Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood: Coastal Socialities in Postwar Sri Lanka PDF
Preview Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood: Coastal Socialities in Postwar Sri Lanka
MARE Publication Series 20 Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood Coastal Socialities in Postwar Sri Lanka MARE Publication Series Volume 20 Series editors Maarten Bavinck, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected] Svein Jentoft, UiT-The Arctic University of Norway, Norway [email protected] The MARE Publication Series is an initiative of the Centre for Maritime Research(MARE). MARE is an interdisciplinary social-science network devoted to studying the use and management of marine resources. It is based jointly at the University of Amsterdam and Wageningen University (www.marecentre.nl). The MARE Publication Series addresses topics of contemporary relevance in the wide field of ‘people and the sea’. It has a global scope and includes contributions from a wide range of social science disciplines as well as from applied sciences. Topics range from fisheries, to integrated management, coastal tourism, and envi- ronmental conservation. The series was previously hosted by Amsterdam University Press and joined Springer in 2011. The MARE Publication Series is complemented by the Journal of Maritime Studies (MAST) and the biennial People and the Sea Conferences in Amsterdam. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10413 Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood Coastal Socialities in Postwar Sri Lanka Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa Department for Social Sciences Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) Bremen, Germany ISSN 2212-6260 ISSN 2212-6279 (electronic) MARE Publication Series ISBN 978-3-319-78836-4 ISBN 978-3-319-78837-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78837-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941460 © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Illustration: Nihal Fernando, Courtesy Studio Times Ltd, Sri Lanka. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland In memory of Regi, Theja and Gnanaratnam and the bold, compassionate politics for which they stood Foreword I grew up by the sea in Colombo and the back wall of my school ran alongside the Colombo-Galle railway line. The waves of the ocean crashed on the rocks that fringed the railway line. It might seem an idyllic picture, but there were several occasions when dead bodies were found on the railway lines. Given this childhood, I find Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood to be a meaningful and rich empirical study of what it means to live with the sea in wartime and post-war Sri Lanka. For to think with the sea is to revisit standard frames of theorizing in the social sciences and humanities; it is to consider programmes of boundary-making and self-fashioning anew and to trouble models for explaining the island of Sri Lanka built from genera- tions of scholarship devoted to interior polities, plantation systems, ethnic conflict, land tenure, agriculture and development. It is to denaturalise the island as a space of intellectual work, connecting it across the waters while scrutinising its bounding by polities and forms of capital and work. In the words of Sisira and Laksiri recorded below, their ‘quarrel was with the net’; the sea, in other words, was a way of working out the meaning of oppressive times while countering such times in a narrative of what was shared. Siriwardane-de Zoysa’s book covers more than a dozen villages and settlements in Northeast Sri Lanka in the liminal space not only of the beach, but across the thresholds of war and peace, the tsunami and reconstruction and across ethnic and cultural divides as well as modes of settlement and migration. In this sense, it uses the space of the sea to get to a series of in-between acts of making place, memory and identity. If there is a key concept here it is sambanda/m, meaning co-operation, but including at least three valences, ‘the lateral, a-sociative and hierarchical’. Siriwardane-de Zoysa explains that the term literally means a relationship, ‘often embodying a dynamic of interdependence’. It stretches across formal and informal means of association, relations of instrumentality as well as affect and romantic and conjugal associations too. As a concept it allows her to get to the myriad contradictions of life for these fishing communities; it doesn’t only mean peace but also conflict. Perhaps the con- tradictions are best illustrated here with respect to some of the wonderful vignettes which I noted in reading this manuscript. vii viii Foreword The role of co-operation emerges for instance in how rule-breaking with respect to fishing has collective consequences: there is a local saying that one wo/man’s lavish meal was another’s empty plate, or in other words to over-fish was to break the rule of collective and ethical acceptability. Fortune itself was perceived as rota- tional in these communities. Yet such meanings of co-operation were in turn twisted by periods of war and peace: at some times, but not others, militarisation and eco- logical depredation interlocked, allowing a continually changing sense of how and how much to fish. Ethnicity was certainly not effaced, but co-operation could at times create everyday forms of associational culture and protest that crossed ethnic communities. Fascinating here is how fishermen utilised dynamite; yet as Siriwardane-de Zoysa explains, dynamiting, purse-seining and the use of strong lights increased in the context of post-war liberalisation. The tsunami also twisted co-operation, and here I note how householders sought to damage their own prop- erty when a second tsunami was expected in 2012, in case the sea ‘failed to ade- quately do its work’. Further valences of sambanda/m are evident, below, for instance in practices such as kappam, keeping rule-breakers in check by levying protection money, in order to redistribute illicitly harvested catches among the janathawa or community. The particular role of the sea and its relation to land as a way of working out relationships is clear for instance in the story of the only woman fisher who Siriwardane-de Zoysa encountered, a migrant from a Catholic village in Chilaw: ‘[t]here were references made to “masculinised” women who fished and subverted gendered norms by consuming copious quantities of kasippu, and don- ning sarongs.’ The way in which conflict and the sea are interlaced is powerfully illustrated in how some fisherfolk saw the tsunami as completing the work of the war on land. These are just some stories that caught my eye – indeed this book is laced with dozens of them. I leave it to colleagues in the field of anthropology to scrutinise the precise theoretical and scholarly contribution of this work, but reading this work from Indian Ocean historiography, I look forward to further research that can pro- vide a historical context for it. There is still much to know about the patterns of migration of fisherfolk over the longue durée, the nature of the long-distance con- nections sustained from the shores towards Southeast Asia and the Middle East over time, or the ways in which seaborne collectivities were reforged across time as a result of differing imperial and postcolonial regimes. For a historian, every-day maritime sociabilities and interdependences are notoriously difficult to extract from the historical archive and so this work is wonderful too for it what evokes for the past. For opening up questions while presenting us with excellent ethnography, Siriwardane-de Zoysa deserves congratulations. I welcome this book into the field of not only Sri Lanka Studies, but also within contemporary scholarship in oceanic and island studies. Reader in World History and Fellow, Sujit Sivasundaram Gonville and Caius College University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Series Editors’ Preface South Asia has bred social anthropologists of repute and is also the site of important anthropological studies on fishing peoples. Paul Alexander’s ‘Sri Lankan Fishermen’ (1982) is a classic, as is Jock Stirrat’s ‘On the Beach’ (1988), with Kalpana Ram’s ‘Mukkuvar Women’ (1991) and Ajantha Subramanian’s ‘Shorelines’ (2009) follow- ing closely behind. To this set we are now happy to add Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa’s fascinating study on coastal socialities in post-war Sri Lanka. Not only is her work placed apart from earlier Sri Lankan studies by a 25-year-long civil war that has affected the country in profound ways, but her fieldwork also took place in a relatively unfamiliar and distinctive part of the country, the Eastern Province. This region is characterized by strong ethno-religious diversity, and it is on the implica- tions hereof that this book speaks loudly. But Siriwardane-de Zoysa’s work also stands out through its emphasis on cooperation rather than rivalry, and the manifold meanings and practices this involves. The book will be of value to all those con- cerned with ‘salt water life worlds’ and the relational dynamics of their inhabitants. It also provides a unique window on one important fishing society in what John Kurien (2002) has called the ‘tropical majority world’. The MARE Publication Series, which commenced in 2004, has hitherto con- tained nineteen edited and single-authored volumes on a variety of regions and top- ics in the field of people, coasts and seas. As Series Editors, we are more than happy to be able to host this new and exciting monograph on Sri Lanka, and expect it to be followed by studies on other coastal regions of the world. Fritz Schmuhl and other staff of Springer have again facilitated the production process, for which we are more than grateful. UiT-The Arctic University of Norway Svein Jentoft Tromsø, Norway University of Amsterdam Maarten Bavinck Amsterdam, The Netherlands ix Acknowledgements In many ways, it seems fitting for a book on multiple mobilities and social entangle- ments to have lived its fair share of wayfaring. Considering its formative conceptual stages at the Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment, and latterly at the CGIAR WorldFish Center in Penang and the University of Bonn, lead- ing up to fieldwork in Sri Lanka between 2011 and 2016, every step of the way has enriched its narrative development until its completion in Bremen, Germany. This book began as a doctoral thesis presented at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn under the title Sambandam: Cooperation, Contestation and Coastal Lifeworlds in Postwar Sri Lanka. There I am indebted to Conrad Schetter, Aram Ziai and Katja Mielke, my advisors and tutor respectively, for their steadfast encouragement and critical feedback given throughout my years as a PhD candidate. The research was funded by a Doctoral Fellowship from the German Federal Ministry of Economic Co-operation and Development via the German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD), together with a fieldwork grant from the Dr. Hermann Eiselen Doctoral Program of the Foundation Fiat Panis. Meanwhile, there are those who make a life by what they give, and my debts of gratitude in this project are plenty. My deepest appreciation to the many participants across the districts of Trincomalee, Batticaloa, Mullaitivu, Jaffna, and Puttalam, Sri Lanka, who so unreservedly shared their stories and insights with me, for without their lively engagement this study would not have been possible. I also thank the great many district- and village-level Fisheries Co-operative Societies that unre- servedly let me sit in on their meetings, and who shaped this research by contribut- ing a wealth of historic and institutional knowledge. To the many friends and colleagues during my Bonn days who were so crucial in shaping earlier renditions of this book: Guido Lüchters and Milena Djourelova for their assistance with the statistical component; Sebastian Ekhert for the film editing support; Epifania Amoo-Adare, Mibi Ete, Elena Kim, Günther Manske, Volker Merx, Stefanie Rinn, Antonio Rogmann, Karsten Schulz, Ruchika Singh and Anna Schwachula for their inspiration and luftmensching throughout these past few years; Ulrike Guthrie and Yana Felber for their editorial assistance. xi
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