I edit and manage production of bimonthly journal ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY (which Jonathan Benthall co-founded with me in 1985) for the Royal Anthropological Institute and presently teach/perform research at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

My fieldwork in the early 80s grappled with the popularization of vipassana contemplation in Burma for a PhD in anthropology which I completed in 1990 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. There are several dozen traditions I surveyed, each with their own biographical, historical and literary trajectories, many of which have remained largely unstudied.

Since the late 90s I have focused on soteriological liberation discourses associated with vipassana (insight contemplation) and samatha (concentration meditation) deployed by national leaders including by Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi and others, aiming for independent government and release from colonial/military confinement, imprisonment or occupation. Some of these results have been published in Mental culture in Burmese crisis politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy and a more recent shorter statement is in my paper Spiritual and familial continuities  in Burma’s ‘secular’ politics and the earlier Burma or Myanmar? The cucumber and the circle.

In Aung San’s lan-zin, the Blue Print and the Japanese occupation of Burma (published in 2007), I expose as falsely attributed to Aung San authorship ofThe Blueprint for a Free Burma, a document supposedly dating from the foundation of the Burma Independence Army in Japan in 1941, but first published only in 1957, a decade after Aung San's assassination (at a time the army's Psywar directorate was active seeking to influence public opinion) by someone using the name R. Sawante in The Guardian (the Burmese newspaper). I attribute its composition to Japanese military intelligence  in preparation for the invasion of Burma, but the value of this document for the Burma army is that, in attributing it to Aung San, this document effectively helped legitimize the militarization of Burma in the name of Aung San. Since the 1962 coup the army has ruled Burma with iron fist using Aung San's image until in 1988 his daughter Aung San Suu Kyi challenged their take of her father's intentions for he country. One of the most persistent agents in its publication and interpretation was Dr Maung Maung, interpreter of Aung San (and rewriter of his communications after Aung San's death), biographer of Gen. Ne Win, and briefly the civilian chair of the Burma Socialist Programme Party and President in the wake of the protests of 1988. Dr Maung Maung was closely associated with General Ne Win and with the newspaper in which this document was first published. 

The Blueprint for a free Burma has been referred to in publication here, here and here. It has often been used in army propaganda in Burmese newspapers to prove how Aung San Suu Kyi's political aspirations are diametrically opposed to her father's presumed authoritarian leanings. Since some academics (including historians) continue to cite this as if it were an authenticated historical document authored by Aung San, this exemplifies to what extent academics have (mostly inadvertently) uncritically confirmed and legitimated army propaganda over half a century as a true historical record of the past. This document has furthermore been substantially rewritten in the latest official history of the Burmese army (eliminating, for example, the reference to royalty as an unsuitable mode of government from the 1957 version, which army leaders have increasingly sought to emulate).