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Belonging in a New Myanmar Identity Law
By Juliane Schober — is the Director of the Center for Asian Research and a Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University.
“To be Burmese is to be Buddhist” is a slogan commonly identified with the dawn of nationalism in the country known today as Myanmar, where violence between Buddhist, Muslim, and ethnic communities has increasingly jeopardized liberalizing reforms. How do contemporary forms of Theravada Buddhist discourse shape ideas of belonging in a multi-religious and ethnically diverse Myanmar following the dissolution of military rule in 2011? How do digital technologies and globalizing communication networks in this nation influence rapidly changing social identities, anxieties, and imaginaries that Brigit Meyer identifies as ‘aesthetic formations’? In this article, I trace diverse genealogies of belonging to show how contemporary constructions of meaning, facilitate religious imaginaries that may exacerbate difference by drawing on past ideologies of conflict or may seek to envision a new and diverse Myanmar.
Recent literature on Buddhism in Southeast Asia and especially Burma or Myanmar has focused on Theravada formations in traditional and modern contexts.1 Theravada civilizations, in particular, are characterized by elite institutions, by their use of a prestige language, Pali, and by related, vernacular narratives that convey in art, manuscript, and print cultures the ethical values or imaginaries of this religious tradition. These imaginaries are sustained through social discourse, cultural practices, and regional networks.2 The study of traditional Theravada Buddhist social formations thus presumes an encompassing hegemony that is grounded in truth claims about particular civilizational narratives, teleological histories, and the moral universe they embody.
In the current unstable landscape of heightened anxieties, communal violence against Rohingya in Arakan, also known as Rakhine State, and in Muslim communities elsewhere jeopardizes Myanmar’s political, economic, and social reforms. Such violent attacks were initially directed against Rohingya in Rakhine: widely seen as not belonging to Myanmar, they were called “Bengali” or kula, derogatory names for foreigners. These developments stoke fear about religious difference and rally people around a common cause to defend Buddhism, the majority religion in Myanmar. Anti-Muslim narratives invoke a routinized discourse of mobilization and selective construction of communal memory (Brass 1997; Schissler 2016: 233; Schissler et al. 2017: 390). McCarthy and Menager (2017: 396) stress the violent discourse of rumors, which in essence claim that “Muslim men are the primary threat to Buddhist women and, by extension, the body politic of Myanmar.” Buddhist identity is the largest ‘common denominator’ among Myanmar’s many ethnic groups.
Nearly 88 percent of citizens are Buddhist, with the remainder identifying as Christian (6 percent), Muslim (less than 5 percent), Hindu (0.5 percent), and others. Although a religious minority, Muslim communities in Myanmar are ethnically diverse and comprise nearly 1.5 million people of Malay, Chinese Panthey, Kamein, and South Asian Zerbadi lines of descent (Farrelly 2016; Yegar 1972). Violence against Muslims also erupted after independence, leading to an exodus of Muslims from Burma to Bengal in 1977 and 1978 and again in 1993, 1997, and 2003. In 1997, anti-Muslim rioting in Mandalay and other towns in upper Burma lasted for several months. Often, Muslims leaders were warned by members of local village councils of the impending destruction of mosques, shops, and homes. While this strategy may have saved lives, it also points to a deliberate organization of the attacks. Some argue that the riots were instigated by people affiliated with the military regime to deflect public attention away from a failing economy. While anthropology has long recognized the fluidity of ethnic identity, the Burmese state and many of its citizens continue to adhere to a hierarchy of racial categories to determine who belongs to the Union of Myanmar. The 2015 census shows that the country’s citizens include Burmese (68 percent), Shan (9 percent), Kayin (7 percent), Rakhine (3.5 percent), Mon (2 percent), Kachin (1.5 percent), Kayah (0.75 percent), and others. The state classifies its population into 135 ethnic groups and 8 national races that developed from colonial notions about race and ethnic identity that are still seen as the foundation for national belonging. Burmese narratives about the origin of Myanmar claim that Burmans are the original inhabitants of the region, while ethnic minorities migrated there from surrounding areas. These sentiments about ethnic identity and national belonging are conveyed in a permanent exhibit of Myanmar’s national races at the National Museum in Yangon.
