M.MAS 7/22/15 but as something mobilized in any given moment with referents that can change, including notions about history and its relationship to the present. Veena Das has described the production of violence in India as a systematic forgetting,73 and this should be a concern in Myanmar. Many of the people we spoke with drew on recollections of communal concord, but some also explicitly disavowed these memories. Over the time span of a lifetime, a generation that experiences Buddhist-Muslim relations primarily in terms of suspicion and violence would help to establish perceptions of this as primordial fact. ‘Maybe this is true for old people,’ a twenty-year-old activist said to two of the authors after we discussed this sense of contradiction. ‘But we young people have had no chance for remembering this kind of harmony.’ Significantly, she is from Kyaukse, an area in central Myanmar that was the site of serious BuddhistMuslim violence during October 2003.74 The complement to forgetting is the recasting of old events in a new light and, through this, the creation of new memory. This could mean re-defining previous instances of violence that may not have been collectively interpreted as ‘religious’ conflict in those terms. Both processes could contribute to establishing a conception of contemporary religious conflict as inevitable and historically determined. Academics, NGOs, and media outlets need to be careful that they do not inadvertently bolster such communalization of conflict as well; lazy historicization that equates contemporary violence with, for example, Indo-Burman riots in the 1930s reinforces attempts to present religious antagonism as a historical fact and thus irreconcilable. Instead, inquiring after the specific constellation of conditions that are producing violence and accompanying justifying narratives would challenge efforts to solidify interreligious antagonism and facilitate work for reconciliation and peace. Who is contradicting – or reinforcing – narratives of Muslim threat? This paper has detailed a set of arguments that are persistently used to justify a narrative of Muslim threat. The next question that must be investigated is what influential actors in society are doing to contribute to this narrative. Such a question could also be positioned in the reverse, as asking what influential actors in Myanmar society are doing that would contradict this narrative. It may seem paradoxical to recommend such an investigation in a paper that has focused on the discourse of non-elites, but this is not so for two reasons. First, as we and others have noted, those little stories detailed above need to be interpreted in light of a larger narrative framework. Connections between the justifications summarized in this paper and extreme hate speech or egregious rumour are clear, but this research suggests that these are not the only ways in which the narrative framework is being constructed. Second, it is important for outsiders to consider the ways that their discourse about violence influences conflict. To locate the cause of violence as primarily in the fears or hatreds that lie within the hearts of some Myanmar people is to generalize and equalize involvement in conflict across society. This is an understanding of mass violence as tragedy; such an understanding makes everyone, and thus no one, accountable.75 Conversely, asking questions about the contributions identifiable actors in Myanmar society make to conflict can help to demystify the production of violence or, at least, avoid obscuring it further. Our research findings suggest that when religious, state, and other prominent political leaders make rhetorical commitments to principles such as human rights, peace, or religious harmony, these should be read in the context of an established narrative of threat. It should not be assumed that such statements are 73 Das, “Specificities,” 113. For a news report on the violence published at the time, see “Muslim Minority Attacked in Myanmar,” Al Jazeera, November 3, 2003, http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2003/11/200841011362824245.html. Notably, U Wirathu also hails from Kyaukse and was sentenced to 25 years in prison for inciting this violence. He was released in early 2012. 75 For an extended discussion of this dynamic in the context of Hindu-Muslim violence in India, see Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. 74 22