The Proud Hotel Termite Inspector of Yangon: Otherings and Conflicts in Myanmar

Abstract

Abstract “They [Rohingya Muslims] are like termites, eating and destroying the house of Burma … many foreign people think we Buddhists are the bad people. They are the bad people!,” bemoaned a local hotel inspector from Yangon. Burman Buddhist nationalism, as Chapter 4 illuminates, is a cornerstone and a perennial legitimizing force of “Burmeseness.” Using the ethnoreligious othering framework, Chapter 4 examines the conflicts involving Buddhist and Muslim factions in Myanmar by probing the emotive, symbolic, and perceptual mechanisms driving these phenomena. It opens with a discussion of how ethnoreligious nationalism provides an affective lexicon for initiating and framing the othering of a target group. It then scrutinizes how securitizing actors project the blame and facilitate the “necessary” extraordinary measures against their designated enemies. The chapter concludes by dissecting how the Burman Buddhists’ attempts at sacralizing their ideal construction of “Burmese” identity, homeland, and nation-state, justify the extermination of the othered.