Christina Davis: The Sinhala “Voice:” Ethnic Conflict and the Configuration of Difference in Sri Lanka
Drawing on ethnographic research in Kandy, Sri Lanka, I explore how speakers in social interactions employ the voices of others to construct ethnic difference. I analyze two examples where members of a Muslim family—who speak Tamil as a first language—codeswitch from Tamil to Sinhala to represent the voices of the Sinhalese “other.” These voices, in turn, are associated with suspicion and violence. In the first example, a mother employs the Sinhala “voice” to represent her interaction with a Sinhalese security guard at her daughters’ school. In the second example, her brother, immediately following a nearby roadside bombing, draws on the Sinhala “voice” to represent the inner thoughts of Sinhalase people when they see Tamils on the bus. In my analysis, I consider how the speakers draw on multiple resources such as codeswitching, shifts in volume and pitch, reported speech, and poetic parallelism to sharpen the distinction between the “voice” of the person reporting, and the speech that is being reported, thus creating a saturation of difference. I argue that emergent with the employment of these “voices” is a moral stance, where speakers, through language, distinguish the “voices” of others from their own. This paper contributes to an understanding of how ethnic difference is interactionally configured, as well as to the study of everyday violence in Sri Lanka.
Biographical Statement:
Christina Davis is a PhD Candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of Michigan. In August, 2008, she completed 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork on Tamil language practices and social difference in two schools in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Her research interests include linguistic anthropology, Tamil, and language and education in South India and Sri Lanka.
