58 JUDITH BEYER In another sequence further into the interview, the interviewer refines the questions: not merely more information about the country seems to be of interest, but also information about the applicant’s ‘traditions and customs’: I: Where do rohingyens [sic] descend? A: From Arab all I’m telling you is what I heard. I: Did you not try to get more information about your ethnicity? A: I was in danger of my life before. But now I am trying to find more about Rohingyas. I: What have you found so far? A: All Rohingyas are dying all the news from BBC. Rohingyas burnt alive. I: Did you not try and find out about their traditions and customs? A: No. I: Why not? A: I’m trying. Since I came here I try and get some knowledge about it. I: You arrived more than a year ago, and the only information you can tell me is that they are being burnt alive. How come you don’t know more after having been here for more than a year? A: There are innocents dying they are trying to finish us off. I: That doesn’t answer my question. You have been here for more than a year. Why do you not know more about the traditions and culture? In this sequence, the interviewer equates information about the country with the applicant’s ethnicity and that, in the course of questioning him, conflates ‘ethnicity’ with ‘traditions and customs’ or ‘traditions and culture’. The applicant denies knowing more about these things and can only point to recently acquired knowledge (by way of TV) of the current situation in Myanmar for Rohingya (‘dying’ and being ‘burnt alive’), but the interviewer is after information that could be assumed to reveal the applicant’s identity. In response to the query about the ‘descent’ of the Rohingya, the applicant gives a long answer concerning his presumed lack of knowledge ‘about the traditions and culture’ of Rohingya, claiming that he really tried to find out more. After his answer, the interviewer did not continue questioning but instead called for a break. Even from these short question-and-answer sequences, it is clear that we are dealing here with essentialised notions of ‘culture’ in the broadest sense, whereby an ethnic group can presumably be identified and distinguished by its own language and ‘traditional’ beliefs or practices that make it distinct from others. The implicit presupposition on the side of the interviewer is that it would not only be possible to find out about a person’s identity by asking about ethnicity, language, customs and traditions, but also that applicants should naturally be interested in knowing ‘more’ about all of these things, as well as about their country of origin, even if they had fled from it as a young child, as the applicant had claimed. Moreover, a general and particularly dominant assumption in asylum procedure concerning minorities is that an ethnic group can always be assigned its own language. The applicant’s claim regarding not knowing ‘Rohingya’ (language) makes the interviewer suspect that he is actually a citizen of Bangladesh. But any assumption regarding a direct correlation of one ethnic group to one language is misguided, as has been known in legal anthropology at least since