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Belonging in a New Myanmar — Identity, Law, and Gender in the Anthropology of Contemporary Buddhism
Dr. Juliane Schober, Ph.D. is the Director of the Center for Asian Research and Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University, USA.
“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.
A question frequently raised in debates about ethnic identity, religious community, and gender roles is, who belongs to the new Myanmar? The discourse on identity and belonging in Myanmar is shaped by converging social forces and amplified by digital forms of religious media amid uncertain reforms, speaking to deep divisions and anxieties inflamed by the politics of religious and ethnic identities. Since independence, the Republic of the Union of Myanmar has been plagued by a struggle for belonging that has included protracted wars with ethnic groups and violence against Muslim communities. While the central government has been negotiating an end to decades of ethnic conflicts at its borders, protracted communal violence in Arakan between a Rakhine Buddhist majority and a Rohingya Muslim minority has exposed its inability to ensure peace for its citizens (Ei Ei Toe Lwin 2014; Kyaw Phyo Tha 2014).
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. In 2011, Myanmar undertook comprehensive reforms that touch upon every aspect of life in which religious difference has increasingly been marked and social and political identity has been contested. Soon thereafter, from 2012 to 2014, violence against Muslims erupted in communities where, as Nick Cheesman explains (2017b: 338): “The fundamental common interests of the members of one community are irreconcilable with those of another, giving rise to a shared belief that the other community poses an existential threat.” Speeches by prominent Buddhist monks often preceded attacks on Muslim neighborhoods, while organizations like Ma Ba Tha, the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, mobilized their followers to defend the Buddhist nation against a perceived encroaching threat from religious others. 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.
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.” Other themes expressing anti-Muslim anxieties include the threat of impending ‘dark forces’ and the destruction of Nalanda by invading Muslims forces that, so advocates claim, ushered in the decline of Buddhism in India. Rohingya and other Muslim communities in Myanmar came to be seen as the regional representatives of a perceived global Islamic threat against a Buddhist majority.
Following the violent attacks on Rohingya in 2012 and 2013, Graeme Wood (2014) described the appalling conditions for internally displaced Rohingya in Rakhine. Others have chosen to become refugees on the open sea, leaving by ship, from the Bay of Bengal for Muslim nations in Southeast Asia, where they are also often not welcomed. The United Nations does not recognize Rohingya as stateless, and Rakhine politicians have been resisting efforts by the national government to end this conflict with the help of the Human Rights Commission chaired by the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Media reports on communal conflict inevitably draw on the often-partisan discourse of participants and on Buddhist apologetics in Burma or the West, highlighting those who advocate a religious nationalism as well as victims who lack agency. An anthropology of contemporary Buddhism in Myanmar must therefore distance itself from common prejudices that Buddhist practices are inherently anti-Muslim or that the presence of religious others poses an existential threat to Myanmar’s national identity.
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). Rakhine Buddhists are one of Myanmar’s eight ‘national races’ and constitute the ethnic majority in Arakan. Leider (2014) writes that the Rakhine struggle for recognition within the new Myanmar is marked by anxiety about ethnic identity and national belonging. Today, Rakhine Buddhists see their livelihoods threatened by a growing Muslim population at a moment when political reforms at the center of the state produce ambiguities about their own position in the new Myanmar. Their own historical narratives of belonging are closely linked with the advent of the Buddhist teachings and the Mahamuni image to the region. In the fifteenth century, Arakanese kings of Mrauk U expanded their kingdom to include the Chittagong region.
Arakanese become subjects of the Burmese after the conquest of 1785, when King Bodawphaya moved the famous Buddha image to Mandalay, where it continues to attract many pilgrims. In 1826, Rakhine were annexed into the British Empire. Continual population movement across the border with what is now Bangladesh has created hardships of migration and economic competition for low-wage labor. The region along the Bay of Bengal that spans from the Chittagong Hills and Arakan has become a tinderbox of communal tensions. The end of dictatorship initiated a new market economy at the crossroads between India and China where Myanmar’s significant natural gas reserves are located (Al-Adawy 2013).
The Rakhine Buddhist majority in Arakan thus sees itself not only in economic competition with Muslims in their homeland, but also as abandoned to its plight by a central government that is dominated by Buddhist Burmans. 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 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. This discourse of race and belonging remains evident in the citizenship laws of 1982 that are still in force and that require minorities to document property ownership and residency for three generations. For many Burmese, the fact that Rohingya are not included in the official list of 135 groups proves that they are not citizens of Myanmar and that they migrated illegally from Bangladesh. Such positions undermine the legal status of Rohingya in Myanmar and their claims to citizenship and land ownership, displacing them beyond Myanmar’s borders.
