M.MAS 7/22/15 committed by Buddhists.52 In these attacks individuals are framed as traitors, individuals who are not only failing to protect their religion but, in so doing, marking themselves as betrayers of their religion, race, and nation. Producing narratives, reconciling contradictions It is important to emphasize again that our intention is not to quantify the degree to which people in Myanmar accept the allegations of threat from Islam or to determine the popularity or influence of groups like 969 and Ma Ba Tha. The above is an in-depth exploration of the ways that people who believe Islam is a threat justified such a narrative, and what such a narrative may justify in turn. Other people we interviewed did explicitly reject such arguments. Rather than see this as a strict dichotomy between two camps, however, it is more useful to recognize that people are attempting to navigate everyday lives in which they must both manage their shifting understandings of past and current events and their relationships with people around them. The following excerpt from an interview with a teacher in Pathein illustrates this point: For the Rakhine issue, the people who come through the border, how can we call them? Bengali? They came into the country. As we are bordering other countries, there can be a population flow problem. However, as we couldn’t stop them systematically in the first place, we can’t send back the people who are already here. This is not good to say, but I want our country to be a pure Buddhist county. We can allow the other religions, but I want our Buddhist [population] to increase. I can have empathy as a human being but I am also afraid that one ethnic group will swallow another. However, we do not know who started this problem and who is right. For now, I think both sides have made mistakes. If the Rakhine people who I know hear that I have answered in this way, they will hate me.53 Interpretation of the current moment and past events is still open and a function of myriad factors: the individual’s personal experiences, the information known, and relationships with others who may have different and stronger views on the issues in question. Conceptions of threat and anti-Muslim antagonism in Myanmar are actively being made, in conversation and contestation with the dynamic views of others and with discourses that circulate within society. In explaining the way such discourses can cohere to form a narrative of threat, anthropologist Stanley Tambiah’s concepts of focalization and transvaluation are helpful: These are linked processes by which a series of local incidents and small-scale disputes, occasioned by religious, commercial, interfamilial, or other issues, and involving people in direct contact with one another, cumulatively build up... focalization progressively denudes local incidents and disputes of their contextual particulars, and transvaluation distorts, abstracts, and aggregates those incidents into larger collective issues of national or ethnic interest.54 In Myanmar, focalization is occurring as people emphasize religion and religious difference. This was most visible, for example, when narrators identified religion as the cause of negative personal experiences or crimes, rather than the specifics of the incident in question. Transvaluation, similarly, is visible when 52 A post circulating on social media during the Meiktila riots in March 2013, for example, provided instructions for destroying the cameras of journalists attempting to cover the violence. For a thorough discussion of such obstacles, see, Sean Gleeson, “For Burma’s Journalists, a Bumpy Road to ‘Discipline-Flourishing Democracy’,” The Irrawaddy, June 17, 2015, http://www.irrawaddy.org/burma/for-burmas-journalists-a-bumpy-road-to-disciplineflourishing-democracy.html. 53 Woman, 42, Buddhist, Karen, Pathein February 2015 Pathein MSPT 6. 54 Tambiah, Leveling Crowds, 81. 14