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Two Sides of the Same Arakanese Coin: ‘Rakhine,’ ‘Rohingya,’ and Ethnogenesis as Schizogenesis – Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Kirt Mausert
Rakhine historiography elides the ethnogenetic process by asserting narratives of timeless, essentialist ethno-communities.xvii Here indigeneity is formulated in a linear historical framework in which authenticity correlates to antiquity, securing the group’s, and by proxy an individual’s, position within Myanmar society. Consequently, Rakhine nationalist historians assert some variety of the claim that “Rakhaing culture is older and more advanced than that of Burma,” seeking to situate the Rakhine as the more “pure” and direct descendants of the progenitors of the modern Bamar “race.”
While Rohingya historiography often interprets the same sources in different ways, positing that Rohingya predated the Rakhine, it reflects a commitment to the same indigeneity imperative that privileges ancient origins. A common trope here is that shipwrecked Arabs brought their faith with them to Arakan in the late 8th century AD, establishing themselves as the progenitors of modern Rohingya. The lack of corroborating historical or archaeological records renders this claim highly speculative, however. While the claim appears reasonable – shipwrecks were common along Arakan’s shores for many centuries and Arab traders were in communication with the Bay of Bengal even before the advent of Islam – the primary tradition of Islam practiced in areas where maritime Muslim Arab traders introduced the faith, Shafi’i, differs from the Hanifi tradition of Islam in Southeastern Bengal and Arakan.
Rohingya nationalists, for their part, in developing a theory of ethnogenesis linked first and foremost to the introduction of Islam to Arakan, dissociate themselves from those preexisting Hindu-Buddhist Vedic cultural emblems, thereby amplifying the complementary schismogenic process, and abdicating those emblems to Rakhine nationalists. Rohingya historiography’s focus on Islam, seeking to emphasize a distinctive and essential Rohingya identity, laminates “religion” on “race,” excluding Arakanese Hindus and Buddhist Mramagyi (the latter a recognized “national race” of Myanmar), groups which both share mutually intelligible dialects and common genealogical ancestry with Rohingya Muslims. This sacrifices a broader, more inclusive, notion of the Rohingya identity by adhering to the dominant model of authentic ethnic groupings under the “national races” ideology of the Myanmar state. Ultimately, while the Rohingya and Rakhine historiographies hence stand as mutually exclusive, they can both be displaced by reconceptualizing ethnogenesis as a historical and cultural, rather than an essentialist biological or genealogical, process. We turn next to what such a pursuit might look like.
