Suchergebnisse

"In recent years anthropology has rediscovered its interest in politics. Building on the findings of this research, this book offers a new way of analysing the relationship between culture and politics, with special attention to democracy, nationalism, the state and political violence. Beginning with scenes from an unruly early 1980s election campaign in Sri Lanka, it covers issues from rural policing in north India to slum housing in Delhi, presenting arguments about secularism and pluralism, and the ambiguous energies released by electoral democracy across the sub-continent. It ends by discussing feminist peace activists in Sri Lanka, struggling to sustain a window of shared humanity after two decades of war. Bringing together and linking the themes of democracy, identity and conflict, this new study shows how anthropology can take a central role in understanding other people's politics, especially the issues that seem to have divided the world since 9/11"--Jacket

In the past decade, Sri Lanka has been engulfed by political tragedy as successive governments have failed to settle the grievances of the Tamil minority in a way acceptable to the majority Sinhala population. The new Premadasa presidency faces huge economic and political problems with large sections of the island under the control of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) and militant separatist Tamil groups operating in the north and south. This book is not a conventional political history of Sri Lanka. Instead, it attempts to shed fresh light on the historical roots of the ethnic crisis a.

Nira Wickramasinghe, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020, 312 pp.

AbstractIn the late 1970s and early 1980s, a generation of young Tamils in Sri Lanka joined one or other of the militant separatist groups that sprang up in opposition to the Sinhala‐dominated government of Sri Lanka. This paper examines the life of one member of this generation, the journalist and intellectual, Sivaram Dharmaratnam, who was abducted and murdered in Colombo in 2005. Sivaram's death provoked a flood of reflections from his peers and these are used to ask questions about the relationship between personal biography, intellectual trajectory and political commitment in a post‐colony in long‐term crisis. The subsequent appearance of a biography of Sivaram, written by his friend the anthropologist Mark Whitaker, provides an opportunity for further reflection on ethnography, friendship and the limits of biography.

Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in. Transnational World. Steven Kemper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 263 pp.

The article explores the relationship between migration and the nation-state in Sri Lanka. In particular, it investigates the shifting political and moral responses to the movement of human populations in the colonial and postcolonial periods. From at least the mid- 19th century, migration was seen as something requiring active 'management' by colonial officials; with the emergence of mass politics in the 1930s, new rhetorics of national purity are invoked. Theoretically, the article makes two points. The first is to treat all kinds of movement-internal and external—as potentially a single phenomenon. The other is to treat the disparity between the ideal of a bounded and static national popu lation, and the inevitably messier reality of movement, as a necessary and inevitable feature of political modernity.

▪ Abstract  This article reviews the history of British social anthropology, concentrating on the expansion of the discipline in the British university sector since the 1960s. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between social anthropology and the main source of its funding, the British government, in particular the Economic and Social Research Council. After a particularly difficult time in the 1980s, social anthropology in the 1990s has grown swiftly. In this period of growth, formerly crucial boundaries—between academic anthropology and practical policy-related research, between "social" and "cultural" anthropology—appear to have withered away. Yet British social anthropology retains much of its distinctive identity, not least because of the peculiar institutional structures, such as the research seminar, in which the social anthropological habitus is reproduced in new generations of researchers.

The author explores the relationship of violence, agency, & community by focusing on the story of Piyasena, a young man caught up in Sri Lanka's political violence in the 1980s. Piyasena's story, which involves both political commitment & political repression, illuminates the general sociopolitical preconditions for political violence in Sri Lanka. Although Piyasena was a Sinhala youth, he believed that both Tamil & Sinhala claims lacked moral coherence. Because he could not accept the moral force of either party's arguments, he did not view violence as a sensible option. Therefore, he chose passivity & refused to assume the militant role that local history had prepared for him. Piyasena's attitude was unusual because violence acts as a privileged marker in drawing the boundaries of community, so that an act that seems both necessary & just to insiders may seem arbitrary & unjust to outsiders. The chronology of political violence often appears to be irreversible because memories of the past limit the options for action in the future. 39 References. A. Funderburg