Masking Terror: How Women Contain Violence in Southern Sri Lanka 9780812201154

Table of contents :
Contents
List Of Illustrations
Preface
A Note On Transliteration
1. Introduction: How Women Contain Violence
Part I: The Wild In Udahenagama
2. "Have Some Tea With A Piece Of Nirvana!": A Lifetime Under The Gaze Of The Wild
3. "Even The Wild Spirits Are Afraid!": The Gaze Of The Wild In Five Neighborhoods
Part II: Cautious Discourses About The Wild
4. "We Can Tell Anything To The Milk Tree": Udahenagama Soundscapes
5. "Those And These Things Happened": Ambiguous Forms Of Speech
6. "She Said That He Had Said That ... ": The Use Of Reported Speech
Part III: Agents Of Discursive Change
7. "It wasn't like that when we were young": Civil War, National Mental Health NGOs, and the International Community of Trauma Specialists
8. The Power of Ambiguity
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Masking Terror

The Ethnography of Political Violence Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Masking Terror How Women Contain Violence in Southern Sri Lanka

Alex Argenti-Pillen

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright© 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10

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Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Argenti-Pillen, Alex Masking terror : how women contain violence in Southern Sri Lanka I Alex Argenti-Pillen ern. -(Ethnography of political violence) p.

ISBN: 978-0-8122-3688-0 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Women and war-Sri Lanka. 2. Ethnic conflict-Sri Lanka. 3. Rural women-Sri Lanka-Language. 4. Mothers of soldiers-Sri Lanka. 5. Psychic trauma-Sri Lanka. 6. Sociolinguistics-Sri Lanka. I. Title. II. Series HQ1735.8 .A85 2002 303.6'095493-dc21 2002029147

For Nicolas, Chiara, and Quentin

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface

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A Note on Transliteration

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1. Introduction: How Women Contain Violence

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Part 1: The Wild in Udahenagama 2. "Have some tea with a piece of Nirvana!": A Lifetime Under the Gaze of the Wild 21 3. "Even the wild spirits are afraid!": The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods 42 Part II: Cautious Discourses About the Wild 4. "We can tell anything to the milk tree": Udahenagama Soundscapes 85 5. "Those and these things happened": Ambiguous Forms of Speech 102 6. "She said that he had said that ... ": The Use of Reported Speech 133 Part III: Agents of Discursive Change 7. "It wasn't like that when we were young": Civil War, National Mental Health NGOs, and the International Community of Trauma Specialists 159

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8. The Power of Ambiguity

Notes

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Bibliography Index

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Illustrations

1. Appearance of a wild spirit 21 2. Wild spirit approaching a sick person 43 3. Survey, Galkanda and Hendolakanda 46 4. Kinship diagram, Hendolakanda 48 5. Kinship diagram, Galkanda 56 61 6. Survey, Puvakdeniya 7. Spatial organization, domestic cleansing ritual 69 8. Survey, Beragama 86 9. Drummer: acoustic cleansing 103 10. Boys that grow up now 11. "Younger brother, if you are killing, kill me" 12. Spatial relations, shrine 142 13. Reported speech, gods 145 14. National Mental Health Week 160 15. Drums of the next generation 196

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Preface

This book gives an account of the ways women from Udahenagama, a community in the rural slums of Southern Sri Lanka, talk about violence and its effects. Many families in rural Sinhalese communities bring up their sons to become soldiers in the war against the Tamil minority in the north and east of the country. The book provides an account of the lives of the families of soldiers who are commonly depicted as perpetrators, because of the genocidal war crimes against Tamil communities they commit. I attempt to reconstruct the violent background of such soldiers by presenting the stories of their mothers, sisters, wives, and grandmothers. To begin to understand these stories, I also provide a detailed analysis of the language in which they are cast, reflecting on the difficulties caused by translating such narratives into English. The book contains many first-hand, literal presentations of the way in which women from Udahenagama talk about themselves and the violent reality in which they live. The relevance of such a localized, small-scale analysis is that rural communities like the one I describe provide soldiers for the war against the Tamil population and constitute a sine qua non for ongoing inter-ethnic violence. In a context without forced conscription, this begs the question how the young men and women of Sri Lanka's rural slums can be militarized with such apparent ease. By means of an analysis of the violence that rural Sinhalese communities have undergone in the past, I provide a perspective on inter-ethnic violence between the Sinhalese and Tamil populations that is typically omitted from existing historical accounts of the war between them. Rather than concentrate on the political arguments raised by the political elites or attempt to provide an analysis of the situation near the frontline, I worked in communities that provide soldiers for a conflict that is locally perceived as remote, and investigated the local reasons that drive young people to participate in the war.

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The endemic high levels of violence in commumt1es like the one I call Udahenagama have not passed unnoticed by the international humanitarian agencies. International and national nongovernmental organizations alike have implemented rehabilitation programs for victims of war trauma and torture in the rural slums of southern Sri Lanka. Some of the women I worked with participated in such programs and had discussed the violence they suffered with trauma counselors. The ways women from Udahenagama talk about violence can thus no longer be studied in isolation from the ways they have learned to present themselves to humanitarian agencies. This book therefore covers both traditional narrative styles for talking about violence and the more recent discourses on violence that are influenced by the presence of nongovernmental trauma counseling programs. By looking at the role that such discursive styles play in the control of violence, I critically assess traditional ways of talking about violence on the one hand and the narrative styles promoted by humanitarian agencies on the other. I have written this book for social scientists conducting research in societies and cultures polluted by war as well as for mental health professionals and human rights workers engaged in humanitarian actions in wartorn non-Western societies. An increasing proportion of field research within the disciplines of anthropology, gender studies, development studies, and refugee studies is conducted in post-conflict or wartorn societies. This book provides a vivid introduction to the difficulties and methodological problems researchers may encounter in such circumstances. The narratives of the women from Udahenagama I quote engage us to think about how survivors of wartime atrocities reconstruct their communicative worlds and interrupt the cycle of violence in ways that may be difficult for Euro-American professionals to imagine. This book provides a detailed critique of the ways in which the notion "war trauma" has been exported to non-Western societies through the implementation of humanitarian trauma counseling services in wartorn societies worldwide. I base my critical analysis on the extensive presentation of empirical material I gathered in southern Sri Lanka, and I show how the discourse on trauma poses a threat to the culture-specific strategies of containment of violence that Udahenagama women use on a daily basis. The cycle of contain-ment of violence in Udahenagama effectively curtails outbreaks of large-scale, modernist violence in which people become targets simply because of their membership in a particular group (religious, ethnic, or political). In a global world dominated by inter-ethnic violence, counter-insurgency violence, and the current wars on terrorism, cultures of containment of violence are invaluable resources. In this book I give a detailed description of the culture of containment of violence in Udahenagama and document how this culture is threatened not only by a modern militarized nation state but also by humanitarian agencies attempting to modernize

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discourses on suffering and violence by teaching people about trauma and trauma counseling. I would like to express my warmest gratitude to all the people from Udahenagama who helped me during my research. I wish them prosperity and good health. I would like nothing better than to list their names here in order to thank them individually, but have chosen not to for reasons of privacy. Heartfelt thanks too for my research assistant Akka, whose ideas and discoveries have been crucial to the development of my research. I also would like to thank those who commented on my work in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, in particular Nanneke Redclift and Murray Last. Audrey Cantlie, from the School of Oriental and Mrican Studies, University of London, was an invaluable source of ideas and support throughout the whole project. Many thanks are also due to the reviewers and editors at the University of Pennsylvania Press for their generous help and advice. This project was supported by a research fellowship from the Graduate School, University College London and two postdoctoral research fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Finally, I am especially grateful to my husband, Nicolas, for his support during the fieldwork we did together. Many of the ideas for research and writing-up were generated in conversations with him. He also helped me enormously during the final revisions, both with the manuscript and by taking care of our children while I was writing.

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A Note on Transliteration

All the Sinhalese words I have included belong to the colloquial Sinhalese spoken in Udahenagama. My research assistants used Sinhalese script to transcribe the conversations we recorded on tape. We then used the system of transliteration recommended by Gombrich (1971: xiii-xiv). I made a number of simplifications to make wordprocessing and typesetting easier and more cost-effective. In the text I have not made a distinction between the retroflex and dental pronunciations of d and tor the short and long pronunciation of a, i, and u, nor have I marked the palatal or nasalized n. This reproduction of orally gathered material should allow Sinhalese speakers to recognize the Sinhalese words (and above all the concepts) that were central to this research project. All mistakes are of course mine.

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Chapter 1 Introduction How Women Contain Violence

A great number of young men in Sri Lanka have chosen to join the armed forces and were until recently fighting against Tamil separatists (the Tamil Tigers or LTTE) in the north and east of the country. As the Sri Lankan army suffered heavy casualties in what has become a war of attrition, waves of young foot soldiers were continuously sent to almost certain death at the front. Operation Leap Forward started in july 1995, Operation Riviresa I in December 1995, and Operations Riviresa II and Ill in April and May 1996. These are but some examples of the violence involving the soldiers of the Sri Lankan army in a conflict that started in 1983. 1 My husband and I worked in Sri Lanka during Operation Sath Jaya (Complete Victory), which started in July 1996, and Operation J aya Sikurui (Certain Victory), which began in May 1997. In the first hundred days ofOperationJaya Sikurui, the official figures conceded that over 575 soldiers of the Sri Lankan army had been killed in action, while 3400 were reported to have been wounded in action (Situation Report, Sunday Times, August 24 1997). The very utterance of the names of the most infamous battle scenes along the front still fills people with horror. Mullaitivu, the name of a coastal town in the north of the island where over 1000 soldiers of the Sri Lankan army were killed in only two or three days during Operation Sathjaya, is a case in point. The island of Sri Lanka, with a majority Sinhalese Buddhist population, is officially a Buddhist state, the armed forces of which are fighting the against the Tamil Tigers, insurrectionists drawn from the Hindu Tamil ethnic and religious minority concentrated in the north and east of the country. According to the international press and the discourse of Sri Lankan politicians alike, the conflict that erupted in 1983 is caused by interethnic strife between Sinhalese Buddhists and Hindu Tamil separatists. This is the rhetoric that has motivated the international military-industrial

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complex to secure a steady flow of military hardware for the Sri Lankan government. While Western governments support the Sri Lankan national army, international arms dealers have backed both the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE indiscriminately. Allegations circulate, in both the international and the Sri Lankan press, that the "interethnic warfare" is only a front orchestrated by arms dealers and political elites who benefit from the consequent trade in weapons. Rumors periodically appear in the Sri Lankan press alleging that a political solution to the conflict has been opposed by powerful members of the political elite who benefit personally from the ongoing war and the concomitant trade in military hardware. Further critical analysis of such rumors and the potential deconstruction of the political elite's rhetoric on interethnic warfare have yet to be addressed by a future generation of investigative journalism. This book represents an anthropological contribution to this debate, which has thus far been led by Sri Lankan investigative journalists such as Iqbal Atthas and Roy Denish. In the chapters that follow, I attempt to deconstruct the notion of interethnic violence by providing a detailed account of a wider cycle of violence in which the war against the Tamil minority forms just one component. For nearly a year and a half (1996-98) I conducted research in the village of Udahenagama (a pseudonym), a rural community in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka, among the families of the Sinhalese soldiers who were being sent to the front in the north and east of the country. From the perspective of the Tamil minority, I worked with perpetrators of wartime atrocities and their families, not the people who orchestrate and design the war but those who actually participate in committing (virtually genocidal) war crimes against Tamil communities. The families of these young and often chronically violent men have their own story to tell, however. Their perspective on the conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil populations is commonly absent from existing historical accounts of Sinhala-Tamil warfare. My aim was to conduct research on the social context that provides the breeding ground for the successive waves of young men destined to enroll in the armed forces and to be deployed by the Sri Lankan nation state against its Tamil minority. Historical or sociological accounts of the willingness of the rural poor to participate in the interethnic war often attribute their motivation to become conscripts in the Sri Lankan national army to poverty. People in the village of Udahenagama eagerly confirmed this to me. Most young soldiers in the national armed forces come from extremely poor backgrounds. Their parents and siblings survive by means of casual labor on the tea plantations or in the rice paddies. Such landless peasants form the majority of the soldiers who fight the LTTE in the north and east of the country. As one elder in the village argued, soldiers work for the army as casual laborers and kill for their daily wage. Their "nationalism" is that of the daily

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wage laborer, a "coolie nationalism" motivated by poverty rather than sincere nationalist fervor. The Sri Lankan army, almost exhausted by the long war against the LTTE, depends on the impoverished population to provide its rank-andfile soldiers (Sunday Leader, july 28, 1996). This implies that the sons of the more privileged classes engaging in the nationalist discourses in the press and in Colombo's elite circles-the discourse that feeds the war-hardly ever join the lower ranks of the army or die for the Sinhalese cause. Meanwhile, ordinary Sinhalese villagers are regularly confronted with rumors about the number of casualties resulting from the latest of the many army debacles of the past five years. Nevertheless, thousands of young men deliberately head for the front and in many cases to their deaths. Povertystricken families are caught between succumbing to army recruitment strategies on the one hand or to poverty on the other. The only tangible reality of the war that permeates the civilian population in the villages arrives in the form of the bodies of dead soldiers returned to their kin in the infamous sealed coffins that they are forbidden to open (cf. Perera 1996: 46). More often than not, however, no news from the front is available and the families of soldiers live in extreme insecurity. The press censorship, justified by the need to keep security-related matters secret during army operations, has ensured that the hearts of the public (the wives, mothers, fathers, siblings, and friends of army personnel) have grown bitter from the festering official silence on the war. The combination of poverty and the greed of an arms-dealing politicoeconomic elite devoid of social conscience can account for part of the reality of chronic interethnic violence, but many questions are left unanswered in the interpretations noted above of the war in Sri Lanka. During my fieldwork in Udahenagama, I attempted to reconstruct the social background of some of the foot soldiers born in the village. Most young conscripts manage to tolerate high levels of oppression and violence during their initial period of training before going to the front. Many successfully become ferocious fighters. Some carry out atrocities at the front, but many also become deserters. It is estimated that twenty to thirty thousand young men have deserted from the army since 1995. As I describe below, even though the state does everything in its power to prevent it, their communities strive to reintegrate these dangerous and volatile young people when they return home. The Sri Lankan army organizes frequent raids and cordon-and- search operations in rural communities to arrest deserters and send them back to the deadly front. As a result, once they return home, deserters go underground to avoid arrest. They therefore are prevented from taking up any employment or continuing to provide a salary for their families. Moreover, the army and the police regularly threaten their family members as a means of tracking them down.

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This book describes the social fabric of a rural community that has become a breeding ground and reservoir of soldiers for the Sri Lankan nation state, one that provides a steady flow of young men to the front without sharing the ethno-nationalist views of the Colombo elite. As the current, massive desertion rate attests, poverty and propaganda are obviously not enough to create such a reservoir, nor can they fully explain why-in the absence of forced conscription-young Sinhalese men continue to go to the front. I argue below that a reservoir of soldiers has been created on the basis of a regime of terror, and not just of poverty. The current participation of the Sinhalese rural poor in the war against the Tamil minority cannot be understood independently from the human rights abuses and war crimes that their communities have suffered, and-as I describe-continue to suffer. It would have been impossible for me to work with the soldiers themselves because the Sri Lankan army wouldn't issue a research permit for such a study. Nor, however, would a study focused purely on the soldiers have provided me with the contextual information I sought in my search for an explanation for their willingness to kill and be killed. Accordingly, I present the viewpoints of their mothers, wives, sisters and grandmothers on the conflict and how it impinges on their own lives. I record the ways in which they talk about violence in its broadest manifestations, domestic, political, or both. Their eloquent accounts shed light on the violent social contexts in which many of the soldiers of the Sri Lankan army grow up in ways that research among the soldiers themselves would not have revealed.

Reservoirs of Violence The regime of terror that pervades the villages of the rural south of Sri Lanka is not only constituted by the fallout of the war against the Tamil separatists in the north and east. A much less well-known and publicized civil war has contributed substantially to the violence and terror that reign in communities like Udahenagama. In 1971 and again in 1989, left-wing Sinhalese activists operating under the banner of the People's Liberation Front or Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) organized an insurgency that resulted in a large-scale civil war. The JVP has been wavering since the mid1960s between mainstream politics and guerrilla warfare. This youth movement grew out of the Peking wing of the Ceylon Communist Party as a political party but quickly resorted to guerrilla warfare during the 1971 insurgency in which they almost managed to topple the government. After their first military defeat they reappeared as a political party in the early 1980s but were quickly banned from political participation due to their alleged role in the anti-Tamil riots in 1983. In 1988-90, however, they reappeared in an even more violent form, deploying a regime of terror that was in turn confronted with an equally

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violent reaction from state security forces and other paramilitary bodies (including most notably the Special Task Force, a counter-insurgency force). A staggering number of people-about 40,000 according to some sources (Chandraprema 1991) -were extrajudicially killed or disappeared (Amnesty International 1993, 1995).2 Civilians on either side of the conflict were abducted and brutally killed by both the JVP and the counterinsurgency forces combating them. In areas like Udahenagama, those supporting the Sri Lankan Army or the JVP were often neighbors, as were victims and perpetrators of violence. Neighbors also denounced one another to the JVP or the government's counter-insurgency forces, thus becoming responsible for each other's disappearances. In the aftermath of the civil war, victims and perpetrators continue to live together at close quarters in crowded neighborhoods. There were a number of historical discontinuities in the composition of the popular bases of the 1971 and 1988-90 insurgencies. In 1971 the vanguard of the revolutionary movement were drawn from the rural educated youth who had gone through higher education but were nevertheless unemployed (see Obeyesekere 1974). They were essentially "village boys," who had attended rural schools, then gone to university, and now lived among the landless peasants. While their education made it less attractive and more difficult for them to follow in the footsteps of their parents and take up traditional occupations (Alles 1990: 254, 341), they were despite their education still debarred from access to the close-knit Englishspeaking ruling elite in Colombo-a legacy of the colonial administration that still monopolizes the white-collar job market. During the 1988-90 insurgency, however, the popular basis of the JVP was very different from what it had been in 1971. Members from the criminal underworld were now recruited into the movement, and a more dangerous group of semi-educated youth from remote villages joined the organization (Alles 1990: 286, 301). Within the discourse of Sri Lankan political analysts, the nucleus of the military wing of the JVP is said to have consisted of army deserters, thugs, criminal elements, people of low intellectual caliber, "psychopaths," or "sadists" (301); and more often than in 1971 armed gangs were involved in the insurrection that had no political affiliation with the JVP but used it as a convenient cover for their criminal activities (291). It is widely recognized that the factors that underpinned the 1971 and 1988-90 JVP uprisings have not been sufficiently dealt with; nor has the frustration and anger of the unemployed youth in economically backward areas dissipated. On the contrary, the youth's confidence in traditional political formations and coalition politics seems to be waning again. In the southern rural areas there are indications of a reemergence of the politics of extreme violence of the JVP (cf. Perera 1996: 4 7). Despite the atrocities of the government's counter-insurgency forces, the JVP was never eradicated

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and it was predicted that, in view of its widespread network at the grassroots level, sporadic outbursts of violence from pockets of JVP supporters were bound to continue for a long time (Alles 1990: 304). The majority of the people killed by the state counter-insurgency forces were local level activists, national leaders, or-all too often-innocent bystanders. Meanwhile, the hard-core cadres at the regional level remain in position (Perera 1996: 4 7), and the future of the JVP depends on these regional leaders as well as on the popular support for their cause. The impoverished communities of the rural south have been mired during the last two decades in extreme violence. During the civil war, Sinhalese rural communities have undergone large-scale cordon-and-search operations in the course of which many people were interned and disappeared. Nowadays, with victims and perpetrators living in close proximity to one another, a cycle of low-intensity violence has followed on the cycle of violence triggered by the civil war. While deserters who return to the village add an additional element of instability to this already strained community life, the raids organized by the army to arrest them resemble in their violence the raids of the counter-insurgency forces during the civil war. As I argue here, the Sinhalese soldiers manning the front lines in the war against the LTTE in the north and east are inevitably a product of this primary regime of violence and the wider history of insurgency and counter-insurgency from which it stems. The combination of piecemeal information about casualties and the heavy-handed recruitment strategies deployed by the army are directed at people who are still grieving about the disappeared of previous upheavals. The violent oppression of the Sinhalese rural poor by the Sri Lankan nation state has thus ironically been a sine qua non for the state to be able to wage a protracted war against its Tamil minority. The Sri Lankan government has thus constructed what may be conceived of as a reservoir of violence: a seemingly bottomless pit of bitterness from which it is now able to draw its coolie soldiers at will. By recording in the chapters that follow the discourses on violence of people from Udahenagama, I construct an image ofthe social organization of this reservoir of violence.

The Dominant Western Interpretation of the Cycle of Violence: The Discourse on Trauma The link between the reservoir of violence and the interethnic war can readily be explained by using the increasingly popular notion of trauma, or post-traumatic stress disorder. According to this model, youths growing up within a context of extreme violence are traumatized: a condition that predisposes them to violent behavior. Traumatized victims of domestic violence are known to be at risk to become perpetrators of child abuse themselves. Likewise, Sinhalese youths who have undergone the insurgency and

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counter-insurgency violence of the civil war in turn become violent soldiers who fight against Tamil separatists and commit wartime atrocities in Tamil communities. This is the perspective propagated by Western mental health professionals and humanitarian aid workers, but it represents only one way of understanding the cycle ofviolence in Sri Lanka. Western trauma specialists draw on a long tradition going back to the treatment of military casualties in World War I, the rehabilitation of concentration camp survivors, and the attempts at reintegration of Vietnam veterans into North American society. Through these experts, the discourse on trauma and PTSD has now spread to various non-Western wartorn societies. One of the underlying assumptions of the discourse on trauma is the link posited between ongoing cycles of violence and "PTSD epidemics" (e.g., ISTSS 1996: A43). Predictions about future conflicts and wars worldwide are thus often based on estimates of "untreated" or "unresolved" trauma (Summerfield 1996: 22). Chronic PTSD and problems with the modulation of aggression and violent behavior are depicted as the main contributing factors to group processes leading to further violent upheavals (e.g., ISTSS 1996: A84). Critics of the discourse on trauma3 challenge the way war is handled as a mental health emergency and allege that trauma work has become the contemporary fashion of Western donors (Summerfield 1996: 11), who channel large flows of capital to war-torn societies citing the treatment of PTSD epidemics as their justification. However critical one may be of the trauma discourse, one has to recognize that the implementation of trauma counseling programs in non-Western societies as an effort to interrupt a cycle of violence has become a reality worthy of ethnographic investigation. For my description of the implementation of psychosocial projects based on the trauma paradigm in Southern Sri Lanka or the global stream of knowledge on PTSD, I make use ofLyotard's (1979) terminology and conceptualization of flows of knowledge. I distinguish several nodal points in this global communication circuit; intersections where messages converge and are redistributed (15, 90). The knowledge about trauma moves from the academic context of trauma research, through the professional organizations of trauma specialists such as the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, to the people who practice in the donor countries and organize training programs for professionals from war-torn societies. The professional elites working for national mental health NGOs in the target countries then transfer this knowledge to rural health workers trained by these local NGOs, who work with survivors. In the case of Sri Lanka, survivors in rural communities are sometimes trained as counselors for trauma victims. I do not intend to impose an essentialistic logic onto the trauma discourse

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by presenting a fixed hierarchy of nodal points, in which the notion of trauma operative within the subculture of Western trauma research becomes the measuring stick for all other possible indigenized or creole interpretations (Bhabha 1994: 27). The discourse within the nodal points based in non-Western societies and the discourses of Sri Lankan mental health professionals who work for national mental health NGOs, rural health workers, and counselors at the village level form a crucial aspect of a truly international trauma culture. In other words, "trauma" has become a master term (Appadurai 1990: 299) in this global cultural traffic of interpretations of suffering. In my opinion, it should not be seen as essentially connected with either of these nodal points in the flow of knowledge, and when I use the phrases "trauma discourse" or "international mental health culture" I simply refer to the conglomerate of these differing nodal points. Humanitarian aid that has been designed within the framework of the trauma paradigm has reached rural communities in southern Sri Lanka. My description of the social background of Sri Lankan soldiers from Udahenagama would thus necessarily be incomplete without a consideration of the effect of the trauma counseling programs in operation in the village. In my own research strategy vis-a-vis this dominant Western interpretation of the cycle of violence, however, I refrain from using any of the presuppositions of the trauma discourse. Rather, I chose to base my critique in the paradigm that Udahenagama people themselves use to discuss the cycle of violence. During a previous research project (Argenti-Pillen 1994) 4 I gathered the ideas that would eventually lead me to this ethnographically based deconstruction. While working in a department of psychiatry and preparing for clinical work with refugees from war-torn societies, I visited a variety of mental health centers that work with victims of torture. In the course of this project I met Derek Summerfield at the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture in London. I observed some of his clinical work with refugees and listened eagerly to his critique of the trauma paradigm. Summerfield argued that humanitarian operations in war-torn societies should be rooted within a rigorous human rights framework and not be confined to programs that see survivors as victims needing individual psychological help (also see Summerfield 1996: 32). Instead of embarking on a clinical training in transcultural psychiatry I then decided to further explore some of the critical comments on the cross-cultural applicability of the discourse on trauma that I had come across during this initial study. I moved to a department of anthropology with the intention of using an ethnographic research method to further analyze the ways in which the discourse on trauma is introduced to non-Western populations (ArgentiPillen 1996, 2000). While I was inspired by many of the existing critiques of the discourse on trauma, my own research project extends the scope of the extant critiques in the following way: so far, critiques of the trauma para-

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digm have been based on ethnographic (Young 1996) or philosophical/ political (Bracken 1999, Summerfield 1996) arguments constructed in the West, using the linguistic and conceptual tools of Euro-American cultures. In order to critically assess the potential cultural impact of humanitarian mental health projects, the study I present in this book is based as closely as possible on the point of view of a (non-Western) culture to which the trauma discourse has been introduced. During the initial stages of this project, I frequently thought I ought to work in one of the home countries of refugees who come to Europe or northern America (for example Tamil, Kurdish, or Kosovan refugees). On closer consideration, it became clear that most of such places are too unstable to be able to conduct traditional long-term ethnographic fieldwork. While I was still considering this problem, I met a number of Sri Lankan mental health professionals at the conference of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies involved in trauma work in Sri Lanka. Together with the fact that a large amount of background material (essential for the project) was available (e.g., Wirz 1954; Gombrich 1971; Obeyesekere 1981, 1984; Kapferer 1983, 1997a; Daniel 1996), it was this event that made me decide to carry out fieldwork in southern Sri Lanka.

A Reverse Flow of Knowledge One obvious entry point for a critical analysis of the implementation of trauma counseling programs in a non-Western context such as Udahenagama would be to question whether traditional, indigenous forms of healing are more effective than imported forms of rehabilitation designed for the treatment of trauma victims. Within the research tradition following on Levi-Strauss's "Effectiveness of Symbols" (1963a, b), "symbolic" efficacy is the most frequently evoked topic.5 The issue of therapeutic efficacy has been a major topic in medical anthropological research.6 The trauma discourse could thus be assessed according to its therapeutic effects in comparison with indigenous healing methods. Such a study would involve the follow-up of war-affected patients in order to monitor the efficacy of the treatment of their initial complaints/symptoms/illness ( by means of either traditional healing rituals or mental health care). However, I have not followed this vein of research on the cultural impact of the trauma discourse and its contemporary role within the reservoir of violence of the Southern Province. Had I made the issue of therapy for war-affected individuals the central concern of this study, I would have remained loyal to the paradigm of the discourse on trauma and PTSD. I would then inadvertently have labored under the presupposition that the issue of therapy for war-affected individuals is the most important aspect of a cycle of violence and its interruption. I would have presupposed that the quality of the social context in which soldiers of the Sri Lankan army grow up is primarily

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determined by the prevalence of traumatized individuals and (mentally) ill people. I have chosen not to base this study on such presuppositions: In the field, I did not attempt to analyze how indigenous healing rites treat war-affected individuals. To do so would have implied a direct correspondence between Western biomedical concepts and local practices that simply cannot be taken for granted. I looked for aspects oflocal postwar social reconstruction that might not be equivalent to contemporary dominant Western modes of postwar rehabilitation. In order to provide a radical, critical assessment of the trauma paradigm as put into practice in southern Sri Lanka, I attempt in this book to construct what I call a reverse flow of knowledge. The knowledge on trauma currently flows from Euro-American cultures to non-Western cultures such as Sinhalese Buddhist Southern Sri Lanka. The reverse flow of knowledge I propose takes its point of departure in Udahenagama and works its way towards Western professionals involved in the construction of the trauma paradigm. Rather than interpreting the cycle of violence in Udahenagama by means of a research methodology that belongs to the trauma paradigm, I use insights and concepts recorded in Udahenagama to critically appraise the trauma paradigm as it is applied in this non-Western war-torn society. The criteria I use to judge the introduction of the discourse on trauma in southern Sri Lanka are thus dictated by the values through which Udahenagama people themselves judge discourses on violence. I briefly reverse the flow of knowledge by using Udahenagama concepts to describe humanitarian trauma counseling services. This reverse flow of knowledge is intended as a contribution to the debate among Western trauma specialists regarding the ethics of the worldwide diffusion of the discourse on trauma. If one avoids taking the presuppositions of the trauma paradigm for granted and questions the links posited between PTSD epidemics and ongoing cycles of violence, or between trauma counseling and the interruption of the cycle of violence, then a few haunting questions emerge. What if the presence of traumatized individuals might not be the main contributing factor to group processes that lead to further violent upheavals? If not, then what might the main contributing factors of a chronic cycle of violence be? Does the organization of trauma counseling services in such a context influence the cycle of violence in any way? Are trauma counseling services as beneficial, or even as harmless, as they seem at first sight? Many people would support the idea that trauma counseling works in the West, and that it might by extension have a positive effect when offered to traumatized populations in non-Western contexts. In the worst-case scenario, it might not have any effect at all, but it surely wouldn't do any harm. I question this attitude that refuses to imagine the possible nefarious social and cultural side effects of the introduction of the trauma paradigm in non-

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Western contexts. The reverse flow of knowledge I orchestrate in the chapters that follow is intended to shed light on the question whether the introduction of the discourse on trauma might have any long-term impacts on the reservoir of violence in southern Sri Lanka, and eventually on the ability of the government to recruit soldiers to fight a nationalist war against the Tamil minority.

Major Sources of Inspiration Many researchers who have worked with survivors of atrocities have argued that terror and horror become sedimented into the body, and that experiences of extreme violence cannot be easily verbalized. 7 One research method to study the reservoir of violence in Southern Sri Lanka would have been to document the relative silence in the aftermath of the civil war-the ways people do not speak about the events of the war. I did not follow this research strategy. Rather than documenting forms of political silencing, though, I have focused on discourses about violence in U dahenagama. During my field research I examined not how people might be dwelling in silence, but how they might be starting up conversations again in the aftermath of a devastating civil war and the widespread human rights abuses that accompanied it. I have been particularly inspired for this analysis by studies of the relationship between discursive styles and sociopolitical organization brought together in the edited volumes of Myers and Brenneis (1984), and White and Watson-Gegeo ( 1990). This research follows on Bloch's research paradigm for political anthropology-more specifically on Bloch's emphasis on the significance of what kind of speech is involved in political interaction (1975: 4). Research on political rhetoric and the tactics of coercion or persuasion of political orators predominantly focuses on political meetings or, more generally, on institutionalized processes of joint discussion (cf. the Bloch-Paine debate in Paine 1981: 2-3; Myers and Brenneis 1984: 3). Myers usefully questions the notion of politics that underlies such ethnographic analyses and gives a critique of studies that simply identifY politics with our own Western public domain and focus on large public meetings; the grand events that resemble prototypical Western political practices (3). In theresearch program set out by Myers (1984) and White (1990), politics is more than decision-making and coercion (Myers and Brenneis 1984: 12), and they advocate a broadening of what is to be considered political talk (4). My use of everyday small talk as an entry point to analyze forms of social organization that emerged from the social debris of the civil war follows this research strategy advocated by Myers and White. I therefore did not analyze speeches made by important members of the community at weddings, funerals, meetings of the Funeral Aid Society, the Irrigation Society,

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or the Youth Group. Instead, I focused on the way violence is discursively addressed in everyday conversations, and on the way in which these culturespecific discourses on violence have led to the reconstruction of a social and political world after the violent destruction of the social fabric brought about by the civil wars. Myers's (1984: 28) distinction between situations in which the polity can be taken for granted and contexts in which the political order is problematic is particularly useful for my analysis. In many situations, the maintenance or creation of a political arena is an achievement based on day-to-day performances, and the political order is not preestablished or formalized. Myers demonstrates how ethnographers operating in societies with centralized, formal political authority tend to take the polity for granted, thereby following the perspective of their informants (24). For researchers working in non-state societies, where egalitarian relationships predominate, discerning a political system is precisely the problematic issue (25). Concerning the postwar situation of Udahenagama, the latter strategy seems the most appropriate. In Udahenagama, the polity cannot be taken for granted; it is problematic. Autocratic as it is, the Sri Lankan state can be described as a weak state; a state that only manages to play a limited role in the postwar rehabilitation of the rural south. While aspects of the postwar social reorganization could be discerned in party political speeches, court hearings, reports of the Commissions of Inquiry or activities of the government's psychiatric services, their impact on community life in Udahenagama is limited. Relatively detached from a weak state's master discourses about the civil war, Udahenagama people talk about violence and its effects. If, however, one disconnects one's concept of politics from formal political structures, one can question how everyday talk contributes to political organization, how specific modes of discourse lead to a specific conception of the community, an interpretation of community life that differs significantly from the image of village communities projected by the predominantly middle-class, Sinhalese-Buddhist Sri Lankan state. Myers (1984: 28) argues that political talk goes beyond persuasion and display and that, at heart, it provides specific visions of the social world through its own organization. I focus on the specific visions of the social world that everyday discourses on violence in Udahenagama engender. I argue that-much as the use of shaming techniques and the evocation of disease sanctions provide an alternative to a weak state's juridical procedures-local discourses on violence play a role in the reconstruction of the social fabric in the aftermath of a civil war. It is within this perspective that I would like to compare local discourses on violence and the trauma discourse. The discourse on trauma originated within a society characterized by a bourgeois public sphere (see Benhabib 1998; Habermas 1962). In contradistinction, I describe how discourses on violence in Udahenagama help to constitute a local, distinctly non-bourgeois communal

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arena. The reverse flow of knowledge I construct-my analysis of the trauma discourse in the light of discourses on violence in Udahenagamathus involves looking at how the introduction of the trauma discourse articulates with local, non-bourgeois forms of social organization constituted by Udahenagama discourses on violence. The culture-specific aspect of violent interaction in Sri Lanka has been a subject of debate among anthropologists (e.g., Kapferer 1988, 1997b; Obeyesekere 1975; Seneviratne 1999; Tambiah 1992, 1996). In addition to modernist institutions such as the state, the army, the business community, drug cartels, U.S.-trained death squads, and international crime networks, the power of ancient myths, sorcery practices, and the mores of the Sinhalese Buddhist clergy have been documented as playing an important role in ongoing cycles of violence. The majority of the studies on violence in Sri Lanka focus on urban riots and anti-Tamil pogroms (e.g., Tambiah 1996; Roberts 1990, 1994), on the nationalist political elite (e.g., Kapferer 1988) or on the role of the Buddhist clergy in the cycle of violence (e.g., Tambiah 1992; Seneviratne 1999). I focus instead on the discourses on violence within a rural community and explore the link between the local culture-specific discourses on violence in Udahenagama, a local cycle of violence, and the containment or limitation of violent processes. The emphasis of the analysis is thus not on how everyday village realities and discourses on violence might be informed by Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist politics and anti-Tamil propaganda. In the course of my research I set out to record the ways Udahenagama people talk about violence without presuming this would mirror the nationalist discursive strategies documented in the above-mentioned studies. The data I gathered led me not simply to focus on the cycle of violence as a homogeneous national phenomenon, but more importantly to discern local strategies for the containment of violence. For both the collection and interpretation of the data I have used a type of discourse analysis that is very much inspired by Besnier's (1994) and Fairclough's (1992a, b, 1995) critique of Foucauldian approaches to discourse analysis. Besnier (1994: 3) argues that studies carried out within the Foucauldian paradigm tend to document solely the ways in which institutional discourses are very much alive in everyday contexts that are not obviously dominated by the institutions in question. In ethnographies inspired by Foucault's writing (3), the analysis of the ways in which discourses-fromabove permeate into everyday existences is thus given priority, at the expense of a focus on the ways in which local, everyday discourses might depart from these institutional discourses. In contradistinction to a Foucauldian strategy, I do not document the ways discourses on violence of the Sri Lankan political elite, state, and military establishment are transposed into the village reality of Udahenagama. Rather, I document the local discourses on violence in Udahenagama and

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interpret them in relation to the local social reality rather than with reference to the institutionalized discourses of the national elite. By eschewing a Foucauldian project design, I aim to highlight the ways in which Udahenagama people might opt out of these institutionalized discourses on violence rather than reproduce or appropriate them. Unlike many other of Foucault's critics, Fairclough (1992a: 56) links the weaknesses in Foucault's work-the lack of focus on resistance and change and the focus on power and domination-to Foucault's methodology. He starts with questions on how to apply Foucault and argues that one cannot straightforwardly operationalize his insights into actual field methods (38). He argues that Foucault's work is abstract and lacking in analyses of specific spoken or written language texts. Following Fairclough's example, I have paid attention to the detail of particular cases in order to avoid the schematism and one-sidedness of a Foucauldian approach. In the chapters that follow, I include an analysis of actual spoken language. In contrast to a Foucauldian methodology, I provide extended samples of spoken conversations. This methodology is intended not only as a means of having quotations to illustrate my points-but as a way of demonstrating how my informants often put their own points across.

Udahenagama Udahenagama is a pseudonym for a conglomerate of five neighborhoods in a densely populated rural-urban area most accurately described as a rural slum. Villages do not exist in the traditional sense of the word as kin-based communities, but exist predominantly as administrative units (Grama Niladari Wasama) and comprise two or three areas, each with its own name and identity. I call these areas neighborhoods. I conducted research in five such neighborhoods in three administrative units: the villages of Ihalagama, Edanduwila, and Galkanda (all pseudonyms). At the time of the last population census in 1993, these three villages together had about three thousand inhabitants. 8 The neighborhoods under study are located between a forest and a main road. I chose the pseudonym Udahenagama, which literally means "hill-garden village," because I focused on the neighborhoods on the slopes of steep hills, the last settlements built along the road that leads into the forest. I focused on these remote neighborhoods because those areas were most affected by the violence of the civil war of the late 1980s (see Chapter 3). In order to safeguard the anonymity of my informants, I have not included any geographical maps, and I have replaced all place-names of villages, towns, and neighborhoods with pseudonyms. The pseudonyms I have chosen-like many actual place-names-are based on general descriptions of landscapes that could be encountered anywhere in the South-

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ern Province: hills, rivers, gardens, tree species, and so on. I have provided a couple of rudimentary thumbnail sketches of neighborhoods in which I carried out extended surveys, but have substantially altered them so that they bear little relation to the situation on the ground but only serve as schematized heuristic devices. Likewise, I have naturally used pseudonyms for all the people I mention, and the kinship diagrams have been altered in various minor ways where necessary. The photographs do not feature any public figures who would be easily recognizable. I have opted for complete anonymity in this work because I believe the political situation in southern Sri Lanka is so complex that I am in no position to guarantee that the publication of this material would not endanger people from U dahenagama or put the participants in this study or my research assistants in a disadvantageous position. The main participants for this study were Sinhalese Buddhist women working as coolies on the tea plantations. Many of them are the heads of their households.9 Some of them are mothers of disappeared JVP insurgents, others are mothers or wives of soldiers or mothers of young deserters. Some of them regularly fell ill and were helped by ritual specialists; others vociferously rejected any form of traditional healing. The violence they lived (or still live) was horrific by any standard, and part of the rationale for this study is merely to report these forms of violence, which only rarely reach the international press. However extreme the violence was, though, it is important to note that it did have its limits, and I therefore question in the chapters that follow why worse forms of violence did not occur. In the late 1980s the Southern Province was a killing field, where death squads operated freely and neighbors denounced and disappeared one another at will, but this was no Cambodia, Rwanda, or East Timor. In other words, powerful mechanisms of containment operated despite the fact that the social system was already maimed or poisoned by the war. I went to Sri Lanka with my husband Nicolas, who carried out a complementary research project on performative responses to state violence in the same area. We both worked in Udahenagama, but we did not live there. For reasons of personal safety we were forced to live in a nearby town and commute to our field site. Occasionally we would spend the night in one of the neighborhoods under study, and for the first six months we were convinced we would eventually be able to live in the village. Through experience of the high level of ongoing violence, however, we gradually realized that traditional forms of participant observation would remain impossible. We started by visiting informants regularly in their homes, and more often than not they spoke generously. In the beginning, these conversations were primarily devoted to language learning, and with their agreement we recorded people's conversations in order to understand them better. While we had thought this would be a methodology for

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the preliminary stages of fieldwork, it never really changed, and most people became used to our tape recorders. In these difficult fieldwork circumstances, we readily took what information participants offered us and what seemed important to them. We therefore focused on what Udahenagama people chose to tell us, or chose to let us overhear without directly addressing us. We also participated-sometimes together and sometimes separately with our own assistants-in domestic cleansing rituals, pilgrimages, visits to the local temple, and trips to soothsayers and puberty parties, but this was far removed from the more traditional participant observation we had originally envisaged. Seldom did we meet people on their own, and I rarely conducted an interview in the usual sense of the word. The speech events I recorded commonly occurred inside a house or on the porch. On average five to ten people were present at any given moment, including members of the same nuclear family, neighbors, or friends. It typically took me half a day or a full day to visit one household, and people would continue their household activities while choosing to join in the conversation every now and again. Such conversations typically started with my asking a few questions, but would often carry on along a path that I had not expected, and I would be left to overhear things as a peripheral participant. Sometimes, however, I had the impression that certain conversations were staged: set out to convey a message to me without addressing me directly. Unlike in the West, conversation is not primarily defined or connoted by visual contact, by people speaking to one another while looking at one another. This cultural difference is reflected in my impression, mentioned above, that I seldom conducted an interview but rather took part in conversations in which many people participated in an ad hoc way. These conversations were characterized by a highly fluid and amorphous body of participants, including people shouting comments from neighboring houses. In local terms, contrary to my impressions, such exchanges were not considered entropic or compromised in any way by the increasing physical distantiation or movement of their contributors. Individual interlocutors rapidly moved between different conversations that were going on simultaneously within the household or between neighboring houses while continuing their work. What caught my attention from the outset was that a word-for-word translation of the recorded speech events did not generate much understanding on my part. In order to begin to understand the conversations, I had to familiarize myself with the complex ways in which Udahenagama people quote one another, use euphemisms, and refer to people and events in circumspect and ambiguous ways and thereby mask the terror they have lived. 10 An increasing proportion of my fieldwork thus became dedicated to linguistic work and to a close analysis of the transcripts of these conversations. A team of six bilingual assistants, who were not from

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the Udahenagama area, helped with the translation work. Akka, my principal assistant, participated in all the visits to Udahenagama and thus gradually became able to provide a context-sensitive translation. For the organization of this linguistic work, I was helped by the work of Brewster and Brewster (1976), Briggs (1986), and Larson (1984). In the end, it was to be this linguistic work that would form the basis for this ethnography of Udahenagama. This work is constructed closely around the transcripts of interviews or taped conversations I amassed in the field. Throughout the chapters that follow, I use extended excerpts of transcripts in order to represent the complexities of local voices as closely as possible. The book consists as it were of two narratives folded into one another. One narrative presents the voices of people in Udahenagama as closely as possible: it is as closely as possible a direct translation of their discourses. The second narrative consists of my comments and interpretations, which I have wrapped around the first narrative in order to make it easier for a Western audience to interpret.

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Part I The Wild in Udahenagama

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Chapter 2

some tea with a piece of Nirvana!~~ ~~Have

A Lifetime Under the Gaze of the Wild

Once in a country there was a raksha [a dangerous spirit] an d he was very foolish . People lived in houses with two stories. The people too were foolish and the raksha too. The raksha wife was ver y rich. She was brought to h er husband's house from a rich family. The raksha husband was poor and he got his wife because sh e was rich. One day the re was no rice for lunch. The raksha wife said , 'This man brought m e h ere and said that we would have everything we need, but see, there is n ot eve n a fl ower of a banana tree, there is no t even a grain of rice in this ho use, there is nothing." She asked him to bring food. "In o ther hom es, even poor households, the husband goes ou t and picks a handful of green leaves," sh e said. "T his man,

Figure 1. T he appearance of a wild spirit ( Viidi Sanni Yaksha).

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of course, can't do anything like this," she said. "It would be much better to chop off a person's two hands and two legs and kill," she said. After that they just lived like that. One day the husband was asleep. He was a real fool. The raksha wife took a knife and went to lie down on the bed. He was sleeping beside her. She asked the raksha husband, "Have you seen how comfortable it is when you just get a touch of the knife?" "Oh, no," he said. "I haven't even seen a knife," he said. What a foolish man. "I cook with the knife," she said. 'Just a bit, cut a little bit of my body and see," he said. After that [laughter], she put the knife on his neck. She put it on his neck and cut the neck into two. After that, blood was pouring and pouring. After that, what she did was, she dragged it [the head and the body] and dropped it into the well. Then somebody from another house came to fetch water. The piece of head was floating. The body parts were underneath. There was blood on the head. They took some water and went, they did not notice anything. Because they didn't see anything they took water and went home. After that, when they were drinking the water, "look," there were pieces of head. As they looked [more closely] they saw hair too. They went back to the well. And while they were throwing away the [bloody] water and fetching [new] water [they said], "Look, someone is dead." After that they went to several houses and checked. When they went to the houses and checked, they found nothing, not even in a single house. After that they went to the raksha wife's parents' house. They should have gone to this house in the first place. They had walked through the whole village. After that the police went to the wife's parents. They were not at home. Then they went to the wife's house. It was when they arrived that the blood was being cleaned up. The house was full of blood. Afterward, while they were looking they realized the raksha husband had died. The raksha had died, and after having taken the raksha's head, they put it on the head of the wife. They put the raksha's face onto the face of the wife. After that they brought the clothes that he had been wearing and made the wife dress up in it. After she got dressed they took her into custody. After having taken her into custody they kept beating her. One day the bars of the prison were not strong enough. She removed one of the bars and went to the policemen with the bar in her hand and stabbed them to death. After that a police car, and even more police, came and killed the lady. The lady died, every day [they] killed and killed people like that. And finally, in the next birth too, she was reborn as a raksha. A raksha like that one, suffering from the same pain. (bedtime story about a dangerous wife, retold by a nine-year-old girl)

Finding a strategy for beginning to study discourses on violence in a community such as Udahenagama is not an easy task. I had intended from the outset to begin my study with an assessment of the local history of violence. This meant that I planned to record the events of the civil war of 1988-90 in U dahenagama as well as assess the current levels of public and domestic violence in the area. Because the notion of violence and its effects on a community does not exist as a meaningful concept in Udahenagama, however, I had to find a set of local concepts that partially overlapped with this Western category. I therefore set out talking to people about health, illness, and healing rituals with the hope of coming across local categories germane to such Western concepts as violence, fear, or terror. The con-

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glomerate of expressions I describe in this chapter is the result of this strategy of research. Some words in this conglomerate of expressions (e.g., iirudha, iivesa) have been translated as "possession trance" and have consequently become central concepts in ethnographic analyses of Sinhalese Buddhist ecstatic religion and spirit possession. Because such analyses extirpate these terms from a much wider field of interrelated Sinhalese expressions, however, they give the false impression that their meaning and uses are restricted solely to the realm of religion, illness, or ritual healing. Many ethnographic analyses do not seriously take into account the discourse on violence that these same expressions also address. The violent reality in which culturebound syndromes or healing rites occur is glossed over and left to function only as the background against which possession states are depicted. Reading such ethnographic texts can therefore easily engender a comforting (and comfortable) derealization in which the pervasive presence of violence becomes obfuscated. By means of this figure-ground reversal, many ethnographic analyses of Sinhalese Buddhism use people's anxieties regarding their day-to-day survival as the soft-focus backdrop to a foreground of more properly cultural activities. Exaggerated attention to the more exotic cultural manifestations, such as culture-bound-syndromes, ecstatic religion, or exorcism, that often form the main focus of the anthropological endeavor in Sri Lanka creates a false sense of difference and distinctiveness between "us" and "them." The more spectacular and rare forms of suffering are filtered from more common everyday experiences and then made central to the anthropological text. This way of looking at things ultimately produces a type of anesthesia in which the reader is given the impression of being very different from these cultural Others and is protected from too close an identification with such exotic informants. This tendency toward anesthesia and derealization promulgated by ethnographic texts has its popular analogue in the contemporary Sri Lankan press. The relatively few Sri Lankan critics of the war against the LTTE in the north and east have frequently pointed at the middle-class strategy of radical differentiation, derealization, and anesthesia. Large sections of the urban elite have recreated themselves as radically different from the rural poor, often professing ignorance of village realities and Sinhalese culture, and they seem largely insensitive to war casualties as long as there are no middle-class casualties. The circulation of such ethnographic texts among the intellectual elites by means of the English language press might further bolster their sense of difference and distance from an exoticized Other and function as an additional anesthetic. It is to deconstruct such distancing mechanisms that I deliberately avoid readymade translations of local expressions and apparently clear-cut anthropological descriptions.' But if an orthodoxy is to be discarded, one

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needs to offer a new paradigm on the basis of which to understand the above-mentioned conglomerate of expressions. In view of the importance given to the role of the gaze in Sinhalese culture, I use the gaze as the central notion for a descriptive and necessarily interpretative type of translation. "Being seen by others," in other words, "being chaperoned or escorted," is central to the ideal of Sinhalese culture approximated in the everyday practices of Udahenagama. Women and men alike tend to seek company when embarking on a journey into the public sphere. Women go to bathe in the river in little groups. Company is always arranged for the anthropologist, even for long and time-consuming journeys along unpopular paths. People eagerly envelop themselves with the gaze of family members and friends on bus rides to town. One seeks to find a place in the midst of a multiplicity of gazes: the protective (albeit judgmental) gazes of family members, the seductive gazes of potential lovers, the jealous and murderous gazes of enemies, the gazes of dead relatives, or more generally the gaze of the "public" enforcing a Sinhalese Buddhist ethos. This last gaze is challenged by the much talked about gaze-of-the-wild; the gaze of unsocialized (nonhuman or human) beings2 who operate outside the norms of Sinhalese Buddhist culture. Unlike in most of contemporary Euro-American popular culture, these various gazes and their effects are explicitly discussed in Udahenagama village discourse. In practice, Udahenagama people continuously take these gazes into account when making the minute decisions of everyday life. For example, a woman's ephemeral escape from the collective gaze is likely to be interpreted as "the moral mistake of being alone" ( tanikam dosha) .3 A prolonged or recurring absence from the public gaze might lead to a dramatic drop in a woman's moral status. Nor is it necessary for a woman to have been physically alone and to have had the chance to engage in activities prohibited by Sinhalese Buddhist norms. She could have had a brief flash of unsocialized reverie at a moment when her attention was not fully commanded by her chaperones. At such moments she is said to be especially vulnerable to what I translate here as the "gaze of the wild" ( dishtiya); the gaze of beings that embody the antitheses to Sinhalese Buddhist civilization, such as excessive materialism, illicit love, or a violent disposition. At such a time, the forces of social control-enacted and experienced as the normative gaze of the public-are replaced by a gaze that reinforces the norms of the wild and unsocialized enemies of Sinhalese culture. Sinhalese women do not merely conform to social norms, however, but rather interact dynamically with them. Some might choose momentarily to revel in the gaze of the wild and to collude with the enemy, either through illicit and antisocial activities or through an imagined life beyond the control of contemporary society's norms and rules. In the discourse of ritual specialists, the gaze of the wild can be ritually

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removed and the afflicted person can be healed, but in the eyes of women such rituals are often experienced as an unfinished and open-ended form of negotiation; they represent an opportunity for social negotiations rather than a form of healing and the closure that term implies. During the ritual women sometimes whisper conspiratorially to each other: "You see-the gaze of the wild hasn't really gone yet," while the ritual specialist has just finished removing the gaze of the wild with the appropriate traditional techniques. Mter such a ritual some women will argue that it didn't work, that the afflicted is still under the influence of the gaze of the wild. When looking back upon the lives of their friends, some women told me that they had never got rid of this gaze and argued that they had spent a lifetime under its influence: "The gaze of the wild didn't even leave them alone at the end of their lives, while they were dying"; "They spent a lifetime under the gaze of the wild" ( dishtiya miirenakama iinge tibuna). It has been well documented (e.g., Lewis 1977) that, in many cultures across the world, oppressed groups, for whom socialization into mainstream society commonly leads to inhumane and tortured forms of existence, tend episodically to collude with their society's enemy, however this enemy is defined by that particular society, as "barbarians," "communists," "terrorists," or "non-Buddhist spirits" (yaksha). They might engage in revolutionary discourse or more cautiously embody the habits of the enemy. In the latter case they temporarily behave like enemies, human or supernatural, or more commonly a combination of both. In Sri Lanka, for example, possessed women behave like wild spirits (yaksha). Yaksha are commonly described as the evil spirits of the forest but also as the original inhabitants of the island who had been the human enemies of the conquering Sinhalese Buddhist warriors in ancient times. In this discourse, ancient human enemies and spirits, conceptualized together as yaksha, lead the marginalized Sinhalese to forms of behavior deemed unsociable within the context of mainstream Sinhalese Buddhist civilization. People who manage momentarily to escape from the gaze of the public are particularly vulnerable to the gaze of wild spirits ( dishtiya). As this gaze intensifies they literally behave like unsocialized beings and become wild ( iivesa, iirudha) themselves. Such states are commonly translated as possession or trance in the ethnographic literature. In local terms the defining characteristic of embodied wildness consists of firmly clenched fists or teeth ( dat putuvelii) that cannot be opened by force. At least, that is the criterion lay bystanders routinely use to assess whether a person is suffering from a genuine possession trance ( iirudha). In women's narratives about such experiences, however, the notion of iirudha is usually accompanied by a series of other terms, referring to states often experienced together with episodic trance states. These other states encompass the experiences of family conflict, domestic violence, and political violence. An understanding of these local expressions was a necessary research tool for me to begin

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a fully contextualized analysis of violence and its representation in Udahenagama. And so I will begin this ethnography with a description of this local terminology referring to experiences of conflict and violence.

"Can't stay here" "Inna bariyo!"-this plaintive expression is a recurring feature of women's laments. In its most direct translation it means "can't live," "can't be," "can't stay." At moments of extreme suffering this little phrase says much to the people who know the sufferer's situation well, while concealing awkward truths from the outsider. To me, its full weight only slowly revealed itself. As I soon realized, learning Sinhalese has less to do with being taught the referential meaning of words than with problematizing the local, contextualized meanings of phrases that are otherwise easy to translate. Inna bariyo is one such example. It would echo through the neighborhood when somebody was breaking down. If such laments were loud and socially unacceptable, bystanders would say the person was suffering from an altered state of consciousness, was struck by the gaze of a wild spirit, or was talking nonsense. Sometimes such a person does speak with the voice of a spirit, or articulates the spirit's demands, but this is only one form of communication at such moments of unbearable pain. Ritual specialists, the anthropologist, and the sufferer's family commonly describe such situations as an altered state of consciousness or possession state, as one tends to focus on the climactic and most striking features of such events. But the lamenting voice often fluctuates between representing the spirit's position and taking up a human position ( inna bariyo: can't stay here). It is this human discourse bordering on the discourse of the spirits that I explore below, first by looking at inna barikama (a state in which, by definition, one cannot live). One night, at four in the morning, as a ritual was being performed in Galkanda, the sound of the drumming abruptly came to a halt as a sudden piercing noise awoke those who had gone to sleep. The middle-aged widow for whom the ritual was being performed, suffering from the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya), suddenly began to shout. She hit the floor wildly, twisted and turned, but this time did not voice the wishes of the spirits for the eager audience. Instead she addressed her daughter, who had died about fifteen years previously, and her mother: [1] Huu, huu, huu ... you see, I can't (bear it), you see, I am coming also, I am coming also my daughter, huu, huu, huu, I am coming also daughter, I can't (bear it) my dearest friend, I can't stay (inna biiriyo), you see I am suffering from sorrow, even my mother doesn't recognize this, seven funerals! [expression of despair] I am suffering from sorrow, my mother, seven funerals!, mother doesn't see I am suffering from sorrow, you see, mother!, mother!, I can't stay!, I can't stay! (inna biiriyo).

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People often told me they were suffering from inna biirikama. This would frequently be mentioned together with complaints about chronic headaches, chronic stomachaches, lack of appetite (kanna biirikama) and lack of bodily strength ( iingata pana nii). During crisis situations women would lie on the floor for hours, speechless and motionless, whispering words like "mother," "can't stay," and simply "can't" every now and again. All too often this condition of inna biirikama went along with periodic attempts to flee from home. If young and middle-aged women attempt to flee4 they are likely to be violently restrained by a group of family members. As a struggling woman is physically controlled or hit, she might hit back and scream, sometimes saying "inna ba," "can't stay." An elderly woman from Beragama, who has tried to run away from home many times, explained: [2] Even now they don't let me sleep, the bloodthirsty wild spirit comes and eats all this [moves her hands over her whole body], eats, pulls me down, I can't stay here ( inna bii), after a protective thread was tied around my arm it stopped, now it has been a month since we tied the thread, after that I had no dreams, now it is difficult to organize a ritual, I have no income now, ... what is there to be done? now there is no point in me dancing a ritual, now I am old, 95, so how many days more? [laughs]. While she wondered "how many days more?" her family members explained how she tends to suffer from reduced consciousness ( sihiya aduyi), the gaze of the wild (dishtiya) and how she then packs her bags and attempts to leave the house. "Yes," she added, "I once even tried to flee through the window!" Her situation is rather unusual since she still suffers from such problems at the age of ninety-five. Other elderly ladies would simply pack their bags and leave in a fury, only to arrive in another household belonging to their extended family, where their sudden arrival would sometimes seemingly go unnoticed, surprising only the anthropologist. Young men tend to suffer from more life-threatening inna biirikama. They are sometimes given the freedom to try to start a life in a different household of the extended family or in the army, where their life expectancy is limited. Despite this possibility of escape, however, many of them commit suicide 5 "because of anger and inna biirikama," people would usually say. A father from Puvakdeniya whose son had committed suicide a few days earlier and who regretted he had not managed to convince him to join the army in time explained: [3] (He) can eat and drink at any time he wants, we keep the food on top of the table, he sleeps and eats whenever he wants, even if there is no food for me he leaves often after having eaten, he went to work in a shop in town, he ran away from that place, after having beaten up a child over there [laughs], then we kept him in another town, in the house of our aunt, he even left that place and came back, he can't stay in any place (koybavat inna bane) ... when you tell him things, he doesn't listen at all, it is the age, nineteen is the age of bad times, it happened just as he was

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getting to the end of his nineteenth year [that he committed suicide], at that age you must take care of your children. Compared to the aborted flights of many young and middle-aged women, this young man's movements were relatively unrestrained. Mter drinking poison he survived for another two weeks. Although young men's restlessness is usually attributed to planetary influences, a young woman in his neighborhood connected his restlessness and violence to the gaze of the wild and inna biirikama: [4] He was running around here and there that day of course, it could be a gaze of the wild (dishtiya), and there must be the pain of drinking poison also, he had run here and there, had gone to hit the children, just like the gaze of the wild, so when you have drunk poison you are confused, you are confused because of the fear of imminent death ... it is said that he didn't suffer from any other illness ... he suddenly drank poison, when he was unable to stay ( inna ban) he suddenly drank poison. I would qualify the household units that constitute Udahenagama society as volatile and rapidly changing. Unhappy teenage boys and young men try their luck elsewhere and are often on the move between households of the extended family, moving between villages, provincial towns, or the Colombo suburbs. Soldiers who "can't stay" in the army take up the hectic life of deserters, perpetually moving from one household to the other within their villages, in search of temporary safety from punitive police raids. An alarming number of young men "can't stay anywhere" (koybavat inna bane) and commit suicide. Elderly ladies are frequently restless too. Young women who work move back and forth between the village and the free trade zones of Sri Lanka or in the Middle East. Others are forced to stay at home even if they "can't stay" either. A mother from upper Puvakdeniya, the head of her household, explains: [5] They have thrown stones at a house, can't live in this place (inna bii), it is a great sorrow when somebody gets drunk and shouts, there are young men living here who are drunk, there is a place where they sell liquor [worried and tearful], when our men go there it is a great trouble, sorrow, as soon as they get some free time they go there, [my husband] did not use to do this, but after he came to live in this village he started to do this, the police often come and arrest two or three people, after having been released they start again, it goes on like that. But few people are very explicit about the chronic presence of lowintensity violence; after all, it is shameful. Such critical comments are an extremely rare occurrence within the public sphere, saturated as it is by Orthodox Buddhist pride. So it took me a long time to begin to see the extent of the general malaise. As the examples have shown, the "state of not being able to stay" crosscuts gender lines and age groups. Although I cannot provide firm statistics, my data suggest that it affects men and women,

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young and old to a similar extent. It goes without saying that the number of times I thought I "wouldn't be able to stay" and continue fieldwork in Udahenagama were countless. I suffered from severe inna barikama (unable to stay illness), and definitively wouldn't call this state a "culturebound-syndrome," although it is commonly known in Udahenagama as a prelude to possession trances. This same malaise affects not only humans but also wild spirits. Far from being the source of "pure evil" it is often assumed to be in the literature, the gaze of the wild (dishtiya) is known to avoid certain people because of their cruelty. The gaze of the wild is said to be "unable to stay" with such people. A young ritual specialist from Galkanda explains how the gazes of the wild, in other words, the wild spirits are afraid: [6] Even the gazes of the wild (dishti) are afraid, now if the ritual specialist would take a torch, none of the gazes of the wild would be summoned, those [gazes of the wild] are very scared, that is what happens, the wild spirit (yaka) does not hit a drunken person, they don't look, the gazes of the wild are scared, if people say some person behaves like a wild spirit [is violent] the gazes of the wild shiver and tremble, [the gazes of the wild] tremble away from the places in which they used to stay, they can't stay ( inna biirikama).

Chronic and widespread forms of violence are now understood to affect spirits as well as people. I would even go as far as to say that the civil war has had a profound effect on the cosmology or the cosmic hierarchy of Sinhalese villagers. Udahenagama people explained how even unsocialized, wild spirits can't bear to stay in a violence-ridden world, they can't stay or can't bear to look. "lnna bariyo" can no longer be dismissed as the lament of possessed women, the entranced, or the "mentally disturbed." Many other people and spirits, now also "unable to stay," are forced to avert their gazes from a violent new world.

"Can't bear to look, can't stand the sight of them" Similarly, in situations of family conflict or domestic violence, people literally stop looking at those who surround them. They don't return their gazes. As a result, these people can no longer participate in the visual social referencing that is constantly going on within a group. In a phenomenon that crosses cultural divides, victimization is experienced at the ocular level by being gazed upon without daring or wanting to gaze for oneself. Penanna ba ("can't look"); the same words are used by people who have lost their appetite and can't stand the sight of food. The people who are disgusted by their social and political context are thus also literally disgusted. In fact, not being able to look at food and at family members often goes hand in hand; refusal of food also being an expression of disdain and disgust toward the person who offered the food (also see Yalman 1969). In

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everyday life one's field of vision might become reduced, or narrowed down in order not to see certain things, to combat inna biirikama and to be able to "stay" and "live" within the household. Such victims of oppressive gazes withdraw from the everyday, moment to moment socialization brought about by noticing human gazes and responding to the gaze of human others. Inevitably, in situations ofwithdrawal, the protective and judgmental gazes of kin and the gaze of the public lose some of their powers. It is thus not surprising that people who complain about severe and prolonged penanna bii ("can't look") are said to suffer from dishtiya, a predominance of the gaze of the wild. More faithfully to local discourse one could say that dishtiya and penanna bii go hand in hand. When penanna bii reaches extreme proportions, it means that the gaze of the wild is present. For example, a ritual specialist explained what happened to a middle-aged widow from Peinigahakanda: [7] The gaze of the wild ( dishtiya) fell on her, she did not stay at home, it is because she dislikes staying at home. After we tied a protective thread [around her arm] it got better.

And the widow explained her predicament: [8] In those days I saw dreams, I suffered less after the offerings were given, I saw various nonsensical things in my dreams, it happens that I can't stand the sight (penanna bii) of the people in the house, I can't stay at home ( inna biirikama).

A young man struggling to make a living despite the ongoing political victimization of people who supported the insurgents in 1988-90 described a similar situation: [9] When the gaze of dead relatives is there, nothing you do is successful, illnesses, troubles emerge, you can't stand each other (penanne bii), so you clear away this gaze (dishtiya) by making offerings, this house had the gaze of our dead mother ... she loved this daughter immensely, so mother died while being sad about leaving her daughter, when mother died, the gaze struck the daughter ... the soothsayer said that our mother had come back, it is also said that there is a gaze of a person who died during the dreadful times [the civil war], so how can we know? Later when we searched and looked, [we found out that] a person had been killed on that side of the paddy field during the eighties, he too is someone who has visited this house, ... all these people had become spirits and had turned their gaze on us, there was a lot of trouble, these two [my two sons] could not stand the sight of each other (penanna bii), the son and father would fight, or the two sons would fight; it happens when the gaze of the dead is there, on the last day of my mother's life she asked about her daughter, she died thinking about her daughter, the other one was killed by the army or something like that [this is a cautious way of saying that he was a]VP insurgent].

This household survived the war but the tension within their family is unbearable. They have turned away from each other, turned a blind

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eye. These brothers can't stand the sight of each other any longer. As exinsurgents they suffer from extreme social isolation. They continue to feel enveloped by the gaze of like-minded people, many of them now dead. They survived the war as a family, but many survivors of domestic or political violence feel utterly alone. That is when the all-consuming gaze of the wild spirits is evoked.

People Covered and Closed Off by the Gaze of the Wild In situations of extreme suffering people of Udahenagama stop looking at anyone, staring instead into the untenanted void, speechless, motionless, and stiff, sickened by the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya). In such cases, the gaze of the wild is understood to have fallen upon ( dishtiya vatenava) or covered and "closed" a person ( dishtiya vahenavii). This local notion of closure might reveal something about the experience of suffering from the gaze of the wild in such a radical way. People do not elaborate upon this experience; they usually can hardly remember anything at all and just mention "being closed off by the gaze of the wild." I thus rely on the recitations of a ritual specialist for a more explicit description of this experience. While tying a protective thread around the arm of a motionless woman in an attempt to remove this harmful gaze, he chanted and described the experience of "opening up" a person who had been enclosed by the gaze of the wild: [ 10] It is as if: as if the tight bark (potta) of a tree tightened itself around the tree, and was finally so tight and dry as to disappear without a trace, as if the old leaves had fallen off the Naa tree and the Boo tree and the new leaves were budding, as if the mud on top of a rock had dried out and disappeared, as if you removed the skin of an aralu fruit, a nelli fruit, or an arecanut, as if the desiccated skins of those fruits had disappeared, as if you undressed a woman, took off her blouse and put it away, as if you removed the railings of a bridge, as if you peeled off the skin (potta) of the siyambala fruit, as if you climbed down into the lake of Ama, into the water of life, the sweetest water, bathed and emerged anew, as if you built a wall and then destroyed it, as if a frog escaped from the mouth of a cobra, as if you shot an arrow with a golden bow and the illnesses of the great and ancient city ofVishala disappeared, as if you brought a thousand Brahmins and performed a gigantic ritual, as if the skin of the king of the snakes had matured and was falling off.

These metaphors-the tight bark of a tree, the desiccated skin of fruits, and the dead skin of snakes-evoke the "dry, fragile skin" (kora potta) of suffering women. Withdrawn women, who have lost touch with people, sometimes experience their skin as if it were dry and fragile. Oily skin is

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associated with strong and intense relationships; the fragrance of the oily skin of a baby inhaled by his parents, the oily skin of flirting teenagers, 6 or young people's hands taken and sniffed at by the elderly to inhale and to imbue themselves with the fragrance of oily skin all come to mind as examples. It is as if people experiencing closure by the gaze of the wild suffer from enclosure in a dry, unattractive, and, as it were, untouchable skin. Of course this is not a sudden occurrence, as the expression "becoming possessed by a spirit" would suggest. Rather, it goes hand in hand with the above- mentioned conditions of "can't bear to look" (penanna ba) and "can't stay" ( inna barikama). Only when it reaches extreme proportions and people look back on it, does the gaze of the wild start to be mentioned. However, this is but one possible course of events, and more often than not it is much more violent situations that expose one to closure by the gaze of the wild.

Terrified Hearts, Emptied Minds, and the Confusion of the Terrified When seeing a person lying on the floor, motionless, stiff, and voiceless for long hours or sometimes for days at a time, the anthropologist might experience a very painful thought: "What is this person going through?" and, more to the point, "What happened here?" One way of making the situation less painful, at least for the researcher, is to participate in a translated version of the local discourse that gives meaning and renders such situations of unbearable pain comprehensible. Mter translating the local terminology into English I could have thought the following: "A possessed woman is lying there, she might even be mentally ill, soon enough a healing ritual will be organized and the demons will be exorcized." The only concern that would then remain regards the efficacy of such a ritual, but I might dismiss this as a problem for later. Sometimes, however, such (anthropological) thoughts and rationalizations did not assuage my worries and the awful feelings of unease that such situations bring about. I remember moments when the anthropological jargon of "spirit possession" and "exorcism" would cross my mind, situations in which I would have welcomed this type of anesthesia, but sooner or later deep worries would settle in and the initial comfort of derealization and anesthesia would fade. Violence and terror could only have been moments away. The everyday discourse about people afflicted by the gaze of the wild (yaksha dishtiya) explains how the Buddha only allowed the wild spirits to throw their gaze on the human world at certain times of the day ( cf. Kapferer 1983; Scott 1994). The gaze of the wild is widely understood to be directed at the earth at midday, six o'clock in the evening, midnight, and six o'clock in the morning. Accordingly, it is at those times that the vast majority of people are said to have fallen ill, or started suffering from

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the gaze of the wild (dishtiya) and to have entered into an altered state of consciousness ( arudha, aves a). This is most clearly marked during major rituals lasting up to thirty hours. During these prolonged performances, the afflicted and entranced person for whom the ceremony is being held is encouraged to tremble, dance, or speak in tongues at these specific times. The narratives about a woman's illness prior to a ritual also often mention these specific times. Some narratives of affliction by the wild are straightforward and coherent and fit within the traditional framework I just described. For example, a sick person has started speaking like a wild spirit at midnight, she/he was screaming and hitting people, just like a wild spirit. Other narratives were very hesitant and moved away from this well-documented script. Such stories began to make me aware of the human-centered discourse parallel to the discourse about spirits, of the ambiguity inherent in the discourse about the wild spirits.7 This ambiguity-the constant possibility of fluctuation between discourse about the wild spirits and a human-centered discourse-tends to get lost during a standard translation process into English. A young man from Hendolakanda recalled his mother's illness in the following way: [ 11] She tried to run away, we had to prevent her from doing so, it wasn't easy, then she called and invited the wild spirits, she was calling each wild spirit by his name, she was talking in this way, and she was also talking a lot of nonsense ... if we would come close to her. she would chase us away, if we didn't leave immediately she hit us ... then she was slamming her hands on the bed,s didn't let anybody sleep. Saying that a person is talking "nonsense" ( vikara, anang manang) is a standard way of evading the necessity to quote that person, of ignoring and annihilating what was said. Moreover, in my interpretation, this piece of narrative is again an example of a human-focused discourse that operates at the edge of the discourse about spirits. This woman does not entirely take up the identity of a wild spirit: as she calls and invites the wild spirits she does not transgress the boundaries of human identity. She maintains a human position and yet engages in socially unacceptable behavior ( vikiira gatiya: most commonly translated as "behavior that doesn't make any sense"). In this way, while keeping hold of her human identity, she creates a human discourse tangential to the discourse about the spirits. Playing with the ambiguity that the discourse on the gaze of the wild encompasses, she easily moves back and forth between a human position with its human discourse on the one hand, and the identity of a wild spirit, which brings about the discourse on wild spirits, on the other. To clarify how this human discourse parallel to the discourse about the spirits operates, I now present another narrative. This narrative relies on a less ambiguous discourse of "the gaze of the wild" ( dishtiya) and "spirit possession" (iirudha) yet leads to questions about the local history of violence.

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An angry grandfather from lower Puvakdeniya spoke to me about his teenage granddaughter who was working in a textile factory in the free trade zone. She first fell ill when she was in seclusion during her puberty ritual, at the age of thirteen. There had been a lot of suffering in the family. Her mother, whose face was badly scarred from having been burned, tended not to speak to anybody. The neighbors simply said she had poured acid over herself. As the teenage girl's inebriated father lay unconscious on the bed, the grandfather explained: [12] From time to time, at twelve o'clock or six o'clock or times like that, she tries to leave, we need several people to restrain her, and we can't communicate with her then, she doesn't recognize us, can't move her hands and legs, her teeth get locked as if with a key, you can't separate the teeth, you have to put a spoon in her mouth and break it open like that, at those times she can't speak any more.

Some narratives manage to remain in the strictly cosmological framework, while others don't quite manage and slip into what could be interpreted as descriptions of domestic violence. Mter a while the idiom of the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya) or spirit possession ( iirudha) lost most of its explanatory value. Motionless bodies on the floor started to look more like the results of violent encounters than possession states: bodies recoiled onto themselves to prevent further abuse. I felt impelled to consider whether such states were the consequences of inna barikama ("can't stay") and attempts to flee (this particular person, unlike some young men in a similar state, had been unable to get away). The discourse regarding wild spirits is not completely divorced from mundane realities; it does leave room to refer to violence and fear. The discourse stresses how sudden terror or a startle reaction (hita bayayi, gasma) leaves one vulnerable to the gaze of the wild, which falls upon people, "covering" and immobilizing them. A person is terrified by the sight of "the wild." As the wild looks back, its gaze affects the person. Or, more correctly, it all happens in one moment, the moment of being face to face with the wild leads to baya and dishtiya, terror and being affected by the gaze of the wild. The traditional forms of fear and terror are caused by seeing a snake or other large reptile or by a branch suddenly falling off a nearby tree. Those are the most commonly cited causes of fear, both in local explanatory discourses and in the anthropological literature (Kapferer 1983; Obeyesekere 1984; Wirz 1954). Another type of fear people mention is the terror caused by humans (manusha baya). All are agreed that this is much more difficult to cure than fear caused by an animal or a wild spirit (yaksha). Terror brought about by a human is much more violent than that caused by a yaksha (yakkunge baya). Though this fear of humans will also lead to the gaze of the wild affecting one, the illness resulting from it will be much more severe. Some

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even argue that there is nothing to be done about fear caused by humans. The rituals won't work. Narratives of assaults in the public sphere are what commonly comes to women's minds when asked about "terror [caused] by humans": "somebody jumped on me," or "somebody suddenly appeared in front of me" are common statements. This discourse does not give a separate status to being terrified by close family members in the private sphere. In such instances the suffering person is given a more proactive role. In other words, s/he is said to be suffering from inna biirikama ("can't stay") or penanna bii ("can't stand the sight of them"), or is not taken seriously at all and is said to be suffering from nonsensical behavior ( vikiira gatiya), an emptied mind ( kalpaniiva nii) and diminished consciousness (sihi aduyi) caused by a wild spirit (yaksha). By this means, unlike what happens in narratives of assault where the "fear of a human" is made explicit, an enemy within the nuclear family is kept out of focus or rendered anonymous within the discourse on "terror [caused] by yaksha." The "terrified hearts" (hita bayayi) caused by what I would classifY as political or public violent events were not clearly attributed to "terror [caused] by humans" either. A middle-aged woman from Puvakdeniya narrates how she feared for her son's life after a large bomb exploded in central Colombo: [13] It was the 15th (of October) around six in the evening, there had been that bomb blast, and our son lives in Colombo, because of that I was very scared, it was pouring rain that afternoon, and because of that fright I was thinking and thinking, a friend of my daughter arrived and screamed loudly and stepped into the house, I didn't expect anybody that afternoon, so I thought she was bringing bad news ... I could see her coming, even before I saw her I was already very scared, but when I was looking at her I got a sudden fright, her hair was loose and she was wearing a black T-shirt, I didn't recognize her immediately, so my legs started trembling ... then suddenly around six o'clock I suddenly couldn't move my neck, and my head became stiff ... my body was trembling and trembling as if being hit, couldn't move my neck, then I vomited and went to the toilet, my legs were stiffened, my hands and feet were trembling.

At the time of the ritual that was subsequently held, this woman's sixteenyear-old daughter described this very same situation in the following way. In the midst of the turmoil of the preparations for the ritual and surrounded by peers and family members, she chose to summarize/somatize her mother's illness history and the narrative lost much of its mundane field of reference: [14] Mother has been very tired lately, when she is tired she vomits, didn't eat or drink, needed support to go to the toilet, she had a pain in her neck, she vomited and had diarrhea, her illness gets worse at midnight, she shouts at midnight, she is suffering from the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya) of the great cemetery spirit (a yaksha).

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This woman made a spectacular recovery after the ritual and remained well for the rest of the year. Her condition was not, however, attributed to a manusha baya, a "scare of humans." In her family's narrative the Colombo bomb blast was never mentioned, nor was her daughter's scary friend who the mother thought was bringing bad news about her son. It is very rare for a woman to visit another household with loose hair, so maybe this young girl also got frightened and thereby forgot to tie up her hair. Even in the mother's narrative the nonhuman qualities of this girl are brought to the fore: loose hair and black clothes, the characteristic features in descriptions of wild spirits. Just as her fear was relegated to the world of the wild spirits, so was the remedy; ritual specialists were called in to summon the wild spirits and then ritually expel them from the household. Another example of terror and illness, which could have been attributed entirely to what we would call "cruel humans" but wasn't, is narrated by a young man from lower Puvakdeniya. He ended up in very much the same state as some of the women I quoted above: [15] I don't remember very well, I wasn't very conscious in those days ... I only regained consciousness at three o'clock in the morning when almost half the ritual had been performed, during the ritual I was in a trance state ( iwesa), they made me dance ... it is said that I did nonsensical things ( vikiira), it is said that I didn't move, I just stayed in one place and I did odd things ( anang manang) ... it was during the civil war, people had been killed that night, I had closed my shop, and I was coming home on my bicycle, they [the army] were burning and burning [His wife clarifies: They were burning a heap of dead bodies], I had been on my bicycle, but I must have left it there, I had somehow come back home but it was as if I couldn't make sense ( vikiiren vage), I had come home without being conscious of it, I reached the house, entered and fell down ... after I was cured I went to Kataragama and made a vow, after that we [the whole family] have been every year, every year on the first of January we go to Kataragama ... yes that was the first time I ever got terrified.

I first learned to understand vikiira and anang manang as the "nonsensical behavior and speech of possessed women," "nonsense" being the standard translation of these words. Family members would summarize the possibly violent confrontations at times "when a suffering person's consciousness is reduced" as vikiira or anang manang. But, as this example shows us, one could equally translate these concepts as the confusion and mindless acts so typical of the panic of the terrified. Such words contain and reflect two discourses: that of the relatively unaffected people and/ or perpetrators and that of the victim. It depends on which position the translator chocses within this field of contesting discourses whether these words mean "the nonsense of the possessed" or "the confusion of the terrified." The second translation leads one to highlight the terror of political and domestic violence that might go along with "can't stay" ( inna barikama), "can't stand the sight of them" (penanna ba), and "terrified heart" (hita bayayi), which might all eventually lead to encounters with the gaze of the

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wild ( dishtiya) and a final closure by this gaze ( dishtiya viihenav, arudha, avesa). I used the exceptional example of this young successful shopkeeper suffering from a reduced state of consciousness to introduce this alternative translation of anang manang and vikara: "the confusion of the terrified." This young man's state was described with the same idioms commonly used for troublesome women. The enemy was denied his/her humanity and the world of the wild spirits (yaksha) was evoked. Young men rarely describe their suffering in this way. Rather, it is most commonly women's suffering within the domestic sphere that manifests itself as an altered state of consciousness and closure by the gaze of the wild. But women's reactions to political violence are also occasionally described in this way ( anang manang, vikara, avesa), and in such narratives the connection between a woman's reduced consciousness, terror, and self-defense is made more obvious for the outsider. During the course of my research, a woman from Hendolakanda in her mid-twenties was frightened by a gun fight between young men from two different neighborhoods who also belong to separate castes and political parties. Many small-scale rituals were performed for this young woman. A week later she finally regained consciousness and explained: [16] [about previous fear and terror] When my mind gets terrified I get it, I was chatting in the courtyard [of my parental home] and at once I fell down, I didn't know, I don't remember anything, ... after I came back to my husband's house I fell ill again, there, on that road, some people got shot, at about midnight, it is after that that my heart got terrified, my husband, the father of my children got ready to go out, I kept talking to him, telling him not to go, I was near him trying to convince him, after that I fell down, it was night, the sound of shootings, we had gone to a purificatory (pirit) ritual and were coming back, along the path way up the hill, they were already having an argument on the road, we had to pass by them quickly, it wasn't a long time after we had come back that we heard the gunshots, my heart felt terrified, when it gets dark I am terrified to go from our little hut to the kitchen, ... when it is dark I am even too terrified to step outside the house, I always fear the same thing, when it gets dark I see two or three people approaching, carrying guns. [her neighbor adds]: they did a ritual for her but after the ritual specialist left she started to scream again "mother, chase them, chase them away," she was screaming and disappeared under the bed, "chase that person away" she would scream, so we went to get the ritual specialist again. The human enemies in these narratives about public/political violence are brought into focus to a certain extent. At least they are briefly mentioned, while they are entirely absent from descriptions of domestic situations that lead to reduced consciousness. There the human enemy within the nuclear family is entirely left out of focus. He/she is never mentioned. But in all three instances-domestic, public, or political violence-the enemy tends to become dehumanized fairly quickly, however close his or her relationship with the victim might be. In the act of terrifying somebody

38

Chapter 2

the enemy immediately loses his human qualities ( manussa kamak) and his affiliation to the human world of Sinhalese Buddhists. A ritual specialist made this explicit to me, by taking the argument about terror and the gaze of the wild a step further. I asked him how "terror caused by humans" can be treated, since many women had told me that this is a difficult matter. He answered: [17] In fact it is the same, when you are scared of a human, the gaze of the wild falls upon you, the gaze of a wild-human (manussa dishtiya) doesn't fall upon you, the gaze of a wild-human simply doesn't exist, when a human frightens you, your heart startles, and an altered state of consciousness caused by a wild being, a yakii (yaksha iirudha) befalls you. Indeed, it had to be explained to me that a "wild human" is a contradiction in terms. When terrified by a human, people are said to be struck by the gaze of the wild. At the moment of being threatened or attacked by a human, Udahenagama people simply did "not discern human qualities" in their assailants ( manussa kamak na). During this moment of looking, being looked at and looking back, although the victim might initially see a human (manussa baya), it is only the wild that looks back at its victim (yaksha dishtiya). So it is not surprising that in many discourses "terror caused by humans" is simply not mentioned, since the victim only sees a wild being. Individual human assailants are thus discursively transformed into terrestrial manifestations of the gaze of the wild. Nevertheless, this ritual specialist and most women alike agreed that the gaze of the wild experienced as a result of "terror caused by humans" is of a slightly different nature than "being terrified by a yakii." In particular, they emphasize the human origin of violence and argue that the suffering related to "terror [caused] by humans" is more difficult to alleviate. I postulate that the notion of "terror caused by humans" ( manussa baya) plays a role in a contemporary process of discursive change in southern Sri Lanka. For lack of historical background material on "terror caused by humans," this is but a hypothesis, and "terror caused by humans" remains an element of the discourse on violence that would be worthwhile to follow up in the future. However, I suggest at this point that the notion of "terror caused by humans" results from a process of disambiguation that the discourse on the wild is going through, and that it represents a move away from the ambiguous notion of the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya), which encompasses both wild humans and nonhumans alike. In most instances though, "terror caused by humans" is never evoked, and the ambiguous fear of wild spirits (yaksha baya) is still the dominant way to talk about terror and its effects. It is therefore important to retain the ambiguous quality of the discourse on the gaze of the wild when translating it into English. The discourse on the gaze of the wild is more than a discourse about spirit

A Lifetime Under the Gaze of the Wild

39

possession and ecstatic religion, and if we are to use this terminology successfully as a research tool for the study of violence it is crucial that we pay attention to its ambiguous nature.

The Discursive Domestication of Political Violence In this chapter I have described a conglomerate of expressions that are used by Udahenagama people to talk about violence. I have chosen not to begin this ethnography with a presentation of the social organization or the history of violence ofUdahenagama. Only in the next chapter do I present these sociohistorical circumstances in detail-as the residents of the neighborhoods under study portrayed them. For the presentation of this local history of violence, I have put the transcripts of conversations I had with participants to the fore in order to shed light on the often ambiguous discourses Udahenagama people use to hint at a daily reality of violence. By organizing the book in this way I also want to reflect the ways in which I only gradually became aware of the high levels of violence in Udahenagama. In providing more than etic data I have tried to avoid giving the reader the impression that a clear or instantly graspable picture of their social reality is available to Udahenagama people. Moreover, by paying as much attention to the process by means of which an (necessarily ambiguous) image eventually emerged for me, I intend to underline the far greater difficulties in sustaining a cohesive social reality faced by those living perennially under the gaze of the wild. During the initial stages of my fieldwork I spoke mainly to the participants about issues concerning illness and health. Once I had learned the local terminology for talking about illness, fear, healing, or possession rites and started using these terms in a rather straightforward way, however, I felt this caused unease among the participants. I had pigeonholed the expressions I had learned and matched them with ready-made translations. For example, ifl spoke about dishtiya, I assumed I was speaking about spirit possession. Udahenagama people made it clear to me that my professional identification and way of talking about the extraordinary and the supernatural was much too literal for them. To have any meaningful conversation with lay people, the everyday, ordinary conceptions related to the gaze of the wild that I outlined in this chapter had first to be understood. During my research, I gradually came to see the ambiguous character of many of the above-mentioned expressions, which fluctuate between the discourse of spirit religion and a discourse on interpersonal violence. It is by means of this vocabulary that I managed to start discerning the local history of violence that I outline in the next chapter. This conglomerate of expressions forms the basis not only for a discourse on violence (albeit an ambiguous one) but also for a discourse on enemies.

40

Chapter 2

The gaze of the wild makes people collude with the enemies of their civilization, and it sometimes compels them to behave violently. The ethnographic literature provides many examples in which certain enemies and forms of violence play a role in this dynamic. Oppressed women or men might start to behave like members of a hostile neighboring group (Boddy 1989; Stoller 1989, 1994), like hunters (Bloch 1992; Devisch 1995; Whitehouse 1996), or even like their colonial or neocolonial oppressors (Argenti 1998; Comaroff 1985; Stoller 1994; Taussig 1993). Others still have been known to behave like anarchists, slavemasters, domineering and aggressive men, or lower caste people (Lewis 1971: 89, 92, 94, 102, 112). My own data don't immediately reveal who the enemy is. In contrast to the political enemies embodied by the oppressed in many cultures (e.g., Argenti 1998; Lewis 1971; Boddy 1989; Stoller 1989, 1994), the way Udahenagama people embody an enemy does not seem to be influenced by the Tamil Tigers, the Indian army, the Dutch, Portuguese, or British colonial forces, the Special Task Force counter-insurgency commandos, or the JVP insurgents. The same underlying logic, though, in which suffering people suddenly behave like "an enemy" of their society, seems to apply to the Udahenagama situation. People are said suddenly to start behaving like yaksha, but the question is what role model is invoked for Udahenagama women: the behavior of the original inhabitants of the island (yaksha) and ancient mythical enemies of the Sinhalese, the institutionalized yaksha of the contemporary Sinhalese Buddhist pantheon (for example Riri Yaksha, Mahasohona, Kalu Kumara, Suniyam), or more mundane enemies? The data presented in this chapter lead me to conclude that the violence embodied by victims of the gaze of the wild seems closer to the everyday lived experience of being aggressed than to the readymade images of religious doctrine and spirit religion. "Becoming violent" is not as tightly tied up with specific cultural, religious images of the (institutionalized) wild spirits (yaksha) as one might expect, but rather remains very close to everyday lived experience, the lived immediacy of a domestic crisis situation: the chain of events defined by "can't stay" (inna biirikama), "can't stand the sight of my family members" (penanna ba), "being closed off by the gaze of the wild" (dishtiya vahenavaa), "a terrified heart" (hita bayayi) and "the confusion of the terrified" ( vikara gatiya) that I have described. In my experience, the model on which contemporary Udahenagama women would base their wild behavior or their discourse on the gaze of the wild and becoming wild was inevitably defined in relation to a day-to-day experience of domestic conflict and violence and of an all too familiar and mundane domestic enemy. It is not the afflicted themselves but the ritual specialists who superimpose the discourse on the gaze of the wild spirits (yaksha, dishtiya) on this situation. Mflicted women are then left to participate in this discourse only in ambiguous, tangential ways.

A Lifetime Under the Gaze of the Wild

41

A bomb blast in Colombo, the army's burning of a heap of corpses, or a gunfight can all be analyzed and expressed by means of the same discursive strategy that is used to refer to domestic violence. This is achieved linguistically by using the conglomerate of expressions that are intimately related to situations of domestic conflict and violence as the building blocks for discourses on a variety of forms of violence in the public sphere. In other words, at a discursive level the effects of many forms of violence can all be addressed as instances of domestic violence. The effects of political violence are expressed by relying upon the same semiotic pool-the same body of terms-used to deal with intimate, domestic enemies who cannot be named and who continue to live nearby. The fact that political violence might be classified or treated as a form of domestic violence might seem quite a problematic statement to make so early on in this ethnography. I argue, however, that precisely because this material was gathered during the early stages of fieldwork (and I deliberately build up the text as a mirror of my own fieldwork experience) I am bound to present the material in this way, by using this language. In fact, the distinction I now use between "domestic" and "political" violence is but a Western heuristic device, a starting point that I will later critique, deconstruct, and attempt to replace with Udahenagama discourses on violence. With the exception of the way enemies are treated in the discourse on "fear of humans," many types of enemies get pooled together by the ambiguity of the discourse on the gaze of the wild. Many women argue that they have suffered from the gaze of the wild for a lifetime, and that the many domestic cleansing or healing rituals performed for them have not been effective. On the basis of Sri Lanka's recent history, it is easy to understand such claims. Elderly women's comments also take the colonial era into account. In many cases ritual specialists have never been able to remove the gaze of the wild for prolonged periods of time. The elderly who argue that they have suffered from the wild for a lifetime most often don't participate any longer in the more dramatic encounters with the wild induced by "trance states" ( arudha, avesa) or cleansing rituals ( tovil). Nevertheless, such resigned grandmothers often continue to challenge the norms of orthodox Sinhalese Buddhism in minor and hidden ways. For example, a ninety-seven-year-old grandmother invited me for tea one day by whispering the blasphemous words: "Come in! Have some tea with a peace of Nirvana"! Elderly women often spent a lifetime under the gaze of the wild and have survived civil war as well as domestic forms of violence. They suffered enormously from the acts of people who transgress the ethos of Sinhalese Buddhism and thus find subtle ways to confirm their belonging to a world of wildness.

Chapter 3

IIEven the wild spirits are afraid!ll The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods

[ 1] Mother (M): How does the wild spirit (yakii) look? Five-year-old son (S): Quite big. It has two big teeth. M: Which color? S: Black. M: Hair? S: Long. M: Which color? S: Black. M: Where does it live? S: In the forest, at night it lives outside. M: Can it speak? S: It can. M: How is it dressed? S: It is just naked [everybody laughs], if some being [human or animal] is in the garden the yaksha will kill him and eat him. M: If you have done something wrong what will the yakii do? S: It will swallow (me): "Oviik, oviik" (gobble, gobble) it will say. M: What does it have in its hand? S: A very big sword. M: And what about its nails? S: Long, they grew down to its feet. M: If it hits you with those, do you get wounded? S:You die! M: And if it comes to our house? S: I will hit and hit and kill it. M: You can't kill it, can you? S: Yes, I can, it has two tiny legs, it can easily slip and fall over. M: Is it big? S: Yes, enormous! Even larger than the sky!

The previous chapter examined the ways Udahenagama people use idioms related to domestic conflict and violence to talk about more public or po-

The Gaze of the Wild In Five Neighborhoods

43

Figure 2. Wild spirit approaching a sick person; women and children hide inside the house.

litical forms of violence. For the purpose of this analysis, I have thus far extracted the discourse on the gaze of the wild from its social and political context. In this chapter I recontextualize this discourse within each of the five neighborhoods in which I worked and attempt thereby to reconstruct local histories of violence. I question in which ways the application of idioms typically used for domestic violence to a context of large-scale political violence affects the cycle of violence and its containment. Once I had established the ambiguous nature of the discourse on the gaze of the wild, I was able to start questioning the various contemporary meanings that are given to the gaze of the wild in each neighborhood. The fact that I had to rely on an ambiguous discourse to gather information about violence caused inevitable methodological problems. I managed, for example, to identity the households in which somebody was suffering from a lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild 1 but did not obtain absolute evidence of domestic violence. H owever, the identification of households that continuo usly struggle with the gaze of the wild was a much-needed preliminary step to begin the study. It was in those households that I began to listen carefully to discourses on violence. On the basis of people's use of the idioms I described in the previous chapter, I would deduce whether a family was suffering from severe conflicts

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Chapter 3

and/ or violence, but I could not be sure what type of violence people referred to in this ambiguous way. Most often it wasn't made clear to me whether the gaze of the wild had made itself present in domestic conflicts about poverty and alcoholism-related problems, land rights, and marriage arrangements on the one hand, or in conflicts between victims and perpetrators of the civil war on the other. I consequently embarked on a tortuous research route that provided only a few glimpses of the local history of violence in each neighborhood. Consequently, rather than using this chapter to present a summary of the sociohistorical background data I gathered, I try to outline the way that information slowly emerged. Illnesses are a cherished topic of conversation in U dahenagama, and comments on the gaze of the wild pervade the neighborhoods like a constant murmur. When a victim argues that s/he is suffering from the gaze of the wild, s/he admits that s/he did not discern many human qualities in the assailant and was not faced with a Sinhala Buddhist but a nonhuman spirit (yakii). While talking about illnesses caused by the gaze of the wild, victims compose not only a discourse on health and illness but also a discourse on humanity that labels assailants or enemies as nonhuman. Talk about the gaze of the wild is therefore more than an expression of personal suffering or a discourse on illness and health geared toward healers. The ambiguous discourse about the gaze of the wild tends to dehumanize the enemy. The dehumanization of assailants, perpetrators, and enemies thus not only is a component of the presentation of illnesses but exists in its own right and constitutes a communal discourse about enemies, and above all dehumanized enemies. The notion of dehumanization plays a major role in anthropological analyses of cycles of violence. These studies argue that an enemy's killing or maiming is inseparable from his or her dehumanization, in Sri Lanka as in other violent contexts. A perpetrator of violence, it is said, suddenly perceives and experiences individuals or whole groups of people as not having many human qualities, as being radically different from him or her. Only in such circumstances, the argument goes, can atrocities and wide-scale human rights abuses become thinkable and bearable for the perpetrator. This is the common understanding of dehumanization of the enemy in the literature.2 In contrast to this view, I suggest that dehumanization also plays a positive role in the rehabilitation of communities during the aftermath of complex forms of violence. In a world in which apparently "humane" neighbors and acquaintances have been involved in inhuman acts3 and the boundaries between humanity and inhumanity have been blurred, the younger generation needs to be taught anew what is human and inhuman. In the process of the redefining what is normal and abnormal, human and nonhuman, certain groups or individuals are bound to be dehumanized. Dehumanization must therefore not solely be described in negative terms as a breeding ground for a cycle of violence; it plays a positive role in re-

The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods

45

defining humanity for a generation that grows up in the aftermath of a civil war. Descriptions of collective violence as a reenactment of exorcism or possession rites in which a dehumanized enemy is expelled or annihilated are common in the anthropological literature. It would seem, however, that the data supporting such conclusions are often collected among urbanized or middle-class people. Speeches of politicians are often quoted as supporting evidence in such analyses, or cartoons in the national media are cited that allude to exorcism and the demonic (nonhuman) nature of the enemy (e.g., Das 1998; Kapferer quoted in Das 1998). While there might be an experiential correlation between large-scale communal riots and exorcism as far as the political elites are concerned (as in Kapferer 1997a), this does not necessarily mean that processes of dehumanization operate in the same ways at the village level. I did not find in the course of my own research that the dehumanizing strategies of middle-class urban Sinhala Buddhist nationalists were mirrored with any precision by the village-based Sinhala Buddhists with whom I worked. In an attempt to reinsert the discourse on the gaze of the wild into its local context, I describe and analyze the processes of dehumanization that occur in the sociopolitical context of U dahenagama on the basis of the local characteristics of the cycle of violence in the village.

Hendolakanda Hendolakanda, "the mountain of gardens and rivers" is a neighborhood in the forest and wastelands at the edge of the forest reserve. People from other neighborhoods in the area describe it as a neighborhood where many people suffer from the gaze of the wild and fall ill, an area very much troubled by the wild spirits. With a few exceptions, most of the Hendolakanda people are "green," that is to say, they vote for the United National Party (UNP), which was in power from 1977 until 1994 and regained power at the end of 2001. The people from Hendolakanda supported the government and the army during the civil war of 1988-90 and then became part of the opposition against the People's Alliance (PA) government that seized power in 1994. Despite the fact that they supported the opposition party during the 1994-2001 period, the people from Hendolakanda predominantly supported the army and sent soldiers to the front in the north and east of the country. Higher up the mountain, however, the people ofPanigahakanda (see Figure 3) are said to have supported the]VP insurgents during the civil war and the PA government in 1994-2001. During the civil war, people from Hendolakanda and Panigahakanda fought each other and disappeared each other by denouncing each other to either the insurgents or the counter-insurgency forces. The party political divisions between these two neighborhoods are not simply ideological,

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Figure 3_Survey area in Galkanda and Hendolakanda (snowball survey): 21 households (1-17, I-IV) .

The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods

47

however, but only the most recent manifestation of preexisting differences. Most people in Hendolakanda work as casual laborers nowadays ( kuli vada), and there are few genuine economic differences between them and the people from Panigahakanda. The people from Hendolakanda, however, belong to a higher caste, the cultivator caste, members of which were once landed. The Panigahakanda people belong to the jaggery-makers caste, landless people who used to live from slash-and-burn cultivation in the forested areas. They are known to other castes as warriors and fierce people, and members of the caste from other areas have now built up an alternative caste identity as soldiers in the Sri Lankan national army. The people who live at the top of the mountain in Panigahakanda have to use a path through the Hendolakanda neighborhood to reach the shops, schools, and main bus route. Conversely, the policemen or soldiers who visit the Panigahakanda people have to pass through Hendolakanda to reach them (see Figure 3). This often makes for a very tense situation in which differences and grudges between the inhabitants of these two neighborhoods have to be managed within a situation of relatively close day-to-day interaction.

Lifelong Dishtiya A substantial number of women from the Obeyesekere family, the principal kin-based group in Hendolakanda, suffer from a lifetime involvement with the gaze of the wild (yaksha dishtiya) .4 Although they have undergone many rituals to rid themselves of this malevolent gaze, they argue that these remedies don't work and they are still suffering from the gaze of the wild. In each of the four generations of the Obeyesekere family that I was able to document, a few women were said to be suffering from this condition (see Figure 4). They spoke of the gaze of the wild as a daily ailment, a continuous (digatama) form of suffering that lasts for life (djivitetama). Udahenagama women argued "some people still suffered from it while they were dying" (dishtiya marenakama angee tibunii). A sixty-three-year-old grandmother (from household 10) explains how her mother, elder sister, and daughter all suffer from a lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild: [2] They organized rituals for my elder sister also, my elder sister was closed off by the gaze of the wild, just like my daughter, what I am suffering from is the "moral mistake of having been alone" ( tanikam dosha), but it is my elder sister who resembles a mad person, she has been ill for a very long time, even now she is ill, she has a love-charm in her stomach, somebody made her eat it ... Some people, when they become mad and you administer some small remedies or organize a cleansing ritual, they get better-isn't it?-but our elder sister never gets better, while she was a very young girl somebody gave her a love charm to eat, since then she hasn't gotten better, the gaze of the wild that fell on those things she has in her stomach is still there ... She suffers from the gaze of Mahasohona (the great yakii of the cemetery) and the gaze ofKalu Kumara (the black prince), those are stuck to her body

0

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Figure 4. Kinship diagram of Hendolakanda.

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The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods

49

( iingata pattiyang vela), she has it for life, you cannot remove it and save her (galavanna biihii), it has been like that for forty-five or fifty years, after she got married they kept having to organize small rituals and domestic cleansing rituals (tovil) ... Our mother suffered in the same way, even while she was dying she was suffering from the gaze of the wild, about every year there was a cleansing ritual organized for her.

The elderly women's older sister herself explained that even now she sometimes suddenly falls ill. Her children argued it happens when there are quarrels in the family, when she hears the sound of drums, or when one of her children is traveling to Colombo and she is worried. Lifelong gaze of the wild does not feature prominently in the discourse of the children of the afflicted woman, and the love charm is not mentioned at all (it probably cannot be mentioned in the presence of the afflicted person's husband). Such prolonged forms of affliction by the gaze of the wild are often associated with sorcery spells (kodivina) and love charms (such as diipu deyak, vashi gurukam) but sorcery and love charms are a delicate topic and cannot be mentioned in many contexts. In order to bring together the different perspectives on the people affected by lifelong dishtiya and to construct an (inevitably fragmented) image of their suffering, I interviewed a number of people within the extended family. It is precisely around those afflicted people and their lifelong suffering that sorcery accusations and stories about (dehumanized?) enemies coalesce and take form. An obvious question is how the people from Panigahakanda-the despised next-door neighborhood-featured in this ambiguous discourse on the gaze of the wild.

A Bond with the Wild Through an Intimate Enemy Although it is known to cause the most tenacious forms of lifelong suffering from the gaze of the wild, I have not so far mentioned sorcery. It is typically people who know the victim well who perpetrate sorcery. Victims often suspect that the debilitating bond between a victim and the wild has been "ordered" by an intimate assailant ( anavina, kodivina: "sorcery"). The discourse on sorcery among lay people is very much a hidden, shameful, and contested discourse, a discourse paralleling the more everyday notions of "can't stay," "can't stand the sight ofthem," and "being closed off by the gaze of the wild." In order not to decontextualize this discourse on sorcery by giving it a primary and central position in my description in the previous chapter, I sought to give the reader an impression of the way in which it usually remains hidden in the background of the conglomerate of expressions used to talk about the wild. And yet some of the marriage or land disputes that have afflicted the Obeyesekere family or still smolder in this kin-group go along with sorcery accusations in which close members of the extended family or from the Hendolakanda group have been accused

50

Chapter 3

of sorcery and are held responsible for lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild. Conflicts between the people of Panigahakanda and Hendolakanda have, however, never been subsumed to the dynamic of sorcery spells and sorcery accusations. On the contrary, women from Hendolakanda stress how sorcery and sorcery accusations are a very localized phenomenon, restricted to disputes between individuals. Here, for example, three women from Hendolakanda talk about an attack by people from Panigahakanda: [3] Wl: If something happens to a person at Panigahakanda the whole generation comes [to fight]. We can't fight/hit the people from Panigahakanda. Even women are carrying weapons. Not like in our neighborhood, there they are very united. W2: In our neighborhood people are against each otherI oppose each other [through sorcery spells and accusations]. There they are very friendly to each other. Wl: They say it is Valli Mahattaya who fired the gun. W2: No they say it is Chutiya. W3: They say it is Valli Mahattaya who cut them, now how many has he cut and killed? Even in that area? But nobody says so. They are united. It is said that they all have guns. No one says so [none of the co-villagers report gun-carriers to the police]. The people from that neighborhood are united. W2: In our neighborhood it is not like that. Wl: Here if one house "has" [guns], they will say that this one "has" and will help capture him. In this passage the interlocutors draw a connection between local conflict, sorcery, and inter-neighborhood violence I didn't expect. Here sorcery is depicted as a type of containment of major outbreaks of violence and a peacekeeping agent, reducing the levels of violence between the different neighborhoods.5 The conflict between the people from Hendolakanda and Panigahakanda dominated the atmosphere in both neighborhoods and terrified people on a regular basis. The conflict particularly affected the women suffering from lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild. They were the ones most likely to fall ill when terrified. And, as I described in the previous chapter, on one occasion a gunfight between men from Panigahakanda and Hendolakanda made a young woman who wasn't known to suffer from lifelong dishtiya suffer an acute attack by the gaze of the wild (see transcript 16). This particular incident led me to postulate that many incidents of inter-neighborhood strife and political violence between pro:JVP and progovernment factions could easily trigger a lifetime of dishtiya-related ailments or illnesses said to be caused by the gaze of the wild. When a woman is suffering from the gaze of the wild, a member of her extended family is commonly accused of practicing sorcery against her. The ambiguous discourse on dishtiya leaves the Panigahakanda enemy unmentioned and highlights instead sorcery accusations against local

The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods

51

enemies, enemies in the victim's extended family. Intimate enmity based on local fissures related to family strife about land and marriages forms the basis for such accusations. Enmity is organized in a triadic way, in which the victim, a local enemy and the wild are interconnected. What emerges from this analysis of enmity in Hendolakanda is that the relationship between Panigahakanda and Hendolakanda enemies is mediated through a local, intimate enemy whom is held responsible for a victim's contact with the wild (which includes people from Panigahakanda, the despised neighborhood). A victim who suffers from an affliction by the gaze of the wild takes revenge on an enemy, who is accused of sorcery, during anti-sorcery or cleansing rituals ( tovil rituals). During such rituals the ritual specialist ensorcels the enemy. A victim thus takes revenge by in turn establishing a bond between the enemy and the wild. In local terms the dishtiya is returned to its sender (pitin yanava). In the triad of enmity described above, however, the wild was not sent back to Panigahakanda, but was addressed to a local enemy, often a family member accused of sorcery. The gaze of the wild was not expelled from the victim's neighborhood but was sent to another household within Hendolakanda. This is the way conflict and violence become localized by means of a strategy in which dishtiya-including translocal forms of wildness, for example, inter-neighborhood striferemains encapsulated within the local community.

Fishbones, Tip-Offs, and Counter-Insurgency Forces In exchange 3 above, the women allude to the connection between local conflicts in the neighborhood, in which sorcery and lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild often play a role, and tip-offs (ottuva) provided by neighbors to the police or the army. The women argue that within the neighborhood of Hendolakanda people are known to betray one another. Members of the community who possess guns are denounced to the police and disarmed. These tips, according to these three women, keep the local arms race and gun-related violence at bay. In this manner, they construct their own group as less dangerous and violent toward outsiders by virtue of the internal strife and conflict it suffers. Small everyday forms of interpersonal violence are construed by them as a buffer against major outbreaks of violence in which firearms and a higher level of communal organization (such as solidarity and complicity) are involved. If anything is more prominent and central to contemporary life in Udahenagama than sorcery, it is tip-offs (ottuva): the practice of informing enemies that often takes the form of a denunciation to the police or the army's counter-insurgency forces and death squads. In my interpretation, this ottuva-culture is closely related to the ethos of sorcery accusations. Intimate knowledge of the enemy needed to cast or to cut a sorcery spell 6 is

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also vital when passing on information to enemies. As much as sorcery is a localized phenomenon, in which perpetrator and victim live in the same neighborhood (in the case of Hendolakanda, in the same extended family), tip-offs also have a limited and localized scope and efficacy. Just as the efficacy of sorcery spells is understood to diminish as the distance between perpetrator and victim increases, so too the efficacy of tips weakens as they become more vague, inaccurate, and ineffective as the social distance between the betrayer and the betrayed increases. In a word, it is easier to betray someone you know well. Two middle-aged women (WI, W2) and one younger one (W3) in Hendolakanda (households 7 and 6), in a typical example, spoke to me approvingly of one such betrayal, in which an allegedly promiscuous next-door neighbor of theirs, Padmavatthi (household 5), was betrayed by her husband and tortured by the army during the civil war of 1988-90: [4] Wl: She [our neighbor] didn't get a cleansing ritual (tovile), but illnesses of course she had [loud laughter], there is no point in talking about these illnesses [more laughter], she has been ill ( asanipa) but we can't tell you [loud laughter, they keep on giggling] ... this is a long story, we can't tell you [laugh]. W2: I am ashamed to tell you those things. There is nobody else like that in this whole village. Wl: There is nobody who has done something so respectable in this whole village [irony] [laughter] ... So respectable! [laughter] W2: The deed was so respectable. Wl: She did things that nobody would do. That is why. [laughs] [long pause] She hasn't done anything [respectable] that would permit her to walk on the road dressed in clothes [she won't be able to walk along the streets in a respectable manner] [laughs]. W2: If it had happened to me, I would have died. Wl: That is true, if it were someone like us, we would not be able to face others again. [laughter]. W2: I went to see her one day, but my husband told me not to go and see her any more. Wl: [laughs]. W2: She is slightly mad, isn't she? WI: She just fakes being mad! ( boru pissuva) [laughter]. W2: We went to look. W3: Why? Because it was nearby. W2: She danced beautifully [irony]. We went to see the dance. Wl: She danced after having eloped with her lover, she was married to someone, but she left with someone else. W2: Yes [laughs] [long pause]. Wl: [to me] She must have told you that she has been ill, mustn't she? Me: Yes, she told me. W2: So she wasn't ill, was she? Wl: She wasn't ill. This is how she got it. It was only after coming home that she danced, before that she had gone to Edanduwila town [there was an army camp in Edanduwila in 1988-90; it was organized in one of the village schools, and

The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods

53

people were known to be tortured and disappeared there], she had climbed on the guy's shoulders [her lover] with a leg on each side. W2: It was the soldiers who told them to do so. WI: Yes, the soldiers had beaten them. They got a good beating from the soldiers [laughs] [long pause]. Now she even goes back shopping in Edanduwila, I don't know how she manages [laughs] [unclear sentence]. The army was there then [long pause] it is said that the army was on both sides of them, beating them, this man [her lover] [uses a pronoun normally used to refer to animals] walked and carried this woman on his shoulders in the middle of [Edanduwila] town, it is after this that brother [her husband] brought her home in a state of madness. W2: Like that it was I j7 W3: She had been mad before she left [with her lover], hadn't she? WI: Not really. W3: So? WI: It was only after she had gone there [to Edanduwila], and after having been brought back that she was in a state of madness and an altered state of consciousness (pissuva, iirudha), she pretended to be mad, because people went to see her and she was ashamed. [laughter] ... W2: Though she was told [by her husband] to come home, she hadn't come, she went along the path of that man [her lover]. Later she was punished [by the army], they caught her, beat her, and displayed her in town.

Because I realized this was malicious gossip, I made my mind up to go and see Padmavatthi-the subject of this exchange-herself. When I met her, she complained of having had a fish bone stuck in her throat for a few years now. This fishbone caused sharp pains and stopped her from being able to swallow food properly, as a result of which she was only able to swallow certain types of food. By her own account, she had gone through numerous long hospitalizations at government hospitals in both the capital and one of the Southern Province commercial centers, but the doctors had been unable to find the offending fishbone (not even after using an NMR scanner). The ritual specialist eventually decided that she was suffering from "the moral mistake of being alone" (tanikam dosha) but she wasn't so sure herself. According to Padmavatthi, something far worse was going on: she was being afflicted by the gaze of the wild, possibly sent intentionally by an enemy or a sorcerer. Quite a few ritual specialists had tried to find out whether the gaze of the wild and a sorcery spell were afflicting her, but Padmavatthi never mentioned the outcome of the ritual specialists' efforts at divination. She suspected she suffered from a prolonged exposure to the gaze of the wild that had been incompletely diagnosed or treated. The conflict between Padmavatthi and her husband, which went back ten years and in which the army was involved, thus simmered on at the local level in the form of Padmavatthi's ambiguous evocations of the gaze of the wild and her threats of possible future sorcery accusations against her local enemies. In this case, enmity was again constructed in a triadic pattern between a

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victim, the local enemy, and the wild. This time, however, two parallel triads were involved: Padmavatthi, the gaze of the wild, and a sorcerer on the one hand, and Padmavatthi, the army's counter-insurgency commando, and her husband (who had denounced her to the army) on the other. The possible link between the gaze of the wild and the counter-insurgency forces' presence in an army camp in Udahenagama occurred to me only after comparing my conversations with Padmavatthi with the conversation I had had with her neighbors. I have reconstructed it here by juxtaposing two discourses, elicited in two different contexts: households 6, 7 and household 5 (see Figure 3). The narrative ofPadmavatthi's neighbors evokes the triad of Padmavatthi, the army's counter-insurgency commandos, and her husband. Padmavatthi's own story relates her suffering to a different triad in which she becomes a victim afflicted by the gaze of the wild sent by a sorcerer. I use this example to argue that during the civil war the traditional triad between a victim, the gaze of the wild, and a local enemy who sent the gaze of the wild to his victim by means of sorcery was paralleled by the triad of a victim, counter-insurgency forces, and a local enemy who sent these counter-insurgency forces to punish his victim.

A Glimpse of the Past In narratives about less tense situations, the link between the gaze of the wild (yaksha dishtiya) that pervades Hendolakanda and the community's enemies is more explicit. A ninety-seven-year- old woman once spoke to me about a more dated type of enemy: she relied heavily on the set of idioms normally used to describe personal suffering: "can't stand the sight (of them)" and "the gaze of the wild" (see Chapter 2). She reflected on a concern that was perhaps more preoccupying to a previous generation in Hendolakanda: [5] There are Rodi [vagrants of the lowest caste], we can't stand the sight of them, we chase them away, hit them with stones, very bad people, they [uses a pronoun that is usually used to refer to animals] were everywhere, in caves or in haunted houses or anywhere they might have lived, we don't know ... when people are walking along a path in the forest those vagrants assault them, we don't have anything to do with those Rodi, with those wild spirits [my emphasis].

This grandmother explicitly refers to human enemies, lower-caste vagrants and delinquents, as wild spirits (yaksha). The problems typical of the Hendolakanda neighborhood are thus not only a contemporary phenomenon. For a long time the village has exhibited the characteristics of a marginal area, in which scores could be settled and about which fearful rumors circulated within the more central neighborhoods of the Udahenagama area. I will end this presentation of Hendolakanda with a view of an outsider, a young woman from Lower Puvakdeniya from the same caste as the people

The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods

55

from Hendolakanda (the cultivators' caste). In her description of the reputation of the frightening path to Panigahakanda (see Figure 3) she links the domestic cleansing ( tovil) rituals performed for women suffering from the gaze of the wild to the danger presented by this dark forest path at night. The path has a reputation as a place where people from other neighborhoods (not only from Hendolakanda-Panigahakanda) come to seek revenge and settle scores: [6] We-of course-don't go to that area. If they perform a domestic cleansing ritual (tovile) in that area, and one of our people is going to see it, people will follow him and take revenge. It is in that area that things like that happen. Not everybody is like that. There are good ones also. But if you go to the Panigahakanda and Hendolakanda area late at night, they will hide somewhere [in the forest] and then suddenly kill or beat you. So things like that happen, therefore we-of coursedon't have friendships with people in places like that. Not only among them, but also among ourselves, there are people like that. But not everybody is like that.

The few instances in which people chose to talk or gossip about the violent past and present of the Hendolakanda neighborhood led me to conclude that quite a number of women from this neighborhood suffer from a lifelong engagement with the gaze of the wild, and that enemyhood is organized in a triadic manner between a victim, a local enemy, and the wild. The young woman quoted above (transcript 6) was torn between the discourse on Panigahakanda and Hendolakanda being inhabited by wild people and the realization that in fact, there were many killers in her own neighborhood as well. In order to further reconstruct the local history of violence and enemyhood, I now turn to one of these other neighborhoods in the Udahenagama area.

Galkanda Galkanda is also a predominantly cultivator caste (goyigama) neighborhood, but is it less homogeneous in both kinship and party-political terms than Hendolakanda. Next-door neighbors are less closely related, and households supporting the PA and UNP live in each other's vicinity. The Galkanda neighborhood is less isolated than Hendolakanda, and people have easy access to the temple and the main road. The women who became participants in this research project all work as casual laborers in the tea plantations.

Lifelong Dishtiya Lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild, which can be traced back up to four generations (much like in Hendolakanda), is what first strikes the outsider (see Figure 5). The women I interviewed in Galkanda made

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The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods

57

the intergenerational transmission of lifelong dishtiya very explicit to me. A middle-aged lady, head of household II, explained: [7] W: The illness started before puberty. I had a stomachache every day. My stomach was swollen. I couldn't eat. I stayed at the government hospital for more than a month for this stomachache. In those days, we didn't know you yet. Akka [my research assistant]: Did it get better after you attained puberty? W: It never got better. Even after I got married, even while I was expecting a baby, I suffered from this stomachache a lot. Even now, I can't sleep at night. All these [touches her stomach, points at the things inside] come upward and tighten my chest. But what happened after they performed a domestic cleansing ritual (tovile) for me is that the madness-like things have gone. That is all. I don't scream in my dreams at night anymore. But even yesterday I had a terrible stomachache. This bad luck ( aguna) affected the children [7 babies died]. They say it is because of the dishtiya on my body. It must have affected the children. Akka: Are there many people with the dishtiya on their body for a lifetime? W: Yes, for example my mother. Twenty-four cleansing rituals (tovil) were performed for her. She was sick every day, even now it is still the same, she is always really sick ... It is that illness that came to my body also. [whispers] My mother also sometimes behaves as if she is mad, even now it happens sometimes. Even when she was very young she was ill and cleansing rituals ( tovil) were performed for her.

Her mother, a ninety-five-year-old woman from household III, later explained: [8] When I was about twelve, I had eaten some fried chicken, and that gaze of the wild ( dishtiya) fell onto my body. It is from then onward that I fall ill regularly. They say they can't make it go away, even though cleansing rituals are danced. They say that even now I have it ... I have it continuously ( digatama).

Much as in the Hendolakanda neighborhood, a number of women from Galkanda suffer from a lifelong engagement with the gaze of the wild. The people from Galkanda, however, revealed an additional dimension of the organization of enmity to me: the way a local enemy is defined.

The Dissociation of a Perpetrator from His Family In the survey area in Galkanda (see Figure 3; households I, II, III, all female-headed households) a so-called peace of the graveyard (cf. Gramsci 1971: 185) was obtained for the duration of my research. Three unnatural deaths-the sudden death of a teenage girl, the untimely death of a ritual specialist, and the suicide of a girl in her early twenties-had all been attributed to local conflicts, sorcery, revenge, and malicious intentions by close family members or next-door neighbors. The hate and suspicions were vividly remembered on one occasion when I met one of the surviving women (from household II) alone:

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[9] What I have now is a stomachache. I can't eat. Sometimes my whole stomach is blown up with air ( bada pipeno). That is all. Time after time my body feels lifeless ... [whispered] My daughter also died because of poisoning. She died suddenly. She hadn't been ill. It was eight or nine o'clock in the evening when life was going away ... It is her "thing" (eyiige meva eka) that I have now. She had not attained puberty yet. It was about to happen. The one that stays here now [her son, Matin] was here. He was here when she died. She was his older sister. He was very small. He did not understand or realize anything. After his sister died, he was taken to a nearby house. I think that it was to this place itself that he was taken [the next-door neighbor's house]. He too started to swell (idimunii). I kept him at the government hospital for two or three months. He was swollen all over and pale/white, ... My daughter was not angry at all. She loved her mother a lot. Near to the moment of her death, as life went, she cried a lot: "my sweet mother," she held onto my shoulders and hugged me. When a young person dies, the deceased spirits (preta) have more effect. The person her /himself comes and calls. They come because they died with desire/love. Daughter died with love for me. That is why she comes and calls me. "Mother let's go" she says, "mother is suffering" she says. That is all she says, nothing else. She comes and sits here, just like you are sitting here now, and stays nearby ... She comes only to me, not to the others. Why? Because I have the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya) on my body ... It is because of them [the neighbors, the household of her elder brother] that all this happened. [whispered, almost inaudible] We were not getting on with them at that time. They were angry in those days I I [abruptly interrupts herself and continues in a loud voice] I always have a headache. I can't stand it anymore. Even the headache that started yesterday is still there. I get it everyday in the evening ... [whispered again] My elder brother of course did not do any good work. He ensorceled people as much as he could, even at night, in this area he practiced sorcery. He did a great job for all the people in the area [irony]. In those days, people were even afraid to come to his house! Even you would have been afraid to go there! That is why he died an untimely and sudden death. Because he harmed/tortured (vade) others ... On his way back from casting a sorcery spell somewhere he died. The sorcery spell he cast onto somebody else hit back at him instead (pitin yanavii). Don't write this down! Why? If they [the neighbors] happen to see your book, they will say that we have told you. If they would see your book they would be angry again. We don't need those things now. He [elder brother] is not here anymore It doesn't matter anymore. It is enough if we do what is important to the people who live now (eva viidak nii apata dang inna kiindege viida karagattama iiti). His wife [now her best friend] does not need to pity me. She helps me with everything. Even if I fall ill, she runs and comes to visit me at night. There is no need to talk about the dead, is there, nona? (my emphasis)

I quote this lady at length because I came across similar ideas expressed by many of the other women I interviewed. I would describe such mixed feelings as the hatred and suspicion experienced in the past, blended with the emotion that goes along with the death of one's main enemy and the feeling of resignation that accompanies the decision to focus on the present rather than the past. "It doesn't matter anymore, it is enough if we do what is important to the people who live now," even if those people are members of the household of a dead enemy or perpetrator. According to my findings, male deceased enemies, such as this sor-

The Gaze of the Wild in Five Neighborhoods

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cerer, are easily dissociated and considered separate from their household. Though the household (gedara) is very much seen as a political, economic, and moral unit, when it comes to accusing an enemy of one's misfortunes, a single person in a household is often picked out and blamed. More often than not, this will be the head of the household. The triadic organization of enmity comes along with an individualization of enmity in which one particular person becomes the primary focus of hatred and revenge. Sorcery accusations and practices emanating from one household concern and afflict the entire household at which they are directed only to a certain degree. One single person will be perceived as the protagonist of sorcery practices and will be accused of sorcery. People send sorcery spells back to such a person, who will be afflicted more severely than the others and will become the "the sick person" for whom a cleansing ritual will be organized. A fissure and distinction is established between an enemy and an enemy's household, a leader and his followers, while after this leader's death the followers are not perceived to be so much of a threat. I return to this below in my description of the Puvakdeniya neighborhood, because an analysis of this pattern of enmity as practiced among close neighbors seems even more crucial when it is applied to the (political) enemies of the civil war. The extreme sorrow this Galkanda mother experienced at the death of her teenage daughter went hand in hand with the intense rage and anger so typical of strife between very close family members. Her elder brother, by virtue of living next door and being a member of the same extended family, was a target for anger and jealousy of an intensity that, in my understanding, could not have been maintained with respect to a more distant enemy. Intense mourning and intimate enmity went hand in hand. At his death, however, his widow became her best friend. When the sorcerer's widow's daughter committed suicide th~ year before I conducted my research, both women had lost a beloved daughter and were united in their sorrow. They regularly helped each other during the preparation of ritual events, a sign of trust (of being vishvasa kenek): ritual events to make offerings to the spirits of the teenager, the sorcerer, and the suicide victim. Women who work in the tea plantations tend to walk to the plantation and pluck tea in groups of two or three. These two women became work partners. But ongoing fear, insecurity, and a realization of the precariousness of their situation continued to dominate the atmosphere in these three female-headed households (I, II, III). With no male family member to protect them, the slightest noise would frighten them in the night. All three of these female household heads suffer from long-term affliction by the gaze of the wild.

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Upper and Lower Puvakdeniya In this section I argue that the dissociation of a perpetrator from his family, which was made so clear by the Galkanda neighborhood families described above, proved to be an essential strategy for the containment of violence in Puvakdeniya both during and in the immediate aftermath of the civil war. In the cultivator-caste neighborhood of Puvakdeniya, the families of the killers and victims of the civil war live in close proximity to each other8 (see Figure 6). What in middle-class discourse is described as the struggle between "communist]VP insurgents," "terrorists" or "thugs" on the one hand and "counter-insurgency forces" of the Sri Lankan army (known euphemistically as the Special Task Force) on the other is described in Udahenagama discourses as a struggle of "the small government of the JVP" 9 against the army's counter-insurgency commandos and the families (members of which were often soldiers themselves) who supported the army. The contemporary representations of the civil war by people of the Puvakdeniya neighborhood are constructed around very concrete, specific local struggles. It would therefore be constraining to describe this discourse as partypolitical in the conventional sense. In Udahenagama discourses all families who had sent soldiers to the Sri Lankan army (whether the Special Task Force combating the JVP or simply the units fighting the Tamil Tigers in the north and east) were seen to be collaborating with the Special Task Force and giving tip-offs about the whereabouts of local JVP youths. For this reason, JVP insurgents targeted these families for punitive action. Members of these families also became targets for the extortion of weapons since they were seen to have easy access to them via their soldier-children. Insurgents also targeted families who were known to possess (usually homemade) guns, even though they were not affiliated with the army. Victims of JVP insurgents, conversely, would give tip-offs to the army's counter-insurgency forces or death squads, who would then disappear the denounced youths. For people from Udahenagama the struggle for arms and the practice of giving tip-offs to counter-insurgency forces or death squads form the core of the justifications for threats, abductions, and murder. Nowadays, almost ten years after the latest civil war, widows or parents of the disappeared live in close proximity to the widows or parents of the killers or betrayers who, in the majority of cases, also disappeared. Women and Children's Lack of Fear of Local Perpetrators Among the survivors of the civil war of the late 1980s, fear of the families of the erstwhile perpetrators living nearby is remarkably absent. A young woman from household 17 (see Figure 6) used the same path as her husband's murderers on a daily basis. From the porch of her hut, you could

40

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Chapter 3

hear the daily noises and voices in the perpetrator's household (household 19). Notwithstanding this uneasy proximity, she assured me that she was not afraid of her neighbors. They had only wanted to kill her husband, not her or her five children. A widow from household 39 was not afraid either; she confidently told me that all the young men (allegedly) involved in her husband's disappearance (e.g., household 8) had been killed by the army. Evoking a "peace of the graveyard," she left the families of the young murderers unmentioned. Their continuing presence among "the living beings" did not frighten or intimidate her. Her husband had disappeared, and so had his abductors, but the circle of violence and counterviolence seems to have ended there. However massive and out of control the political violence of the 1988-90 civil war appears at first sight, when compared to other wartime situations (for example Guatemala, Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor, Punjab, Kashmir), a remarkable type of restraint seems to have been exercised at the village level. Women and children were certainly threatened and maltreated, but they were not killed or sexually abused. The similarity between the restraint exercised vis-a-vis women and children during the war and women's and children's relation to the gaze of the wild (dishtiya) during violenceridden domestic cleansing ( tovil) rituals is striking. During cleansing rituals, men gamble, drink, smoke, and fight at the outskirts of the ritual space, where the ritual specialists dance. Women and children remain inside the house, away from the dishtiya, the gaze of the wild that roams outside (see Figure 7). Again the gaze of the wild is defined ambiguously as both the gaze of wild spirits summoned by the ritual specialists and their human counterpart: drunken men who often act violently and pose a threat to women and children attending the ritual. At certain times during such rituals, the space of the wild and the space of women, children, and the afflicted person are separated by a white curtain (kadaturava) held up by two assistants that breaks the space into two (kadanava: to break, kadaturava: the curtain that breaks, cuts) (see Figure 7). It seems that during the civil war a similarly powerful symbolic "curtain" (kadaturava) protected women and children from the wildness of war. The struggle was fought man-to-man, and once the young men involved had disappeared, so did the fear of violence. The households of perpetrators of violence or murderers, which often included middle-aged men, or brothers of the murderers, who would be very capable of fighting, were given a certain independence from the actual perpetrators of violence during the 1988-90 era. Most family members of perpetrators of violence didn't become targets for revenge, and nowadays they commonly do not have a reason to fear for their lives. Victims and families of the disappeared dealt with the young politically active men separately-after having been isolated from their households. The ways the victims of the civil war organize enmity and revenge is in some ways similar to the individual-

The Gaze of the Wild In Five Neighborhoods

63

I House

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Figure 7. Example of spatial organization during domestic cleansing ritua l.

ization of enmity I described in the section on Galkanda, where a dissociation of the perpetrator from his family occurred and a friendship emerged once the principal perpetrator of violence had died. In Puvakdeniya, hate and anger toward the households of war criminals remains, but the fear has subsided. Because fear had largely concerned individual killers, it subsided when those killers had been disappeared. Moreover, victims did not proceed to kill the remaining family members of the disappeared. This does not mean that fear doesn't linger in Puvakdeniya. Many women still suffer from a "terrified heart" (hita bayayi) and long-term affliction by the gaze of the wild (see Figure 6). Near the top of the hill, relatively inaccessible to the police, stood an illicit distillery. Women regularly complained about violent, inebriated men making the hill paths unsafe, the scary nightly noises of drunken brawls, or the sounds of domestic

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violence. Such incidents constitute an ongoing form of wildness and a cause of illness for women in Puvakdeniya.

Coolie Nationalism: "Our people should follow the example of the Tamil people" For a further analysis of the contemporary meaning of the notion of the wild and the strategies of dehumanization of the enemy in Udahenagama, I consider people's relation to the "Tamil enemy"-the principal enemy of the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist middle class and political elite. On the basis of the way Hendolakanda people deal with their enemies in Panigahakanda and the way Puvakdeniya people deal with the perpetrators of the civil war, one can anticipate that the notion of a homogeneous group of remote enemies such as "Tamils" will be a problematic notion in the Udahenagama context. In fact, in the context of the strategies of individualization of the enemy and the localization of hatred and revenge, the concept of a Tamil enemy is not central in Udahenagama life, despite the fact that Udahenagama families send a considerable number of soldiers to the front in the north and east of the country. During the period of my research, the community of Puvakdeniya was in the process of learning how to deal with a problem of more recent origins than the conflicts related to the civil war of 1988-90: the presence of deserters who had fled the front in the north and east. The high number of casualties in the Sri Lankan army and the terrifYing conditions at the front had led many young soldiers to desert. Rumors circulated in the national press that about 20,000 armed deserters were roaming the countryside in the Southern Province. Two middle-aged men (M1 from household 12 and M2 from household 10) and an elderly man and his wife from Puvakdeniya (M3 and W from household 12) described the plight of deserters: [10] M2: The army has raided the funeral house [in the night during the funeral]. Ml: Did they capture anybody? M2: They captured. Ml: Where was that? M2: On the other side of the river. Ml: At the funeral house? M2: The other two have escaped. Even D. was there! And L. was also there! Just when the army raid started they managed to escape. Ml: Now they have given an order to catch them. M2: Now it goes as follows; the person who gives them shelter will be arrested also. If you keep a person like that [a deserter] in your house, you will be taken away ... It must have been because of some kind of tip-off ( ottuva) that they [the army] have come, otherwise, how would they know? Ml: Somebody must have told [the army] that they were at the funeral house. M2: It is said ( -lu) that five boys have escaped from the army. Ml: Whom did they catch? M2: They said (kivuvii) that it was a boy from the other side of the river.

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Ml: Now they even have the order to shoot them [the deserters]. M2: No matter how well you hide they will catch you. They catch and catch boys over here and over there. [angrily] And why did they become soldiers in the army? Couldn't they have stayed at home? Isn't that true, elder uncle? M3: Oh, I don't know [laughs] [a way of agreeing with what was said] ... M2: If they catch you they beat you [ talanavii: to crush, to flatten, to hammer, to beat, to bruise] ... W: But if they can't live in the army? Why do they go then? Ml: Why are they going? M2: Oh, they go [to the army] as kerumkiirayo [persons who think they are capable of doing anything] ... But then, as soon as they get frightened they escape. Ml: When they are unable to cope with the training they escape. The training is difficult. M2: The training is very difficult. Ml: Once the training is over it is less difficult, but then you don't know by whom you will get shot, by the army or the Tigers ... M2: They escape because they fear for their lives. M3: If they are escaping anyway why don't they just stay at home? Ml: Oh, I don't know [laughs] [agrees, doesn't know either why they do it]. M2: It goes like this. They go to the army ... Then, after having fled, they become outlaws and steal things ( mankolla kiirayo). Ml: This time, because of all the army raids, they [the deserters] won't be able to stay here, ... Even today it can't be there won't be an army raid [there will even be a raid today]. W: Sometimes they [the army] come in civilian clothes. M2: Somebody might have given them a list, and told them that there are so many [deserters] in this particular village. They even said that he [the arrested deserter] was arrested because of his own fault, they [?] said that they [the army] asked him "what is your name?" "what?" "what?" "no, no, that is not your name [use disrespectful pronoun]" they [the army] have said, and next it was all over [laughs] ... They [?] said that he will be beaten severely ... Ml: [sarcastic] Oh, he will be tortured really well. M2: Though the people at the other side of the river said that they have beaten him up here in the village itself ... M2: The families [of the deserters] are said to get in trouble if they lie about the whereabouts of their sons. W: They gave an order to capture them [the deserters], they even said that they would give presents to the people who would help to capture them. They said that recently, didn't they? Ml: [jokes] Yes, and once you have gone to get your present you will be beaten up by the boys [the deserters]. It is better not to do anything. M2: [sarcasm] Presents? They will probably give us the hollow space within a stick of bamboo! [nothing] ... M2: It is only recently that a whole group of our boys had decided to join the army, saying it was a good job. Later, after some time had passed, they all escaped and came back. They couldn't stay in the army (inna biihii) ... They tortured them severely. M2: We can't protect them [our boys]. It is the government's law that we have to give them away. W: Yes, there is a government law according to which you have to give the children. [To date there is no conscription in Sri Lanka. This sentence refers to something rather different that is further described below.] M2: After one year of training, the parents [of the soldiers] have to sign a paper.

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Once the elders have signed, they have completely given (biira dila) them to the army. Then the child is theirs, it belongs to the army. Then they [the children] can't do things in the way the parents would want it. Our boys have escaped before the end of the first year ... M3: So the government has spent money on them for a year. If they would pay the government the amount of money that was spent on them, they would be free [financial indebtedness rather than military need to fight the LTTE is evoked]. M2: Yes, yes. M3: So it is because of their [financial] debts that the boys [the deserters] are captured ... M3: You can't stop the war. Ml: I say that the war will not come to an end. M3: [satirical] To end the war we must reduce the production of Tamil people. The habits of our Sinhalese people are as follows. We only have five children per household, but the Tamil people have twenty per household, and the children they raised they give [for the war], not like us Sinhalese parents. They [the Tamil people] send them to the front straight away. They don't send them for money. Our people go to the army as coolies, Sri Lanka has a coolie army (kuli hamudiivak) [an army of casual laborers, where the soldiers work only for wages]. But [the Tamil people] go to the army courageously, to offer their lives for their country. Those are the habits of the Tamil people ... If we want to win the war, our people must follow the example of the Tamil people; not do it because of money, but do it for the country. But our people don't want to go to the front and die. They don't like to tie a bomb on their bellies and die [become suicide bombers] [laughs sarcastically]. We are casual laborers! And they are not! Even their women fight ... Ml [joking]: I wouldn't mind if they would enroll me in the army! [laughs]. M3: You know why? If you live everything stays the same, and if you die everything stays the same! [laughter]. M2: The people who remain alive will receive some money [compensation]! Ml: Ifwe die! [as soldiers at the front]. M3: Yes, after we have died! ... M3: Mostly village people go to the army. Look in any place, it is always village people who go to the army. Ml: Village people protect Colombo people and they [Colombo people] live well. Villagers cannot just live doing small jobs here and there, they just can't. Because of this state of being unable to do anything [unemployment] some boys go secretly to the army without telling their parents. Why? Because then at least they have a job. Because the boys in the village are unemployed; they depend on their parents. Ml: They stay in the village without doing any work. M2: So they think (hiteno kiyalii) [uses reported speech to report on their thoughts]: "it is good to do this" [to go to the army]. But then, after they have gone to the army, it is too hard and they run away. Ml: After that they just hang around without aims. W: They have an ordinary education, they are educated, but can you get a job with an ordinary education? [rhetorical]. M2: In the village about SO percent of the boys are rowdies ( rastiyiidu). They go to school for a few days and then they get fed up. They don't listen to what their parents say. Once the child has been changed by the environment like that he becomes a rowdy. It is children like this who try to go [to the army]. Why? To help build up the economy of the household ... M2: The children who grow up these days are not like the ones growing up in our

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generation. We grew up with decency (hikmimakin), having fallen into the society [samiidjeta viitilii as opposed to viiteno rastiyiidu piittata, having become an outlaw]. Those boys get angry easily. These days we have to agree with what the boys say. What the young people say, what the new generation says, that is what is correct. Not what the parents say. M2: They go [to the army] and they think about it in a very simple way. They think that if they go to the army they will have a job, and then they will be able to live off that salary. Ml: But then, after you go, they torture you there, don't they? And because they torture you, you escape ... Ml: But if they don't do any work in the house either, what is the reason for them being at home? M2: Most of the children of this generation don't do any work at home when they are told to. It is only with great difficulty, after having scolded and threatened them, that you can get them to do some work. Ml: Now, I say in the morning [laughs], "son, pluck some tea," but he doesn't pluck tea. He eats and then runs away, gets dressed, has a bath, comes back in the afternoon, eats again, and runs away again, comes back at night at about 1 or 2 in the morning, eats, sleeps and goes away again in the morning. M2: He [the son] must have got used to the company of the rowdies. So then his mother scolds him. Ml: Mother scolds him. I stay silent.

In addition to the lack of a prominent local shared discourse about a Tamil enemy, it was this conversation that lead me to define the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism practiced in Udahenagama as a "coolie nationalism," or the nationalism of the daily-wage laborer. The conflict with the Tamil ethnic minority has been reframed in local terms as the problem of rowdy sons, especially after they have become deserters. The local face of a remote form of political, interethnic violence is very similar to the violence of the civil war of 1988-90.1° During the civil war of the late 1980s, during the conflict between pro-insurgency and pro-army individuals, denunciation of JVP activists to the counter-insurgency forces and their subsequent disappearance played a major role in structuring the conflict locally (see the previous section on Galkanda). Nowadays a very similar type of violence takes place when deserters are betrayed by local people, denounced to the army and disappeared in a high-risk squadron at the deadly front. It is again by means of the dynamic of giving tip-offs to the army about one's enemies that a political, large-scale conflict gains relevance in the local context. Remote forms of wildness, such as the war against the LTTE, did not seem to play a role in the women's ambiguous discourse about the gaze of the wild. What featured were the drunken youths, unpredictable soldiers on leave from the front, deserters, tip-offs, and the increasingly common army raids to arrest deserters. Coolie nationalism notwithstanding, not all the neighborhoods in the Udahenagama area participate in the war against the Tamil minority. As I describe below, people from the Beragama neighborhood presented another sort of wildness to me.

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Beragama Neighboring peoples condescendingly refer to this lower-caste community as the "gode," the "heap" (of people). Its official name, Beragama, literally "the village of the drum," is just as humiliating. Though the name is used by higher-caste people and bureaucrats outside the community, the inhabitants themselves never mention it. The drummers' caste people inhabiting the village call their place Galkanda, blurring the distinction with the nearby higher-caste neighborhood of Galkanda. For the sake of clarity, and in order to be able to consider these people as a separate group, I have to use the pejorative place-name here. Belonging to the drummers' caste as they do, the "people of the heap" represent a major supply of ritual specialists for the Udahenagama area (and far beyond). None of them were disappeared throughout the civil war (see Figure 8). When the counter-insurgency forces conducted largescale cordon-and-search operations and arrests in the area, groups of men (up to twenty or thirty at a time) from "the heap" were arrested, but they were all released soon afterward. This might be a coincidence or it might have to do with the lack of interest the authorities had in lower-caste people. Party politics in the Udahenagama area tend to be dominated by people from the cultivator caste. Women from Beragama, when asked explicitly, would comment that party-political affiliation in their community was "mixed." Party politics in Beragama seemed to take a less prominent position than, for example, in Puvakdeniya or Hendolakanda. Too Scared to Fight

Despite being lower caste, this neighborhood is economically well off. In the contemporary context, their traditional caste-related occupationscarpentry, masonry, and dancing-are a more certain source of income than the occupations of higher-caste neighboring people can offer. Young boys often take up an apprenticeship (at a building site or a dancing school) outside the village. This community only sent one soldier to the front, from a marginal and socially ostracized household. His wife's worries were met with little sympathy by the rest of the inhabitants of this neighborhood. When I asked women from Beragama why their sons were not sent to the army, they would answer in a quizzical way: "Oh, we are much too frightened for that, it is much too terrifying for us." Fear, a terrified heart (hita bayayi) is a common source of illness, but it also needs to be mentioned that it is a very fashionable and ladylike comment to make. While complaining about "being terrified," one stresses one's distinctiveness from the people who are less frightened and engage in fearsome and reprehensible activities, such as sending sons to the front.

40

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Figure 8. Survey area in Beragama (random survey) : 47 households.

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The Wild from the Sorcerers' Perspective The ritual specialists of Beragama, who have regular access to other neighborhoods, bring home stories of the dangerous and unsocialized nature of the people who attended their rituals. Often ritual specialists have difficulty establishing their authority and carrying out a ritual in higher-caste neighborhoods. Regularly teased by young men in the habit of ridiculing tradition, they are sometimes even chased away from their rituals altogether. The violence of these young people "who do not trust anybody" and the danger of the ambiguity of the gaze of the wild generally both feature in narratives about shambolic visits to certain neighborhoods. A twenty-eight-year-old ritual specialist explained: [11] No matter what happens, they [young men] don't care. They don't take it seriously ... There are also people who tell everybody that there aren't any wild spirits (yakku). They are going through a good period [of their lives]. It is only because of that they can they can be like that. But when they go through bad times, when something happens to such a person, then they will speak differently. In some households, there are people who say they don't care about the wild spirits. I have performed rituals for such people so many times ... The boys who grow up now don't care, they don't even know [anything] until the gaze of the wild (dishtiya) falls upon them ... Once we went to perform a cleansing ritual (tovile) in V., it was a long time ago, we went with my uncle [his teacher] ... There were four boys who constantly said: "There are no wild spirits (yakku) at all, where can there be beings that are more 'yakku' than us" (mona yakekvat niiteyi kohedeiyi yakku inne apita vadii arahe kiyalii)? And then the cock (billa: sacrificial substitute) died from the gaze of the wild while we were at the cemetery. We just left it there and made them bring another cock. So those four boys then said "there are no wild spirits" and they said "let's eat the cock!" So we [the ritual specialists] said "eat it," and we left them at the cemetery. By six in the morning, a message came that all four boys had diarrhea-that the gaze of the wild had fallen upon them. It could not be cured. We [the ritual specialists] don't know whether they got cured. We quickly slid away, left secretly in the morning. We never went back to that area. Things like that happen ... There are people [in the audience] who dance while the ritual specialists dance. Just to tease and ridicule the ritual specialist. They grab and shake the flower hut [a construction on the edge of the ritual space]. We don't let them do that, if they don't stop the ritual specialist who came from outside/from another village will charm/ ensorcel them, so that they dance forever ... The gaze of the wild will then fall upon such a person. We can send the gaze of the wild to people who keep teasing us. They tend to disturb us, they tease us so much that we are not able to perform the rituals in the proper way ... There are methods to send them away by using charms (gurukam) ... Yes, you can punish them then and there. At the same time, we place an oil lamp in the lamp hut for the godling Suniyam. If this is done properly there will be no trouble at all till dawn, till six in the morning, then there won't be any trouble for the people at the cleansing ritual. The godling Suniyam stays near us for protection. If somebody causes trouble at the cleansing ritual, the godling Suniyam sees it. When this troublemaker is on his way to the cleansing ritual a punishment is given then and there; someone will hit him with a pole, or somebody will hide in the forest, wait for him near the road, and hit him. It is with this thing [the power] of the godling Suniyam that somebody hits him ...

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We cannot see it [the godling Suniyam], but my grandmother says she sees the godling Suniyam. We don't see it. We also call the godling Suniyam a wild spirit, Suniyam yakii. It is for the godling Suniyam that we light an oil lamp when we start our [ritual] work. It is the other wild spirits we summon through offerings, but the one who ensures our protection till dawn is the godling Suniyam. He won't let any trouble (karadarayak) befall us. Suniyam protects us, so that no trouble will come to the house where we perform the cleansing ritual. In this passage, the youths' constant (and often violent) disruptions of ritual events prompted the ritual specialist to relate that the cock actually died from the gaze of the wild. This is an extreme situation, since the cock is usually not meant to die during the ritual. Being a (sacrificial) substitute for a human being, the cock will not actually be killed but will be substituted for by other offerings to the wild spirits (yakku). Reports in the ethnographic literature that describe the actual death of the cock relate how an exceptionally mad sick person, utterly consumed by the gaze of the wild, bites off the head of the cock and sucks its blood. In this narrative, this sequence of events does not occur. The announcement of the death of the cock caused by the gaze of the wild closely follows on a description of unsociable and potentially violent youths (who claim to be wild spirits themselves). Contemporary violence and the gaze of the wild are juxtaposed, one storyline forming the context for the other and vice versa. The narrator interweaves the threats and violence of the youths with the gaze of the wild. The narrative easily slides from one type of description to the other and quickly shifts from a description that uses the vocabulary of violence and "trouble" to a description based on the notion of dishtiya. Later on, the narrative slides in the reverse direction, from the gaze of the wild straight back to public violence. The gaze of the wild sent by the ritual specialists, with the help of the godling or yakii Suniyam, results in a type of public violence common to nights when cleansing rituals are performed: the assault or murder of members of the audience while on their way to the ritual event. In this narrative, it is the gaze of Suniyam that is at once protective of the audience (and ritual specialists) and punitive toward the troublemakers, the gaze of the Suniyam godling or the Suniyam yakii that helps avoid "trouble" at the house where a cleansing ritual is performed. Here the gaze of Suniyam is not merely there to protect people from the gazes of the other wild spirits (yakku) that will be summoned and activated throughout the ritual (dishtiya of Mahasohona, Kalu Kumara, or Riri Yaka). Suniyam's gaze is also there to protect everybody from human troublemakers. Throughout this particular narrative, the gaze of the wild's presence is very closely connected with a more secular, everyday cycle of violence, threats, and assaults in the public sphere. The communicative strategy chosen by this ritual specialist is not the ambiguity that I described as typical of women's accounts of the gaze of the wild in the previous chapter. The gaze of the wild and the youth's threats

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remain two separate narrative strands that revolve around one another. Ramanujan's analysis (1989) of contextual descriptions and framing techniques in Indian literature and Tamil and Sanskrit lyrics could serve as a basis for the analysis of this narrative technique. Ramanujan describes how a tale receives its meaning and moral connotations from the contextual description that accompanies it. A tale is constructed as a structure of successive encompassments in which the contained mirrors the container, the texts mirrors the context, and the meaning is elicited by the context. In the ritual specialist's narrative quoted above, it is unclear what is context and what is text, what is contained and what plays the role of container. It is as if both narrative strands form a context for one another, the gaze of the wild receiving its meaning from the violence of contemporary youths, and the tale of the youths acquiring its moral connotation by virtue of the evocation of the world of the spirits and the gaze of the wild. An elderly ritual specialist evoked (and proudly dismissed) the fears that had affected this young ritual specialist during his performances: [12] Akka: Is it difficult to control the people who tease you? Ritual specialist (RS): [rhetorical] Is it difficult? They don't listen to anything you say! Akka: What can you do, guruniinse [teacher, ritual specialist]? RS: We know what to do against those, but we don't do it. It is sinful (pav) to do such things. We are all people who will die one day, aren't we? So why should we do sinful things? [laughs] With one such thing, I can hit such a man and finish him off [laughs]. Akka: That means by using sorcery spells [sending the gaze of the wild upon them]? RS: [laughs] ... If they trouble us, we don't wait and watch. Then and there, we do something [cast a sorcery spell] [laughs]. Therefore, they are scared of us. But we don't do such things ... Akka: Is the new generation (ape alut parampariiva, alut lamayi) scared of you? RS: Scared! Even "the people who do not trust anybody" do not dare to oppose me/speak against me. They don't argue with me! It is like that [laughs].

The narratives about performances related by Beragama's ritual specialists are often tinged with a mixture of fear, awe, and condescension toward troublemakers in other neighborhoods. Haunted by unsociable and unsocialized youths, the sorcerers evoke the gaze of the wild. It is obviously not only the gazes of the institutionalized wild spirits that are summoned during the rite (the dishtiya of Mahasohona, Kalu Kumara, Riiri Yaka, and Suniyam) that constitute this gaze of the wild. Ritual specialists also evoke the gaze of the wild in connection with the presence of human troublemakers and everyday forms of violence. What is important here is that they do not make a link between the gaze of the wild and people from other (often rival) neighborhoods in an undifferentiated way. The dehumanizing strategy is not applied to a whole group of people in an indiscriminate manner. The ritual specialists are careful to use this communicative strategy to de-

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scribe only specific incidents and the behavior of a very specific category of people from other neighborhoods: troublesome young men. The young troublemakers' families are meticulously ignored and are therefore not associated with the gaze of the wild. I would suggest that this situation is comparable to the dissociation of the perpetrator from his family that I described in the sections regarding Galkanda and Puvakdeniya.

Kalubowatta: A Brief Sketch I now turn to the last neighborhood in which I conducted research, Kalubowatta, from which a number of families had been collaborating with the mental health NGO I was studying. My research in Kalubowatta was consequently focused on NGO activity in the neighborhood, and the families I visited were almost exclusively those mentioned on lists of participants in the NGO programs. Because I did not want to be perceived as an employee of the NGO in question, I left this body of research to the very end of my fieldwork. Although my focus on NGO collaborators limited the topics of conversation and at times created an atmosphere of formality and suspicion that I had not previously experienced, it did lead to revelations regarding the counter-insurgency violence. People from Kalubowatta described events that people from other neighborhoods with whom I had built up a longer-term relationship had not mentioned so explicitlyno doubt in order to protect me from fear and consequent illness (hita bayayi). Although counter-insurgency violence had also been a fact of life in the other neighborhoods under study, it never became a sustained topic of conversation during my work in these neighborhoods. Even though it was widespread, I therefore include this local history of violence under the section on Kalubowatta because the presentation of this type of information was a product of my more focused research strategy in this neighborhood. This does not mean that I learned more about discourses on violence in Kalubowatta. On the contrary, this set of interviews, focused on the NGO and on political violence as they were, made it easy for me to collect facts regarding the violence but revealed less about the way in which people represent this violence to each other. Many people from Kalubowatta were disappeared, and many others managed to save their lives by hiding in the nearby forest. Four of the families who collaborated with the NGO had had a family member killed by the army, while local JVP insurgents had killed men from two other households in the neighborhood. That means that, in Kalubowatta, in 3 percent of the households a family member was killed and/ or disappeared. Some of the murderers or people who gave tip-offs to the army were still hiding in this neighborhood at the time of my research and were still palpably feared all these years later. In fact, rumors were circulating that the JVP insurgents were reorganizing themselves.

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My research into the activities of a mental health NGO in Kalubowatta revealed that there was a high degree of suspicion, competition, and even hate among those receiving help from the NGO. People tried to hide their involvement and potential benefits while at the same time trying to find out about others' contacts and successes. All the families of the disappeared had sent a letter with information about the disappearance to the Commission of Inquiry. None of the families of the disappeared with whom I spoke claimed to have received compensation, but there was much speculation and animosity about families that were suspected of having received some compensation, either through their involvement with this NGO or through links with regional politicians. The Helicopters of the Special Task Force People from this area readily talked about the highly organized cordonand-search operations involving ground troops backed by helicopters, in which all the men from the area were rounded up and driven to a local school. The soldiers would then choose one of the men to be the billa. In the context of the civil war and the modern counter-insurgency techniques used by the Special Task Force, the billa was the betrayer but also a member of the community who was certain to die soon. The billa was hooded by the soldiers and then made to identifY JVP insurgents among the crowd of village men who were made to parade in front ofhim.ll For this person's personal enemies or the inhabitants of disputed land, a nod of the billa's head meant arrest, torture, and often disappearance. Mter this identification parade, the billa was invariably shot. Fifty or sixty men were once made to parade in front of a billa in Kalubowatta. Seven of them disappeared. In other cases, Special Task Force soldiers stopped buses and made all their passengers parade in front of a billa at gunpoint. The word billa is borrowed from the context of traditional storytelling. In this context the billa is a mythical person who is said to scare or carry away naughty children. This traditional concept was thus appropriated to refer to counter-insurgency techniques and strategies of community destabilization. Much in the way that the idioms for expressing personal suffering related to domestic strife and violence are used to refer to political violence, the notion of billa, belonging to the domain of traditional storytelling, was transposed to a context of political violence and global counter-insurgency warfare. The Limits of Hatred As I have previously mentioned with respect to other neighborhoods, the their victims alike drew a remarkable distinction between those they identified as legitimate targets and other

JVP combatants of Kalubowatta and

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members of their families or political parties. As a middle-aged widow put it to me: [13] One [of the murderers] is still alive. He was given bail. He got married and even has a small child. Those should go onto/affect the wife (okunta pavul pitin yiivi). The wife is expecting a baby. It should affect that baby too and everybody with his blood. Because of what they did to me. I tell the gods every morning and evening ... I tell the gods my sorrows. I would like to take revenge on those who came [and murdered my husband]. I am not angry with those boys' parents though. Those young thugs/wild boys ( madiivi biippala) did it without their [parents'] knowledge ... I am only angry with those who came [and killed]. I am on speaking terms [with their parents]. Those young boys did that while their parents had told them not to. There were about a hundred or two hundred boys here who joined the JVP insurgency. I [only] hate the four of them that came to my house [and killed]. Even though they [the hundred others] did this job [of organizing an insurgency] they didn't do anything wrong to me. I will take revenge on the four boys that came to my house. This is on my two children's mind as well. The children say that when they grow up, when they grow old they are going to kill one of them, because they killed our father. This passage clearly reveals the mechanics of what I have termed the containment of violence. A crucial point in the above-mentioned individualization of enmity is expressed by the widow as follows: "even though they organized an insurgency they didn't do anything wrong to me." Even after what happened to her and her family, she radically refrains from considering a whole group of people her enemies and a legitimate target for revenge. In this statement, she limits her hatred to four boys out of the two hundred that carried out disappearances and killings in the area. And she asserts that she is still on speaking terms with the parents of her husband's murderers. Enigmatic as the cycle of violence may be, it is matched by an equally enigmatic cycle of containment of violence. The family members of killers and victims alike join forces in comprising this cycle of containment. Killers attacked very specific enemies but not their enemies' family members. The family members of disappeared victims allowed the families of killers to continue to live in the neighborhood without fearing for their lives. In this woman's narrative, however, the cycle of containment of violence does not cover the children of the perpetrator. The question now remaining thus concerns the extent to which the containment that protected the families of the young killers of the civil war of 1988-90 will prevent the next generation from resurrecting the conflict by targeting the children of their fathers' killers.

The Cycle of Containment of Violence The description of the local history of violence in the neighborhoods under study touched on three central themes. The first emphasized the fact that a number of women in each neighborhood suffer from a lifelong

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exposure to the gaze of the wild. Their gossip and laments play a central role in the representation of the history of violence in U dahenagama. The second theme concerned the triadic nature of the culture-specific organization of enmity. During relatively peaceful times, this triad consists of the gaze of the wild, a victim suffering from the gaze of the wild, and a local enemy who might have consulted a sorcerer to send the wild to his or her victim. However, at times of war when counter-insurgency commandos or death squads were operating, a parallel triad of enmity emerged. This triad consisted of the death squads of the Special Task Force, a victim, and a local enemy who might have betrayed someone to the Special Task Force to make the victim disappear. During the civil war of 1988-90 the counterinsurgency commandos of the army thus took up a role in this triadic organization of enmity and were used by local enemies to take revenge on one another. Currently, this same mechanism operates when people denounce deserters to the Sri Lankan army. A remote form of violence-the front in the north and east of the country-thus becomes localized in the village. It is not an exaggeration to say that one of the Udahenagama people's motivations to participate in remote forms of political violence (for example, the current war against the Tamil minority or party-political violence) lies in this localizing triad of enmity. A third theme recurs in the descriptions of the local histories of violence I presented: the individualization of enmity and the dissociation of a perpetrator and his family. This phenomenon protected the family members of the victims and perpetrators of the civil war of the late 1980s, allowing them to live in close proximity to each other in the same neighborhoods. Revenge was taken on individual enemies, but the enemies' family members were not killed or disappeared. This limitation of hatred to individual enemies facilitated the containment of the cycle of violence, averting much more widespread forms of violence, and the number of internally displaced people was thus kept to a minimum. The number of casualties would have been at least five to ten times greater if villagers had taken revenge on people merely because of their group affiliation and identification as pro:JVP or pro-army independent from their participation in individual incidents. This was not "the fog of war," however-the unmitigated chaos and anarchy that many war correspondents depict-but rather a cycle of violence that comprises within it the conditions of its own containment. In Udahenagama the dominant notion of enmity consists of an individual enemy, and people are reluctant to conceive of an undifferentiated group of people as an enemy. This leads to a culture-specific cycle of containment of violence. Despite the omnipresent effects of the civil war, party-political strife, or inter-caste conflict, people keep very specific enemies in mind, identified on the basis of specific incidents. This may explain why the nationalist propaganda about ethnic and religious minorities

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(Tamils) representing the ultimate enemy and the greatest danger has never caught on very well in Udahenagama. What would strike a distanced observer first when considering the violence in southern Sri Lanka would no doubt be the violence and not its containment. During the civil war of 1988-90, approximately thirty thousand people were disappeared. Although this wasn't a war based on ethnic or religious differences, there were plenty of categorical distinctions that could be made between opposing groups. The most obvious distinction was and still remains political-dividing pro-insurgency from proarmy families. This distinction reflects much deeper divisions such as caste and class distinctions. Being faced with such a large number of disappearances, a distanced observer might assume whole families were targeted. On closer observation of the situation in Udahenagama, however, I came to the conclusion that this was not the case.J2 The majority of brothers and fathers of insurgents had survived, and I never came across any cases of women or children killed in the civil war. Despite the thirty thousand disappearances, the cycle of containment of violence ensured that people were not targeted merely because of their caste, class, or political and family affiliation. Furthermore, what I called the individualization of enmity or the dissociation of the perpetrator from his family was equally present during peacetime sorcery-related forms of violence and wartime disappearances. As I have argued earlier in this chapter, the organization of enmity during traditional sorcery-related violence and the violence of the civil war are readily comparable. This is what leads me to suggest that the cycle of containment of violence is culture-specific. The containment of violence does not merely depend on the fact that the civil war of 1988-90 was fought between members of the same ethnic group. There were many other categorical distinctions that could have been made and could have defined whole categories of people as collective targets. However, this never happened in U dahenagama, and young men were killed or betrayed only because of their participation in specific incidents. The discourse on the gaze of the wild can easily be labeled as a dehumanizing one, through which abusive husbands, sons, or violent neighbors get lumped together into one inhuman force. I observed, however, that the strategies of revenge deployed in the dynamic of this discourse are directed toward individual enemies and not toward whole groups of people. In other words, people tend not to take revenge on the people they allude to in the ambiguous discourse on the gaze of the wild. The triadic organization of enmity, transposed into a context of civil war, leads to the organization of hatred around particular, local, individual enemies and played a role in the cycle of containment in which the family members of killers and victims were spared. This discussion of the role of idioms and strategies related to personal

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suffering and domestic cleansing rituals in a context of civil war can be framed within a larger debate in the literature on the link between ritual and political violence. This wider debate includes discussions about the connection between the violence enacted by the victims of society in ritual contexts (cf. ethnographic texts reviewed by Lewis 1971) and everyday domestic or public/political violence. Some ethnographic research revealed that ritual violence functions as a protective mechanism against more widespread everyday violence (e.g., Allen 1998; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Gluckman 1968; La Fontaine 1985). The anthropologists who have studied contemporary urban riots (e.g., Das 1998; Devisch 1995; Kapferer 1997a, b), 13 however, show how certain aspects of culture-specific ritual violence spill over into the everyday context and take the form of large-scale riots. In the Sri Lankan context, this argument proposes that a dehumanized and "demonized" Tamil Other, as a general category, is periodically exorcized by means of widespread, indiscriminate looting, burning, and killing. These large-scale, urban-based, national (and nationalist) strategies of dehumanization of the enemy are a global phenomenon, however, and remain distinct from the local processes of dehumanization that I observed in Udahenagama. The triadic organization of enmity that uses the dehumanizing notion of the gaze of the wild determines the local character of political violence and protects people against worse atrocities. As long as only specific individuals become targets for revenge, their families remain relatively safe. My findings therefore suggest that ritual violence-together with the idioms and strategies of revenge it engenders-is at once both a protective mechanism (a factor in the cycle of containment of violence) and a blueprint for the local characteristics of the cycle of violence. The experiential correlation between large-scale communal riots and exorcism postulated in the ethnographic literature (e.g., Das 1998; Kapferer quoted in Das 1998) is, in my interpretation, deduced from the modernist narratives of middle-class politicians and cartoonists in the field of study, in which a universalized enemy is demonized or dehumanized. In Sri Lanka, politicians and cartoonists use the imagery of the wild spirits (yakku) and of exorcism to mobilize popular opinion against the Tamil minority, making of them an object of hatred and a source of fear and revulsion. My interpretation of this middle-class discourse is once again indebted to Ramanujan's analysis ( 1989) of the pervasive emphasis on contexts and the particularities of situations in the great narratives of Indian literature. From the perspective of a Western observer, Indian lyrics are excessively dependent on contextual descriptions. For Ramanujan, however, modernization represents an erosion of contexts: the modern is the context-free in which universal values and universal knowledge reign. I extend this literary analysis to an analysis of the organization of enmity and hatred in southern

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Sri Lanka. In Udahenagama, enmity is context-specific and depends on very particular incidents. Revenge is not taken on a generic group of enemies. In middle-class politics, however, the discourse on the gaze of the wild is reified; it loses its ambiguity and its connection with a triadic organization of enmity. Under such conditions, it may be harnessed as an instrument for the organization of large-scale communal riots. The discourse on riots as a form of traditional exorcism is thus necessarily a product of modernity, in which enmity has been extracted from its contexts and an entire ethnic group is transformed into a universal enemy. It is only under conditions of what I now term modernist violence that people can be eliminated on a wide scale because of their group identity. There is a danger, however, in extrapolating analyses of middle-class forms of dehumanization to a rural context. People living in villages as well as in urban centers in the Southern Province testifY that the violence of the civil war of 1988-90 was particularly bad in remote areas, particularly in villages at the outskirts of district and divisional boundaries, or in communities located at a distance from a main road.l4 Udahenagama is located in one such remote border-zone. These are exactly the communities that are thought of as traditional by people who live in town or even by the people who live near the main road and differentiate themselves from the people who live on the forested slopes of the hills ( dushkara palata: backward areas). Middle-class political rhetoric and the above-mentioned ethnographic analyses both establish a link between political violence and traditional forms of hatred (e.g., sorcery and exorcism) and thereby seem to account for the higher degree of violence that occurred in remote areas in 1988-90. These discourses, however, covertly promote the projection of evil and violence upon rural, traditional communities and help a violent modernist nation-state to locate the origins of its wide-scale human rights abuses within the very communities that it victimizes. The role of anthropologists in such a dynamic needs to be questioned. The example of an anthropologist employed by a French state-sponsored institution provides a case-in-point. In an interview in Le Monde about the atrocities in Algeria (Tuquoi 1997), the anthropologist Grandguillaume argued that large-scale massacres are linked to local disputes and grudges: Anthropologist: What's taking place is a horrific and wholesale settling of scores ... Journalist: Can that explain why three hundred or four hundred people get massacred in a village? Anthropologist: ... I agree that the scale of the violence is such that one probably has to delve further into the past. Scores are being settled today whose origins lie in conflicts resulting from Algerian independence ... Such as the massacre of a hundred thousand harkis that took place only months after independence ... those harkis were members of families and tribes. There are persistent grudges that have been reactivated . . . Traditional hatred between villages, families and clans-the results of breaches of honor or disputes over land-lingers on ...

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There may have been just as much violence in previous years without one being aware of it. (my emphasis) This anthropologist refers to traditional forms of hatred to explain massacres of three hundred to four hundred people. Weeks later, however, an agent of Algeria's military security who defected to Britain was interviewed by the Guardian (Sweeney and Doyle 1997) and flatly contradicted the anthropologist Grandguillaume: The relentless massacres in Algeria are the work of secret police and army death squads ... Algerian intelligence agents routinely bribe European police,journalists and MP's ... they spent some of Algeria's oil and gas billions to bribe politicians and security officials in Europe ... I personally delivered a suitcase containing 500,000 francs to one French MP with strong links to the French intelligence services ... All the intelligence services in Europe know that the government is doing it, but they are keeping quiet because they want to protect their supplies of oil. It is of course lamentable that the anthropologist involved was not in possession of this information when he analyzed his ethnographic evidence of "traditional hatred" and linked it to large-scale massacres. In Sri Lanka, as mentioned earlier, an estimated thirty thousand people disappeared during the civil war of 1988-90. A counter-insurgency unit known as the Special Task Force carried out large-scale counter-insurgency operations in rural areas as part of a cold-war strategy to eliminate the political base of the "communist" activists of the JVP. Udahenagama people were subjected to cordon-and-search operations, community destabilization using concealed apprehension techniques (billa), and other aspects of a counter-insurgency type of warfare. In the local context, these operations constituted a type of wildness that was out of proportion with any type of violence that had heretofore been understood under the notion of the gaze of the wild. This time the wild hovered around in the sky, looking down on the villagers from inside its helicopters. This is not to say that the people from Udahenagama did not actively participate in the atrocities of the civil war. I documented the ways neighbors disappeared one another. I would argue, however, on the basis of the triadic organization of enmity in Udahenagama, that reprisals and violent acts against local enemies were directly related to people's suffering and terror, itself the direct result of a more global wildness, orchestrated on a much larger scale by a militarized nation-state. I thus come back to the image of the two parallel triads of enmity I evoked earlier in this chapter. The sequence of events of a triad of enmity during relatively peaceful times goes as follows: a victim suffers from the gaze of the wild associated with domestic strife or violence. This suffering gives rise to a sorcery accusation in which a local enemy is accused of sending the wild to her /his victim (committing sorcery) and becomes a target for revenge. The suffering

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caused by the gaze of the wild plays the primary and causal role in this sequence of events. On the basis of the data I collected, I argue that the sequence of events of the triad of enmity developed during times of war-when the army became incorporated into the local cycle of violence-was similar. A victim, the wild forces of counter-insurgency violence, and a local enemy who could be disappeared constitute this second triad of enmity. Much as the wildness associated with family strife is the motivating force behind accusations and revenge against a local enemy, the suffering caused by the militarized nation-state was a crucial force behind this sequence of events. As I have mentioned, the violence of the civil war was worse in remote areas and less extreme in areas near the main roads. The reasons for this differential distribution of extreme violence are not immediately clear. The people who live near the main road, possess land, and run shops are not substantially culturally different from the landless daily-wage laborers living on the forested slopes of the hills. The people who live near the roads in the Udahenagama area do not organize domestic cleansing rituals (tovil) as often, they have more easy access to the local (Ayurvedic) health center and generally rely less on the services of the ritual specialists from Beragama. However, this does not mean that they engage less in "traditional forms of hatred" (Tuquoi 1997), sorcery accusations and sorcery that can also be perpetrated at local and regional shrines (cf. Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988). The triadic organization of enmity is thus equally present among the people who live near the main road, although it might be less visible since they don't use loud, night-long domestic cleansing rituals to deal with local enemies. People who live near the roads in the Udahenagama area, however, suffered less from the violence of the civil war, and the insurgency and counter-insurgency violence was concentrated in remote areas on the forested slopes of the hills. Since people who live near the roads equally participate in sorcery practices and the triadic organization of enmities, the prevalence of traditional forms of hatred (see, e.g., Tuquoi 1997) cannot be used to explain the differential distribution of extreme violence. The data I collected in the Udahenagama area strongly suggest the following explanation. I postulate a cycle of violence determined by the following factors. First of all, Sri Lankan political analysts argued that the JVP organization during the insurgency of 1988-90 recruited a more dangerous group of semi-educated youth from remote villages (Alles 1990: 301). Indeed the Marxist ideology of the JVP might have been more appealing to the offspring of landless coolie workers than to the sons of landowners and shopkeepers living near the main roads. This relatively small regional difference and differential distribution ofJVP recruits might have reenforced the already bloated imagery of "communist enemies" and "the dangerous landless peasantry" in cold-war counter-insurgency

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ideology. In accordance with this belief, the violence organized by counterinsurgency forces would have become increasingly vicious in remote areas. The wildness of this incipient civil war caused an excessive amount of personal suffering and terror 15 (hita bayayi and dishtiya) that led to strategies of revenge against local enemies, eventually triggering a full-scale civil war. However, women and children and the families of perpetrators more generally were protected by a culture-specific cycle of containment of violence by means of which Udahenagama people were able to forestall the full-blown cycle of widespread modernist violence generated by the nation-state.

Part II Cautious Discourses About the Wild

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Chapter 4 ~~we can tell anything to the milk Udahenagama Soundscapes

tree~~

Before describing the characteristics of discourses about the wild in Chapters 5 and 6, I want first to set these discourses in the context of Udahenagama acoustic space. A discourse is not only a flow of information or a style of talking. Discourse is voiced; it sounds, resonates, and has a presence among all the other sounds that characterize daily life. Its enunciation thus crucially depends on the ways acoustic space in general is organized and experienced. In this chapter I reinsert verbal discourses into the general economy of sounds in order to be able to highlight the connections between U dahenagama discursive styles and the ways that p,eople deal with sounds or noise in general. The visual bias in ethnographic descriptions has often been noted (see Classen 1993; Howes 1991a, b, c; Jackson 1989; Peek 1994; Tilley 1994). In analyses of the spatial organization of houses and households (e.g., Bourdieu 1977; Moore 1986; Vom Bruck 1997) the visual aspects of the organization and the embodiment of space are those most often evoked: characteristics that can most easily be observed by researchers. In contradistinction to this bias, however, Ardener (1993, 12) has pointed out that a map of significant spaces identified by one's gaze might not coincide with a map of significant sound zones. In descriptions of their interactions with the wild, people from Udahenagama frequently mentioned soundscapes, or the characteristics of acoustic space. As terrified people retreat into the relative safety of their houses, violence or the wild come to be experienced primarily as acoustic phenomena. It is thus not surprising that both large-scale (tovil) and smallscale domestic cleansing rituals comprise forms of "acoustic cleansing." In this chapter I describe both the soundscape of the wild and the strategies of acoustic cleansing. I argue that the sound of words, especially the sound of words used to describe the wild, plays a role in both dynamics. Words

Figure 9. Drummer: acoustic cleansing.

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that refer to the wild can make people sick and thereby take part in the illness-provoking soundscape of the wild, while the more cautious discourses about the wild play a protective and potentially cleansing role.

The Soundscapes of the Wild Udahenagama people commonly make a broad distinction between the gedara (house, household, family) and samadjaya (society). Samadjaya should not be understood as being equal to the Western academic concept of "public sphere," however. Because the English word "public" is loaded with Euro-American political connotations (cf. Abedi and Fischer 1993; Hui 1994) I have restricted myself to using this "modernist gloss" (Abedi and Fischer 1993: 223) only as a starting point for the description ofthe cycle of violence examined in Part I. From here on, I avoid the notion ofthe public sphere, so problematic in the Udahenagama context, and instead translate samadjaya as "society." Rather than projecting the notion of a bourgeois public sphere (as in Habermas 1962) onto the Udahenagama context, I root the definition of the nondomestic sphere in local representations. Ardener (1993: 10) argued that, while the application of the Western public-private distinction in non-Western contexts remains problematic, communities often regard the space closest to that occupied by the family as a relatively secure and predictable inner world in contrast to the potentially hostile and untrustworthy space outside. It is in this sense that I define the distinction between gedara, the household, and samadjaya, the wider society. During the lifespan of the current generation of elders there has been an inward movement, in which the household as it were implodes and consolidates itself. Men who used to sleep outside on the porch now prefer to sleep in the main room with the women and children. During puberty rituals, the seclusion hut (kili pala: polluted hut) is no longer built in the forest, but (polluting) young girls spend their seclusion period in the kitchen, inside a usually very well protected section of the house. People in Udahenagama inadvertently evoke an almost non-Sinhala and non-Buddhist wild society encroaching on the ethos of the household. The walls of the house form a barrier and boundary, a protection against evil eyes/poisonous gazes, the gaze of the wild, or the effortless intrusion of strangers. If those barriers are breached, cleansing rituals are used to reestablish the boundaries of house or garden. Nevertheless, the house is immersed in society's soundscapes; it is porous and does not form an effective sound barrier. This aural porosity crosscuts and belies the boundaries erected within visual space and necessitates an analysis of soundscapes. When they are frightened at moments of violence outside, people often remain in their houses behind closed doors, consequently only witnessing the sounds of violent events. Furthermore, the dense vegetation makes for

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a fragmented, obscure landscape in which individual houses and gardens can only be observed at very close range. But this sense of the isolation of houses at the visual level is largely compensated for by the auditory landscape of the Udahenagama area. The hillsides provide the acoustics of an amphitheater in which sounds reverberate across visual boundaries. Within the soundscape, the illicit distilleries at the tops of the hills subject the rest of the neighborhood to their acoustic regime. As groups of drunken men trickle down the hillside paths in the evening, they worry many people. Loud families, invading the (acoustic) space of other houses with the chilling sounds of domestic strife, also frighten neighbors with their sounds. In Puvakdeniya, for example, households 18 or 15 could easily hear people shouting during fights in household 36 (see Figure 6). A young woman (W) in house 18 once made the exposure of the domestic sphere to violations by the soundscape clear to me: [1] W: We didn't go to the funeral. We are angry. There is no land dispute, but we just don't get on. They can't live with us (egollanta inna bane apitekka) [laughs]. He [the young man who died] was the son of our uncle. There is not a single person among them who is good. The people in that whole area (ee pattema inna kattiya) are angry with them. At any time you "look" [listen], they are fighting ... Me: She [the mother of household 36] is not in today, is she? W: Aah, did you go there!? She probably isn't in. There isn't much noise. If she is at home you can hear the noise .... She shouts .... She often fights, if she is at home everything can be heard here. And more trenchant still than the sounds of domestic strife were those of shootings or murders, which often made women in the neighborhood ill (see, for example, transcript 16 in Chapter 2). Similarly, an elderly ritual specialist from Beragama told me, the sound of bomb blasts in Colombo caused the capital's citizens to fall ill: [2] Only people who live nearby fall ill. They hear the sound/noise of the bomb. We only know about it via the radio or television. We don't pay that much attention to it, so we don't fall ill. ... We cannot get scared here, we don't hear the noise. But they [the people in Colombo] fall ill.

Such are the accidental soundscapes of Udahenagama or Colombo, but more often than not sound effects are used as a deliberate weapon. I During the civil war, groups of young insurgents would wander through the neighborhoods screaming insults and threats at their enemies as they passed their closed doors. Many people in Udahenagama complained about the insurgents' noises-shouting or the sounds of fights and executions-terrifying them at night. The insurgents created a soundscape of terror for many people in the area locked inside their houses. A mother (M) from Puvakdeniya talked about her sick teenage son, whom she protected well and always kept inside the house at night:

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[3] M: He screams/laments in his dreams. He is scared, he got scared when he was a child, didn't he? They [the JVP insurgents] come at night and make noises in these places. He might have got scared when he was young. It is that fear that is in his body. It is because of this that he started screaming in his dreams. (my emphasis) Me: That fear? M: Yes, those people come at night, shoot and beat the dogs, kill people, because of anger. They [my children] were small and they got frightened. That fear stayed in his body just like that. He screams at night, in his dreams, "mother, they are beating me," he screams such things.

During my fieldwork period the strategic use of noise and sound reached absurd dimensions. One night an elderly man and his granddaughter were shot by their neighbor for daring to complain that his television was too loud. This was of course but one aspect of a much more complicated and longstanding conflict, but it was nevertheless the provocative use of noise that led to the fatal encounter. When analyzing the politics of sound in Udahenagama, I often found it difficult to discern accidental from more strategic acoustic regimes. The soundscape of the wild is essentially an illness-provoking soundscape that leads to terrified hearts (hita bayayi) and illness. It is impossible to contain, except in its discursive form. Only when the wild is represented, made to sound again by means of words, can rigorous boundaries be erected around it. Chapters 5 and 6 describe how such boundaries are firmly installed at the level of discourse. Discourses about the wild in Udahenagama thus need to be understood as part of this dynamic between an almost uncontrollable soundscape of the wild and the discursive and ritual strategies deployed to contain it.

The Sound of Words To begin this description of verbal acoustic spaces in Udahenagama, I start with a simple observation. People commonly establish their presence in the acoustic domain without relying on the visual aspects of communication. From the confines of their houses or kitchens women easily start conversations with other women working inside their own homes ten to twenty yards away. They simply raise their voices, and thus bridge large distances without taking a step. There is no need for them to face each other and, unlike in the West, it is not considered unusual to communicate without eye or visual contact. In fact, in the public domain whole groups of people seem to be excluded from each other's visual landscapes. When there is a significant status difference between two interlocutors, the one of higher status rarely looks on the one of lower status. Very low-status people thus become invisible in the daily landscapes of the powerful. As a result, their presence only manifests itself at the acoustic level, when they speak and are spoken to or shouted at. Status differences are then enacted and negotiated

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within the acoustic domain; loud and fast-speaking voices (hayiyen means both loud and fast) dominating soft and slow ones (hemin). Words can thus exist as a predominantly acoustic phenomenon, certainly compared to Western contexts in which words tend to be contained within "conversations" primarily defined by visual contact. As I discuss below, the expressions used to talk about voices often refer to the effect a voice has after it has left the speaker and constituted part of a conversation. A voice thus has an effect beyond the immediate context of a speaker and a listener. When referring to a "word" I do not refer primarily to the referential meaning of words or to words that are thought, but rather to the uttered word, the voiced word. I use Voice with an uppercase V from here on to refer to a local understanding of the potential uses one can make of one's voice and the potential effects of utterances. The Poison in the Voice

Many texts have described the evil mouth or the poisonous voice ( kata vaha) in the Sri Lankan context (e.g., Kapferer 1983: 72; Obeyesekere 1984: 46-47; Wirz 1954: 7, 10). For this argument I want briefly to reiterate the definition of evil mouth and make explicit how the poisonous mouth was explained to me during my fieldwork. Apart from the verbal aspects of voicing and listening to voices, a few nonverbal cues are crucial to understanding the effects voices have: to sigh, to spit, and to swallow saliva. I paraphrase ritual specialists from Beragama and Puvakdeniya: [4] Saliva comes into your mouth when you see other people eating good food, your mouth starts watering. This might go along with a happy feeling, you enjoy the good food-wealth, health, or beauty-of people you care for without actually participating in it and you swallow your saliva ... uhm, [you think to yourself) that's good ... this is called seman gannavii.2 Or maybe this situation has the opposite effect on you and you might get angry, jealous, and furious. These feelings are associated with faults or moral shortcomings ( dosha). They don't go along with a movement of ingestion and swallowing but are sent out to other people, especially those who are held responsible for creating those feelings. Through one's breath, gaze, and words they reach others.

Indeed, a poisonous voice goes along with a poisonous gaze (ass vaha) and evil thoughts (ho vaha). The poisonous voice takes the form of jealous, ill-intentioned praise, while evil thoughts find a way out through a silent and bitter sigh, and the jealous and poisonous gaze looks straight at its object rather than averting itself. But the person who is on the receiving end of all this-evil words, breath, or gaze-can sometimes choose to avoid it. When one realizes one is the target of poisonous mouth, one can refuse to submit to it, one then thinks, "May this not affect me, I am not taking this, you take it back," while spitting three times. More often than not, however,

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there is no choice, since the Voice does not affect only the immediate listener or interlocutor. When one is not aware of all this going on, one routinely swallows one's saliva and ingests the faults and moral shortcomings inherent in the other's jealousy and anger (ass vaha dosha or kata vaha dosha). Then one "takes" (in) the poisonous voice (kata vaha gannavii), swallowing it together with one's saliva. Swallowing other people's jealous words is a common cause of illness. Poisonous voice, in my interpretation, could be about the redistribution of danger or anger inherent in inequality: a negotiation takes place between the jealous and the wealthy one about who will take responsibility (kata vaha biira gannavii) for the moral shortcoming ( dosha) inherent in this jealous relationship. This is but one very specific instance in which Voice plays a role in the creation of a moral self, a self not overwhelmed and sickened by the faults and moral shortcomings related to its own jealousy and anger, but a self in a moral deliberation with others.

"Don't tell people frightful things or you will make them ill" Another instance in which Voice is considered a cause of illness and has to be used with caution is when it makes present frightful things. This is most obvious when people are talking about infectious or incurable diseases. It is not acceptable to utter words "chickenpox" or "epileptic fit" in the presence of family and friends. Their heart might suffer from fright (hita bayayi; see Chapter 2) simply by hearing those terrible words. They might get terrified and startled ( hita gassenavii), and this fear and terror may cause illness. So if one wants to mention infectious or incurable diseases, one must use a euphemism, such as "the bad illness." This local understanding of fear has been well documented as one of the major causes of illness (Kapferer 1983: 69; Obeyesekere 1969: 176-77; Wirz 1954: 11). As I discussed in Chapter 2, the more "traditional" origins of fear are the sudden sight of a snake or other crawling animal, or a branch suddenly falling off a tree when you pass by. In the contemporary context, more often than not people do not directly witness terrifYing events but are informed by other people about violence and terror. This is where the local understanding of the effects of listening to a Voice and hearing certain words comes in. Everybody overtly agrees that one has to use euphemisms to talk about dangerous diseases. On the basis of this explicit example and more data about the use of euphemism (which I discuss in Chapter 5), I argue that this attitude underlies other speech practices, for example, general ways of speaking about suffering and violence in which it is important to be careful not to scare your interlocutor. Using scary words is, as it were, a weapon of the afflicted. Misery can easily spread through the Voice.

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How Talking About Danger May Shorten Your Life Taking this description of local interpretations of Voice one step further, I want to consider instances in which Voice is not only the source of a single illness episode but is said to reduce one's entire lifespan (iiyusha). Two such instances were often mentioned: girls who told their mothers before anyone else that they had menstruated for the first time, and recounting one's nightmares without taking the proper precautions. This is how a middle-aged woman from the neighborhood of Beragama explained it to me: [5] I became a big girl when I was sixteen, after I found out about it I told my aunt, she quickly put a small harvesting knife in my hand, to keep me company, and took me to the jack fruit tree, she said "cut the tree," ... when you get your first period, they say: "you need to cut the milk tree~ with a small harvesting knife," and you need to say "it is the time of that thing [menstruation]," don't you?, they truly say "it is not good to tell mother," when you tell your own aunt, that is quite all right, ... so we can tell anything to the milk tree, can't we?, it is apparently said that "if something like that happens, before you tell anybody you have to tell the milk tree," it is also said that "if you have seen a dream, it is not good to tell others," now, if you see a bad dream, without telling anybody, you first tell the jack fruit tree "I saw a dream like this," then it [the bad thing] goes out toward the tree, doesn't it? (pitin yanaviJ:I), if you would tell these people, then it would go outwards toward these people, isn't it?, you can tell anything to the milk tree, or the citrus tree, or the water, so I tell the milk tree ... (my emphasis)

First menstruation is a source of extreme pollution, and talking about it needs to be done in the correct manner. If a pubescent girl tells her mother first, her mother's lifespan will be reduced (iiyusha aduvenavii). This is not an irreversible state. Most healing or cleansing rites ( tovil)both small- and large-scale ones-include episodes in which the lifespan is increased ( iiyusha vadikaranavii, ayibovevii). The person most vulnerable to a voice presenting pollution and danger is the speaker's closest relative: the mother. For this reason, people take precautions to divert the effect of Voice away from their mothers in particular and human listeners in general toward purificatory containers such as milk trees or water.

Words That Represent the Wild I have presented these examples of the effects Voices can have, not so much to describe a causal relation between one and the other as to give an impression of a general atmosphere or ethos surrounding the use of Voice and its reception. I only discerned a few instances in which Udahenagama people made the effect of Voice on the listener explicit (for example bad illnesses, first menstruation, jealous praise), and there are many more subtle instances that are not explicitly marked. For example, words that

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represent violence and terror have to be used with caution and are often replaced by words that only indirectly and ambiguously refer to the wild (see Chapter 5). The importance of these local interpretations of Voice, although mentioned by many people in Udahenagama, was certainly not agreed on unanimously. Fearless youths, for example, didn't mind listening to rough speech. I would rather qualifY the cautious use of Voice as a contested but powerful undercurrent influencing a general style of speaking that errs on the side of caution. The linguistic habits of English speakers to talk about danger and violence might seem crude, lax, unguarded, or even rude in this context. Representing the wild involves the pronunciation of words with which to describe it, and the sound of these words gives the wild its own voice. Just as the soundscapes of violence and civil war affect people, so do the words used to represent this reality. In other words, discourses about the wild act as agents of the wild. Dangerous words are therefore avoided as much as possible among family and friends, where discourses about the wild tend to remain cautious. This culture of caution engenders a particular distribution of knowledge about a past ofviolence. Flows of knowledge within a community are commonly restricted by rules of secrecy established between different groups of people. One could argue that the disclosure of information typically depends on the degree of trust and closeness between interlocutors. In Udahenagama, the social categories that determine the degree of closeness are the following: gedara (house, nuclear family), pavul (family or wife)' nadayoo (relatives)' dura nayakama (remote relatives)' yiiluvo (friends)' vishviisa kenek (trusted people), ape minissu (our people), ahala pahala minissu (people from our hamlet), andurannati minissu (people you don't recognize/know by name), iishraya (contacts), yakii-vage minissu (people who behave like the yakku), samiidjaya (society at large) and the wild. Because ofUdahenagama understandings ofthe effects ofVoice and the enunciation of dangerous words, however, there is no straightforward relationship between degree of closeness, trust, and the revelation of information about a violent past. This is exactly the opposite of what I had assumed would be the case. Outsiders (such as police, army, lawyers, regional politicians, NGO personnel) are easily informed about Udahenagama's violent history. During day-to-day interactions, however, people tend to protect close relatives from fright and illness by avoiding the pronunciation of words that represent the wild. Family members might be informed because they witnessed or lived through the same events. Close friends, members of the extended family, or people from the neighborhood, however, form a core of relative ignorance around the afflicted. By being presented with what I defined as a very cautious discourse on violence, these people are protected from the fearful states of mind that listening to stories of the

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afflicted might bring about. I discuss the linguistic strategies used to bring about such a cautious discourse about the wild and this particular distribution of knowledge about the events of the civil war in the next chapter.

Acoustic Cleansing I now discuss the cleansing strategies people use when they suffer from having heard the sounds of the wild. These forms of acoustic cleansing can be subsumed within the wider context of domestic cleansing. The boundary between the household and the wider society is subject to a continuous process of protection as well as redefinition and renegotiation. This becomes increasingly important in a situation of chronic violence. The discourse on the gaze of the wild distinguishes human (e) from nonhuman, Sinhalese Buddhist from wild spirit (yakii). People need continuously to define the places to which those human and nonhuman qualities belong, and by doing so they create boundaries. The obvious locations for such qualities is inside or outside one's own person, household, garden, immediate surroundings, or neighborhood. Those are the boundaries within visual space that are evoked during the process of defining, locating, and relocating the human and the nonhuman. During cleansing rituals, the gaze of the wild is gradually distanced from an afflicted person's body, bedroom, house, and garden. Various ritual strategies to isolate the house(hold) from a surplus of negative social relations and embeddedness within the wider society take into account visually defined boundaries between household and society. If sorcery is suspected, for example, ritual specialists can protect the household by spreading sea sand around the garden. As one ritual specialist explained, "sand from the bottom of the sea has never been walked upon by other people." Sea sand denotes an absence of others, and in this sense it purifies and isolates the household from the rest of society, turning it into an island of sorts. During domestic cleansing rituals, ritual specialists further purifY the house by means of fireballs, which they produce by throwing highly flammable powdered resin into the air and lighting it with their torches. The fireballs engulf and cleanse room after room and are finally used to purifY all the entrances to the house. When there is a contagious illness in the family, the doors and windows are kept shut. Equally, when an enemy has fallen ill and is likely to try to take revenge through sorcery, his or her potential victims are careful to keep all their doors and windows shut. These strategies of isolation once again evince the triadic organization of enmity (a victim, a local enemy, and the gaze of the wild) that I discussed in Part I. Domestic cleansing rituals first remove the nefarious effects of a sorcery spell and then send a new spell back to a local enemy who is held responsible for the first spell. Ritual specialists do not only establish

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a boundary between two feuding households, by means of cutting the tie of sorcery (the power one household had over another), but take revenge on an enemy as well. If I were to focus on anti-sorcery rites as a form of sorcery I would only highlight such dyadic relationships within the community. Domestic cleansing rituals do more than ensorcel an enemy. Ritual specialists also cleanse the household from the effects of sorcery: the gaze of the wild. Domestic cleansing rituals are thus involved in organizing a boundary between individual households and the various contemporary forms of wildness that are subsumed under the notion of the gaze of the wild. Indeed, the negotiation of the boundary between a household and the wider society involves more than the management of dyadic relationships with potential individual enemies. Ritual specialists need to establish a boundary between the nuclear household and the wild. Within a triadic organization of enmity, people need to maintain a boundary between victim and local enemy as well as a boundary between victim and the wild. The house and household are not only cleansed along the lines of visually defined boundaries. The soundscapes of the wild also lead to specifically acoustic strategies of exclusion. In a description of acoustic cleansing, it is important to make a distinction between the relatively silent, small-scale, and often secret rituals and the loud, large-scale cleansing rituals whose soundscapes invade large sections of the neighborhood. The more silent rituals do not involve drumming and are often used when people are afraid that the enemy will take measures to prevent the rite from having any effect. 5 In such instances, the preparations for the rite and its performance have to be kept secret. Sorcery spells are often cut in a silent and secretive manner, during a small dehi kapanavii or more elaborate kodivina kapanavii ritual (literally: "to cut a lime" and "to cut sorcery"). Such rituals are much smaller and cheaper than the major anti-sorcery rites such as the Suniyam tovilritual (see Kapferer 1997), and above all, they are silent. In both small- and large-scale rituals, however, a form of acoustic cleansing is carried out. I first turn to the relatively modest and silent cleansing rituals in the course of which ritual specialists use turmeric water and charmed sacred designs (yantra) to cleanse and protect. The Absence of Voices

A ritual specialist from the neighborhood of Puvakdeniya told me about the silence needed to bury charmed sacred designs (yantra) and sorcery spells. Before building the foundations of a house, yantra have to be buried in the four corners, to safeguard the house and its inhabitants from danger. These yantra have to be buried at a moment of perfect silence. Should the yantra be "caught" by the Voice of a human or an animal, they would lose their effect. The very early morning before dawn is the preferred time

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for (hidden) ritual activity. A silent soundscape is one of the advantages of this time of day. The expressions U dahenagama people use to talk about Voice often refer to the effects of Voice after it has left the speaker. The Voice "falls"6 on an object or interlocutor (katahanda viitenavii), or it "catches" something or somebody ( katahanda ahuvenavii). Mter its initial appearance, Voice might stay and reside (katahanda pavatinavii) and create disorder in the yantra, which would then lose its efficacy. Not only yantra but "any other thing you bury" needs to be buried in the absence of Voice. This of course refers to the work of the sorcerer, who will secretly enter people's gardens and bury charmed objects with which to ensorcel them. The absence of Voice is thus equally important for the efficacy of sorcery spells. In the case of the burial of protective yantra, one has to be careful of the Voices of enemies. Their cruel thoughts (ho vaha) and knowledge of charms that would incapacitate the yantra are all contained in their "Voice." Conversely, when one attempts to kill an enemy through sorcery, one has to avoid the Voices of one's enemies' friends when burying something in his garden. It is not pollution (kili) that lends those Voices their power. The "effect of Voice" does not fall under the notion of pollution. Nor does it have anything to do with wild spirits (the gaze of the yakku); the human Voice can have its own effects without being dependent on the spirits' help. In virtually all the cleansing rituals, small-scale silent ones as well as loud cleansing performances, turmeric water is sprinkled on the afflicted person and is used to purifY the house, garden, or ritual space (note the pot of turmeric water behind the drummer in Figure 9). Water to be used for rites to be performed during the day and the following night needs to be collected from the well in the very early morning, long before a human or animal voice could have "fallen" upon it. Much as the sea sand sprinkled around the house denotes the absence of people, turmeric water embodies silence and the absence of Voices. This is not to say that turmeric water doesn't have its own intrinsic cleansing properties, but also it spreads out a cleansing "silence" as it is sprinkled around. The Sounds of Ritual Cleansing

In contrast to the silence of these secret cleansing rituals, large-scale cleansing rituals ( tovil) are loud and protracted, lasting up to thirty hours. For an entire night and part of following day, the sound of the drums pervades the neighborhood. Friends and family members gather at the house where the ritual is held. They are ritually protected from the potentially dangerous effects of the ritual when the ritual specialist applies charmed oil to the head of all the members of the audience in the early evening (tel miitirima). However, those in the vicinity who do not attend the ritual are left unprotected. Enemies and distrustful people from the area remain at

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home, where they are subjected to the same acoustic regime as those attending the domestic cleansing ritual. In order to protect themselves, these people shut their doors and windows, thereby sealing themselves off from the gaze of the wild. Such people are likely to be suspicious that the gaze of the wild might affect them. Initially, the gaze of the wild is summoned and intensified in the course of tovil nights ( dishtiya karanavii), and subsequently it is driven out of the afflicted house, out of the garden, all the way to the cemetery and eventually to a river, stream, or crossroad, and then it is left to roam beyond that final boundary, free once again to affect neighbors. Hence the tendency of suspicious people to close off their house, or even to leave the area for the night. People are very aware of the fact that while the actual gaze of the wild can be kept out by closing up the house, the soundscape of a large cleansing ritual cannot be contained or excluded.7 And, more dangerously, the drumming arouses the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya iivissenavii). It is in this setting that one needs to place the role of women who suffer from (lifelong) affliction by the gaze of the wild. In Chapters 2 and 3 I gave a description of women whom the gaze of the wild never leaves, or who are covered by the gaze of the wild for long periods of their lives. The sound of the drums thus especially affects women who have the gaze of the wild on them, who have never managed to get rid of it. It has been well documented that, in many cultures, people in the audience of possession rituals might fall ill, enter a trance state, or become possessed (e.g., Lewis 1971). In Udahenagama women hiding in nearby houses might suffer the same destiny, despite the fact that they would have closed all doors and windows. Most often, these are women who suffer from a lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild. The sound of the drums arouses the women's dishti and makes them fall ill. Women from households that do not get on with the people from the house where the cleansing ritual is held are particularly vulnerable to this type of affliction, since they have not been able to participate in the preparations of the ritual and cannot benefit from the protection that the closeness to the cleansing ritual specialists brings about (e.g., tel miitirima). Once they have fallen ill, their family might also have to organize a loud cleansing ritual. People often told me that the soundscape of a domestic cleansing ritual obliged them to organize a further cleansing ritual, which would then afflict another household, and so on. Some families anticipated this problem of "acoustic contagion," and certain women were moved out of the area whenever it was likely that the sound of a drum might fall on their ears. This regularly happened to the woman in household 14 in Hendolakanda. Her family members took her to another village each time a large-scale cleansing ritual (yaksha tovile) was held at household II in Galkanda (see Figure 3), or even when a loud ritual (deviyange tovile) was held at the nearest temple. What often surprised me was that women afflicted in this way-by means

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of the soundscape-did not make a distinction between the sounds of different types of drums used in different types of ceremonies. As soon as they heard the sound of a drum they fell ill. They made no distinction between the sound of the hera used by the lower-caste ritual specialists (during domestic charming rituals, yaksha tovil, purificatory rites involving Buddhist monks, or deviyange tovil rituals held for the deities), or the sound of the davul, a smaller drum used at purificatory rites (pirit) and funeral ceremonies and played by higher-caste people. As a young woman from upper Puvakdeniya (household 18) argued, the sound of the drum (be it the hera of the tovile or the davul of a funeral ceremony) made her enter a fearful state of mind: [6] I am too scared to go and see cleansing rituals (tovil). Long ago, of course, I went to see them, but now I don't go any more. That is to say, I am scared of those. I got scared when I attended a funeral. That is why I don't go [and see cleansing rituals] any more. I went to a funeral in our house [her parent's house]. When I came back here, I felt something like fear. So I don't go to cleansing rituals anymore. My mind does not feel good .... My stomach burns, my limbs hurt. ... Ever since I got frightened of that dead body at the funeral, I don't feel like going [to funerals and domestic cleansing rituals]. So whenever there is a funeral, I feel strange (amutu gatiyak). There is something like fear in the mind. YVhen [!] hear the drumming[!] feel fear in the mind. Something like fear comes to the mind. (my emphasis)

I thought this was a lay perspective, in which no distinction was made between the sounds of a lowly domestic cleansing ritual for wild spirits and the sound offerings to the deities, but I was later surprised to find the same association between affliction and instrumental sounds in general in the recitations of a ritual specialist from Galkanda. While attempting to bring a young woman back to consciousness, he addressed the wild spirits (yakku) and described the places where (and times when) they had afflicted this young woman: [7] This has been done by you at a place where this sick woman comes and goes, while she was eating or drinking, while she was at a place where she removed her dress and put on another dress, while she was at a place where she shook and combed her hair, at the time of the three samayama, [when the wild spirits are allowed to cast their gaze upon the human world] in a lonely house or at a lonely resting place, at a graveyard, where pollution was caused by seeing a corpse and touching it, ... at a house were a party was held for a girl who attained puberty, at at at at

a place where the drums (davul) were beaten, a place were the drums (hera) were beaten, a place where horns were blown, a place where a flute was blown,

at a stream, at a rivulet coming from a stream, at a place she comes and goes, at a place where a dead body is buried,

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at a party, at a meal, at a time when she looked at the sun as it was descending, at a time when she looked at the moon as it was descending at noon time, ... (my emphasis)

Just as the secular sounds of human voices invade the house, bringing worries, fear, and illness, so do ritual sounds form a source of danger and affliction for suffering women. This is equally true for the sound of the drum, the horn, and the flute used in a variety of rituals, such as funerals, rituals to appease the deities, or the domestic cleansing rituals used to expel the wild from the domestic sphere. Women who already suffer from the gaze of the wild are particularly vulnerable to the illness-causing effects of listening to such sounds. This is the perspective of the women who are subjected to dangerous sounds and eagerly talk about illness-provoking sounds. A more hidden dimension of this phenomenon, however, is revealed when women find themselves at the center of a loud cleansing ritual and the drums coerce the surrounding neighborhoods in their acoustic regime. While ill, a woman often stops addressing or responding to those around her, and as a result she lives in the absence of her personal soundscape, remaining silent for extended periods of time (see Chapter 2). When the drums of the domestic cleansing ritual suddenly burst forth on the soundscape for a night, their power invades the neighborhood. The sick woman, her household, and its wild spirits suddenly surface as a renewed presence in the village; so much so that many people in the neighborhood stay inside their houses-and some of them get frightened and fall ill themselves. However, "the trusted people" ( vishviisa kenek)-friends and family members of the afflicted-gather around the afflicted, and they are thus protected from danger (in both a spiritual and physical sense). Meanwhile, other residents of the neighborhood, including enemies and innocent bystanders alike, are indiscriminately subjected to a dangerous acoustic regime. Because those living closest to the ritual are most affected by such dangerous ritual sounds, acoustic cleansing represents an indiscriminate form of revenge against all one's neighbors. It resembles the triadic organization of enmity of sorcery and anti-sorcery practices in which revenge is carried out against local, intimate enemies, but it differs because of its indiscriminate character. Indeed, it is often women who are not considered either enemies or friends who fall ill and then pose an additional burden on the general well-being of their own households. The effects of the soundscape of the anti-sorcery rite ( tovile) thus go beyond the simple strategy of taking revenge upon a close neighbor who committed sorcery, who is not invited to the domestic cleansing ritual, and who is thus exposed to acoustic and other forms of danger (as well as sorceryS). The sounds of the drums have a more widespread effect in the neighborhood. Through their crucial role in cleansing rituals, women afflicted by long-term affliction by the gaze of

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the wild help define the acoustic space, much like male drinking groups, youth gangs, or insurgents. They do not form a group of afflicted people in the traditional sense; they don't attend meetings, nor is there a special type of solidarity among women who suffer from a lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild. They each operate from within their own relatively smallscale social world. Their afflictions, however, necessitate loud performances that bring other women into the center of the acoustic regime that governs Udahenagama people.

The Neighborhood as a Dump In this description of the "acoustic ecology" (see Peek 1994: 475) of the Udahenagama area, I have included sounds of the wild, human voices and instrumental, nonhuman, ritual sounds. Much as the sounds of domestic or political violence can make people ill, so do the words that represent danger threaten, terrify, or make people sick. The names of incurable illnesses or the occurrence of a girl's first menstruation should be pronounced with caution. In some cases, human interlocutors should not be addressed at all, and people ought rather to confide to a milk tree in their garden. Indeed, "one can tell anything to the milk tree." A description of these diverse aspects of the Udahenagama soundscape further clarifies people's attitude toward words that represent the wild. An understanding of this fear of representing the wild is a central point in the main line of argument of Part II and underpins many of my descriptions of cautious discourses on violence in the next chapters. Much like the gaze of the wild, Voices can "fall" ( vatenavii) on people and make them ill. Certain words and Voices cause terrified hearts ( hita bayayi) and lead to dreadful diseases that are associated with a terrified heart. The notion of "terrified heart" and fear related to hearing "wild words" are key notions in the development of discursive strategies for talking about the wild. In Part III I therefore point at the demise offear (hita bayayi) in the aftermath of the atrocities of the civil war as a potentially powerful agent of discursive change. This description of the Udahenagama soundscape also contributes to the analysis of the relationship between households (gedara) and society (samiidjaya). People's comments on the acoustic ecology ofUdahenagama revealed many times at which the household was utterly invaded by society's soundscape. A large variety of domestic cleansing rituals are available for when the boundaries between these two postulated moral spaces, the household as a Sinhala Buddhist space and the space of the wild, have been breached. I have documented the ways in which households negotiate their relationship with the wider society not only by establishing and periodically reconfirming the visually defined boundaries between household and society but also by means of acoustic cleansing.

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A social world is imagined which is the mere sum of idealized domestic spaces, a sum of houses and their inherent moralities. The society in the immediate surroundings of the household, however, is periodically excluded from this vision of a Sinhala Buddhist morally cleansed space. Friends, relatives, far relations, contacts, and enemies (who did not attend the cleansing ritual) are indiscriminately subjected to the dangerous acoustic regime of the cleansing performance. Moreover, the gaze of the wild is gradually moved away beyond boundaries within visual space, away from the afflicted person, the house, and its garden. The wild is attracted to the offerings at the nearest river or crossroads and is thus left to roam among the nearby neighbors. This is quite different from the vision of a "society" I evoked in Chapter 3, a society in which revenge is taken upon an individual local enemy by means of sorcery or tips to death squads. Not only is the gaze of the wild sent to an individual enemy, it is left to affect many vulnerable people in the local community (the women suffering from a long-term affliction by the gaze of the wild). During cleansing rituals, the local neighborhood could almost be said to be serving as a dump, a convenient repository for the wild. I will further analyze the nature of U dahenagama society ( samiidjaya) in the following chapters. This chapter has offered a prefiguration by describing the way the wider society around the household is indiscriminately affected by acoustic cleansing strategies.

Chapter 5 ~~Those

and these things happened"

Ambiguous Forms of Speech

In this chapter I look at the discursive strategies that are used when people refer to the wild and the terrifYing and divulge or receive such potentially dangerous or illness-provoking messages. The following gives an initial impression of the type of communicative events I will describe: [1] My husband's father had three brothers and two sisters. One of them was from another father. His mother was one of three siblings. That uncle does not believe in the wild spirits. He only believes in Buddhism. He is called Perera. Before, when that "Matin elder brother" was alive, he was the father of "Sita," the one who killed herself by drinking poison. He was a good workerl ( eya hari hari viida karii). It was him who did things like that. Things like the ones that destroy families. When I think how those things occur less frequently now I am very happy. Those have bad things in them. Now when we think about the things that happened to our family, it is impossible not to accept that there is truth in those things. My father did not believe in those. He did not allow us to do anything, because of that our family was destroyed. As time went on the troubles (karadara) were not finished. (my emphasis)

This family history, which takes the form of a lament, reveals in turn how sorcery, an enemy, and the disappearance of family members are represented. To a Western observer it might seem surprising that all this has really been expressed in this short, seemingly vague passage. This surprise parallels my confusion and disorientation as I discovered the ambiguity of everyday discourse. To shed some light on laments of this sort, I analyze three aspects of this type of discursive style below. First I look at the use of euphemism (for example, vada, "work," to describe a sorcerer, and karadara, "trouble," to refer to disappearances). Second, I describe the way referential pronouns and phrases are used to build up the vague and ambiguous quality of narratives in Udahenagama. What do "those" and "things like that" and "anything" refer to? It is difficult for an outsider to

Figure 10. The boys that grow up now: "Where can there be beings that are more 'yakku' than us?"

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identifY the people or events such pronouns might refer to. I analyze the sociopolitical implications of such ambiguous discourses. Third, for an analysis of the discourse that represents the particularities of violence in the village, I pay attention to the way people (and by extension their houses) are given a name. In the first section of this chapter I present the communicative strategies that cultivate ambiguity and uncertainty. In the second section, I comment on the fact that such discursive strategies not only are used within the household or a small-scale social unit but are transposed to conversations within the wider society (samiidjaya). Indeed, in a small-scale social context ambiguous forms of speech might not cause much of a problem for the interlocutors, since all the people involved are relatively well informed about the referential meaning of vague forms of speech. Once this close-knit social context is transcended, however, it is more difficult to understand a vague statement unequivocally. I discuss the implications of the use of vague forms of speech in the wider society and analyze the ways such speech forms contribute to the organization of postwar society into smallscale, well-bound social units. Much as domestic cleansing rituals organize boundaries around the household (in both acoustic and visual space), so, I suggest, can discursive strategies that cultivate ambiguity create a boundary around a household or a small-scale social context.

The Dangers of Utterance In the previous chapter I described a general ethos surrounding the use of Voice and its effects, giving specific examples of words that are dangerous to articulate. For example, the enunciation of "epileptic fit" or "chickenpox" can cause illness among one's interlocutors. Likewise, the verbal presentation of a girl's first menstruation can reduce the lifespan of her mother. Another example is constituted by the fact that envious praise is considered poisonous (the poisonous Voice or kata vaha), and words of praise can thus cause illness. Listening to a Voice is a common cause of illness. I argued that this ethos also determines the way people use words that represent the wild: words that, if pronounced, can cause fear and illness. In this chapter I give specific examples of the ways words that directly represent violence and terror are avoided. Discourses on violence are replete with ambiguous and cautious words used to avoid the enunciation of such dangerous words and to refrain from terrifYing people by pronouncing words that represent (make present) the wild.

On the Avoidance of Inauspicious Words A journalist for one of the English-language national newspapers once wrote that somebody had been "bothered" by opponents and was buried

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soon afterward. The lack of causal relation between the English terms "bothered" and "buried" is likely to leave many a non-Sinhalese English speaker bemused. Nor can such translations of Sinhalese accounts be solely attributed to the work of the ever-present censors of the Sri Lankan media. In my interpretation, "bothered" was a literal translation of karadara karanavii, which could indeed be translated literally as "to bother" or "to trouble." But karadara is also used to refer to menstrual pain, blackmail, death threats, and torture. In his description of Sinhalese rhetoric, D'Alwis (1858: 313) commented on the eager use of euphemism and the "decency of expression" cultivated by the Sinhala orator. A vivid description of delicate, offensive, or indecent topics is always carefully avoided ( 314). Western linguists have argued that euphemistic discourse (from the ancient Greek euphemizein) found its roots in the word-magic of taboo words (Chilton 1987: 13). When the utterance of a word was understood to presence its referent in some way, the use of words referring to inauspicious or morally reprehensible things was far too dangerous. Instead, such dangerous words were replaced by, among others, polite metaphors, figurative descriptions, or mere nonsensical and unrelated words. In an attempt to explicate the effect of contemporary euphemisms on the listener, Western linguists postulate that euphemisms constitute a conventionalized block on the listener's mental representation of the real world. Euphemistic discourse is processed in such a manner as to avoid the mental representation or visualization of a taboo act or object itself ( 14). As discussed in the previous chapter, people from Udahenagama argue that the pronunciation of words that refer to something dangerous can cause a "terrified heart" (hita bayayi), which is a common cause of illness. Since this local exegesis resembles the Western notion of euphemism in many ways, I opted for calling the avoidance of dangerous or inauspicious words in Udahenagama euphemistic discourse. In local terms, euphemistic discourse, or the avoidance of terrifYing and dangerous words, saves people from "terrified heart" and its concomitant illnesses. In this section I present the euphemisms that caught my attention while recording interviews and conversations in Udahenagama 1 (see Table 1). Of particular interest are the euphemisms used to refer to a violent reality. Instead of words that might bring about fear (hita bayayi) or moral outrage (such as "sorcery," "rape," "torture," "assault," "murder," or "war"), a much more gentle terminology is deployed. One technique is to replace dangerous words with words that would normally connote safety, warmth, and trust. Thus torture ( vadayak) is encapsulated in a word that also stands for a child's mischief,2 and civil war is replaced by "the confusion and mistakes of the people who hurry too much." Soft expressions are wrapped around harsh experiences, and gentle words prevent fearful realities from imprinting themselves on people's hearts.

TABLE

l. Some Euphemisms Used in Colloquial Sinhalese ofUdahenagama Benign meaning

Euphemistic use

karapu deyak diipu deyak

things that were done things that were given

vade karii

did the work/ gave the work thing somebody has jumped over work happened

sorcery spell sorcery committed by giving a person something charmed to eat sorcery (also sexual abuse) sorcery spell

Wealth, envy, sorcery

piinnumak viidak una

was successful, was effective, became rich

Illness, death, menstruation naraka leda

bad illness

angalanavii

to be boisterous, disobedient, to misbehave people who left to disappear, lose fierce/violent pollution entanglement (of hair, of ideas) became knowledgeable like the elders trouble flow of honey

giyapu kattiya neitivenavii darunu kilak avulak iinamutuvechcha karadara piini berenavii

epilepsy, febrile convulsions, smallpox frantic movements during seizures the dead to die menstruation menstruation first menstruation menstrual pains menstruation (if used to refer to a woman)

Violence, aggression viidak dunna

gave work

kalabala

general hustle and bustle of the day (as opposed to the quietness of the night), being in a hurry incident

siddhi vechcha/ vechcha sidin karadara karanavii

navakavadaya evameva randuvak miirune kiigahalii gahanavii

to trouble, to bother

trouble given to newcomers, ragging those and these fight to have died after having screamed to hit

torture, murder, sexual abuse domestic fight, the civil war, confused and agitated acts of a mad person fight, murder, etc. child abuse, domestic violence, ragging, torture, bombing torture, harassment quarrels and fights lethal fight unnatural death, murder to kill, murder

Benign meaning

Euphemistic use

kapanava bhishana kala bili ganna tiinak

to cut time of great fear place that takes sacrifices

ganan karayo/ganan karakan kerunkan vikara

value agent

mirikannava billa

squeeze (e.g., a lemon) mythical person said to scare or carry away naughty children

yaka vage minissu

disobedient, rowdy sons

kata siirayi

talkative person

dishtiya

gaze of the yaksha

to kill, murder the civil war place where many people have died (by accident, murder, suicide) thug; arrogant, ambitious person disorientation and confusion of the terrified strangle person used by counterinsurgency forces to betray and disappear fellow villagers perpetrators of violence, enemies of the civil war fearless person, using rough speech gaze of perpetrators of domestic or political violence

Violence, aggression

funny nonsense

Corruption, bribery, lies, gambling

joke, flirtation goods catch somebody bad work

lie, pretense illicit liquor bribe drinking and gambling

piini berenava

flow of honey

atavara karanava atin karadara karanava

badu

(nonsexual) (lit. "to trouble by hand") to trouble actively instead of the passive "to be troubled" to hug, embrace as a lover, hold an entranced person tightly ugly, dirty, disgusting betray big things happened something sweet/ oil is flowing from the face goods

flirtation (if used to refer to a man) harassment rape rape

onniiti vachana onneiti viida koranava

unneccessary words to do unnecessary work

boruva badu kavuruhari allagena naraka viida Sexuality, sexual violence

badagannava

kiita pava denava loku deval una mune piini/tel berenava

assault

indecent incest sexual violence flirt, seduce desirable women/men (also illicit liquor) indecent words indecent acts

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Where Spirits Fear to Tread: Cruel People and Civil War Let me here consider the euphemisms used to refer to the civil war in greater detail. The civil war of 1988-90 is called bhishana kala, the "time of extreme fear" or kalabala kala, which is usually translated into English as the "time of the great confusion." Kalabala refers to the sheer speed of events and describes a period in which people could not think clearly. The speed of life amid generalized violence made people unable to think and made people confused and disoriented.3 Many acts of violence were prepetrated in this state of kalabala in which there was no time to make a wellinformed assessment. The rapid spread of rumor and suspicion and urgency of action lifted people out of the context of well-considered "realities." A much-used synonym for kalabala is avulak. 4 "Confusion" also means "entanglement," a state in which people are very closely involved in the situation and cannot step back to establish the necessary distance for contemplation. During such times, relationships as well as thoughts are "entangled." As the case of kalabala illustrates, there is often an experiential correlation and continuity between the benign and less innocent meanings of a euphemism. Terrifying words are not merely replaced by nonsensical or unrelated words. Euphemisms allow people not to expose their hearts to danger and shock (hita bayayi) unnecessarily. A language that evokes the warmth and trust of the gedara, the household, and the troubles that go along with children's education is transplanted into the nondomestic sphere, in fact into a war zone. The thus constructed (slightly less harsh) reality allows victims of violence to safeguard the people who did not witness an incident themselves, at least to safeguard them from hita bayayi or too close an involvement in a violent reality, the violence that occurs in the wider society (samadjaya). Euphemisms thus help to protect life within the domestic context by enabling people not to have to represent violence in ways that are threatening or-literally-sickening. I focus on one particular euphemism, the euphemism used to refer to war criminals, to explore the culture-specific way in which certain euphemisms are constructed. There is often an experiential correlation and continuity between the benign and less innocent meanings of a euphemism. Part of my fieldwork experience in the village consisted of being constantly warned of impending danger. I was told not to visit certain households, not to proceed on this or that path, not to set foot in particular neighborhoods. When I asked why I had been warned about certain people, I was often given a metaphor in lieu of an explanation: those people are like wild spirits! (yaka vage minissu) So entrenched was this metaphor among my informants that, in time, I began using it myself as a way of talking with people about perpetrators of violence, terrifying events, and danger in their own immediate surroundings or in more remote neighborhoods.

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The gender ideology behind the metaphor is interesting. The welldocumented Sinhalese gender ideology mainly associates women with the wild spirits (yakku) (e.g., Kapferer 1983). Women are most prone to the effects of the gaze of the wild (dishtiya of the yakku) because their minds are "weak" or "delicate" ( hita liimakayi, durvalayi). This "weakness" and propensity to indulge in things disapproved of by Sinhalese Buddhist cultural norms (greed, materialism, illicit love, verbal abuse) constructs women as-in many respects-similar to the wild spirits. These are the dominant representations of female identity as they are enacted and reinforced in practices such as trance and healing rituals (see Kapferer 1983: 149). The expression and euphemism "yakii-like people," which is mainly used for men, establishes an alternative type of gender ideology, one in which certain types of men are said to resemble the wild spirits. 5 Unlike female patients, such men are not understood to be suffering from an illness caused by the gaze of the wild, nor are they subjected to cleansing rituals. In other words, they are distinct from the group of men who routinely emerge in statistics on exorcism and possession as the minority of male patients (the majority being women). The link between these men and the wild spirits is established by other means. Both women and men engage in a discourse that evokes a resemblance between groups of men and unsocialized, nonhuman beings, the yakku. This discourse is very different from the ambiguous discourse on the gaze of the wild, in the sense that it is an explicit discourse by means of which people are able to point directly and explicitly at troublemakers. To demonstrate the way euphemisms are constructed, let me describe the way the notion of "yakii-like people" is used in Udahenagama. This example will also allow me to show the very real social effects of the use of euphemisms and the ways they sometimes play a role in the cycle of containment of violence.

Peacetime Characteristics of Yakii-Like People An elderly lady, the wife of a ritual specialist in Galkanda, commented:

[2] [ Yak&like people] are jealous people, who don't know any kindness/humanity ( manussakamak) or values (agayak). You can see it when you look at their face; there is no affection ( lengatuva), no mercy (pingatiya). A group of joking teenage boys from Beragama added: [3] You say it about a man with very rough behavior, somebody hard/ cruel/violent ( darunu). He talks in a very fierce/ wicked way (siira-purusha). We accept (piligiinima) the presence of wild spirits (yakku) among the people. Very fierce, rough per-

sons. So if you see a man like that, he is also called a wild spirit.

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When a middle-aged husband (H) and wife (W) from Hendolakanda talked about an enemy with whom they were involved in a marriage dispute, they described this neighbor as a female wild spirit, a yakshini: [4] W: She [the enemy] said: "if [my daughter] has a child [with your son] I will break the child's neck with my own nails," that is what this mother said with her own mouth. Akk: Did she come and tell you that? W: No she said [shouted] it from within her own house. It is said ( -lu) that she has said that if a child is conceived, she will break the neck of the child with her nails, ... H: [whispers] She is not human ( manussayek nevii eyayi). W: [loud and angry] Not a human but a yakshini! You cannot say she has love/kindness (karuniiva). Also the way in which she talks, she uses extremely dirty words. H: A wild animal ( tirisan). W: They say that she doesn't care about human qualities.

A young ritual specialist from Galkanda explained the metaphor in extenso. He took it one step further by arguing that if you see a yaka-like person, the gaze of the wild might fall upon you and you might fall ill. Cruel people-as much as the yakku-are briefly described as a source of illness within the community. For a short moment this ritual specialist obliterated the distinction between yaka-like people and the institutionalized illnesscausing yakku (Mahasohona, Riri Yaka, Kalu Kumara, Suniyam) as he explained: [5] There are people who used to resemble the wild spirits. People with a big, fat stomach, with teeth that have come forward, extra teeth that come out like a monster's teeth . . . . Those people live in the midst of us all. It is those people we call yakii vage. Most people get frightened when they see them. Why is that? Because they resemble the wild spirits. We say it in this way-a fat face, drowned eyes, a fat stomach-those are people who look like a wild spirit and have the same figure or personality as a wild spirit. People have made up that expression. There are various types of people. When we see somebody with the shape or the figure of a wild spirit-some have faces that look just like the ones of the eighteen masked wild spirits of the cleansing ritual (daha ata piiliya)-it is about such people they say "this one [uses disrespectful pronoun, moo] is like a wild spirit." Their character is also similar to the one of a wild spirit, you can read it from the face, it's like that too. There are people who are completely like that .... Their behavior also. There are some people, if they see that human [who resembles a wild spirit}, the gaze of the wild falls onto them. Usually there are other people [who are not like wild spirits], whom when they go somewhere and see such a human [who resembles a wild spirit} the gaze of the wild falls on them. The speech of those people [who resemble wild spirits] is very loud/fast (hayiyen). Their speech is sharp/rough/violent too. The speech of the wild spirits is also very sharp/ rough/wild, and such is the speech of those people. It is because of all these things that people have made up this expression. The expressions about poisonous eyes (ass vaha) and poisonous mouths (kata

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vaha) are very similar. Such people exist. It is correct [what the expression describes]. In every village you have a group of people like that, humans. If a cow is expecting a calf, it is enough that they just touch it and the calf will not be born. There are people like that. It is people like that we call yakku vage [laughs]. There is a very bad/very evil kind of people among us ( maha naraka minissu djatiyak in no, api atarema). They are successful (honda vada karanne), but they are bad. (my emphasis)

Yaka-Like People and the Civil War

In other contexts this metaphor would be used in descriptions of insurgency and counter-insurgency violence in the area. A young man (M) and his sister (S) from Kalubowatta argued: [6] M: [ Yakiz..like people are] people who are not scared. If you fight with them they will hit you back. That is why we call them yaka vage minissu. Here also there are people like that. S: In the Panigahadeniya hamlet [part of the Panigahakanda neighborhood] people are like wild spirits. In Valideniya most people are from the [lower] jaggery makers caste ... M: They are treated as lower caste. Then they become helpless ( ahinsaka), rough/ violent (siirayi), and not scared of anyone (baya nii katavat). During the civil war these people didn't mind their own business at all. All got mixed ( ehemat nii iting kavalame 6 tamayi), they weren't especially violent, our people were involved also, but there were a lot of them ljVP insurgents} in Piinigahadeniya. We were destroyed because of them. I don't even know one of them by name. That is their habit in that neighborhood: they leave their neighborhood and raid ours. There are no human beings in those neighborhoods, so they come to our neighborhood and trouble us! [laughs] S: That is what happened. Even our identity cards were taken by people we didn't know/recognize. They haven't given them back yet. In this neighborhood there weren't many people who created trouble [committed violent acts]. Most of them came from that neighborhood [Panigahaden'iya]. (my emphasis)

Yaka-Like People's Lack of Fear

This young man from Kalubowatta mentioned how yaka-like people are people who aren't scared of anything. In the narratives in which I was told about yaka vage minissu it transpired that such people are claimed to be scared neither of the institutionalized illness-causing yakku (Mahasohona, Kalu Kumara, Suniyam, Riri Yaka) nor of human beings (even in wartime situations). Some young people evoked an ongoing struggle between yakalike people and the institutionalized yakku of the Sinhalese Buddhist pantheon. Late at night, at a cleansing ritual in a neighborhood known for its past and present affiliation with the JVP insurgency movement, some boasting teenagers told us that when (yaka-like) JVP insurgents would come to power in the country, nobody would be troubled any longer by the (institutionalized) wild spirits (yakku), and cleansing rituals would no

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longer be necessary. In Chapter 3 (transcript 11) I quoted a ritual specialist complaining about young men who made his ritual performance difficult. He quoted them as saying: 'There are no yakku at all, where can there be beings that are more yakku than us?" Another ritual specialistalmost resigned to the fact that the struggle between institutionalized wild spirits and yaka-like youths was over-simply asserted how the institutionalized wild spirits are scared of yaka-like people, how they tremble and turn away their dangerous gaze (see Chapter 2, transcript 6). In this type of narrative, it would seem that the yakku suffer more from fear than their human counterparts the yaka vage minissu do, and that they even have more human characteristics: such as the ability to experience fear. Yakalike people thus invert the usual hierarchical relation of wild spirit and human being. An astrologer (A) and his teenage daughter (D) from Edanduwila, while discussing the contemporary decline of ritual specialists and traditional ritual, also discussed this issue: [7] A: Before there were various people to do the [ritual] work. None of those [people] are here now. Where are the wild spirits now? [rhetorical] The wild spirits who were here in those days are not here anymore. They have been chased away. Now it is the humans who have become wild spirits! (dang manushyayin tamayi yakku velii tiyenne 7 ). Akk1: So why are there fewer rituals now? D: Before people were scared of the slightest thing. The people who live in this era/ time are not scared. Before, if a tree shook they were afraid, weren't they? Now people just approach [the tree] and check [what happened]. They are not scared. (my emphasis)

The Exclusion of Yaka-Like People from Sorcery and Anti-Sorcery Practices

Since such people are not afraid of anything, they are less prone to fall ill. Mothers of such men would often tell me that the only illness their sons had was unemployment. The failures and misfortunes of yaka-like people would be attributed to bad planetary influences (graha apala, aguna), for which the remedies would, typically, be a yantra bandinava or a mal baliya ritual. 8 According to my data, when faced with problems caused by unsociable youths, families would never evoke the wild spirits, the gaze of the wild, or a sorcerous enemy. An elderly ritual specialist from Beragama explained why: [8] You have to think about that in this way. We can't give the responsibility to the wild spirits for everything. Even without the wild spirits, things happen, sorrow comes, even without the wild spirits .... That [those criminals] is not the gaze of the wild, that [that they kill and burn corpses9] is the mind in anger. When you burn a corpse, it is difficult to identify. One must see the face to identify it, and [if

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you have identified it] you will have suspicions. After having killed they are still angryI they feel even more anger, therefore they burn [the corpse]. That is not because of the wild spirits that has nothing to do with the wild spirits. That is just the way humans are, it is those people you call yaka vage minissu. [When people are like wild spirits] the gaze of the wild (dishtiya) falls less onto them. At such times the wild spirits don't come. You know why? Because such a man doesn't have any consciousness (kalpanava sihiyak nii), even the wild spirit is fed up with/ dislikes (epavela) that man [laughs]. There is no way of ''Putting the gaze of the wild" [sorcery] onto a person you don't like/desire/want (eyiiyita dishtiya danna vidiyak niine epa ekkenata). (my emphasis)

And a much younger ritual specialist from Galkanda reiterated this: [9] We say it [yaka vage minihek] to any person we want, usually someone speaking roughly, a girl or a boy. In the past people have made up that expression .... Someone like that is less often ill. Usually we say it to people who are rude or violent, even the gazes of the wild are afraid [of them]. (my emphasis) Undesirable people, people who aren't liked, are thus paradoxically safe from the gaze of the wild spirits. The wild spirits seem to operate mostly in a situation where the victim is liked/desired to a certain extent, whether this is the desire of the enemy for the victim or the desire of the wild spirit for his victim. "Sorcery/possession" only operates in a context where hatred and desire are both present, where the wild spirit deployed by an enemy actually likes the victim (or the victim is in some ways liked by the human enemy?) . 1o What this amounts to is that yaka-like people have been largely excluded from forms of sociability that rely on sorcery and antisorcery practices, fear of the gaze of the wild, and cleansing rituals. 11 Antisocial men have become categorized as beings who, by and large, have fewer human qualities than the institutionalized nonhuman wild spirits of the Sinhalese Buddhist pantheon.

The Location of Yaka-Like People

An important aspect of the discourse on yaka-like people concerns where people locate these inhumane persons-either in relation to their own nuclear household, the gedara, or in relation to their neighborhood. People often refer to farther-away neighborhoods, or to people from another caste or political affiliation as being yaka-like as well. As a middle-aged lady from Beragama argued: [10] "Yaka-like people": we say that to people who drink. Not here! Further away, it is near the road [where people from a higher caste live] that there are people like that. When they get drunk in the evening, although we hear the noises [of the drunks or drunken fights] we don't go to see. We don't inquire about other people's things.

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But the discourse on yaka-like people also offers ample opportunity to recognize and state publicly that yakii-like people might be very close neighbors or even family members. The distinction between "our people" (ape minissu, ahala pahala minissu, tamange kenek) and "yaka-like people" (yaka vage minissu) in this discourse is less radical than one might expect. A middle-aged woman from Kalubowatta, for example, used the discourse on yaka-like people to describe domestic violence in her uncle's /neighbor's household: [11] We also use that term for people who drink, scream, and use obscene words. If a person talks in "an unnecessary way" ( oniiti vidiyata) [euphemism], wears clothes and has hair like a wild spirit, then people say: "look: that man is like a wild spirit, he is very drunk." They call people from Panigahakanda yaka-like because they don't behave and because of their [lower-caste] status. They don't dress properly, they don't walk on the road in a proper way [are drunk]. People say somebody is like a wild spirit when he behaves wildly ( vanachara hamata hiisirenavayi), or because he does things like the wild spirits (yakku vidiyata deval karana). These are words that people have made up for people's behavior; behavior that results from drinking. Everything changes because of people drinking. Even "our people" (ape kattiya) are sometimes like that. In our own neighborhood there are people who drink a lot, some of our own people are like that. My uncle [and neighbor] sometimes screams obscenities or talks nonsense ( anang manang). People say he is like a wild spirit. He doesn't know how to live at home: he screams, uses unnecessary words, throws the pots on the floor, fights with his wife, throws even the cups and saucers. It is such people they call yak&like.

Mter taking the variety of meanings of yaka vage minissu into account, I defined the notion of a yaka-like person as a euphemism. Yaka vage minissu can be used for both enemies who are loved and enemies who are loathed; it can be used for troublesome sons as well as war criminals. In my understanding, this discourse on yaka-like people-which stresses the distance from as well as the closeness to cruel or inhumane people-is very similar to the discourse on the gaze of the wild that I described in Part I. In these two discourses, intimate enemies as well as radical others are addressed in the same ways (and both are evoked by ambiguous notions such as dishtiya or yaka vage minissu). Neighborhood enemies are spoken about in the same way as very close domestic enemies, while the same idioms are used to describe political enemies or perpetrators of violence and killers. When mobilized to refer to the people who committed atrocities during the civil war, these idioms can be defined as euphemistic.

"Eva meva": Those and These-Zero Anaphora The answers to the questions "who was involved?" "where did it happen?" and "what happened?" need to be represented in discourse. In daily conversations about violence, people sometimes need to refer to local perpe-

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trators of violence, locations, or specific events. I now explore how these realities are represented, how an ambiguous picture of reality is superimposed onto a well-known situation. Some of the techniques deployed could again be described as euphemistic, but the rationale for this type of discourse is not exclusively based on the avoidance of inauspicious words, terrified hearts ( hita bayayi), and illness. In Table 1, I referred to eva meva, "those and these" as a euphemism for "quarrels and fights." Apart from that, eva meva belongs to a more widespread system of referential pronouns and nouns with uncertain referents that Besnier ( 1985) has termed "zero anaphora." "Zero anaphora" are referential pronouns and nouns such as "those" and "they" that lack any introduction earlier in a narrative. In other words, it isn't clear for the listener to what "those" or "they" refer to. There isn't a clear-cut reference tracking mechanism either. The listener cannot find the reference of such referential nouns and pronouns in any straightforward way (Besnier 1985: 139), but has to guess what they refer to. Zero anaphora are used for the construction of essentially ambiguous narratives. In Udahenagama, referential pronouns and phrases are often packed with specific but hidden meanings, and their referents are seldom explicitly named in this type of discourse replete with zero anaphora. For example, in the lament I presented in the introduction to this chapter "things like that," "those things," "things," "those," and "anything" (see transcript 1) stand for sorcery spells ( kodivina, which are not explicitly mentioned, though the sorcerer himself is mentioned through a euphemism). Furthermore "things" might stand for sorcery, attempted murder, disappearance, or poverty, all of which one can gather by knowing the context of the relevant family. Such references are clear for insiders, first of all by deduction from the general topic of the conversation, second by knowing the events and persons that are represented in this oblique way. But the referent itself is not introduced by being named, either explicitly or through a standardized euphemism. (See Table 2 for more examples.) Instead, a referential pronoun is used and it is left to the interlocutor to imagine the referent. 12 This technique allows for a substantial variability in the interpretation of the narrative, dependent on the knowledge and position of the interlocutor. The well-practiced deployment of zero anaphora forces the audience to be an important coauthor of the discourse. Within the context of the household, this strategy of communication does not cause many double entendres because all the people from the same close-knit context know the people, places, and events referred to by the customary zero anaphora. In this sense, this type of communication might not be very different from the style of communication within families or between age-old friends in the West. What is particular about the Udahenagama people's use of zero

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TABLE

2. Additional Examples of Ambiguous References from My Field Notes Reference

Referring to

Alut meva Meva velii

the new thing while being like this

Hambuna pamanekuta evata

some people met (received) (things) for those things the things I have now

an elopement while being in this state of being tricked we took revenge for the sorcery (crimes?) they perpetrated against us the sorrow, illness (injustice?) I am suffering from

Meva eka tamayi mata diing tiyenne

anaphora, however, is that it is also used outside the immediate context in which interlocutors are supposed to know the referents. As a result, Udahenagama conversations force their wider audience to be highly involved in making sense of imprecise communications, in imagining the referents that are touched on by a deliberately vague discourse. The degree of clarity produced by zero anaphora depends on the degree of closeness between the speaker and listener. Speakers carefully build into their narratives various levels of understanding for different members of the audience. Like "one size only" clothes, this type of discourse makes no adjustments for the diverse clientele to which it is geared. The strategic ambiguity of such narrative might lead the audience to misunderstand the message or to be unsure that they understood it well. Further, the original speaker is not fully responsible for what she/he said. 13 Udahenagama people thus build an efficient safety mechanism into their conversations, ensuring against something being overheard by the wrong person. Since members of the audience often have to fill in the most sensitive material of a narrative for themselves, both the speaker and the audience share the responsibility for the utterance.I4 Such diffuse responsibility 15 leads to a diffuse type of truth (Besnier 1994: 20), coconstituted by audience and speaker, in contradistinction to the truth constituted by the institutional or raw authority of a truth teller. Rather than being a value intrinsic to a truth teller, zero anaphora locates "truth" at the meeting point between individuals. "Truth" and knowledge thus remain firmly embedded in a localized context, and-as soon as the distance between speaker and interlocutor increases-"truth" and knowledge take on a dubious quality. As the social distance between a speaker and her/his interlocutor increases, the amount of common knowledge is sharply reduced, making the unambiguous interpretation of a message problematic. In the second section of this chapter, I discuss the link between this strategy of encapsulating knowledge in a small-scale context such as a nuclear or extended family and the cycle of containment of violence.

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Bebi nona: "Mrs. Baby" and Other Names The lament I presented at the beginning of this chapter (transcript 1) also mentions several names: uncle, Perera, Matin elder brother, Sita. A further interpretation of this lament leads to the question how people address and refer to one another in everyday conversation and, by extension, in discourses about violent events. Although every person is registered by means of a personal name as a citizen of the Sri Lankan state, 16 it is very impolite-indeed sacrilegious-to address a person by his or her personal name. 17 The Avoidance of Names Within and Beyond the Family

Within the nuclear family, rules of respect prevent people from using each other's personal names. Instead, people commonly use kinship terms to address one another. For example, a woman might refer to her husband or grown-up son as "the one who lives in this house" ( oya dang inna ekkena), or a husband might refer to his wife as "the one in the house" (gedara ekkenayi) _18 For the time being, I relegate these practices to rules of "respect" and avoidance that reign within Udahenagama families. The avoidance of a person's name could simply be seen as one aspect of the avoidance relations that go along with respect. However, I further question why the avoidance of a person's name or kinship term is qualified as "respect" in Udahenagama. Naming strategies in the wider community mirror the dynamic of naming and being named that operates within the family. In contexts that transcend the nuclear and extended family, kinship terminology is used and combined with parts of the personal name or a part of a place name, as in "Matin elder brother" or "Edanduwila uncle." Teknonyms, such as "the mother of ... "or "the father of ... "are also popular. People are named in a variety of ways, depending on their relation to the person who addresses them or refers to them. What is important here is that there is a multiplicity of terms of address that is in fact endless and, depending on the context, can even be made up on the spur of the moment. Once this dynamic of naming within the family and neighborhood is taken into an even wider context, it is particularly difficult for widows or family members of the disappeared to choose a term of address. Because of the rules of respect governing names within the family, together with areluctance to use the names of deceased persons (see below), a female household head might choose a name that does not refer to her husband for official purposes. Widows sometimes resort to terms of address that were used before they got married. The government census in Udahenagama in 1993 thus included a considerable number of terms of address in lieu of people's names, such as bebi nona or bebi hiimine: "Mrs. Baby."

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The names of a house are used and designed along the same pattern as people's names. When I asked the woman who told me the family history in transcript 1 why her house was called Samanvatta, she was initially surprised that I knew this name, and then explained the following: [12] Why is this house called Samanvatta? Because the characters come to the mind like that. It is not nice to say Yamanvatta! [play on words with yaman, "let's go"]. That does not mean anything. [whispers, in order to divulge something relatively secret] So, we say Samanvatta [loud]. But people call this place by various names ( viihiiviira karano). They say Panigahadeniya, because that is the name of the next-door garden, and then they call the shop Panigahadeniya shop. Before we used to live a bit further up the hill at Udadeniya. They still call this place Udadeniya.

Houses are named differently according to the relation of the speaker to the household, or the generation to which the speaker belongs. The practice of using a variety of names for the same thing ( vahaviira karanavii 19 ) particularly struck me as an outsider unfamiliar with Sinhalese naming strategies. The practical difficulties I faced in trying to find people and houses with multiple names was what initially led me to start wondering about vahaviira karanavii, but I was by no means the only person moving between contexts in Udahenagama. Ritual specialists routinely move from one context to another, and they tend not to use the names of houses or addresses at all to locate people. When ritual specialists from Beragama, for example, were called on to organize a cleansing ritual in a nearby neighborhood, a family member of the afflicted person would meet them at the main road. Otherwise, they argued, they would not be able to find the house. I wondered how new postmen, policemen, counter-insurgency commandos, women collecting the radio tax, or NGO personnel managed to find the people they were looking for when they could not count on equivocal support from the people who lived along the route to a particular house. The multiplicity of names referring to one person or house lends itself particularly well to misleading unwelcome outsiders. The Fear of Being ''Named" by Enemies

In the midst of this multiplicity of terms of address, one becomes reluctant to divulge one's personal name or the name of one's house to enemies. Geertz (1973: 375), encountering a similar attitude among the Balinese, could not refrain from remarking that personal names are treated as though they are military secrets. In Udahenagama, in some cases, the original name of a house is kept secret in order to protect its dwellers from sorcery. The woman quoted in transcript 12 trusted me enough to tell me her house was called Samanvatta, but she later asked me not to tell anyone else. Among the myriad terms of address, there is one name of special

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status: the name given to a person at birth and the name given to a house by its inhabitants during the rituals of inauguration. A newborn's initials will often be determined by an astrologer in accordance with the particular planetary constellation at the moment of birth ( niikat). The resulting name, which I call the original term of address, carries a particular weight, most obviously revealed by its strict avoidance in a variety of circumstances. There is one situation in which the knowledge, pronunciation, and "possession" of this original name is of particular importance: committing sorcery. In order to ensorcel one's enemy, his/her name is imprinted on an ash pumpkin that is subsequently cut into pieces and destroyed (see Wirz 1954; Kapferer 1997). By means of destroying this written name, an enemy becomes ensorceled, and this might in turn lead to his or her destruction. In other words, there is a link between the destruction of a person's original name and the destruction of the enemy him/herself; a link between people's knowledge of a name, their subsequent power over this name (including the power to destroy it), and their consequent power over the person or house referred to. Even in small-scale sorcery rites, the recitation of the enemy's correct name is crucial. In an analysis of why original names are sometimes avoided within the wider community, the secrecy surrounding an original name could in part be interpreted as a protective mechanism against sorcery. The Restriction of the Flow of Names Between Contexts

On first sight, it might seem that the rationale for hiding original names of both people and houses from enemies finds its roots in the fear of sorcerous recitations, or of the destruction of one's written name. However, this interpretation does not apply to many of the situations in which people avoid the unguarded use of original names within the wider community. The secrecy and reluctance to pronounce an original name thus seems to point to something else, beyond sorcery practices. The analysis of the use of names in everyday conversations leads to another set of possible interpretations. People who do possess the knowledge of an original name will often be careful to avoid it even in circumstances where secrecy toward an enemy or outsider does not matter. For instance, people avoid using any of the names of a house in which somebody was suffering from a "bad illness," a house in which a sudden death occurred, or a house on which a sorcery spell had been cast. This caused quite a few problems for my day-to-day activities as an anthropologist. Once, as I was asking where an anti-sorcery ritual would take place, somebody told me: "the name of the house of course I don't know, we call it 'the house of younger sister,' but we don't mention a name!" Or when I asked where a sick person I had heard about lived, people would simply re-

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ply evasively, "over there" or "I don't know" (the name of the house). Though I failed to attend many a ritual as a result, I also avoided the personal danger that comes with naming a house of misfortune and ultimately the pollution caused by visiting such a house. At a ceremony organized a year after a person's death (dana), a young man went so far as to refer to his own deceased sister in the following way: "the relative that died under that particular family name" ( e pavule e namen miyagiya maruna). During such ceremonies, people would refer to the deceased person as "the dead one" ( maranakaraya) and thereby avoid the term of address or name they used when the person was alive. This practice resonates with the custom of avoiding the deceased's name during the period of mourning in Assam and Bengal.20 The custom finds its roots in the notion of nama rupa, literally, "the name form, figure, or appearance." To mention a person's name thus makes a certain appearance-the "name appearance"-of the person present, something that should be avoided during a period of mourning when people are trying to deal with the absence of the person who passed away. In many of the attitudes toward pronouncing a name this dimension of nama rupa,2 1 "name-appearance," could help the Western observer make sense of the fear of naming or being named. Nor does this practice limit itself to the context of death and mourning. To further develop my interpretation of naming strategies in Udahenagama, I will use Ramanujan's argument (1989) about the radical influence of context on people and things in "an Indian way of thinking." Ramanujan examines examples from Vedic rituals, Tamil poetry, and Ayurvedic medicine to show how people and objects are considered to be continuous with their context (50). In this sense, the moral status of people and things can vary depending on the nature of the context they inhabit. This type of analysis can be extended to my data about naming and being named in Udahenagama. The pronunciation of a name in the context of sorcerous recitations can harm a person. The state of appearance of people's names is closely linked to their bodily selves. The immersion of a name in a nefarious context can thus bear negatively on the named person. Conversely, the name-appearance itself can also alter a context. People therefore fear the pronunciation of the name of a house of misfortune within the context of their own household, which they want to protect. During everyday conversations, names (and by extension the named people/things) are in a constant process of recontextualization. They are made to move from context to context by the narrator. Sensitivity to the nature of this recontextualization and concern for the named one makes people engage in what I experienced primarily as vague discourse, a discourse that relies heavily on zero anaphora; a discourse in which the referent is rarely identified unambiguously by means of a name.

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Although, as I have mentioned, Western linguists consider "the word magic of taboo words" to be at the origin of the development of euphemisms (see Chilton 1987), I do not find this interpretation of the avoidance of names useful here. For one thing, this theory simply relegates people's avoidance of names to the world of the occult or the mysterious, whereas mundane sensitivity to a family's good name can explain many of the avoidance strategies I have noted. Southern Sri Lankan people try not to be named in contexts that they consider disreputable in order not to be associated with that context or status group. Within the family, names are avoided out of "respect," and one could equally argue that the avoidance of the utterance of certain names within the wider community also involves a form of respect. I therefore understand the relationship between the avoidance of names and "respect" in Udahenagama as constituted by a tacit agreement not to recontextualize people by using their names. Conversely, people try to remove disreputable people from their social context by avoiding the use of their names or the names of their houses. People are often considered disreputable because they suffer from illnesses or violence, signs of their moral faults ( dosha). The apparent ignorance about the suffering of disreputable people resulting from this practice evokes a social distance from violence or illness, thus safeguarding one's respectable status. The restriction of the flow of names between contexts is thus one aspect of the preservation of contexts or small-scale, bounded social units. People protect their own contexts from further moral decay by carefully monitoring which person and which house can be mentioned by name. These strategies of naming are comparable to the use of the names of wild spirits during cleansing rituals. Ritual specialists engage in lengthy recitations of the names of the wild spirits, which is one of the techniques by which the wild spirits are summoned and made present. Subsequently, the wild is subjected to forms of acoustic cleansing. I consider the refusal to pronounce certain names (for example, the name of a house of misfortune) a form of acoustic cleansing. The zero anaphora (such as "they" or "those people") that replaces the names and prevents names from being uttered thus plays a role in acoustic cleansing and the maintenance of boundaries between contexts. The movement of uttered names between contexts is restricted and the boundaries between contexts are prevented from blurring. While "dangerous words" and other sounds of the wild, together with the wild spirits who have been made present through the recitations of their names, are removed from the context of the household during domestic cleansing rituals, the sounds of the names of certain people and houses are removed from one's context by means of careful strategies of avoidance.

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Ambiguity and Postwar Society The above-mentioned communicative strategies are more deep-rooted and widespread than an analysis of suspicion and secretiveness between status groups or enemies might suggest. In the village ofUdahenagama, plagued by the fallout of old and contemporary violent conflicts, the atmosphere is very tense. Contrary to what one might expect, this tension results not only from ongoing conflict or the seething anger that resides just under the surface of polite relationships. Another type of tension is paramount and resides in everyday conversation. This tension emerges from the effort to meticulously and consistently uphold the cautious discourses necessary to avoid conflict. The style of women's informal discourse in Udahenagama is evasive, and the speakers rigorously evince as few signs of personal involvement as possible in what they are saying. The use of euphemism allows people not to expose their hearts to danger and shocks ( hita bayayi) unnecessarily. Even at the level of enunciation, people evade clear-cut positions by avoiding naming the referents. The customary sensitivity needed to refer to people and houses without necessarily naming them increases the number of available discursive strategies to remain vague and dissociated from the people one is talking about. Such discursive strategies can usefully be considered as a cultural resource deployed to manage conflicts. Similar styles of communication have been described in cultural contexts where there is an emphasis on the avoidance of direct confrontation and open conflict (Atkinson 1984: 42, 43) .22 Ambiguous discourses provide speakers with protection from too passionate an involvement in their arguments (see White and Watson-Gegeo 1990: 15). Such a strategic construction of conversation could be considered one among many strategies of survival deployed in a community like Udahenagama (see Besnier 1994: 25). Just as the chronic presence of colonial and neocolonial violence fostered flexible kinship relations facilitating adoption, it also encouraged cautious forms of communication. This can be compared with the presence of a variety of devices of indirection and cautious communication in other contexts where collective social life is fragile and a polity cannot be taken for granted. In such situations, the maintenance of a political arena requires a substantial amount of linguistic work (see Myers and Brenneis 1984: 12-18, 24, 28). In some situations it is surprising that talk can occur at all. The creation and maintenance of forms of communication in the aftermath of the horrendous violence of civil war can be considered a form of micropolitical reorganization. In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss the link between the strategies of communication ofUdahenagama women and the postwar social order.

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The Preservation of Contexts Cautious styles of communication should not be seen as merely a sign of resistance and antagonism by the marginal against their domination. It is all too easy to answer the question "When can a speaker not say exactly what he means?" (Brenneis 1984: 69) by pointing to a situation of hegemony or domination. Another question might lead to a less stereotypical analysis that goes beyond a documentation of forms of resistance: "In what types of societies is highly allusive speech the most important mode of communication?" (70). In other words, what type of political organization goes hand-in-hand with verbal disguise and ambiguous discourse? Ambiguity and indeterminacy have an intrinsic value independent of their potential classification as forms of resistance, and they may play a crucial role in the maintenance oflong-term social relations. Highly allusive speech and oblique referencing are the predominant mode of conflict communication in egalitarian, acephalous forms of social organization, in leaderless communities, where direct leadership is dangerous to all involved (Brenneis 1984: 70, 82, 83). This description matches the situation I encountered in postwar Udahenagama. The micropolitical organization among the women working as casual laborers on the plantations is largely egalitarian and leaderless. Indirect and vague forms of speech, however, introduce a particular texture into this relatively homogeneous social organization. Distinctions and divisions are made on the basis of a differential participation in common knowledge about everyday life in the village. It is exactly this differential participation in common knowledge that the use of zero anaphora draws on and reinforces. A temporary omission of such ambiguity and vagueness would thus disrupt this form of (micro-) political organization by divulging pieces of information to the willfully uninformed. Cautious discourses about violence thus play a role in the reconstruction of some kind of "political" world23 that emerges from the social rubble and confusion of the civil war. The political impact of deliberately vague discourses on violence in U dahenagama is far-reaching. Since the audience is invited to come up with a variety of interpretations depending on their degree of knowledge about a situation, a unanimous collective judgment cannot be expected. Multiple interpretations and the "diffuse truths" described above do not easily lead to communal judgments of a situation and the subsequent stigmatization and marginalization of violent people. The kaleidoscopic picture constructed by this cautious type of discourse is quite different from the "collective knowledge" about a violent past (or present) a Western observer might expect. The notion of a "public outcry" seems particularly out of place here. Moreover, such a cautious discourse about violence has a limited impact. It pervades relatively small, well-preserved family or neighborhood

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contexts while safeguarding a wider context through relative ignorance about specific incidents. While victims construct a cautious and often vague picture of a violent reality, they allow perpetrators to create their own livable contexts as well. The lack of a unanimous judgment or a judgment shared by a large group of people is corollary to the absence of a local cycle of widespread, modernist violence (see Chapter 3) and a high degree of integration of violent individuals. In order to make the notion of a "context" more concrete, let me give an example of what I mean. In Puvakdeniya (see Figure 6), members of households 17, 18, and 8 were involved in the murders of the heads of households 3 and 39. Households 20 and 19 were involved in a failed attempt at murder of a man in household 17. Perpetrators of violence, killers, and their victims continue to live together in the Puvakdeniya neighborhood. At times when I was involved in gossip about nearby households, people took a lot of time to find out which household I was actually talking about. For example, household 2 was outside the range of common knowledge of members of household 6. Those two households knew very little about each other's circumstances, yet there wasn't a great distance between them. In this sense, households 2 and 6 belong to two different "contexts." They know little about one another and, more important, they are not keen to talk about one another. The preservation of such contexts brought about by the discursive practices described above is particularly important in view of the fact that Udahenagama people-in the aftermath of the social devastation the civil war has brought about-are forced to ride on the same overcrowded bus to town, send their children to the same school, worship at the same temple, and buy goods in the same shopping area near the main road. Udahenagama people partially convert the tension inherent in such close encounters with enemies and morally reprehensible people into a drive to meticulously safeguard and consolidate one's context. This means that Udahenagama women, while distinguishing themselves from violent neighbors, stop identifYing with the wider, often violent society (samiidjaya). This nonidentification with the outward appearance of community life or one's outward appearances when venturing into spaces in between contexts, such as buses or temples, finds its expression in the subsequent preservation of one's context. The relationship between local strategies for preserving contexts and the local cycle of violence is complex. On the one hand, I argue that the meticulous preservation of contexts was one factor in the containment or limitation of widespread, modernist outbreaks of violence during the civil war and immediately afterward. Modernist violence, in which whole groups or categories of people become targets for elimination in an indiscriminate manner, was narrowly avoided. The absence of unanimous collective

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judgments about monolithic groups of enemies prevented any modernist forms of collective violence from emerging. On the other hand, the preservation of contexts has led the community to accommodate a substantial number of perpetrators of violence, the war criminals of the latest civil war. It could thus be argued that the preservation of contexts plays a role in the contemporary, ongoing cycle of lowintensity violence. The preservation of contexts thus breaks the cycle of violence at the cost of fragmenting the community, creating social isolation and a lack of identification of many people with the wider society. From another perspective, however, one could argue that the preservation of contexts allows perpetrators and victims to live in close proximity to one another. As my description of the complex forms of violence in Udahenagama has shown (see Chapter 3) the categories of victim and perpetrator of violence are easily interchangeable, and with so many people being at once victims and perpetrators of violence, the creation of livable contexts for violent individuals might have been the best short-term solution. Indeed, in view of the atrocities of the late 1980s, the number of internally displaced people is remarkably small. The role of the violent individuals of the civil war in the current cycle of low-intensity violence has thus to be weighed against the problems that would have been brought about by massive internal displacement. The data presented in this chapter were not gathered in a systematic way. The material gradually emerged during numerous encounters along paths in the Udahenagama area. In order to visit people on the slopes of the hills, I moved from context to context. Along the road, people would routinely greet me with "where are you going?" The conversations that ensued often took up most of the day before I reached my destination. It is on the basis of these conversations that I have described the preservation of contexts. In the next section, however, I look at how the spaces between contexts are constructed, especially when strategies pertaining to the household and to the preservation of domestic contexts are applied out of context, in the wider society.

Out of Context(s) The use of essentially domestic discursive strategies (such as euphemisms, zero anaphora, and avoidance of names) outside the domestic sphere leads to a preservation of contexts. By sealing households off from the surrounding world, these discursive strategies enable perpetrators of violence and victims to live in close proximity to one another. But discursive strategies usually deployed within the context of the household are, however, also applied outside the household, in the wider society. These strategies have implications that reach beyond the issue of the preservation of contexts,

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and it is those implications for the reconstruction of the postwar society (samiidjaya) in Udahenagama that I will discuss now. The above-described domestic discursive strategies play a role in the construction and conceptualization of what-for lack of a better term-I call the spaces in between contexts. Since the notion of a bourgeois public sphere is not applicable to the Udahenagama cultural context, however (see Chapter 6), I have replaced the concept of "public sphere" with the notion of spaces in between contexts, or nondomestic spaces. I refer to the wider society surrounding the households as the space in between contexts, out of context(s). Shops, distilleries, hillside paths, bus stands and buses, public roads, junctions, regional towns, or the Colombo slums Udahenagama residents regularly frequent could be considered spaces between contexts. What strikes an outsider most about such spaces is their harsh, icy, and almost cruel nature when compared with the atmosphere prevalent in close-knit kin groups or households. A Westerner would describe this "public sphere," still strongly affected by the wartime ethos of the 1988-90 civil war, as a public sphere in crisis. Many women in Udahenagama, however, make comments that would sound familiar to those accustomed to the EuroAmerican notion of "a crisis of the public sphere." For them, the boundary between safe and dangerous spaces often lies at their doorstep. The skull-hunting expeditions carried out in nearby neighborhoods supply an extreme example of the crisis of the nondomestic sphere. During the preparation of a domestic cleansing ritual ( tovile), men from the afflicted family must procure a human skull, which is then used during the ritual as a receptacle in which to cook food for the wild spirits. Before going on a skull-hunting expedition, the men involved usually first get drunk. They then go to a cemetery in a neighboring village and dig up a corpse, which they decapitate, bringing back the skull to the household where the ritual is to take place. Young men from Puvakdeniya would, for example, acquire skulls from graves in the Galkanda neighborhood. Stories about such expeditions are probably as important as the acts themselves, which have now been made illegal by the Sri Lankan state. Both such stories and the occasional acts themselves reveal that the enemy, whose graves one can desecrate, is considered to live very nearby, in some cases in the nextdoor neighborhood. The surprising proximity of the targets of such skullhunting expeditions is one of the most striking examples of the crisis of the nondomestic sphere in Udahenagama. Udahenagama people construct and reconstruct this problematic nondomestic sphere by means of discursive strategies that originate in the domestic sphere. For example, I have described the euphemism "yakiilike people," which is used to refer to violent individuals in the family and in the wider community, and I have provided other examples of words that belong to the household context applied out of context, to the reality of civil war, taking on the role of euphemisms. I argue that euphemisms play a

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crucial role in the reconstruction of the nondomestic sphere in postwar Udahenagama. Critical analyses have often pointed out how euphemisms form part of the discourse of repressive regimes. Shown in this negative light, euphemisms form a crucial aspect of oppressors' discourses. Euphemisms are said to reduce people's access to a critical representation of reality, or even to thwart their access to reality altogether. According to this line of thinking, euphemisms suppress reality. As a powerful device of hegemonic discourse, euphemisms conceal the undesirable (or unbearable) while legitimizing the status quo. In this respect, their excessive presence would point to a general crisis of moral legitimacy in a regime (see, e.g., Chilton 1987: 17). Had I looked exclusively at the relation between Udahenagama villagers and the Sri Lankan state, army, and other institutions, I would have supported such a critical interpretation of the use of euphemism in this case. While it could easily be argued that euphemisms legitimize violent aspects of reality in Udahenagama, however, I would also argue that they play a role in an altogether different local dynamic. By suggesting an alternative reality through the use of euphemism, by evoking safety and trust while talking about danger and violence, the atmosphere of the small-scale, familiar context of the household (gedara) is extended to the darker, more unpredictable reaches of society. Just as it might be empowering to call to an untrustworthy or feared soldier "younger brother," it might equally be easier to suggest that he has been "naughty" or "confused" when alluding to atrocities he has committed. The notion of yakii-vage, yakii-like is used for both "bothersome" sons as well as for the murderers of the civil war. A vocabulary primarily used to talk about troubles within the household, a "household vocabulary" pertaining to the small-scale context of the household, is mobilized to talk about less homely forms of violence. Euphemisms thus play a role in a village-level dynamic that operates independently from the abovementioned hegemonic (or counter-hegemonic) discourses. If one takes up a radically critical position toward euphemisms and assumes that they mainly play a role as a strategy of domination and hegemony by repressive regimes (e.g., Chilton 1987), one could suggest they be replaced by making an alternative vocabulary (or "semiotic pool," Daniel 1993: 597) available. While the short-term effects of such a strategy are obvious, the role of euphemisms in the long-term dynamic between safe and dangerous spaces at the village level is overlooked. It has been argued that euphemisms encapsulate a speaker's wishes and hopes that the negative state in question will be replaced by its positive counterpart (Farghal 1995: 376). It should also be considered whether the domestication of a violent reality by means of a household vocabulary plays a role in the radical recontextualization of violent events and individuals. The application of a household vocabulary (or euphemisms) for events that

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happened "out of context(s)" reinserts such events within a small-scale, familiar context. The description of violent people with such a household vocabulary reintegrates such people within the moral economy of the household and makes symbolic links between victims' and a perpetrators' households. The euphemism "yaka-like people" is used to refer to perpetrators of violence. The household is depicted as a bounded moral entity, in need of protection from outside forces. During the civil war and its aftermath, more often than not the boundaries between the household and the wild are breached. One interpretation of the discourse on the invasion of the household by the nonhuman, yaka-like or inhumane stresses the communal, "household" nature of affliction and cure. Data on cleansing rituals largely suggest this model: a sick person's whole household/ house (gedara) as a moral unity is affected by the illness-provoking effects of misdeeds, sins (dosha) and the gaze of the wild (dishtiya). Therefore, all family members and the house and garden are to be ritually cleansed. Another, alternative type of description, which I would endorse, highlights the domestic fissures that are represented by the discourse on the gaze of the wild and yaka-like people. The discourses on people who behave like the wild spirits (yaka vage minissu) as well as the discourse on the gaze of the wild locate the nonhuman or the partially human within the family or its close surroundings. Udahenagama people evoke deep fissures within the household by locating inhumanity inside their own houses, differentiate themselves from the "less human" family members, and temporarily dehumanize family members (yakii-like people) without always naming them. However, people use the same vocabulary and the same symbolism for the households of enemies and perpetrators of violence and thereby evoke the potential fissures in a war criminal's household. By virtue of the ambiguous notions of the gaze of the wild and yaka vage minissu, intimately related people who are antisocial and abusive within the family are lumped together with enemies from other families and neighborhoods who might be insurgents, killers, or war criminals. In this way, Udahenagama people establish symbolic links between the families of the disappeared and the households of war criminals. It is of course not necessarily true that the use of the same metaphor for antisocial sons, political opponents, and murderers necessarily goes along with the same emotions and levels of dehumanization. The same metaphor used in relation to different kinds of enemies and in different locations might mean quite different things for the person using the metaphor. While interpreting these data on the use of the notion of yaka-like people, one could simply assert the polysemic nature of this metaphor and end the analysis there. I would tentatively take the interpretation a step further,

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however, and postulate the very real power of this discourse on yaka-like people; a discourse in which the same metaphor is used for a variety of enemies. By means of this idiom, a metaphorical link may be established between the fissures in one's own household on the one hand and the fissures in an enemy's or a perpetrator's household on the other. A conceptualization of the possible fissures in a perpetrator's household on the basis of the experience of radical fissures in one's own household might have played a role in the disassociation of a perpetrator from his family that I described in Chapter 3. Indeed, what made me suggest the power of this discourse was the fact that Udahenagama people somehow managed to contain the violence of the civil war. Despite the widespread and horrific nature of that violence, there remained definite boundaries and firmly established mechanisms for the control of violence. I called this a local cycle of containment of violence. While young and middle-aged men were killed during the war, their wives or children were threatened but hardly ever physically harmed or killed (and they knew they would not be-see Chapter 3). In the aftermath of the war, perpetrators were clearly dissociated from their families. The victims and their families were much less angry and vengeful toward the perpetrators' families, compared to the feelings they harbored against the perpetrators themselves. People took revenge only on perpetrators, leaving their households largely untouched. In my interpretation, this moral distinction between a perpetrator and his household, which resulted in highly controlled and specific types of violence, derives part of its strength from the discourse on yaka-like people. The dissociation of a perpetrator from his family is produced in a variety of ways, one of them the discourse on people who behave like the wild spirits. Because people learned to distance themselves from their own family members involved in the violence, they were also able to recognize that there might be a radical difference between a war criminal and the rest of his family. In other words, questioning the monolithic identity24 of one's own family made one able to question the monolithic identity of all other families. As I understand it, many lives were saved because people were not operating from the moral high ground of their own household, or radically opposing "our people" to a generic "dehumanized other." While people routinely engage in domestic cleansing rituals and discursive strategies to preserve their own contexts, they nevertheless recognize the problem of violence both in their own household and in more distanced contexts. Yaka-like people were described as both nearby and faraway. A discourse existed to distinguish ordinary people (samanya minissu) from yaka-like people. This discourse left people the option to distinguish themselves from very close yaka-like people who participated in the civil war, while

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enabling people to see that many members of opposing groups were not directly involved in the war either. Parents of yak&like sons, who have been victimized by sons of other households, establish a kind of allegiance with their abusers' parents. People of the prewar generation are somehow loyal to each other regardless of the events they were involved in during the civil war. In my description of the discourse on yaka-like people I have tried to show how even close-by spaces can be dehumanized, that is to say, conceived of as being occupied by inhumane, cruel people, the yaka vage minissu. Previously, dangerous or illness-provoking spaces were predominantly defined in relation to the traditional (water-based) cosmology: streams, wells, crossroads, or the forest. Nabokov (1997: 306) describes how demons in Tamil Nadu have moved to modern sites such as the heart of large urban centers, cinemas, and buses. These new, modern landscapes of demonic attack are associated with anonymous, threatening zones, far away from the security of home. My data about Udahenagama, however, suggest that the institutionalized demons or wild spirits (yaksha) are claimed either to have remained in their traditional places or to have disappeared altogether (see, e.g., transcripts 11 in Chapter 3 and 1 in Chapter 7). Rather than demons, it is the yaka-1ike people together with an ambiguously defined gaze of the wild who now make the spaces in between contexts dangerous and threatening. An important difference from Nabokov's findings is that these spaces are not relatively far-away spaces of modernity but are very well known, familiar spaces within the village, including paths, plantations, or shopping areas. Just as the wider society pervades houses and households, so does the domestic ethos determine the societal ethos. Household vocabularies and household metaphors are applied out of context. One obvious example is the frequent use of kinship terminology (e.g., elder brother, elder sister) for non-kin during brief encounters outside the context of the household.25 This gives an air of conviviality and congeniality to such interactions. In my interpretation, the discourse on yaka-like people and the frequent use of euphemism provide further examples of a projection of discursive strategies belonging to the domestic context onto the nondomestic sphere. The discourse on yaka-like people operates at the family level, in very intimate contexts. While some people are dehumanized at this familial level, their dehumanization is ephemeral, volatile, and superficial. After all, one is talking about people one encounters on a daily basis and toward whom one might have family obligations; people with whom one eats and with whom one shares a fluid, shared self. These same idioms and discourse are then transposed to another sphere, where political opponents or war criminals are discussed and conceptualized in the same ways. Much like what happens within the family, these remote perpetrators may be dehuman-

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ized, but they are dehumanized by means of a strategy also used for close family members. And much like what happens in the family, dehumanized enemies are also dissociated and distinguished from their kin. Whether this dehumanization is as ephemeral, volatile, and superficial as when it is applied within the family context remains to be seen. In any case, domestic strategies of dehumanization helped to produce and express the dissociation of killers and their families, so important for the cycle of containment of violence. In my interpretation, therefore, this primarily domestic discursive strategy of dehumanization has played a role in the control of the spread of violence during as well as after the civil war. This process of dehumanization is very different from the dehumanization in middle-class discursive practices that have been linked to urban riots and massacres, in which whole groups of people are identified with wild spirits, become demonized or dehumanized, and consequently are eliminated, or "exorcized" (see Das 1998; Kapferer quoted in Das 1998). I thus make a link between the local cycle of containment of violence and the application of domestic strategies of discursive dehumanization outside the context of the household, within the nondomestic sphere. These strategies of dehumanization, such as the use of the metaphor yakalike people, are part of a much wider discursive atmosphere where words that evoke the small-scale context of the household are used within the wider society. The effects of this are twofold. First, the use of euphemisms to describe violence, the use of zero anaphora to refer to violent events and the deployment of ambiguous naming strategies increase the social fragmentation of U dahenagama society. Postwar society is built up of very well protected small-scale social units, and the discursive strategies I described in the first part of this chapter play a major role in this protection and isolation of households from the wider, often violent society. Because people concentrate so much on the protection of the domestic sphere, the nondomestic sphere is neglected. The contrast between the warm and very humane atmosphere within households and the almost icy nondomestic sphere surrounding those households is striking. A second effect of the use of domestic discursive strategies in the wider society inadvertently addresses this crisis of the nondomestic sphere. Violent youths who roam the neighborhoods of the Udahenagama area are represented by using words that belong to the life-world of nuclear families and households. This discursive technique somehow reintegrates these youths within the moral economy of the household and, more important, the morality within any Sinhalese Buddhist household. Udahenagama people hereby create crosscutting ties between the households of victims and the households of killers. This played a role in the dissociation of perpetrators of violence from their families. Udahenagama people recognized there might be radical fissures within killers' households. These fissures

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are comparable to the radical divisions within their own households, between themselves and family members, who might be violent too. Discourses used to describe domestic moralities and violence are applied out of context, in the wider war-torn society, and this played a crucial role in a Udahenagama culture of containment of major, modernist outbreaks of violence.

Chapter 6

"'She said that he had said that

,, • • •

The Use of Reported Speech

He came back (from the front) because it seems to h ave been said that his mother said: "You should come home because I am scared." (gossip about a deser ter)

While in the previous chapters I discussed the discursive strategies that people use when speaking for themselves, in this ch apter I analyze the ways

Figure 11. I said: "Younger brothe r, if you are killing, kill me."

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in which Udahenagama people quote one another. Quoting is a game that is firmly woven into the fabric of discourses in many cultures. When trouble looms on the playground, the toddler quotes his father. Journalists quote cunning politicians and ethnographers quote the discipline's forefathers to similar effect. In the West, reporting other people's speech is a valuable asset in the game of identities. It permits a speaker to position him/herself at the center of a variety of statements from others that he/ she can reproduce (or redesign) at leisure. Once original statements are uttered, they become alive in the imagination of the listener and finally reenter conversations as reported speech; a rich and often ambiguous reflection of "original" words. In Euro-American culture the use of reported speech can be categorized as a continuum along which I would identifY four key modes. In the first place, people can identifY with a statement to the point of almost completely internalizing it. In such cases, one's own voice becomes completely merged with the voice of others and other people's voices become part of one's own identity. This often occurs in scientific discourse, in which takenfor-granted statements cease to be examples of reported speech. One does not have to quote Newton, for instance, to talk about gravity. The same thing may happen in communities with a high sense of coherence and a strong identity, such as a community of readers of the same newspaper. In such cases, one does not say, for example, that the Daily Telegraph mentioned X, but simply asserts that one knows X to be true, without necessarily mentioning the source of information. The members of such communities make little distinction between the source of the ingested information and the self. In such communities, private and public knowledge overlap to a large extent, public knowledge easily becoming one's own knowledge in a relatively unquestioned manner. Second, in many instances people quote others but only partially identifY with the quoted speaker, by revealing or even stressing the identity of the original source. Then a person who uses reported speech makes a distinction between the quoted speaker and the self and identifies or agrees with a particular point of view or position the quoted speaker holds. This is a technique often used when people want to take advantage of a social position that is obviously not their own. Then they maintain a certain distance between the speaker and the self so that this social distance or difference can be exploited. The voice of authority is quoted and requoted, and clusters of followers form at the feet of powerful speakers. In such cases, an utterance finds a new life as a cluster of reported speech events. One obvious example is the ways academics quote important members of their discipline as a way oflegitimizing their arguments. Third, more perverse or wicked uses of reported speech also exist, in which the original statement is dragged through the mud in more or less

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subtle ways. In such cases, people use reported speech to show how they do not identifY with the quoted speaker, resulting in a process of nonidentification rather than identification. They create an identity in distinction to the speaker's identity, pluck the original statements out of their context, and re-implant them in a context that is not so flattering. Alternatively, a quotation can be used in an ironic way, the speaker's cynicism only revealed in the intonation used. Taking this process further still, one can create shock quotes, in which the speaker shocks his or her audience by using a quote in a sensational way or by misquoting somebody altogether. In such a setting, the original meaning of the utterance might be of secondary importance, and the identity of the reporter as it were obliterates the identity of the original speaker. Instead of playing a genuine role in the reporter's negotiation of identity, the speaker might involuntarily acquire a novel, bogus identity by being (mis)quoted in this way. More often than not, though, this more blatant form of false reporting is not acceptable, and subtle forms of irony and recontextualization of the original quote have to be deployed to convey one's disagreement or resentment with a quoted speaker. In the West, ironic and cynical modes of relating to other people's statements and identities are the predominant types of "nonidentification," in situations where overt disagreement is unacceptable. Finally, another mode of reporting speech involves not so much obliterating as stealing the original speaker's identity. In other words, a spoken idea may be plagiarized. This mode is close to the first example mentioned here, the instance of complete identification, but is nonetheless essentially different. In this case the person does not throw him- or herself wholesale into the pool of public knowledge but tries to carve out a particular identity with ideas and statements "stolen" from somebody else. The statements of the original speaker now are presented as the original statements of the reporter. The true original speaker is no longer present in such sentences, which might lose the characteristics of reported speech altogether. A description of these essentially Western modes of quoting others and their links with processes of identity formation 1 provide the background material I will build on to explore the use of reported speech in U dahenagama discourses on illness, misfortune, and violence. I document the ways Udahenagama styles of quoting and the nonidentification that goes along with them differ from the above-mentioned Euro-American modes of quotation. I present data from different communicative contexts and bring together quoting strategies characteristic of differing speech genres. These include a group interview, the speech of a mediumistic diviner, and a narrative from an individual interview. These are snapshots of communicative events chosen to represent a more widely practiced style of quoting in the community of Udahenagama (for an example of this methodology see Parmentier 1993).

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Before presenting the data, I need briefly to introduce the ways reported speech is conveyed in Sinhala.2 The constructions most commonly used in spoken Sinhala to report another person's speech are the verbal construction kivva-kiyala or kivva and the suffix -lu. I will describe the use of the suffix -lu in the last section of this chapter. Kivva-kiyal and kivva are relatively easy to grasp for the non-Sinhalese. Both kivva and kiyala are derived from the verb kiyanava, "to say." Kivva means "said" and kiyala means "having said" (Reynolds 1980: 9, 226-29). These terms can be used to report a statement much in the way English speakers use "said" and "said that." 3 Sentences containing more than one instance of kiyala, however, may be confusing for the non-Sinhalese. These are what I call double and triple reported speech clauses. Sentences beginning with "She said that he said that ... "are in fact not at all unusual in Udahenagama. In the transcripts that follow, I highlight the markers of such reported speech clauses by presenting them in italics.

Transcript of a Group Discussion Among Humans I have chosen this family interview as an illustration of the ways people quote each other, give Voice to each other, and put their Voice into other people's mouths. I pay special attention to quoting strategies used when "dangerous" statements have to be made or "wild words" (see Chapter 4) have to be used, which could cause terrified hearts ( hita bayayi) and concomitant illnesses. Such dangerous statements include sorcery accusations, the words of an entranced person, the naming of an illness, or curses and terrifYing statements. Before presenting the interview, I first describe the family context and the participants in the discussion. The Obeyesekere family live in a small mud house at the outskirts of the neighborhood of Hendolakanda. As I described in Chapter 3, the people from Hendolakanda are engaged in an ongoing conflict with the people from Panigahakanda, and the people living on the outskirts of Hendolakanda suffer from periodic violent clashes between young men from Hendolakanda and Panigahakanda. The house of the Obeyesekere family is built on a contested piece of land. The family's neighbors have attempted to reclaim the land from them for many years, and a bitter court case has ensued. To make things worse, a hostile woman, a local enemy living in one of the neighboring houses, is suspected of having used sorcery against them. The Obeyesekere family once called the police, who gave the hostile neighbor a warning, but things didn't change. When all goes well, the house is a home for ten people, but throughout the year I was there people moved in and out, as "they couldn't bear staying" in the house. The sorcery spell has mainly affected the mother, Mrs. Obeyesekere. Over the past few years, the whole family organized several

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healing rites for her. When her suffering became unbearable, she would lose consciousness and start screaming, at midday, 6 P.M., or midnight. Sometimes she hit her bed with her fists and heels all night long, tried to flee the house, or physically attacked family members. In November 1997, after many sleepless nights for the whole family, an all-night domestic cleansing ritual was organized, followed by two smaller-scale all-night rituals. I visited the family a few days after the cleansing rituals were completed. The sick Mrs. Obeyesekere (L), her husband (H), her cousin, and a young unmarried man (M), were talking and giving each other voice. Other participants take up the role of overhearing the conversation: the two eldest sons of Mrs. Obeyesekere, her teenage daughter, three younger daughters, her daughter-in-law with her baby, and me. People were scattered over the various rooms, the porch, and the kitchen of the house. Many conversations went on at the same time, and most of the participants were simultaneously busy with household activities. During this particular interview, I was mainly talking with Mrs. Obeyesekere's daughter-in-law. My assistant Akka (with the tape-recorder) continued to focus on Mrs. Obeyesekere, while Mrs. Obeyesekere's husband busied himself preparing betel nuts and taking care of the young children. He positioned himself variously at the doorstep, the outside door, or the door to the bedroom. Throughout the day, many snacks and cups of tea were served and M, the young nephew, dropped in a few times, and then participated in the conversation. Mrs. Obeyesekere gave a very disaffected impression, speaking at high speed in a soft, monotonous voice. There was no change in intonation when she was quoting other people. Her body language did not reveal much of the excitement and engagement that might have been elicited by narrating things that were obviously close to her heart. [I] I. Akka: Why did you go and see the horoscope reader? 2. L: They might have consulted the horoscope reader when I was sick [but I don't know]. 3. M: That is the first thing we do if anybody is sick. 4. L: Yes, when I got ill they read my horoscope [but I was not involved]. 5. Akka: What did the horoscope reader say? 6. L: I don't know [emphasizes the I] 7. M: (He) said "(she) has aloneness-sickness." 8. Akka: Did he say you should do a cleansing ritual? 9. M: He said: "Tie a thread" [around her arm]. IO. L: Ask big brother what the horoscope reader said! [L tells M to ask H what the horoscope reader said]. II. M: Big brother, what did the horoscope reader say? I2. H: After he read the horoscope (he) said: "Do a cleansing ritual (tovile), do this and that."So we did small cleansing rites.

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13 .... 14. Akki: [to L] Did your family members tell you what happened to you afterward? [when you lost consciousness] 15. L: No, I don't know, they didn't tell me. 16 .... 17. Akka: What does she do? 18. M: She talks and talks, a mad person's talk, (she) (apparently) says: "look! the wild spirits are coming," she says (apparently) "look! the wild spirits are coming," (she) hits her hands and feet on the floor, and twists and turns. 19. Akka: And when it is time to sleep? 20. M: (She) didn't sleep, she slept at our house [Mrs. Obeyesekere's mother's house], she said "at night I can't stay here" and went, after having left the house, she slept in our house for a little while, then she fell ill again ... and she said: "can't stay," 4 she said: "Want to go," then she left us, in the morning she bathed [at another house] and then came back. 21. L: Why? I don't know anything. 22. M: It was apparently said: "The wild spirits come, they are causing trouble," ... she said: "The gaze of the wild (dishtiya) is at work," she said: "can't stay," but we can't keep the ritual specialist here all the time, those people have work to do, this is not their only job! 23 .... 24. L: On the first day of the illness, at night, when the ritual healer had left I saw a cleansing ritual (tovile) in my dream ... the dream indicated that (we should) "make decorations" [preparations for the ritual], that little I know, that is all, I don't know anything else. 25 .... 26. L: The day after, at noontime, I realized they had done a cleansing ritual, I told them [her family members]: "find out what happened" [the things that happened during the ritual while she was unconscious]. 27 .... 28. L: It seems that everybody has come, they say: "everybody helped me," it is said that: "they saw my illness, and after having come, seen me, and gone, everybody came back and helped." 29 .... 30. Akka: While the gaze of the wild was leaving the body, did it leave a sign/proof of its departure? 31. L: They [her family members] didn't tell me. 32 .... 33. Akka: Were there moral faults (dosha) in the house ... ? 34. L: [to her husband] Come and talk, I don't know about it, do I? 35. H: They [the ensorceling enemies] 5 didn't do it to the house, they gave something to her, something charmed. It wasn't the ritual specialist but the sick person [L!] who told us. 36. M: Yes, when she was unconscious, she told us, she said: "a charmed thing." ... 37. H: Even before that she had told us: "there is something* buried" [a sorcery spell buried in the garden]. 38 .... 39. M: It* [the sorcery spell] has something to do with a wedding, elder sister's [L's] eldest son got married, because of that marriage there are problems. 40. L: At that time (she) [the sorcerous enemy, her son's mother-in-law] spoke and scolded me because my son had brought (her daughter) home [as a wife], so now I don't know, younger brother (M) said: "it might have happened like that"

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[sorcery accusation]*, when my daughter-in-law was brought here, she [the daughter-in-law's mother] scolded me, and called me "wrongdoer," younger brother told me: "it is through this* [sorcery] that they might have done this* to you," (she) [mother of her daughter-in-law] said "I will really do it," (she) said it truly, (she) told me: "I will not allow you to stay alive," her mother [points at her daughter-in-law] told me: "I will not allow you to stay alive." [in summary: Laccuses the mother of her daughter-in-law of sorcery] 41. M: We don't say: "it is exactly those people" [who did this to us], but we don't trust them [L's daughter-in-law's family members], in fact we don't know, we cannot say "they did it," we didn't see it happen, nobody told us [that they did it], don't trust them really, so to say, even today they are friendly with me, they talk (to me) [they are on speaking terms], meet up, everybody is good.

42 .... 43. L: I am not working, since I have been ill, I am not working, our mother told me: "don't do any work," (she) said: "don't eat any fried food for a while."

There are a few sequences in this discussion that are worth commenting on in detail. Mrs. Obeyesekere often says "I don't know" (lines 2, 6, 15, 21, 34, 40). In doing so, she invites other people to speak for her and to quote her trance-speech. It is most probable that people have already told her what she said during the trance, as the speech of the entranced is a very popular topic of conversation soon after a domestic cleansing ritual. I noticed the same dynamic during group interviews in similar situations. What often struck me was that the healed person does not say: "They told me that I said: 'sorcery is involved.' " It is as if a recently healed person does not want to take such words into her mouth again but relies on other people to do so, as if such words can only be uttered in a sick or entranced state and should not be repeated too soon after a successful recovery. This is not surprising in the light of the fact that an accusation of sorcery can be considered an accusation of premeditated murder (see Obeyesekere 1975), and is indeed a dangerous utterance. It means that, during a cleansing ritual, ritual specialists (sorcerers) will take revenge on the accused person for the accuser. In this case, Mrs. Obeyesekere's husband (line 35) and her younger brother (line 36) are made to breach the topic, albeit in veiled terms. But then Mrs. Obeyesekere takes this strategy of caution one step further. Not only are her close family members made to quote her dangerous utterances, she finally puts a dangerous utterance in the mouth of her younger brother herself (line 40). "Younger brother said: 'it might have happened like that ... it is through this that they might have done this to you.' " Again, this does not take the form of the grandiose sorcery accusation that an anthropologist might expect or be looking for. In my experience, however, this is a very common mode for uttering such dangerous statements.6 I had expected to find a powerful interest group unconditionally backing a particular accusation, and a spokesperson to make a public statement. More often than not, however, relations in an ensorceled house-

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hold are rather precarious.7 The dangerous statement is heavily debated (line 41) and sent around from one person to the other. Others are given voice, and "giving Voice" takes on a rather different meaning in such cases from the connotations it holds in the usual context of empowerment and advocacy. Suffering women, such as Mrs. Obeyesekere, construct whirlpools of dangerous utterances around the self, not really voiced by oneself but spread by quoting others.

Transcript of a Group Discussion Among Deities In this section I do not myself present the context of the communicative event, but rather paraphrase Loku Arnma to describe the setting in which the mediumistic diviner, a middle-aged woman, spoke. Loku Arnma, a seventy-five-year-old grandmother, went to visit the diviner and took me with her on a journey up the hill through the embattled neighborhood of Hendolakanda to Panigahakanda, where the diviner works. As we were on our way, this is how she introduced the neighborhood to me: [2] Before, this was forest. It used to be given to people as chena [for slash and burn cultivation]. Panigahakanda is very prosperous now. They teach the children very well there. Looks as if they haven't gone to school today, here the children are good, the girls study well ... [Points at the fields] These are chena, these people live by chena cultivation, they grow cinnamon, tea, they are prospering, our big chenas have a disease, but these ones are good ... [On the way, we meet a soldier walking in the opposite direction who aggressively interrogates my assistant and me. Since he is a family member of Loku Amma, she comments on his situation:] Very dangerous where he works, his best friend died suddenly, his mother is making a lot of vows at the temple. Here [in Panigahakanda], two men died while serving in the army, one was not married, the other had everything arranged for his marriage. I just come here to go there [to the diviner] otherwise I don't know anything about this place ... [We pass the empty ruin of a temple.] People do not develop the temple. They don't even try. Even a monk cannot thrive here. There must be something to make the monks dislike the place. Though they came, they couldn't stay. Their mind had a bad time. There was no trouble, but they [the people from Panigahakanda] did not even give proper food offerings to the monks, that was the problem [they didn't feed the monks properly] ... [We come across some houses under construction]. Now, see: they even earn money to build these, all because of this road. Look: a power station ... [We come upon a slightly bigger house] That belongs to somebody working in Colombo, a carpenter [uses the disrespectful term for carpenter]. Before, there were only small houses here, now they make bigger, better, more developed houses ... Those people are very together/ united. (my emphasis) I will now juxtapose this description of Loku Aruma's presentation of the diviner's neighborhood with the context in which this divinatory conversation took place. I add my opinion of Panigahakanda here, for the sake of the clarity of the argument. Indeed it was a journey to a relatively unknown area for us as well as for Loku Arnma. Caste boundaries have largely cut

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off the information flow from this uphill neighborhood to the downhill areas. Moreover, a week before we undertook this journey, four men from Loku Aroma's neighborhood had been disemboweled and shot on this path, allegedly by people from Panigahakanda. As we passed the place, stained with blood, where the shooting had taken place, Loku Amma remained silent. Soon afterward, however, a steady stream of exaggerated praise accompanied our entry into the neighborhood of Panigahakanda. Parts of this praise could be called "poisonous mouth" (kata vaha), a way of attacking the enemy through jealous praise (see Chapter 4). Poisonous mouth is a common cause of illness caused by jealous enemies who say things like "Oh! Your children are doing so well at school!" In that sense, Loku Aroma's comments could be seen as a form of retaliation, while she carefully avoided representing (or making present) the violent event itself. When the high-strung soldier aggressively interrogated us, she expressed sympathy for him and his mother and managed to create the sense that we all were on a rather pleasant walk after all. She reached the diviner in good spirits. Loku Aroma's comments reveal how she talked about danger on the way to the diviner, or-in our terms and literal translations-almost didn't talk about it. When interpreting the conversation between the gods and Loku Amma that follows, her human, ambiguous way of presenting danger needs to be taken into account. While she spoke to us humans, her account is ambiguous and veiled. Finally, I want to present the gods who take part in the discussion. The entranced diviner, turned with her back toward the people and facing the statue of the goddess Pattini in the main building of the shrine, utters sacred speech at high speed, giving voice to about ten gods. Commonly the divination starts with a god visiting the supplicant's home. A divinatory description of the layout of that house precedes the description of the problems that the household is suffering from. While the gods do not address their human audience directly, a deified ancestor reports their speech; in this case the diviner's deceased great-aunt who became a deity in her next birth. In addition to this, the gods who address the deified ancestor often use reported speech. For example, the deified ancestor quotes Pattini, quoting Badra Kali, quoting Vishnu. In English this would be: "The ancestor says: 'Pattini said (to that ancestor that): "Kali said (to Pattini that): 'Vishnu said (to Kali that): "you have to make a vow." ' " ' " In my interpretation of this speech style, I focus on the ways in which these sequences of (often double and triple) quotations are linked to the division of labor and distribution of danger among the gods. 8 Among others, Kali and Suniyam are located in small shrines outside the main building. They can be recruited to take revenge on one's enemies, and as one diviner once explained: "they are too violent to keep in the shrine of the Company of the Great Gods" (the

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Entrance Suniyam's Shrine Buddha's hous

Ghana' Shrine

Shed

0 0 0 D0

0

r---

Worshippers

p adimunda Shrine

with Main hrine of the great deities

offerings

Kali's Shrine

Figure 12. Spatial relations at a shrine: the segregation of danger (shad ed areas) .

main building; see Figure 12). During divination, these more dangerous deities are cast in specific roles. For example, the diviner in Panigahakanda described the division of labor between Pattini and Kali as follows: [3] Kali is also brough t in by Pattini, if you want to ask about your house/ household, if you offer betel leaves and sacred coins to Pattini, she will . . . tell Kali to go to the house and look. It is like that: Pattini sends Kali to houses, in those houses there is pollution, dirt, various things. Therefore, Pattini does not visit houses, she first sends Kali, telling the route to the house, Kali is sent, she looks (to see) whether the house has a sorcery spell cast on it, even if it is in the fire place, Kali would

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squeeze in everywhere and find out. It is Kali who is sent to houses to inquire about the land/ the earth. If there is a grave somewhere around the house, Kali would say there is a grave, there is a well, an excrement pit, a toilet, Kali goes on and on saying those things and tells Pattini. After Pattini has been told, it is that information that she gives by means of the trance state.

The gods addressed Loku Amma (LA) as follows: [ 4] l. Diviner: (mantra) Permission. " 'The place where she stays has no trouble, or turmoil, or confusion, the confusion and suffering that that being had are solved, about the troubles by enemies, I will give a few details' (she) says)" (she) says 9 . "The children had some confusion and troubles, some incidents" (she) says, "in that way, things have happened that way" (she) says [refers to Loku Aroma's daughter who eloped with a man from Panigahakanda], "there will be no trouble" (she) says, " 'after you have fulfilled the vow it will be good, it will benefit you' the respected Pattini is saying" (she) says, (mantra) ... 2. Loku Amma: Don't know whether we will receive some benefit (a dowry) from them? 3. Diviner:" 'Permission' (she) says" (she) says." 'While the father is there [conversational tone, louder, slower], because of the ideas of the father's side [her father's disapproval of her marriage] she does not receive any help or aid from her brothers ' the respected Pattini is saying" (she) says. " 'They will remain with wholehearted affection toward her' the respected Pattini is saying" (she) says . 4. Loku Amma: The father does not loosen up [her husband refuses to see his eloped daughter]. 5. Diviner: "'It's the same, no good' (she) says" (she) says, permission, [conversational tone, slow] "'mother, because she broke the words (of) mother [because she did not obey]' (she) is saying" (she) says, " 'because of the things she said on her deathbed he has kept anger like this in his mind' the respected Pattini is saying" (she) says, " 'permission' (she) says" (she) says ... 6. Loku Amma: Then how is the chief that lives in that household (gedara) Miiniyo? [refers to her husband as "the chief that lives in that house" 10 and makes inquiries about him]. 7. Diviner: (mantra) "Child, that being will never surrender, nor would he accept/believe in the influence of the planets, or faults related to the planets, he would not do anything about the behavior of the planets, he does not believe in the work of the gods" (she) says. "You must give only English medicine" (she) says.

8. Loku Amma: hm. 9. Diviner: "Due to the behavior of the planets, wind disease will keep on occurring" (she) says. "He has wind disease, he might be caught by paralysis too" (she) says. "'Though it is like this, his power/the authority in his mouth and words did not decline,' the respected Pattini says" (she) says. 10. Loku Amma: That is quite right. 11. Diviner: " 'He will not keep his mouth shut' said the respected Sri Vishnu" (she) says. " 'Cannot get his mouth to apologize' says" (she) says, " 'if you want I will make a vow to Dadimunda and give you a drop of oil' says" (she) says, "'"because of the bad planetary influence even that should not be done for him"

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said the respected Diidimunda' (she) says" (she) says, "let it happen like that," let him talk to himself, the respected Pattini said, "let him speak with himself" (she) said, "'he will not harm anyone, he will not fight with anyone' (she) says" (she) says, " 'even if he causes a lot of trouble to the family members, don't take it seriously' the respected Paramakandiishvara is saying" (she) says, . 12. Loku Amma: Then, are things working out for this (my) son? 13. Diviner: " 'So far all the troubles he had in mind, confusion, turmoil, obstacles have been cleared' Vishnu says" (she) says, "there is no condition of unrest, (it is the same) like before; he is not interested in his job," permission. [Suniyam joins the conversation] " ' "but there is no harm either, no troubles from enemies" says Pattini' says Suniyam" (she) says, permission [Pattini on her own again], "'no trouble' (she) is saying" (she) says, (mantra)," 'if somebody [her son] is indebted to you, you will get it back' (Pattini) is saying" (she) says, "you will get the money back next month" (she) says, "'permission' (she) is saying" (she) says, [Lakshmi enters the conversation], "'you will receive that money' Pattini and Sryii Miiniyo (Lakshmi) are saying" (she) says, (mantra), permission, [diviner trembles heavily], "is that all" (she) asks, "ask: 'is that all?' '"what do you still have to ask?, is that all?"' (Pattini) asked" (she) says. 14. Loku Amma: That is all. 15. Diviner: Permission, blessed, blessed, (mantra), permission [loud], [recites gta to give merit to gods, bhuta, and all beings]

Then the gods addressed me (A). The goddess Kali's and Suniyam's comments on my fieldwork experience follow: 16. Diviner: [slow and low] A confusion in the blood/blood pressure has occurred [uses literary Sinhala], permission, permission, after you arrived in Sri Lanka that confusion, danger I trouble got worse ... 17. A: Yes. 18. Diviner:" 'For this you need something to cool down your body' the respected Pattini says" (she) says, "you understood it?" (she) says, "because of the country [uses High Sinhalese], because of the heat caused by the way the country is, you have those thoughts" (she) says ... [conversational, slow] "'you should be careful with the place where you stay/accommodation' (Pattini) is saying" (she) says ... [louder, poetic] "someone is scolding you" (she) said," '(he) will use various traps/secrets [secret plans]' (Pattini) is saying" (she) says ... permission, gods, peace calm, [mantra, in which she mentions Badra Kalil, "even now, child, in the place where you live, even though you haven't any troubles" (she) [probably Kalil says "there is a male being who peeps in every now and again." ... [slow, conversational], (she) tells (you) "to understand" (she) says, " 'that male being is not that much of a person to be interested in [poetic], you should protect yourself from that person' (Pattini) is saying" (she) says, " 'he is like a deceitful/ fraudulent person' (she) is saying" (she) says ... " 'that person lives as if he is half asleep' (she) is saying" (she) says, it is good for you to hear this ... 19. A: Yes. 20. Diviner: (Deified ancestor) says that now the accomplished and respected Suniyam will tell how it all happened-in Pali language to Badra Kali with the four powers-having told her to make it clear and understandable to the people who are here, permission, [mantra, high pitched voice] "'something you ate

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and disliked and (you) said "yuk, yuk" to is causing an illness' (Kali) says (Suniyam has said), "'what the female being has eaten and disliked and said "yuk, yuk" to has caused an illness' (Kali) says" (Suniyam has said) ... "'Eat something you do like, child, eat something sour, child, in the way of sour things, have something sour every morning, take sour things for a day or two' (Kali) says" (Suniyam has said) , "something poisonous/ dangerous happened" (she) says, "'"That (the dangerous thing/poison in the stomach) will be cut away" said the respected Badra Kali' (she) says" (she) says .. . [lamenting voice, quoting me] "'Oh, I can't eat, I lost my appetite/! don't like the food' you often said, 'you ate something you did not like and said "yuk, yuk" to'" (she) says. 21. A: Yes.

Figure 13. Reported speech among the gods. The arrows show how a statement moves from one god to anothe r, at least as far as one can gather from the ways they quote each other.

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22. Loku Arnma: Maniyo, should we charm the sour things or (give them to Alex) without charming them? 23. Diviner "'Don't charm them, charming will have no effect on this person' (Kali) says" (she) says . .. (she) tells you "eat something sour, like the juice of currants, sour or sweet oranges every morning on an empty stomach," "the food has affected you" (she) says, "'eat some honey' (Kali) says" (she) says, (mantra) ...

In this passage, the gods are careful to quote each other in the appropriate way (see Figure 13). Putting it another way, the diviner is cautious to quote the gods in the appropriate way. In the first part, the deified ancestor quotes Pattini (lines 1-10). Then Vishnu and Dadimunda are quoted to criticize the supplicant's husband (line 11). Vishnu continues to talk about Loku Amma's son, and then Suniyam is quoted to mention the enemies (line 13). Of course Lakshmi addresses the money matters (line 13). Suniyam and Kali are summoned and quoted to describe my misfortunes and their possible remedies (line 20). The way in which the gods voice some potentially dangerous or frightening statements stands in stark contrast with the way in which Loku Amma tends to circumvent such issues (for example in her presentation of the neighborhood of Panigahakanda). During this divination the gods' voices remain strictly separated, even to the extent of being in a different and almost inaccessible language altogether. It is often commented upon that Kali speaks Tamil during divination, but here she is asked to translate Suniyam's Pali. Kali works for Pattini, and is sent out to the houses of the supplicants. But Pattini does not appropriate the knowledge that Kali gathered; they remain Kali's knowledge and words. Kali and Suniyam embody the most dangerous powers (like the doing and undoing of sorcery spells) and Kali comes in regular contact with pollution inherent in human dwellings. The diviner does not directly voice their dangerous statements (in the majority of the examples I presented). Pattini and the deified ancestor take up the role of intermediaries, who quote these utterances of dangerous powers. Dangerous words are not directly placed into the mouth of the diviner. Long sequences of quotes form, as it were, a buffer zone through which potentially dangerous words are transmitted.

Brave Narrative In contrast to the highly performative and self-conscious speech of the diviner, the following narrative took the form of a quick whisper; a story I was given on my first visit to Nishanta's family in Puvakdeniya. I had dropped in on them that day because Nishanta, a nineteen-year-old man, had been the subject of a healing ceremony the night before, in the course of which a protective charmed sacred design (yantra) had been tied around his

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neck. Like many young men in the village, he had attempted to become a soldier but had come back from the front terrified, angry, and disillusioned. When I met him, he was leading a life of constant suspicion and flight typical of deserters. As his mother said, "The illness he is now suffering from is unemployment and disobedience (to his mother)." The rituals they performed for their "ill" son and the constant arguments between mother and son were but two aspects of the ongoing process of finding a moral position as a family. The narrative I present here is about the suffering that has persisted for almost ten years now. Nishanta's father was murdered during the civil war of 1988-90, and his widow Pemavatthi speaks about how she had tried to intervene and prevent his murder: [5] He was killed and put there, he was thrown alongside the road, killed, we brought him home, he was thrown alongside the road, killed, they stabbed and stabbed him with a knife, they stabbed and stabbed him with a knife in those places [shows the places with her hands on her own body], then he was killed and put on the road, having brought him home, and having taken him to the hospital, having kept him there, had the postmortem examination, the police said to us "take him home," then we brought him home, after we brought him home we kept him here for three days, after that did "the little job" [euphemistic way of referring to the funeral], that was that then, after that there wasn't anything, so, no rumors/news [about the killers], nothing, they had beaten and killed that is all ... after that there were no rumors/news, so I searched in various ways, I went to their [the killers'] houses, I went and (I) asked "why did (you do) this crime to me?", "you could have broken one of his hands or legs, couldn't you?, if he had done something wrong, why did you destroy his life like this?" like that I went and (I) asked, they said "oh, we don't know about those things, don't ask us," they spoke like this, I went to those houses, so I spoke like that, and though I spoke like that, there wasn't anything I could do, so then [before the murder], before they tried to harm us in various ways, they asked our son-in-law from us, the one that is in the army, they told us "give the son-in-law," they told us "bring the son-in-law and give him to us, if you want to save yourselves," then father [her husband] said "I will not bring and give the son-in-law, it is no problem if I die, but I can't get my child killed," that is what he said, in those days (we) wouldn't bring a child and give it to them, would we?, [louder] will we give a child to be killed, will we?, we won't give, will we? ... we say "it's no problem, even if we get killed," don't we?, like that the father spoke, "it is no problem ifl die, but I can't give the child," that is what he said, ... in those days they QVP activists] came to the house at night, at about midnight they came, called us, told us to open the door, but we didn't open it, [Me: You didn't open the door.], we didn't open the door, kept the doors closed and stayed in, then they went away after having beaten and killed the dog, beat [it], finished [it] off and went away, it was like that, later they told my husband to come to the place where they were living, I didn't allow him to go, I went, !went and asked "why?", then they said "You are of no use to us"-they call my husband Black Sir, they call this one's father Black Sir-"Pemavatthi is of no use to us, it is Black Sir we want" they said, [faster] I told them "there are no secrets between the two of us, and what they have to say to him, can be said to me, anything I will go and tell him," I said, though I said this they didn't accept/ believe it, "we need him himself," they said, [faster] I said "younger brother, if you are killing, kill me," "I cannot watch you kill him" I said, "first kill me

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and then do anything you want" I said, so when I had spoken like that, they said that "No, elder sister, there is no problem like that," after that, it was over, it is while remaining like that, [fast] that later they came and came at night but weren't able to get him killed, it was I who stepped outside/ came out before him, if they would have shot they would have had to shoot me first, after I had put them (family members) in the back, I came out first, so in those days, they couldn't do it at home, if they would have done it at home, they would have had to kill all the children and all of us ... he was killed, the fault was that he hadn't brought the son-in-law to them, son-in-law is in the army, then the daughter was married, she was married yes, therefore they said "bring the son-in law," (they) told us "bring him," (they) told us "ask and bring bullets from son-in-law" (they) told us "ask for a gun" [interrupts herself] to uncle [an uncle who was killed by them] also they said "ask a gun and bring it," [fast] there is no way for us, to take those from the army, is there?, will they give us even if we ask them?, might they give us?, how can we take, how?, they don't give those to us, so he (son-in-law) said to me "I have no way to give those to you, there is no way" he said, before we had a gun, but (they) took it away, they asked for it, so after they had asked for it, we went and gave it to them, (we said) "don't kill us, and don't give us any trouble," they said "if the gun is not given, might come and cut younger brother's neck and bring it to older brother's place at night, to elder brother, bringing younger brother's neck (head)," (they) said "(we) will come near elder brother, if the gun is not given," we said "don't kill anybody, there is no point in killing anybody for a piece of iron, we will give, don't kill," so then I said [interrupts herself] I went to give the gun, yes, (I) took it to the Kalubowatta cross-roads, having tied the gun like this to my leg, I took the gun to the Kalubowatta cross-roads, [loud, stressed] there were quite a lot (of people), from the army and the police, no matter how many there were, having tied this (gun) to my leg, having dressed in a sari, I took and gave it to them [to the]VP activists], to save the father (husband) they had said that they would kill the father if the gun was not given, wouldn't they?, then because I wanted to save the father, I took the gun and gave it to them, having taken all those, later they killed, yes, later elder brother [her husband] died, it was to save him from death that all those were given, and we weren't able to do it [save him], gave everything that was asked for, having received everything, still they killed. This narrative gives the impression of being very objective. It pulls listeners into a field of moral tension and invites them to draw their own conclusions.11 It is as if the narrator is an outside observer of her own past. She prevents the past from invading and overwhelming the present. For example, she reiterates how the conversation between her and the killers of her husband had always remained polite. She addressed the insurgents as younger brothers, while they called her elder sister. Her own opinions, emotions, and current moral outrage are not placed at the center of this testimony, something one would expect to have happened in a EuroAmerican cultural context (see Buttny 1997). She does not give the impression of completely identifYing with the words she uttered during the civil war. These words did not merge with her present Voice; they were not incorporated within it and are carefully segregated from it by means of reported speech clauses within the narrative.

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The use of reported speech for vivid presentations of dialogue at the most crucial points of a narrative is also commonly found among English speakers (Buttny 1997: 489). But in the narrative I presented above the use of reported speech serves to achieve more than the mere dramatization of the narrative (as in Holt 1996: 233). Pemavatthi's relatively direct way of referring to violence is a rare event during conversations between people and is a more common characteristic of the speech of the goddess Kali or the godling Suniyam. In my interpretation, Pemavatthi's use of reported speech to quote herself should be framed within this context. It is as if she is quoting a past Voice, a Voice that was engaged in a violent world, out of which she has now emerged. Through quoting herself, she can create a certain distance between the dangerous and frightening utterances of a bygone Voice and her present Voice. 12 I would postulate that reported speech, the characteristic technique of quoting within this speech community, is a type of distance regulator. Reported speech not only regulates the distance between the benevolent gods and the more dangerous Kali-like deities but it also helps separate people from the dangerous statements and Voices that emerged during their lifetimes.

-lu: It is apparently said that . .. Kivvii-kiyalii, he/she said that ... is the means by which people quote others or put words in other people's mouths. There is, however, another reported speech marker: the suffix -lu. The - lu construction cannot be conveyed directly in English grammatical constructions of reported speech.l3 It is therefore more difficult for English speakers intuitively to understand its meaning. Using -lu builds a connotation of doubt, uncertainty, or critical distance into a statement. Volosinov (1971) describes how a culture and the sociohistorical background of a community play a critical role in the creation of the grammatical constructions of reported speech. Society selects and makes grammatical just those forms of speech that are socially vital and that are grounded in the cultural context of a particular community of speakers (151). In Udahenagama, the importance of the social strategy of doubt is reflected in the common use of -lu. The use of -lu implies that you were not present when the original speaker made a statement. 14 The quotation has reached the speaker via a third or fourth party. Since the speaker has not witnessed the original speech event, she or he cannot be sure whether the quote is correct. It is often better translated as "it seems/appears that so-and-so has said that," or "so they say" (Karunatillake 1992: 182, 238, 277), or "it is apparently said that," or "it is allegedly said that." Using -lu suggests that the reporter does not necessarily take up responsibility for what she or he is saying. She or he shows that the statement is not necessarily true; she or he is simply quoting

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somebody else. In some instances, the suffix -lu might even indicate that the reporter does not identify with the statement. 15 In the passage that follows, events that were not witnessed and are only known to the speaker by means of hearsay are marked-as in the original Sinhalese text-by the suffix -lu: It is apparently said (-lu) that that person is at home at the moment, but I didn't go and check.

The suffix -lu is also commonly used to talk about tradition: It is apparently said (-lu) that people get better after a cleansing ritual has been organized for them. It is apparently said (-lu) that you have to make offerings to the spirits of the deceased three months and a year after the death of a person. It is apparently said (-lu) that pregnant women cannot attend domestic cleansing rituals.

They apparently say (-lu) that women who dance one cleansing ritual want to dance more and more cleansing rituals. It is apparently said (-lu) that people can do something to the land by using the wild spirits (a sorcery spell). It is apparently said (-lu) that the gaze of the wild does not fall upon cruel people.

Udahenagama people narrate a common body of knowledge, in this case the tradition (sastara), as if it were something they did not and cannot directly witness. In this way of talking about tradition, they stress the fact that this is the way the tradition appeared to them. Other people have talked to them about it, but they did not witness the (postulated) original communicative events themselves. They position themselves within a chain of communications and only state that a certain statement about the tradition has apparently or allegedly been said (-lu). By means of this communicative strategy they instill a distance between themselves and the statement. It is as if the voices of tradition have not been completely internalized and are not endowed with the same status as statements that have been uttered by a specific person and were actually witnessed by the reporter (who will then report them by using the reported speech marker kivva-kiyalii). The same strategy is used to report forms of (what we would call) "common," "general" or "collective" knowledge that do not belong to the tradition. For example: It is said that/it seems that (-lu) you can't enter the hospital without a prescription. [A woman explaining why men drink so much alcohol] People who work hard are

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courageous, they carry a lot of weight, cut trees, dig fields, do heavy work, their bodies are tired; it is apparently said (-lu) that when you drink this tiredness goes away, it is said (-lu) that then they don't feel their tired and painful bodies anymore, and fall asleep. Specific communicative events that weren't witnessed are typically reported by using the suffix -lu. It is used when people quote somebody they haven't actually heard or overheard saying something: [About the victims of an assault] It is apparently said (-lu) that even their intestines had come out [that they were disemboweled]. It is apparently said (-lu) that it is V. M. who fired the gun. [About an unpopular diviner] They apparently say (-lu) that all things she says are all false. It is apparently said (-lu) that the army carried out a raid at the funeral. It is apparently said (-lu) that my son was tortured and beaten in the army.

Communicative events that by definition cannot be witnessed, such as a dialogue between a spirit of the deceased (preta) and a human being, are also qualified as such by using -lu: My daughter died while she loved me very much, that is why she (her spirit) comes and calls me, she apparently says (-lu): "mother, lets go," she apparently says (-lu) "mother is suffering." By means of this discursive strategy, the narrator presents the interlocutor with an appearance, an account of what has appeared to the narrator. An atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty is routinely evoked once a very small-scale communicative context, which can be reported by means of kivvii-kiyalii, is transcended. In the first sections of this chapter, I described how Voices maintain their separateness by means of the strategies used to report them. Other people's words are not easily absorbed within a speaker's Voice. In this section, however, I look at how people relate to statements that have lost their connection with an original speaker. Again, a distance is maintained between such statements and the reporter's Voice. The uncertainty and doubt evoked by the suffix -lu reveal the distinctiveness between a person's Voice and the forms of knowledge about tradition and everyday life that are circulating within the community. I would define this discursive strategy as a form of dis-identification or nonidentification with collective life and collective forms of knowledge. Udahenagama ways of relating to what I tentatively describe as a common, collective form of knowledge is certainly very different from the modern notion of "public opinion" in the bourgeois discursive public

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sphere (for example, as defined by Habermas 1962). Habermas describes the notion of public opinion as the critical reflections of a public competent to form its own judgments (90). It gradually evolved from the earlier, Roman notion of opinio. The -lu construction, however, would seem to correspond better to the original meaning of the Latin opinio. Habermas describes the Latin opinio as an uncertain, inchoate judgment whose truth still had to be proven (89). Nevertheless, the Udahenagama use of reported speech to convey messages whose original utterance people have not heard is different from the presentation of an opinio in that a distance is maintained between the reported Voice and the reporter's Voice. In this sense, it is also different from the modern notion of a "personal opinion." The use of reported speech in U dahenagama defies our common sense notions of both personal and public opinion. Therefore the notion of a public spherel6 as we know it cannot be really applied to the situation in Udahenagama. This is one of the reasons why I refrained from using the notion of public sphere to describe the cycle of violence (as "domestic," "political," or "public" forms of violence) in Udahenagama.

An Excess of Quotation I now return to the issues raised in the introduction to this chapter where I described links between modes of quoting others and processes of identity formation in Western culture. If I were to summarize the quoting strategies and modes of identification obtaining between reporter and original speaker, I would describe them in turn as complete, partial, and nonidentification with the original speaker, or alternatively as plagiarism. During my fieldwork in Udahenagama I was struck by the remarkable absence of complete identification with the Voices of others. The examples I present in this chapter could mostly be categorized as examples of nonidentification. In the West, subtle instances ofnonidentification, distancing, and disagreement with a quoted voice are most commonly classified as ironical or cynical modes of relating to other people's voices. The notions of ironyl7 and cynicism and the bad faith they connote do not, however, satisfactorily cover the distancing discursive strategies of people in Udahenagama. In many of the above-mentioned examples, the Voice of the original speaker is taken seriously and in good faith. The subtle mockery inherent in ironical and cynical remarks is largely absent in these passages. The strategy of nonidentification is embedded in the fact that other persons are meticulously and exhaustively quoted. Other people's statements are not routinely admitted as a part of the Voice of the reporter and maintain their separate status. Quoting others can reveal a strategy of exclusion in which other people's points of view and moral positions are not easily incorporated into the reporter's Voice. 1S

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The very particular use of reported speech should, in my understanding, be seen as part of the general atmosphere of caution related to the effects of Voices I described in Chapter 4. The rationale for this style of speech is most obvious when people quote dangerous utterances, when they quote voices that carry danger and use words that refer to illness, misfortune, or violence. In that sense, quoting another person operates like a safety measure. This is the reason why Mrs. Obeyesekere quotes her younger brother, when Pattini quotes Kali quoting Suniyam, 19 or when Nishanta's mother quotes her own, albeit dated Voice. People are careful not to forget who uttered a dangerous statement and take care not to let dangerous words merge with their own statements. U dahenagama people, however, do not only apply this strategy of speech to dangerous statements but routinely use reported speech even when words that represent danger are not involved. Other people's statements are as it were kept "in transit." Other people's voices remain in transit in any speaker's utterances-present only momentarily, and gone without having had an impact on their host. Reported statements are not allowed to settle or merge into the reporter's Voice. By means of kivva-kiyala and -lu constructions, statements pass through people without stopping. This movement is certainly not unidirectional. Words do not only move outwards from an original speaker to the various reporters. People also put their own voice into other people's mouths; attribute their own statements to others, as was most clearly revealed in transcript 1, and thereby create a multi-directional movement of Voices in transit.2o One could argue that all this has already been described in analyses of South Asian understandings of personhood, such as the notion of the dividual person (Marriot 1976), the fluid person (Daniel 1984), or the giftexchanging person (Parry 1986; Raheja 1988). One could further argue that words are but one of the substances that flow among people in South Asian cultures. However, such analyses often limit themselves to a description of selves and the culture-specific construction of personhood and hierarchy. The particular characteristics of the flow of words and statements within a community such as Udahenagama, however, determine the discourses on violence, which in turn influence the local cycle of violence and the concomitant cycle of containment of violence that I discussed in Chapter 3. Some of the analyses of reported speech practices have made the explicit link between types of political organization and styles of quoting (Lucy 1993; McKenzie 1987; Volosinov 1971; Wilkinson andjanks 1998).2 1 This type of analysis postulates a link between the sociolinguistic and politico-ideological conditions of a speech community. As Bakhtin (1981: 295) has suggested, changes that occur in a language can be seen as part of the socio-ideological becoming of its speakers. Volosinov argues that

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authoritarian regimes go along with a mechanical and depersonalized way of reporting other people's speech (1971: 154-57). The voice of authority is taken seriously and transmitted wholesale. The boundaries between the original speaker's voice and the reporter's voice cannot be violated. In other words, the original speaker's voice cannot be recontextualized in cunning ways. It cannot be modified, merged with other voices, or used in an ironical way. Volosinov's analysis presumes that it is because authority figures within the family or wider community are taken seriously that they are quoted in an authoritarian style. Transposing this to the Sri Lankan context, one can see many parallels at a superficial level. People have been suffering from a succession of colonial and neocolonial authoritarian regimes and the forms of political silencing that went along with them. Such silences, resulting from political repression, terror, and distrust within communities, have been described by what I would call an anthropology of silence that was often dominated by an anthropology of the body (e.g., Daniel1994, 1996: chaps. 5, 7; Das and Nandy 1986; Das 1995; Ettema 1994; Jaworski 1989, Risseeuw 1988; Scarry 1985; Tully 1995). Of course there are many things that cannot be spoken about in the community of Udahenagama, and to document these silences would involve a different type of analysis and data collection. I have chosen, however, to describe the ways in which a discourse on violence was possible in the aftermath of the civil war. Following Volosinov (1971), the style of quoting in Udahenagama could be interpreted as a result of the communities' oppression by an authoritarian regime. Within such an interpretation, the quoting style in Udahenagama would then be described as highly mechanical and depersonalized, a style of quotation in which voices of authority within the village are taken seriously and are transmitted wholesale. To interpret these quotation styles as a mere response to an authoritarian regime, however, would not do justice to the local culture that underpins Udahenagama people's use of reported speech. The way people (and deities) quote dangerous statements in everyday life in Udahenagama virtually follows the rules of contextualization and framing applied in Indian literature (see Ramanujan 1989). Sanskrit lyrics imply the whole communication diagram: who said what to whom, when, why, and often with who else overhearing it (49) .22 Texts are thus firmly embedded within a communicative context of "who said what to whom." The similarities with the excessive use of quotation I encountered in Udahenagama everyday conversations are striking. Accounts of "who said what to whom" especially frame such conversations when dangerous topics are discussed. Moreover, I propose to interpret the above-described quotation style as related to the local attitudes toward Voicing and listening to a Voice I described in Chapter 4, linked to the local definition of dangerous state-

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ments and their effects. As I documented in this chapter, the excessive use of quotations plays a role in the regulation of a distance between the speaker and dangerous words. People avoid Voicing dangerous words themselves and prefer to quote others and to maintain dangerous statements as it were in transit. The excess of quotations ultimately reflects a radical process of nonidentification with other people's voices and dangerous positions. People are cautious not to allow other people's potentially dangerous Voices merge with their own voices. This discursive strategy presupposes a self-awareness that simultaneously renders the multiplicity of possible voices available to one's experience, while evading the speaker's capture by them. Excessive quotation is about the containment of danger inherent in dangerous words, but it is also an assertion of a self that is not determined or exhausted by dangerous words and situations; a self that exists beyond the various reported dangerous statements. In contrast to the many portrayals of victims of war in which individuals are depicted as subjected to overwhelming violence and danger, Udahenagama people's subjectivities are not exhausted by these events and they continuously reconstruct themselves as not contained or defined by the circumstances within which they find themselves. Mter having taken these cultural themes of danger and its avoidance into account, it becomes clear that the rationale for nonidentification in Udahenagama is different from the rationale of Western forms of nonidentification such as irony, cynicism, or mockery. The mere excess of quotation marks a substantial difference from the occasional quotation so typical of Western-style cynicism or irony. Nonidentification as practiced in Udahenagama is primarily about averting danger and excluding from one's social context the power of the wild to cause illness. Nor can this style of quotation be reduced to an authoritarian style of quotation that one might expect in the national political culture of Sri Lanka. These cautious discursive strategies are not directly caused by the climate of political repression, war, and violence of successive colonial and neocolonial regimes but rather predate them. Since the community has had to deal with a greatly increased amount of potentially dangerous utterances as a result of the civil war and its aftermath, they have become an important resource. In the local context, dangerous utterances remain "in transit" among local enemies and allies by means of the kivvii-kiyalii marker of reported speech. Discourses on danger and violence are thus firmly embedded within their context, one determined by local relations, friendships and enmity, and by "who said what to whom." Once this local context is transcended, such utterances are conveyed by means of the reported speech marked -lu and thus acquire a quality of doubt and uncertainty. Outside their local context and specific communication diagram, such utterances rapidly become mere hearsay and rumor and can easily be contested. In

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this format, they do not have the power to mobilize large-scale, collective forms of hatred and revenge. Dangerous statements are thereby encapsulated within a small-scale social context and are only effective at a localized level. Such context-sensitive discourses on violence therefore play a role in the localization of enmity and the containment of the cycle of modernist violence and stand in sharp contrast to context-free categories such as "insurgents," "deserters," or 'Tamil terrorists" that currently fuel modernist forms of violence in Sri Lanka. The culture-specific use of reported speech thus operates both at an individual and a collective level. This speech strategy allows individual people to maintain a certain distance from illness or fear-provoking words and thereby to protect themselves from the consequences of other people's statements. At the same time, the frequent use of reported speech in Udahenagama plays a role in the organization of postwar society into smallscale social units and the concomitant cycle of containment of violence.

Part Ill Agents of Discursive Change

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Chapter 7 ''It wasn't like that

when we were young" Civil War, National Mental Health NGOs, and the International Community of Trauma Specialists

The question arises whether the discourses on violence I describe in Part II should be interpreted as one aspect of the cultural impact of the civil war or as styles of communication that existed prior to the violent conflict. In other words, are these particular discursive styles the outcome of a violent history-a response to violence and war-or were they normal before the war? Considering the long history of colonial and postcolonial violence in southern Sri Lanka, however (cf. Risseeuw 1988; Roberts 1990, 1994), the notion of a prewar era of peace is largely notional. Styles of acoustic cleansing and the use of euphemisms, ambiguity, and reported speech all constitute a strong cultural asset with which to address widespread forms of violence. The links between these Udahenagama styles of speech and discursive styles in other parts of South and Southeast Asia (cf. Kolenda 1990; Ramanujan 1989; Atkinson 1984) and ancient cultural practices in Sri Lanka (cf. Wirz 1954; Roberts 1990) reveal that these discursive styles are not predominantly a reaction to massive forms of insurgency and counterinsurgency in Sri Lanka's recent history. I classifY these discursive strategies for talking about violence as traditional in the sense that they are comparable with discursive practices in a wide cultural area, including both South and Southeast Asia. In other words, these cautious discursive strategies are not a recent phenomenon, but a preexisting mode of communication that has been redeployed to deal with the effects of the civil war of the late 1980s. The civil war in Udahenagama forced many women to lead an itinerant existence. Some hid in the forest at night together with their children, or slept in the deep furrows dug between the tea bushes to prevent erosion. If people had contacts or family members in a nearby town, they would move their children to the relatively safety of the town at times when the war in

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Figure 14. National Mental Health Week at Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference H all, a monument of national pride.

the village became unbearable. Women whose husbands or sons h ad disappeared spent a great deal of time away from the village, often traveling together with a friend or close family member. They searched for their missing family members by visiting local politicians, gathering gossip in the vicinity of detention/ concentration camps, or visiting the sites of massacres in an attempt to identify one of the bodies there. Most women eventually came back home empty-handed, reestablished a life in the village, and continued to suffer. Some have been h aunted by the gaze of the wild ever since. These are the women I have described as suffering from a lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya) . Although th ey returned h ome, women wh ose family members had disappeared continued to take action. Almost all the war widows in Udahenagama reported their case to the Commissions of Inquiry and, with the help of local politicians, they acquired a death certificate and organized the paperwork necessary to receive compensation from the government. Some women attended training events organized by the outreach centers of national mental health NGOs, to which they had been referred by officials in the Divisional Secretariat or by local politicians. In this way, wittingly or not, these women became participants in the global flow of knowledge on war trauma.

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The introduction of the discourse on war trauma and trauma counseling must, however, be placed within the context of much more localized agents of discursive change. In the aftermath of the civil war, many women claimed to have become fearless and refused to participate in the traditional discourses on fear, fear-related illnesses, and domestic cleansing rituals. They thereby challenge the cultural context that gives rise to the cautious discourses on violence I described in Part II. It is precisely such fearless women who seek help from the national mental health NGOs. In order to assess the cultural impact of the discourse on trauma I will therefore first discuss the implications of the presence of fearless families in the community of Udahenagama before addressing the issue of the introduction of the discourse on trauma and the concomitant nongovernmental (mental health) services.

Women's Fearlessness Quite a number of Udahenagama women have distanced themselves from the discourse on fear of the wild altogether (see Figures 3, 6, 8 for an impression of the number of fearless families in the area under study). These women claim they aren't scared of anything and don't suffer from terrorrelated illnesses. This typically male attitude has now been taken up by a certain number of women, who also indulge in this discourse of fearlessness and invulnerability. Many people in Udahenagama argue that this change took place during the last civil war of 1988-90. An elderly ritual specialist from Beragama explained the problem with particular acuity: [ 1] There are two ways [of life]. In the past, when you visited a funeral house-a house with a dead person in it-and you came back from such a house, you used to say "[I am] polluted," didn't you? You said "polluted" and you were obliged to bathe. But in these days [during the civil war], there were bodies on the road, and in the forest, and near the houses. They put the corpses there, didn't they? Now when things were like that some people said "polluted," and the gaze of the wild spirits (dishtiya) should have fallen [upon them]. [loud] But the gaze of the wild spirits wasn't there then! The fear had also ended. People nicely went and looked [at the dead] ... [loud] When they saw those [dead bodies] they weren't afraid! So because this is something new, I don't understand it and I don't know what to say. It wasn't like that when we were young ... There weren't any illnesses caused at the time [of the civil war]. After having seen those [dead bodies], some people fell ill. [loud] Some didn't though! There were only a few people who fell ill. [loud] The majority didn't fall ill, though!

A middle-aged woman from Kalubowatta exemplified the problem when she recalled her own experience of the war: [2] There were "beaten heads" in the paddy fields. When you see those you get scared, don't you? They burnt [bodies] at that crossroads there. Because of those

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things you get scared. But I am not scared of anything (Mama nam baya nii mokakatavat). I am not scared. What should I be scared of? I went to see all those things; I am not scared. A researcher operating within the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) paradigm would probably interpret this testimony as evidence of "emotional numbness," one of the criteria used to diagnose PTSD. It is important, however, to go beyond this individualistic, disease-oriented approach and to look at the effects that a large number of people's experience of fearlessness (or emotional numbness) may have on the discourses on violence (and the cycle of containment of violence that goes along with it) within the community as a whole. During the civil war, many women walked long distances to search for disappeared family members. They were sometimes away from home for months on end, and the care of their children was taken over by their parents or siblings. 1 Some of them who were considered to have continued their search for too long were called wanderers, rowdies, good-for-nothings (for example, rastiyiidu, normally used to refer to men only). Upon their return home, some of these women fell ill and were then regularly helped with cleansing rituals. But many of the women who had witnessed atrocities claimed to have become fearless and professed a total lack of interest in the teachings of the ritual specialists ( iidurukam), small ritual remedies (pilivet), or large-scale domestic cleansing rituals ( tovil) . These fearless women might have been boasting, and their discourse is often ambiguous: despite their assertions of a radical lack of fear, secret fears continuously emerged in their conversations with me. To clarify this point, I present parts of a young woman's narrative. She cried as she recounted her husband's abduction and murder: [3] The insurgents came in the evening, on full moon day. They hit the cup of tea out of his hand, grabbed him and left. They made him lie down on the main road and killed him, cut the neck. I went too ... People in this area didn't even go and look when people were killed, because they were scared, I am not like that! ... When they abducted him, [I] thought "Oh Buddha, I don't know why they take him," and my heart was in shock, I shivered and felt as if burning, very strongly. Then when they had cut his neck, I lost consciousness (sihiya niitivelii). I stayed right next to him there, the whole night, until dawn. Now I have no fears, I can even walk over a dead body, I am not scared. Be it night or day, I have no fears ... If you want you kill us but we are going to defend ourselves as well as we can ... Now we think of biting or hitting them with a stone if they come to do anything to us, we won't back away. I won't go, I will stay put. If anybody calls me in the middle of the night, I open the door. If somebody calls me from nearby, I open the door. I won't go out, but I am ready. I keep the idea in my mind of making a mark [on the murderer]. If they kill you, you can't do anything. Either they kill or we kill ... I don't mind whether it is night or day when I walk on the road. I am not scared. Because I haven't done anything wrong, I am not scared. If someone calls me, regardless whether it is day or night, I talk. When it is dark, I take a torch with me. I hold it in

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front of me and see who has called me. First I look and then I talk. If I go out at night I take a child with me. Even if I just walk from this house to that house [a neighboring house] I don't go alone. I lock the door, and go with both children, or else even with only one child. At night, I won't go alone, and even ifl go during the daytime, if they come and trouble me again I won't back out. I will always go forward. I, of course, I could kill and eat the people who killed my husband. If I were given a piece of these people's flesh, I would eat it. I am so angry.

The lack of fear alleged in this statement is obviously ambiguous, laced as it is with revelations of tremendous everyday fears (for example, of going outside alone). Nevertheless, I do not consider this denial of fear as just another way of expressing fear for the following reasons: such women do not suffer from the traditional fear-related illnesses (see Chapter 2), nor do they engage in cleansing rituals (pilivet, iidurukam, or tovil). Compared to other women who suffer from terrified hearts, their strength and health is remarkable. If they attend domestic cleansing rituals at all, they tend to allow their younger children to attend the rituals too. Previously, young children would be kept away from such terrifying rituals as they might suffer a fright and fall ill. In fact, many people argue this is part of a general trend in which most women are less wary of taking their children to such rituals. The discourse on fearlessness thus goes hand in hand with very real practical changes. Fearlessness as it is defined locally is not necessarily about not being frightened or terrified. Being fearless is about not allowing fear to become terror, not allowing oneself to become coerced by terror or fear. This fearlessness is omnipresent and almost (but not quite) as widespread as the discourse on terrified hearts (hita bayayi) or the discourse on lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild (yaksha dishtiya) and the feared yaka-like people (see Figures 3, 6, 8). Some ritual specialists commented on fearless women and fearless families. During the civil war, one ritual specialist from Beragama had had doubts about the long-term viability of the traditional rituals. He briefly thought the "tradition might be over" (shastare ivara viiya kiyala hituva). With burned corpses scattered over the village, people asked themselves why more people did not fall ill. This particular ritual specialist thought such questions posed a serious threat to the tradition. The discourse of some fearless women certainly supported his doubts. A young woman from Puvakdeniya talked about her brother who had killed many people (including his own mother) and explained: [4] If he comes here he is afraid of me. I hit him with anything I can lay my hands on. I am not afraid, no matter how many children I have ... Even the little bit of life that is left [her mother], that too he crushes. After having crushed it he got the idea of killing me. That time he thought of killing me. For several days recently, he came to our small shed, the small shed here, the small wooden shed where my husband works, [he] came and lay down. He told my children to kill their mother.

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Then I got up and roughly told him "you come here." He ran away, afraid that I would hit him. He ran down the hill and walked the other way ... Nowadays I step outside thinking "Haa, there, brother is waiting to kill me." Even that coconut tree can be seen as being my brother, understood? Then I scream "Buddu amme, " I lament. For several days cows [approached our house] [interrupts herself] my husband gets frightened. [softly] He is very scared. He doesn't dare to step outside [the house], thinking it is our brother. He whispers to me, whispers that cows are roaming in the garden. He says, "Look, have cows come?''; "[I] don't know whether somebody has come" he says and frightens me. I go [outside] straight away and look. [I] go nearby and look. It might be anybody. Sometimes he doesn't even let me open the door, why? Because I am the one [my brother] would come and kill. All the time, I have an ache in my mind/heart. It occurs in my mind/ I think [it]. Though it comes to my mind I don't get scared ... Ritual healing has no effect on us, neither on me, nor on my children. Those [illnesses] are mostly in the mind. If your mind is weak you need those [rituals]. "Oh, I need a ritual for this or that": if one thinks like that, then such a person definitely needs ritual healing ... It is in the mind that it happens, when you can't bear the problems you have, it happens, isn't it so? Now, for example, there is a sarong hanging on the washing line. So at night when you see that you think, "There is somebody standing there." Then you are afraid. After that you think, "Now I need a ritual." Then you dance [at the cleansing ritual (tovile) ]. It would not have been like that if you would have tightened up your mind and gone to look at it, and seen that it was a sarong. Then you wouldn't have needed any of those [rituals]. Ritual healing has no effect on us, it does not stick to our body, it has no effect. (my emphasis)

In contrast to fearless women, women who believe in the efficacy of large-scale cleansing rituals stress that they have to be made to suffer extreme fear and terror during the rituals in order for them to work. What women in Udahenagama most often mention in descriptions of their own ritual (the ritual in which they were the afflicted person) is the attack by the Vadi Sanni Yaksha around four or five o'clock in the morning. A ritual specialist is dressed up as one of the Sanni Yaksha characters, the Vadi Sanni (see Obeyesekere 1969: 203). This wild spirit represents the Yedda, the ancient inhabitants of the island, who are known to Sinhala Buddhists as hunters and killers of animals. Vadi Sanni Yaksha caries a bow and arrow, wears a pitch-black mask, and is covered in leaves. This wild being finally jumps onto the afflicted person in an apparent attempt to devour her. This event features prominently in the narratives of women afflicted by the gaze of the wild. Mflicted women tend not to remember the earlier parts of the ritual that started at dusk. During these earlier stages, afflicted women are in an altered state of consciousness and tend not to get startled at all when threatened by fire or by the dancers. By the time Vadi Sanni Yaksha approaches them, most women will have regained consciousness and can remember things. As they slowly regain consciousness they are likely to get startled and to show signs of fear. A mother from lower Puvakdeniya once gave me a detailed account of the experience of being faced with

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the ritual specialist presenting her with a masked appearance of the terror of the wild: [5] It is said that they frighten you to capture the gaze of the wild (dishtiya), but I don't know, they frightened me also. I remember being scared, in the early morning, that one that has leaves bound around his waist frightened me, it was about four o'clock, it is said that it isn't good if you don't get frightened, he caught the cock, did this and that, and made a few jokes, then he secretly plucked a feather from the cock, burned it and brought it to me, he told me to take it with both hands [laughs], I didn't take it, I was scared, and I knew he wanted to frighten me, then I eventually closed both eyes a little bit, and reached for the feather, and he jumped on me, "Haw!" so I startled and got frightened, he didn't really give the feather to me, when I tried to reach for it he jumped on me, although you get frightened at that moment, it doesn't make you fall ill, it is said that they frighten you at that moment to take the fear away from your body.

The afflicted person wavers in and out of an altered state of consciousness throughout such all-night rituals. While the person is fully conscious and alert, the frightening events are experienced as direct fear and terror. Ritual specialists say that the fear or terror they bring about is necessary to remove the gaze of the wild (e.g. "Baya nokara askaranna ba e dishtiya"). The above narrative follows the standard line of discourse when it relates how a burned feather is used as a ruse. Just plucked from the cock, this feather is somewhat bloody, and after being burned it is thought to be especially enticing to the yaksha, who are attracted to such smelly, meaty (and generally disgusting) types of food. So the discourse of ritual specialists has it that this feather is an ideal instrument with which to trick a yaksha or a human being consumed and closed off by the gaze of the wild. But after this scene, in which the afflicted woman describes the preparation of the feather, the narrative takes a slightly different turn. This young woman continues to describe a human being getting frightened, and the discourse typically used by ritual specialists is left behind. As this example shows, many women do not fuliy adhere to the ritual specialists' explanation of the efficacy of traditional rituals and argue that the ritual specialists need to frighten the afflicted woman herself in order to get rid of herfears. Ritual specialists are thus not just tricking or frightening the wild spirits in order to send them away and cleanse the household. In the discourse of afflicted women, ritual specialists are terrifYing a human being in order to get rid of the illness provoking fear ( hita bayayi). The ability of women to experience fear and terror when faced with masked appearances of the wild is a necessary condition for the rituals to work. However, the statements of women who have become fearless threaten this ritual tradition by disclaiming the fear and terror that form the core of afflicted women's experience of healing by means of large-scale

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cleansing rituals. I now turn to a fearless woman's description of this same ritual episode; the assault by Vadi Sanni Yaksha. A very old woman from Hendolakanda, the widow of a ritual specialist, took advantage of our presence to reveal her lack of fear and skepticism regarding rituals: [6] W: You don't get frightened by those [ritual specialists] who come with masks on! They come with branches and leaves attached to their bodies and jump on us to frighten us. But we don't get scared! Akka: The ritual specialists say that the more you get frightened the more likely you are to get well; is that true? W: When they try to frighten us, we don't even startle! We don't feel frightened. Why should we be afraid! They are humans! Even though they jump on us to frighten us. Akka: Do the illnesses get cured because of this fright? W: No, no. Do illnesses get cured by [someone] jumping onto you and making you scared?

[rhetorical] Akka: They give you a burned feather, in the early morning-do you get scared when they give it? W: No, no, no! They give [offer] it [to you]. Though they give it, we don't take it. They burn it and then give it, but we don't take it with our hands. If that character/appearance (piiliya) comes with the feather, don't take it! If you take it they [uses unrespectful pronoun un] will laugh loudly "baka," "baka" [the sound of laughing ritual specialists]. Don't take it! (my emphasis) I am not in a position to enter the debate on the decline or demise of certain aspects of traditional ritual life (cf. Simpson 1997). All I can do is juxtapose the differing and competing local discourses, of which the discourse on fearlessness and skepticism toward the rites of the ritual specialists (whether pilivet, adurukam, or tovil) is but one among several. This discourse results in a particular lifestyle, and fearless families certainly relate to the wider society in quite distinct ways. I use the term "fearless families" for families in which even women (and by extension their young children) adhere to the discourse on fearlessness (normally a discourse only favored by young, violent men or yaka-like people). Such families are excluded from the group dynamics that fear-related illnesses bring about. Their fearless presence in the village might, however, alter the quality of life in the wider society for others. That is to say, they may make nondomestic spaces harsher and more frightening for those who suffer from a lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild. Such women do not fall ill. By means of their discourse on fearlessness they suggest they belong to the contemporary society, dominated by violence or the (sometimes inhumane) fearless acts of yakii-like people. In such instances, the household (gedara) and its inhabitants are considered healthy and free from fear-related illnesses, but at the same time the household ethos is threatened from within-from within its female center. Fear, timidity, and shame are key notions for women to express (and practice)

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the Sinhalese Buddhist moral code. Once fearlessness is proclaimed, some highly valued attitudes vanish, as do some of the justifications for the cautious discourses on violence that help to constitute a local cycle of containment of violence.

Fearlessness as an Agent of Discursive Change While there is a direct link between the fearless acts of yaka-like men and the cycle of violence, the impact of women's fearlessness is more insidious. The principal question is not to what extent women's fearlessness directly exacerbates the cycle of violence. Such instances are rare and limit themselves to public verbal abuse. The question is to what extent the demise of terrified hearts (hita bayayi) might alter the discursive styles I described in Part II. On the basis of the data I gathered, I can't provide evidence of discursive change in, for example, the use of euphemism, zero anaphora, or reported speech. All I can do is point to the relevance of the recent emergence of fearlessness as a potentially powerful agent of discursive change. As I have shown throughout, the rationale behind the discursive styles Udahenagama people use to talk about violence is the avoidance of fear, a terrified heart (hita bayayi) and its concomitant illnesses. The avoidance of hita bayayi underpins many of the cautious discourses on violence that play a role in a cycle of containment of violence. It is often fearless women who are said to have a sharp tongue ( kata siirayi). Sharp-tongued fearless women are also sometimes compared to female wild spirits, yakshiniyan. Like many of the words I discussed in the section on euphemism, the notion of a sharp tongue is ambiguous. It can be used among friends for people who are simply talkative, or it can be used to refer to women who use ruthless speech that deviates from the customary caution regarding discourses about enemies, conflict, and violence. Once women proclaim fearlessness, their children's illnesses are less often interpreted as fear-related. A survey I conducted among ritual specialists in the Udahenagama area showed that in about half the instances people consulted them the reason was a sick child. Most ritual specialists in the Udahenagama area talked about children's illnesses in terms of the gaze of the wild and terrified hearts. This means that from an early age children learn about terrified heart and its relation to illness and physical suffering. However, fearless women do not tend to rely on the services of ritual specialists when their children are ill. They more readily go to the Ayurvedic dispensary. Fearless mothers do not interpret their children's illnesses as related to fear and a terrified heart. Such children are also allowed to attend potentially frightening events such as cleansing rituals. Moreover, fearless mothers often tell the ritual specialist not to put protective charmed oil (tel miitirima) (see Chapter 4) on their heads or the heads of their children at the start of a cleansing ritual. In a word, fearless mothers

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try to bury not only their own fears but those of the next generation. The question then arises to what extent the relative absence of the notion of terrified hearts in the lives of the children of fearless mothers will affect their socialization into the cautious discourses on violence to which most people of their parent's generation still adhere.

Fearlessness and Postwar Societal Reorganization The question remains whether the fearlessness brought about by the atrocities of the civil war of the late 1980s constitutes a radical break with the past or maintains some continuities with it. The latter seems to be the case. There is undoubtedly a parallel between the use of fear and terror during domestic cleansing rituals and the life history of fearless women. During cleansing rituals the afflicted person is made to startle. By means of ritual frights, fear is made to leave the sick person's body. This sequence of events seems to have been replicated in many respects by women searching for their disappeared husbands. The great majority of them recount having experienced terrifYing situations, and when these women returned home they overwhelmingly proclaimed themselves to be healthy-devoid of fear and fear-related illnesses. This is very similar to the discourse of women who have been healed by domestic cleansing rituals and who claim, for example, that the sudden fright caused by the wild spirit ( Vadi Sanni Yaksha) near the end of the ritual relieved them of their fears (see transcript 5). Women who have been healed by means of acute fear within a ritual context tend, however, to fall ill again and to need further cleansing rituals. But women who proclaim fearlessness and health because of their experiences during the civil war claim to be have been cured and changed forever. They do not organize cleansing rituals and do not partake in the community's cycle of acoustic cleansing. Fearless women thus overtly challenge the dominant discourse on fearrelated illness while simultaneously reenacting part of the traditional script on fear and its cure. They adhere to the paradigm of being cured by terror but refute the link between illness and the fears and terror of the postwar era, such as the terror brought by the army's raids to arrest deserters. Fearless women also tend to be skeptical about the value of ritual cleansing and the effects of traditional ritual means of inducing shock and terror. As such, they can be seen to offer an alternative organization for postwar society (samadjaya). Their refusal to participate in ritual forms of domestic cleansing challenges the reproduction of cleansed, well-bounded, and relatively isolated domestic spheres and the local redistribution of the wild organized by women suffering from lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild. As I have described in Chapter 4, domestic cleansing strategies deployed on behalf of women who suffer from the gaze of the wild pose a threat

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to people who live in the immediate surroundings of the afflicted household. The surrounding neighborhood becomes as it were a dump, a repository in which to dispose of the wild. Because fearless women do not engage in domestic cleansing strategies, they safeguard the spaces between contexts within the neighborhood from the fallout of modernist insurgency and counter-insurgency violence (disappearances). In the case of fearless women, such violence does not lead to illnesses related to the gaze of the wild that need to be cured by means of domestic cleansing rituals potentially affecting other women in the neighborhood. While women who suffer from lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild concentrate on the domestic sphere and consolidate its boundaries by means of domestic cleansing rituals, fearless women are predominantly oriented toward the spaces in between contexts. As I have described in Part II, afflicted women ultimately also orient themselves toward spaces in between contexts, but they do this on the basis of an altogether different premise. They operate from the basis of a morally cleansed household and let the concepts and household vocabularies pertaining to such a cleansed domestic space radiate out into the wider community. In my interpretation, widespread modernist violence was averted in the late 1980s when local women used this rigorous preservation of contexts to engender a cycle of containment of violence. Because fearless women do not take part in the production of isolated cleansed spaces, however, they live in a world in which the boundaries separating the household from the surrounding society (samadjaya) have been breached. While most people in the postwar society in Southern Sri Lanka have survived as members of small-scale, regularly cleansed, wellguarded, and bounded social units, fearless women advocate an alternative social reorganization. Their strategy of postwar social organization is oriented not so much toward the preservation of contexts and the creation of small-scale, cleansed social units as toward seeking redress within the wider society or nondomestic sphere ( samadjaya). While fearless women may have averted the implosion of some social contexts, they seem to be turning their backs on other cultural resources that play a role in the cycle of containment of violence. They do not, for instance, look down on society from the moral high ground of women with terrified hearts. As I described in Part I, this is often the only avenue used by women to comment on the abnormality of the violence-ridden contemporary Udahenagama society. Commenting on other people's illness as being fear-related is also one of the most common ways of commiserating with another person's social problems. In a context like that of Udahenagama, being diagnosed by family members, friends, or a ritual specialist as suffering from a terrified heart can be remarkably soothing. It is the principal way fears can be acknowledged. Proclaiming fearlessness therefore

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undercuts these strategies of survival and might constitute a move toward an acceptance of the violence and fragmentation characteristic of the contemporary social world as normal. Fearless women thus play a role that is at once dangerous and pivotal in the communities' postwar social reorganization. While fearless women have not been involved in the social fragmentation brought about by domestic cleansing strategies in the aftermath of the war, they have sometimes made the spaces in between contexts more awkward and daunting for women suffering from a terrified heart and the gaze of the wild. Their fearless presence has been compared to the fearlessness of yaka-like men. As I note above, the question for the future will be how the sons and daughters of fearless women construct their domestic spaces and the spaces in between contexts. The introduction of the discourse on trauma in the rural south of Sri Lanka needs to be placed within this preexisting cultural dynamic that emerged in the aftermath of the civil war of the late 1980s, and I now turn to this last aspect of the Udahenagama discourses on violence and its effects.

The Discourse on Trauma Women from Udahenagama who use the services of the outreach centers of national mental health NGOs inadvertently become participants in the discourse on trauma. As I pointed out in the Introduction, I use the notion "trauma discourse" for the conglomerate of nodal points in the global flow of knowledge on war trauma. I do not want to privilege any one definition, pertaining to any one nodal point, but rather to consider "trauma" as a master term that subsumes a myriad interpretations. Below, I describe three principal nodal points in this global flow of knowledge on war trauma: the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, the Colombo-based mental health NGOs, and an outreach center in Sri Lanka's Southern Province. I then provide an outline of the way Udahenagama women use and conceive of these mental health or trauma counseling services.

The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies Discourse on Trauma The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) includes about two thousand mental health professionals, clinicians, and researchers from around the world and has been active for just over a decade. Today this organization is conceptualized as the mother organization of the European (since 1990), Australian, Russian (since 1995), and Mrican (since 1997) Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. The conferences of the Societies for Traumatic Stress Studies are the only easily accessible materialization of the international community of mental health professionals in

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which the social and political context of the negotiation of differing discourses on trauma can be observed. I therefore conducted fieldwork at conferences of the ISTSS and the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS) .2 My literature-based research on PTSD (Argenti-Pillen 1994) served as the background from which to begin to conduct an ethnographic survey of these conferences. The term "mental health professional" does not entirely capture what it means to be a member of the international community of trauma specialists. Members of the ISTSS choose to become closely involved with people from Rwanda, Bosnia, the inner cities of the United States, or Chernobyl. Conferences of the Societies of Traumatic Stress Studies are thus not only occasions in which professional knowledge is exchanged but events in which "international healers" share their own suffering. Their professional experience represents a kind of initiation into a world of unremitting cruelty that remains more often than not hidden from the general public. Just as has been described (albeit to a lesser degree) for victims of torture (Turner and Garst-Unsworth 1990) members of the therapeutic community are prone to suffer grave existential dilemmas (4 77) and an inability to see the world as they did before. Some radically change their worldview or suffer silently, while others still share their experiences at conferences on PTSD. A middle-aged speaker at the ISTSS conference in Jerusalem addressed her paper to "my friends who work in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia ... here all in front of me," evoking these three worlds as a basis for solidarity and common (emotional) survivorhood. An important episode of the history of the discourse on trauma occurred during the cold war. During this era, the rehabilitation of Vietnam veterans-run by the Vietnam administration-became the focal point around which the discourse on PTSD evolved (see Young 1996 for a critical analysis). While the research apparatus of the Vietnam administration is still running, today an important part of the research is conducted in the Middle East, more specifically in Israel. The Holocaust, together with the current power struggles in the Middle East, has made of Israel a "natural laboratory" for the study of trauma.~ This is but one obvious example of how the discourse on trauma is molded by the complexities of contemporary geopolitics. Like the concentric waves around a pebble dropped into a pool, teams of Israeli trauma specialists are now deployed in humanitarian actions in conflict areas around the world, implementing, "perfecting," and further disseminating the knowledge on PTSD acquired in Israel (ISTSS 1996: A71). Today the trauma specialists who work for the Israeli army and the army psychiatrists and psychologists linked to the Vietnam Administration in the United States all play a leading role in the committees or boards of the ISTSS.4 I call this the U.S.-Israeli spine of the ISTSS. As those who make the decisions that mold the international trauma discourse into its present

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configuration, the people constituting the U.S.-Israeli axis can be viewed as the leading group within the trauma sector. Interviews with the current and past presidents of the ISTSS, the president of the (ESTSS), and some other eminent members of these organizations have given me an initial view of the ethos surrounding this leadership. The overt task of the society is not political-it is to provide scientific evidence and to promote empirical research on trauma. One of the major claims of those carrying out trauma work is that it is apolitical; in order for them to do their work, people are required to find a common ground that transcends politics. Under the surface of such broad statements, however, the ISTSS encapsulates myriad competing discourses on trauma. I give a brief overview of these competing approaches before looking at the ways in which the discourse on trauma generated by the ISTSS influences humanitarian interventions. A powerful and almost hegemonic discourse on trauma within the ISTSS comes from the researchers who work on the pharmacological treatment ofPTSD and the hormonal alterations or neurophysiological abnormalities underlying PTSD. The first generation of neurobiological research on PTSD was dominated by the question whether PTSD was a biological reality as well as a political, social, and clinical one. The goal of these biological studies was to validate the disorder as different from normal states or from other psychiatric disorders. It was soon confirmed that trauma is essentially different from stress and is constituted by a distinct neurobiological reality. The second generation of research tried to find a model to explain this biology of trauma and link it to clinical findings in various populations. Those who carried out this research are now presenting predictive thoughts about the third generation of research. One of the objectives of this third generation is to find a specific pharmacological treatment for PTSD 5 or even a pharmacological preventive measure against the development of psychiatric illness following traumatic events (antistress drugs, anti-emotional-numbing drugs, drugs influencing the initial formation of the traumatic memory, or antidissociative agents). Akin to the project of neurobiological psychiatrists, the diagnosticians present discussions about the current criteria for PTSD, or the nomenclature within the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM). Their concern is with the correct diagnosis of PTSD on the basis of observable clinical symptoms, according to the universal standard of the DSM. Although on first sight it might not seem immediately relevant to the individual patient, the criteria used for the diagnosis of PTSD have important political and research implications. A diagnosis of PTSD allows claims for financial compensation for psychiatric injury or PTSD to be based on objective indications (such as the claims of Vietnam veterans or Gulf War soldiers). At the same time, definition of the core symptoms of PTSD allows for comparison of the results of different research teams conducting drug trials or assessing the efficacy of differing

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treatment methods as they are measured against the same objective standards outlined in the DSM manual. The members of a pressure group among the diagnosticians, clustered around the term "complex trauma reaction" or DESNOS (Disorder of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified) (see also Herman 1992), envisage an illness category "beyond PTSD" that they had hoped would feature in the updated classification of psychiatric disorders in 1994 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV, DSM IV). This campaign is interesting in the sense that DESNOS members recognize that PTSD does not capture the full range of reactions to traumatic events (ISTSS 1996: ASS). Their aim is to account for the enduring personality changes or changes in beliefs, worldviews, or attitudes toward the self, others, or political issues that result from complex traumatic experiences. Far from promoting questionnairebased studies on the symptoms ofPTSD outlined in the manual,6 DESNOS adherents call for diagnostic interviews focusing on the context in which the traumatic event occurred, the meaning of the event, or the causes to which the victims are attributing the event. They call for a shift of the focus of research from the observable symptoms to the attributions of people and the meaning of the traumatic events, and they argue that this may help explain some of the diversity in treatment outcome research between different populations (ISTSS 1996: ASS). Clinicians constitute another powerful lobby group within the ISTSS. These include, among others, psychoanalysts, family therapists, cognitivebehavioral therapists, conflict- resolution practitioners, and community psychiatrists. Interestingly, some of the key members of this group of professionals focus on the resources available to the survivors rather than on observable symptoms or signs of pathology. These include, for example, the personal resources necessary to benefit from psychoanalytic treatment, family resources and social support, or community resources. For instance, these clinicians discuss the cycle of loss of resources of a community after a catastrophic event-how the initial loss of resources cascades into the loss of other resources-and provide guidelines for community interventions to limit resource losses and initiate gain cycles (ISTSS 1996: Al). Others are involved in conflict-resolution projects or organize workshops for mental health workers from opposing sides of a conflict (e.g., ISTSS 1996: A1S4). A small but important subgroup within the ISTSS is constituted by people whose political engagement takes the lead over the more traditional tasks and presentations of mental health professionals. This minority of mental health professionals discuss, for example, the "ugly side of the aid business" and question "what trauma specialists can do" (ISTSS 1996: Al27). These politically engaged trauma specialists are clearly concerned with the possibility of humanitarian interventions in areas that continue to be politically unstable. They explore the trauma specialist's relation to the

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causes of the traumatizing situation and his/her possible political impact. These members of the ISTSS argue that providing a therapeutic setting for gathering testimony and teaching human rights under conditions of war is their challenge. Here, post-traumatic therapy for victims of war ceases to be perceived as a purely professional task using traditional clinical methods and becomes a political task. The balance of power between the many subgroups I have just described crucially determines the discourse on trauma that then influences the design of international humanitarian interventions. The credibility of the ISTSS has been strongly established, partly through their direct connection to leading academic institutions in the West, the funds of the pharmaceutical industry, and their predominantly scientific output. The paradigms underlying NGO or UN rehabilitation programs for victims of war often originate directly from this professional community. In 1993 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees hosted a group of renowned trauma specialists and drafted guidelines for the evaluation and care of victims of trauma and violence (DeMartino et al. 1994). In accordance with these guidelines, attempts have been made to design a culturally sensitive approach; in the former Yugoslavia a pilot project was carried out that emphasized self-empowerment, self-management, and community-oriented rehabilitation. These guidelines will be finalized and implemented on a worldwide basis for populations affected by violent conflict with the necessary cultural adjustments. The formulation of these policies reveals a combination of language and ideas derived partly from the conventional trauma discourse on PTSD, and partly from concerns about the cultural applicability of the trauma paradigm and the design of community-based approaches. Another way in which the ideas of the international community of trauma specialists permeates practices in non-Western contexts involves providing training manuals for NGO workers and local health professionals (e.g., Buus and Agger 1988; Staehr et al. 1993; Arcel et al. 1995). As an eminent PTSD researcher remarked that "we [the trauma specialists] are in a business, certainly not without a market." While trauma specialists perceive the demand for expertise on trauma as endless, however, ethical questions about the political economy of trauma research, the final aims and direction of the movement, its cultural impact, or the practical modalities of research and intervention projects simmer just under the surface. The most crucial ethical question concerns the aims envisaged by the trauma movement. Questions arise about the target populations of the trauma discourse, whether it is not intrinsically oriented toward wellresourced populations, the middle classes of the West as well as the nonWest, or toward psychologically minded people with a strong sense of mastery and personal agency. This brings along doubts about whether the currently available financial resources for trauma research are allocated to projects best dealing with the demands at the international level.

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Some people advocate a redirection of resources to research more directly related to the design and implementation of large-scale intervention projects. The question whether the ISTSS should include an umbrella ethical committee that addresses the issues of the future direction of trauma research and the worldwide diffusion of the discourse on trauma at a global, international level remains a sensitive one. The board of advisors of the ISTSS has so far rejected the proposals for such an ethical committee on the grounds that the existing ethical committees of the academic institutions in question are sufficient to scrutinize any future research project on trauma. Such ethical committees include local scientists, consumers (patients), lawyers, and experts in medical ethics. Certain ethical questions do indeed belong to the realm of expertise of local scientists and consumers. Underlying the refusal to organize an ethical committee that would operate at an international level, however, lies the opinion that little harm can be done by distributing a context-free, scientific approach to war trauma across a variety of non-Western contexts. I strongly disagree with this position and argue that, in view of the worldwide diffusion of the trauma discourse and its possible cultural impact, some ethical questions require global debates; in particular, the voices of communities of potential consumers who do not belong to the researchers' own local cultural community need to be heard. One obvious question is whether a contextfree, scientific approach to suffering is as harmless as it might seem at first sight. The discourse on trauma constructed within the ISTSS is continuously renegotiated by the various pressure groups. Even within the core U.S.Israeli group of researchers, a constant debate about the future directions of trauma work is going on. Below, I provide an ethnographic snapshot of such a discussion. I paraphrase from the notes I took during a conversation held between major U.S. and Israeli teams of trauma experts. Greg represents the research group from the United States, and the Israeli team is lead by Jacob and Shlomit (all pseudonyms): [7] Greg [to Israeli team]: You are in a unique position to collect data that are extremely interesting for the field. Get as much information as you can. Jacob: We are not producing an archive, are we? Greg: These are important data, if it gets published it will get a lot of interest, this will excite people. The physiological reaction to mental imagery can even be predicted by evoked potential analysis. Shlomit [to Greg]: And your research about the startle response? You don't have any data about that? Greg: No, only some anecdotal information [no full statistical analysis], but very interesting data' Shlomit [grinning] Very interesting! If there is the motivation, that is important! [laughs] What are you doing?

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Greg: We have twenty studies. Shlomit: In Asia, in Africa? Greg [to Israeli team]: How are you selecting the subjects? Are they self-reported? [Do the subjects themselves decide to seek help and participate in the study via that channel?] Jacob: mm Greg: Is that how we diagnose PTSD: self-reported? [ironical] I want the physiological data!

Jacob: Why would we want to extend the sample further? [If physiological criteria were used instead of personal malaise, far more people would become candidates for the study.] Greg: If the diagnosis of PTSD is based on self-reporting, I think the field is missing the point. You are excluding a lot of important information. Shlomit: You believe more in the startle test, the MRI scan, than in the clinical diagnosis? He [referring to Greg while addressing the Israeli team] believes the definition of the disorder is based on the imagery test not on self-reporting. Greg: We need the self-reported people and the physiological reactors. The problem is that if you try to confirm subjective symptoms (of PTSD) in the lab you often don't get a significant reaction. I don't think this is PTSD. I don't know what it is! (original emphasis) Ramanujan (1989: 46) argues that universalization is the golden rule of the New Testament, of Hobbes's "law of all men," and the main premise on whichJudeo/Christian ethics are based. The debate on the neurobiological basis of trauma brings about such a universalization, or decontextualization: victims of child abuse, soldiers, and traffic accident victims are all constructed as suffering from the same underlying neurobiological disorder. For some trauma specialists PTSD is a relatively universal value that can be applied across a variety of contexts-cultural, political, or related to different traumatic experiences. There is a continuing debate within the ISTSS about the cross-cultural applicability of the notion of PTSD. Some clinicians and most of the politically engaged psychiatrists advocate an increasing attention to the context in which the traumatic event has occurred, and consequently the context in which treatment is to be provided. The current composition of the ISTSS and of its board of directors in particular reveal a propensity to include researchers and psychiatrists who favor a relatively context-free conceptualization of suffering. The composition of the ISTSS reflects and influences the future orientation of mainstream trauma research and influences the discourse on trauma of the international humanitarian community. The outcome of the debates within the ISTSS ultimately defines the characteristics of the discourse on trauma that reaches communities such as Udahenagama.

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Colombo: An Excess of Mental Health Projects? As in many other war-torn societies, the discourse on trauma has been in-

troduced to Sri Lanka through a variety of channels. Mental health NGOs in Colombo have formed an important "nodal point" (Lyotard 1979) in the "global cultural traffic" of knowledge on war trauma (Appadurai 1990: 308) or constituted "bridgeheads" (Hannerz 1987: 549) for the introduction of the international discourse on trauma among Colombo-based intellectuals and the Sri Lankan political elites. From the early 1990s onward, the number of mental health NGOs in Colombo has steadily grown (see Table 3). During this period in Colombo, International NGOs such as the UNHCR, UNICEF, Oxfam, SCF, and the International Rehabilitation Council for Victims of Torture have organized workshops on war trauma to which they invited international trauma specialists (often members of the ISTSS) to give lectures. A decade later there seem to be more mental health NGOs (approximately 30) in Sri Lanka than psychiatrists (approximately 25) or psychologists. TABU: 3. NGOs Working with the Mentally Ill or the Traumatized Alokaya (Youth Counseling Center) Association for Health and Counseling Center for Family Services Communication Center for Mental Health Family Planning Association Family Rehabilitation Center Family Studies and Services Institute Institute of Human Rights Life Muslim Women's Conference National Council ofYMCAs of Sri Lanka National Christian Counsel Counseling Center NEST Sahan Sevana Psycho-Therapy Center Sahanaya (National Council for Mental Health) Salvation Army Sarvodaya (Family Counseling Center Movement) SEDEC Relief and Rehabilitation Sri Lanka National Association of Counselors Sri Lanka Sumithrayo (Branch of Befrienders International) Survivors Associated Tamil Women's Union Women's Development Center Women for Peace Women in Need (WIN) Young Women's Christian Organization

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A Precarious Division of Labor As a result of the unprecedented growth of the NGO sector, a struggle has developed between NGO volunteers and directors on the one hand and public servants and mental health personnel working in governmental institutions on the other. Despite the many tensions between nongovernmental and state sector mental health professionals, a National Mental Health Week was organized in October 1997 during which "all ideas of the entire [mental health] community were thrown together," as the chairman of the National Mental Health Week put it (see Table 4). The fierce competition between NGOs and the mental health services of the state sector made the organization of such an all-encompassing forum difficult. It was thus no surprise that these underlying tensions and the division of labor between the different sectors became a central topic during the speeches of public servants, NGO volunteers, and politicians alike during National Mental Health Week. TABLE 4. NGO Programs Presented at National Mental Health Week (Implemented and Proposed Activities) Workshops on PTSD and trauma counseling for NGO volunteers (by international trauma specialists, often members of ISTSS) Counseling services for victims of torture, traumatized people Mental health awareness program for village headmen, family health workers, nurses, doctors, police officers, teachers, armed forces Mental health education and promotion at grass root level, in remote areas Counseling training (e.g., for government officials such as police officers, prison officials, schoolteachers) Training in befriending (suicide prevention) Trauma centers Stress management program Crisis counseling centers Workshops and seminars on child abuse Empowerment program for women Psychosocial rehabilitation project for mothers and wives of disappearedJVP insurgents Play therapy Life enrichment programs Group therapy and role play Art therapy (music, origami, clay modeling, theater) Relaxation therapy Culture-friendly approaches: music, dancing, drama, meditation Alternative therapies: relaxation, hypnotherapy, hypno-exorcism, yoga, acupuncture, transcendental meditation First aid Physiotherapy Community rehabilitation of disabled ex-servicemen (occupational therapy) Rehabilitation of released detainees (vocational training, self-employment schemes, loans)

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First of all, it was clearly established by many of the speakers that public servants or personnel of the state sector are unsuitable for the kind of work currently carried out by the mental health NGOs. The Minister of Health and Indigenous Medicine (N. S. De Silva) argued: [8] Mental health, you realize, it needs very much personal attention, it is not like an operation that can be performed by a doctor and leave the patient afterward, counseling is necessary, the counselor has to build up a personal rapport with the patient, even to identifY the person you have to have a very good rapport with that person, it is very difficult for only the paid personnel to do that, our nurses or doctors, they are paid workers, and do not have so much dedication, therefore the social workers, NGOs, nonprofit organizations, are the ideal people for work in this sector, I am not saying that it should only be handled by them, but I think we can get very good results ... Especially7 if mental health NGOs helped, cooperated a lot, these voluntary organizations took the responsibility, if people from the government would replace the NGOs they would not do the job so well, they would ask uniforms and shoes and too much salary, they would not be as dedicated as the people working for the NGOs. I am not saying that people in this government are not working, but people in NGOs are like brothers and sisters for the patients, government people cannot do that, it is not only about understanding pain and sadness, but you need a personal relation, that is how you must do this service, if you want to work with a mentally ill person you have to be like a friend, mother, or father; only if we employ people like that will this job be successfully done. (original emphasis)

During the debates of National Mental Health Week, one public servant made the Health Minister's message more explicit and spoke with a frankness that would be almost unthinkable in many other public contexts: [9] As a government official, I find it very difficult to be friendly. Most of the government people under pressure have this. I think that they believe that the government institutions belong to them, "our hospital," "our department," the patients have no rights, the hospital belongs to us, to the people who work there, not to the patient. In the NGO sector, it's not so bad, of course. In Sri Lanka, unfortunately, there are other problems now-we see two hundred patients in two hours, so we cannot be friendly, but in the NGOs sometimes, we can be friendly. I think that while being in the government services, we have to try to be friendly.

While the crucial role NGOs have played in organizing mental health care services was recognized by most of the officials attending National Mental Health Week, the NGOs' links with foreign donors and mental health professionals were nevertheless objectionable to many nationalist politicians. The Minister of Health and Indigenous Medicine continued his vibrant speech as follows: [10] With the National Mental Health Task Force, of which I am the Chairman, we are preparing to do everything for the mental health needs of our society ... aNational Action Plan which will be implemented nation-wide ... The NGOs, the nonprofit organizations, they are to serve the people, they have the mental capacity and

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ability to support the people, to talk about their problems and to thus implement mental stability, mental courage, and strength, we are very happy that the NGOs are prepared to do that but I have-I will tell you what-the NGOs who work with the people without understanding the cultural, religious background of our country, without understanding the language, but I noted some of the NGOs, some are very good, most of the NGOs, they write very good reports in English and present them at international symposiums, but these symposium discussions do not bring us more results, indeed some are very good for the purpose of finding funding sometimes and also for foreign institutions to come, but our main objective is to reach the man in the village, to go into the difficult areas in the country and find what their problems are, go and ask questions about what are the problems of the mentally ill, find what their problems are, teach them, do some counseling there, so that is what is correct, so therefore I would like the NGOs to have a reorientation program for you all NGOs, because otherwise all the effort which will be put into this action plan program will not bear very good results. (original emphasis)

In fact, many of the speeches at National Mental Health Week did not clearly distinguish between the need for improved institutional or community-based care for the severely mentally ill on the one hand and the need to organize counseling for the survivors of war and the "mentally discouraged" and disgruntled people in "difficult areas in the country" on the other. One of the most important effects of the introduction of the international discourse on trauma is that a forum has been created in which the relation between the effects of past atrocities and an ongoing cycle of violence can be discussed in veiled terms. The master discourse on severe mental illness provides as it were a cover or aegis under which the suffering of the victims of war can be discussed independently from their ethnicity or political affiliation. In a country deeply divided along ethnic as well as party-political lines, this is a significant achievement. The discourse on mental illness and trauma allows people to talk about the suffering of all kinds of people without appearing to be taking sides in the conflict by presenting the specific forms of suffering of this or that ethnic or political group. The NGOs play a dangerous role in this new forum. First, they "lead the state sector on aspects of mental health, [bring] the state sector to look at mental health in a broader sense and to engage in the promotion of mental health," as the Secretary of the Ministry of Social Services, D. Dissanayaka, has put it. Second, they have initiated a public discussion on the long-term effects of insurgency, state-led counter-insurgency, and ethnic violence by relying on foreign funds. The NGOs' dependence on foreign donors makes their project particularly dangerous for the Sri Lankan nationalist elites. Because of the foreign funding involved in such delicate tasks as dealing with the effects of counter-insurgency violence national mental health NGOs are particularly vulnerable and open to scrutiny. The position of the national mental health NGOs is now so precarious that one

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eminent director of an NGO felt the need explicitly to reinsert the NGOs within the nation: [ll] The NGOs and the government need to work side by side: the government's mental health plan and the NGO plan jointly will be the National Mental Health plan, we are part of the nation, and the NGOs are part of the community that is trying to develop this national mental health plan, OK? The treatment will be done by psychiatrists etcetera, etcetera, but recognizing-the early recognition of mental illness is an NGO activity, rehabilitation is 101 percent-as far as I can see-an NGO activity. There are a lot of talks about the government's plans for rehabilitation, but I think it is for the NGOs to take a lead, and the NGOs have the capacity, they have the personnel, they have the will, they are in touch with everybody in the community, so the section of recognition, treatment, and rehabilitation, NGOs have to take over, the early recognition and the rehabilitation, let the government do the treatment part of it. (original emphasis)

The Mental Health of Those Living in Remote Areas By pointing to the fact that the NGOs "are in touch with everybody in the community" and reach the grass-roots level, the director of a mental health NGO I quoted here touched on a very sensitive issue. The discourse on providing services at the grass-roots level and organizing counseling services for people in remote areas is central to the self-presentation of NGO personnel, while in fact most of their programs have only been successfully implemented in Colombo. NGO volunteers readily boast about having been taken to uncleared areas behind the front line by Red Cross or UN convoys to organize workshops on trauma counseling for local doctors. By these means, they evoke a link that is in fact conspicuous by its absence between concerned and compassionate middle-class professionals and war victims in (virtually) no-go areas. In my interpretation, the prominence of this discourse among middleclass volunteers should be interpreted as one aspect of the way the political elite copes with an increasingly deterritorialized state under siege, a state that in reality has difficulties protecting central Colombo, the heart of the business community to which many of the upper echelons of the NGO volunteers belong. In recent years the Tamil separatists have managed to move the front-line ever closer to the center of the Sri Lankan state. 8 Moreover, during the JVP insurgency of 1971, youths from rural areas formed a serious threat to the government and briefly occupied many rural police stations. In the Southern Province they forced government agents to retreat into the coastal towns (Alles 1990). Again in the late eighties, the violence was seen to emerge from "remote areas" (286, 301) and, as I have described in Part I, the insurgency and counter-insurgency violence was particularly vicious in these remote areas. It is in this context that the discourse on the implementation of counseling

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programs in remote areas and the typically brief visits of professional middle-class NGO administrators to such areas become particularly salient. Such programs and visits could be seen as an attempt by members of the professional elite to reestablish contact with fellow citizens in remote areas, but they could also be seen as part of the nationalist endeavor to reintegrate remote areas-seen by an anxious urban middle class as inherently violent and politically suspect-within the Sri Lankan state. In other words, what looks like a decentralization of the mental health services from one angle might look from another angle more like the reannexation of remote areas by a weak postcolonial state. I summarize some of the points made by a counselor who made the link between counseling and counterinsurgency tactics explicit: [12] We need people with a professional approach, most important are the war-related problems; the stress mainly revolves around this. We need crisis containment and counseling, we need a professional approach toward grief. During the student unrest [euphemism for the civil war of the late eighties] there was no proper counselor at the university, not anybody can be a student counselor, students hate self-appointed student counselors. There is a political problem at the university, an uprising problem. Students from the Arts faculties [who do not speak English] feel inferior, they have no people to go to when they have problems, they commemorate Che Guevara, are unhappy with the successive governments, but the main problem is that there is no support system for the students, to say "I like you as you are." (my emphasis)

The discourse on the necessity to organize mental health services for people in remote areas is not an exclusive characteristic of the rhetoric of the NGOs. Public servants and politicians also stress the need to organize counseling facilities "all over the country." The government plans to "train ten thousand counselors and to develop twenty counseling centers in remote areas to help rural young people with psychological disorders" (government official). A spokesperson for the Ministry of Social Services talked about her ministry's plans to organize counseling programs and workshops for public servants at the provincial level and at the level of the divisional secretariats in addition to a program on "lining up the youth of tomorrow through mental sports." By means of trauma counseling programs, it is not only the middle-class mental health professionals who reestablish contact with parts of their nation that are considered inaccessible and dangerous; politicians intend to use the same strategy. As the Minister of Health and Indigenous Medicine eloquently described his plans: [13] We first have to educate the people employed in high levels within the government, then we must wake up the people who do not belong to the government, after that we must let that knowledge spread in villages, across the whole country in all its corners, we must spread this knowledge like a hug, an embrace, this wakening up must be spread to towns and across villages, therefore we must have a successful plan. (my emphasis)

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The Mental Health of the Nation It is clear that the mental health professionals are dealing with something much more central to the concerns of the middle-class political elites in Colombo than the reorganization of a dated system of institutional care for the severely mentally ill. Most participants in the National Mental Health Week agree that the impetus for such a renewed attention to mental health issues comes from the mental health NGOs. In other words, this rapid growth of a previously much-neglected mental health sector is linked to the recent boom in international financial support for mental health projects in war-torn societies, and ultimately to the discourse on war trauma within the international humanitarian community. Transposed to a context of neocolonial Sri Lankan nationalist politics, the discourse of international trauma specialists has inadvertently become a discourse on the "mental health of the nation." Both government officials and volunteers of the nongovernmental sector alike advocate the need for "a national perspective on what mental health means in Sri Lanka" and for "a mental health program for our country." Concepts such as "national mental illness"9 and "the mental health of the nation" were routinely used by many of the professionals attending the National Mental Health Week, and politicians praised the government's commitment to a National Action Plan implemented by a National Mental Health Task Force. The message from Her Excellency the President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga read during National Mental Health Week summarized this concern of the Colombo-based elites clearly: [14] The UN has now reported that Sri Lanka has reached one of the highest rates of suicide in the world, 49 per 100, 000, which by itself is worthy of note. The most significant aspect of this alarming statistic is the large number of school-going children who have attempted or committed suicide during the recent past over relatively trivial issues often connected to their school life. Is this the consequence of the education our children receive? We must seriously examine whether our education system teaches our children to cope with stress and the problems with siblings and with maturity and whether it makes them learn to resolve conflicts peacefully. We also see youth from all walks of life resorting to violence of various degrees and styles of provocation. For me these are the roots of a society that will develop various forms of mental illness and psychosocial problems in the coming years. We also see regarding curative aspects the vast inadequacies in our health care system to counsel and to give appropriate therapy to those diagnosed as being mentally ill. The grossly inadequate institutional care facilities we have in this country stand testimony to this. My government is taking significant steps to address all these areas I have highlighted; education for peace and conflict resolution, promotion of negotiating skills and dialogue without resorting to violence are high on the agenda. We are taking measures to introduce these concepts to schoolchildren via the private school curricula. With the new education reforms this aspect will be implemented instantly. We have also introduced counseling and guidance into the school timetable in the junior and senior schools ...

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In the proposed National Mental Health policy which is being finalized right now far-reaching community based programs of prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of those affected by mental disorders are in development. Consequently, I must acknowledge the valuable contribution certain NGOs and other private organizations have made over several years. The significant psychological trauma experienced by the victims of child abuse, children conscripted by the LTTE and those left destitute due to the war in the north and east need to be especially addressed. As a government we recognize the social obligations and responsibilities, we begin just to address these issues that affect our society and our future generations, within our process of moving into the 21st century. In this context, I wish to congratulate the organizers of this event for bringing into focus issues of such significant national importance. (my emphasis)

Again, "issues of such significant national importance" are addressed by means of a discourse that covers the need for institutional care facilities for those affected by mental disorders while alluding to the problem of having to deal with youthful insurgents and separatists. The discourse on mental health provides a cover for discussing a variety of issues such as the reintegration of insurgents into mainstream society. However, many people from the mental health community in Colombo do not look at the needs of their country from the same perspective as some of the nationalist politicians I quoted above. The Awkwardness of the Sri Lankan Public Sphere

In Chapter 5 I discussed the way the nondomestic sphere or the wider society (samiidjaya) is conceived of and constructed in the aftermath of the civil war in Udahenagama. I preferred the notion of nondomestic sphere rather than the concept of a public sphere to discuss the situation in Udahenagama, because the notion of a public sphere is not fully applicable in the cultural context of the rural Southern Province. For the sake of clarity, however, in my analysis of the ways in which Colombo-based middle-class professionals discuss the "mental health of the nation," I use the notion of a public sphere. I would, however, postulate a continuity between the awkwardness (or-as I argued above-cruelty) of nondomestic spaces within rural communities and the awkwardness of public spaces experienced by the middle classes in urban centers. Many mental health professionals I interviewed included 'just traveling" as a traumatic experience. As one psychiatrist put it, "any person traveling by bus will tell you"; another psychiatrist euphemistically referred to "the problems inherent in public transport." This is a theme that also emerged many times during National Mental Health Week as well as in articles in the national press. Public transport or travel on the roads takes in a large proportion of the public space middle-class Sri Lankans are confronted with on a daily basis. Large buses, vans, and jeeps eagerly compete to drive one another off nar-

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row roads, while poorer traffic accident victims are more often than not carelessly left by the roadside. Overcrowded buses provide a ready-made context for sexual harassment. The spectacle of rapacious individualistic competitiveness and outright violence on the public roads-a situation that Simpson (2001) has referred to without exaggeration as a "national disaster"-contributes to the general grimness of the public sphere. An NGO volunteer who was forced to live in exile for most of his life took the opportunity during his address to National Mental Health Week to describe his experience of returning to Sri Lanka as follows: [15] What is happening to Sri Lanka? When I left Sri Lanka the people were happy, my friends were friendly. When I came back I realized that there was a tremendous amount of tension among people, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if you would not know what I am talking about, you see it on the streets, stress! There is an immense need in the country, we need our people to be smiling again, and we can do it. (my emphasis)

National Mental Health Week provided a setting for a moment of selfreflexivity that would not regularly occur within the national/nationalist heavily censured media or even in ordinary conversation. Many mental health professionals aired their views on the "general deterioration in manners and lack of courtesy" and the "pervading sense of fear, suspicion and distrust" among their fellow citizens, while others put it more bluntly, stating simply that "people [had] got used to increasing levels of violence." However salutary at first sight, National Mental Health Week was not simply a mass epiphany. The discourse of Colombo-based mental health professionals easily slips from a position of self-reflexivity to one of distanced spectatorship, especially revealed in the focus on public transport: "One needs only to look inside a passing bus and see severe psychological distress." One government official, however, had the courage to include respected middle-class people, who would not routinely partake in grim forms of public transport, as part of the problem: [16] In order to deal with the problems you have to increase the mental health of the nation, you have to shift the whole mental health of the nation, we are wasting our time only working with these people [the severely mentally ill]. I would like to talk about what we call normal and abnormal, the war in the north and the east and its bearing on the mental health of the nation, what have you thought? Any, any thoughts? There are so many people involved in the war, on the side of the government, on the side of the LTTE. What about the people who are conditioned to see another person as an enemy and kill him? Large numbers of people are used to this lifestyle. They are used to this. A particular person came to me and said "I don't want peace." That person said "let people fight and fight," this was actually said by a very senior person, a respected person. Now, if we don't have a program for these people, that will be the norm of the day in Colombo, we need a program for all people who are kind of used to violence ... I went through the international literature [on

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war trauma], Gulf War Syndrome and all that. I don't think that is applicable to Sri Lanka, the problem has to be tackled from many directions. (original emphasis)

It is within this context of chronic violence that the Sri Lankan political elites present NCO volunteers and trauma counselors as "brothers and sisters," "mothers and fathers" (see transcript 8).Just as women in Udahenagama evoke the ethos of the household and transpose it to the awkward spaces between contexts (see Part II), the political elite use kinship terminology for middle-class people who have taken up the task of addressing the grimness of the public sphere and the ongoing cycle of violence. NCO volunteers are thus seen as playing a role in the recolonization of the public sphere by household mores. This dynamic reveals striking parallels with the ways in which Udahenagama women deal with the high levels of violence in their immediate surroundings.

A Modernist Approach to Violence International trauma specialists have introduced the paradigms of research on the neurobiological basis of cycles of violence to Sri Lanka through guest lectures and workshops financed by international humanitarian organizations (such as UNICEF and Oxfam). In the hands of Sri Lankan intellectuals and Colombo-based NCO volunteers, the discourse on trauma or the modernist, decontextualizing approach to violence has taken on a life of its own. It has ceased to be a social movement controlled by a Euro-American bourgeoisie engaging in humanitarian actions abroad. Within the context of the national mental health NCOs of central Colombo, the discourse on trauma goes through a process of culturespecific translation into Sinhalese (see Argenti-Pillen 2003 for a more detailed description and political analysis of this translation process). A considerable amount of the time and energy of Sri Lankan mental health professionals goes to finding a place in Colombo's political arena. Moreover, mental health NCOs are involved in the tentative organization of a forum where the mental health of the nation and the role of the middle classes in the perpetuation of violence can be publicly discussed. Mental health workshops and conferences provide a setting where otherwise taboo subjects such as widespread human rights abuses, atrocities, and the ongoing cycle of violence can be addressed. Elites in Colombo have thereby acquired a paradigm by means of which they can discuss violence without having to mention its context: the caste, ethnic origin, or political affiliation of the people involved. Discussions about the neurobiology of violence have thus played a positive role in opening up a debate about the effects of violence close to the center of a repressive regime. As a result of this recent cultural input, Sri Lankan professionals have implemented (and plan to implement) nationwide treatment programs for

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violence-prone individuals in rural areas and remote communities. Such programs play a role in the reestablishment of contact between the increasingly distrusted political elite of a violent nation-state and survivors in rural no-go areas virtually beyond the reach of the Sri Lankan state. While fully recognizing the important role trauma discourse plays for Colombo elites, I now turn to a discussion of the altogether different role nongovernmental mental health programs play in rural areas. Despite the discourse on the importance of organizing services in remote areas, the obvious problem of many of the mental health NGOs in Colombo is the lack of community outreach beyond the capital. Some NGOs have, however, reached the stage at which outreach centers are operational. I now focus on the discourse of people working in the outreach center of one such NGO and then discuss the interaction between Udahenagama women and such programs.

Mental Health NGOs and the Discourse of Rural War Widows This section is based on interviews with field officers in an NGO outreach center. The field officers employed by this NGO were all rural war widows who had received their training at the NGO head office in Colombo. In line with the paradigm of the trauma discourse, this outreach center offers mental health services for people traumatized by the civil war of the late 1980s. The program is thus oriented toward a very specific target group: victims oftorture, families of the disappeared, and the internally displaced. One of the first questions field officers ask their clients is whether their suffering is immediately related to the civil war-whether they "lost a family member because of the time of great terror." If not, the client is referred to other services. NGO personnel hereby impose Euro-American distinctions of "domestic" versus "public" or "political" violence. Women afflicted by the wild who are only familiar with local categories of violence (see Part I) thus learn about such distinctions when they are selected or rejected by the mental health NGOs. An important part of the field officer's task is to collect information and make up a file for each client. Most of the field officers' day-to-day activities consist of administration and referring people to other services, governmental or nongovernmental. Field officers play a very personal and active role in these referrals; more often than not, they actually accompany lowstatus people and speak on their behalf to government officials about claims for compensation, war-related land disputes, or problems with education. They also refer people to local governmental mental health services or to nongovernmental counseling services in Colombo. In this sense, their role is similar to that of regional politicians in urban areas. During the evenings and on weekends, one can often see large groups

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of people waiting on the veranda of a politician's house. These people have made an appointment and plan to discuss a problem with the politician, who then refers them to particular people within the government services or writes reference letters for them. It is not uncommon for politicians to have quite a few secretaries or scribes especially employed to write reference letters for followers. The field officers of the NGO argue that their presence during their clients' encounters with government officials enables low-status people, who would normally get turned down in a rude manner by the state's bureaucracy, 10 to obtain a hearing. Because government officials get to know the field officers over the years, the NGO workers can get the work done quickly for their clients. By becoming members of a national mental health NGO, these rural war widows trained to be field officers have thus taken up a role previously dominated by regional (predominantly male) politicians. A final aspect of the field officer's task involves trauma counseling. To introduce trauma counseling in a context dominated by the acoustic cleansing strategies I describe in Chapter 4, and more generally in Part II, is indeed a bold endeavor. For a more detailed description of the fieldofficers' activities, I quote them at length. Their discourse is heterogeneous11 and comprises aspects of the mental health discourse acquired during training sessions in Colombo (italicized) as well as a typically traditional way of talking about the problems of the postwar society. [17] When I send a letter to one person, I get the addresses of many people who disappeared during the civil war. We collect information in this way. After having gathered the addresses, we go to their houses to meet them. We go into "the field" ( fildeke yiivi). The fact that we go to their house strengthens them. The people living in the neighborhood watch closely who is going in and out. Commonly, these are marginal people (konvelii). They have been left alone and marginalized. When somebody is visiting such a house [of misfortune] the neighbors watch closely, to see who comes and goes to this house. Because their neighbors watch closely when we arrive, our visit strengthens them. Their mental condition ( miinasika tattvaya) develops/ grows because of this visit ... We visit them two or three times. Sometimes a relation, a friendship develops between us and them like among family members . . . Even those who usually threaten a lot, when we go there, they get friendly with us and talk [laughs] ... Most often the people who get this mental thing ( miinasikava mevenne) are the people who were detained in army camps and who were beaten. It is those people who most commonly suffer from mental illness ( miinasikava viitila). Those whose brains have been through bruises and cracks, the ones whose body have been hurt; those always suffer mentally. They can't speak about their illness. They can't even tell their mother and father what's in their minds, or their siblings. Sometimes when we get very close to them they tell us, when we keep asking/ask and ask, they tell us things they wouldn't even tell their parents.

The field officers have readily taken up the discourse about "going into the field." When the officers are in attendance at the NGO outreach cen-

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ter, they even refer to the villages they themselves come from and return to every evening as the "field." Despite their adherence to some aspects of the mental health discourse, the officers readily address local problems that are not explicitly addressed in the Western discourse on trauma and rehabilitation. They allude to the fact that many households and neighbors live in complete isolation from one another (see Chapter 5) and they consider their visit as playing a role in opening up imploded social contexts. They also note that people do not readily talk about their suffering to close family members and friends, and here too they see themselves as playing a role in this culture-specific reaction to violence. Their description of their roles as counselors clearly reflects their dual allegiance to the discourse of mental health NGOs and the local discourses on violence and fear-related illnesses I discussed in Part II: [18] The counselors work at the head office [in Colombo]. We also have been given the training as counselors. A doctor called X [a member of the ISTSS], came from abroad to train us. He also "did counseling" to us. He did it better than we can do it. We do counseling in an ordinary way. But in Colombo, after having talked to people for a long time, they take the "deep down mind" (yatihita gannava) ... the things people usually wouldn't say, they somehow take them from them, we must take them out (eliyata ganna) ... We must always keep our eyes directed toward people when we do counseling to them. There is also "the method of sitting down" ( vadivena kramayak) [literally "sit-down method"]. There is a method of talking (katakaranna kramayak). Talking with our eyes, our face, with our whole posture, we must tie them to us ( biindagannava). We put them in a position ( tattvaya) in which they can't keep any secrets. We talk to them in a friendly way. If we talk to a person while doing other things, while watching our watch, while scratching our heads, while looking in all directions, his attention (avadhanaya) will not get directed toward us. Therefore we should only counsel people after having finished all our work. We listen. We don't say anything. We look straight at the client ( diham balan). First we listen and then we say "There are many people like you who have been referred to us [kind and slow tone]. It is not only you who comes to us with such problems and has talked to us. The things that have happened to them! Not half of it has happened to you!." We say this to make their minds lighter (hita siihiillu). How do we do this? That client has more problems than the others, but we always put the client into a less grave situation than the others. Then the client thinks "Ah, I don't I have more problems than that person!" or the client quickly says that she too has problems like that. In this way, we do counseling. We take the information out of the clients. We must be there with the client herself, we must talk, we must be friendly, we must create a familiar situation so that we can even touch/hold the client by the hand. We must build up trust, otherwise they won't speak.

Field officers' discourse reflects the propagation of Western-style interaction by Colombo-based Sri Lankan mental health professionals: the organization of a "conversation" by means of eye contact, the "sit-down method," and the use of touch. Other aspects of their description of counseling remain strictly within the sphere of village discourses on illness and

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suffering. Words and information have to be taken out of the client. This is expressed by means of the same vocabulary used by village women to describe how their fears are taken out of their bodies during domestic cleansing rituals (see, e.g., transcript 5). The need for Western-style eye contact becomes a "straight gaze" (diva balanava, looking straight at something), a theme that regularly occurs when people discuss the nature and efficacy of the gaze of deities or wild spirits ( biilma, dishtiya). Their further description of counseling makes the link with indigenous concepts more explicit: [19] They [the clients] have told me that we are like deities. They say we are their gods, when we help them a lot, they think and say we are gods. Even if we talk that is enough, they say "even if you talk that is a relief (sahanayak) to us." ... Counseling is different [from iidurukam, small-scale cleansing rituals]. In the past counseling didn't exist. It [counseling] sometimes has Buddha's (buduguna) qualities in it. It [counseling] is like reciting the Buddha's qualities. These recitations (gatha) have an effect upon the head. Usually you say those (gatha) to gain tranquility and benefit ( setak shantiyak). Counseling might work like that sometimes, though it isn't really like counseling, is it? That was in ancient times, counseling only came recently. Though a small-scale domestic blessing ritual (attagaha miitirum) is a little bit like counseling, but counseling doesn't happen by doing a large-scale domestic cleansing ritual (tovile). A tovile frightens, those wild spirits come and jump on you ... The moral mistake of being alone (tanikam dosha) and things like that might be cured by rituals ( iidurukam), but terror ( baya) or a terrified heart ( hita bayayi) cannot be cured by means of domestic cleansing rituals ( tovil). The illness that has hit the mind can sometimes not be cured even if you would dance a thousand cleansing rituals, let alone one. So, if you don't give counseling or medicine in the correct way, that person will stay in the same condition. In several ways, the field officers' discourse about tradition bears a resemblance to the discourse ofUdahenagama women I described in Part II. Like fearless women in U dahenagama, the field officers are critical of largescale domestic cleansing rituals ( tovil) and of the ritual specialist's role in healing the hearts terrified during the civil war. Field officers, however, easily convert their discourse into traditional illness narratives to describe the suffering of close family members. Again, their personal illness history reflects an intermeshing of the discourse acquired during their training as counselors and more traditional ways of talking about illness. I quote from a conversation with two field officers who were talking to me at the same time, interrupting one another regularly: [20] W2: Yesterday I went to the [private] hospital and had a "scan" of my head, because of a headache. We both have no husband, disappeared during the time of terror. During that time, we stayed without sleeping for a long time, we tired the brain, cried and "this and that" happened for many years. They said that it is because of "that" that I am getting a headache. When you get a headache our mothers and fathers think this headache is caused by the misdeeds of wild spirits ( bhuta dosha or yaksha dosha). Sometimes they perform small-scale healing rituals (adu-

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rukam). They dance cleansing rituals, make offerings. But in order to think that this headache is caused by "that fact" [the civil war and the disappearances] to think that much, and to understand that much they are not developed/educated/clever enough. So I think you can't cure it with any other method than counseling. Wl: Even if you dance a cleansing ritual, this headache won't get better.

W2: When I have a problem, I get an unbelievable headache on this side of my head. When a problem comes to my mind, this whole side along with the eye starts hurting. Wl: They [counselors from Colombo] told me I have another problem: tears don't flow from my eyes. W2: [about the headache] The pain goes on for a long time. Wl: No matter how sad I am, I don't cry, tears don't come out of my eyes, that is very bad. I get a headache because of that. W2: It is good if tears flow. He [the doctor at the hospital] asked whether I have a problem that affects me mentally and he did a "brain scan."

These field officers belong to the group of fearless women I described in the first part of this chapter. They fully realize the risks involved in their job and because of that they mainly belong to the nondomestic sphere, or the "spaces between contexts." When prompted, they talked about threats and their fears related to visiting unknown communities. Nevertheless, they continued to work for the NGO: [21] There were times I escaped, maybe because of some merit (pin) I had gained earlier. I think that, because we help other people, we have the [protective] gaze of the deities upon us. If that wouldn't be the case, we would be doing a job "holding our life in our hands" (pana ate tiyanan) [risking our lives].

Udahenagama Women's Views of Mental Health NGOs Udahenagama women's participation in the programs of the outreach center of national mental health NGOs is surrounded by secrecy, suspicion, and competitiveness. Visits to such NGOs have experiential similarities with searches for the disappeared during the civil war, participation in court hearings against enemies, or bribing local politicians to acquire a death certificate for disappeared family members and start the application process for compensation. In order to gain maximum advantage in the competition to receive compensation, bereaved women are careful not to divulge information about NGOs to other war widows in the village. War widows complained to me about one another, saying "nobody tells me anything," and they typically received information about NGOs through government officials and politicians rather than from their own neighbors. Within this tense atmosphere, the definition of a target group by the NGO creates additional animosity. Those excluded from the target group defined by the trauma discourse are angry and jealous of those included. As I discuss in Part I, the different categories middle-class elites (both in

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the West and in Sri Lanka) use to talk about violence are difficult to apply to the Udahenagama context (for example, the distinctions made between "domestic" and "public" or "political" violence). It therefore comes as no surprise that Udahenagama people experience difficulties coping with the way mental health NGOs select a target group. Victims of domestic violence, the families of suicide victims, the mothers of deserters who have been recaptured by the army, families of the severely mentally ill, and young men who have been tortured during their training in the army!2 alike receive no help from the group of NGOs that has emerged in Colombo as a response to the international humanitarian communities' discourse on trauma. On the other hand, neighboring families to these-members of which are among the disappeared, or who were held in detention camps and tortured during the civil war of the late 1980s-are eligible for "outside help," a highly valued commodity in Udahenagama. War widows who participated in the activities at the outreach center in one of the major towns often proudly emphasized that their bus fare was paid and that they received a food parcel and tea during the meetings. They argued that the NGO "teaches us not to think of those" (the civil war, the disappearances) and that the NGO also teaches them how to educate their children. The field officers lend money for medicines to participating war widows. Many women expect the NGO to provide a safe place for their children. If the violence in the village were to intensifY again, they plan to send their children to the outreach center in the way other villagers would send their children to relatively better-off family members in regional towns. They also expect the NGO to help them in their quest for compensation and regret the fact that the NGO cannot help them pay for the education of their children, which the widows often cannot afford because of the disappearance of their husbands. Nowadays, almost a decade after the (official) end of the civil war, many women are told by their family members "not to walk [about] any more" and to focus on developing a new life at home. Their previous efforts to search for their husbands or sons and to apply for compensation have not borne any results. New partners, children, or parents are therefore eager not to see them make further fruitless efforts. They discourage war widows from attending the meetings or training sessions of the NGOs since these maintain their status as women belonging to the spaces between contexts and delay their reintegration within the household (gedara). As I discuss in the first section, many of the women who have searched for disappeared family members have become fearless and have severed their ties with the household by refusing to take up a role within domestic cleansing rituals. Most of the women who participate in the NGO activities belong to the category of women I call fearless. They inhabit an awkward position in which their suffering cannot be alleviated by means of domestic cleansing

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rituals but they cannot rely on support from home to go to the outreach center either. When family members withdraw their support for them, such women find it difficult to secure the help of a chaperone for the long journey to town, and they are forced to stay home. The high levels of suspicion and fragmentation within the community make it highly improbable that war widows from different households would travel together and above all that they would discuss their problems in front of one another at the outreach center. The rationale for participating in training events organized by the NGO also somehow loses its strength when transposed to the village context. War widows are trained by the NGO to engage in community-based mental health care activities. They are taught how to identify people who are likely to commit suicide or develop major mental health problems. Coming from "a house of misfortune" and operating within a community constituted by a conglomerate of well-guarded, almost isolationist social contexts (see Part II), their "community outreach" capacities are often limited. Despite these drawbacks, the letters sent to them by the NGO and the occasional visits of the field officers are a much-cherished source of strength and hope. Outside contacts strengthen people against the threats from neighbors. None of the families of the disappeared in Udahenagama claim to have received compensation yet, but continued visits to town reinvigorate the hope for compensation and a better life in the future.

The Trauma Discourse as an Agent of Discursive and Societal Change The discourse on trauma put into practice in the rural south of Sri Lanka feeds into a preexisting culturally specific change that occurred in the aftermath of the civil war: women's fearlessness. 13 In the case of the NGO under study, fearless women were those who became field officers and trauma counselors. Women from Udahenagama who had been searching for a disappeared relative for prolonged periods of time-the majority of whom had become fearless as a result-were particularly inclined to participate in the activities organized at the outreach center of a mental health NGO. If one looks at the ongoing NGO activities from the point of view of contemporary Udahenagama debates, one could argue that these activities support the position of fearless women within the community. While the majority of the community consider fearlessness an aberration, a characteristic of yaka-like or yakshini-like people, the NGO activities now provide an outside legitimization for fearlessness. In other words, whereas fearlessness would once have been derided as an aberration, the NGOs now support fearlessness as a viable form of sociability. I am very much aware that this support is integral to the well-intentioned empowerment programs of

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mental health NGOs. However, within the Udahenagama context, fearlessness represents a controversial aspect of empowerment. While NGO personnel construct fearless women who participate in their training events as empowered, the women suffering from terrified hearts or lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild or who take up the role of the sick and entranced person during large-scale domestic cleansing rituals are constructed as being in need of mental health services. While fear- and terror-related illnesses once normal are now construed as war-related mental illness or trauma, the discourse of women participating with mental health NGOs now constructs the fearlessness that was previously an abominationi4 as empowerment. The discourse on trauma has thus inadvertently taken up a role in the local dynamic between women afflicted by lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild at one end of the spectrum, and fearless women at the other end. As I have discussed above, while reacting to the same crisis situation, these two groups of women advocate opposing models of postwar societal reorganization. Women afflicted by the gaze of the wild contribute to the preservation of contexts and the organization of society into small-scale bounded social units. At the same time they contribute to the social fragmentation of the community and the neglect of the extra-domestic sphere, which can be associated with ongoing low-intensity violence. Fearless women, in contrast, provide an alternative model of postwar social reorganization. These women do not organize domestic cleansing rituals, but rather attempt to build up a life outside the domestic sphere. On the basis of the data I have gathered, I estimate fearless women's contribution to the cycle of violence to be substantial in the long term. The children of fearless women are prone to become fearless themselves. When they are afflicted by childhood illnesses, their mothers don't tell them that their suffering is related to fear or terror. While fearless sons terrifY the community as yaka-like people, fearless daughters may engage in rough speech (kata siirayi) and refrain from the cautious discourses on violence of their mothers' generation. Nowadays the majority of people from Udahenagama avoid illness-provoking fear and a terrified heart by speaking about violence and terror in cautious and ambiguous ways. Once not only men but also women claim to have become fearless, the rationale for adhering to such a cautious discourse is under threat. As I documented in Part Two, cautious discursive strategies are especially vital in the containment of widespread modernist violence. The link between women's fearlessness, their children's fearlessness, and future forms of modernist violence is what has to be borne in mind when considering the local impact of the discourse on trauma.

Chapter 8 The Power of Ambiguity

The history of the Southern Province of Sri Lanka is replete with violent events. First colonial violence and then counter-insurgency violence terrified generations of civilians in the rural south. I refrain from using the term "culture of extreme violence" or "culture of terror" to refer to this situation of chronic violence. I find such terms misleading since they give the impression that the principal origin of violence and terror can be found locally, in a local culture. This is certainly not true in Udahenagama. In this final chapter I recapitulate some of the main ideas of my argument and conclude that the central characteristic of life in Udahenagama is a culture of containment of violence. I also look into the more global origins of the violence Udahenagama people lived through and comment on the Euro-American culture of terror that has been exported to southern Sri Lanka in the form of counterinsurgency training programs. I then further contextualize another aspect of globalization of village life: the provision of trauma counseling services for suffering wives and mothers in Sinhalese Buddhist rural neighborhoods or the globalization of Euro-American techniques to alleviate the suffering of survivors of war. Finally, I attempt to anticipate some of the critiques and reservations mental health professionals or trauma specialists might have regarding my analysis of the situation in Udahenagama. I provide a deconstruction based on ethnographic evidence of discourses that would label both fearless women as well as women afflicted by the gaze of the wild as "traumatized."

Containing Violence Udahenagama discourses on violence are often ambiguous. Notions regarding the gaze of the wild (dishtiya), or the fear of wild spirits (yaksha

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Figure 15. The drums of the next generation.

bayayi) and terrified hearts (hita bayayi) enable people to speak about a variety of forms of terror and violence in veiled terms, thereby effectively masking the terror they have lived. By means of these ambiguous terms, the reality of domestic violence and the discourses about such violence constitute a blueprint of sorts for discourses about nondomestic types of violence, including the atrocities of the civil war of the late 1980s. In the case of domestic violence, the ambiguous discourse on violence typically arises out of a situation in which the perpetrator of violence lives nearby, most often in the same household. Using the power of ambiguity to avoid provoking perpetrators of violen ce, this discourse is characterized above all by caution. The use of this cautious register of discourse h elps to prevent

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the escalation of domestic conflicts, enabling victims to continue living with their aggressors as members of one family. The public situation in the aftermath of the civil war is very similar to this domestic scenario. Insurgents, informants working for the counterinsurgency forces, killers and their families all now live promiscuously amidst their victims or their close relations. The suffering of these victims is accordingly expressed in a language that is intimately related to situations of domestic conflict, such as "can't stay," the "gaze of the wild," or the "confusion of the terrified." At a discursive level, many forms of extradomestic violence are simply addressed as if they were instances of domestic violence. Ambiguous idioms used to describe and interpret domestic violence in socially acceptable ways are now used to describe political violence and war. As I have argued, the resulting ambiguity plays a role in postwar forms of conflict-avoidance and enables the perpetrators of atrocities and their victims to live together in the same crowded neighborhoods. The cultivation of linguistic ambiguity and uncertainty thus contributes to the postwar social reorganization of Udahenagama society. The greater part of this community has survived in the form of small-scale, bounded, regularly cleansed social units. Discursive strategies for talking about violence can be considered another form of acoustic cleansing, in which people manage to represent the inauspicious, the unrespectable, the unsociable, or the wild without using dangerous words. By means of euphemisms, zero anaphora, and avoidance of the names of unrespectable or sick people, the domestic sphere is safeguarded from the intrusion of the language of the wild. The excessive use of reported speech enables people to maintain dangerous words "in transit," as it were, and to maintain a safe distance from such words and their referents. By means of this style of everyday conversation within the domestic sphere, the household is continuously cleansed, and family members are safeguarded from illness and moral decay. The transposition from the domestic to the wider society (samadjaya) of cautious discursive strategies fosters a rigorous localization or cellularization of enmity and hatred. Members of the wider community typically have difficulties fully understanding such strategically ambiguated discourses. During everyday conversations interlocutors are intensely involved in making sense of ambiguous communications and in imagining the referents (people and events) that are touched upon by deliberately vague forms of discourse. The degree of clarity for the listener depends on his or her degree of closeness to the speaker and the speaker's household. Such cautious discourses bring about a particular, cellular distribution of knowledge within the community in which people close to a particular household are relatively well informed while those who live further away in the neighborhood remain relatively ignorant. The culture-specific use of reported speech is another discursive

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strategy that contributes to the cellular organization of postwar society. The frequent use of reported speech markers creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and doubt once a small-scale communicative context is transcended. When a statement has not reached a speaker via a well-known friend or family member, or by a chain of known interlocutors, the information is transmitted by means of the reported speech marker -lu: "it has apparently or allegedly been said that." Statements thus rapidly acquire the quality of hearsay or rumor, and the speaker's responsibility for their statements is accordingly dispersed. While many discursive strategies call for a suspension of disbelief, Udahenagama discourse would seem to call for a suspension of belief from its interlocutors. This call for suspicion and doubt is only rhetorical, however, enabling the speaker to divest him or herself of responsibility for a statement while nonetheless making it. These discursive techniques ensure that unambiguous information and knowledge about everyday life and a violent past remain encapsulated within a relatively small-scale context, such as a nuclear or extended family. By restricting the free flow of information and creating uncertainty among interlocutors in the wider community, these discursive strategies prevent local conflicts from spilling out into the wider community and mobilizing larger-scale, collective forms of hatred or revenge. This aspect of cautious discursive strategies leads me to identifY them as a factor contributing to the containment of modernist violence, which is characterized by collective forms of action against whole groups or categories of people. I have further argued that the application of domestic discursive strategies such as euphemism in talking about violence outside the domestic sphere also plays a role in the cycle of containment of violence in another way. Because the killers of the civil war era are qualified as yaka-like people, they are effectively lumped together with disobedient sons or abusive spouses who are spoken of in the same way. By means of this label, violent people from other families and neighborhoods are metaphorically compared to violent family members, for example, to troublesome sons. In my analysis, this euphemistic means of referring to killers is not a trivialization of extreme violence but rather a means of reintegrating those with blood on their hands into the moral economy of the household. I have further argued that this deployment of a vocabulary that primarily belongs to the realm of the household in the wider society played a role in the cycle of containment of violence. The use of the dehumanizing notions of yaka-like people (yaka-vage minissu) or the gaze of the wild to allude to abusive or violent family members represents and brings about a fissure within the household. Udahenagama people thereby make a distinction between ordinary (samanya minissu) and yaka-like people, and this enables people to distinguish themselves from violent family members. By using the notion of yaka-vage minissu for non-family members, people likewise

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mark a fissure between a perpetrator of violence and his family. In my understanding, this establishes a (symbolic) link between a victim's and an aggressor's household, between the fissures in a victim's household and those in a killer's household. Victims have the option of tacitly acknowledging that a perpetrator's household is suffering from the perpetrator's presence as much as they themselves suffer from abusive or violent family members. Young perpetrators who are qualified as yaka-like by their victims' families not only are enemies but are thought of as causing trouble and suffering within their own families as well. The discursive strategy of calling perpetrators of violence yaka-like is not in this analysis purely a form of reprobation or of condemnation but goes hand in hand with the limitation of violence and revenge. The local cycle of containment of violence is very much dependent upon the dissociation of a killer from his family. A victim's relatives or associates may take revenge on an enemy, but they will leave his family members alone. This is the way the community averted a much more widespread outbreak of violence in the late 1980s. In my analysis, the use of the notion of yaka-like people for insurgents or killers of the civil war metaphorically dissociates killers from their families, in the same way that the use of this metaphor within the family dissociates abusive sons or husbands from their families. I would therefore suggest that the application of such household metaphors within the extra-domestic sphere and the surrounding society reflects and promotes attitudes toward killers and their families that are crucial for the containment of violence. The possible role of these same cautious discourses on violence and cleansing strategies within an ongoing cycle of low-intensity violence, however, cannot be ignored and requires further questioning. The organization of society into small-scale, well-isolated social contexts has led to the creation ofliveable contexts for perpetrators of violence and a high degree of integration of violent individuals within the community. The strategic ambiguity of discourses on violence results in a "truth" that is located at the meeting point between individuals, and is largely dependent on the interpretations of the listener. The diffuse types of truth resulting from such ambiguous types of communication discourage the public condemnation of the killers of the civil war and encourage their accommodation. While I use the terms "killer" or "perpetrator of violence" for heuristic purposes, this is certainly not an ernie category. The Udahenagama discourse about perpetrators of violence is context-specific and cast in the language of who said what to whom, who did what to whom, and for what reason. People who are considered perpetrators/ enemies within a particular small-scale, cellular context of family and neighbors within Udahenagama can relatively easily shed this identity when entering the wider society or the spaces in between contexts. There they might be considered to be "so-and-so's enemy" or "yaka-like" but they will not be labeled "killers,"

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"deserters," "insurgents," or "criminals" against whom collective action should be undertaken. For this reason they continue to make "spaces in between contexts" unsafe. They might be denounced to the police or the army by their local enemies, but because people from the wider community largely tolerate them, they remain free to use their relative anonymity and the lack of public condemnation to instigate further terror, suffering, and fear-related illnesses. The community's attitude of tolerance toward such perpetrators of violence is mirrored by the fact that most people concentrate on domestic cleansing. This goes along with strategies of nonidentification with the nondomestic sphere and segregation from the wider society. The most frequently practiced traditional cleansing techniques in fact neglect spaces in between contexts and focus on life within the domestic sphere. Domestic cleansing rituals deployed for the rigorous protection and preservation of small-scale social units indiscriminately affect the immediate neighborhood. During those brief moments of ritual activity, the nearby neighborhood is conceived as a repository for the wild, which is excluded from the domestic sphere. A social world is thus imagined that is the sum of a few, idealized, cleansed domestic spheres, and the society in the immediate surrounding is periodically excluded from this vision. Very nearby houses or spaces in between contexts are neglected and are readily relinquished to the wild, a conception of the wild that includes the ongoing low-intensity violence caused by perpetrators of the civil war era as well as the postwar era. This ongoing low-intensity violence that goes along with a culture of containment of major outbreaks of violence in southern Sri Lanka can, however, be radically distinguished from the nature of the violence during the civil war of the late 1980s.

War Crimes and the Trademarks of Western Intelligence Services In the wake of Rwanda, Algeria, Chiapas, and East Timor, it has become clear that documenting local, culture-specific discourses on dehumanization and the cycle of violence they engender cannot be undertaken without considering the translocal modernist context in which they exist; a context defined by discourses and techniques of dehumanization to be found in Western military training manuals and military practice. To give some idea of the extent to which the modern military impinges upon local techniques for the containment of violence, I begin by considering the following: [l] U.S. involvement with Rwanda's military has been far more extensive than previously disclosed, including psychological operations and tactical Special Forces exercises that occurred a few weeks before the start of last fall's Rwanda-led

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insurgency in neighboring Congo, an internal Defence Department chronology shows . . . . The official denied that this was counter-insurgency training. (Duke 1997) The Mexican government blames the atrocities in Chiapas on village feuds. But they may be the handiwork of a state-backed ghost army. (MacAski111998) Indonesian military forces linked to the carnage in East Timor were trained in the United States under a covert program sponsored by the Clinton administration that continued until last year.... Kopassus was built up with American expertise despite Washington's awareness of its role in the genocide of about 200,000 people in the years after the invasion of East Timor in 1975, and in a string of massacres and disappearances. (Vulliamy and Barnett 1999) It appears that the militias [in East Timor] have been managed by elite units of Kopassus, the "crack special forces unit" that had, according to veteran Asia correspondent David Jenkins, "been training regularly with U.S. and Australian forces .... These forces adopted the tactics of the U.S. Phoenix program in the Vietnam war, that killed tens of thousands of peasants and much of the indigenous South Vietnamese leadership," Jenkins writes. (Chomsky 1999) President Clinton expressed regret last week for the U.S. role in Guatemala's 36-year civil war, saying that Washington "was wrong" to have supported Guatemalan security forces in a brutal counter-insurgency campaign that slaughtered thousands of civilians. Clinton's statement marked the first substantive comment from the administration since an independent commission concluded that U.S.-backed security forces committed the vast majority of human rights abuses during the war, including torture, kidnapping and the murder of thousands of rural Mayans. (Babington 1999) Colombian army personnel, trained by U.S. special forces, have been implicated ... m senous human rights violations including the massacre of civilians. (Monbiot 2001) In an article in the Sri Lankan national press entitled "U.S. military co-operation with Sri Lanka" the current role of the U.S. armed forces is described as being limited to "training events." "All activities related to the training events took place well away from areas of active military operations" a spokesman of the U.S. military asserted (Daily News, August 17, 1996). After the revelation of the torture techniques in North American military training manuals used for training Latin American counter-intelligence services, one can but speculate on the topics involved in the promotion of "military professionalism in other regions where that concept is still nascent." (Priest 1996)

During the civil war of 1988-90 an estimated 30,000 people disappeared in Sri Lanka. As noted above, a counter-insurgency force (the Special Task Force) carried out operations in rural areas as part of a cold-war strategy to eliminate the political base of the "communist" JVP. A description of culture-specific aspects of the wild in Udahenagama that does not address the transnational interests behind the actions of counter-insurgency forces

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such as the Sri Lankan Special Task Force (or Kopassus in East Timor, or the Phoenix program in Vietnam) would give the false impression that the war had been a purely local affair, beholden to strictly "traditional" worldviews, and would thus unwittingly participate in the dissimulation of U.S. involvement in atrocities around the world. Udahenagama people have suffered not only from the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya), but from air raids and deliberate community destabilization promulgated by means of so-called "concealed apprehension techniques" (CAT; see Chapter 3). The use of air raids, concealed apprehension techniques, and disappearances to fight an insurgency are all trademarks of Western-style counterinsurgency warfare. The effects of such counter-insurgency techniques can be seen in many societies today, including Guatemala, Peru, Punjab, Kashmir, East Timor, and Sri Lanka. 1 The origin of this type of warfare, however, can only be found in a distinctively Euro-American "culture of terror."2 Since most of this type of warfare is covert and designed to be deniable by its instigators, the involvement of Euro-American counter-insurgency training programs of course cannot be proven (see Sluka 2000; Lutz 1997). An anthropologist can only document the effects of such counter-insurgency techniques, as I have tried to do with respect to Udahenagama. Rather than provide evidence of Euro-American military involvement, it is easier for ethnographers to document the ways local people participate in civil war, denounce each other to death squads, and make each other "disappear." I do not deny that such things happened in Udahenagama. This local involvement is an aspect of the civil war that is relatively easy to document, by human rights workers working for local nongovernmental organizations as well as by anthropologists. The danger, however, is that an exaggerated focus on the hard facts and evidence one can provide and the arguments one can prove leaves the role of Euro-American involvement in counter-insurgency training unmentioned. Although I may be criticized for introducing this wider context of violence without absolute proof of the data I refer to, I nevertheless believe that it is imperative to add this dimension to a study of the violence in Udahenagama in order to present as full as possible an account of its causal factors. Anthropologists who study civil war without mentioning its translocal context and its distant protagonists are in danger of participating in a spurious indigenization of violence (see Aditjondro 2000: 164) and an unwitting dissimulation of the Euro-American culture of terror in its Third World client states ( 183-84). Attempting to broaden one's analysis of a context of civil war by taking into consideration the activities of Western intelligence services in one's fieldwork area inevitably jeopardizes the radical empiricism to which ethnographic work is committed. But I believe it is an ethical imperative to momentarily abandon such rigorous empiricism to complete studies of cycles of violence in areas where the trademarks of the involve-

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ment of Euro-Arnerican intelligence services are undeniably present, by providing piecemeal information of this wider context of violence. Udahenagama people and the rest of the landless peasants and coolies at the margin of Sri Lankan society were drawn into the maelstrom of the cold war in the 1980s. During the "communist" insurgency of the late 1980s, Sri Lankan political commentators described disgruntled youths from remote villages like U dahenagama as "a more dangerous group of semi-educated youth from remote villages," "thugs," or "criminal elements" that had joined a communist political movement (Alles 1990: 286, 301). In other words, youths from remote villages were even more dangerous than "communists" from urban areas participating in modern political discourses. Such was the label applied to a struggle against poverty waged by people who didn't obviously belong to the communist political apparatus within mainstream society. As I have shown in this book, the bourgeois notion of a public sphere or of public opinion, a sine qua non for the practice of modern party politics, cannot be applied fully to the Udahenagama context. Furthermore, a culture-specific triadic organization of enmity constituted a crucial element in the participation ofUdahenagama people in the civil war. Udahenagama insurgents and their families were nevertheless glossed over as "communist" by both the Sri Lankan national and the international political elites and were confronted with counter-insurgency techniques that find their origin in a Euro-Arnerican culture of terror. For a brief moment in the history of U dahenagama, the notion of the gaze of the wild (yaksha dishtiya) was made to subsume a type of wildness that was totally out of proportion with any type of violence that had yet been understood under this notion: the wildness of Western-sponsored counter-insurgency operations. This consideration of the Euro-Arnerican involvement in the design of terror in Third World client states of the West is even more important in the post-September 11 context, with "United States intelligence agencies preparing for a return to covert operations of the kind that made the CIA notorious during the cold war" (Beaumont 2001). In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the United States, a radical distinction has been made between people who support the neoliberal, capitalist New World Order and any group that might object any of its incarnations. This dichotomy mirrors the cold war ideology of capitalism versus communism and the underlying Manichaean worldview it promulgates of struggles between Good and Evil. The question thus becomes in which ways Udahenagama people will be conceptualized within future global discourses on Good and Evil. While I was conducting fieldwork, there were rumors-in Udahenagama and the coastal towns of the Southern Province alike-that the survivors of the JVP insurgency were reorganizing (also see Perera 1996). For over two decades now, the urban poor have mobilized to protest against extreme poverty and destitution under the nominal banner of communism as

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represented by the JVP. However, they now will have to confront the political realities and global discourses of the post-cold war era. A major question regarding the people of Udahenagama concerns how they might participate in a future JVP uprising if it were to occur. In the past, during the cold war, they became a focal point for counter-insurgency warfare, as there was a concentration of war crimes in remote areas, among the landless peasants. In this book I have described how people in Udahenagama have reorganized their war-affected society (samadjaya) in culture-specific ways. Their strategies are distinctly different from the modernist attempts at postwar rehabilitation proffered by the Sri Lankan political elite (such as the Commissions of Inquiry or the party-political propaganda). Precisely because of this non-Western, nonmodernist (political) process-representing a culture-specific cycle of violence and containment of violenceUdahenagama people are vulnerable to be labeled aspecifically and inaccurately by outsiders such as academics, political commentators, foreign intelligence personnel, or the national political elite, for example, as "communist insurgents." During the cold war era, poor people who challenged their oppressors and the status quo were readily labeled as "communists" (also see Sluka 2000: 5); an insult guaranteed to invert the old adage that "names will never hurt me." Since the organization of enmity and hatred in Udahenagama is not easily reduced to modernist definitions of political organization, Udahenagama people are vulnerable to representation by the political elites by means of gloss or catch-all Eurocentric (and strongly negative) descriptions. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11 in the United States, disgruntled landless peasants from Southern Sri Lanka run the risk of being castigated as "terrorists"-a term rapidly gaining the discursive power of its cold war sibling, "communists"-and of being pooled together with other groups of people, with very different motivations, intending to attack the New World Order in more dangerous and global ways. This new discourse of "terror" may have grave consequences for the people of U dahenagama and others living in similarly destitute and marginalized environments around the world. The violence of the cold war era created reservoirs of violence that have yet to be drained. Cold war counter-insurgency operations and war crimes were committed in Udahenagama on the basis of a loosely defined and recklessly applied notion of "communism." On the basis of these historical events, it is imperative to recognize that Udahenagama people, if they protest again against the extreme poverty they suffer, might be restrained with instruments of terror that have been designed and exported to Third World client states of the West as part of a new global war: that on "terrorism." The question for Udahenagama would then be whether the local notion of the wild (yaksha dishtiya) would once again be able to encompass the boundless and arbitrary violence of a mili-

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tarized nation state, and whether the local cycle of containment of violence would withstand another wave of modernist violence and state terror. And the question for the transnational coalitions exporting modernist violence to the world's poorest populations would be what one is to do in the longer term with the reservoirs of violence that such wars create in their attempt to rid the world of all signs of political dissent-if not of its causes.

The Traumatized and the Fearless In this context a further question emerges as to whether the introduction of the discourse on trauma is an instrument of domination, or is hegemonic in the Gramscian sense (see Gramsci 1971: 55). The trauma discourse as seen in the light of this case-study could indeed be deemed an instrument of nationalism helping to constitute the hegemonic power of a political elite. It might help the ruling elite to create the conditions most favorable to their expansion and security (5). The trauma discourse can be described as hegemonic, however, only if one considers the short-term interests of the nationalist elite (see Argenti-Pillen 2003). If one considers the long-term, unintended consequences of the introduction of the trauma discourse at the local level and their potential impact on this elite, an altogether different picture emerges. In this book I have given an image of what these unintended consequences might consist of in Udahenagama. One of the most dangerous unintended consequences is a further destabilization of the local cycle of containment of violence. In the aftermath of the civil war, many women opted out of the traditional ways of dealing with danger and terror. Such women proclaimed that the atrocities they witnessed during the civil war had made them fearless. These women no longer suffer from fear-related illnesses, they do not need domestic cleansing rituals, and they argue that their children do not suffer from fear-related illnesses either. Their strategy of survival is therefore radically opposed to that of women who suffer from terrified hearts and the gaze of the wild, and who organize domestic cleansing rituals and engage in cautious discourses about violence. Women suffering from a terrified heart argue that fearless women have "sharp tongues," that they speak carelessly and without fear. Moreover, fearless women's daily activities are not restricted by fear or concern for the avoidance of fear. They readily attend frightening cleansing rituals together with their children and embark on long journeys in search of disappeared husbands or arrested deserters or in pursuit of their claims for compensation from the government. It is especially these fearless women who participate in the activities of the outreach center of the national mental health NGOs that operates on the basis of the trauma paradigm. I argued that in Udahenagama the cultural impact of the trauma discourse depends on the mental health NGOs'

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reinforcement of the position of fearless women within the community. Training programs about primary mental health care readily label women who suffer from the gaze of the wild or engage in domestic cleansing rituals as mentally ill, while mental health NGOs consider the trainees (often fearless women) to be empowered. The mental health NGOs thus take a clearcut position in the debate between women afflicted by the gaze of the wild and fearless women, each of whom advocate different forms of survival and postwar social reorganization. The discourse on trauma is an asset for fearless women while it disempowers women afflicted by the gaze of the wild. The discourse on trauma thus has a cultural impact by influencing an existing local debate regarding the role of culture-specific forms of postwar reorganization. Unlike the survival/ cleansing strategies deployed by afflicted women, fearless women's strategies do not increase the social fragmentation of the community. However, their fearlessness poses different problems. The children of fearless mothers are prone to become fearless themselves; their illnesses are not interpreted as fear-related, and their lives are not dominated by the danger of suffering from a terrified heart ( hita bayayi). It is therefore questionable whether the children of the fearless will adopt the cautious discourses on violence of the majority of people of their parents' generation, who are motivated by the rigorous avoidance of fear and terror. The question thus remains how soon the normalization of fearlessness in this and the next generation as an acceptable moral position will bring about less cautious discourses on violence and a concomitant erosion of social contexts and make the community more vulnerable to future cycles of modernist violence. The Colombo-based urban elites who organize traumacounseling services in rural war-affected areas thus do so at the risk of eroding a fragile local cycle of containment of violence. Mental health professionals operating within the trauma paradigm could easily refute this claim by considering fearlessness as an aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder and redefining it as emotional numbing, a well-known symptom of PTSD. Moreover, the notion of "fearlessness" is the key concept by means of which people in Udahenagama describe waraffected individuals. The presence of fearless people within the neighborhoods constitutes the principal difference between the prewar and postwar situation. So is there a difference between fearlessness and trauma? Why not take a pragmatic stance and argue that counseling services take care of fearless people, who create problems for war-affected communities? Trauma counseling might thus be seen to be doing exactly what it claims to do: treating victims of PTSD and thereby playing a major role in the interruption of the cycle of violence. This type of analysis, which remains bound by the conceptual apparatus of the discourse on trauma, limits itself to a description of individual forms of suffering without considering how sick or suffering people play an active and crucial role in postwar societal reor-

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ganization. The picture of the postwar reality provided by discourses on trauma does not, however, account for the ongoing local struggle between fearless women and women affected by lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild, or for the local cycle of containment of violence. Tales of "traumatized survivors" fail to provide a much-needed framework in which local techniques for containing violence can be safeguarded. They also fail to assess the potential risks of the introduction of the discourse on trauma to such local techniques. I would further argue that the similarities between the notions of fearlessness and trauma are only superficial. In their interactions with trauma counseling services, fearless women convert cautious discourses on violence into a more straightforward and less cautious description of violence and atrocities. They discuss the atrocities of the civil war in unveiled, overt terms that bypass the more cautious discourses on violence most women adhere to while they are in the context of their own family or neighborhood. In using the notion of trauma as a gloss description to refer to such fearless women, one loses sight of the cultural context of fearlessness that is all-important for the postwar reconstruction of neighborhoods. In other words, "fearlessness" has connotations and implications that the term "traumatized" does not cover. By challenging the attempts at postwar social reorganization of women afflicted by the gaze of the wild, the fearless women, considered to be "empowered" by the mental health NGOs, threaten the local cycle of containment of violence. Fearless women who have been helped by national mental health NGOs often become helpers themselves. They then attend training programs organized by the NGOs to help people with mental health problems in their communities. Within the discourse on trauma, a conceptual link is established between trauma, dissociation, and trance states (also see Castillo 1994a, b). Within the mental health profession, trance states are readily labeled as culture-bound syndromes and a form of mental illness. The discourse on trauma can therefore easily be used to label women afflicted by the gaze of the wild, suffering from periodic "trance states," and participating in domestic cleansing rituals as mentally ill, traumatized, or in need of help. By means of this labeling process, in which both fearless women and mental health services participate, the position of women suffering from a lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild is weakened. The capacity of women afflicted by the gaze of the wild to contribute to postwar reconstruction thereby becomes disqualified in the eyes of outside helpers such as mental health NGOs or fearless women trained as counselors. Moreover, the discourse of women afflicted by the gaze of the wild goes through a debilitating editing process when they present their suffering to health care services. During interviews, Sri Lankan mental health professionals revealed that many women from areas such as U dahenagama are "somatizing" their distress. In other words, they present their suffering in

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physical terms, as physical diseases (e.g., as headaches and stomach aches, oluva kakkuma, bade kakkuma). In the context of mental health care in the West, people from non-Western cultures frequently present themselves as suffering from physical symptoms; that is, they "somatize" their "psychological" suffering. "Somatization" is accordingly commonly reported among the "traumatized" of non-Western cultures, such as refugees seeking help in Western countries (see, e.g., Westermeyer et al. 1989). Throughout this book I have provided examples of women complaining about physical symptoms while describing their violence-related suffering. The young woman complaining about a fish bone stuck in her throat immediately springs to mind (see Chapter 3), as does the mother who had lost her teenage daughter and loudly complained to me about a stomach ache and headache while intermittently whispering about sorcery (see Chapter 3, transcript 9). I also described how a woman who had been terrified by the news of a bomb blast in Colombo became ill. Her daughter's description of her suffering limited itself to "tiredness," "vomiting," "pain in the neck," and "diarrhea" (see Chapter 2, comparison of transcripts 13 and 14). Indeed, amid the conglomerate of expressions used to describe violence-related suffering ("can't stay," "can't bear the sight of my family members," "terrified heart," "closed off by the gaze of the wild," "the confusion of the terrified"), I almost always came across descriptions of physical suffering ("headaches," "stomach aches," a "weak body" ( angata pana na)). Once such discourses on violence are presented within a context of primary health care or mental health care, the wider framework constituted by the whole variety of expressions mentioned above gets lost. In other words, local discourses about violence go through an editing process when presented in the context of health or trauma-counseling services. When women from Udahenagama seek (Western) medical help for their suffering, their physical pains are brought to the fore during the interaction between patient and doctor, resulting in the patient being referred to other health care services. During this editing process, not only are the local expressions of suffering omitted, such as "being closed off by the gaze of the wild," but so are the strategies of postwar sociopolitical reorganization that such representations of suffering facilitate or generate. In other words, the strategies of social reorganization of women afflicted by the gaze of the wild become obfuscated and disqualified. Udahenagama is presently the site of a struggle between fearless women and women afflicted by the gaze of the wild, and between two competing strategies of postwar social reorganization and rehabilitation. The discourses and cleansing practices of women afflicted by the gaze of the wild go hand-in-hand with a cycle of containment of widespread, modernist violence. The discourse on trauma propagated by trauma counseling services in Sri Lanka's Southern Province weakens the position of women afflicted

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by the gaze of the wild in the community. The danger, or the cultural sideeffect, of the introduction of the discourse on trauma is that it threatens culture-specific mechanisms of control of violence in which women afflicted by the gaze of the wild play a crucial role. I have refrained in this book from calling tovil "healing rituals." Instead, I have referred to them as domestic cleansing rituals and focused on the role such rituals play in the postwar reorganization of neighborhoods. Such rituals do not merely alleviate the suffering of entranced women or heal chronic trance states. Additionally, domestic cleansing rituals continuously help to reorganize Udahenagama society into small-scale, bounded, and cleansed units. Together with the cautious discourses on violence I have described in this book, they form a crucial aspect of the Udahenagama culture of containment of violence. Cautious discourses on violence and domestic cleansing rituals are but two aspects of the same cultural phenomenon, and it is difficult to imagine how one would operate without the other. The avoidance of fear and terror provides one of the reasons for Udahenagama people to engage in cautious and ambiguous discourses on violence. Once such protective measures fail and discursive or nondiscursive forms of violence have invaded the household, people suffer from terrified hearts (hita bayayi). A terrified heart in turn predisposes them to fall ill. If one family member falls ill, the whole household is in need of a domestic cleansing ritual. Then the household reestablishes a boundary with the surrounding war-torn society. Domestic cleansing rituals or the traditional treatment of fear-related illnesses thus form an essential part of the cultural reality that generates cautious discourses on violence and a cycle of containment of violence. The discourse on trauma fails to account for the forms of sociopolitical reorganization that accompany this presentation of suffering. Had my analysis remained within the trauma paradigm, I could have argued that both groups of women, the fearless and the afflicted alike, suffer from trauma. One group-the fearless women-would then consist of the women mostly suffering from emotional numbing. The other group of women, suffering from a lifelong affliction by the gaze of the wild, would be seen as having reacted to the atrocities they witnessed with dissociation and trance (see Castillo 1994a, b). These two groups of women would also differ from one another by the type of help they sought; either by going to mental health services or by participating in the rituals of traditional ritual specialists. One very simple observation already points at the limitations of such an analysis. While suffering women travel long distances to visit mental health NGOs or trauma-counseling services, afflicted women would never visit the household of a ritual specialist. Ritual specialists always visit the afflicted at home. Mflicted women avoid visiting other households in order not to spread the danger, inherent in an affliction by the wild, throughout the

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wider community. In other words, the two groups of women, the fearless and the afflicted, differ in more radical ways that cannot be accounted for by means of the discourse on trauma. Those two groups of women do not merely differ on the basis of their symptoms and help-seeking behavior, as they would be described by a discourse on trauma and mental health. Traditional "exorcism" rituals, the most common way in which tovil rituals are presented in English, and trauma counseling are, however, not simply ways to make "traumatized" or "ill" individuals feel better. The differing representations of suffering and the remedies applied to them alike engender a different type of postwar social reorganization. I assessed the cultural impact of the introduction of the trauma paradigm in southern Sri Lanka by bringing into focus the alternative type of social reorganization advocated by fearless women and supported by national mental health NGOs. This cultural impact cannot be assessed if one continues to operate within the trauma paradigm. An assessment that remains faithful to the discourse on trauma and healing, in my interpretation, loses itself in the trivialities of a comparison of the efficacy of trauma counseling versus "traditional healing" techniques to alleviate the suffering of individuals. I have criticized the introduction of the discourse on trauma in southern Sri Lanka on an altogether different basis, by pointing to the risk that trauma-counseling services will further destabilize a local cycle of containment of major outbreaks ofviolence. The discourse on trauma feeds into a process of destabilization of the local discourses on violence caused by fearless survivors of the war. In view of the strong link between local, culture-specific discourses on violence and the containment of violence, the introduction of the discourse on trauma in southern Sri Lanka should cause great concern. The fact that humanitarian trauma counseling services alter people's ways of talking about violence and presenting war-related distress may not seem very dangerous at first sight. Nonetheless, the potential impact of the trauma discourse among rural communities of survivors is severe, in the fact that it erodes the basis oflocal, cautious discourses on violence by supporting the women who opt out of the traditional ways of presenting distress. My evidence leads me to the position that extreme violence combined with the discourse on trauma threatens culture-specific forms of containment of violence. War-time atrocities witnessed by large sections of the civilian population (including women and children) together with the introduction of the discourse on trauma form a toxic cocktail that threatens to erode culture-specific mechanisms for the containment of further violence. Once these mechanisms fail to function, communities such as Udahenagama will become vulnerable to a cycle of much more widespread, modernist violence of the type we have witnessed in Cambodia, Rwanda, or Kosovo. On the basis of the evidence I provide, I argue that the cultural side effects of the discourse on trauma should become central in debates

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concerning the ethics of the implementation of humanitarian trauma counseling programs in war-torn societies worldwide.

Postscript: Damaged Cosmologies and Reservoirs of Violence Many people who have lived through the atrocities of the civil war fail to become terrified when confronted with postwar forms of low-intensity violence, and they then claim to have become fearless. What is particularly striking about the situation in Udahenagama is that not only men but also women claim to have become fearless. There are many societies that cultivate fearlessness in a particular section of their population. The people that are made fearless through ritual initiation, however, are invariably male and destined to become fighters or warriors (cf. Bloch 1992; Harrison 1993; Whitehouse 1996). In other situations, men lose all fear of death after having been involved in warfare, as either soldiers or insurgents. Mahmood (2000: 80) comments on the fact that people pushed into a rat-like existence tend to become supermen when they rise up. They fight without being hindered by the fear of death. What makes southern Sri Lanka different from these situations is that many women also have become fearless. Men's fearlessness might not have that much cultural impact on a society except for the fact that they can fight against intruders or oppressors. The main activity of fearless women, however, is not fighting but raising children, and a substantial number of children who will form the next generation have fearless mothers. Fearless youths currently occupy a particular position within the Sinhalese Buddhist cosmology. Many people in Udahenagama argue that during the civil war even the wild spirits were afraid. They didn't dare cast their eyes on the human world any longer and turned their gazes away. They were especially afraid of fearless youngsters engaged in wartime atrocities such as burning corpses. The cosmic hierarchy thus became briefly reversed. Instead of humans being afraid of the spirits (yaksha), the spirits became afraid of human beings. In this sense, the Sinhalese Buddhist cosmology was damaged by war. The effects of war were much more far-reaching than an assessment of its effect on individual people can account for. The hierarchy between people and spirits became temporarily reversed, and this caused damage to a cosmological order that could previously have been thought of as written in stone. Youths are very aware of this problematic situation. The debate regarding the effects of the war in Udahenagama operates at two different levels. First, there are the party-political and essentially modern discourses on postwar rehabilitation orchestrated by the political elite. In Udahenagama it is mostly men who participate in such discourses. At a second level, there are discourses regarding affliction by the wild and fearlessness. Women

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predominantly participate in the debate at this level. I would even go as far as to say that they dominate the debate that is cast in the language and discourse about the wild. In this sense women play a major role in the containment of violence in Udahenagama. The most obvious sources of modernization of discourses on violence in the rural south of Sri Lanka are party-political discourses. Such discourses represent the violence Udahenagama people have lived as a struggle between "communist insurgents" and mainstream political parties, between the "Sinhalese civilization" and "Tamil terrorists." For the most part, however, such modernizing discourses only reach men. In this context it is important to note that the modern discourse on trauma, as an alternative discourse on violence, reaches women in particular. It is mostly women who use the services of the national mental health NGOs, since the principal target groups of trauma-counseling services in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka are widows and mothers of the disappeared. In this sense the modernizing discourse on trauma does what party-political discourses fail to do: it reaches rural women. The local debate about the future of Udahenagama society (samiidjaya) is an ardent one. Its outcome is particularly important in view of the fact that communities in the rural south provide soldiers to the Sri Lankan National Army. Areas such as Udahenagama have been transformed by past conflict into what I have termed reservoirs of violence, reservoirs that can be drawn upon by the Sri Lankan state to fight an interethnic war against the Tamil minority in the north and east of the country. Youths living in this reservoir of violence are not unaware of their predicament. While some of them become soldiers in what they themselves call an "army of casual laborers" ( kuli hamudiivak), others replace the wild spirits in the Sinhalese Buddhist pantheon: "There are no wild spirits (yakku) at all, where can there be beings that are more 'yakku' than us?" (mona yakekvat nateyi kohedayi yakku inne apita vada arahe kiyalii).

Notes

Chapter 1

1. At the time of the final revisions to this book in early 2002, a ceasefire was brokered between the newly elected United National Party government and the LTTE. In the course of the past nineteen years of conflict, four previous peace agreements have collapsed and approximately 64,500 people have died (Harding 2002). 2. During the civil war of 1988-90 the United National Party was in power and was held responsible by its opponents for the gross human rights violations perpetrated by security forces and pro-government death squads in their struggle against the JVP. During the electoral campaign leading to the victory of the People's Alliance (PA) coalition in the parliamentary elections of August 1994, the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP), tapping into the public outrage over the civil war, promised not only to fight corruption but to bring the perpetrators to justice (Samarasinghe 1994). After their electoral victory this resulted in the appointment of three Presidential Commissions of Inquiry into the Involuntary Removal and Disappearance of Persons, which received information on thirty thousand cases of disappearances during the first two months of 1995 (Amnesty International 1995). 3. See, e.g. Bracken et a!. ( 1995), Bracken (1999), Kleinman ( 1996), Summerfield (1993 a, b, c, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001), Young (1996). Kleinman (1996: 186) argues that the epidemiological statistics, comparative psychometric surveys, and high-level discussion of political violence as a public health or clinical condition provide an inadequate basis to understand cycles of violence. 4. Among other things, I studied culture-specific PTSD questionnaires designed to be used for the diagnosis of traumatic stress among non-Western refugee populations (e.g., Boehnlein and Kinzie1992; Eisenbruch 1990, 1991, 1992; Hinton et a!. 1993; Kroll eta!. 1989; Mollica eta!. 1987, 1992; Westermeyer eta!. 1989). 5. See de Sardan (1994: 21) and Last (1991: 59) for a critical deconstruction of this research tradition. 6. For example, Csordas (1994: 2) for overview, Dow (1989), Kleinman (1979), Last (1981), Moerman ( 1979). 7. For example, Daniel (1994), (1996: chapters 5, 7), Das and Nandy (1986), Ettema (1994),Jaworski (1989), Risseeuw (1988), Scarry (1985), Tully (1995).

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8. According to the Resource Survey of the Integrated Rural Development Project of the Southern Provincial Council, June 1993. 9. About 15 percent of the households in the Udahenagama area are singleheaded (Resource Survey of the Integrated Rural Development Project, Southern Provincial Council, June 1993). 10. Learning a language seems as much about understanding the unsaid as the said. White (1990), in a chapter that is very useful from a methodological point of view, argued that the full meaning of what is said depends on much that is unsaid. People rely on culturally patterned inferences to fill in unstated propositions (54). The poverty of word-for-word translation (91) thus leads the researcher to focus predominantly on such culturally patterned inferences, especially when trying to understand sensitive conflict discourses.

Chapter 2 l. One such clear-cut anthropological description would be this: women become possessed by the yaksha: evil supernatural beings at the bottom of the cosmic hierarchy who roam in forests and near rivers. Scott (1994) provides a critique of this translation on the basis of historical and religious arguments. But I want to ground my critical translation in the conglomerate of expressions I discuss below. 2. These unsocialized beings are either yaksha (wild spirits) or preta (spirit~ of the dead), and people can be afflicted by the gaze ( dishtiya) of either of them. 3. Dosha is commonly translated as "moral fault or mistake." A gloss translation of tanikama would be "a state of being alone." For extensive descriptions of tanikam dosha, see Obeyesekere (1981), Kapferer (1983), Scott (1994: 60-66). Obeyesekere translates tanikam dosha as "illness caused by aloneness" (1981: 54). Kapferer defines tanikama as "mental and physical 'aloneness': a symptom and precondition of demonic attack," and tanikam dosha as "illness arising out of boredom" ( 1983: 378). Scott (1994: 282) describes tanikama as a "condition or state of mental apprehension that makes one vulnerable to the disturbing look of the yaksaya," and tanikam dosha as "the ill effects that result from being in a state of vulnerability to the malign eyesight of yakku." Here I use a slightly different translation, an "absence of the gaze of the public," which is a possible interpretation-based on the importance given to the role of the gaze in Sinhalese culture-of the more general translation "aloneness sickness." 4. Elderly women are often allowed to flee if they "can't stay." They then simply move to another son's or daughter's household. 5. According to WHO statistics, young men in Sri Lanka (between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five) suffer from the highest suicide rate in the world (see Kearney and Miller 1985; LaVecchia et al. 1994; Somasundaram 1993; Somasundaram and Rajadurai 1995 for statistics). 6. To gossip about a flirtatious boy, one can say: "eya harima tele, eyta tele viidi": literally, "he is very oily, he has too much oil." 7. A similar issue was raised by Humphrey (1999: 9). In her description ofBuryat shamanic practices in a Siberian city she argues that "it was impossible to tell whether they were talking about traditional shamanic spirits or the unkind, cruel thoughts of living people, the evil powers which so oppressed Nadia on the bus." 8. Slamming one's hands on a wooden bed without a mattress is extremely loud and could be compared to the drumming used by ritual specialists during domestic cleansing rituals ( tovil).

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Chapter 3 l. See Figures 3, 6, and 8 for an impression of the common nature of this condition. 2. Often referred to as "demonization" (e.g., Erlich 1997; Kapferer 1997a; Das 1998). 3. Krohn-Hansen's analysis (1994: 376) resonates very much with what I came across in Udahenagama. He explains how in societies of extreme fear and violence the ontological and epistemological problems that are usually contemplated by the intellectual experts of the elite become an everyday problem among the masses. Ontological thoughts such as what distinguishes human from animal are then more than just an intellectual problem. They form-as it were-an everyday activity for the crowds. 4. A lifetime engagement with the gaze of deities (deviyange dishtiya) has been well documented in the literature (e.g., Obeyesekere 1981). This gaze of the deities, though, leads a person to take up a job as soothsayer or diviner, while the gaze of the wild (yaksha dishtiya) does not lead to a new profession and income. 5. This idea is similar to Gluckman's analysis (1963) of the role of, for example, witchcraft accusations or the threats of private vengeance among the Nuer in southern Sudan: small-scale divisions and conflicts divide each group against itself (12), contribute to the maintenance of law and order in societies without governmental institutions, and inhibit the spread of violence (18). Gluckman furthermore argues there is peace as well as war in the threat of the feud (23) and divisions within one group prevent it from standing in absolute opposition to other groups (24). These women from Hendolakanda describe sorcery accusations in Udahenagama as playing a similar role. 6. For example, the exact name of person, name of the house, where the person is sleeping (on a bed or on the floor). 7. I use the symbol I I to indicate that the speaker was interrupted by another person. 8. See Figure 6; men from households 17, 18, and 8 were involved in the killings in household 3 and 39; households 19 and 20 were involved in a failed attempt at murder of a man in household 17. 9. Victims of the JVP insurgents also use this term (podi anduva). 10. The long journeys mothers currently undertake to search for information about the whereabouts of arrested sons/ deserters are remarkably similar to the searches of the mothers and wives of the disappeared during the civil war. For example, a mother about her search: "The army came, he got caught, I walked and walked about for three months, then I got hold of big people and got him out, they might come again though [to arrest him]." From the point of view of the mothers whose sons disappeared during army raids the differences between the disappearances organized by the counter-insurgency forces during the civil war and the contemporary army raids might not seem very substantial. In both cases mothers and wives continued and continue to search for months on end. 11. This counter-insurgency technique is similar to the one used by "Black Cat" commandos in the Punjab and Kashmir, where the Indian security forces refer to it as CAT or "concealed apprehension technique." Mahmood (2000: 83) describes how security forces bribed former militants into wearing a black hood over their heads and identifYing militants who would then be eliminated. In a notable difference, the billa in Udohenagama was not bribed but tortured. 12. For example, young men from Panigahakanda did not become a collective target despite being lower-caste and living in a pro-insurgency neighborhood.

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Notes to Pages 78-99

13. Das (1998: 124) argues that the language of exorcism became a political language that links the aggressors and the victims on the model of the exorcist and the patient. Devisch (1995: 607) draws a connection between popular uprisings and the traditional imagery of sorcery while Kapferer ( 1997a,b) describes the riot as a gigantic exorcism with a similar dynamic. 14. This was confirmed by the field officers of the mental health NGO under study, who had gathered information on dissappearences in a wide geographical area, including the Galle, Matara, and Hambantota Districts in the Southern Province. 15. Some aspects of counter-insurgency violence form, as it were, a mirror image of sorcery-related suffering, albeit on an entirely different scale. Suffering related to sorcery is essentially characterized by doubt, uncertainty, and insecurity. Speculations and rumors about enemies and sorcerers are at the center of the experience of illness or death caused by sorcery. The civil war brought with it the terror of the disappearences, the terror of not knowing and being faced with invisible forces (death squads). Counter-insurgency forces as well as insurgents left the corpses of people they had killed in the village by the roadside and more often than not burned them so that people could not identify the deceased. This caused high levels of uncertainty, insecurity, and doubt among the civilian population, who were terrified not only by wartime atrocities but also by the lack of knowledge of who exactly had been killed and who had survived.

Chapter 4

l. For the strategic use of sound effects prior to and during urban riots see Roberts (1990, 1994) . 2. For a dictionary-style translation of seman gannavii as "feasting with the eyes" see Scott ( 1994: 225, 276). 3. When one gives a small cut to the bark of a milk tree, milky (pure) sap comes out. Trees that are called milk trees are the bread fruit tree, jack fruit tree, and, of course, rubber tree. 4. This expression is also used to refer to situations in which the effects of sorcery are sent back and affect the sorcerous enemy (see Chapter 3, transcript 9). It is also used for forms of revenge that do not obviously include sorcery (see Chapter 3, transcript 13). 5. Enemies can secretly sprinkle wild pig's fat or chicken broth in the garden where a cleansing ritual is about to be held. Then the failure of the purifying ritual is guaranteed. 6. Interestingly, the same expression is used to refer to the effects of the gaze of the wild ( dishtiya). Dishtiya viitenava: the gaze falls upon somebody and causes illness. Likewise Voice falls upon people and things, katahanda viitenava (note the use of the involitional form of the verb "fall"). 7. As Peek (1994: 484, 488) argues, sound is the most potent representation of the mystery of the unknown, and the visual representation of spirits is often secondary to their awesome acoustic dimensions. 8. For a description of the ways anti-sorcery rites ensorcel the enemy see Wirz (1954) and Kapferer (1997).

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Chapter 5

1. For a discussion of the method of paying systematic attention to euphemisms when carrying out field research on sensitive topics, see Foster (1966). 2. Similarly Foster (1966: 56) described how, in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico, the nefarious work of witches is referred to as las travesuras, a word normally used for the pranks and mischief of small children. 3. The same word is used in expressions such as kalabale duvanava: to drive in a hurry and dangerously without taking care of others; a form of traffic violence; vibagayak kalabalen liyanava: to write an exam badly and in a hurry; kalabala nisa amatak una: to forget something because you were in a hurry and couldn't think in a calm and relaxed manner; kalabala: after a traffic accident: people gather fast and in a chaotic manner to see what happened but without being able to do much; pissa kalabala karanava: a mad person shouts and tries to run away and creates a general atmosphere of confusion. I would not translate kalabala as straightforward "panic." During kalabala states there is more scope to think than during moments of sheer panic, yet there is a sense of the necessity to hurry up, which makes one do the wrong things. 4. Avulak's most general translation would be "entanglement." Hair can be tangled in knots (konde avul vela); thoughts can be unclear, mixed up, and confused ( oluva avul vela, manasika avulak as mental problem). Avulak is also used for menstruation when there is "confusion" and "trouble" in the blood. Verbal forms related to avulak are avula venava, avulanava, and iivilenava. When fire is catching up with something, when something becomes engulfed (entangled) with fire, one can say gini iivilenava. Conversely, trying to set fire to something or to "entangle fire around a stick of wood," one can say kottuvata gini avulanava. Similarly you can instigate a fight (randuvak avulanava) by setting two persons against each other by provoking and "entangling" them in a fight. This "entangling" is more literal in the ritual fighting of the an keliya (lit. "horn game"), a religious event in which two groups of men are competing/fighting with each other (see Obeyesekere 1984 and Roberts 1994 for detailed accounts of this ritual). A ritual specialist entangles two horns (an avulavanava). A group of men are made to pull on each of the horns until one of the horns breaks and the two horns/ group of men get disentangled. In short, interpersonal or political turmoil as well as turbulent thoughts or setting fire to something are all referred to by the word avulak. 5. Such people defY neat categorization as either wild spirits or human beings and are thus particularly "dangerous" (as in Douglas 1966). 6. The horror of being mixed with yakiirlike people (kavalam) is evoked. 7. A more literal translation would be: now the humans are going through aperiod of yakii-ness. 8. The tying of an amulet (yantra) around the afflicted person's neck together with a ritual in which mal baliya, offering trays covered in flowers are offered in order to reduce nefarious planetary influence. 9. Perpetrators of violence burned the majority of the corpses of people they killed in the village during the civil war. 10. Nabokov ( 1997), writing about exorcism and spirits (peeys) in Tamil Nadu, argued that spirits do not seem to be compelled to possess people because of a hatred of human beings as the missionary Caldwell ( 1849) believed. Nor do they possess people because of anger, as Caplan put it in 1985. All Nabokov's informantsspecialists, lay people, and the spirits themselves-were unanimous that spirits are motivated by love and lust. In the Madurai district, Dumont (1986: 450; quoted in

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Nabokov 1997) also noted that relationships between peeys and victims were very clearly stated to be love relationships. 11. This is very different from Kapferer's analysis (1983: 106). He describes how young unemployed or delinquent men, members of youth gangs or petty criminals, become victims of demonic attack. Like demons they are at the margins of the cultural order and act to disrupt it. A notorious local gang leader who had recently been involved in a rape incident had become possessed, and a cleansing ritual (Mahasohona tovile) was organized for him (149). Unlike the delinquent youths described by Kapferer in the early 1980s, young unsociable men from Udahenagama do not participate as the sick or possessed person in traditional healing rituals and are excluded from sorcery and anti-sorcery practices. 12. Brenneis (1984) in his description of conflict resolution discourse in Bhatgaon, a Fiji Indian community, points to a very similar strategy. One of the central syntactic devices used by speakers in Bhatgaon is what Brenneis labels "coy references." Coy references employ the indefinite pronoun koi, "someone," and kya "some (thing)," and occasionally relative pronouns such as jo, "who." "They are used to provide vague antecedents for the later use of the third person pronouns" (78; my emphasis). 13. On the Managalase practice of telling stories that listeners will find difficult to interpret and its relation to the avoidance of responsibility see McKellin ( 1984: 111). 14. See Besnier (1994: 19) for a discussion of this type of discursive tactic used for gossip in Nukulaelae. Besnier previously described (1990) covert communicative channels that are minimally marked for evidentiality. In such instances the author of the discourse may not readily be held accountable for the affect communicated in his discourse (318). 15. White and Watson-Gegeo (1990: 27) argue that in Melanesia speakers use quoted speech, metaphor, and other devices to distance themselves from responsibility for accusations or interpretations. 16. For a historical overview of the ways these personal names were constructed see Reimers ( 1930). 17. Geertz (1973: 370) describes a similar situation in Bali where the virtually religious avoidance of a personal name's direct use indicates it is an intensely private matter. He frames his interpretation within a general discussion of the Balinese definition of personhood. 18. Kolenda (1990), in her writings about untouchable Chuhras in Uttar Pradesh, describes how it is even prohibited to use a descriptively correct kinship terms when referring to or addressing a respected kinsman or kinswoman. A woman might refer to her husband as "that one" or "someone," and a man might refer to his wife in similar ways. It is embarrassing or even shocking for a woman to pronounce her husband's name, even if by chance she is asked to say someone's name that is the same as her husband's (131). 19. Related to the high Sinhalese vyavahara, from the Sanskrit word for usage: the way in which you say something. 20. Audrey Cantlie, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, personal communication. 21. In Sinhala rupa, derived from the Sanskrit rupa, is used to refer to, among other things, statues and a person's face. 22. Among the Wana of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, speaking forcefully risks not only illness but even death (Atkinson 1984: 42). People developed a way of speaking with great caution, in which utterances hint at multiple meanings ( 43, 50). 23. In his analysis of the role of ambiguous discourse in local forms of political organization, Brenneis ( 1984: 75) focuses on the creation of status differences. In

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situations where common knowledge about everyday life in the village is a valued commodity, ambiguous discourses play a critical role in the negotiation of statuses based on knowledge about everyday life. I argue, however, that the political impact of deliberately vague discourses in Udahenagama goes beyond its role in the establishment of status differences. 24. I would refer again to Gluckman's analysis of peace processes (1963: 24). He argues that divisions in one group prevent it from standing in absolute opposition to other groups. Witchcraft accusations and threats of private revenge are an obvious example of fissures or fissions that inhibit the spread of violence. I would argue that dehumanization within the nuclear family (gedara), as manifested in the discourse on yakii-like people and the gaze of the wild, plays a similar role in the containment of violence. 25.Joseph (1997) provides a systematic discussion of the use of idiomatic kinship in the public sphere in Lebanon. Lebanese politicians or businessmen refer to each other with kin terms of address and thereby evoke the expectations and obligations of kinship for instrumental and affective purposes. Through idiomatic kinship, they have incorporated non-kin into the family's moral order (79). A more critical approach to idiomatic kinship stresses how kinship discourse is used to disguise inequitable relations and could be understood as one of the "hidden transcripts" of domination, in which the powerful organize a fictional claim to parenthood (Scott 1990). This then brings about quasi-natural hierarchical superiority and authority (ibid., 96). In line with my critique of the unidimensional analysis of euphemisms as a hegemonic discursive strategy, I argue that Udahenagama women's use of kinship discourse in the nondomestic sphere plays a role in a local dynamic that cannot be reduced to questions of domination and resistance (for a particularly salient example, see Chapter 6, transcript 5).

Chapter 6

1. Most texts on the topic of reported speech, however, do not address the relation between the use of reported speech and processes of identity formation. One notable exception is Maybin ( 1996). She argues that the use of reported speech allows people to explore their relation to dominant cultural conceptions of identity (44). The narrator can construct a particular kind of voice and can experiment with a range of possible identities that can be made to vary from one narrative to another. Narratives are thus but glimpses of an ongoing life-long conversation in which identities are explored and negotiated. This "long conversation"-repeated acts of discursive identification with others-is seen not so much as expressing identity but as constituting it ( 4 7). Briggs ( 1992), in his description of ritual wailing among the Warao in Venezuela, presents a similar argument when he states that reported speech plays a central role in the exploration of alternative perspectives and the construction of a collective vision of community life (347). He focuses on the formation of a collective identity in a non-Western context, whereas Maybin focuses on the constitution of an individual identity throughout childhood in the West. 2. I use the analyses of Briggs (1993), Buttny (1997, 1998), Coulmas (1986), Holt (1996), Lucy (1993), Maybin (1996), Parmentier (1993), and Wilkinson andjanks ( 1998) as methodological examples for the translation and presentation of reported speech. 3. I deliberately do not enter the debate on direct and indirect reported speech at this stage (see Buttny 1998; Holt 1996; Lucy 1993; Wilkinson andjanks 1998). In English "He said 'I am flabbergasted' " is an example of direct reported speech,

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Notes to Pages 138-143

representing the original direct sentence of the speaker. "He said that he was flabbergasted" is an example of indirect reported speech, in which the reporter paraphrases the utterance of the original speaker. I take into account Hirose's (1995) article that analyzes direct and indirect reported speech in japanese. In my opinion, for the sake of this argument, it is better not to try to patch Sinhalese sentence structures into the mold of English grammatical notions such as direct and indirect reported speech. A problem also is that most research on reported speech has concentrated on written language (Coulmas 1986: 11, 25), and in written language the distinction between indirect reported speech that paraphrases and direct reported speech that claims to quote verbatim is obvious. As Coulmas remarks, this model might not be relevant for the study of reported speech in oral language. Direct reported speech in oral language seldom represents the original statement of the original speaker, but is part of a concoction made up for the sake of the argument of the reporter. In that sense, for an analysis of the social implications of particular modes of quoting in Sinhalese, the distinction between direct and indirect reported speech does not seem a priority. While I realize that this distinction between direct and indirect reported speech is not particularly relevant for this type of analysis, I nevertheless opted to use direct reported speech in the translations. This technique allows me to translate double and triple reported speech clauses that cannot easily be conveyed through indirect reported speech in English. 4. As I described in Chapter 2, this is a phrase often used by women who are suffering from domestic violence. 5. This conversation includes many zero anaphora (see Chapter 5). I indicate further examples within this piece of transcript with an asterisk *. 6. Brow (1988: 322, 1990, 1996) gives evidence of the contrary. His data show how "demonic possession" and related sorcery accusations are given a prominent place in public discourse. These accusations expressed preexisting polarities and conflicts within the community, and as such were important in a conflict-resolution type of debate between factions within the community (for another similar example, see Parmentier 1993). During my fieldwork I did not come across such clearcut situations. Entranced speech and sorcery accusations did not take up the role of a public discourse, which mediated between large groups of people (such as different castes or pro-government and pro-opposition factions). On the contrary, as I will discuss below, sorcery accusations and entranced speech were subjected to the same verbal regime as other dangerous utterances and did not have the tendency to become communal or public knowledge. 7. Udahenagama people consider fights within a household or domestic violence to be caused by sorcery. When the conflicts are never-ending, a fragmented household might sooner or later start wondering about sorcery. Then the everyday quarrels might be taken over by a debate about the possible perpetrator of sorcery, about which ritual specialist should be consulted, about the detailed ways in which the ritual should be prepared for, and finally about whether the ritual has been successful or not. The household splits into the believers and the nonbelievers, the skeptical and the zealous, sometimes along lines that are defined by previous quarrels. 8. For this particular argument a full character sketch of the gods is not necessary. I will draw a description of them based on this specific situation at the shrine, rather than participating in a more general debate on the nature of these deities and their place within the Sinhalese Buddhist pantheon. 9. This repetition means that "double reported speech" is used which I discussed above. 10. See terms of address in Chapter 5.

Notes to Pages 148-153

221

11. Buttny (1997: 486, 500) remarks that reported speech is also a way of showing, not merely a way of telling. Direct reported speech involves the listeners because they are shown, rather than told. Much like the use of zero anaphora I discussed in the previous chapter, the use of reported speech is a discursive strategy that involves the listeners. 12. For example, in the narrative I presented she refers to herself in the third person (Pemavatthi). 13. Other languages that are reported to have a similar verbal construction are Navajo, Kwakiutl, Hopi, Tunica, and Bulgarian (Jakobson quoted in Coulmas 1986: 22). For what is hearsay and not the speaker's own experience there is a separate verb conjugation. In English, for example, an adverb is used to alert the interlocutor about the possible lack of authenticity of a reported statement (for example, the use of "apparently"). But in Sinhalese (and those other languages that have a separate verb conjugation for hearsay) such adverbs can be left out. Where -lu is used to quote a group of people there always is a built-in connotation of doubt. 14. I was told that the gods never use -lu, but always use kivvii-kiyalii to quote each other, because they are omnipresent and thus can witness any speech event. 15. In this sense the use of-luis similar to the meta-discursive markers that connote dis-identification or counter-identification in English, such as "so called," or "what you call" (see Fairclough 1992b: 32). 16. See Abedi and Fischer (1993), and Hui eta!. (1994) for a critique of the application of the notion of a public sphere across cultures. 17. As Spencer (1990) remarks, a pervasive spirit of irony informs so much public sociability (165, my emphasis). He further comments on the fact that in place of overt challenge there is a kind of institutionalized irony (175, my emphasis). While many distancing strategies might be experienced by the ethnographer as irony, in my opinion, much more radical forms of distancing are at play, which cannot be described within a study of ironical forms of communication. 18. This idea could be expressed in Bakhtin's language as "rhetorical doublevoicedness" (1981: 354). In other words, voices are not allowed to merge. Macaulay (quoted in Buttny 1997: 500-501) in his work on polyphonic monologues in oral narratives shows how reported speech allows reporting speakers to distance themselves from the message because they position themselves as merely the animators but not the sources of what is being said. 19. This move from secular to sacred speech might seem a bit sudden. In this respect I would follow Winslow's example (1984). She compares worldly political organization with the organization of the Sinhalese Buddhist pantheon, and she inspired me to explore how discussions among the gods might reveal some parallels to worldly conversations. 20. The processes of giving voice I discuss are localized at the family, extended family, and neighborhood level in Udahenagama. My analysis greatly differs from studies in which "multiple identities and multivocality" are described in relation to major political and national debates, in relation to debates that matter for the national middle classes, such as state religion versus local religious practices, the issue of a national culture, or modernism versus religious fundamentalism (e.g., Wilce 1998a, b; Ewing 1998). Such studies of multivocality remain open for shifting identifications, multiple identifications, "laminated identities" (Wilce 1998b: 249), which-from a Western point of view-might seem contradictory or indeed multiple. The speech strategies I describe, however, are radically different from the development of "multiple identities" and "multivocality" in the sense that it derives from a strategy of non-identification, rather than from a strategy of multiple identifications.

222

Notes to Pages 153-193

21. Coulmas (1986: 10) comments on one of the crucial points in Volosinov's work. Volosinov was prepared to look for nonlinguistic explanations for the presence or absence of a given kind of speech reporting in a language. 22. Ramanujan (1989) gives an example of a poem that can be analyzed as an account of "what his concubine said about him, within earshot of his wife's friends, when she heard that the wife had said disparaging things about her" (49).

Chapter 7 l. I was struck by the similarities with Tambiah's (1975) description of types of guardianship in the precolonial period, when group marriages in which a group of sisters would marry a group of brothers (involving both polyandry and polygamy) were the norm. Then siblings had parental responsibility over each other's children, and when they failed the guardianship was left to the grandparents. If the marriage pattern was matrilocal (binna), the maternal grandparents would take over the education (7). This situation is comparable to contemporary practices, in which a woman, after the disappearance of her husband, returns to her parental home and her parents take over the guardianship of her children, who (as I encountered quite a few times) consider their mother as an older sister. 2. I gathered data during the Fourth European Conference on Traumatic Stress, organized by the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (Paris, May 7-11, 1995) and during the Second World Conference of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (Jerusalem,June 9-13, 1996). 3. I paraphrase one of the founders of stress research (Lazarus), who argued that Israel is a "natural laboratory" for the study of stress. 4. They take up important positions in the Organizing Committee, Presidential Advisory Committee, Scientific Committee, and Advisory Board of the ISTSS. 5. Currently the pharmacological treatment ofPTSD is aspecific and mainly consists of antidepressants and tranquilizers. 6. The diagnostic criteria for PTSD in the DSM-IV refer to the following symptoms: reexperiencing of the traumatic event (e.g., nightmares or intrusive thoughts, acting or feeling as if the event was recurring), avoidance of stimuli associated with the event, numbing of general responsiveness, or increased arousal (DSM 1994: 209-10). 7. From here onward translated from Sinhalese. 8. As the bomb blasts in the Central Bank in 1996, Dehiwala (1996) and Maradana (1997) train stations, and the Hilton and Galadari hotel in 1997, the attacks on the president and her home ( 1999), and the attack on the national airport (2001) have shown. 9. In the words of one psychiatrist: "the nation suffers a bereavement overload." 10. In the words of one field officer, "Not all [officials] are like that but eighty percent of the people [in the government] are people without humanity (manussakamak niiti aya) ."This is an expression routinely used by Udahenagama people to describe people who resemble the wild spirits (yaka-like people, see Chapter 5). 11. As Fairclough ( 1995: 2) argues, the heterogeneity of texts (both spoken and written) is a sensitive indicator of cultural change. 12. When Udahenagama people bring up the topic of torture they invariably talk about the torture of young conscripts during their initial training period in the army. 13. This partially follows Nordstrom's (1992) assertion that Western interpretations of suffering are mostly introduced in "culturally destabilized spaces" and

Notes to Pages 194-202

223

places where cultural knowledge might be disabled (268). I would not qualify Udahenagama as a context in which cultural knowledge is heavily disabled but do consider fearlessness an element of cultural destabilization. 14. In the sense that fearless men and women are neither spirit nor human, they are yaka-like or yakshini-like.

Chapter 8

1. Note the cross-cultural similarities between the effects of counter-insurgency warfare in these differing situations (see Aditjondro 2000). 2. It has been argued that the global rise in state terror and counter-insurgency warfare has fundamentally been the result of U.S. foreign policy (see, e.g., Blum 2001). In this respect, the death squad is a manifestation of U.S. influence in Third World client states of the West (see Chomsky and Herman 1979; Herman 1982; Chomsky 1985, 1988, quoted in Sluka 2000: 8, 22).

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Index

acoustic cleansing, 85, 94-100; and boundaries between household and society, 87, 94-95; drumming, 86, 96, 97-98, 99; effects on neighbors, 96-97, 99, 101; and gaze of the wild, 97-100; loud, large-scale rituals, 85, 95, 96-100; and naming of wild spirits, 121; silent, small-scale rituals, 85, 95-96; and sorcery, 95-96, 99; and talk about violence, 197; turmeric water in, 95, 96. See also soundscapes ambiguous forms of speech, 102-32; and civil war, 108-9, 124-25, 126, 129-32, 197-98; and clarity for listener, 197; and containment of violence, 123-25, 129-32, 169, 194, 195-200, 205-7, 209, 219 n.24; and dehumanization, 128-32, 198-99, 219 n.24; and differential participation in common knowledge, 123-24, 197, 219 n.23; and euphemistic discourse, 104-9, 122, 126-32, 198-99; and gaze of the wild, 33-34, 38-41, 43-44,70-72, 128-29;household discursive strategies used in society, 125-27, 129-32, 196-99, 219 nn.24, 25; and kinship terminology, 117, 130, 218 n.18, 219 n.25; and local cycle of violence, 124-25, 129, 131, 198-200; and names, 117-21; and postwar society, 122-32; and preservation of contexts, 123-25, 169, 198; and references to local perpetrators of violence, 114-16; and reported speech, 133-56; and spaces between contexts, 125-32; style

of women's informal discourse, 122; tensions in conversation, 122; and yakalike people, 109-14, 126, 127, 128-32, 198-99; and "zero anaphora," 115-16, 120, 121, 123, 218 n.12 Ardener, Shirley, 85, 87 Atthas, Iqbal, 2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 153-54, 221 n.18 Beragama neighborhood, 68-73; fearlessness and, 161, 163; and fear of fighting, 68; and gaze of the wild, 68-73; party-politics in, 68,215 n.ll; ritual specialists of, 68, 70-73, 161, 163; survey area map, 69; and yaka-like people, 112-13 Besnier, Niko, 13, 115, 218 n.14 Bloch, Maurice, 11 Brenneis, David Lawrence, 11, 218 n.12, 219 n.23 Briggs, Charles L., 17,219 n.1 Brow, James, 220 n.6 Buttny, Richard, 221 n.11 "can't look" (penanna bii), 29-31, 35, 36 "can't stay here" ( inna biiriyo), 26-29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 54, 214 n.4 Ceylon Communist Party, 4 civil war of 1988-90, 4-6; and ambiguous speech, 108-9, 124-25, 126, 129-32, 197-98; and Commission oflnquiry, 213 n.2; and "communist" insurgency, 203; and containment of cycle of violence, 76, 124-25, 129-32, 199-200;

236

Index

civil war of 1988-90 (cont'd) and counter-insurgency violence, 5-6, 60, 74, 76, 80, 81-82, 201-2, 216 nn.12, 16; and disappearances, 67, 77, 160, 162, 192, 193, 215 n.10, 216 nn.13, 15, 16; and distribution of violence, 81-82; and fearless women, 161-67; and Hendolakanda, 45-47; organized enmity and revenge by families, 62-63, 76; postwar reservoirs of violence, 4-6; and Puvakdeniya, 60-67; and restraint at village-level, 62-63; and sorcery, 54, 80-81, 216 n.16; and soundscapes, 88-89; and triads of enmity, 54, 76, 77, 80-81; and violence in remote communities, 79-80, 81; and Western military influences, 200-205; and yakiilike people, 111. See also deserters; JVP (People's Liberation Front); Special Task Force cleansing rituals: acoustic cleansing, 85, 86, 87,94-100, 121, 197; and ambiguous discourses, 128; and boundaries between household and society, 87, 94-95,100-101,128, 200,209;and children, 62, 163, 167, 205; and containment of violence, 209; crises of postwar society and use of skulls in, 126; and fearless women, 163-66, 167, 168, 205; and gaze of the wild, 24-25, 32-39, 41,47,49,55,57,94-100,137-40, 163-66; and lifespan, 92; names of wild spirits recited in, 121; and neighborhood as repository for the wild, 101, 168-69, 200; rural war widows' criticism of, 190-91; and sorcer~51,59,94-96,99, 137-40,220 n.7; and spaces between contexts, 200; and triadic organization of enmity, 94-95, 99; and visual boundaries, 94-95; and yakii-like people, 111-12, 128 communism, 203, 204 containment of local violence: ambiguous discourses and cautiousness, 123-25, 129-32,169,194,195-200,205-7,209, 219 n.24; author's fieldwork focus, 13; and children of killers, 75; and cleansing rituals, 209; and community tolerance, 199-200; as culture-specific, 13, 76-78, 82; cycle of, 75-82, 124-25, 129, 131, 199-200; dehumanization strategies, 78-80, 129-32, 198-99, 219 n.24; discourses on effects of violence, 211-12;

euphemisms and, 129-32, 198-99, 219 n.24; and fearless women, 162, 169-70, 194, 205-7; and household discursive strategies used in society, 129-32, 196-97, 219 n.24; and intimate enmity, local enemies, 50-51, 53-54, 57-59, 60-67, 74-78,80-81,129,131, 198-99;and modernist violence, 79, 82, 124-25, 198; and preservation of contexts, 123-25, 169; and reported speech, 139-40, 153, 155-56, 197-98; and revenge, 62-63, 76, 77, 79; and ritual violence, 78-80, 216 n.14; and sorcery, 50-51,77,80-81, 215 n.5; and tip-offs, 51-54; and trauma discourse, 194, 205-12; and triadic organization of enmity, 50-51, 53-54, 57-59, 76, 77-81, 94-95; and Western military influences, 200-205; and yakiilike people, 129-32, 198-99, 219 n.24 Coulmas, Florian, 220 n.3, 222 n.21 counter-insurgency training, Western, 200-205, 223 n.2 Das, Veena, 216 n.14 dehumanization of enemy: ambiguity and postwar society, 128-32, 198-99, 219 n.24; in anthropological analyses of cycles of violence, 44-45; and containment oflocal violence, 78-80, 129-32, 198-99, 219 n.24; dissociation of perpetrator from his family, 129, 131, 198-99; and families of disappeared, 128-29; and gaze of the wild, 37-38, 40, 41, 44-45, 54, 77; and household discursive strategies, 129-32, 198-99, 219 n.24; large-scale, national strategies of, 78-79; by ritual specialists, 72-73; role in rehabilitation of communities, 44-45, 215 n.3; and triadic organization of enmity, 78-79; and urbanized middle class, 45, 79 Denish, Roy, 2 deserters, 3, 6, 28, 64-67, 215 n.lO DESNOS (Disorder of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified), 173 Diagnostic and Statistical ManuallY (DSM-lV), 172-73, 222 n.6 Dumont, Louis, 217 n.10 euphemistic discourse, 104-9, 122, 126-32, 198-99; and anthropology of taboo words, 105, 121; avoidance of inauspicious words, 104-7, 217 n.2; and

Index avulak (entanglement), 108, 217 n.4; and boundaries between household and society, 108, 127; and civil war, 108-9, 129-32; and containment of violence, 129-32, 198-99, 219 n.24; dehumanization of enemy and, 129-32, 198-99, 219 n.24; and kalabala (speed of events), 108, 217 n.3; and names, 117-21; and oppressors' discourse, 127; role in village-level dynamics, 126-28; sorcery and zero anaphora, 115; and yakii-like people, 108-9, 114, 126, 127, 128-32, 198-99, 219 n.24 European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS), 9, 170,171

Fairclough, Norman, 13, 14, 223 n.11 fearless women and discourse of fearlessness, 161-67; and boundaries between household and society, 169; as challenge to discourse of fear-related illness, 168; children of fearless women, 163, 167-68, 194, 206, 211; and cleansing rituals, 163-66, 167, 168, 205; and containment ofviolence, 162, 169-70, 194, 205-7; cultural impact on society of, 167-70, 211-12; and cycle of violence, 169-70, 194, 205-7, 211-12; and discourse on trauma, 162, 193-94, 205-8; fear defined by, 163; and "fearless families," 166; fearlessness and postwar societal reorganization, 168-70, 205-11; fearlessness and reservoirs of violence, 211; fearlessness and trauma, 206-8; fearless youths and cycle of violence, 211-12; and gaze of the wild, 161, 163-66; itinerant existence of, 159-60, 162, 168; and men's fearlessness, 211; and mental health NCO participation, 190-91, 192-94, 205-6; post-civil war, 161-67; and PTSD and emotional numbness, 162; ritual specialists' comments on, 161, 163; and sharp tongues, 167; and terrified hearts, 163, 167-68 Foucauldian paradigm of discourse analysis, 13-14 Galkanda neighborhood, 14, 55-59; caste and kinship in, 55, 56; cleansing rituals in, 126; defining oflocal enemies, 57-59; gaze of the wild and, 26, 29, 55-57; and sorcery, 57-59 gaze in Sinhalese culture, 24-25

237

gaze of the wild, everyday discourse and narratives of affliction, 21-41, 32-39; and altered states of consciousness, 37; ambiguity of discourse on, 33-34, 38-41, 43-44, 70-72, 128-29, 214 n.7; anthropological understandings of, 32; covering and closing off by, 31-32; and culture of gaze, 24; and domestication of political violence, 40; and enemies, 37-38,40,41,44-45,50-51,53-54, 57-59, 60-67, 74-78,80-81, 129, 131; and fear and local violence, 33-38, 41; and fearless women, 161, 163-66; human discourse and discourse about spirits, 33-34; and inna biiriyo ("can't stay here"), 26-29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36; and local idioms, 25-31, 39; and moral fault of being alone, 24, 53, 214 n.3; narratives of affliction, 32-34, 36-37, 38; and penanna bii ("can't look"), 29-31, 35, 36; and "possession," 25, 33; rituals of removing/ cleansing, 24-25, 32-39,41,47,49,55,57,62,63, 70-71, 85,94-100,137-40, 163-66;and sorcery, 49-54, 137-40; and soundscapes, 85-101; and times of day, 32-33, 34; variety of discourses, 33; and women, 24-25, 37, 40, 109, 214 n.1 (see also gaze of the wild, lifelong afflictions of); and yakii-like people, 109-14 gaze of the wild, lifelong afflictions of; and cleansing rituals, 41, 47, 49, 55,97-100, 163-66; and discourse on trauma, 194, 207-10; and drumming, 97-100; and elderly women, 27, 28, 41, 47, 49, 57, 214 n.4; in Galkanda, 55-57; in Hendolakanda, 47-51; and interneighborhood strife and political violence, 37,50-5 1; and methodological issues, 43; post-civil war afflictions, 160; and sorcery, 49-51 gaze of the wild and local histories of violence, 42-82; and ambiguity of discourse, 43-44, 70-72; in Beragama, 68-73; and containment of local violence, 59,60-67,74-82, 129, 131; and conversations about illness, 44; and counter-insurgency violence, 54, 60, 73, 76, 202; and dehumanization of enemy, 37-38, 44-45, 54; and dissociation of enemy from his family, 57-59, 60-67, 74-75, 76, 77, 129, 131; in Galkanda, 55-59; in Hendolakanda, 45-5.5; and

238

Index

gaze of the wild and local histories of violence ( cont'd) homogeneous remote enemies, 64-67; in Kalubowatta, 73-75; and local enemies, 50-51, 53-54, 57-59, 60-67, 74-78, 80-81, 129, 131; in Puvakdeniya, 60-67; and sorcery, 49-54, 137-40; tipoffs and local conflicts, 51-54; and triadic pattern of enmity, 50-51, 53-54, 57-59, 76, 77, 80-81; violence and gaze of wild juxtaposed, 70-72 Geertz, Clifford, l18, 218 n.17 Gluckman, Max, 215 n.5, 219 n.24 Habermas,Jiirgen, 152 Hendolakanda neighborhood, 37, 45-55; civil war, 45-47; cleansing rituals in, 47, 49, 55, 166; dehumanizing enemies, 54; and fearless woman, 166; and gaze of the wild, 47-51, 54-55; kinship diagram of, 48; Obeyesekere family, 47-49, 136-40; and Panigahakanda, 47, 50-51, 136, 141; political alliances in, 45; reported speech in, 136-40; and sorcery, 49-54; survey area map, 46; tipoffs and local conflict~. 51-54 Humphrey, Caroline, 214 n.7 illness: author's fieldwork centered on, 22-23, 39; fearless women and, 168; gaze of the wild and conversations about, 44; and local discourse about fear-related illnesses, 166, 188-91, 194; rural war widows and, 188-91; and soundscapes, 89, 91, 104, 105; trauma discourse and, 188-91, 194 International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), 7,170-76 Joseph, Suad, 219 n.25 JVP (People's Liberation Front): and civil war, 4-6, 45, 60, 80, 88-89, 201, 213 n.2; counter-insurgency forces against, 5-6, 60, 74, 76, 80, 81-82, 201, 216 n.16; and cycle of violence, 6, 76, 81-82; origins of, 4-6; revolutionary insurgencies, 4-6, 81-82, 203-4; and rural communities, 4-6,45,60, 74-75, 76,81-82;useof sounds as weapons, 88-89 Kalubowatta neighborhood, 73-75, 114, 161-62 Kapferer, Bruce, 214 n.3, 216 n.14, 218 n.ll Kolenda, Pauline, 218 n.18

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 9 -lusuffix, 136,149-52, 198,221 nn.13, 14 Lyotard,Jean-Franc;ois, 7 Mahmood, Cynthia Keppley, 2ll Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture (London), 8 Mullaitivu (coastal town), 1 Myers, Fred R., 11, 12 Nabokov, Isabelle, 130, 217 n.10 names and discursive strategies of ambiguity, 117-21, 218 n.18 National Mental Health Week, 178-81, 183, 184, 185 NGOs, mental health, 177-84; and awkwardness of Sri Lankan public sphere, 184-86; competition with state sector, 178-81; and cycle of violence, 194, 205-7; and discourse on mental health of the nation, 183-84, 185; and divisions oflabor, 178-81; and fearless women, 190-91, 192-94,205-6;and foreign donors, 179-80; and Kalubowatta community, 73-74; and local discourses of violence and fearrelated illness, 188-91; and modernist approach to violence, 186-87; and National Mental Health Week, 178-81, 183, 184, 185; and rural outreach centers, 181-82, 187-93; and rural war widows as field officers, 187-91; rural women's views of, 191-93, 205-6; and target group definitions, 191-92; and trauma discourse, 7, 8, 177-84, 193-94; vulnerability and dangerous role of, 180-81; working with mentally ill or traumatized, 177 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 223 n.13 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 214 n.3 Obeyesekere family of Hendolakanda, 47-49, 136-40 Panigahakanda neighborhood: and civil war, 45-47; and Hendolakanda, 47, 50-51, 136, 141; survey area map, 46; and transcript of group discussion among deities, 140-46; and yaka- like people, 111 People's Alliance (PA), 45, 213 n.2 poisonous voice/mouth, 90-91, 104, 110-11, 141

Index

post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): clinicians' approach to, 173; and "complex trauma reaction" (DESNOS), 173; criteria and DSM standards for, 172-73, 222 n.6; cross-cultural applicability of, 176; and fearless women, 162, 206-8; and ISTSS, 171-76; neurophysiological bases of, 172-73, 222 nn.5, 6; pharmacological treatment of, 172, 222 n.5; and Western discourse on trauma, 6-7, 171-76 Puvakdeniya, Upper and Lower, 36, 60-67; and ambiguous speech, 124; and civil war, 60-67; cleansing rituals in, 62, 63, 126, 164-65; and containment of violence, 60-67; and "coolie nationalism," 67; discourse about deserters and enemies, 64-67; and fearlessness, 163-64; gaze of wild and fear, 36, 60-64; perpetrators and victims in proximity, 60, 62; and soundscapes, 88; survey area map, 61 Ramanujan, A. K., 72, 78-79, 120, 176, 222 n.22 reported speech, 133-56; anthropological analyses of, 153-54, 221 n.20, 222 nn.21, 22; and atmosphere of caution, 139-40, 153, 155-56, 220 n.6; containment of danger /violence by, 139-40, 153, 155-56, 197-98; culturespecific use of, 155-56, 197-98; and domestic cleansing rituals, 137-40; and listeners, 148, 221 n.ll; and multivocality, 153, 221 n.20; Pemavatthi's brave narrative, 146-49; and nonidentification, 151, 152, 155, 221 n.18; and organization of postwar society, 197-98; and public sphere, 151-52; as regulator of distance, 149, 155, 197; and Sanskrit literature, 154, 222 n.22; and Sinhala language, 136, 220 n.3; and socio-political organization, 153-54, 155; and sorcery, 137-40, 220 n.6; and subjectivity, 155; suffix -lu, 136, 149-52, 198, 221 nn.13, 14; transcript of discussion among deities, 140-46; transcript of discussion among humans, 136-40, 220 nn.5, 6; and voices in transit, 153, 155, 197; Western modes and identity formation, 134-35, 152, 155, 219 n.1, 221 n.l7; zero anaphora in, 138-39, 220 n.5, 221 n.ll

239

Scott, David, 214 nn.1, 3 Simpson, Robert, 185 sorcery: accusations of, 139-40, 220 n.6; and afflictions of gaze of the wild, 49-54, 137-40; anthropological understandings of, 220 n.6; and boundaries between household and society, 94-95; civil war and, 54, 80-81, 216 n.16; and cleansing rituals, 51, 59, 94-96, 99, 137-40, 220 n.7; as containment of violence, 50, 77, 80-81, 215 n.5; and counter-insurgency violence, 54, 81, 216 n.16; euphemisms and zero anaphora, 115; hidden, background discourse on, 49; and household fights, 139-40, 220 n.7; intimate enemies and, 50-51, 52, 80-81; naming and ambiguous discourse in, 119; reported speech and, 137-40, 220 n.6; sorcerers' perspective of the wild, 70-73; and soundscapes, 95-96, 99; and tip-offs, 51-54; and triad of enmity, 50-51,54,59,80-81,94-95,99;and yaka-like people, 112-13, 217 n.10, 218 n.11 soundscapes and "acoustic ecology," 85-101; accidental and strategic uses of sounds, 88-89; acoustic cleansing, 85, 86, 87, 94-100, 101, 121; and ambiguous speech, 102-32; cleansing rituals to reestablish boundaries, 87; and dangerous words, 92-94, 100, 104-21; effects of voices, 90-94, 100; effects on neighbors, 96-97,99, 101; and fear of representing the wild, 92-94, 100; and gaze of the wild, 97-100; and house as barrier, 87-88; and houses' acoustic porosity, 87-88; illness and, 89, 91, 104, 105; and lifespan, 92, 104; and naming of wild spirits, 121; and neighborhood as repository for the wild, 100-101; the poisonous voice, 90-91, 104, 110-11, 141; relationship between household and society, 87-88, 94-95, 100-101; and sorcery, 95-96, 99; and sounds of domestic sphere, 88; and status differences, 89-90; verbal acoustic spaces, 85-87, 89-94, 102-32; violence as acoustic phenomena, 85, 88-89; and visually defined boundaries, 87, 94-95. See also acoustic cleansing Special Task Force: as countei~insurgency force,5,60, 74, 76,80,201-2;

240

Index

Special Task Force (cont'd) helicopters and cordon-and-search operations, 74, 80; and Western counter-insurgency training, 201-2 Spencer,Jonathan, 221 n.17 Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), 213 n.2 Sri Lankan wars: ceasefire and peace agreements, 213 n.l; interethnic strife, 1-2; international weapons trade and, 1-2; operations and battles, 1; and political elite, 2, 3; and reservoirs of violence, 4-6; and rural poor, 2-3, 23; and Sri Lankan press, 23; and Western military influences, 200-205, 223 n.2. See also civil war of 1988-90; deserters;JVP (People's Liberation Front) Summerfield, Derek, 8 Tambiah, Stanley J., 222 n.l Tamil Tigers (LTTE), 1, 24, 213 n.l "terrorism," 204-5, 223 n.2 tip-DfTs (ottuva), 51-54, 60, 67 trauma discourse: as agent of discursive and societal change, 193-94, 205-11; and author's fieldwork, 8-11, 12-13; and awkwardness of Sri Lankan public sphere, 184-86; containment of violence destabilized by, 194, 205-11; critiques of, 7-9, 213 n.3; and cycle of violence, 7, 10; dominant Western interpretation, 6-9; ethical questions regarding, 175; fearlessness and trauma in, 193-94, 205-11; and fearless women, 162, 193-94,205-8;and geopolitics, 171; and humanitarian aid, 8, 9, 174-76; and ISTSS, 170-76; and mental health NGOs, 7-8, 177-84, 188-93; and modernist approach to violence, 186-87; and nationalism, 205; and nodal points, 7-8, 170-77; post-traumatic stress disorder, 6-7, 10, 170-76; research on, 11-14; and reverse flow of knowledge, 10-11, 13; and traditional indigenous forms of healing, 9-11; and "trance states," 207; and trauma counseling in non-Western contexts, 9-11, 205-11; and women afflicted by gaze of wild, 194, 207-10

Udahenagama, 214 n.l; and author's residence, 15-16; data and discourse analysis, 13-14; conversations, 15-17, 214 n.lO; family perspectives, 2, 4; gaze as central paradigm in, 24; local discourses, cycle of violence, and containment of violence, 13, 78-79; neighborhoods studied, 14-15; organization of book, 29; and political violence as domestic violence, 41; and public/private distinctions, 87; pseudonyms, 14-15; scholarly inspiration in research, 11-14; strategy for studying discourses on violence, 22-23, 39; study participants, 15, 214 n.9; and trauma discourse, 8-ll, 12-13. See also individual neighborhoods United National Party (UNP), 45, 213 nn.l, 2 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 174 violence: and descriptions of collective violence, 45, 78-79, 216 n.l4; and notion of dehumanization, 44-45; domestication of, 40-41; reservoirs of, 4-6, 9-11, 211-12; and Western counter-insurgency training and intelligence, 202-5. See also containment of local violence Volosinov, V. N., 149, 154, 222 n.2l war. See civil war of 1988-90; Sri Lankan wars Watson-Gegeo, Karen-Ann, 11, 218 n.l5 White, Geoffrey M., 214 n.lO, 218 n.l5 women, Sinhalese. See fearless women; gaze of the wild yaka-like people, 109-14, 126, 127, 128-32,

198-99; and civil war, 111; and cleansing rituals, 111-12, 128; and containment of violence, 129-32, 198-99, 219 n.24; and lack of fear, 111-12; locations of, 113-14; peacetime characteristics of, 109-11; and sorcery, 112-13,217 n.lO, 218 n.11 "zero anaphora": and ambiguous forms of speech, 115-16, 120, 121, 123, 218 n.l2; in reported speech, 138-39, 220 n.5, 221 n.11