M.MAS 7/22/15 conflicts over land and population movement in Rakhine State are framed in religious terms, which both imbues an issue urgent for ethnic Rakhine communities with national import and connects it to a globalized fear of Islam. Both of Tambiah’s concepts are valuable because they underscore that it is the everyday interpretive acts of people in Myanmar that are helping to produce this sense of threat, illustrated and reinforced through the selective interpretation of stories from their everyday lives, reports of events in Myanmar, and international news. But such interpretive acts must occur in light of a larger narrative framework. ‘Little stories feed into a narrative with ethnocidal momentum... but only insofar as they are framed by larger narratives,’ Arjun Appudarai argues. ‘Such narratives typically come from states and large-scale, wellorganized political forces. Such forces can never produce the contingent conditions for the reception of their narratives... but without them many sparks would die quietly, long before they become fires.’55 This echoes findings from long-term participant observation in western Yangon, which illustrates the interplay between everyday life and the written and oral discourse of organized groups such as 969 and Ma Ba Tha.56 Many people share the perception of Islam as inherently a threat and thus irredeemably at odds with Buddhists and Buddhism. But many others are seeking to reconcile such a narrative with contradictory memories and experiences of religious co-existence and friendship. The teacher from Pathein continued: Q: When did you start to worry about this issue [religious conflict]? A: It was when the Rakhine conflict started. Q: During this time, what kinds of changes have you seen? A: I think they [Buddhists and Muslims] do not like each other and hate each other… This is what I see but I didn’t ask any other people, so, it’s just my opinion. I think they are being cautious. In the past they loved each other but now they may have doubts… In the past, families might have very close relationships but now they might be careful and watch each other’s steps.57 As in the above excerpt, nearly everyone described their concerns about Islam or inter-religious tension as recent, marking the 2012 riots in Rakhine State or other more recent incidents as the origin point of such a sense. Noting this is not to say that anti-Muslim sentiments did not exist in Myanmar prior to 2012, or that Muslims did not experience violence before this date. But that almost every person we interviewed in all six cities defined their concerns as relatively recent is important to recognize because, for each person, this articulated sense of prior co-existence required them to do subsequent interpretive work: Before I joined this association [Ma Ba Tha], I felt that we are all the same human beings in my heart… There was no discrimination in my mind. Not only I felt this way, all Buddhists have this same feeling. But after the [riots in May 2013] took place, I knew that the situation was not the same anymore… This is the weakness [of Buddhists], we don’t know what [Muslims] are doing to our religion, or making our religion shrink. I didn’t notice this, but when I studied about it in detail I found out that it’s a dangerous issue. So we have to find ways to protect our religion.58 55 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 91–92. 56 See, Matt Schissler, “New Technologies, Established Practices: Developing Narratives of Muslim Threat in Myanmar,” in Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, ed. Melissa Crouch (Forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2015). See also a semi-regular series of essays reflecting on these observations published by the Australian National University blog New Mandala, http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/author/matt/. 57 Woman, 42, Buddhist, Karen, Pathein February 2015 Pathein MSPT 6. 58 Woman, 38, Buddhist, Myanmar, Lashio, March 2015 Lashio MSPT 9. 15