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"Sri Lanka -- Politics and government -- 1978"
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In My Mother's House
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.
eBook
Charred lullabies
How does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can he remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel \"walked into the ashes and mortal residue\" of the violence that had occurred in his homeland. His planned project--the study of women's folk songs as ethnohistory--was immediately displaced by the responsibility that he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior, what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author's term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence? In avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he avoid flattening it with theory? The ways in which Daniel grapples with these questions, and their answers, instill this groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and intellect.
eBook
Postcolonial Insecurities
This ambitious work explores the vexed connections among nation building, ethnic identity, and regional conflict by focusing on a specific event: Indian political and military intervention in the ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka. Postcolonial Insecurities counters the perception of “ethnicity” as an inferior and subversive principle compared with the progressive ideal of the “nation.” Krishna, in fact, shows ethnicity to be indispensable to the production and reproduction of the nation itself.
eBook
Aid, peacebuilding and the resurgence of war : buying time in Sri Lanka
\"As one of South Asia's oldest democracies Sri Lanka is a critical case to examine the limits of a liberal peace, peacebuilding and external engagement in the settlement of civil wars.This book is based on nine years of research and more than 100 interviews with those affected by the war, NGOs, and local and international elites engaged in the peace process\"-- Provided by publisher.
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