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This article was downloaded by: [University of Tasmania]On: 29 November 2014, At: 18:46Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T3JH, UK
Ethnos: Journal ofAnthropologyPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20
In My Mother's House: CivilWar in Sri LankaRohan Bastina
a Deakin UniversityPublished online: 12 Nov 2012.
To cite this article: Rohan Bastin (2014) In My Mother's House: Civil War in Sri Lanka,Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 79:3, 442-444, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2012.704930
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.704930
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utilitarian. The syzygy of war and econ-omics in the system of patronage politicsmeant that war leaders came to bejudged by their market value, namelytheir ability to deploy dependant youthas persons and instruments of violence asa flexible labor pool.
Surrounding this compelling centralnarrative are complex portraits of kamajorsleaders and followers andanalyses of the lin-kages between peoples and events acrossthe super-porous political borders of SierraLeone and Liberia. Hoffman also describesthe inability of international institutionssuch as courts to even make sense of theforms of social organization they are alleg-edly holding up to international legal stan-dards. He also shows how magic andmagical thinking infiltrate the everyday vio-lence of a war zone, and provides morespeculative, but interesting, ideas about therole of local forces in the global securityenvironment. Finally, Hoffman reminds us,whatever their failings, the kamajors werefar less ruthless than the enemies againstwhom they fought.
David M. RosenFairleigh Dickinson University
# 2013 David M. Rosen
Sharika Thiranagama. 2011. In MyMother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka.Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress. 16 + 296 pp.
As the daughter of a prominent SriLankan Tamil human rights activistassassinated by the Tamil Tigers in 1989,Sharika Thiranagama offers a unique per-spective on the Sri Lankan civil war.Reunited after her mother’s death withher left-wing activist Sinhalese father, heliving in hiding from nationalist extre-mists in the south of the country, and
forced into exile in England with himand her sister, Sharika Thiranagamagrew up in the shadow of a distant warand became an anthropologist studyingher native country. With fieldwork com-mencing at a time of ceasefire and nego-tiation in the early 2000s, Thiranagamawas able to return to Jaffna as well asconduct research in the settlements ofdisplaced Muslims who were evicted enmasse from the north of the country bythe Tigers in 1990 and to interviewColombo-based Jaffna Tamils, some ofthem displaced by the war and Tiger bru-tality and others returned to the sites fromwhich they had been purged by riotousSinhalese mobs in 1983, losing familymembers in the process. Piecing togetherbiographies and narratives from thesevarious sites of suffering, Thiranagamawrites a wonderfully balanced accountof the multiple effects of a prolongedcivil war, with depictions of Tamilvictims of Sinhalese violence, Muslimvictims of Tamil violence and, likeherself, Tamil victims of Tamil violence.Here is an account of the ‘making andunmaking’ (p. 10) of everyday lifeworldsin the conditions of war that rejects anyattempt to reduce its subjects to culturalessentialism and with that cultural loss,while at the same highlighting people’sdeep sense of longing for a time whenthere was no war. The book has muchto commend it for a Sri Lankanist reader-ship and for a more general audience. I amsurprised, though, that she neglects thework of one of her mother’s erstwhile col-laborators, Daya Somasundaram, andhis account of the psychological impactsof the war on the Jaffna population(Somasundaram 1998).
The ‘mother’ of the book’s title is, inthe first instance, the author’s mother.Beyond that, the reference is to the sense
ethnos, vol. 79:3, 2014 (pp. 438–444)
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of house, home and dwelling; a senseof place and belonging that unpacks themultiple resonances and polysemy ofthe Tamil language term ur (‘village’).Dramatically conditioned by war, forcedrelocation, migration and ethnic cleansing,this sense of home as place, memory andloss is the central theme of the book.Instead of a study of war, the book is astudy of the effects of war that hopes, inits own way, to serve as an interventionin any future peace in a country where,still, the multiple tragedies of threedecades of conflict remain seen as distincttragedies that befell specific ethnic and ter-ritorial groups rather than the country as awhole.
Connected to this partial and frag-menting perspective on the effects ofwar is the scholarship that works withinthe dominant ideological fold. In a fewplaces, Thiranagama is particularly criti-cal of scholars, including anthropologists,whose access to Sri Lankan Tamils in theconditions of war was mediated by theTigers, because these writers typicallyreproduce the official Tiger line or atleast depict as normal the carefully culti-vated and fearful public personae ofTamil civilians under the Tiger totalitar-ian yoke where no one can be trustednot to be an informer. More worrying,though, are those authors anxious to rep-resent Tamil Tiger ideology as quintes-sential Tamil culture in order topathologize the Tigers and Tamils moregenerally. Her compelling stance is thatthere is another story here; a story or,better, set of stories to which she hasmore privileged access, not simplythrough language and familiarity, but alsothe notoriety of being her famousmother’s daughter. Unfortunately, though.Thiranagama neglects existing scholarshipon Sri Lankan nationalist ideology as this
informs anthropological writings on SriLanka such as the authors she criticizes aswell as some of the others whom shepraises.
Problematic also, but understandableand excusable, is the silence in this bookregarding the Tigers, what they wereabout and why they embraced thefascist absolutism that was ultimatelytheir undoing. The promise of freedomoffered to youth in an intensely casteand, with that, gender conscious Jaffnasociety is rightly identified as underpin-ning all of the militant movements;informing how they reacted to growingmarginality at the hands of the majoritar-ian state. However, what is inadequatelyexplored is how this restless radicalismabated when the Tigers became moreand more oriented to statehood andabsolute rule. Instead, Thiranagama pre-sents poignant portraits of survivorswho have moved on from their (mostlynon-Tiger) militancy, living in Colomboand overseas and contemplating whathappened to a struggle wrenched fromtheir hands by an organization willing toexterminate its rivals and ultimatelycreate a conservatism that had neitherprecedent nor purpose. The making andunmaking the book describes is thus notsimply of cultural identities, but of morecontingent selves that were activelyinvolved in the critique of their world.Why the Tigers took this path, especiallywhen at the same time, the militant Sinha-lese extremists staged an equally dramaticabsolutist swing in the south of thecountry, is a question not addressed inthis book. One hopes, though, that itmight be a question Thiranagamapursues in the future.
Rohan BastinDeakin University# Rohan Bastin
ethnos, vol. 79:3, 2014 (pp. 438–444)
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ReferenceSomasundaram, Daya. 1998. Scarred
Minds: The Psychological Impact ofWar on Sri Lankan Tamils. NewDelhi: Sage Publications.
Orin Starn. 2012. The Passion of TigerWoods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf,Race, and Celebrity Scandal. Durham andLondon: Duke University Press. 140 pp.
The most famous stroke with a golf clubis without comparison the one TigerWood’s wife delivered, shattering theside window of his SUV and allowingher to pull her unconscious husbandfrom the car he wrecked in an attemptto get away from a marital dispute. Afterthis, it did not take long for ‘Tigergate’to dominate the US media.
Tigergate, as discussed by Starn, bringstogether a number of cultural themes, andStarn manages to give sensible presenta-tions of them in spite of the limitedformat of his discussions. He doesindeed deal with sports/golf, race, celeb-rity scandal, as the title suggests, butmany other terms could be added, andare dealt with, most obviously perhapsmasculinity. We also get, for example, avery interesting presentation of how acelebrity attempts to manage the conflict-ing demands of a public personae and aprivate one – not just after Tigergatebroke but virtually all through his career.
The books’ title, The Passion of TigerWoods, of course reflects back to thesuffering dramas being enacted inChristianity. The allusion is clever, andalso points to the embracing theme ofthe book, the understanding of Tigergateas a social drama (and a nod is given to
Turner). This, in turn, would be imposs-ible, as Starn points out, if a shorter-term drama is not ensconced in widercultural understandings and how theseare energized.
The Passion of Tiger Woods touchesupon many difficult and complexthemes; it is not the work of a timidperson. Even if it is somewhat of a skip-ping stone, often engaging with analyticalissues in too rapid a fashion, it shows thatthere is a huge potential for anthropolo-gists to give really serious attention tosuch things as how, e.g. celebrity andcelebrities should be seen as both part ofand expressive of contemporary culturaldynamics. We have not met them verysuccessfully, as is illustrated by the list ofreferences in Starn’s book – there ishardly a single anthropological worklisted there with this theme.
The perhaps biggest drawback of thisbook is that it is too short. Many complexthemes are dealt with, and adequately,but not really expanding on anthropo-logical theory. It has received praise bymany non-professional anthropologists,and rightly so. However, it is moredifficult to state its lasting contribution toanthropologists, except for two things:pointing to fascinating cultural complex-ities and suggesting some analytical road-maps. Not bad at all. And to the extentthat Starn’s book brings greater attentionto anthropological analysis outside theanthropological profession – great.
Yngve LithmanUniversity of BergenPB 7802, 5020 Bergen
# Yngve Lithman
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