Rohan Bastin

Expert knowledge : first world peoples, consultancy and anthropology

Contributors: Rohan Bastin, Barry Morris, Janine R. Wedel, Craig R. Janes, Stevan Weine, Ralph Cintron, Ferid Agani, Elissa Dresden, Van Griffith, June Nash, Alcida Rita Ramos, Georg Henriksen, Richard Daly, Steven Robins, Barry Morris, Roland Kapferer.

'Royal science' and civil war in Sri Lanka : a comment on S. Goonatilake

In highlighting the relationship between the production of knowledge, the administration of government and the formation of subject–citizens in colonial systems, post-colonialism has arguably found its most fertile field of inquiry and revision in South Asia. The reasons for this are complex and relate, in part, to the nature of both colonial administration and the colonised civilisations to be found in the region, as well as to the nature of the different independence movements—many of these persisting well beyond the formal grants of independence in the late 1940s. Also important is the emerging post-colonial middle class, its transnational interconnections comprising inter alia extensive participation in knowledge/information economies, and its ‘organic intellectuals’ (Gramsci 1971) whose work represents the interests of their class. In other words, the tremendous insights offered by post-colonial theory into the nature of latent or implicit power relations to be found in forms of knowledge reveal the ongoing complicity of scholarship in government. Post-colonialism, thus, raises the issue of how the nexus of knowledge and power translates into contemporary situations—the post-colonial predicament (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993).

Development Aid, Civil War and the Containers of Capitalism

The politics of international aid and development, so often wrapped in the language of human improvement, mutual respect and selfless generosity, are well recognised for their pragmatic, duplicitous and often disingenuous self-interest. This is nowhere more apparent than in the civil wars that litter the postcolonial world. According to ex-senior USAID administrator, Andrew Natsios, it was determined in 2004 that sixty percent of the countries USAID funded in 2001 ‘had had a civil conflict in the preceding five years’ (Natsios 2010: 51). Prompted by this apparent realisation to tie development more strategically with conflict mitigation, Natsios explains that the problem USAID encountered was the ‘obsessive measurement disorder’ (OMD) of the new ‘counter bureaucracy’ (ibid.). How, Natsios asks, ‘do you prove quantitatively that an aid programme prevented a conflict if it never takes place?’ (ibid.). The problem with contemporary development, therefore, is a problem of excessive accountability or what others refer to as the rituals of verification associated with audit cultures (Shore 2008; Strathern 2000a). Such cultures, or the larger domain of value to which they refer (e.g., ‘risk society’), are not always disparaged and nor are they restricted to development. Audit culture is, as Strathern declares, a new regime in international affairs where ‘governance has become reconfigured through a veritable army of moral fieldworkers (NGOs)’, environmental responsibilities and indigenous rights provide constant sources of accusation, and ‘transparency of operation is everywhere endorsed as the outward sign of integrity’ (ibid.: 2).

Death of the Indian social

The figure of Dumont continues to loom large in the anthropology of South Asia, notwithstanding the fact that arguably the last thing he published on India was the preface to the 1980 edition of his masterpiece Homo Hierarchicus. Yet what Dumont shows in that preface is that he has loomed large while and perhaps because other anthropologists have pointed accusatory fingers at him, especially those from Britain and within the tradition of British social anthropology and social science. So what was it that so ruffled the feathers of the British bulldog? Was it Dumont’s attack on the atomistic individualism of British social theory? Was it that he appeared to reduce every aspect of Indian caste to the structural dyad of pure and impure? Was it his argument (more fully developed in Dumont 1977) that the ideological notion of the economic as a distinct social category is the product of a historical juncture, and that historical materialist or Marxian analysis is as much an ideology as it is a theory of ideology? Or was it simply Dumont’s insistence that India is seen in its own terms, and not from the (ideological) position that stressed the fundamental inequalities and injustices of the Indian social system as something in need of change? Was Dumont, in short, a conservative apologist for caste writing in an era in which the social was regarded as something that could be changed?

sorcerous Technologies and Religious Innovation in Sri Lanka

This essay examines the importance of sorcery in the dynamics of religious inno vation in contemporary Hindu and Buddhist Sri Lanka.1 My interest stems from two observations. First, in almost stark contrast to other Hindu ritual forms that emphasise unchanging text-based rites, the sorcery practices I describe display an almost modernist preoccupation with innovation. Second, much of this innova tion originates, or is seen to originate, from outside the cosmic order both of the pantheon and of society. Consequently, sorcery practices manifest a dynamism that often results in the appearance of sorcery having sprung up from nowhere or of being on the sharp increase. However, such an appearance of growth is less of an increase by degree than a shift in visibility. Moreover, it is a characteristic Sri Lankan sorcery practices share with practices elsewhere. When social scien tists whose gaze has been primed for spotting anomalies light upon these shifts in visibility, the reaction is usually one of alarm. Scholars whose basic orientation is to the problem of social order and stability tend to judge these apparent aber rations in terms of social breakdown and anomie. Instead of considering what sorcery reveals anthropologically, they instead analyse sorcery as a symptom of a social pathology. The restless dynamism of sorcery and its role in religious innovation remain unaddressed, and this contributes to a conservative view of both the phenomenon of sorcery and the study of religion in general. I commence my discussion with the Tamil Hindu Bhadrakali temple at Munnesvaram on the north-west coast of Sri Lanka in order to introduce a major site for sorcery practice in present-day Sinhala Buddhism. Having situ ated the Hindu goddess Bhadrakali (or more simply Kali) in the contemporary pantheon and introduced some of the sorcery practices associated with her, I turn to an analysis of a special ritual event held near the west-coast town of Kalutara and sponsored by a female trance specialist, or maniyo, who is a devotee of Kali. Sorcery is a practice that looms large in this maniyos world, but so too is the pursuit of new sorcerous technologies. Followers of the maniyo include a significant number of women who are returned labour migrants to

Dynamics of Fragility: Secret Victories and Political Awakenings in Sri Lanka’ s Civil War

It is for this reason that the JVP’ s rising will reverberate, again and again, throughout the island even after its suppression. For there are some spectacular defeats which from the very moment of their consummation are already secret victories, because the time in which they occurred and the spirit with which they were fought lead to a sudden political awakening far beyond themselves.

Hindu Temples in the Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflict: Capture and Excess

Developing Deleuze and Guattaris concepts of territorialization and the apparatus of capture, this article explores the role that Sri Lankan Hindu temples have played in the formation of ethnicity and ethnic conflict. Analyzing three contemporary events, the article introduces ways in which many different Sri Lankans (Sinhalese and Tamil) interpret their countrys predicament and seek to resolve or prolong it. The events also reveal how scholarship becomes entangled in ethnic nationalism. I then examine in greater detail a village in which temple construction was a critical feature of identity formation during the creation of Sri Lanka as a colonialist and capitalist bureaucratic space. Through this account, I argue that the formation of polarized ethnicity in Sri Lanka is the product of multiple refractive forces, of which temples are one, and not the end result of a singular colonialist bureaucratic agency.