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112 The interlocking lessons about desire and hierarchy that children learn in their early relationships are built on and used as young people participate in all sorts of relationships. The model of hierarchy learned in childhood shapes relationships with peers as well as with juniors and seniors. The deeply learned lesson that desire is dangerous and the habit of disavowing it shape how people pursue their own interests and respond to the pursuits of others. Sometimes these broadly shared cultural understandings lead to mutually satisfying, smooth-­ running interactions. But these shared cultural understandings are also implicated in conflicts within relationships. As people work through these conflicts , they draw on their cultural understandings and psychodynamic resources to interpret each other’s actions and feelings, actions and feelings that are themselves patterned by earlier cultural lessons. By understanding the lessons about desire and hierarchy learned early in life, we can better understand the ways people behave in and experience these conflicts. Envy is at the heart of many such conflicts. The Sinhala conception of envy (irishiyava) is deeply rooted both in understandings about desire and in understandings about hierarchy.1 If we consider envy’s core definition to be the emotional complex resulting from situations in which a person desires something that another possesses, then surely this feeling is not unique to Sri Lanka.2 But in Viligama, ideas about envy were more elaborate and more specific than this—­ and more threatening. In this chapter, I examine two conflicts involving teenaged girls and accusations of envy. Through the analysis of these cases, I argue that, because inequalities between juniors and seniors are justified and valued within the Sinhala model of hierarchy, envy only makes sense between structural peers—­ between those who should be the same. Further, I argue that, because of the ways desire 5 Making Sense of Envy Desires and Relationships in Conflict Making Sense of Envy 113 is thought about and experienced as uncontrollable, dangerous, and destructive , envy is particularly threatening. In these conflicts, the participants actively use the cultural models at their disposal—­ models of envy, of hierarchy, and of desire, along with a host of other models such as those regarding food sharing, track meets, and sorcery. These models overlap, reference, entail, and sometimes contradict each other, as is clear in their use. In the scenarios I describe, the participants are not simply enacting their culture; they are drawing on it to make sense their world, navigate relationships , and process their feelings. While the cultural models available to the participants enable certain understandings, they block other ones. As I argue, this dual nature of cultural models to frame the world so that some views are clear and others obscured, can also be used to avoid or revise that which might be painful. The final scenario in this chapter offers an example of how a cultural model might preclude the recognitions of some envy-­ like feelings while suggesting ways to reinterpret those feelings. This can facilitate psychodynamic defenses against painful feelings, thoughts, and perceptions. In this way, what is intolerable in one’s self may not only be disavowed, as dangerous desires were in Chapter 3, but also repositioned and dealt with indirectly. In this way, one’s own disavowed feelings of envy may be projected, so that they are interpreted instead as coming from someone else. This allows one to avoid the anxiety of owning the intolerable feelings, while simultaneously articulating, resisting, indulging, or condemning them in another. Likewise, if envy is felt to be coming from someone whom it is intolerable to believe could envy one, that envy might instead by interpreted as coming from a more culturally sensible and manageable figure, protecting oneself as well as the valued relationship. These ideas are hard to grab hold of in this abstract form. It takes close ethnography and actual cases to see these dynamics in action and to see why they matter. Before going on to the conflicts that will illustrate and be explicated by these ideas, I want to begin with another piece of ethnography—­ the incident that got me started thinking about envy in Viligama. Nimali’s Dress Early one morning, Nimali came by my house with a message from her mother. Nimali was nineteen and just finishing up her education at the village school. That morning, I was surprised to see her in a pretty new dress rather than her usual white school uniform. Having just woken up and being unprepared for visitors, I mustered...

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