Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the different temporal registers that young Karen Buddhists inhabit in their attempts to live virtuous lives. I argue that value is best understood as a set of contradictory and ambiguous ideals which individuals seek to cultivate and enact within multiple temporalities.

Paper long abstract:

In Karen communities in southeastern Myanmar, children learn from a very young age that filial respect and gratitude are considered the highest moral values. For many people it is believed that children incur a debt of gratitude to their parents when they are born, a debt which is vital to understanding the basis of parent-child relationships. While all children are born indebted to their parents, daughters in particular bear a material responsibility to provide for the family unit and failure to fulfil this duty is considered demeritorious or immoral.

Drawing from Ssorin-Chaikov's (2017) understanding of modernity as made up of multiple temporalities, this paper explores the relations between different temporal registers that young Karen women inhabit in their attempts to live virtuous lives. MacIntyre's (1981) theory of virtue ethics implies a degree of coherence in eudaimonic conceptions of the self, virtue and conceptions of human flourishing. However, to focus on a singular and coherent narrative of eudaimonic selfhood, overlooks the variety of everyday temporalities that people draw upon in their deliberations about how to pursue a virtuous life and indeed morality. Drawing from the lives of two young Plong Karen women, I argue that the ability to pursue a virtuous life cannot be reduced to singular understanding of time or indeed virtue. Directing our attention to the fragility embedded within young people's efforts to transform themselves and the social and material spaces within which they live, I argue that pursuing virtuous lives depends crucially on traversing circumstances and temporalities that are often fraught, uncertain and can also lead to failure.