a body writing

This article is a meditation on how the body fights to write about experiences of gendered risk and discomfort in anthropology. It details the sensorium of trauma and risk in fieldwork and how writing is central to processing traumas and but also curating future methodological directions. Responding to the demands placed on knowledge production in the discipline, anthropologists are often trained to seal up and bury these kinds of vulnerable writings. However, feminist writing praxes of disobedience and survival encourage anthropologists to do fieldwork and write not to survive a "trial by fire" or preserve an anthropology tested and known but to treat the body and writing as mutual sites of re-visioning more ethical engagements in their fields of work

Bargaining in a Labor Regime: Plantation Life and the Politics of Development in Sri Lanka

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of migrant labor, development, and gender among Malaiyaha ("Hill Country") Tamil tea plantation residents in contemporary Sri Lanka. It draws on one year of field research (2008-2009) conducted during state emergency rule in Sri Lanka amongst Malaiyaha Tamil plantation residents, migrant laborers, and community members responding to histories of dislocation and ethnic marginalization. Based on ethnographic observations, detailed life histories, and collaborative dialogue, it explores how Malaiyaha Tamils reconstitute what it means to be a political minority in an insecure Sri Lankan economy and state by 1) employing dignity-enabling strategies of survival through ritual practices and storytelling; 2) abandoning income-generating options on the plantations to ensure financial security; and 3) seeking radical alternatives to traditional development through employment of rights-based ideologies and networks of solidarity in and beyond Sri Lanka. Attending to these three spheres of collective practice--plantation life, migrant labor experience, and human development--this dissertation examines how Malaiyaha Tamils actively challenge historical representations of bonded labor and political voicelessness in order to rewrite their representative canon in Sri Lanka. At the center of each pragmatic site is the Malaiyaha Tamil woman. Focusing particularly on the female worker, I present emerging gender relations and experiences in group life, transnational labor mobilization, and development work that pose radical and deliberate alternatives to economic marginalization and capitalist plantation production in Sri Lanka. Negotiating their place within patriarchal structures on the plantation and in civil society, Malaiyaha Tamil women present themselves in ways that sharply contrast the expert narratives of their experiences, which are composed for public recognition and consumption. Interceding this transmission of knowledge, their stories actively transform plantation development discourses in Sri Lanka and resituate their practices within the more enabling frame of transnational feminism and solidarity. Addressing lacunas in South Asian, social science, and humanities literature on Malaiyaha Tamil women, this dissertation contributes lived content on previously unrecorded women's experiences and complicates former accounts of the woman worker in Sri Lanka. Informing this project is the relationship among community, vulnerability, and reproduction. How are forms of Malaiyaha Tamil development and membership, when increasingly opened up to the realm of the political, made at once vulnerable and generative in their attempts to gain a sense of security and belonging in Sri Lanka? What do practices of cultural reconfiguration and solidarity-building reveal about the persistence of community as an affective term and the woman worker's position in global movements of transnational feminism and migrant labor? Each chapter focuses on this relationship in the context of the final months and aftermath of civil war in Sri Lanka, and I engage the work of political theorists, Sri Lankan historians, and development scholars to argue for a more productive way of thinking about communities in crisis. I argue that community is the continual mental exercise of self-refinement and a mode in which Malaiyaha Tamils address insecurities of a closed past with intentional practices of fixing belief in an open present. This enabling perspective allows us to account for the realities of social investment, movement, and network-building that Malaiyaha Tamils experience in Sri Lanka. By analyzing the contradictions and legacy of seizing Malaiyaha Tamil plantation experience in Sri Lankan history and scholarship, this dissertation seeks to envision the Sri Lankan woman worker as a global subject with transformative possibilities for her community and nation and contribute to the anthropologies of development, labor, and gender in South Asia

U.S. Philanthropic Commitments For HIV/AIDS

This report produced by the Funders Concerned About AIDS (FCAA) organisation covers 2003 HIV/AIDS grant commitments from 170 grantmaking organisations in all sectors of US philanthropy. The report presents and analyses data on total and top grantmaking, changes in giving pattern, geographic distribution and intended use of HIV/AIDS grants. The appendices list related resources for further reference

Deficient realities: expertise and uncertainty among tea plantation workers in Sri Lanka

In May 2009, nearly three decades of civil war in Sri Lanka came to an end with the Government of Sri Lanka’s defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Often eclipsed within representations of the country’s civil and political conflict, Malaiyaha or Hill Country Tamils, who primarily reside and work on Sri Lanka’s tea plantations, have experienced protracted forms of discrimination that directly result from social and economic matrices of escalating civil violence, legal and affective exclusion, and neoliberal policies of worker dispossession. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the immediate aftermath of war, this article focuses on Malaiyaha Tamils encounters with economic and bodily uncertainty in postwar Sri Lanka and their responses to hegemonic forms of knowledge about their heritage and present marginalization from Sri Lankan society. By presenting an ethnographic narrative of a cāmi pākkiratu (“consulting god”) healing ritual on a tea plantation, I argue that Malaiyaha Tamils, when intimately confronted with deficient realities that emerge from the more subtle effects of sustained dispossession on their community, cultivate modalities of expertise that destabilize the more dominant, subordinating perceptions about their worth and emplacement as minority workers in Sri Lanka. Such modalities suggest that building knowledge and competency within one’s conditions of dispossession cannot be understood as simple resistance or agency. Rather, such modalities of expertise complicate the redacted categories into which Malaiyaha Tamil plantation workers are persistently emplaced by affirming both new possibilities alongside the subtle militarization and persistent dispossession of minority workers in postwar Sri Lanka

Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka

Beyond nostalgic tea industry ads romanticizing colonial Ceylon and the impoverished conditions that beleaguer Tamil tea workers are the stories of the women, men, and children who have built their families and lives in line houses on tea plantations since the nineteenth century. The tea industry\u27s economic crisis and Sri Lanka\u27s twenty-six year long civil war have ushered in changes to life and work on the plantations, where family members now migrate from plucking tea to performing domestic work in the capital city of Colombo or farther afield in the Middle East. Using feminist ethnographic methods in research that spans the transitional time between 2008 and 2017, Mythri Jegathesan presents the lived experience of these women and men working in agricultural, migrant, and intimate labor sectors. In Tea and Solidarity, Jegathesan seeks to expand anthropological understandings of dispossession, drawing attention to the political significance of gender as a key feature in investment and place making in Sri Lanka specifically, and South Asia more broadly. This vivid and engaging ethnography sheds light on an otherwise marginalized and often invisible minority whose labor and collective heritage of dispossession as coolies in colonial Ceylon are central to Sri Lanka\u27s global recognition, economic growth, and history as a postcolonial nation.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1438/thumbnail.jp