A panel of judges was recently appointed to select the winner of the ASAA Mid-Career Book Prize for 2026. The panel is pleased to announce the winner as Dr Justine Chambers from the Danish Institute for International Studies for the book Pursuing Morality: Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar, ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series, NUS Press, 2024.

ASAA President, Associate Professor David Hundt, would like to thank the three judges for their generosity in serving on the prize selection committee: Professor James Leibold (La Trobe University), Professor Kathryn Robinson (ANU), and Professor Kaori Okano (La Trobe University).

The judges provided the following citation for the winning book:

Pursuing Morality is a beautifully written, deeply researched and conceptually ambitious ethnography of Plong Buddhist life in southeastern Myanmar. Based on bold fieldwork conducted in a conflict-affected region between 2015 and 2019, the book offers a richly textured account of how Buddhist Karen people understand, negotiate and practise morality in everyday life. Chambers shows that morality [thila/sīla] is not simply a Buddhist rule-system or an ethnic essence. It is an ongoing pursuit, shaped by family obligation, gendered self-making, migration, economic pressure, charismatic monks, Buddhist nationalism, armed authority and the violence of the Myanmar military state.

The committee was especially impressed by the book’s refusal of easy binaries: resistance and accommodation; Buddhism and violence; morality and corruption; tradition and change. Instead Chambers shows how Plong people navigate “multiple moral compasses” that do not always point in the same direction, and how moral agency is unevenly available across gender, age, class, ethnicity, and political position. The book is particularly strong in its attention to young women’s lives and to shifting gender relations in a world marked by insecurity and change.

Pursuing Morality also stands out for its methodological care. Chambers reflects with unusual honesty on her positionality as a white anthropologist from the global North and on the wider politics of anthropological knowledge production. The result is a work of great ethnographic depth and interdisciplinary reach. It speaks not only to anthropology and Buddhist studies, but also to scholars of gender, ethics, conflict, nationalism and contemporary Southeast Asia.