New Technologies, Established Practices: Developing Narratives of Muslim Threat in Myanmar Matt Schissler, in Melissa Crouch (ed) Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging (forthcoming Oxford University Press 2015)1 FINAL pre-publication draft This chapter was prompted by concern for Buddhist-Muslim violence in Myanmar. Drawing methodological inspiration from a study into the significance of mobile phones in India (Jeffrey and Doron 2013; 2012), the chapter asks: What are established communication practices in Myanmar that might be disrupted – or align particularly powerfully – with the growing use of new technologies and media that will arrive along with telecommunications networks? The chapter seeks to answer this question using an approach of ‘observant participation’ (Vargas, in Hale & Calhoun 2008), drawing from experiences living in western Yangon and participating in activist networks seeking to disrupt anti-Muslim violence. After a section (I) detailing technological change under way in Myanmar, the chapter turns to a discussion of those established practices (habitus; metis) developed to communicate during life under authoritarian rule (section II). The section following then explores everyday narratives regarding Islam as they are currently produced by organized political forces and circulate online and through everyday life in western Yangon (section III). The final section (IV) discusses potential alignments between new technologies and established practices, situated in the context of these narratives. During the first week of July 2014, violence between Buddhist and Muslim communities wracked Mandalay, Myanmar’s second largest city, leaving two persons – one Buddhist, one Muslim – dead and property belonging to both sides destroyed. ‘[S]cores of Buddhist men on motorcycles converged on a Muslim neighbourhood in Mandalay brandishing swords, yelling anti-Muslim slogans and ransacking Muslim shops… set off by reports that a Muslim man had raped a Buddhist woman,’ opened the coverage by the New York Times (Fuller and Moe 2014). ‘Facebook Post Stokes Anti-Muslim Violence in Mandalay,’ ran the headline for another news story, as it adduced the violence as deriving from the Facebook posts of a leading nationalist monk famous for his virulent anti-Muslim sermons (Mezzofiore 2014). Though not the first such violence in Myanmar, the incident marks the first time violence was explicitly connected to uses of social media. While coverage from other news outlets was slightly more cautious in drawing such causal connections,2 civil society, religious leaders, and even Myanmar’s central 1 This chapter also benefited from discussion and feedback on the following conference papers: “Whither the ‘moderate mainstream’? Religious violence and Myanmar's changing information environment,” Islam, Law and the State in Myanmar, Centre for Asian Legal Studies, National University Singapore, 23-24 January 2014; “Echo chambers in Myanmar: Social media and the ideological justifications for mass violence,” Communal Conflict in Myanmar: Characteristics, Causes, Consequences, Australian National University Department of Political & Social Change Research Colloquium, Yangon, 17-18 March 2014. 2 The New York Times, for example, noted that Facebook posts about the incident shared by a prominent Buddhist leader, ‘appeared to have partly spurred the violence.’ See Fuller and Moe 2014. 1