Extended version of: Prasse-Freeman, Elliott and Kirt Mausert. “Two Sides of the Same Arakanese Coin: ‘Rakhine,’ ‘Rohingya,’ and Ethnogenesis as Schismogenesis,” in Prasse-Freeman, Chachavalpongpun, and Strefford eds, Unraveling Myanmar: Critical Hurdles to Myanmar’s Opening Up Process, Kyoto U Press, 2020. 1 Draft – consult authors for most up-to-date version Two Sides of the Same Arakanese Coin: ‘Rakhine,’ ‘Rohingya,’ and Ethnogenesis as Schismogenesis Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Kirt Mausert "Bengalis do not have any characteristics or culture in common with the ethnicities of Myanmar." - Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, 19 March 2018 i “The patterns of behavior associated with elimination of other groups may be assimilated into their culture so that they are impelled to eliminate more and more.” - Gregory Bateson, 1935 ii Introduction: A Theory of Longue Duree Ethnogenesis In the wake of ongoing cycles of ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority, the most recent of which saw over 700,000 driven out of Myanmar’s Rakhine State into Bangladesh beginning in August 2017, the world has been searching for answers to what has motivated these brutal pogroms. Journalistic and academic accounts have generally characterized the violence as deriving from some mixture of internecine conflict (between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya) and state-sponsored military cleansing operations. Although the modality of violence is quite different across these explanations, what they have in common is reducing the conflict to Buddhists versus Muslims, or the autochthonous Rakhine (with backing of their co- religionists, the Bamar, amongst other ‘national races’ of Burma) versus the putatively allochthonous Rohingya. The problem with these accounts is that while religion and indigeneity have certainly proven to be potent discourses for mobilizing the violence, an exclusive focus on them ultimately obscures factors that would illuminate deeper motivations of the conflict. Specifically, while both folk and academic histories draw on particular interpretations of official British colonial records and Arakanese royal chronicles to present the Rakhine and Rohingya as unrelated ethnic groups – a division that has allowed elites of both to make political claims to autonomy within Myanmar – re-examination and retheorization of historical sources, linguistic patterns, archaeological records, and anthropological data casts doubt upon that conclusion and the very epistemological stance that insists upon such a project of categorization. Instead, we suggest that beginning after the migration of the Mranma people to Arakan around the 9th century, iii processes of schismogenesis iv (creation through differentiation) have been underway which have resulted today in the binary Rakhine/Rohingya, with the former considered “native” and the latter “foreign” to Arakan. We suggest here that both emblems of identity in fact are intimately related to one another rather than either preceding the other in a meaningful sense.