Jonathan Spencer

Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology

Acknowledgements, Introduction, List of Entries, List of Contributors, Analytical Table of Contents, Entries by Contributor, Entries, Biographical appendix, Glossary, Index

A Nationalism without Politics?The illiberal consequences of liberal institutions in Sri Lanka

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between developmental and cultural nationalism through an extended case study of the Sri Lankan conflict. It highlights, in particular, the deeply political process of the construction of nations in which the usual opposition between politics and an anti-political realm of the nation or culture itself plays an important role. The conflict, it is argued, has to be understood first of all in political terms, as the outcome of a specific history of electoral politics which, from the 1930s on, was structured along ‘ethnic’ lines. Appeals to the national or the cultural, which often appear in rhetorical opposition to the divisive forces of everyday politics, are nevertheless themselves products of the very political processes they claim to transcend.

Sri Lanka. Political violence and ethnic conflict

In recent years, Sri Lanka has experienced 2 violent rebellions in which youths have played a prominent role, 1 in the majority Sinhala community and 1 in the minority Tamil community. The former was crushed, but the latter remains ongoing, with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who claim to represent the Tamil minority, battling the Sinhala-dominated government. Prospects for peace in the short- and medium term appear poor. These events have generated an impressive body of interdisciplinary interpretation, but several important topics have received relatively little attention. Most ongoing research is being carried out by anthropologists, historians, and political scientists, but psychological insights would offer important complementary perspectives.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. How to Use this Book. List of Entries. List of Contributors. Analytical Table of Contents. Contributions by author. Entries A-Z. Biographical Appendix. Glossary. Name Index. People and Places Index. Subject Index.

The Perils of Engagement: A Space for Anthropology in the Age of Security

In the winter of 2006–2007, British anthropologists became embroiled in a series of protests about a planned research program on “radicalisation” to be jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. By linking research on so‐called Islamic radicalisation to UK intelligence and UK counter‐terrorism policy, the program, it was argued, posed unacceptable levels of risk to other researchers. This paper draws on the author’s role in unsuccessful attempts to mediate between the academic critics and the funders, contextualized within a fuller account of the political and ethical implications of researching issues of “security.” The paper concludes with some reflection on the hazards faced by the author’s Sri Lankan colleagues, for whom issues of security are quite simply matters of life and death.

“With That, Discipline Will Also Come to Them”: The Politics of the Urban Poor in Postwar Colombo

After the end of the country’s 30-year civil war in 2009, the Sri Lankan armed forces continued to grow despite the complete absence of obvious military threats to the government. Under the guidance of the president’s brother, the Ministry of Defence has played a leading role in town planning through the Urban Development Authority (which formally became part of the ministry in 2010). Colombo has seen an aggressive program of improvement, which started with a “war” on alleged underworld figures, took in the eviction of hawkers from pedestrian spaces, and involved the clearance of “substandard” housing, especially in places such as Slave Island, a historically dense area near the city center. In this paper we try to capture the temporal properties of a particular moment in the history of the city when speculative capital and military force combined in an attempt to bypass the well-worn channels of urban politics. At the end of the paper we consider events of early 2015, when the incumbent president was defeated and urban development was immediately removed from the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence.

Securitization and its discontents: the end of Sri Lanka's long post-war?

In the 5 years after the 2009 defeat of the secessionist insurgency by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan armed forces expanded in numbers, moving into unexpected niches – tourism, urban planning, training university students. With the defeat of the Rajapkasa government in 2015, this process of ‘securitization’ or ‘militarization’ appeared to go into swift retreat. This paper considers the experience of the post-war years and asks what was permanent and what was less permanent in Sri Lankas post-war experiment in securitization. The paper is a revised version of the Keynote Lecture delivered at the 29th Annual Conference of the British Association of South Asian Studies, held at the University of Portsmouth in April 2015. The theme of the conference was the securitisation of South Asia.

NGOs, the State and ‘Cultural Values’: Imagining the Global in Sri Lanka

In January 2005, immediately after the tsunami which struck the island on 26 December 2004, a rumour gathered force in the southern part of Sri Lanka. The leader of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Prabhakaran, was dead. He had died when a church on the shoreline at Mullaitivu in the north of the island had been swept away by the force of the tsunami. But efforts to cover this up went awry, according to the rumour, when it was discovered that Oxfam had imported a special gold coffin for his funeral — an ostentatious object that is hard to move around without drawing unwanted attention.

A Certain Gesture

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a generation of young Tamils in Sri Lanka joined one or other of the militant separatist groups that sprang up in opposition to the Sinhala-dominated government of Sri Lanka. This paper examines the life of one member of this generation, the journalist and intellectual, Sivaram Dharmaratnam, who was abducted and murdered in Colombo in 2005. Sivarams death provoked a flood of reflections from his peers and these are used to ask questions about the relationship between personal biography, intellectual trajectory and political commitment in a post-colony in long-term crisis. The subsequent appearance of a biography of Sivaram, written by his friend the anthropologist Mark Whitaker, provides an opportunity for further reflection on ethnography, friendship and the limits of biography.

A Certain Gesture: Reflections on the Murder of Sivaram

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a generation of young Tamils in Sri Lanka joined one or other of the militant separatist groups that sprang up in opposition to the Sinhala-dominated government of Sri Lanka. This paper examines the life of one member of this generation, the journalist and intellectual, Sivaram Dharmaratnam, who was abducted and murdered in Colombo in 2005. Sivarams death provoked a flood of reflections from his peers and these are used to ask questions about the relationship between personal biography, intellectual trajectory and political commitment in a post-colony in long-term crisis. The subsequent appearance of a biography of Sivaram, written by his friend the anthropologist Mark Whitaker, provides an opportunity for further reflection on ethnography, friendship and the limits of biography.