M.MAS 7/22/15 they kill an Arakan35 man and if we catch him [the killer], we do not kill him. We just hand him over to the police. If they catch an Arakan man, they cut his neck and kill him. When there was a conflict, they showed us like this [violent gesture] and told us, ‘we will do this to your Arakan people.’ One person from Section #--- was killed. They cut off his flesh and cooked and ate it. Then, they cut off his head and showed other people. They are very wicked.36 People also made reference to personal experiences with Muslims, making up the third strand of argument. It is important to note, however, that this strand was far less common than the other two. That is, narrators more regularly invoked events internationally or elsewhere in Myanmar, or characterized as personal experiences events that might blur the boundary between things lived or witnessed and things heard recounted. Nonetheless, we did hear references to personal grievance, in which people explained that they had individually been wronged by Muslims. For example: They are bad, if it is related to females. They destroy girls, to be frank. They have those habits. For us, we care for others as brothers and sisters but for them they would like to take advantage in any circumstance. Even for donations, they would ask for donations only to support members of their own religion and they do not care for others… I have lived in the Islamic community; I have studied them a lot. When we ask for water, they would spit [into the cup] first and let you drink. So disgusting… When I was [working as a truck driver], I rented a place in their compound, so I know them well.37 Violence and virtuous self-defence We have chosen to organize our interpretation of these interviews spatially, in order to emphasize the way narrators situated their concerns in a global context. Using space as an organizing principle helps clarify how a dominant demographic majority (Buddhists) can fear a demographic minority (Muslims): the concerns presented are with Muslims inside Myanmar as the local embodiment of a global threat seen to surround Myanmar. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was pilloried by non-Burmese observers for her 2013 BBC interview,38 but in situating domestic fears in a global context she was descriptively accurate; fear in Myanmar is not (only) of a small minority population, but of a global threat felt to be both descending upon the country and growing within it. In her exploration of Hindu-Sikh violence in India, Veena Das has described similar discourses, making note of an important shift: when ‘fear of the other is transformed into the notion that the other is fearsome.’39 In the Myanmar context, the arguments we interpreted above regularly consisted of such a shift. With the narrative of Muslims as a threat established, people described how this prompted them to direct their gaze towards individual Muslims with uncertainty and concern. In Mawlamyine for example, a young ethnic Karen woman we spoke to in a Church compound described discussing this feeling with her friends: 35 Note this narrator moved back and forth between ‘Rakhine’ and ‘Arakan,’ which are two terms for the same ethnic nationality. 36 Woman, 49, Buddhist, Rakhine, Sittwe, February 2015 Sittwe MSPT 9. 37 Man, 54, Hindu-Buddhist, Thitagu, Mawlamyine March 2015 MLM MSPT 12. 38 David Blair, “How Can Aung San Suu Kyi – a Nobel Peace Prize Winner – Fail to Condemn anti-Muslim Violence?,” The Telegraph (UK), October 24, 2013, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidblair/100242929/howcan-aung-san-suu-kyi-a-nobel-peace-prize-winner-fail-to-condemn-anti-muslim-violence/. 39 Veena Das, “Specificities: Official Narratives, Rumour, and the Social Production of Hate,” Social Identities 4, no. 1 (February 1998): 125, doi:10.1080/13504639851915. (emphasis original) 11