Introduction by Mithran Tiruchelvam …. a son of Neelan Tiruchelvam of the ICES [who was tragically assassinated by the LTTE in front of the ICES offices one year later]
The present collection of essays arose out of a symposium held at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES), Colombo from 13-15 March 1997, where researchers and scholars presented some of their recent research interests. This volume seeks to gather the threads of a hybrid collection of essays and weave them together in their shared historical moment. An anthology of this nature seeks organizational cohesion based on the papers’ common origins at the symposium, thereby sacrificing some degree of thematic or disciplinary unity. It is intended that such a collection make available to the general reader and to the scholar alike, a sense of the variety of social science pursuits being undertaken in Sri Lanka today. As such its purpose is to flavour as much as to nourish the reader’s palate, providing a sampling of the eclectic diversity of topics, methodologies and critical perspectives. engaging the social scientist today.
Nonetheless, the essays in this volume do find general unity in the questioning of cultural and political identity in Sri Lanka. This is neither a fortuitous or accidental unity, but rather a reflection of social-scientific discourse in the country and its particular normative concerns. The distinctive character of social science inquiry has fostered, and indeed demanded, this unity of purpose. This character has, in turn, been one that has at once been shaped and conditioned by a history chequered by virulent ethnic strife and a frayed and fragmented political identity. It is under such conditions that the social scientist has conceived her purpose as essentially reactive and dialectic to the politics of myth and the ideologies of the state.[1] We do not choose our fields of engagement fitfully or capriciously; rather our interests are often reflexive to the structures and environments that surround us.
The notion of a critical social science is inseparable from its manifest or unsaid objective of de-mystifying (or in the fashionable parlance, ‘deconstructing’) essentialized tropes of identity. The task set by the social scientist as such is not dissimilar to that envisaged of the ‘geneologist’ by Michel Foucault who writes that ‘where the soul pretends unification or the self fabricates a coherent identity, the geneologist sets out to study the beginning—numberless beginnings, whose faint traces and hints of colour are readily seen by a historical eye’.[2] Today the social scientist is deeply wary and distrustful of modem expressions of political community and social organization in Sri Lanka, and its presumptions of being seamless and self-evident. It is the appearance of historical and sociological self-evidence that the social scientist seeks to challenge. The construction of identity as unity is troubling simply because it chooses to ignore or silence voices of disquiet and opposition, and to ignore the significance of multiple allegiances, communities and experiences, in exchange for its own coherence and consistency. Groups and communities are typically imagined as if they were natural, real, stable and static units. They seem to be always already in existence. The essays in this volume closely examine the rough contours of political and cultural identity in Sri Lanka and trace out the subtle deviations and multiple, overlapping and often competing connections that subvert an assumed homogeneity.
Moreover, the experience of Sri Lanka can be considered in light of the deep-seated structural movements that have guided the course of its history. These movements transverse the economic and social changes that have significantly inscribed the past, as well as strategies of understanding the past. These broader structures find expression and embodiment in many of the essays in this volume. For instance, Michael Schaeffer demonstrates how symbolic conceptions of the ‘public sphere’ (ingrained in the ‘body’ of a park) convey the movement of broader social and economic structures. Similarly, Jani De Silva reflects on how the symbolic construction of Sinhala male identity gravitates on the social pressures of kinship and land tenure. In both cases, the visions, metaphors and institutions of the cultural landscape convey and embody a society’s image of reality and of its place within it.
Patrick Anderson’s paper ‘Talk About the Passion’ regards an evolving conception of mentalite through the social and paradigmatic shifts in Christian evangelical meanings of inter-faith ‘dialogue’ (primarily between Christians and Buddhists). An esoteric theological discourse is seen as being closely intertwined with changing frames of identity, imaginings of community and senses of being (the cluster of social, religious and moral ‘personhood’). Anderson is also interested in how the ‘academic’ discourse of inter-faith dialogue acts in service of religious and ideological efforts for emancipatory social change (the alleviation of poverty and so on).
Buttressed by her own field-research, Jani De Silva’s paper ‘Shifting Frames of Masculinity’ examines the projections of ‘social personhood’ amongst JVP male activists during the period of the insurrection of the late 1980s, its aftermath and prevailing consequences. De Silva argues that the collapsing of traditional practices of kinship and land tenure led to the distorting and distending of hierarchical categories of identity. She investigates a kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ of group formation, embodied in the distance between ideal personhood and social reality. De Silva discovers how the symbolic orientation of language to reality exposes the ascriptive, hierarchical and fraternal bonds of young Sinhalese males.
In ‘Understanding the Aryan Theory’, Marisa Angell critiques the assumptions of nineteenth-century European ‘positivist’ historiography, and its inquiry into ‘pre-existent’ social and ‘racial’ formations in Sri Lanka. Angell is noteworthy for her tunnel vision approach, considering the virtues of European colonial historiography in light of its consequences towards the crystallization of race and cultural universals. Her method is characteristically future-oriented and her critique of the past is often considered in the grain of its present manifestations and consequences. She provokes the fashionable theoretical syllogism of strategies of knowledge and its conceptual leash of power (which begs the question as to whether all post-colonial forms of knowledge suffer this same fate).
Michael Schaffer’s, paper ‘From Victoria to Vihara Mahadevi’, follows in the general direction indicated by New History, the Annales School and their Indian counterpart, the Subaltern Studies school. Drawing on a variety of sources, Schaffer creates a linear narrative of the vicissitudes of Victoria (later Vihara Mahadevi) Park in central Colombo. Rather than elaborate on the transformation of socio-political forces and structures themselves, Schaffer seeks to portray the urban public space that is the park as a site of impact of those forces and structures and their associated symbolic articulations. What also characterizes Schaffer’s narrative is a certain lightness, a slightly flippant touch, which perhaps warrants some scrutiny. This light touch reminds one of Edward Said’s celebration of the ‘gradual disappearance of narrative history’ and his emphasis on irony as the desirable historiographic mode (‘narrative is replaced by irony’)[3] and more generally, of post-structuralist writing fashions.
In sharp contrast to Schaffer’s paper, Sasanka Perera’s paper ‘The Other Victims’, dealing with women’s experiences (more specifically, the experiences of women who headed households as a consequence of the loss of husbands or male partners) in the JVP insurrection of the late 1980s, adopts an appropriately sombre approach. The objectives of Perera’s paper are professedly preliminary in nature in that the emphasis in the paper is on locating the inadequacies of available studies in this area and, further, to outline a possible agenda for further research and analysis. Stressing the importance of the objectives of such studies, Perera avers that ‘(the study) was undertaken with the expectation that their experiences would be taken into account in any attempt to deal with our collective painful past and in building a framework for the future of Sri Lanka’s society.’ Such anthropological approaches to the understanding of these phenomena, Perera feels, will help us fully understand the reasons behind the kind of political violence experienced in the late 1980s and ensure that there is no repetition of the horror.
Sunil Bastian’s paper ‘Development NGOs and Ethnic Conflict’ attempts to locate the political, ideological and structural contexts (and subtexts) of development NGOs operating against the backdrop of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. After initially clarifying the conceptual and definitional aspects relating to NGOs and to the notion of civil society, Bastian subjects development NGOs and their responses to the ethnic conflict to rigorous analysis in a broadly Marxist paradigmatic and theoretical framework. By turns objectively analytical and polemical, Bastian, inter alia, problematizes notions of ‘neutrality’ pursued by NGOs in the context of such a conflict.
Shari Knoerzer ‘s paper ‘Transformation of Muslim Political Identity’ works on a defined and explicit hypothesis, which is: Muslim political representation is moving from a wealthy, Colombo-based, business elite to a unified and more grassroots body representing a greater proportion of Muslim interests across the island. Her paper revolves for the most part around the formation and emergence of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) as a major political force in the country. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, Knoerzer’s paper is in the conventional political history mould; top-down (as opposed to subaltern) and with grand narratives of mobilizations, fissures, continuities and discontinuities. The paper highlights the difficulties and dilemmas confronting the SLMC (a classic example of a political organization trying to draw simultaneously on religious, ethnic, class and regional constituencies) in its task and function of providing political representation.
In his paper, ‘Biographies of a Decaying Nation-State’, Jayadeva Uyangoda is distressed by the absence of ‘a political theory concerning the nation-state and its historical consequences’ within the scholarly milieu on Sri Lanka. He seeks to interrogate the nation-state, through a combination of episodic personal narrative, a survey of current literature and rounded theoretical sophistication. The paper argues that the nation-state and its characteristic attributes (‘fixed sovereignty, fixed territorial borders and fixed demands of political loyalty and obligations from its citizenry’) inflicts sustained and broad-scale violence on its citizens. The characteristic or ‘totemic’ attributes of the nation-state have themselves become sacrosanct values and it is Uyangoda’s desire to see them de-legitimized or ‘profaned’.
In sum, the essays in this volume focus on the structural and ideological rubric that channels expressions of political and cultural identity in Sri Lanka, and the discursive space in which this identity is allowed to flourish. If Patrick Anderson does this in relation to theological discourse, and Jani de Silva in terms of the ascriptive orientations among Sinhala youth, Marisa Angell does it in relation to European colonial historiography and its consequences towards the construction of racial categories. Michael Schaeffer’s paper works on an understanding of the ways in which discourse tends to mediate the fortunes of urban public space (and consequently, the uses to which it is put). Sunil Bastian’s problematization techniques are also clearly derived from an understanding of discursive strands and formations in putatively ‘neutral’ settings. Thus in different ways, and in relation to different subjects, each of these authors is laying bare the structural and ideological roots of these discursive formations. Uyangoda’s paper then utilizes a general understanding of the maintainability or otherwise of these (and other) structural and ideological sites and throws up teasers with far- reaching implications.
The variety of subjects under review in this volume is matched by the variety of methodological approaches that have been adopted by the different writers; some essays are preliminary, some full blown research findings, and yet others critical surveys. The lack of a coherent theoretical thrust or framework is amply compensated for by the sheer diversity of this collection. It is perhaps appropriate that Jayadeva Uyangoda’s paper should conclude this volume as it (in effect) calls for a fresh constitution of subjects which are in future to form the foci for exertion of critical energy in political science (and by convenient extension, social science) research in this country. One might add that this call from Uyangoda has come about as a result of an exercise in the best traditions of reflexive social science.
Mithran Tiruchelvam
END NOTES
[1] One would take pain not to suggest that such critical hermeneutics are either paradigmatic or dominant of social science scholarship in the country. Rather, as Jayadeva Uyangoda suggests in his most prescient contribution, the critique of traditional identity politics is engaged in a vigorous debate with its proponents. And often, at least at the level of popular media, it is the antithesis of the critique, or the essentialists, who predominate.
[2] Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzche, Ideology, History’ in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, Pantheon.
[3] Edward Said, ‘Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture’ quoted in Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Verso, London, 1992, p.325.
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WE remember THEE, Neelan
