Book Review of, Women in Post-Independence Sri Lanka

Reviews the book Women in Post-Independence Sri Lanka, by Swarna Jayaweer

In the Wake of the Gulf War: Assessing Family Spending of Compensation Money in Sri Lanka

Between 1997 and 2000, the United Nations Compensation Commission delivered US$ 4000 apiece to roughly 87,000 Sri Lankan citizens who suffered displacement and loss of employment due to Iraq’s military actions in Kuwait during the Gulf War. Using qualitative ethnographic data, this essay examines eleven case studies of Kuwait returnees in the village of Naeaegama, in southern Sri Lanka. Like the majority of Sri Lankans caught in the Gulf War, these returnees are women from poor rural families who worked as domestic servants in Kuwait. The essay compares how the eleven households have spent compensation money and migrants’ remittances. Spending choices reveal a clear hierarchy of priorities: buying land and building a house, providing a dowry for unmarried women, and starting a viable business. These goals reflect family-based considerations, and use of the money illustrates the family’s role as an economic as well as a social unit. The essay also explores the role of family in facilitating migration and depressing women’s wages on the global market. Data reveal the local values, motives, and cultural contexts that shape individual and family decision-making on matters of finance and migration. Family choices are products of and adaptations to globalized contexts

Money That Burns Like Oil: A Sri Lankan Cultural Logic of Morality and Agency

New labor opportunities have drawn Sri Lankan women to work as domestic servants in the Middle East. Many migrants complain that their remittances burn like oil, disappearing without a trace. The gendered discourse on burning remittances both draws on and contradicts an older cultural system that fetishizes money. The emerging logic provides symbolic resources for women to spend their remittances on advancements for the nuclear family, distancing themselves from other kin. (Migration, remittances, fetishism, Sri Lanka, Middle East

Wearing a Dead Man\u27s Jacket: State Symbols in Troubled Places

A village rumor concerning the attempted theft of a uniform from the corpse of a Sri Lankan army soldier supplies the subject matter for this paper. In May 1993, soon after the assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, a spectacular local funeral for a Low Country Sinhalese soldier killed in the civil war near Trincomalee provided a space for the display of state symbols, the voicing of patriotic rhetoric, and the exhibition of the precision and discipline of the national army. Military pageantry legitimated the use of force by the government, while the funeral ritual as a whole produced a catharsis of love, grief, and patriotism. However, several days after the funeral, rumors circulated that grave robbers had tried to steal the uniform in order to use it as a disguise while committing crimes locally (as during the period of the recent insurgency), or to sell it to the separatist army in the North. A veiled counter-discourse of illegitimate violence surfaced concerning atrocities committed by the army, by the insurgents, by the separatists, and by private citizens pursuing personal vendettas. These rumors revealed a space for play, parody, betrayal and deception within the official aggregate of military signs. Symbols of state power acquired multiple and ambiguous local meanings, reflecting a continued local consciousness of the disorder and terror of the previous decade of insurrection and covert state violence. This paper examines how structures of nationalism and justifications of violence are reproduced, challenged, and transformed at the village level

Sri Lanka’s Post-Tsunami Recovery: Cultural Traditions, Social Structures and Power Struggles

The Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004 killed over 220,000 people and affected two million more in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and other Indian Ocean nations. As the world reels under the impact of more recent disasters in Haiti, Peru and Pakistan, we consider lessons learned about postdisaster relief and recovery from the aftermath of the tsunami in Sri Lanka. The tsunami waves caused by an undersea subduction earthquake off the coast of Sumatra devastated 70% of Sri Lanka’s coastline and killed 35,000 people. Days after the disaster, Dennis McGilvray joined forces with Michele Gamburd to organize an interdisciplinary team funded by NSF’s Human and Social Dynamics program to conduct research on the aftermath of the tsunami. The team included a political scientist, a demographer, and three cultural anthropologists; two disaster studies specialists later joined the group. All team members had prior experience working in Sri Lanka and South Asia, and collaborated on a project implemented in 2005-06 to compare the importance of cultural, regional and political factors in post-disaster governmental and NGO efforts. Results of the research appear in the volume Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions, edited by McGilvray and Gamburd (2010). Here we discuss what anthropology—in collaboration with related disciplines—has to offer discussions of post-disaster development and diplomacy