Masking Terror by Alex Argenti-Pillen

Author:Alex Argenti-Pillen [Argenti-Pillen, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9780812201154
Google: AYkXAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-07-17T05:24:11+00:00

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, and it is those implications for the reconstruction of the postwar society (samādjaya) 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 Euro-American 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 next-door neighborhood. The surprising proximity of the targets of such skull-hunting expeditions is one of the most striking examples of the crisis of the nondomestic sphere in Udahenagama.

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