Suchergebnisse

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

This Chpt (originally published in Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence [Princeton U Press, 1996]) explores the representation of violence in the accounts of survivors & witnesses. It focuses on the case of a Sri Lankan girl who witnessed her murdered father's body being tied to an army jeep & dragged away in the midst of applauding & cheering soldiers. The author considers four major modes of relating reality to language: the representational, constitutive, & expressive theories of language, & the genealogical model. He argues that the fourth mode is most appropriate for the story of the Sri Lankan girl because it privileges voices that are not in sympathetic vibration with the major channels of history, culture, & power. 25 References. A. Funderburg

At the most manifest level, this paper is about agricultural and agronomic terminology as found in the discourse of Tamil-speaking workers on Sri Lanka's tea plantations or tea estates, as they are called there. My use of the terms agricultural and agronomic in this context is admittedly idiosyncratic. In the tea estates of Sri Lanka, two kinds of agricultural (in the unmarked sense) terminology are in use, one belonging to managerial agriculture and the other to folk agriculture. But by and large, the tea estate is the regime of managerial agriculture. Whereas in village India, folk agriculture prevails. I call the class of terms belonging to managerial agriculture, agronomic terminology, and reserve the term "agricultural terminology" for the domain of folk agriculture. By analyzing four communicative events that I observed and recorded on tea estates in Sri Lanka, I attempt to show how these two terminological worlds interact. The nature of that interaction is such that the dominant terminology of agronomy may be seen to be deconstructed by the subdominant terminology of village agriculture.

The twentieth century has seen people displaced on an unprecedented scale and has brought concerns about refugees into sharp focus. There are forty million refugees in the world--1 in 130 inhabitants of this planet. In this first interdisciplinary study of the issue, fifteen scholars from diverse fields focus on the worldwide disruption of "trust" as a sentiment, a concept, and an experience. Contributors provide a rich array of essays that maintain a delicate balance between providing specific details of the refugee experience and exploring corresponding theories of trust and mistrust. Their subjects range widely across the globe, and include Palestinians, Cambodians, Tamils, and Mayan Indians of Guatemala. By examining what individuals experience when removed from their own culture, these essays reflect on individual identity and culture as a whole.