostile environments, Huard develops a supple analytic for understanding local political agency. His approach draws on a broadly Maussian sensibility, foregrounding how power is embedded in acts of exchange, obligation, and the moral weight of reciprocity. This mode of engagement, he shows, is neither passive compliance nor heroic resistance, but a constant process of negotiation within shifting political fields. The book offers a compelling advancement of earlier models that tended to essentialize hierarchy or treat patron-client ties as relatively static, instead showing how authority is negotiated through situated practice. In doing so, the book advances debates in Southeast Asian studies on power, brokerage, and corruption, pushing back against portrayals of the Dry Zone as docile or uniformly statist. His account challenges classic ‘strongman’ genealogies, resonating with wider literatures on localized charisma and affective authority (J. Barker (ed.), The anthropology of morality in Melanesia and beyond 2007; J.T. Sidel, Capital, coercion, and crime 1999). In contrast to the coercive, militarized figures described in Buchanan's study of Myanmar militias in the Shan Uplands (The rise of the Bo 2018), Huard's lugyi – in the present day – are embedded moral brokers, exercising authority through reciprocity, care, and calibrated obligation. His distinctive contribution lies in offering an intimate, civically embedded theory of power attuned less to domination than to the textures of legitimacy and everyday calibration. Still, some questions remain: where does calibrated engagement reach its limits? What are the rupture points that lead to shifts in authority? And how might women's often-overlooked roles reshape or contest these forms of leadership? The book opens productive space for further theoretical engagement. Broader comparative perspectives, such as Steinmüller's study of emerging moral authority among the Wa and Lahu (‘Grace is incommensurability in commensuration’. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 40 2022, 104-20), may help clarify why distinct forms of leadership emerged at certain historical moments. Steinmüller, for example, argues that figures of moral authority, including strongmen, arise precisely when modern systems of measurement and accountability proliferate, embodying a kind of power that exceeds or evades those very systems. The relevance of Huard's work is sharpened by Myanmar's current crisis. Since the 2021 military coup, the state has lost control of vast swathes of territory, and forms of local governance and authority are being dramatically reshaped. In such revolutionary conditions, the fragile form of local politics Huard describes, based on self-reliance and the moral authority of the lugyi, provides a powerful stepping stone towards beginning to understand the rise of local people's defence forces (PDFs) in areas traditionally seen as the lowland heart of state power. This lucid account, both for Burma Studies and political anthropology more widely, captures a political landscape in motion, where relations of hierarchy and obligation are not fixed structures but fragile, fluid, and actively remade under pressure.