Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village: Shaping Hierarchy and Desire

1. Introduction

1 In the Sri Lankan village where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork, little children are given whatever they demand. Yet, somehow, they turn into undemanding , well-­ behaved ten-­ year-­ olds. This surprised me. Like many in the United States, I believed that giving in to children’s selfish and rudely articulated demands would reinforce that behavior, teaching children to expect that they will always get their way if they scream loudly enough. However, in the Sri Lankan village I call Viligama, this did not seem to be the case. Other things surprised me, too. A two-­ year-­ old girl whose mother gave in to her temper tantrum demanding ice cream would, at other times, sit quietly on her mother’s lap while her mother popped little balls of rice and curry into the girl’s open mouth. As she fed the girl, the mother did not ask which bits of curry she wanted next or whether she was full. Instead, the mother confidently gave the child what the mother deemed suitable, as she did with the girl’s eight-­ year-­ old brother. This surprised me because of the contrast between the two styles in which the girl was given things—­ one in which she demanded her own way and the other in which she passively accepted whatever she was given. But it also surprised me because of the contrast between the way this mother fed her children and how I fed my own son. Like many mothers in the United States, I had encouraged my son to feed himself from his own plate sitting in his own chair, beginning almost as early as he could eat solid food. By the time he was four and we were living in Viligama, mealtimes were sometimes a struggle, as I tried to get him to try unfamiliar foods, not expecting that he would just happily eat whatever I gave him. Further, the style of interaction in Viligama in which children accepted what their caretakers provided, without a discussion of preferences or choices, did not stop at age six or at ten or even at eighteen. When it came time for young 1 Introduction 2 Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village people to marry, ideally it was their parents or other senior relatives who would begin looking for a spouse for them. Ultimately, the consent of the young person was required, but their specific preferences were not something parents and children typically discussed with each other. For young people in this village, maturity was marked by a greater sensitivity to hierarchy and a deference the wisdom of elders, rather than the kinds of self-­ assertion, choice-­ making, and independence that typically mark growing up in the United States. What is more, this type of interaction between parents and their children in Viligama struck me as similar to interactions between superiors and subordinates that I observed in other settings in Sri Lanka. Students repeated the lessons teachers taught but did not ask questions or contribute their own ideas. Bakery counter workers did not correct the manager when he misinterpreted a customer’s problem, even though they had been working to solve it before he arrived. When I asked people what should be done about the civil war going on at the time in the north of the country, my neighbors said that the politicians should solve it. Senior people should provide what they judged junior people to need, without consulting those juniors directly. The juniors, in turn, held their tongues, accepting what they were given—­ although they might leave a relationship or otherwise act out their displeasure if they were not being taken care of satisfactorily. These kinds of observations prompted many questions for me—­ questions about people’s relationships, about their wishes and desires, and about how these developed. My own cultural understandings about people and relationships were not very helpful in answering such questions. These understandings that I carried with me, formed by my own experiences growing up and living in the United States, included a firm—­ if not uncritical—­ grounding in the ideas of human psychology and healthy personhood that circulated widely there. In trying to work out these initially puzzling observations, I learned not only about life in this Sri Lankan village, but about the limits of my own cultural understandings. This, of course, is how anthropological fieldwork works. What is initially strange becomes familiar, and what were taken-­ for-­ granted truths are recognized as products of one’s own cultural context...