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32 2 Deaths Fate and Vulnerability Prasanna, who worked in the army, discussed tsunami fatalities. He said, “Our military people from all branches of the service helped collect the dead bodies. For example, we helped in Peraeliya [at the site of the train derailment where 1,200 people died]. The civilians didn’t want to do this work, and they didn’t have the right equipment for carrying bodies. Those bodies were decomposing; they were coming apart in pieces and fluid was oozing out.” Pictures and videos of mass graves marked the magnitude of the fatalities and the unprecedented treatment of the bodies. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes, “There are at least three points where chaos—a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability— threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight” (1973, 100). The tsunami heightened survivors’ awareness of their physical fragility and their lack of control over natural hazards. By mid-2005, people had had time to think deeply and ask themselves why this disaster had happened and why particular people had been harmed or killed. A few people turned to religious doctrine for an explanation of the tragedy. A respected Naeaegama elder presented me with a provocative view of karmic justice that I later discussed with a series of interviewees. The proposition’s assumptions sparked lively conversations that revealed how people thought about moral causality and death in the context of plate tectonics, the Indonesia subduction zone earthquake, and the resultant tsunami. As my interlocutors discussed ethical action and mortality, they drew on implicit understandings of social norms and values. Deaths | 33 Similar discussions of the relationship between culture and nature take place among disaster studies scholars, who consider survivorship and postdisaster recovery in terms of the concept of vulnerability. In this view, preexisting inequities mitigate or exacerbate how people from various social strata experience a natural hazard. Two Naeaegama villagers died while at the beach side on work-related ventures. Although dissimilar in numerous ways, these two individuals shared certain characteristics that made them susceptible to the waves when the friends and relatives who were with them at the same time and place managed to escape. These cases point out the interaction of human social dynamics with environmental realities and highlight the vulnerabilities inherent in gender and poverty. Tsunami Deaths as Karmic Justice In several South Asian religious traditions, the concept of karma plays an important role. Sinhala Buddhists often turn to a pantheon of deities for intervention in their day-today lives but seek understanding of ultimate reality and meaning in Buddhist teaching (dhamma) (Carbine 2000). Buddhists believe that future good and bad events depend in part upon prior good and bad actions (kamma) (Lopez 1995). Good thoughts and acts generate merit (pin). Negative states of mind and nonvirtuous acts generate demerit (pawu). The concept of karma incorporates much more ethical causality than the idea of “fate.” With karma, past actions in prior and current incarnations affect people’s situation in the present, and present choices will influence subsequent events in this life, one’s future incarnations, and one’s ability to achieve liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsaara) and reach Enlightenment (nibbana) (Rahula 1959). Although largely framed as a theory of ethics and accountability, the concept of karma also allows those who enjoy enviable conditions (wealth, good health, and high social standing) to explain their status as a result of their own moral actions in their current life or prior incarnations. Similarly, dire events and unenviable experiences (particularly those of other people) can be explained as the consequence of prior immoral behavior. Being poor, low caste, or female can be seen as punishment for past wrongdoing, and karmic logic can also explain whether someone survived or died in armed conflict (M. Gamburd 2004, 162). This framework opens the possibility that those who died in the tsunami deserved their fate and that those who survived did so not through luck but through merit. A number of informants pointed out to me that in many areas where the tsunami destroyed other buildings, Buddhist temples remained relatively unscathed. They also noted that in damaged houses, pictures of the Lord Buddha and associated worship areas often survived. While it might be noted that stupas are solid brick, religious institutions are better built than many houses, and pictures are placed high on...

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