December 2017 – vol 33 – no 6
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Elliott Prasse-Freeman 1
The Rohingya crisis
Hjorleifur Jonsson 3
Stexit?: South East Asian pluralism,
statelessness and exclusive identities
William F.S. Miles 7
Malagasy Judaism: The ‘who is a Jew?’
conundrum comes to Madagascar
Joyce Dalsheim 11
Exile at home: A matter of being out
of place
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Infrastructures of environmental
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Smog in a time of tobacco control
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The Rohingya crisis
Guest Editorial by Elliott Prasse-Freeman
As this article went to press, Myanmar military clearance
operations in northwest Arakan state had already displaced
over 600,000 Rohingya,1 the country’s long-oppressed Muslim
minority. Often aided by Buddhist Rakhine people who claim
the land as their own, these attacks have resulted in the torching
of hundreds of Rohingya villages and the slaughter of over
1,000 men, women and children.
The simple facts of the crisis require reiteration because of
the prevarication emerging from both Myanmar’s military and
Aung San Suu Kyi’s government. Each has suggested that the
Rohingya are burning their own homes, conjuring fake accusa-
tions of rape and are solely responsible for the recent conflagra-
tion. This narrative is unsupported by evidence.
On 25 August 2017 a militant group calling itself the Arakan
Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) did launch attacks on secu-
rity installations that killed perhaps 100 people. But ARSA,
a collection of Saudi-trained Rohingya emigres (ICG 2016),
appears less like an organic expression of Rohingya resist-
ance and more like a group of interlopers machinating to insti-
gate an uprising. Content to play its part in such escalation,
the Myanmar military used ARSA ‘terrorism’ to justify the
initiation of a campaign of collective punishment and ethnic
cleansing that shows no sign of ending. Indeed, even though
the active destruction of Rohingya homes has currently ceased,
no political solution is in sight, leaving the possibility of further
conflict perpetually open. This is not the first time Rohingya
people have been the victims of collective punishment at the
hands of the Myanmar state apparatus – Rohingya were also
expunged in the 1940s, 1978, the early 1990s and 2012 – and
Myanmar’s leaders have given no reason to believe that fur-
ther cleansing will not be forthcoming. This history of abuse
and marginalization displaces attention from the recent events
onto the political conditions that have enabled them. What is
noteworthy is not ARSA’s attack but that the Rohingya have
eschewed armed response in the face of humiliation and
despair for so long.
Yet policymakers and academics, tasking themselves with
solving the Rohingya problem, seem to ignore those political
conditions even as they attempt to overcome them. For instance,
many insist that the state should grant the Rohingya citizenship,
asserting that this procedural fix will be sufficient to end hostil-
ities and integrate society (Holliday 2014). But such solutions,
which call for ‘rights’ for the Rohingya and the ‘rule of law’
for the polity, presuppose the very ends that must be created.
They risk arriving as dead letters; as some of the few Rohingya
villagers who have achieved citizenship know bitterly well,
attaining citizenship may mean nothing more than holding a
pink piece of paper while remaining immured in one’s village,
denied permission to leave (Galache & Avezuela 2017).
For citizenship to actually come to mean substantive oppor-
tunities, it will be necessary instead to address the collective
Burmese perception of Rohingya ethnicity as allochthonous
and their religion as incompatible with Burmese society.
***
A first task is to understand why the Rohingya are seen as not
belonging. It is necessary here to discuss how colonial and
post-colonial state regulatory techniques have helped construct
conceptions of autochthony and foreignness. Burma here does
not, however, recapitulate the now-classic story familiar to
students of Benedict Anderson, Bernard Cohn or Thongchai
Winichakul in which state apparatuses applied knowledge/power
to produce fine-grained ascriptive markers with which they
differentiated subjects. Burma’s various ruling regimes lacked
the sophistication, will and willingness to expend resources to
Elliott Prasse-Freeman is a
PhD candidate in anthropology
at Yale University. He can
be reached at elliott.prasse-
freeman@yale.edu.
1. Small numbers of Hindus
and other ethnicities have also
been caught up in the dragnet
(Das & Jain 2017).
2. State Law and Order
Restoration Council/State Peace
and Development Council.
Callahan, M.P. 2004.
Making Myanmars. In J.S.
Migdal (ed.) Boundaries
and belonging, 99-120.
Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cheesman, N. 2017. How in
Myanmar ‘national races’
came to surpass citizenship
and exclude Rohingya.
Journal of Contemporary
Asia 7(3): 461-483.
Das, K.N. & R. Jain 2017.
Hindus fleeing Myanmar
violence hope for shelter in
Modi’s India. Reuters, 20
September.
Galache, C.S. & A. Avezuela
2017. Citizenship for a few,
rights for none. Equal Times,
24 July.
Holliday, I. 2014. Addressing
Myanmar’s citizenship crisis.
Journal of Contemporary
Asia 44(3): 404-421.
International Crisis Group
(ICG) 2016. Myanmar: A
new Muslim insurgency in
Rakhine state. Asia Report
No. 283, 15 December.
McAuliffe, E.L. 2017. Caste
and the quest for racial
hierarchy in British Burma:
An analysis of census
classifications from 1872-
1931. Master’s thesis,
University of Washington.
Naw Betty Han 2017.
Democracy group warns of
one-sided Rakhine coverage.
Myanmar Times, 13 October.
Nemoto, K. 2000. The concepts
of Dobama (‘our Burma’) and
Thudo-Bama (‘their Burma’)
in Burmese nationalism,
1930-1948. Journal of Burma
Studies 5: 1-16.
Prasse-Freeman, E. 2016.
Grassroots protest
movements and mutating
conceptions of ‘the political’
in an evolving Burma. In R.
Egreteau & F. Robinne (eds)
Metamorphosis, 69-100.
Singapore: NUS Press.
RFA 2015. Aung San Suu Kyi
urges support for NLD amid
Myanmar candidate row.
Radio Free Asia, 10 August.
Schissler, M. et al. 2017.
Reconciling contradictions:
Buddhist-Muslim violence,
narrative making and memory
in Myanmar. Journal of
Contemporary Asia 47.3:
376-395.
Taylor, R. 1981. Party, class and
power in British Burma. The
Journal of Commonwealth &
Comparative Politics 19(1):
44-62.
Wade, F. 2017. Myanmar’s
enemy within. London: Zed
Books.
2 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 33 NO 6, DECEMBER 2017
develop forms of power of a ‘disciplinary’ kind in Foucault’s
sense, through which power’s capillary nature could encompass
and resubjectivize individuals. Instead, colonial and post-colonial
regimes all deployed an obtuse, blunt-force ‘sovereign’ mode of
power in which direct attempts at domination allowed remarkable
space for the subversion and refraction of state will.
For instance, unlike in India, where the British colonial state
used caste to efficiently demarcate and hierarchize subjects,
British censuses of Burma stumbled from one remarkably
confused classificatory schema to the next, using caste (which
hardly existed among Burmese), religion, language, even
birthmarks to fail to produce intensive knowledge (McAuliffe
2017). While ethnic categories became increasingly essential
and essentialized – because the British made them vehicles
for resource acquisition – these categories remained hollow
integuments that actual people could move between with rela-
tive ease.
The post-colonial regimes did no better in defining and
refining the ethnic concept. The constitutional (1948-1962)
and socialist (1962-1988) regimes attempted to subsume ethnic
differentiation under civic and socialist identities, respec-
tively. And while the SLORC/SPDC2 military government
(1988-2011) attempted to homogenize the polity as Myanmar
(often synonymous with the majority ethnicity) and Buddhist,
even scholars who emphasize this project (Callahan 2004) are
unable to show this had real effects on the ground. With the
state too infrastructurally unsophisticated to inscribe upon
subjects irrefragable ethnic labels they could not shed while
moving across contexts, the entire concept has remained con-
text dependent. The irony is that while ethnicity became some-
thing that people were willing to die for in some cases, they
could also choose to change that identity by wearing different
clothes, speaking a different language or learning the basics of
a different religion – manoeuvres which Francis Wade (2017)
documents in his new book on Myanmar’s Muslims.
While ‘ethnicity’ remains mutable in Myanmar, both colo-
nial and post-colonial governments did, however, create a clear
distinction between the various Myanmar ethnicities on the one
hand (those taingyintha or ‘sons of the soil’) and Chinese and
South Asians on the other – as the latter actually conformed
to the classically racial physiognomy-based logic of the British
census, and as the British favoured them in the economy and
administration, making them convenient objects of populist
anger (Taylor 1981). Nick Cheesman has traced the genealogy
of the term taingyintha, showing how it has become the sine
qua non of belonging in Myanmar even as the actual people it
has indexed have changed over time. Cheesman relays how the
current constitution even ‘puts taingyintha over and ahead of
citizenship, addressing the political community not as an aggre-
gation of “citizens” but as “national races”’ (2017: 470).
This brings us back to the Rohingya. They have committed
the dual sin of having perceived characteristics of ‘foreign-
ness’ while demanding taingyintha status. Cheesman highlights
the brutal irony for Rohingya: ‘the surpassing symbolic and
juridical power of taingyintha is at once their problem and their
solution’ (ibid.: 461). But while Cheesman declares taingyintha
a ‘term of state’, a ‘contrivance for political inclusion and exclu-
sion’ (ibid.: 462), and notes how the state thus has the power to
welcome the Rohingya into the fold (ibid.: 474), he underesti-
mates the way that taingyintha, or rather the political belonging
it confers, is dialogically constructed through interaction with
the public. Hence, even though the state has mainstreamed the
taingyintha logic, it no longer decides who gets to be counted
as such.
***
But there is a vast difference between rejecting the Rohingya as
taingyintha and violently driving them out. Why, for instance,
have the Rohingya and not the similarly foreign Chinese been
the objects of ethnic cleansing? More research must consider
the way precarity, affective and participatory deficits within
Burma’s current democratic experience, ethno-nationalist
mobilizations and Islamophobia are combining in Myanmar to
scapegoat the Rohingya.
First, concomitant with Burma’s ‘transition’ to democracy
has been a rapidly evolving political economy. For instance,
while land grabs have defined Myanmar’s last half-century,
their dynamics have recently evolved: whereas land was once
simply stolen by elites who exploited its productive capacity (by
inviting dispossessed farmers to work as sharecroppers), today
land is worth more for its minerals or as a site for investment.
Farmers, once considered essential to production, are today ren-
dered superfluous as lands sit fenced off and fallow in order to
prevent adverse possession claims. Critically, farmers become
transformed into floating populations, travelling to zones of
extraction until the land is used up, which displaces them again.
The new democratic regime seems impotent, or unwilling, to
mitigate the conditions of precarity created by these dislocations.
Aung San Suu Kyi has not only neglected land grab victims, but
has done so by telling them that they must sacrifice for the nation
(Prasse-Freeman 2016). Hence, belonging in the nation becomes
increasingly relevant, providing a ticket for eventual compensa-
tion for current suffering. In this context, the Rohingya’s desire
for taingyintha status takes on material repercussions.
Second, nationalist movements seem to be providing marginal-
ized Burmese with ways of confirming and reaffirming belonging
in the nation. Pace Aung San Suu Kyi, who coldly lectures her
constituents that ‘the responsibility of the people is simply to vote
for the party’ and nothing more (RFA 2015), Buddhist and racial/
ethnic movements recruit and enrol followers by politicizing their
everyday conduct. For instance, monk-led beef-eating prohibi-
tion campaigns are both promoting rural values (by not killing
the socially esteemed cow) and undermining Muslim business
owners (who operate most slaughterhouses). ‘Protection of Race
and Religion’ campaigns have succeeded in rewriting national
laws and capturing local governance institutions so as to police
religious conversion, marriage, sexual relationships and even
procreation. Prosaic acts are turned into vital opportunities for
performing belonging and excluding imposters.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the way that Islam
has been demonized. Opportunistic political entrepreneurs,
including Buddhist monks, have explicitly associated the
Rohingya with transnational jihadists. The ‘global war on terror’
discourse that has cast suspicion and derision on Muslims world-
wide has been redeployed in Myanmar (Schissler et al. 2017), to
depict the Rohingya as a conduit for the incursion of a massive
Islamic horde. Nationalists present themselves as defending the
nation’s very existence against this imminent Islamification,
warning that Rohingya (and Muslims in general) would use any
citizenship privileges offered them as the means to ultimately
forcibly convert all Burmese. While the extent to which average
Burmese subscribe to this narrative is unclear, Suu Kyi herself
amplified and ratified it as reasonable when she declared that
many around the world – including in her own country – fear
‘global Muslim power’. In an environment of precarious exist-
ence, the affectively laden imagery and narratives associated
with ‘radical Islam’ take on new potency.
This all leaves the Rohingya in a miserable predicament.
But there is some hope. Schissler et al.’s research suggests that
what appear to be intractable hatreds are actually quite contin-
gent: informants report only recently becoming ‘aware’ of ‘the
Muslim threat’. This provides more support for the thesis that
the conflagration against the Rohingya is as much due to the
political factors adumbrated above than putatively primordial
racism. One prospect is for Burmese leaders to focus on those
political issues, especially on the crony capitalists and elites
who are producing the precarious economy that is exploiting
the masses and spurring much of the angst. Indeed, while many
have recently spoken of a need for a broader cultural shift to
take place in Myanmar vis-à-vis ethnicity and religion, such a
politics provides an actual means for producing such a shift. It
can begin to deconstruct the exclusionary meanings of taingy-
intha and imagine the Rohingya as part of Myanmar’s future. l