M.MAS 7/22/15 city]… When people are at peace, there is no problem but when they start to have conflict, they become opposed to each other. If you live in a house, if you do not have good relationship with your neighbour, it is dangerous. If you do not have a good relationship, you will do bad things.71 This excerpt presents a temporal definition of the conflict as contemporary and marked as different from memories preceding it. We can also note this temporal definition in an absence: narrators made a persistent set of arguments to justify a sense of Muslim threat, but these arguments did not often include references to a history of grievance against Muslims in Myanmar. Those arguments made tended to be either universal claims about Islam, and thus timeless, or relatively contemporary, and thus not presented as evidence that Muslims and Buddhists in Myanmar have always been at odds. Indeed, narrators presenting a narrative of threat often did so by acknowledging past coexistence and explaining this as a function of a Buddhist failure to adequately recognize the ‘truth’ of the Muslim threat. This is noticeably different than, for example, the ways that ethnic conflicts in Myanmar are often discussed; in the authors’ experiences in Karen, Mon, or Kachin communities, for example, history and memory of wrongs suffered at the hands of Burmans is often explicit in discourse.72 Narrators did not invoke a sense of having been victimized by Muslims in Myanmar across a long arc of history. This is not to say that recent violence has no history or that temporal frames of a longer duration were not present in the justifications presented by narrators. Muslims in Myanmar have faced violence and discrimination at times before 2012. Concerns that people expressed about Islam or Buddhism more generally were situated historically: arguments about countries once Buddhist and now lost or about immigration patterns and growth in Muslim populations both entail a temporal frame that stretches back centuries. But these arguments are not about presenting a history of antagonism that is defined as between Buddhists and Muslims and operating inside Myanmar; rhetorically, narrators did not often make reference to longer histories of grievance between the two religious communities. The only place where old examples of conflict were used to illustrate conceptions of present threat was in Rakhine State, where we heard reference to immigration from Bangladesh and Mujahideen massacres of Rakhine villages in the early 1940s. While our narrators did not commonly point to historical grievances in their arguments, our methods do not allow for us to project this onto the general population. Additionally, our interview arrangements could have discouraged reference to historical grievance. However, narrators did raise historical grievances in relation to other issues of importance such as complaints about education and governance in Myanmar, which were variously situated in relation to the socialist and post-1988 eras. This clarifies an important question. How is the historical lineage of contemporary Buddhist-Muslim conflict being constructed in Myanmar, and what beliefs about the irreconcilability of religious communities does this support? This is an important question, for two reasons. First, it is significant that people are asserting a contradiction between past and present, regardless of instances of violence or periods of antagonism that have been salient at other times in Myanmar. Such an assertion is a decision, and a decision that needs to be better understood as it may serve as a foundation for mobilizing alternative narratives that contest ideologies of threat and self-defence. The converse is also significant. Working for peace and reconciliation would be manifestly more difficult if this contradiction ceases to be expressed, if the two communities are understood to have always been at odds. Second, individual memories and collective conceptions of history are mutable. This underscores the importance of understanding religious conflict in Myanmar not as a prior and ossified set of relationships 71 Woman, 54, Buddhist, Rakhine, Sittwe February 2015 Sittwe MSPT 12. For a thorough exploration of the everyday salience of such senses of grievance in the Karen context, see Stephen Campbell, “Articulating Grievance in Southeast Myanmar,” in Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development, ed. Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar (India: SAGE Publications, 2015). 72 21