Anthropology in the Margins: Comparative Ethnographies

3. Checkpoint: Anthropology, Identity, and the State

On January 31, 1995, cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), arguably one of the most sophisticated militant groups in the world, exploded a massive bomb in the heart of Colombo’s financial district. Hundreds died, and nearly a thousand people were injured. Several steel and glass towers were reduced to blackened shells. The direct consequences of this explosion, even though important in many ways, do not concern me here. Rather, I am concerned with another kind of consequence of this event. Let me explicate that concern with an example. The headquarters of the Sri Lankan air force sits a few miles south of the financial district, at a busy intersection named Tunmulla. In a holdover from another time, the headquarters is surrounded by upper-middle-class homes of prominent Colombo citizens. The bomb downtown did not directly affect this neighborhood. Yet, in the wake of that event, residents renewed with vigor their efforts to have the military installation, which had been part of the area for many years, removed. Why so? The next bomb, they thought, might blow up right next door. That assumption was not unreasonable. Six years previously, a similar bomb had exploded at another military complex, the Joint Operations Command 67 3 Checkpoint Anthropology, Identity, and the State Pradeep Jeganathan (JOC), located nearby in another upper-middle-class residential neighborhood . Every new bomb that explodes in the city renews the possibility of more violence in areas like Tunmulla. Such places are remapped, again and again, into new spatial arrangements. New cartographies, predicated on the anticipation of violence, come into being. In Colombo, bombs, like people, are given names—from the Pettah bomb, which killed 150 people in the Pettah bus station in the summer of 1986, through the JOC bomb, which devastated an entire neighborhood in 1990, to the Wijeratne and Dissanaike bombs, which killed politicians in the intervening years. A bomb is named after its “target”: a military installation, government office, hotel, airport, or politician. And once the “target” of the bomb has been “determined” after the event, all other destruction accompanying the event is folded into that one “thing” the bomb is thought to center on, such as the JOC or the Central Bank. That “target,” in turn, becomes the name of the bomb. There can arise then, in the wake of the relocation of these transgressive events into the social, cartographies of targets, which are, in turn, cartographies of anticipated violence, mappings of a terrifying future. A map of targets, as lived by the residents of Colombo, would include a whole host of sites, such as military installations like the air force headquarters, homes of prominent and therefore vulnerable politicians, ports and airports, and shopping malls. But such maps are not indiscriminate; such maps of anticipation have a particular logic, constituted by tactics of preparation. For example, such maps do not include schools, universities, stadiums, or playgrounds in the city, since the LTTE has never attacked such sites and has not, therefore, made them visible as “targets.” The targets could be further classified into “hard targets” that are “well secured,” such as the president’s official residence, and “soft targets” that are hardly “secured” at all, such as buses and trains. One could, in fact, extend these labels to “fixed targets ,” such as buildings, and “moving targets,” people. One could argue that Neelan Tiruchelvam, a senior colleague and renowned liberal intellectual, was a soft, moving target: he was blown up by a suicide bomber in July 1999, just outside the International Center for Ethnic Studies (ICES), which he directed and had founded. It is possible here, then, to produce what would be recognizable, in PRADEEP JEGANATHAN 68 anthropological discourse of an ethnographic map of Colombo, as a map of targets, organized spatially, classified through some social logic. Such a map filters and flickers as implied targets do, for what might be subject to “violence” shifts—and the targets themselves move like shadows across the landscape of the city. Targets are marked by “checkpoints.” Colombo is a city of checkpoints . Sri Lanka itself is a territory of checkpoints—large or small, important or minor, confused or precise, official or unofficial. At its most basic and ordinary, a checkpoint is staffed by low-ranking soldiers, men or women, who stop the flow of traffic, usually vehicular but quite often pedestrian, to ask questions of...