Dennis B. McGilvray

Arabs, Moors and Muslims: Sri Lankan Muslim ethnicity in regional perspective:

In the context of Sri Lankas inter-ethnic conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, the Tamil- speaking Muslims or Moors occupy a unique position. Unlike the historically insurrectionist Māppilas of Kerala or the assimilationist Marakkāyars of coastal Tamilnadu, the Sri Lankan Muslim urban elite has fostered an Arab Islamic identity in the 20th century which has severed them from the Dravidian separatist campaign of the Hindu and Christian Tamils. This has placed the Muslim farmers in the Tamil-speaking north-eastern region in an awkward and dangeruus situation, because they would be geographically central to any future Tamil homeland. The first part of this essay traces the historical construction of contemporary Muslim ethnicity and surveys their position in contemporary Sri Lankan politics. The second half of the essay provides an ethnographic portrait of a local-level Muslim com munity closely juxtaposed with their Hindu Tamil neighbuurs in the agricultural town of Akkaraipattu in the eastern Batticaloa region of the island.

Caste ideology and interaction

Following the publication of the book by E. R. Leach, ed., Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-West Pakistan (1960), much additional information was gathered on caste hierarchies in South Asia, and two major attempts were made to identify the underlying unity of this material - a structuralist one by Louis Dumont and a ethnosocialogical one by McKim Marriott et al. This quest for unity seemed attractive, yet at the same time, as the contributions to the present volume indicate, premature. The four papers collected here and published in 1982 are all concerned with caste ideology and caste interaction in different locales of South Asia.

Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian Ethnicity in Sri Lanka

Historians and anthropologists in Sri Lanka have tended to migrate in opposite directions, but away from the multiethnic confusion of the port cities. Typi- cally, the heterogeneous, semi-Westernized, postcolonial urban society of Colombo and the larger towns has been only a transit point on intellectual journeys outbound to European archives or inbound to “traditional culture.” This was certainly my viewpoint as I arrived “inbound” in Sri Lanka for my first anthropological fieldwork. I took only passing notice of the clerks of mixed European and Sri Lankan descent who sold me stationery supplies at Cargills and mosquito nets at Carvalhos. These people are given the official designation of Burghers in the government census: they are the racially mixed descendants of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British personnel who occupied the island during four and a half centuries of colonial rule.

Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka: An Anthropologist Confronts the Real World

Recent calls for a new “public anthropology” to promote greater visibility for ethnographic research in the eyes of the press and the general public, and to bolster the courage of anthropologists to address urgent issues of the day, are laudable although probably also too hopeful. Yet, while public anthropology could certainly be more salient in American life, it already exists in parts of the world such as Sri Lanka where social change, ethnic conflict, and natural catastrophe have unavoidably altered the local context of ethnographic fieldwork. Much of the anthropology of Sri Lanka in the last three decades would have to count as “public” scholarship, because it has been forced to address the contemporary realities of labor migration, religious politics, the global economy, and the rise of violent ethno-nationalist movements. As a long-term observer of the Tamil-speaking Hindu and Muslim communities in Sri Lanka’s eastern coastal region, I have always been attracted to the classic anthropological issues of caste, popular religion, and matrilineal kinship. However, in the wake of the civil wars for Tamil Eelam and the 2004 tsunami disaster, I have been forced to confront (somewhat uneasily) a fundamentally altered fieldwork situation. This gives my current work a stronger flavor of public anthropology, while providing an opportunity for me to trace older matrilocal family patterns and Hindu-Muslim religious traditions under radically changed conditions.

A matrilineal Sufi shaykh in Sri Lanka

This article explores the influence of local concepts of matrilineal kinship and descent through women in the construction of a modern Sufi silsila (an authorized ‘chain’ of spiritual and genealogical ancestry) in Sri Lanka. Makkattar Vappa, a popular Sufi shaykh in the Tamil-speaking eastern region of the island, asserts hereditary maulana (sayyid) status as a member of the Prophet’s household descent group (ahlul bayt) by means of close genealogical linkages to a locally enshrined saint of Yemeni family ancestry traced through several women, including his mother, his father’s mother, and his wife. The kinship system here is Dravidian in structure, but with a matrilineal emphasis that is seen today in the administration of Hindu temples and Muslim mosques by matrilineal clan elders, and in the negotiation of matrilocal marriages based upon women’s pre-mortem acquisition of dowry property in the form of houses and paddy lands. The shaykh in question is himself the successor Kālifā of a Sufi order (tāriqā) based in Androth Island, Lakshadweep, a similarly matrilineal society located off the west coast of India. In his prior career, he was an art and drama teacher in a local government school, and his style of Sufi leadership continues to be pastoral and pedagogical in tone. This, together with a strong base of support from former students, has enabled him to escape the sort of stridently anti-Sufi violence that has erupted in Muslim communities elsewhere in the region. His awareness of anthropological research on matrilineal kinship and marriage patterns in this part of the island may have encouraged him to trace his sayyid silsila through both male and female genealogical connections.

Pilgrimage to Kataragama, Sri Lanka

The multicultural festival for the Sri Lankan god Kataragama, extensively studied by Gananath Obeyesekere and other anthropologists, is the destination for a group of Tamil Hindu pilgrims shown in this film walking 300 km from the northern Jaffna Peninsula down the eastern coastline of the island, to fulfill their vows at the god’s remote jungle shrine in the south. (For an excellent film on this from a Sinhala Buddhist perspective, see Kataragama: A God for All Seasons in the 1973 Granada Television ‘‘Disappearing World’’ Series, 52min.) Lord Kataragama, also known as Murugan to most Tamils, is the good-looking second son of Siva, and his festival celebrates his mythic extramarital love affair with an aboriginal Vedda princess named Valli. Filmed in 2003–2004 during a ceasefire in the island’s bitter civil war, this documentary makes a strong effort to situate the Kataragama Pada Yatra (on-foot pilgrimage) within the context of Sri Lankan military campaigns and multiethnic violence. In fact, the camera first sights the pilgrims already a third of the way toward their destination, after they have left territory then controlled by the LTTE (‘‘Tamil Tiger’’) guerrillas. More than two-thirds of the film’s footage depicts the progress of this growing pilgrim band as they walk in daily stages from one temple campsite to the next along the eastern coastal road, stopping frequently to receive village hospitality and to express their devotional fervor by singing hymns and falling into states of rapturous possession–trance. Some of this footage is spectacular. We see a Tamil woman in trance illuminated by camphor flames frantically reaching into the holes of a termite mound trying to make physical contact with the cobra deity. We are mesmerized by a Tamil granny in white sari who dances sensuously and seductively to a recorded devotional song while gazing into the doorway of a Murugan shrine. Every day, as they hike steadily southward, the pilgrims chant harō harā, the distinctive invocation for Lord Kataragama. A central figure in the film is an American Hindu devotee, Patrick Harrigan, who first performed the Pada Yatra in 1972 and who led the efforts to sustain the pilgrimage during Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict. Harrigan, conspicuous in a bright green waistcloth and turban, offers a somewhat patronizing meta-commentary throughout the film, yet he is also deeply committed to the religious goals of the pilgrimage, making him a Visual Anthropology, 23: 356–357, 2010 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2010.485019