Paper short abstract:

This paper sets out on a bus journey through Yangon to discuss the spatiotemporal dissonance thrown up by Myanmar's fraught democratic transition.

Paper long abstract:

Pentecostal believers in Yangon, like their Buddhist neighbours, spend a lot of time on the bus, often stuck in traffic. Many of these buses are second-hand imports from South Korea, which frequently display route maps not for Yangon, but for Seoul. This paper sets off on one such journey with Pentecostals amidst Myanmar's fraught democratic transition, attending to the spatiotemporal dissonance between Yangon's congested streets and the sleek but faded renderings of Seoul's public transport network. To traverse these actual and imagined infrastructures simultaneously is to commute across the complex timescapes thrown up by Myanmar's promised transition - timescapes upon which Pentecostals seek to act, in consort with God, through a combination of voting and prayer that intertwines secular with messianic time. I discuss how, for these minority Christians, contrasting visions of modernity and progress are evaluated through a soteriology that maps personal onto national salvation, one in which the figure of a hyper-modern South Korea - as an apparent Christian nation - looms large. Recalling Weber's classic thesis, this figure stands in contrast to a not-yet-arrived Myanmar whose intransigent Buddhism, even in the face of two centuries of missionary effort, continues, for now, to hold it at an impasse, stuck like a bus idling in Yangon traffic.