Suffering, Frustration, and Anger: Class, Gender, and History in Sri Lankan Suicide Stories

This paper explores competing stories of suffering, frustration and anger that shape the performance and reception of suicidal behaviours in contemporary Sri Lanka. Drawing from the results of 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how suicidal acts fit within broader narratives of class and gender experience and expression that draw from contemporary and historical ‘folk’ and ‘state’ discourses. Debates over whether suffering, frustration and anger are legitimate socio-effective states to exhibit come to determine the kinds of claims and counter-claims that suicidal people on the one hand, and those charged with their treatment and management on the other, can make with regard to the efficacy of suicide as a means of social action. Through such debates—not only what it means to be suicidal in Sri Lanka but also what it means to be middle class or working class, male or female, etc. are made and remade anew

Chapter 6 Monsoon uncertainties, hydro-chemical infrastructures, and ecological time in Sri Lanka

The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research

Chapter 6 Monsoon uncertainties, hydro-chemical infrastructures, and ecological time in Sri Lanka

The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research

Charity, philanthropy and development in Colombo, Sri Lanka

No description supplie

Self-harm and self-inflicted death amongst Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka: An ethnographic study.

Suicidal behaviour has long been observed to occur at unusually high rates in Sri Lanka. In this thesis, the results of twenty-one months' ethnographic, clinical, and archival research into the social-structural, interpersonal, and psychopathological contexts of self-harm and self-inflicted death are presented. The thesis argues that acts of self-harm and self-inflicted death amongst Sinhalese Buddhists in the Madampe Division, northwest Sri Lanka, reflect the kinship structure. In turn, the kinship structure can be understood as a reflection of several hundred years' political economic change. Within this, suicidal behaviour can be viewed as a manifestation of three key issues: (1) the question of the 'inevitability' of kinship; (2) the ability of individuals to respond to their problems through other means; and (3) the political economic status of individuals within the social structure that defines that ability as well as psychological experience and response. I argue that when moral codes of kinship are brought into question and the individual finds him- or her-self accused of shameful behaviour, suicidal behaviour becomes more likely. In this context, suicidal behaviour stands as a denial of sociality, as a means by which the fundamental premise of shame can be rejected. Comparing two communities in the Madampe Division, I demonstrate how wider economic and social changes over the past couple hundred years have today manifested different structures and ideologies of caste, class, marriage, kinship, personhood, and religion in each. Given the highly localised specificity of such structures and ideologies, as well as their attendant psychological states, I am concerned to explain how Division-wide epidemiologies of self-harm and self-inflicted death mask various underlying problems and pathways to self-harm and suicide amongst groups of demographically similar people. In this way, I argue that suicidal behaviour reflect material relations and their idealisations

Suicides, poisons and the materially possible: The positive ambivalence of means restriction and critical–critical global health

Developing an object-oriented perspective on suicide, in this article the author challenges critical global health scholarship and sociological theories of ambivalence by showing how a focus on ‘materially possible’ suicide prevention can offer culturally relevant solutions to a suicide epidemic in a resource-poor setting. Taking the example of pesticide regulation in Sri Lanka, he demonstrates why, in theoretical terms, banning toxic pesticides has coherence in a local poison complex that renders suicide available to people as a cultural practice. While writers in the field of critical global health have been suspicious of ‘magic-bullet’ interventions such as means restriction because such policies reportedly overlook the social complexity of problems such as suicide, the author argues that what is materially possible is often of merit because it renders graspable an otherwise deeply contingent and variegated problem. He further argues that critical global health can view the ambivalent costs and benefits of materially possible, magic-bullet interventions as a positive rather than negative offshoot of global health

Mechanistic Investigation of Granular Base and Subbase Materials A Saskatchewan Case Study

ABSTRACT Saskatchewan Highways and Transportation commonly specify three types of subbase course and three types of base course materials for conventional road building. These specifications are primarily based on grain size and were developed years ago at a time of lower variation in pit run quality. Today, Saskatchewan Highways and Transportation are experiencing reduced pit run availability and increased variability in pit run quality, especially with respect to fines content. This is resulting in higher pit wastage and with the increased opportunity for undesirable material, there is a higher risk for varied performance in the field. At the same time, traffic loadings have exceeded the original safety margin incorporated into the empirical based granular specifications used today. This study investigated a mechanistic characterization protocol of typical Saskatchewan Highways and Transportation specified granular materials to quantify any significant difference that exist may in the mechanistic behaviour as a function of fines content, moisture content and cement modification. Samples were characterized using unconfined compressive strength and dynamic frequency sweep analysis to characterize the relative elastic and inelastic bulk behaviour of the various granular materials. Based on the findings of this research, significant variability in the mechanical behaviour of typical Saskatchewan specified granular materials was observed across varied fines content and cement treatment under typical Saskatchewan field state conditions

Accumulation through nationalism: the politics of profit in “neoliberal” Sri Lanka

It is worth remembering that the introduction of open economic reforms in the country cannot be dichotomized from the tacit encouragement of nationalist forces that led to the outbreak of the civil war. In his analysis of the continued twinning of capitalism and nationalism, Tom Widger draws attention to what he terms ‘philanthronationalism’ as a characteristic of private capital in the country. Widger demonstrates how the nationalist imagination of Corporate Social Responsibility Programmes in Sri Lanka function to legitimize and encourage capital accumulation, while gaining state sanction for the exploitative economic activities of these companies