{"id":137026,"date":"2024-06-14T16:51:06","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T16:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/?p=137026"},"modified":"2024-06-14T16:52:40","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T16:52:40","slug":"confronting-two-calamities-in-eastern-sri-lanka-in-2005-by-dennis-b-mcgilvray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/confronting-two-calamities-in-eastern-sri-lanka-in-2005-by-dennis-b-mcgilvray\/","title":{"rendered":"Confronting Two Calamities in Eastern Sri Lanka in 2005-by Dennis B. McGilvray"},"content":{"rendered":"

Confronting Two Calamities in Eastern Sri Lanka in 2005-by Dennis B. McGilvray<\/span><\/h2>\n

Source:<\/span><\/strong>Thuppahis<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Dennis B. McGilvray,\u00a0in\u00a0India Review\u00a0<\/em>5(2-3) November 2006, special issue on public anthropology, \u2026. where the title reads\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cTsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka:\u00a0<\/strong>An Anthropologist Confronts the Real World\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u2026. with highlighting in different colours imposed by the Editor, Thuppahi<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"elanka\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Recent calls for a new \u201cpublic anthropology\u201d to promote greater visibility for ethnographic research in the eyes of the press and the general public, and to bolster the courage of anthropologists to address urgent issues of the day, are laudable although probably too hopeful as well. Yet, while public anthropology could certainly be more salient in American life, it already exists in parts of the world such as Sri Lanka where social change, ethnic conflict, and natural catastrophe have unavoidably altered the local context of ethnographic fieldwork. Much of the anthropology of Sri Lanka in the last three decades would have to count as \u201cpublic\u201d scholarship, because it has been forced to address the contemporary realities of labor migration, religious politics, the global economy, and the rise of violent ethno-nationalist movements. As a long-term observer of the Tamil-speaking Hindu and Muslim communities in Sri Lanka\u2019s eastern coastal region, I have always been attracted to the classic anthropological issues of caste, popular religion, and matrilineal kinship. However, in the wake of the civil wars for Tamil Eelam and the 2004 tsunami disaster, I have been forced to confront (somewhat uneasily) a fundamentally altered fieldwork situation. This gives my current work a stronger flavor of public anthropology, while providing an opportunity for me to trace older matrilocal family patterns and Hindu-Muslim religious traditions under radically changed conditions.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A Secluded Coast<\/span><\/p>\n

My anthropological training, my intellectual interests, and the fieldwork opportunities available to me in the Tamil-speaking region of eastern Sri Lanka since my first visit there in 1969-71 have all lent my research agenda a rather Malinowskian tone. I had what many graduate students today would consider the luxury of two full years of continuous fieldwork support, and I spent my time taking notes on a wide and eclectic range of Hindu and Muslim kinship, caste, and religious practices, as well as consuming endless cups of over-sweetened milk-tea in roadside shops while developing my conversational Tamil fluency. I had the time, and I found it intriguing, to explore the local puzzles of matrilineal kinship and ritual symbolism, topics that my local Tamil and Muslim friends also found worthy of documentation and preservation. As a result, my scholarly publications have focused primarily on things like non-Brahmanical Hindu caste hierarchies, ethnomedical ideas about gender and health, life-crisis rituals, matrilocal marriage and dowry, and regional temple and mosque festivals.[i] From the beginning, Tamil and Muslim (or \u201cMoorish\u201d) ethnic identity-formation was also an important topic for me, one of the reasons that I chose to make the bi-ethnic agricultural town of Akkaraipattu, in Ampara District, the center of my fieldwork network. My historically inflected monograph on Tamil and Muslim kinship and caste structure will finally appear, after a long period of scholarly gestation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"elanka\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Back in the 1970s, the east coast of Sri Lanka \u2014 the region south of Trincomalee encompassing Batticaloa and Ampara Districts \u2014 felt to me like the end of the road (Map 1). Although the eastern side of the island had been the route by which the earliest European expeditions made direct contact with the landlocked Kandyan Kingdom in the 16th century, it was superceded by the development of the more densely populated western coast of the island under Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial regimes. Remote from the expansion of colonial tea and rubber plantations in the Kandyan highlands, and devoid of other products of value to the global export economy, the east coast largely remained what it had always been, a rice-growing and fishing region with an anthropologically distinctive matrilineal social structure among its Tamil and Muslim inhabitants. An American Jesuit priest based in Batticaloa compiled an unpublished history of the Catholic missions in this region entitled The Secluded Coast,[iii] a descriptive phrase that resonated comfortably with my own impressions, until historical events harshly intervened.<\/span><\/p>\n

To be sure, the region had undergone new developments in the period since Independence in 1948, principally the Gal Oya irrigation project that brought in a wave of landless Sinhalese colonists to cultivate newly-watered paddy fields in the western parts of the Batticaloa and Ampara Districts. This, of course, was the beginning of the nationally-directed and internationally-funded program of irrigation resettlement that has radically changed the ethnic balance of populations in many parts of northeastern Sri Lanka, contributing ultimately to the current Tamil insurgency and the ethnic polarization of the country.[iv] When I arrived in Akkaraipattu in late 1969, however, there were still Sinhalese dry goods shops open for business on the main street and a small Sinhala Buddhist vihara in town as well. The escalating series of anti-Tamil riots that began to occur in the decades following the Sinhala nationalist victory in the 1956 elections apparently had little impact in Akkaraipattu, and when the short-lived insurrection of the JVP, a neo-marxist Sinhala youth movement, was unfolding in 1971 in the southwestern provinces, most people in Akkaraipattu \u2014 myself included \u2014 listened to the radio reports with detached amazement. It certainly never occurred to me that a militant Tamil separatist movement would gain popular support in such an out of the way part of the island. I assumed this special ethnographic laboratory would always be, well, secluded.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eelam Wars Erupt<\/span><\/p>\n

Although it had roots in the British colonial period, the conflict between Sinhala versus Tamil ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka rapidly intensified in the decades after Independence in 1948. The three key issues were policies to establish Sinhala as the national language, to \u201crectify\u201d Tamil over-representation in the universities and the civil service, and to re-settle landless Sinhala peasants on newly irrigated lands in the east and north of the island, where Tamils and Muslims had predominated for centuries. Parliamentary efforts to create a federal system that would have given the Tamils a significant degree of provincial autonomy failed repeatedly between the 1950s and the 1970s, and so a number of armed Tamil separatist organizations \u2014 including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE[v] \u2014 came into being that attracted a much younger, and more impatient, Tamil nationalist following.<\/span><\/p>\n

When LTTE guerrillas ambushed and killed 13 Sinhalese soldiers in Jaffna in 1983, resulting in massive carnage against Tamils living in Colombo and other major cities, it become clear that I had misjudged the situation. But it still seemed unlikely to me that such an educated, middle-class, hierarchical, kinship-based community as the Tamils would ever permit a militant youth-based gun culture to take root. Yet in fact \u201cthe boys\u201d (podiyans, as the male LTTE cadres are called informally in Tamil) have utterly defied and outraged their elders, rendered impotent the established Tamil parliamentary elites, and radically altered the social and political landscape of Tamil-speaking Sri Lanka.<\/span><\/p>\n

This represented the first drastic alteration of my comfortable and familiar fieldwork situation. Most of the military campaigns that have convulsed Sri Lanka since 1983 have had some impact in the region where I conduct anthropological research. While many of the set-piece battles have taken place to the north, in Jaffna and the Vanni, where the LTTE now occupies a fortified nation-like swath of Dry Zone territory it has renamed Tamil Eelam, LTTE cadres in the eastern region of the island also control much of the inland forest and paddy lands on the western shore of the Batticaloa Lagoon (Map 2.) Tamil Tiger cadres move easily throughout the densely populated coastal towns, including Akkaraipattu, and government security forces vainly attempt to monitor their presence. Despite a formal cease-fire signed in 2002, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan armed forces have kept up a bloody exchange of assassinations and bombings, and a regional schism in the LTTE led by a Tamil commander from the east, Colonel Karuna, has led to desperate internecine bloodshed between his followers and those of the implacable LTTE leader in the north, V. Prabhakaran.<\/span><\/p>\n

[Map. 2 here]Fig 2 LTTE controlled areas of the Batticaloa region<\/span><\/p>\n

Not wishing to become a martyr for ethnography, I waited a decade in hopes that the Eelam conflict would be resolved. Finally, in 1993 I cautiously returned to eastern Sri Lanka for new fieldwork, negotiating thirteen government security checkpoints on the bus ride from Colombo to Batticaloa. Since then, I have visited the east coast five more times, most recently in 2005. The atmosphere for fieldwork in this region fluctuates, depending on Sri Lankan politics and the extent of local violence, but it never feels the same as it did back in the 1970s. The Hindu temple to the goddess Bhadrakali that I documented in great detail in 1970 and again in 1975 and 1978 now lays in ruins, demolished in 1990 by Muslim vandals operating with the tacit permission of the Sri Lankan security forces. One of my original Tamil research assistants from my dissertation days recounted a horrific tale of being tortured in the mid-1980s by two different branches of the Sri Lankan security forces on two different occasions. Along with 92 other young Tamils, he was taken to a Sri Lankan Army camp where he was strung up by his feet, beaten, and forced to inhale the smoke of burning chillies and kerosene, a story I had to hear twice before I could fully grasp it.[vi] On two separate occasions, in 1995 and 2000, I myself was detained (and quickly released) by Sri Lankan Army patrols while I was visiting Tamil friends in Akkaraipattu. The first came at 5 AM when the barking dogs alerted neighbors that a house-to-house \u201cround-up\u201d of suspected Tamil militants was underway, and the second happened at a neighborhood Hindu temple that I was photographing in the rays of the setting sun. At times the Tamil and Muslim neighborhoods of Akkaraipattu feel as if they are hermetically sealed off from each other, and nocturnal travel across this urban ethnic boundary can be dangerous. Religious shrines are attacked and bombed for communal, not theological, reasons, and it is never certain who has carried out these vendettas. A recent example was a hand grenade attack on the Akkaraipattu Grand Mosque that killed six Muslim men and injured twenty at early morning prayer.[vii] At times of heightened violence, there is palpable terror and reticence to talk openly about the security situation. People discuss the Army or the LTTE only in whispers, fearing their words might be overheard.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"elanka\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In a sense, the Eelam Wars have redefined my anthropological subjects, redirecting attention away from the central topics of my earlier research\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 kinship, caste, ritual\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 to\u00a0issues of violence, suffering, displacement, and diaspora.<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 These are important questions in today\u2019s conflict-ridden and globalizing world, as shown in Patricia Lawrence\u2019s extraordinary work on cathartic Tamil spirit-mediums in Sri Lanka\u2019s war zone.[viii]<\/a>\u00a0 In some ways the Sri Lankan civil war has also separated me from the sites of contemporary cultural agency.\u00a0 Whereas previously I could analyze Muslim dowry payments simply by sitting in on marriage negotiations, or study Tamil caste hierarchies by attending annual temple rituals,\u00a0an altogether different multi-sited and media-suffused methodology would now be required if I wished to understand the impact of diasporic resources from Toronto or Zurich on village-level Sri Lankan ethnic politics or the global mobility of Tamil and Muslim families from Akkaraipattu.\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0The veteran Sri Lankan Tamil journalist D. Sivaram (who wrote under the pen name \u201cTaraki\u201d)\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 a good friend murdered in cold blood on April 28, 2005, for his political sympathies\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 once boasted to me that back in the late 1970s youthful members of his own nascent guerrilla group in Batticaloa had been secretly meeting and laying revolutionary plans while I, a na\u00efve graduate student, was blithely questioning Tamil village elders about their matrilineal clans and temple myths.\u00a0 (Fieldwork is definitely not the same thing as espionage, despite what some cynics may think.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The visibility and intractability of the island\u2019s ethnic conflict has torn the veil away from Sri Lanka\u2019s \u201csecluded coast.\u201d I am contacted now by journalists seeking insights into the causes of Tamil, Muslim, and Sinhalese ethnic violence, and\u00a0I am invited to participate in conferences addressing the future of \u201cstate-building\u201d in unstable regions of Asia.<\/strong>\u00a0 To an anthropologist steeped in such ethnographic topics as Tamil female puberty rituals, Sufi tomb-shrine myths, and the logic of Dravidian cross-cousin marriage,\u00a0this is something new<\/strong>.\u00a0 At the same time, I can professionally attest that there is still \u201ca culture\u201d on the east coast of Sri Lanka, a regionally distinctive Tamil and Muslim way of life that is responding to the long-term stresses and traumas of the Eelam conflict.\u00a0 For example, in the immediate aftermath of massacres in the 1990s, there was an burst of renovation and reconsecration of temples and mosques in the Batticaloa region, and in some cases a reinvigoration of the traditional form of temple and mosque management by matrilineal clan (kudi<\/em>) trustee committees.\u00a0 At the same time,\u00a0popular forms of Hindu trance-mediumship and ecstatic vows of firewalking and\u00a0mullukkavadi<\/em>\u00a0(dancing with hooks in one\u2019s back) have visibly increased under conditions of terror and suffering.\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0At the household level, the practice of matrilocal marriage continues among both Tamils and Moors, along with the customary pre-mortem transfer of family wealth to daughters in the form of very large dowries (including cash, wedding houses, and paddy lands).\u00a0\u00a0 However, the matrilocal dowry system is nowadays disrupted by a shortage of available grooms, by the sequestration of paddy lands in LTTE hands, and by some grooms\u2019 fear of exposure to local violence at \u201cexposed\u201d dowry house sites.\u00a0 In Akkaraipattu, low caste Tamil groups such as Barbers and Drummers have also leveraged the political instability of the Eelam conflict to abruptly discontinue their stigmatizing hereditary\u00a0kudimai<\/em>\u00a0service at high caste funerals.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I have argued in greater detail elsewhere, the evolving society in the multi-ethnic eastern region will be key to any long-term solution of Sri Lanka\u2019s ethnic conflict, because\u00a0it is the only region of the island where all three ethnic communities\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim\u00a0 \u2014 are found in roughly equal proportions on the ground, albeit in geographically Balkanized sectors<\/strong>.[ix]<\/a>\u00a0 While Jaffna and the Vanni will always be monocultural bastions of Tamil population, and the central and southern provinces will remain overwhelmingly Sinhala Buddhist, the eastern region stretching from Trincomalee and Batticaloa south to Pottuvil will provide Sri Lanka\u2019s ultimate test of ethnic cooperation or ethnic schism.\u00a0\u00a0 In these circumstances, even the ethnographic details of east coast Tamil caste hierarchies and Moorish matrilineal clan organization can provide a valuable form of \u201cpublic anthropology.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Tsunami Strikes Sri Lanka<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Starting in the early 1980s and continuing for more than two decades, the Eelam conflict exerted a deadly numbing effect on the daily lives of east coast Tamils, Muslims, and Sinhalese, and a whole generation of children came of age living under the stress of ethnic tensions and brutal violence.\u00a0 Then\u00a0a second catastrophe struck the region<\/strong>:\u00a0the tsunami of December 26, 2004,<\/strong>\u00a0which transformed my fieldwork site yet again \u2014\u00a0 in a different but equally tragic way.\u00a0 Since the 1980s, local residents had learned how to gauge and anticipate some of the local ethnic flare-ups and island-wide political crises, but no one could possibly have anticipated the deadly tsunami waves traveling at 500 miles per hour in a straight line from Sumatra. East coast settlements and villages within half a kilometer of the sea were reduced to rubble within a period of 20 minutes, and\u00a0more than thirteen thousand Tamils and Muslims died at once.\u00a0<\/strong>Approximately 43% of Sri Lanka\u2019s 31,147 tsunami deaths occurred in Batticaloa and Ampara Districts alone (Map 3.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Fig 4 Tsunami deaths in Sri Lanka by district<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This is the kind of natural catastrophe we have read about in earthquake and flood-prone zones of the world, but in Sri Lanka it was an experience no one was remotely prepared for.\u00a0 Most Sri Lankans had never conceived of a\u00a0tsunami<\/em>; there was no term for it in Tamil or Sinhala (although the Japanese word has quickly entered both languages).\u00a0 Yet, it was also a highly unusual disaster affecting only those households immediately adjacent to the sea.\u00a0 Along the beachfront in places like Kalmunai and Tirukkovil, the destruction was complete, leaving intact only deeply embedded concrete well-casings and hardy coconut trees.\u00a0 If you were unlucky enough to experience the direct impact of the wave, you probably died, especially if you were a woman who could not swim and were scrambling to save your children.\u00a0 If you were only half a kilometer inland from the shore, you probably survived, and your neighborhood was largely unaffected.\u00a0 The extreme localization of the tsunami had a deadly effect, but it also permitted immediate access to hospitals and to relief services provided by the \u201cgolden tsunami\u201d of NGOs and aid agencies that have flooded into Sri Lanka to provide assistance.\u00a0 The large number of international non-governmental organizations working on tsunami relief in Sri Lanka is now reflected in their trademark logos and acronymic signage\u00a0 \u2014 from ACF to ZOA \u2014\u00a0 posted along main roads everywhere throughout tsunami-land.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"elanka\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

On a visit to Akkaraipattu in August 2005, eight months after the tidal waves struck, I found the town colonized by a number of NGOs whose freshly painted headquarters buildings and air-conditioned Japanese twin-cab pickup trucks were highly visible on the main roads of the town.\u00a0 While some of the NGOs in the tsunami zone are Sri Lankan, many are foreign, including those from each of Sri Lanka\u2019s former imperial rulers: Portugal, The Netherlands, Britain.\u00a0\u00a0The region is now crawling with foreign relief workers, both volunteer and professional, a<\/strong>nd my identity as a scholar is the last thing most people would ever suspect.\u00a0 A profession\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 or perhaps we should call it a global industry\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 dedicated to disaster relief work has set up shop in the affected coastal communities of Sri Lanka.\u00a0 These are the experts to whom everyone turns, not least because they have also become a prominent source of employment and resource distribution in the local economy.\u00a0\u00a0 Initially, my grassroots ethnographic authority seemed irrelevant to a tragically altered situation, challenged by exogenous factors that were dictated by political decisions in Colombo, or by NGO funding priorities in Oslo or Paris.\u00a0 Upon consideration, however, it seems that my ethnographic experience and cultural knowledge of the region are skills that circulating government bureaucrats and transitory NGO personnel will never be able to match.<\/span><\/p>\n

PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY IN SRI LANKA<\/span><\/h4>\n

This brief sketch of how my anthropological research site has been transformed from a \u201csecluded coast\u201d in the 1970s to a region convulsed by the dual traumas of civil war and tsunami today illustrates some of the dilemmas and opportunities that \u201cpublic anthropology\u201d poses for an ethnographer like me, whose academic career has previously focused on the long-term study of historically-embedded social institutions and cultural practices.\u00a0 To be honest, until Sri Lanka\u2019s civil war and (especially) the tsunami hit me in the face, I had not paid much attention to what others had been saying about \u201cpublic anthropology\u201d within my own discipline. To some degree, this reflected my longstanding indifference to the polarizing dichotomies of \u201cacademic\u201d vs. \u201capplied\u201d anthropology.\u00a0 To me, applied or policy-relevant work has always been a legitimate possibility, perhaps even a professional duty under certain conditions.\u00a0 However, to count as anthropology it definitely needs to make use of knowledge acquired in the course of ethnographic research, and it should be both anthropologically\u00a0significant\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0interesting<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Several recent initiatives in the profession have re-framed these old issues around a broader concept of \u201cpublic anthropology\u201d or \u201cpublic interest anthropology,\u201d distinguishable from the activities of the independent Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA, a section of the American Anthropological Association), whose members engage in consulting work and pursue non-academic careers under the respective designations of \u201capplied anthropology\u201d or \u201cpracticing anthropology.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The newest label,\u00a0\u201cpublic anthropology,\u201d\u00a0serves to recognize a more socially relevant kind of scholarship located\u00a0within<\/em>\u00a0the academy<\/strong>.\u00a0The most brief and yet most uplifting definition is found on the website managed by Professor Robert Borofsky,[x]<\/a>\u00a0where the goal of public anthropology is a discursive or dialogical one, \u201cto effectively address problems beyond the discipline\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 illuminating the larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change.\u201d\u00a0 Borofsky\u2019s associated book series looks excellent, including a prize-winning title by a colleague in my own department.[xi]<\/a>\u00a0 A rather more earnest and pensive discussion is posted on the website of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Public Interest Anthropology (CPIA),[xii]<\/a>\u00a0where detailed effort is devoted to defining key terms and to articulating the progressive political values of\u00a0 \u201cpublic interest anthropology.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 These include such undebatable goals as improving the \u201chealth, well being, social welfare, and quality of life in multi-cultural societies,\u201d and dispelling oppressive regimes of knowledge wherever they have gained hegemony.\u00a0\u00a0My own Boasian tastes were gratified when I spotted a clause \u201cemphasizing individual agency, the aesthetics of daily life, and the uniqueness of cultural forms . . .\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

However, when the UPenn CPIA manifesto endorsed the unproblematized expansion of \u201cdemocracy,\u201d I immediately winced, sensing an ethnographic blind spot.\u00a0 Sri Lanka is the textbook case of a multi-ethnic country where a high literacy rate, free elections, a constitutional legislature, a competitive political party system, and independent judicial institutions have nonetheless\u00a0resulted in an abjectly dysfunctional democracy, an opportunistic majoritarian political system based upon \u201cethnic out-bidding\u201d that is incapable of resolving a civil conflict that has killed over 60,000 citizens and which threatens to permanently divide the island into two hostile, culturally segregated nation-states.<\/strong>[xiii]<\/a>\u00a0 Working toward popular humanitarian goals such as improved healthcare or village-level educational access poses few ethical problems for a public anthropologist, but how should we deal with the \u201cpublic interests\u201d of passionate ethno-nationalists, of religious zealots, or of corrupt politicians?\u00a0 These are the recalcitrant kinds of cosmologies we are likely to keep encountering in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, as I pondered these dilemmas, I began to realize how many academic anthropologists working in Sri Lanka have already adapted their research in various ways to the altered circumstances of this lovely but afflicted island.\u00a0 Most of these scholars have not raised the banner of public anthropology per se, but have simply responded, directly or indirectly, to the ethnographic reality of social change and chronic civil strife. As members of Sri Lankan society themselves, some senior scholars such as Gananath Obeyesekere[xiv]<\/a>\u00a0and Stanley Tambiah[xv]<\/a>\u00a0have inserted themselves directly into the debates over ethnic chauvinism and xenophobic readings of history.\u00a0 Anthropologists working in Sinhala Buddhist communities have critically examined mytho-historic templates for contemporary identities,[xvi]<\/a>\u00a0exposed the worldly entanglements of the Theravada Buddhist monkhood,[xvii]<\/a>\u00a0and traced the grassroots symbolic and economic ramifications of the Tamil-Sinhala conflict.[xviii]<\/a>\u00a0 Other ethnographers have zeroed in on the social problems arising from widespread labor migration of Sri Lankan women to the Middle East as indentured housemaids,[xix]<\/a>\u00a0the harrowing experiences of female workers in Sri Lanka\u2019s rapidly expanding export garment industry,[xx]<\/a>\u00a0and the steady growth of the advertising industry.[xxi]<\/a>\u00a0 In direct response to the impact of the Eelam conflict in the Tamil areas of the island, we now have cultural studies of terror and suffering,[xxii]<\/a>\u00a0fieldwork profiles of women LTTE cadres and children in the war zone,[xxiii]<\/a>\u00a0ethnographic accounts of militarized Sri Lankan society,[xxiv]<\/a>\u00a0and soon the anthropological biography of an assassinated Tamil journalist.[xxv]<\/a>\u00a0 In the last decade, some of my own papers have also addressed problems of Tamil and Muslim ethnic hostility and the impact of chronic civil war on matrilocal households and marriage patterns.[xxvi]<\/a>\u00a0 While sociology, economics, psychology, and political science are the regnant discourses of public policy in the US and Europe,\u00a0in Sri Lanka it is anthropology and history that have significantly shaped public debates over nationhood and ethnic identity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>One recent \u201cpostcolonial and postempirical\u201d critic finds this oddly pernicious,[xxvii]<\/a>\u00a0but to me, it looks like a prime example of public anthropology.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, my working concept of public anthropology is one that applies local ethnographic knowledge to address\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 or at least to illuminate\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 broader issues and problems. For some scholars this might become a Weberian calling, or a consultancy contract. For me it simply means seizing those sporadic and unexpected circumstances when one\u2019s long-term ethnographic experience, language fluency, and familiarity with local cultural knowledge can actually shed light on an issue of deeper social significance, or contribute in some way to the relief of human suffering.\u00a0 My own \u201cpublic anthropology\u201d represents an unforeseen opportunity to leverage extra social value from ongoing academic research.\u00a0 On the annual Faculty Report of Professional Activities I submitted to my university this year,\u00a0I finally added three new keyword descriptors: terrorism, disasters, and diaspora.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The New Tsunami Project<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, my private definition of public anthropology is no longer hypothetical, because\u00a0I am now the Principal Investigator on a five-person multi-disciplinary study of post-tsunami recovery in two culturally-contrasting coastal regions of Sri Lanka (NSF grant #SES-0525260)<\/strong>. This is\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0the sort of solo fieldwork project that cultural anthropologists have typically undertaken.\u00a0 Indeed, until December 26, 2004, I had never dreamed of doing anything remotely like this in my entire career, so it called for some quick thinking.\u00a0 Anthropologists know that one of the fundamental principles of successful grantsmanship is to acknowledge the subculture of the funding agency, in this case NSF, so I promptly refreshed my acquaintance with the experimental paradigm and resuscitated my dormant hypothetico-deductive vocabulary. The deadline for NSF anthropology proposals had already passed before the tsunami project was fully conceived, so it became necessary to seek alternative programmatic resources, in other words, to poach beyond the normal foraging range of our tribe.\u00a0 One of the conspicuously unfenced pastures was the interdisciplinary NSF Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) program, which explicitly invites hybrid proposals combining social science and high-technology methodologies to discover \u201cAgents of Change\u201d and \u201cDynamics of Human Behavior.\u201d\u00a0 The thought that we might find ourselves competing against other Sri Lankan tsunami proposals employing methodologically creative but ethnographically clueless methods\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 say, tracing the patronage networks of local Buddhist temple committees using infrared satellite imaging, perhaps?\u00a0 \u2014 gave us further motivation to win the grant.<\/span><\/p>\n

The guidelines for the NSF-HSD grant called for a multi-disciplinary team, so we assembled three anthropologists, one sociological demographer, and one political scientist, all of whom had prior Sri Lankan, or at least South Asian, research experience.\u00a0 In our race to meet the grant proposal deadline barely a month after the tsunami struck, we described the methods of each researcher in familiar disciplinary jargon: anthropological \u201cfieldwork,\u201d sociological \u201csurveys,\u201d political \u201cinterviewing.\u201d\u00a0 However, as anthropologists unsocialized in the research traditions of natural disaster studies, we made Sri Lankan\u00a0cultural factors<\/em>\u00a0central to the overall heuristic of the project.\u00a0 From a humanitarian point of view, the scores of NGOs and foreign government agencies that had come to Sri Lanka\u2019s aid immediately after the tsunami had already supplied the most essential relief services: temporary or transitional housing, health, and nutrition.\u00a0 Numerous surveys and task forces had already been devoted to improving the immediate, short-term coordination and delivery of tsunami relief.\u00a0 What our project offered was a broader, longer-term perspective on Sri Lanka\u2019s post-tsunami recovery process,\u00a0one that sought to compare the underlying cultural factors that could promote or hinder the social resilience of local communities in ethnically distinct regions of the island in the long run.\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0Taking inspiration from an anthropological tradition that has successfully utilized Sri Lanka as an ethnographic laboratory for studying social structural variation and systematic inter-cultural comparison,[xxviii]<\/a>\u00a0we formulated the project as a natural experiment that compares the post-tsunami resilience of patrilineal Sinhala-speaking Buddhist and Catholic communities on the southwest coast with matrilineal Tamil-speaking Hindu and Muslim communities on the eastern coast of the island.\u00a0\u00a0In formal terms, a two-way pattern of cultural variation within Sri Lanka is treated as the independent variable, while the physical effects of the natural disaster and the subsequent relief policies of the nation-state are treated as constants.\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, as area specialists ourselves, we know this \u201cscientific\u201d design will have to reckon with extraneous or uneven factors such as the ecological and topographic differences between the two coastlines, the flow of foreign remittances from Sri Lankans working in the Gulf, the regional patronage and corruption of Sri Lankan MPs, the competition and rivalries between foreign and domestic NGOs, the ethnic tensions between Tamils and Muslims and Sinhalese, the religious competition between Buddhist monks and Roman Catholic clergy, as well as the most unpredictable factor of all: the political and military agenda of the LTTE, the Tamil secessionist guerilla movement that controls a large stretch of the tsunami-affected northeastern coastline near Mullaittivu.\u00a0 This is where our anthropological experience as local-level ethnographers and regional specialists should prove invaluable.\u00a0 The southwestern tourist, industrial, and expatriate \u201chousemaid\u201d belt of Sinhala Buddhist and Catholic communities in Kalutara and Galle Districts will be studied by Michele Gamburd, an anthropologist with fieldwork experience there since her childhood days.\u00a0 Patricia Lawrence, an anthropologist who has studied Tamil village women caught in the eastern war zone, will collaborate with me on fieldwork among the east coast Hindus and Muslims.\u00a0 Alan Keenan, a political scientist specializing in the Sri Lankan peace process, will assess the political ecology of the NGOs serving the tsunami-affected areas, and Randall Kuhn, a demographer with survey experience in Bangladesh, will keep all of the project anthropologists \u201chonest\u201d by conducting statistical surveys of pre and post-tsunami social indicators such as health records and school attendance.<\/span><\/p>\n

The logical clarity of this cross-regional, intra-national research design provided a useful starting point, a way to package and leverage our expertise as Sri Lankanists in a way that would not have been as credible if we had proposed to study other tsunami-affected regions in the Indian Ocean, including Tamilnadu, southern Thailand, or northern Sumatra.\u00a0\u00a0 Since it was the anthropological thing to do, we polished the proposal and submitted it electronically twelve minutes before the deadline.\u00a0 NSF-HSD is not a common funding source for anthropologists, and we had no idea whether our ethnographic proposal stood any chance against the more industrial grades of quantitative social science.\u00a0 Thus, we were pleasantly surprised when the NSF reviewers ranked our proposal in the top 15%, despite its glaring neglect of the natural hazards literature.\u00a0\u00a0We subsequently learned that this type of fine-grained cultural comparison is virtually unheard of in the field of global disaster studies.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The first phase of the project was a reconnaissance visit to all of Sri Lanka\u2019s tsunami-affected coastline in August 2005, nine months after the disaster had struck. We began in the Sinhala areas near Ahungalla and Galle, where the damage was often severe but locally uneven, and traveled eastward to Hambantota, Arugam Bay, Tirukkovil, Akkaraipattu, the Kalmunai area, and Batticaloa.\u00a0 In the latter sites, the damage was much more uniform and devastating, since the tsunami waves struck the eastern shore squarely, unimpeded by coastal topography.\u00a0 Survivors were living in a wide variety of \u201ctransitional\u201d shelter colonies, each built by a different NGO using different materials and designs.\u00a0 In Akkaraipattu a \u201ctsunami market\u201d had sprung up where surplus or undesired relief goods\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 including brand new bicycles, student backpacks, and various toiletries\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0 were regularly sold to the public at large.\u00a0\u00a0Whereas the immediate post-tsunami relief work had been quite effective in ministering to the injured, providing safe drinking water, and burying the dead, the outlook nine months later was discouraging.<\/strong>\u00a0 The special government agencies set up to coordinate the reconstruction process had elaborate websites and organizational charts, but the moratorium on rebuilding houses in the beachfront tsunami \u201cexclusion zone\u201d had prevented families from capitalizing on their most valuable asset: real estate.\u00a0 Families living away from the beach could use governmental reconstruction grants to rebuild or repair their homes, while those whose homes on the seashore had been totally washed away were left to squander their grant money on motorbikes or consumer goods.\u00a0\u00a0 One of the critical questions to be explored as our NSF project gets underway is whether the residential dowry property of Tamil and Muslim women, a major form of female capital and domestic authority in the Batticaloa region, is being eroded by bureaucratic ignorance of, or indifference to, the traditional matrilocal household system.\u00a0 Another issue to be explored is the role played in tsunami recovery by local religious institutions (temples, mosques, and churches) versus internationally based religious organizations with global funding resources.<\/span><\/p>\n

Confronting the Real World<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Public anthropology can contribute to understanding and addressing larger issues of the day, but the key is to focus existing anthropological expertise where it will be most productive and useful, tailoring the research methods to a specific location and historical context.\u00a0The fact that I have been coming back again and again for three decades to conduct fieldwork in the same Sri Lankan community does give me a kind of credibility in local eyes, and an awareness of linguistic idioms and local cultural values, that no transitory NGO worker or \u201crapid assessment\u201d survey analyst will ever be likely to acquire.\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0It also makes me an actual stake-holder in the local society, someone who has made close friends there.\u00a0 As the tsunami relief organizations gradually start to pull out of the coastal zones of Sri Lanka, their mission frustrated by political paralysis and bureaucratic stalemate, their attention directed to new disasters in other lands, I predict a fairly high degree of local resentment against the foreign and domestic NGOs who will be regarded as people who did not make a long-term commitment.\u00a0 Could \u201cpublic anthropologists\u201d fill such a void?\u00a0 In terms of tangible assistance, certainly not, but in terms of a committed and genuinely engaged program of research, yes.\u00a0 Anthropology is the discipline that takes fieldwork seriously.<\/span><\/p>\n

As part of our August 2005 field reconnaissance, I had also managed to visit tsunami sites in Mullaittivu in the northern Tiger-controlled Vanni (\u201cTamil Eelam\u201d) region, where NGO work is tightly but efficiently monitored by the LTTE.\u00a0 I was hoping to include this rebel-held region in our overall comparison of tsunami reconstruction efforts, since Sri Lankan government policies\u00a0 \u2014 and political influence\u00a0 \u2014 are likely to have a significant effect on tsunami recovery in both of our main fieldwork project sites in the south and the east.\u00a0 However, as this paper goes to press in the summer of 2006, the ethnic conflict is moving toward the outbreak of renewed warfare between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE, and the prospect of conducting field research anywhere on the east coast is increasingly in doubt.\u00a0 Just dreaming about how I am going to manage this alien and uncertain fieldwork situation makes me a bit nervous and ill at ease.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anthropologists usually say that culture shock the\u00a0first<\/em>\u00a0time is good, but I find it disconcerting to feel another twinge coming on 35 years later, as a consequence of tsunami and civil war in Sri Lanka.\u00a0 Perhaps, however, these anxieties augur well for our research.\u00a0 Unlike most multi-disciplinary social science projects these days,\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0one is focused around anthropology, with all of its first-person ethnographic experiences and direct cultural encounters.\u00a0 I expect it to produce some public anthropology, but I also hope it leads to new insights about Sri Lankan society and culture more generally.<\/span><\/p>\n

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

Research for this paper was supported by the fellowships from the Social Science Research Council (1993-94) and the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (2001 and 2002), as well as by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 0525260).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

FOOTNOTES<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h3>\n

[i]<\/a>\u00a0Dennis B. McGilvray,\u00a0 \u201cMukkuvar Vannimai: Tamil Caste and Matriclan Ideology in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka,\u201d in D.B. McGilvray, ed.,\u00a0Caste Ideology and Interaction<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.\u00a0 34-97; \u201cSexual Power and Fertility in Sri Lanka: Batticaloa Tamils and Moors,\u201d in Carol P. MacCormack, ed.,\u00a0Ethnography of Fertility and Birth<\/em>\u00a0(London: Academic Press, 1982), pp. 25-73. Second edition (Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1994), pp. 15-63; \u201cThe 1987 Stirling Award Essay: Sex, Repression, and Sanskritization in Sri Lanka?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Ethos<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 16, No. 2 (1988), pp. 99-127; \u201cHouseholds in Akkaraipattu: Dowry and Domestic Organization among the Matrilineal Tamils and Moors of Sri Lanka.\u201d in John N. Gray and David J. Mearns, eds.,\u00a0Society from the Inside Out: Anthropological Perspectives on the South Asian Household<\/em>\u00a0(New Delhi: Sage, 1989), pp. 192-235;\u00a0Symbolic Heat: Gender, Health, and Worship among the Tamils of South India and Sri Lanka\u00a0<\/em>(Ahmedabad: Mapin. 1998);\u00a0 \u201cArabs, Moors, and Muslims: Sri Lankan Muslim Ethnicity in Regional Perspective,\u201d\u00a0Contributions to Indian Sociology\u00a0<\/em>Vol. 32, No. 2 (1998), pp. 433-483.\u00a0 Reprinted in Veena Das, Dipankar Gupta, and Patricia Uberoi, eds.,\u00a0Tradition, Pluralism, and Identity: In Honor of T.N. Madan\u00a0<\/em>(New Delhi: Sage, 1999), pp. 307-357. Reprinted slightly abridged in T.N. Madan, ed.,\u00a0Muslim Communities of South Asia<\/em>\u00a03rd<\/sup>\u00a0edition (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), pp. 499-553; \u201cJailani: A Sufi Shrine in Sri Lanka,\u201d in Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld, eds.,\u00a0Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation, and Conflict<\/em>\u00a0(Delhi: Social Science Press, 2004), pp. 273-289.<\/span><\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a>\u00a0Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka<\/em>.\u00a0 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, in press).<\/span><\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a>\u00a0J.W. Lange, S.J.\u00a0The Secluded Coast, The Story of the Diocese of Trincomalee-Batticaloa, Ceylon: 1895-1970<\/em>.\u00a0 (Unpublished typescript, no date, 476 pp.).<\/span><\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a>\u00a0Patrick Peebles, \u201cColonization and Ethnic Conflict in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka,\u201d\u00a0Journal of Asian Studies<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 49, No. 1 (1990), pp. 30-55; Amita Shastri, \u201cThe Material Basis for Separatism: The Tamil Eelam Movement in Sri Lanka,\u201d\u00a0Journal of Asian Studies<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 49, No. 1 (1990), pp. 56-77; Chelvadurai Manogaran, \u201cColonization as Politics: Political Use of Space in Sri Lanka\u2019s Ethnic Conflict,\u201d in Chelvadurai Manogaran and Bryan Pfaffenberger, eds.,\u00a0The Sri Lankan Tamils: Ethnicity and Identity<\/em>\u00a0(Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 84-125; Ross Mallick, \u201cForeign Aid for Conflict Development in Sri Lanka,\u201d in Ross Mallick, ed.,\u00a0Development, Ethnicity and Human Rights in South Asia<\/em>\u00a0(New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, and London: Sage 1998), pp. 128-149; Ronald J. Herring, \u201cMaking Ethnic Conflict: The Civil War in Sri Lanka,\u201d in Milton J. Esman and Ronald J. Herring, eds.,\u00a0Carrots, Sticks, and Ethnic Conflict: Rethinking Development Assistance<\/em>\u00a0(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 140-174.<\/span><\/p>\n

[v]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Eelam<\/em>\u00a0is an older Tamil historical name for the island of Lanka. \u201cTamil Eelam\u201d is the name Tamil nationalists and militants have chosen to designate a proposed Tamil-majority province, or independent nation-state, in the northern and eastern districts of the island.<\/span><\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a>\u00a0\u201cTamils and Muslims in the Shadow of War: Schism or Continuity?\u201d\u00a0South Asia<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 20 special issue (1997), pp. 239-253.\u00a0 Reprinted in Siri Gamage and Ian B. Watson, eds.,\u00a0Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka: \u2018Pearl of the East\u2019 or \u2018Island of Tears\u2019?<\/em>\u00a0(New Delhi: Sage, 1999), pp. 217-228.<\/span><\/p>\n

[vii]<\/a>\u00a0Tamilnet.com<\/em>, November 18, 2005.<\/span><\/p>\n

[viii]<\/a>\u00a0Patricia Lawrence, \u201cThe Changing Amman: Notes on the Injury of War in Eastern Sri Lanka,\u201d\u00a0South Asia<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 20 (1997), pp. 215-236. Reprinted in Siri Gamage and Ian B. Watson, eds.,\u00a0Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka: \u2018Pearl of the East\u2019 or \u2018Island of Tears\u2019?<\/em>\u00a0 (New Delhi: Sage, 1999), pp. 197-215; \u201cGrief on the Body: The Work of Oracles in Eastern Sri Lanka,\u201d in Michael Roberts, ed.,\u00a0Sri Lanka: Collective Identities Revisited, Vol. II<\/em>\u00a0(Colombo: Marga Institute, 1998), pp.\u00a0 271-294; \u201cViolence, Suffering, Amman: The Work of Oracles in Sri Lanka\u2019s Eastern War Zone,\u201d in Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds.,\u00a0Violence and Subjectivity<\/em>\u00a0(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 171-204; \u201cEncountering Kali in a Context of Terror: The Tasks of a Goddess in Sri Lanka\u2019s Civil War,\u201d in Jeffrey J. Kripal and Rachel Fell McDermott, eds.,\u00a0Encountering Kali: In the Center, at the Margins, in the West\u00a0<\/em>(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 100-123.<\/span><\/p>\n

[ix]<\/a>\u00a0Dennis B. McGilvray,\u00a0Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka<\/em>\u00a0(Durham and London: Duke University Press, in press).<\/span><\/p>\n

[x]<\/a>\u00a0http:\/\/www.publicanthropology.org<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

[xi]<\/a>\u00a0Donna Goldstein,\u00a0Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown<\/em>\u00a0(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xii]<\/a>\u00a0http:\/\/www.sas.upenn.edu\/anthro\/CPIA<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

[xiii]<\/a>\u00a0Neil DeVotta,\u00a0Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka<\/em>\u00a0(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xiv]<\/a>\u00a0\u201cDutthagamini and the Buddhist Conscience,\u201d in Douglas Allen, ed.,\u00a0Religion and Political Conflict in South Asia.<\/em>\u00a0 (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 135-160; \u201cBuddhism, Nationalism and Cultural Identity: The Question of Fundamentals,\u201d in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds.,\u00a0Fundamentalisms Comprehended<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 231-256.<\/span><\/p>\n

[xv]<\/a>\u00a0Stanley J. Tambiah,\u00a0\u00a0Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986);\u00a0\u00a0Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xvi]<\/a>\u00a0Bruce Kapferer,\u00a0Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia.<\/em>\u00a0(Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988); Steven Kemper,\u00a0The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life<\/em>. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xvii]<\/a>\u00a0H.L. Seneviratne, H.L.\u00a0The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka\u00a0<\/em>(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xviii]<\/a>\u00a0Michele Ruth Gamburd, \u201cWearing a Dead Man\u2019s Jacket: State Symbols in Troubled Places,\u201d\u00a0South Asia<\/em>\u00a020 (special issue, 1997), pp.181-194.\u00a0 Reprinted in Siri Gamage and Ian B. Watson, eds.,\u00a0Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka: \u2018Pearl of the East\u2019 or \u2018Island of Tears\u2019?<\/em>\u00a0(New Delhi: Sage, 1999), pp. 165-177); Mark P. Whitaker, \u201cTigers and Temples: The Politics of Nationalist and Non-Modern Violence in Sri Lanka,\u201d\u00a0South Asia<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 20 special issue (1997), pp. 201-214. Reprinted in Siri Gamage and Ian B. Watson, eds.,\u00a0Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka: \u2018Pearl of the East\u2019 or \u2018Island of Tears\u2019?<\/em>\u00a0 (New Delhi: Sage,1999), pp. 183-195; Deborah Winslow and Michael D. Woost, eds.,\u00a0Economy, Culture, and Civil War in Sri Lanka<\/em>.\u00a0 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xix]<\/a>\u00a0The Kitchen Spoon\u2019s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka\u2019s Migrant Housemaids<\/em>\u00a0(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xx]<\/a>\u00a0Sandhya Hewamanne, \u201cPornographic Voice: Critical Feminist Practices among Sri Lanka\u2019s Garment Factory Workers,\u201d\u00a0Feminist Studies<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 32, No.1 (2006); Caitrin Lynch,\u00a0Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka\u2019s Global Garment Industry<\/em>\u00a0(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxi]<\/a>\u00a0Steven Kemper,\u00a0Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in a Transnational World<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxii]<\/a>\u00a0E. Valentine Daniel,\u00a0Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence<\/em>\u00a0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Selvy Thiruchandran,\u00a0The Other Victims of War: Emergence of Female Headed Households in Eastern Sri Lanka<\/em>\u00a0(New Delhi: Vikas, 1999); and works by Patricia Lawrence (see Note 6).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxiii]<\/a>\u00a0Margaret Trawick, \u201cReasons\u00a0 for Violence: A Preliminary Ethnographic Account of the LTTE,\u201d\u00a0South Asia<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 20 special issue (1997), pp. 153-180.\u00a0 Reprinted in Siri Gamage and Ian B. Watson, eds.,\u00a0Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka: \u2018Pearl of the East\u2019 or \u2018Island of Tears\u2019?<\/em>\u00a0 (New Delhi: Sage, 1999), pp. 139-163; \u201cOn the Status of Child Combatants,\u201d\u00a0Journal of Social Sciences<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 4, No. 2 (2000), pp. 1-18.\u00a0 (Delhi: KRE Publishers); \u201cKilling and Healing Revisited: On Sacrifice, Warfare, and Cultural Difference,\u201d in Mark Nichter and Margaret Lock, eds.,\u00a0Medical Anthropology for the New Millenium: Essays in Honor of Charles Leslie<\/em>\u00a0(London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 267-296. \u201cInterviews with High School Students in Eastern Sri Lanka,\u201d in Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb, eds.,\u00a0Everyday Life in South Asia<\/em>\u00a0(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 366-380;\u00a0Enemy Lines: Childhood, Warfare, and Play in Eastern Sri Lanka<\/em>.\u00a0 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, in press).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxiv]<\/a>\u00a0Pradeep Jeganathan, \u201cWalking through Violence: \u2018Everyday Life\u2019 and Anthropology,\u201d in Diane P. Mines and Sarah Lamb, eds.,\u00a0Everyday Life in South Asia<\/em>\u00a0(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 357-365; Yuvaraj Thangarajah, \u201cEthnicization of the Devolution Debate and the Militarization of Civil Society in North-Eastern Sri Lanka,\u201d in Markus Mayer, Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, and Yuvi Thangarajah, eds.,\u00a0Building Local Capacities for Peace: Rethinking Conflict and Development in Sri Lanka<\/em>\u00a0(Delhi: Macmillan India, 2003), pp. 15-36.<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxv]<\/a>\u00a0Mark P. Whitaker,\u00a0Learning Politics from Sivaram<\/em>.\u00a0 (London: Pluto Press, in press).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxvi]<\/a>\u00a0Dennis B. McGilvray, \u201cTamils and Muslims in the Shadow of War: Schism or Continuity?\u201d\u00a0South Asia<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 20 special issue (1997), pp. 239-253.\u00a0 Reprinted in Siri Gamage and Ian B. Watson, eds.,\u00a0Conflict and Community in Contemporary Sri Lanka: \u2018Pearl of the East\u2019 or \u2018Island of Tears\u2019?<\/em>\u00a0(New Delhi: Sage, 1999), pp. 217-228; \u201cTamil and Muslim Identities in the East.\u201d\u00a0Marga Journal<\/em>, n.s. Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003), pp. 79-116. Also published as Marga Monograph Series on Ethnic Reconciliation, No. 24 (Colombo: Marga Institute, 2003), ISBN 955-582-087-2; \u201cPersistence of Matriliny in the Sri Lankan War Zone,\u201d paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego.\u00a0 March 4-7, 2004.<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxvii]<\/a>\u00a0Qadri Ismail,\u00a0Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality<\/em>\u00a0(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).<\/span><\/p>\n

[xxviii]<\/a>\u00a0Nur Yalman,\u00a0Under the Bo Tree: Studies in Caste, Kinship, and Marriage in the Interior of Ceylon<\/em>. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967); Deborah Winslow, \u201cRituals of First Menstruation in Sri Lanka,\u201d\u00a0Man<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 15, No. 4 (1980), pp. 603-625; Gananath Obeyesekere,\u00a0The Cult of the Goddess Pattini<\/em>\u00a0(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984).<\/span><\/p>\n


\nClick here to receive your free copy of the eLanka Newsletter twice a week delivered directly to your inbox!<\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Confronting Two Calamities in Eastern Sri Lanka in 2005-by Dennis B. McGilvray Source:Thuppahis Dennis B. McGilvray,\u00a0in\u00a0India Review\u00a05(2-3) November 2006, special issue on public anthropology, \u2026. where the title reads\u00a0\u00a0\u201cTsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka:\u00a0An Anthropologist Confronts the Real World\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u2026. with highlighting in different colours imposed by the Editor, Thuppahi Recent calls for a new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":137027,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[65788,65790,32371,65789],"class_list":{"0":"post-137026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-aside","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-articles","8":"tag-confronting-two-calamities-in-eastern-sri-lanka","9":"tag-pradeep-jeganathan","10":"tag-sri-lankan","11":"tag-transnational-world","12":"post_format-post-format-aside"},"yoast_head":"\nConfronting Two Calamities in Eastern Sri Lanka in 2005-by Dennis B. 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