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8 Economic Liberalization, Nationalism, and Women’s Morality in Sri Lanka
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8 Economic Liberalization, Nationalism, and Women’s Morality in Sri Lanka Caitrin Lynch In 1977, Sri Lanka’s United National Party (UNP) government introduced an economic liberalization package. The centerpiece of the “Open Economy” was the establishment one year later of the Katunayake Free Trade Zone (FTZ) in an urban area on the outskirts of the capital city, Colombo. From the start, the workforce consisted primarily of women from villages who were employed in various export industries, particularly the garment industry. Since shortly after the FTZ was established , there has been considerable moral panic about “good girls” going bad in Katunayake. Moral panic about these women has focused on reports of the following issues in association with FTZ and other urban women factory workers: prostitution , premarital sex, rape, sexually transmitted disease, abortion, and sexual harassment.Since the early 1980s,Sri Lanka also has been the site of an increasingly violent civil war. The government, which is associated with the majority Sinhala Buddhist ethnic group, has been ¤ghting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who are waging a war for independence in the north and east of the country where Tamils form the majority.1 Newton Gunasinghe argued persuasively in a 1984 essay that the rise in ethnic hostilities in Sri Lanka since 1977 can be connected to economic liberalization (Gunasinghe, this volume). If Gunasinghe was correct, given the visible role of women in this new economy, one may then pose the following questions: How has the moral panic about the behavior of female factory workers been associated with the ethnic hostilities? What kinds of connections have been made between factory women’s morality and concerns about the dissolution of the Sinhala Buddhist nation in the face of the LTTE’s separatist campaign ? In this essay I address these questions to demonstrate how Sri Lankan economic liberalization policies have been argued out socially in terms of women’s behavior . I consider the social position of Free Trade Zone women workers in relationship to women workers in a later UNP economic development scheme: President Ranasinghe Premadasa’s 200 Garment Factories Program (200 GFP), which was begun in 1992. I demonstrate that a shift in the primary focus of the 200 GFP from youth unrest to women’s morality was related to moral panic about “Juki girls” (a derogatory nickname for urban garment factory workers) and societal concern about a potentially crumbling rural/urban divide. I argue that the public visibility of Juki girls indicates to many Sri Lankans that these women who have crossed the rural/urban divide by leaving their villages for employment symbolize the dissolution of Sinhala Buddhist traditions. These concerns about Sinhala Buddhist national culture have led to Juki girls being cast as key symbols of the problems of modernization since the 1977 introduction of economic liberalization. Although it has historical precedents (Lynch 2002), this intense concern with women’s morality seems to have taken on renewed importance during the post-1977 period of ethnic con®ict. Ethnic con®ict certainly has economic roots (among others) and economic tolls, and several recent publications provide a glimpse of the compelling and tragic accounts of the economics of the Sri Lankan con®ict (Arunatilake et al. 2000; Edirisinghe 2000; World Bank 2000b; cf. Shastri and Richardson, this volume). Here,I analyze a seemingly purely economic strategy of the Premadasa government to think about how economy and culture are intertwined and are best conceptualized in interrelationship. Although Premadasa’s 200 GFP was certainly motivated by economic concerns,2 Premadasa’s implementation of the program and the changes made in it over time raise important cultural questions about what it means to be Sinhala Buddhist in this era of ethnic con®ict. The 200 GFP story reveals that economic and cultural interests are tightly interwoven and mutually constitutive, and as such they must be addressed in interrelationship. Mine is a cultural angle on the 200 GFP, in which I examine the cultural signi¤cance and place of the program’s transformations and of Premadasa’s rhetoric about the program— in particular, in this essay I focus on his use of Sinhala Buddhist gender ideologies. The 200 GFP raises questions about how to conceptualize the relationship between cultures and economies, and I argue that these very questions belong at the center of theorizing the relationship between the economy and ethnic con®ict. Youth Unrest and Women’s Employment In 1992,Premadasa began his 200 GFP,an ambitious rural industrialization program in which 200...