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The figure of the traitor plays an intriguing role in modern politics. Traitors are a source of transgression from within, creating their own kinds of aversion and suspicion. They destabilize the rigid moral binaries of victim and persecutor, friend and enemy. Recent history is stained by collaborators, informers, traitors, and the bloody purges and other acts of retribution against them. In the emergent nation-state of Bhutan, the specter of the \"antinational\" traitor helped to transform the traditional view of loyalty based on social relations. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers' fear of traitors is tangled with the Tamil civilians' fear of being betrayed to the Tigers as traitors. For Palestinians in the West Bank, simply earning a living can mean complicity with people acting in the name of the Israeli state. While most contemporary studies of violence and citizenship focus on the creation of the \"other,\" the cases inTraitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Buildingillustrate the equally strong political and social anxieties among those who seem to be most alike. Treason is often treated as a pathological distortion of political life. However, the essays inTraitorspropose that treachery is a constant, essential, and normal part of the processes through which social and political order is produced. In the political gray zones between personal and state loyalties, traitors and their prosecutors play roles that make and unmake regimes. In this volume, ten scholars examine political, ethnic, and personal trust and betrayals in modern times from Mozambique to the Taiwan Straits, from the former Eastern Bloc to the West Bank. This fascinating collection studies the tension between close personal relationships, the demands of nation-states, and the moral choices that result when these interests collide. In asking how traitors are defined in the context of local histories, contributors address larger comparative questions about the nature of postcolonial citizenship.

In May 2009, the Sri Lankan army overwhelmed the last stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam-better known as the Tamil Tigers-officially bringing an end to nearly three decades of civil war. Although the war has ended, the place of minorities in Sri Lanka remains uncertain, not least because the lengthy conflict drove entire populations from their homes. The figures are jarring: for example, all of the roughly 80,000 Muslims in northern Sri Lanka were expelled from the Tamil Tiger-controlled north, and nearly half of all Sri Lankan Tamils were displaced during the course of the civil war. Sharika Thiranagama'sIn My Mother's Houseprovides ethnographic insight into two important groups of internally displaced people: northern Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Through detailed engagement with ordinary people struggling to find a home in the world, Thiranagama explores the dynamics within and between these two minority communities, describing how these relations were reshaped by violence, displacement, and authoritarianism. In doing so, she illuminates an often overlooked intraminority relationship and new social forms created through protracted war.In My Mother's Houserevolves around three major themes: ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement; transformations of familial experience; and the impact of the political violence-carried out by both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state-on ordinary lives and public speech. Her rare focus on the effects and responses to LTTE political regulation and violence demonstrates that envisioning a peaceful future for post-conflict Sri Lanka requires taking stock of the new Tamil and Muslim identities forged by the civil war. These identities cannot simply be cast away with the end of the war but must be negotiated anew.

This essay explores a global and existential problem—how ordinary people live and contend with historically deep subordination, humiliation, and exclusion—through an examination of the everyday lives of formerly untouchable caste Dalit communities in Kerala, India. I look at this through the lens of neighborliness: how people discuss how they live together with other castes and classes in small town and rural Kerala. Their continuing struggles with and experiences of humiliation and subordination must be placed within the historical context of Kerala, where deep inequality previously constituted every social relationship, and where the communist movement and other important social and political transformations have radically transformed living conditions and provided new languages and possibilities of equality within the official public sphere, if not the household. Drawing from the anthropology of ethics and engaging with philosophical discussions of living with others, I scrutinize neighborliness as an ethical landscape for Dalits living in new kinds of neighborhoods produced by political and social transformation. In doing so, I also reflect upon the ongoing conversations and interactions within which, for Dalits, respect, dignity, and worth are at stake. The essay also suggests new ways of understanding publics that are neither private nor part of the official public, but rather are networks of houses within rural neighborhoods—what I call “private-publics,” which are constituted through gendered caste relations.

This article discusses the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto and its relationship to the Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Taking the case of the Sri Lankan Tamils, oft-cited as the example par excellence of long-distance nationalism, I argue against naturalizing diasporic ethnonationalism to investigate instead how diasporas are fashioned into specific kinds of actors. I examine tensions that emerged as an earlier elite Tamil movement gave way to the contemporary migration of much larger class-and caste-fractured communities, while a cultural imaginary of migration as a form of mobility persisted. I suggest that concomitant status anxieties have propelled culturalist imaginations of a unified Tamil community in Toronto who, through the actions of LTTE-affiliated organizations, have condensed the Tigers and their imagined homeland, Tamil Eelam, into representing Tamil community life. While most Tamils may not have explicitly espoused LTTE ideology, as a result of the LTTE becoming the backbone of community life, Tamils became complicit with and reaffirmed the LTTE project of defending \"Tamilness\" militarily in Sri Lanka and culturally in Toronto. I suggest that the self-presentation of diasporic communities should be analyzed within specific histories, contemporary conflicts and fractures, and active mobilizing structures. Discuto aquí la diáspora de los esrilanqueses de origen tamil en Toronto y su relación con el grupo separatista tamil, Liberación de los Tigres de Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Tomando el caso de los tamiles de Sri Lanka, frecuentemente citado como el ejemplo por excelencia del nacionalismo a larga distancia, argumento en contra de una naturalización del etnonacionalismo diaspórico para investigar cómo las diásporas moldean específicas clases de actores. Examino las tensiones que emergieron en la medida en que el movimiento élite tamil cedió el paso a la expansión contemporánea de migración a comunidades tamiles con fracturas mucho mayores de clase y casta—mientras un imaginario cultural de migración como una forma de movilidad persistió. Sugiero que ansiedades concomitantes de estatus han impulsado imaginaciones culturalistas de una comunidad tamil unificada en Toronto quien, a través de acciones de afiliadas organizaciones al LTTE-, han condensado los Tigres y su imaginada tierra natal, Tamil Eelam, representando la vida de la comunidad tamil. Mientras la mayoría de tamiles pueden no haber explícitamente apoyado la ideología de los LTTE, porque los LTTE llegaron a ser la columna vertebral de la vida de la comunidad, la gente se convirtió en cómplice y reafirmó el proyecto de los LTTE defendiendo la \"Tamilinidad\" militarmente en Sri Lanka y culturalmente en Toronto. Sugiero que la auto-presentación de las comunidades diaspóricas debe ser analizado dentro de historias específicas, conflictos y fracturas contemporáneas, y estructuras activas movilizantes.

Civil war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009 with the military defeat of the separatist LTTE. International and local pressure around war crime allegations and the lack of political reform subsequently forced the state to initiate the 2010 Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission. This essay first takes the LLRC and the minority response to it to argue that this reconciliation process in Sri Lanka is very little about ethnic reconciliation between communities and instead is a \"state performance\" in the midst of ongoing violence. Secondly, the essay takes into account everyday relationships between displaced Sri Lankan Tamils returning \"home.\" The essay argues that long-term reconciliation between former neighbors rests upon the possibility of larger political transformation rather than face-to-face coexistence alone.

This paper takes as its subject the 1905 opening and 1990 closure of the Northern Railway Line, the major Sri Lankan railway which ran the length of the island from south to north. It argues that it can been seen as a social compact in which the life of the individual, the community, and the state became integrally intertwined. It focuses on two dimensions of what the Northern Railway Line enabled in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon): first, a physical and symbolic representation of stateness, and, secondly, the pursuit of mundane everyday life. These are embedded within Sri Lanka's landscapes and histories of colonial and post-colonial rule, and the ethnic conflict, riots, and war which inextricably shaped the railway's journeys and passengers. Railways are more often thought of as large-scale, high-tech artefacts rather than the smaller everyday technologies that are the themes of other papers in this special issue. However, this paper highlights the ways in which railways also make particular kinds of everyday life possible and how, in being woven into routine daily and weekly journeys, the Northern Railway Line came to intertwine the changing circumstances and histories of its mainly Tamil passengers within an increasingly ethnicized national landscape. In the aftermath of its closure, the railway has now come to symbolize a desire for a return to the normalcy of the past, an aspiration to an everyday experience that younger generations have never had, and which has, in consequence, become a potent force. . . . the Northern Railway Line to be opened tomorrow would be a great boon to the Jaffnese in and out of Jaffna. . . it has become possible to travel to Jaffna in a single day. . . At last the railway which was characterized as a ‘tantalising vision’ by a previous Governor and ‘a railway to the moon’, by a quondam Colonial Secretary, has become a fait accompli.1This line has been completely destroyed between Vavuniya and Kankesanthurai (KKS) a track length of 160km. . . The Northern Railway Line is the main line connecting Colombo with Jaffna. . . the third largest town in Sri Lanka prior to the conflict and the Northern Railway Line was in high demand from both passengers and freight. There is a great sentiment amongst the people of the north for restoration.2

In a 2006 Canadian Sri Lankan Tamil pamphlet called Thurohi (Traitor), the author tells his diasporic audience, “many of us fled and came to this country. Why? Our life’s duty is to survive. But what is our historical duty? To be traitors” (Jeeva 2006, 3; emphasis added).¹ The war between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) drew in Sri Lanka’s three largest ethnic groups: the majority Sinhalese, the minority Sri Lankan Tamils, and Sri Lankan Muslims; the latter, while war-affected, were not active in the conflict. The primary battlefields and areas of LTTE