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2. Sri Lanka: Setting the Ethnographic Context
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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21 People often ask me why I chose to do this study in Sri Lanka. I find it a difficult question to answer. In some ways, I could have conducted this study anywhere, but I had to conduct it somewhere. In order to study the ways that children are shaped through their experiences with others, I needed to find some particular children who were being shaped. In my initial project design, the one I proposed to my doctoral committee, I aimed to study the intergenerational effects of community violence on children. Before coming to graduate school, I had spent eight years working with children and adults affected by sexual violence in the United States. For some of the women with whom I worked, I saw how their exposure to violence and their ways of dealing with those experiences influenced the ways they parented their own children. In my doctoral research in anthropology, I wanted to investigate how people in a different cultural setting, exposed to different kinds of violence close to home, might respond, and how those responses might shape the ways they raised their own children. In the late 1990s, at the time I was looking for a field site to situate such a study, there were many possibilities— Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti. But it was Sri Lanka that drew me. Sri Lanka had been the site of an extended ethnic conflict since the anti- Tamil riots in 1983, the seeds of which had been sown long before that, as the nation emerged from centuries of colonial occupation.1 These conflicts escalated into a civil war in which separatists in the north and east of the island fought for an independent Tamil state, a fight they continued until crushed by government forces in 2009. In addition, there had been two recent insurrections in the Sinhala- dominated south, the first in 1970– 1972, and again on a more massive scale in 1988– 1989.2 These movements brought violence into the streets throughout much of that region. Many of the teenagers who witnessed episodes 2 Sri Lanka Setting the Ethnographic Context 22 Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village of community- based violence in the 1980s would be parents by the time I began my study, ten years later. This made a promising site to study the kind of questions I had in mind. In addition, there were more practical reasons to choose Sri Lanka. I would need to learn a language— and Sinhala, as an Indo- European language with a simplified spoken version, was said to be relatively easy for an English speaker to learn. I would be traveling with my husband and young son, so the relatively high levels of health and safety in Sri Lanka made that seem possible. But there were other reasons, reasons that have more to do with attraction and are harder to explain. I had been thinking about Sri Lanka for a long time. When I was young, living in Guam, where my father was stationed with the U.S. Navy, I briefly knew a girl whose mother was Sri Lankan. When I was just out of college, I had another Sri Lankan friend, a young man who talked endlessly of the civil war he had been sent away to avoid, and who cooked delicious Tamil food from a cookbook he had bought in the States. When I got to graduate school in San Diego, I was assigned Medusa’s Hair (Obeyesekere 1981), a strange and wonderful book about possessed priestesses in Sri Lanka, which led me to write a master’s thesis on the topic. By the time I got to choosing a place for my doctoral research, I felt in some ways as if the choice had already been made. Eventually, my project moved away from questions about the effects of violence to deeper, more general questions about the ways that culture is communicated from parent to child, how it is lived out, and how it might change. I came to realize that my initial questions were far too specific, too embedded in my own previous understandings about “trauma” and PTSD and the ways that parenting shaped children. My observations about more general patterns of relating did not stay neatly inside the boundaries marked out by the focus on an event ten years in the past. Instead, my research became concerned with the experience , relationships, and internal life of the people I got to know, and centered on the things important to them, rather...