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ix Acknowledgments Minutes after the Indian Ocean Tsunami struck, family, friends, and strangers began to help the tsunami survivors. In the United States, the scholars who do research in Sri Lanka activated our personal and professional networks to send money and other aid overseas. Sincere thanks are due to all who supported the humanitarian efforts that followed this disaster. Many people, particularly scholars whose field sites were directly affected by the tsunami, also felt an urgent need to know what had happened during the catastrophe and what was taking place in its aftermath. Dennis McGilvray, professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado—Boulder, took the lead in crafting a successful proposal for funding from the National Science Foundation (SES 05625260) to send to Sri Lanka a multidisciplinary research team with prior experience in the country and region. The NSF team performed a comparative study of relief and recovery operations in ethnically and regionally diverse locations along Sri Lanka’s coast. The team initially consisted of Dennis, me, and Patricia Lawrence (all of us sociocultural anthropologists), Randall Kuhn (a demographer), and Alan Keenan (a political scientist). Timmo Gaasbeek and Georg Frerks (disaster studies specialists) joined us later. An edited volume entitled Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions contains the fruits of this collaborative venture (McGilvray and Gamburd 2010). Some elements of the argument that I make in this book appeared previously in my contribution to the earlier volume (M. Gamburd 2010). I am grateful to the research team, especially to Dennis, for encouragement and inspiration. Researching the tsunami, I spent two and a half months in the Aluthgama-Ambalangoda area during the summer of 2005. I set out to chronicle and analyze the social repercussions of the disaster on the southwest coast. Initially, the research parameters of the collaborative NSF project guided my inquiry. The anthropological aspects of that project examined the role of social organizations such as family and caste structures , religious institutions, and political parties in relief and recovery efforts. I began by asking informants about these issues. Themes of power and politics emerged repeatedly in my initial conversations, and I systematically pursued those topics in further interviews. In April 2006, I returned to Sri Lanka for another four and a half months of research supported by a fellowship from the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. In Sri Lanka, thanks are due to my research associate R. B. H. “Siri” de Zoysa, his wife D. Telsie Karunaratne, and Nilam Hamead. In 2005, Siri and I conducted sixty interviews and informal focus groups with a total of seventy-nine people in the Aluthgama-Ambalangoda area. In addition, we performed site visits and follow-up interviews with thirty-five people in 2006 and 2009. To find out about camps set up x | Acknowledgments for tsunami-affected people, we spoke with the chief monks at three local Buddhist temples and the pastor of a church that hosted crowds of people fleeing the shoreline. Our interlocutors included four poverty alleviation program workers, two village-level government administrators, and a representative from the Balapitiya Divisional Secretariat ; all of these officials administered government aid, and two of them helped run camps in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. On multiple occasions, Siri and I visited three areas with temporary shelters (two tsunami-affected villages where owners were rebuilding on their own land and one camp for people who had lived within the one-hundred-meter beachside exclusion zone and awaited new houses elsewhere) and two donor-built housing schemes. We also interviewed five local intermediaries who distributed money, goods, and (later) houses from international donors. In addition, we spoke with stakeholders about damage to local tourist hotels, garment factories, and the fishing industry and learned about the tsunami’s effects on other economic sectors, such as construction. I owe a large debt to the many individuals who took time from their busy schedules to speak with me about their experiences during and after the Indian Ocean Tsunami. I extend my thanks to my editorial team at Indiana University Press and to three anonymous reviewers, all of whom provided helpful suggestions and support. In Oregon , I thank my colleagues at Portland State University for covering my departmental obligations over the leave during which I did my research and the sabbatical during which I wrote this manuscript. And on the home front, Trish Walsh and Tonie Gatlin made it possible to balance work and family responsibilities. Finally, I am...

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