Courses of Conflict: Transmission of Knowledge and War's History in Eastern Sri Lanka

After three decades of armed confrontations, the Sri Lankan civil war ended in May 2009 with the military defeat of the liberation tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). To sustain the war for so long, mechanisms of knowledge reproduction were used legitimizing violence and assuring the conflict's transmission across the generations involved in it. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork in the island's Eastern Province, this article addresses the processes through which Sri Lanka's war-history has been taught and learnt, empirically linking the multiple sites of knowledge transfer. It suggests a trajectory moving from the institutional (policy and textbooks) to the defiant (specific schools and armed movements) spaces of transmission, while comparing the attitudes, memories of violence and transmission strategies of educators, students and former combatants. The data are embedded within the broader discussions on social change and the cultural reproduction of war, a process illustrated with the help of a new concept: semantic alliances.     

Working gender after crisis: partnerships and disconnections in Sri Lanka after the Indian Ocean tsunami

This article focuses on how northern non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their partners, community-based organizations (CBOs), are ‘working’ gender after a crisis. It explores the relationship between one NGO aiming to mainstream gender and a women's CBO in a village in southern Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. The gender policies of the NGO and how the CBO has co-opted these policies are analysed in terms of discourse, interdependence, power and performance. Structural and individual challenges for working gender in post-crisis situations are analyzed and the constraints for making deep reaching changes that can alter gender relations are identified. Because of differences in the conceptualization and implementation of gender policies and practices, the CBO has manoeuvred to maintain its own interests, while the NGO has experienced disconnections in working gender between organizational levels and locations of implementation. In conclusion, it is argued that for changes to take place, knowledge production on gender needs to be locally situated and sensitive to the structural conditions and power relations with which organizations and communities engage.     

Positive responses,uneven experiences: intersections of gender,ethnicity, and location in post-tsunami Sri Lanka

This article examines the role of women in post-tsunami livelihoods recovery in two tsunami-affected villages in the Hambantota District, South Sri Lanka. It considers four key livelihoods recovery strategies involving women, revealing their immense capacity to overcome socially constructed disaster impacts. Their ability to respond positively is grounded in specific geographic and cultural contexts, making location and ethnicity of profound consequence. Although pre-existing ethnic backgrounds, influenced by religious and patriarchal structures, are critical indicators of the uneven ways in which women engaged in livelihoods recovery, the tsunami generated new patterns of cultural practice. The article adds to research that goes beyond the simplistic representation of women as undifferentiated ‘victims’ in post-tsunami Sri Lanka. It stimulates discussion on the lived experiences of intersectionality in feminist geography, and emphasizes the broader relevance of the study for understanding multiple and transforming positionalities that constitute the post-disaster lives of women in divergent socio-political contexts.     

The Poverty Discourse and the Poor in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is cited as an exemplary case of direct poverty alleviation because of a long history of social welfare and high values in quality of life indices. Notwithstanding, anti-poverty measures in Sri Lanka founded on the international discourse of poverty and development do not serve the interests of poor people. This discourse begins by locating poor people in a distinct poverty sector and proceeds to examine its characteristics. Several attributes of that discourse make it intellectually incapable of seeing how poverty is socially constructed in a diffused nexus of production relations that extends far beyond the so-called 'poverty sector'. An alternative 'substantive approach to poverty' is presented. The arguments are illustrated using the theme of food production in Sri Lanka.     

The political geography of war's end: Territorialisation,circulation, and moral anxiety in Trincomalee,Sri Lanka

This article argues that territorialisation and circulation are centrally important to the transition that takes place at the end of a war. It does so with a case study of Trincomalee, a multiethnic region on Sri Lanka's east coast, after the end of the ethno-separatist war in 2009. Post-war territorialisation comprises the consolidation of the government's military victory through the establishment of military zones and sacred sites, the construction of strategic roads and shifts in the ethnic settlement patterns. There are, however, a number of contingent counter-forces that unsettle the common interpretation that this is orchestrated 'Sinhala colonisation'. The angle of circulation directs us to flows and influences that become manifest when the curtailment of war (checkpoints, frontlines, collapsed infrastructure, surveillance) comes to an end. This propels a peace dividend - access, security, mobility - but also incites concerns among all ethnic communities about exposure to the moral decay of a globalised world. While territorialisation and circulation may appear to be opposites, they are in fact a conceptual pair. The two terms expose a field of tension that has much to contribute to the geographical literature on war endings, which has neglected the significance of postwar shifts in circulation thus far.     

Preliminary Report on the Excavation of the 17th-Century Anglo-Dutch East-Indiaman Avondster in Bay of Galle, Sri Lanka

The Avondster was a 17th century British ship captured by the Dutch and used by the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading with Asia until it was wrecked in Galle Harbour, Sri Lanka in 1659. The shipwreck was found in 1997 to be in very good condition but under threat from development in the harbour. From 2001–2004 an archaeological project was implemented by the Dutch/Sri Lankan Mutual Heritage Centre. The aims were to record and recover important cultural material as well as to build up the capacity of a Sri Lankan Maritime Archaeology Unit for implementing future work.
© 2005 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

Sri Lankan Muslims: between ethno‐nationalism and the global ummah

ABSTRACT. Sri Lanka's Sunni Muslims or “Moors”, who make up eight percent of the population, are the country's third largest ethnic group, after the Buddhist Sinhalese (seventy‐four per cent) and the Hindu Tamils (eighteen per cent). Although the armed LTTE (Tamil Tiger) rebel movement was defeated militarily by government forces in May 2009, the island's Muslims still face the long‐standing external threats of ethno‐linguistic Tamil nationalism and pro‐Sinhala Buddhist government land and resettlement policies. In addition, during the past decade a sharp internal conflict has arisen within the Sri Lankan Muslim community between locally popular Sufi sheiks and the followers of hostile Islamic reformist movements energised by ideas and resources from the global ummah, or world community of Muslims. This simultaneous combination of “external” ethno‐nationalist rivalries and “internal” Islamic doctrinal conflict has placed Sri Lanka's Muslims in a double bind: how to defend against Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic hegemonies while not appearing to embrace an Islamist or jihadist agenda. This article first traces the historical development of Sri Lankan Muslim identity in the context of twentieth‐century Sri Lankan nationalism and the south Indian Dravidian movement, then examines the recent anti‐Sufi violence that threatens to divide the Sri Lankan Muslim community today.     

On the impossibility of invariant repetition: ritual,tradition and creativity among Sri Lankan ritual specialists

This article sets out to explore the strategic creativity that underlies supposedly invariant ritual performance. The ethnographic focus is on a group of Sri Lankan ritual specialists and the way they present the past in terms of mythical, historical and genealogical relationships that give power and legitimacy to their performances of healing rituals in the present. The analysis brings together local notions of “tradition” with ideas of performance and embodiment. The conclusion takes up the idea that, far from being the dead weight of tradition, invariance is a performative illusion of considerable ingenuity and persuasive power. Indeed, it is a fundamental means whereby the authority and power of ritual is maximized in performance.     

Informal sovereignties and multiple Muslim feminisms: Feminist geo-legality in Sri Lanka

This paper argues that Muslim feminisms emerge as spatially differentiated strategies and tactics to accommodate local varieties of Muslim “informal sovereignties”. These informal sovereignties are exercised by Muslim judges, scholars and lawyers regulating Muslim marriages and divorces, based on diverse readings of the Muslim Personal Law and situated in the context of different forms of violence, such as Islamophobia and ethno-religious communalism. Comparing two districts in Sri Lanka - Puttalam and Batticaloa - the paper shows how Muslim feminist activists navigate spatially diverse forms of informal sovereignties exercised by Muslim movements and institutions, in response to locally specific political, social and economic challenges that Muslims face in the aftermath of Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war. The struggles over implementing and reforming the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act (MMDA), the Muslim Personal Law in Sri Lanka, focus on Muslim women's bodies and spaces as main sites of politics. The paper thereby contributes to debates in feminist geo-legality and Muslim femininity by pointing to the need to understand the contextuality of Muslim Personal Law within Sri Lanka's varieties of lived Islam.     

Awareness and Action: The ethno-gender dynamics of Sri Lankan NGOs

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are the modus operandi in the development arena at this juncture. Many, including feminists, place much faith in these actors for creating a progressive space for social, political, and economic activities to be undertaken. This article employs fieldwork evidence from eastern Sri Lanka, carried out in 1998–1999 and early 2004, to challenge this simplistic reading. The primary social group that was studied during the fieldwork period was female-headed households. This article argues that there are different types of NGO working in multiple ways in the region, and it is important to distinguish between these differences. NGOs that primarily execute development-oriented projects without considering the ethno-nationalist and gender politics are culpable of the violence of development. It is only when NGOs are in local communities for the long haul that they are able to develop a commitment to reassess and evaluate the social transformative potential of their activities. Using a feminist political economy perspective this article argues that it is important and necessary that NGOs confront social, political, and economic structures, including ethnic identity politics, if their activities are to lead to transformative feminist politics. In other words, NGOs would have to do more than pay lip service to gender mainstreaming, as is more often the case. These actors need to recognize and understand the potency of ethno-nationalist politics, social structures, social exclusion, and social injustice in order to create social spaces that are enabling of women's agency in the local communities within which they work and operate.     

A harbour in the country,a city in the sea: Infrastructural conduits,territorial inversions and the slippages of sovereignty in Sino-Sri Lankan development narratives

This paper adopts infrastructure as a lens through which new understandings of the inter-relationships between territory and sovereignty can be advanced. It argues that inverting the terrestrial assumption of territory can lead to “slippages” of sovereignty in which territorial sovereignty is indirectly claimed through the assertion of governance rights. For the purposes of this paper, I explore these inversions through the reclaiming of land from the ocean, and the removal of land by the ocean. Drawing on ethnographic research exploring the effects of China-backed infrastructure mega-projects in Sri Lanka, these territorial inversions are explored, respectively, through the Port City Colombo project – in which territory is claimed from the ocean through the creation of an island infrastructure – and the Hambantota International Port project – in which territory is removed by the ocean through the creation of a man-made port. Both projects reveal the ways in which infrastructure investments are implicated in the region-building ambitions of the Belt and Road Initiative, and thus provide conduits through which Chinese sovereignty can be asserted. As conduits, they foreground the realisation, but also the reimagination, of what “islandness” can mean in/to post-war Sri Lanka.     

Intersections between philosophy and art: expressions of immanence in the seventeenth century — Spinoza and Vermeer*

ABSTRACT

Spinoza's philosophy of immanence represents a turning point that radically changed our conception of human agency and its relation to infinity. Hans Blumenberg rightly called the principle of immanence “a general hypothesis of the epoch”, a principle that applies to philosophy no less than to the sciences and arts in the seventeenth century. This article looks at Dutch paintings by drawing parallels between Spinoza's philosophy and Vermeer's work. Spinoza and Vermeer both deny a dualistic conception of the world and a hierarchical structure between inner and outer spheres. With the example of Vermeer's painting the Milkmaid, this article shows how an analysis of light and colour, time and space, reveal a vision of immanent infinity, with the human agent at its centre.     

Rejuvenation after encounters between different artistic forms: a synopsis of studies of indigenization of Christian art in China

Religion and art are symbiotic. The ecumenical propagation of Christianity inherently entails a mission of indigenization. Since it spread to China, Christianity has produced many renovated art forms which combined indigenization and local artistic expression on the one hand, with original religious notions and Western art on the other. This article reviews Chinese scholarship on the indigenization of Christianity in modern China and emphasizes that the renovated Chinese architecture, music, and fine art, after integrating with religious ideas and techniques, largely promoted the modern transformation and rejuvenation of traditional Chinese art.     

John Hewitt’s curatorial eye: art and poetry in the municipal galleries

ABSTRACT

This article examines the art writing of the poet, critic, and curator John Hewitt in mid-twentieth century Ireland and Northern Ireland. Hewitt’s promotion of modern art and artist collectives in Ulster through shifting definitions of internationalism and regionalism will be linked to the art writing of Herbert Read and the late poetry of W.B. Yeats. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to Hewitt’s poetry and art writing reveals the sustained imbrication of politics, poetry and the visual arts in his thinking. Hewitt’s ottava rima poem in response to Yeats, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited, October 1954”, will be reassessed with recourse to the context of the Municipal Gallery in Dublin and its mid-century sculpture collections. By identifying artworks within the Municipal Gallery poem, the article illustrates Hewitt’s broader dialogues with the late Yeats and the art scene in Ireland.     

The dry tank: development and disuse of water management infrastructure in the Anuradhapura hinterland,Sri Lanka

We identify and offer new explanations of change in water management infrastructure in the semi-arid urban hinterland of Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka between ca. 400 BC and AD 1800. Field stratigraphies and micromorphological analyses demonstrate that a complex water storage infrastructure was superimposed over time on intermittently occupied and cultivated naturally wetter areas, with some attempts in drier locations. Our chronological framework, based on optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) measurement, indicates that this infrastructure commenced sometime between 400 and 200 BC, continued after Anuradhapura reached its maximum extent, and largely went into disuse between AD 1100 and 1200. While the water management infrastructure was eventually abandoned, it was succeeded by small-scale subsistence cultivation as the primary activity on the landscape. Our findings have broader resonance with current debates on the timing of introduced ‘cultural packages’ together with their social and environmental impacts, production and symbolism in construction activities, persistent stresses and high magnitude disturbances in ‘collapse’, and the notion of post ‘collapse’ landscapes associated with the management of uncertain but essential resources in semi-arid environments.     

Cultural nationalism of the interwar period: Latvian visual art and folklore

The interwar period in Europe marks a tendency towards authoritarian leaders in politics as well as the classicizing practices of the visual arts. However, the extent and modality of both tendencies vary from state to state: mapping differences and similarities leads towards greater understanding of each national history. The particularity of Latvian art life is a comparatively substantial use of folklore motifs and representation of pagan mythology, going hand in hand with overall ethnolinguistic nationalism agenda and related state cultural policy. Despite the coexistence of various artistic styles, in regard to content and intentions of artworks, the interwar period can be characterized by the turn from National Romanticism to Romantic Nationalism. The historical outline and theoretical discussion of folklore representations are illustrated by three case studies, analysing the biographies, ideas, and works of Latvian artists Ansis Cīrulis, Jēkabs Bīne, and Niklāvs Strunke.     

Caught between nationalism and internationalism: replicating histories of Antarctica in Hobart

In December 2013, a replica of ‘Mawson’s Hut’ (a historic structure in Antarctica) joined a growing list of polar tourist attractions in the Australian city of Hobart, Tasmania. Initially promoted as the city’s ‘latest tourist hotspot,’ the ‘replica museum’ quickly took its place in Hobart’s newly redeveloped waterfront, reinforcing the city’s identity as an ‘Antarctic Gateway’. The hut forms part of a heritage cluster, an urban assemblage that weaves together the local and national, the past and present, the familiar and remote. In this article, we examine the replica hut in relation to the complex temporal and spatial relations that give it meaning, and to which it gives meaning. Our focus is the hut as a point of convergence between memory, material culture and the histories – and possible futures – of nationalism and internationalism. We argue that the replica hut, as a key site of Hobart’s Antarctic heritage tourism industry, reproduces and prioritises domestic readings of exploration and colonisation over a reading of Antarctic engagement as a transnational endeavour. However, like other ‘gateway city’ heritage sites, it has the potential for aligning with a larger trend in international heritage conservation and heritage diplomacy, that of prioritising narratives of the past that weave together transnational connections and associations.     

异质思维的历史误区——对延安时期政治与文艺冲突现象的几点看法

艺与政治二间思维的异质,是使延安时期“启蒙”与“救亡”相互误读,以至步入艺发展误区的主要历史动因。本通过政治家与艺家对“艺”、“政治”以及自身责任与使命的认识差异,来揭示这一时期艺与政治相冲突的表现特征,并对中国现当代学历史上的独特现象——由于艺主张的分歧而进行的政治批判运动。进行了一定程度的探讨。     

Minateda rock shelters (Albacete) and post-palaeolithic art of the Mediterranean Basin in Spain: pigments,surfaces and patinas

The inorganic and organic fractions of two microsamples of prehistoric paint from the same site, the Minateda rock shelters, are analysed here for the first time. The two samples correspond to two rock shelters of different styles (Levantine and schematic) – Abrigo Grande de Minateda (The Great Rock Shelter of Minateda) and Abrigo del Barranco de la Mortaja (Del Barranco de la Mortaja Rock Shelter). Since its discovery, historiographical tradition has emphasised the Abrigo Grande de Minateda, with its magnificence and complexity, as emblematic of the origin and evolution of rock art in the Mediterranean Basin of the Iberian Peninsula (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Four complementary techniques –Microphotography, Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDX), Raman Spectroscopy and Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectroscopy (GC–MS)– were combined to identify and characterise the physicochemical properties of the paint and of the surface. We present an interpretation of the results that leads us to define complex taphonomic alterations beyond the usual distinction of layers that include the surface, pigments and patinas.