The Semeiosic Economy of Fear

E. Valentine Daniel The Semeiosic Economy of Fear AN ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE-STUDY This essay is based on field research carried out in Sri Lanka, a country where there has been a civil war since the summer of 1983: a period during which it has earned a place in the roster of nations where torture is routinely practiced. Over the past 30 years, the fear of torture and the fear from torture have become ubiquitous in certain parts and certain sectors of the population. The aim of this paper is to examine the role played by the sociocultural in the constitution of fear as well as to illustrate the political use of fear derived from its sociocultural constitutedness. THE IN D IVID U A L IN FEAR AND “ALONENESS” A year or so ago, a New School conference had for its subject the theme of “privacy.” Quite by chance, “privacy” is going to be my point of entry into the discussion of fear. Granted, this is a side door. I am not choos­ ing the main entrance labeled “fear” partly for comparative purposes, but more importantly to prevent its reduction to connotations and denotations that are made available to us in the modern West through our own cognitive and cultural habits of thought and feeling. I believe that this approach will lead us to a clearer understanding of a distinctly Sri Lankan or possibly, even a broader South Asian meaning, manner, and manifestation of fear. The concept of “privacy” does not translate easily into the South Asian languages that I know and know of. In Tamil, Sinhala, Hindi, social research Vol 71 : No 4 : W inter 2 004 1087 Marathi, or Malaylam, the available glosses for the English word “privacy” are invariably tinged with the dark hue of “loneliness.”Unlike modern Westerners’ understanding of the term “privacy,” none of these South Asian glosses carry unambiguously positive connotations ofrelief, freedom, and warmth. On the contraiy, the South Asian glosses imply, if not indicate, something undesirable, a state from which to escape or be rescued, reminding us of “privacy’s” own dim etymological past in English, which survives in the words “privation” and “deprivation.” In the South Asian cultural context, there is not a cultural experience of being alone that could be lexically or conceptually modified so as to transform that state of being alone from something undesirable and negative to something desirable and positive. For most speakers of English, if “privacy” occupies the desirable— even pleasurable—end of the connotative spectrum of the experience of being alone, “loneliness” would be the word that best describes the experience at the other end: friendless, desolate, and deserted. Sinhala, the language spoken by the majority of Sri Lankans, carries this state of being alone even further, beyond loneliness, into a unique state of vulnerability1 or predisposition known as tanikam dosa. In semeiotic terms, this condition may be called rhematic. Charles Peirce compares a rheme to a proposition with a blank for a subject. In chemistry it would describe the state of an ionized atom or an unsaturated bond. In the case of tanikam dosa, its rhematic significance may be seen as an incom­ plete state, a state that is open to possibilities as well as a state that is vulnerable to dangers. The literal translation, or rather description, of this condition is “Aloneness Dis-equipoised Fright.”2 In the interest of brevity, I shall henceforth call this syndrome by the initials ADF. Aloneness in ADF is not merely a state of being alone. It is a state of being (a) alone in an irreducible triadic correlation with (b) being disequilibrated on the one hand and (c) frightened on the other, all three occurring concurrently. All three vectors must meet, if a person is to be stricken with ADF. One may possess or experience any one of these and not experience either one of the other two. Thus one can be alone, but neither frightened nor disequilibrated; one can be 1088 social research disequilibrated but neither alone nor frightened; and one can be fright­ ened without being alone or disequilibrated. To be affected by even one of these forces, however, predisposes one to be affected by...