Programme
Mark Whitaker
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of South Carolina
E/ MarkW@usca.edu
Trauma and Agency in Sri Lanka and Toronto in the 'New Media' Age
In this paper, Prof. Whitaker will discuss how an interesting combination of politicization, state-sponsored counter-insurgency (or C-I) tactics, and the use of mobile phones and the Internet at, near, or about sites of various kinds of disasters in Sri lanka has altered the relationship between individual and collective "trauma" for that country's minority, Tamil community – most particularly for those living now in the world-wide Tamil Disapora. These developments have altered this relationship by making horrible individual experiences available much more quickly than would otherwise be the case for the construction of politically potent public grievances, as well as repressive state C-I, counter narratives. The changes have also frequently re-contextualized tragic personal events in ways that intrude upon or, sometimes, displace 'traditional' coping and grieving rituals.
More theoretically, Prof. Whitaker thinks this change in what one might call the 'velocity' of trauma calls into question, in an odd way, the distinction some psychologists and social scientists might like to make between individual and collective 'trauma,' something that perhaps threatens the concept of 'trauma' per se by drawing attention to the way agentive 'strategy' plays a role in its construction. To illustrate this, Prof. Whitaker will tell three stories: one about how a man dealt with his child's illness and impending death in a Tamil temple village in the pre-Internet and pre-mobile phone days before the beginning of Sri Lanka's civil war; another about how the vast tragedy of the 2004 tsunami became, as well, a spreading impact wave of vicarious individual trauma for people living in the world-wide Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora; and a third and final story about how the murder of a single man on a Colombo street became transformed, via the Internet and various politics, into a collective trauma: the death of a Tamil martyr.
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Prof. Whitaker's current research interests centre on Tamil, Sri Lanka,
politics, media, diaspora, and nationalism. His selected publications include
Learning Politics from Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil
Journalist in Sri Lanka (2007),
Amiable Incoherence: Manipulating Histories and Modernities in a Batticaloa
Hindu Temple (1999), and "TamilNet.com: Some reflections on Popular
Anthropology, Nationalism, and the Internet" in Anthropological Quarterly
77:3 (2004).