Programme
Sidharthan Maunaguru
Graduate Student
Department of Anthropology
John Hopkins University
E/ smaunag1@jhu.edu
Human/Non-Human: Work of doubt in everyday life in the time of war
More than thirty years of prolonged war in Sri Lanka has devastated lives of Tamils. Many people have been displaced within and outside of Sri Lanka. The war has also set the scene for the possibility of "victims" and "perpetrators" coming from the same social space and kin groups. The social landscape of the Tamil community in Sri Lankan has been thrown into a complex web. On the one hand, there are repeated ethnic riots on the Tamil communities, evacuation of Tamils from Colombo in recent past and suspecting every Tamil person to be a member of the LTTE in everyday life; but on the other hand we also see that internal and intra killings within and between Tamil military movements. Ordinary Tamil are targeted in these internal fights. Given the complex situation of Sri Lankan Tamils, this paper draws the notion of "doubt" as a conceptual tool to think about "Tamil Human" or "Tamil personhood." How does the notion of "doubt' plays a role in deciding or not deciding, who the "perpetrator's and "victims" are, or who is LTTE -Tamil and non LTTE- Tamil or who is a "pro Tamil nationalist" or 'anti Tamil nationalist?" Which pinches on the idea of who is the human and non-human? My argument draws from particular ethnographic cases and events in the time of political violence and brings the ideas of "doubt," "suspicions" and "rumor" to rethink the category of "human" in the context of Sri Lankan Tamils. This paper will draw the notions of human from the works of Tamil kinship, history and literature among other sources.
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Mr. Maunaguru is a doctoral candidate who has conducted research on internal
displacement and ethnic identity, a case study of Jaffna migrants to Colombo
since 1990 and submitted as dissertation for the B.A (Hons) Degree 2000. His
publications include “Negotiating Tamilness" in
Building local Capacities for Peace: Rethinking Conflict and Development in
Sri Lanka (2003) ed. Mayer, M., Thangaraja, Y., and Rajasingham, D.;
"Brides as Bridges? Tamilness through movements, documents and anticipations" in
Formations and Transformations of Tamil Nationalism ed. Cheran, R.