The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after Sri Lanka's Tsunami Disaster

Notes

199 Notes Introduction 1. Unless otherwise indicated, my fieldwork conversations took place in Sinhala. 2. Anthropologists usually change names of people and places to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. But the events of the tsunami are inextricably place based; one cannot adequately and accurately describe what happened without telling where the event took place. Knowing a place, one can discover the identity of the people who live and work there. My compromise in this book is to provide real names for the cities and major towns in the area where I do my fieldwork but to use pseudonyms for villages such as Naeaegama. I provide real names when discussing officials who made presentations at public events (which are already in the public domain) but use first-name pseudonyms for other interlocutors. 3. The list “Abbreviations, Names, and Sinhala Terms” explains Sinhala and English phrases and abbreviations used frequently in this book. 4. Tsunami (Special Provisions) Act, No. 16 of 2005, enacted May 13, 2005, http://documents .gov.lk/actspg/acts2005.htm; Sri Lanka Disaster Management Act, No. 13 of 2005, enacted 13 May, 2005, http://documents.gov.lk/actspg/acts2005.htm. 5. In 2005, one US dollar (US$1.00) converted roughly to one hundred Sri Lanka rupees (Rs. 100). I use this conversion rate throughout the book. 6. Blaikie and Lund’s edited volume The Tsunami of 2004 in Sri Lanka: Impacts and Policy in the Shadow of Civil War (2010) is somewhat disingenuously named, given that three of the eight articles have little or nothing to do with the tsunami but focus entirely on the ethnic conflict. 2. Deaths 1. Buddhists in Sri Lanka offer alms in memory of a deceased relative seven days, three months, one year, and thereafter yearly following his or her death. An almsgiving ceremony involves the gift of a meal and other items to monks or, less frequently, residents in orphanages and eldercare facilities. 2. The requirement to show a body before receiving a death certificate was later waived. The process for registering tsunami deaths is set forth in the Tsunami (Special Provisions) Act, No. 16 of 2005, enacted May 13, 2005, http://documents.gov.lk/actspg/acts2005.htm, and the Registration of Deaths (Temporary Provisions) Act, No. 17 of 2005, enacted June 13, 2005, http://documents.gov.lk/ actspg/acts2005.htm. 3. Short-Term Camps 1. In August 2005, the ethnographer donated money to have an additional toilet built at the temple. 2. As people cleaned their homes and left the informal camps at temples and churches, government support for the more seriously tsunami-affected individuals increased and grew more formalized . The system distributed goods with impersonal equity to people who met specific qualifications. In 2005, the government provided a variety of aid, including Rs. 15,000 in death compensation and Rs. 2,500 to replace necessary items such as pots and pans. The government also provided monthly payments of Rs. 5,000 to unemployed people such as fishermen and hotel employees who had lost 200 | Notes to Pages 57–134 their income because of the tsunami. (Initially promised for six months, these payments were given for only two months.) Finally, the government gave each person in an eligible family a weekly ration card worth Rs. 375 for Rs. 200 in cash and Rs. 175 in goods. 3. Although local camp administrators and some scholars feel that the armed guards provided much-needed additional security for women in the camps (de Mel, Ruwanpura, and Samarasinghe 2009b, 238; Divakalala 2009, 203; Goonesekere 2009, 109), critics also note the problematic gender relations between armed men and displaced women, particularly in Sri Lanka’s North and East, where ethnic tensions sometimes played out through sexual harassment and rape (Coalition for Assisting Tsunami-Affected Women 2009, 250–51; de Mel 2009, 8). 4. Sri Lanka Disaster Management Act, No. 13 of 2005, enacted May 13, 2005, http://documents .gov.lk/actspg/acts2005.htm. 5. Eight percent of Sri Lanka’s population is Christian; of the Christians, 80 percent are Roman Catholics (US Department of State 2010). Evangelical Christian groups have a small but growing presence on the island. 4. Housing 1. The governing statutes include the Coastal Conservation Act, No. 57 of 1981 and a Revised Coastal Zone Management Plan of 2003 or 2004 (Parliament of Sri Lanka 2005, 73). 2. Legal partition and new deeds make property much easier to sell. Issues about land ownership arose, however, particularly in eastern Sri Lanka, where...