'Nature', nationhood and the poetics of meaning in Ruhuna (Yala) National Park, Sri Lanka

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 199-227

  Jazeel, Tariq ^a  

^a OPEN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

NATIONAL PARK; PERCEPTION; TOURIST ATTRACTION;

ASIA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; SOUTH ASIA; SRI LANKA; WORLD;

EID: 16444381470     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/1474474005eu326oa     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. H.S. Panwar and W.M.R.S. Wickeramasinghe, Management Plan Yala Protected Area Complex [Rubuna National Park Block I to V, Yala Strict Natural Reserve, and Kataragama, Katagamuwa and Nimalawa Sanctuaries], Plan period: 1998-2007, Vol. 1 (Colombo, Department of Wildlife Conservation records room, 1997).
2. For a more sustained and reflexive account of one researcher's participation and postcolonial critique of nature-based tourism, see B. Braun, The intemperate rainforest: nature, culture and power on Canada's west coast (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002), ch. 4.
3. For an account of the relative benefits of 'covert' research practices, see H. Parr, 'Feeling, reading and making bodies in space', Geographical review 91 (2001), pp. 158-67. During the course of this research, my own intentions were never to efface my own presence in social situations I had to some extent constructed. Rather, they were attempts to place myself in situations where I thought I could best understand, and gain insight into, common landscape experience in and of Ruhuna.
4. Papers relating to the working of the Game Ordinance, No. 6 of 1872 by the Assistant Government Agent of Tangalle, Ceylon, Mr. F.C. Fisher (National Archives, London, CO57/84, n.d. but c.1873/4).
5. For a detailed exploration of how colonialism and 'the hunt' were ideologically and materially linked to one another, see J. MacKenzie, The empire of nature: hunting, conservation and British imperialism (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988).
6. S. Whatmore, Hybrid geographies: natures, cultures, spaces (London, Sage, 2002), p. 2.
7. Drawing upon postcolonial cultural geography in particular here invites contemplation of the ways that colonial encounters and mappings produce the very spatial fabric in, with and through which post-independent and contemporary politics are lived and negotiated. Following Jane Jacobs's observations on 'postcolonial cities', at their most fundamental (Ruhuna's) colonial legacies provide the agreed points of reference, the 'maps which define the architecture of "here" and "there"'; J. Jacobs, The edge of empire: postcolonialism and the city (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 21.
8. Along with other postcolonial geographers, Jacobs suggests the importance of conceiving of the history of spatiality in any historical inquiry itself. See also P.Carter, The toad to Botany Bay: an essay spatial history#i] (London, Faber & Faber)
9. J. Sidaway, 'Postcolonial geographies: an exploratory essay', Progress in human geography 24 (2000), pp. 591-612;
10. C. Nash, 'Cultural geography: postcolonial cultural geographies', Progress in human geography 26 (2002), pp. 219-30;
11. B. Yeoh, 'Postcolonial cities', Progress in human geography 25 (2001), pp. 456-68.
12. See N. de Lanrole, A reign of ten kings: Sri Lanka - the World, 500BC-1200AD (Colombo, Ceylon Tourist Board, 1999), pp. 41-48.
13. Sri Lankan Burghers descend from mixed Portuguese, Dutch and 'native' ancestry. All population statistics taken from T. Somasekeram et al. eds, Arjuna's atlas of Sri Lanka (Dehiwela, Sri Lanka, Arjuna's Consulting Company Limited, 1997), pp. 47-52.
14. Prior to 1972 Sri Lanka was called Ceylon. The name 'Sri Lanka' derives from the Sinhalese language and roughly translates as 'sacred or holy "Lanka"', where Lanka is the Pali word used to refer to the whole island in translated Buddhist scriptures. Up to 1972, other policies and tactics that effectively led to the creation of a non-secular, Sinhala-Buddhist state included the implementation of Sinhalese (over English and Tamil) as the national language, educational reforms that divided schools into Sinhalese and Tamil streams and university admission policies that privileged ethnicity over intellectual achievement. For more detailed social histories, see K.M. de Silva, A history of Sri Lanka (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1981);
15. V. Samaraweera, Sri Lanka (Oxford, Clio Press, 1987).
16. The civil war began in 1983, following race riots in southern Sri Lanka where Sinhalese lynch mobs burned and looted known Tamil houses, in response to an LTTE attack on a group of Sinhala-Buddhist monks in the north of the country. The war represented the culmination of ethnicized tensions that had been bubbling for decades prior to the 1983 riots. It is estimated that some 60 000 Sri Lankans of all races lost their lives during the war, and over 500 000 (mostly Tamils located in the north) lost their homes and were forced to flee the country; L. Marshall, 'Sri Lanka 2003: players in search of solutions', Polity 1 (2003), p. 20.
17. For critiques of the Sinhala-Buddhist state in the years leading up to and during the war, see S.J. Tambiah, Buddhism betrayed: religion, politics and violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1992).
18. Portal inscription at Ruhuna National Park.
19. A dagoba is a Buddhist stupa, the dome-shaped main structure of most Buddhist temples.
20. From the 1940s onwards, Sri Lanka's national parks have been strongly marketed for a host of reasons. Elsewhere, I have situated such campaigns within the post-independent politics and strategies of nation-building by suggesting that such vigorous promotion was connected to the promotion and spatialization of appropriate types of citizenship by a saturation of Ceylon's peripheral landscapes with a body politic; see T. Jazeel, 'Being Sri Lankan: three cultural geographies' (PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2002), pp. 76-101.
21. C. Selwyn Samaraweera, 'Yala in history', Loris 12 (1970), p. 18.
22. 'The silent living of Ruhuna National Park: Yala', Loris 12 (1970), p. 76 (emphasis added).
23. For examples, see R. Williams, Culture (London, Fontana, 1980);
24. K. Soper, What is nature? (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995);
25. W. Cronon, 'Introduction: in search of nature', in W. Cronon, ed., Uncommon ground: toward reinventing nature (New York, Norton, 1995), pp. 23-68;
26. N. Castree and B. Braun, 'The construction of nature and the nature of construction: analytical and political tools for building survivable futures', in B. Braun and W. Castree, eds, Remaking reality: nature at the millennium (London, Routledge, 1998), pp. 3-42.
27. D. Cosgrove, 'Ideas and culture: a response to Don Mitchell. Exchange there's no such thing as culture?', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21 (1996), p. 575.
28. K. Soper, 'Nature/"nature"', in G. Robertson et al. eds., Future natural: nature/science/culture (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 26.
29. Also see N. Smith, 'Nature at the millennium: production and re-enchantment', in Braun and Castree, Remaking reality, pp. 271-85.
30. Cronon, 'Introduction: in search of nature', p. 36.
31. Although Jennifer Light provides a provocative example of 'natures' that do not possess a conventional substantive element in her discussion of virtual computer generated nature. See Light, 'The changing nature of nature', Ecumene 4 (1997), pp. 181-95.
32. N. Carrol, 'On being moved by nature: between religion and natural history', in S. Kemal and I. Gaskell eds, Landscape, natural beauty and the arts (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 244-67.
33. B. Braun, 'Querying posthumanisms', Geoforum 35 (2004), p. 271.
34. S. Pile and N. Thrift, 'Mapping the subject', in S. Pile and N. Thrift, eds, Mapping the subject geographies of cultural transformation (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 27.
35. Also see N. Thrift, Spatial formations (London, Sage, 1996), ch. 1.
36. See Braun, 'Querying posthumanisms'; Whatmore, Hybrid geographies, esp. ch. 1-3.
37. Castree and Braun, 'Constructions of nature and the nature of construction', p. 17.
38. Eric Kaufman refers to the legitimation of social relations and national virtues through 'nature' as 'naturalizing the nation'. See Kaufman, '"Naturalizing the nation": the rise of naturalistic nationalism in the United States and Canada', Comparative studies in society and history 40 (1998), pp. 666-95.
39. Also see O. Zimmer, 'In search of national identity: Alpine landscape and the reconstruction of the Swiss nation', Comparative studies in society and history 40 (1998), pp. 637-64.
40. S. Buczaki, 'All creatures great and small', unknown Sri Lankan newspaper from clippings file on 'Yala' (Department of Wildlife Conservation archives, Colombo, 2000).
41. Much has been written on the links between National Parks and nationhood. For North American examples, see D. Cosgrove, 'Habitable earth: wilderness, empire and race in America', in D. Rothenburg, ed., Wild ideas (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 27-41;
42. for British examples, see D. Cosgrove, B. Roscoe and S. Rycroft, 'Landscape and identity at Ladybower reservoir and Rutland', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21 (1996), pp. 534-51.
43. For example, guidelines laid out by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the 1992 Caracas Convention that urged countries to manage their nature in a manner sensitive to local people.
44. Sri Lankan Tourist Board, www.lanka.net/ctb/nationalpark.html
45. Far from the apolitical practice of unearthing buried history and revealing its uncontaminated forms to an eagerly waiting public, archaeological practices have come to be seen as politically charged authorizations and endorsements whose objectification and assumed neutrality define the very parameters for thinking about origins and identity. By constructing and authorizing teleological historical frameworks, archaeology just as easily defines who 'we' are as it does who 'they' are. For examples, see P.R. Schmidt and T.R. Patterson, eds, Making alternative histories: the practice of archaeology and history in non-western settings (Santa Fe, NM, School of American Research Press, 1995);
46. D. Miller, M. Rowlands and C. Tilley, eds, Domination and resistance (London, Allen & Unwin, 1989);
47. and D. Miller and C. Tilley, eds, Identity, power and pre-history (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984).
48. Many inscriptions and other archaeological artifacts were displayed in Colombo's newly constructed museum of 1877, whose vogueish Georgian architectural style, as Nihal Perera suggests, symbolically framed the appropriation of the 'native' culture by the dominant colonising one. Perera also suggests that as the island colony developed into a strategic node in the South Asian and Far Eastern British Empire, the institutions, buildings and size of operations in the port capital, Colombo, were disproportionate to the needs of the island and the city at the time. This explains the colonial government's enthusiasm for bringing artefacts and inscriptions from the Southeast to Colombo for analysis and display. See Perera, Society and space: colonialism, nationalism and postcolonial identity in Sri Lanka (Boulder, Co, Westview Press, 1998), pp. 75-85.
49. Address of His Excellency, the Right Honorable W.H. Gregory on closing the session of the Legislative Council, 6 Jan. 1875 (National Archives, London CO57/64).
50. Report of the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon for 1897, by F.T. Hobson, R.S. Colombo, W.T. Taylor and F. Modder, 1898 (National Archives, London CO57/138).
51. M. Angell, 'Understanding the Aryan theory', in M. Tiruchelvam and C.S. Datthathreya, eds, Culture and politics of identity in Sri Lanka (Colombo, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 1998), pp. 41-72.
52. Angell, 'Understanding the Aryan theory', p. 58.
53. Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon for 1934, Senarat Parnavitana Esq. (National Archives, London CO57/241).
54. For example, 'back to the land'-style Agriculture and Patriotism schemes attempted to settle educated, middle-class - mostly Sinhalese - Ceylonese on rural land development projects. The government's aims were to boost the colony's agricultural production whilst symbolically infusing colonial Ceylon's neglected rural landscapes with a Ceylonese body politic. See D.S. Senanayake, Agriculture and patriotism, ed. D.S. Senanayake (Sri Lanka, Sridevi, 1999, 1st edn 1935). Catherine Nash has written on the geographies of anti-colonial Irish masculinity and nationhood proposed through similar projects in early twentieth-century Ireland.
55. See Nash, 'Men again: Irish masculinity, nature and nationhood in the early twentieth century', Ecumene 3 (1996), pp. 427-53.
56. Both Situlpahuwa and Akasachetiya are, of course, popular restored, sacred places within Ruhuna National Park today.
57. Annual report of the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon for 1934, Senarat Parnavitana (emphasis added).
58. Papers relating to the Game Ordinance, No. 6 of 1872, by the Assistant Government Agent of Tangalle, F.C. Fisher (as quoted in n. 2).
59. Report of the Fauna and Flora Protection Committee, by C.V. Brayne (Chairman), W.E. Wait, H.L. Dowbiggin, A.B. Lushington, Lucius Nicholls, A.J. Wickwar, 20 Aug. 1934 (National Archives, London CO57/243).
60. I b i d.
61. This is only one reading of this important piece of fauna and flora legislation that draws specific attention to its role in shaping a Ceylonese historical geography of national emparkment. I am grateful to other historical geographers who have drawn my attention to alternative and complementary readings that highlight e.g. global and international networks and discourses of national emparkment contemporaneous with this legislation, or the preservation and translation of the increasingly marginalized hunting rights of a privileged elite heavily involved in drafting this legislation. Whilst acknowledging such alternative historical interpretations, this paper focuses specifically on the creation of Ceylon's/Sri Lanka's 'sacred nature', and therefore chooses not to pursue such alternative interpretations in any great depth here.
62. Administration Report of the Warden, Department of Wildlife for 1951 by C.W. Nicholas, July 1952 (National Archives, London DO109/ 25).
63. Just 10 years later, in 1954, the Department of Wildlife reported the apparent 'discovery of a herd of Sinhala wild cattle in Ruhuna National Park'. It seems that even the park's fauna were now being racialized. Administration report of the Warden, Department of Wildlife for 1953, by C.W. Nicholas, May 1954 (National Archives, London DO109/ 27).
64. Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon for 1934, Senarat Parnavitana.
65. S. Kemper, The presence of the past: chronicles, politics and culture in Sinhala life (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991).
66. See ch. 5, 'Races and places'.
67. I b i d.
68. Catherine Nash highlights the troubling implications of postcolonial renaming programmes. The apparent celebration of 'cultural re-appropriation, resistance, recovery and reclamation', by renaming, unproblematically assumes a 'pure homogenous, pre-colonial culture suppressed by colonialism'. Such assumptions edit claims of attachment and belonging that minority groups (in this case Sri Lanka's Tamils, Muslims and Burghers) might have to places given new names that mobilize hegemonic 'postcolonial' narratives of nationhood. See Nash, 'Irish placenames: post-colonial locations', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (1999), p. 463.
69. Y.-F. Tuan, 'Language and the making of place: a narrative-descriptive approach', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81 (1991), p. 686.
70. On myth and memory, nature and landscape also see S. Schama, Landscape and memory (New York, Knopf, 1995).
71. M. de Certeau, The practice of everyday life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984), p. 122.
72. P. Bishop, Dreams of power: Tibetan Buddhism and the western imagination (London, Athlone Press, 1993), p. 17.
73. There is a wealth of literature that outlines and explores in detail the ways that Buddhist philosophy and religion construct a cosmology or way of being in the world. This paper can only skim the surface of this literature. For some examples of more in-depth exploration, see A. Kaplan, The new world of philosophy (New York, Vintage, 1961), ch. 7;
74. M. Wickeramasinghe, Buddhism and culture (Sri Lanka, Tisara Prakasakayo, 1981);
75. and A. Guruge, Buddhism: the religion and its culture (Colombo, World Fellowship of Buddhists, 1984).
76. J. Pickering, 'Selfhood is a process', in J. Pickering, ed., The authority of experience: essays on Buddhism and psychology (Richmond, Middlesext, Curzon; 1997), p. 163.
77. R. Porter, 'Introduction', in R. Porter, ed., Re-writing the self: histories from the Renaissance to the present (London, Routledge, 1997).
78. On Cartesian dualism and the 'self see Peter Burke's essay in the same collection: 'Representation of the self from Petrarch to Descartes', pp. 17-29.
79. Wickeramasinghe, Buddhism and culture, p. 6.
80. B. Goven Gokhale, 'Aesthetic ideas in early Buddhism', Ancient Ceylon 3 (1979), p. 137. This themed edition of the journal of Sri Lanka's Archaeological Survey Department collated papers given at the 2nd annual conference on Asian archaeology, held in Colombo, 1966.
81. M. Batchelor, 'Even the stones smile: selections from scriptures', in M. Batchelor and K. Brown, eds, Buddhism and ecology (Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), p. 13.
82. See W.S. Yokoyama, 'Circling the mountain: observations on the Japanese way of life', in Batchelor and Brown, Buddhism and ecology, pp. 55-64.
83. Kay Anderson traces the emergence of a dominant and predominantly 'Western' 'scopic regime' that characterized human relationships with the non-human world through her work on Adelaide Zoo. She outlines the emergence of associated 'Western "ways of being" in relation to nature', which she refers to as 'rationalist perspectivalism'. See Anderson, 'Animals, science and spectacle in the city', in J. Wolch and J. Emel, eds, Animal geographies: place, politics and identity in the nature-culture borderlands (London, Verso, 1997), pp. 27-50.
84. See C. Classen, Worlds of sense: exploring the senses in history and across cultures (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 2;
85. and C. Gamage, Buddhism and sensuality (Northwestern University Press: printed in Colombo, 1998).
86. P. Rodaway, Sensuous geographies: body, sense and place (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 22.
87. M. Pieris, 'Wildlife in the Jataka', Loris 21 (1996), pp. 45-57.
88. '...my own native land. Block II, Yala National Park', Daily News (3 Mar. 1990) (newspaper clippings file on 'Yala', Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. Library, Lake House, Colombo).
89. Kusum Disanayaka, 'Dusk at Yala', The Island (8 Aug. 1992) (newspaper clippings file on 'Yala', Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. Library, Lake House, Colombo).
90. S. Senadhira, 'The lure of the jungle', Loris 20 (1994), pp. 139-40.
91. C. Tilley, A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths and monuments (Oxford, Berg, 1994), p. 14.
92. Cosgrove, 'Ideas and culture', p. 575.
93. See Classen, Worlds of sense, (p. 6),
94. J.D. Porteous, Landscapes of the mind: worlds of sense and metaphor (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1990).
95. H.S. Panwar and W.M.R.S. Wickeramasinghe, Management Plan Yala Protected Area Complex [Rubuna National Park Block I to V, Yala Strict Natural Reserve, and Kataragama, Katagamuwa and Nimalawa Sanctuaries], Plan period: 1998-2007, Vol. 2 (Department of Wildlife Conservation records room, Colombo, 1997).
96. Perera, Society and space, p. 144.
97. S. Rodrigo, 'The Yala bungalow: a loving requiem', The Island (21 July 1996) (newspaper clippings file on'Yala', Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. Library, Lake House, Colombo).
98. See G. Chakravorty Spivak, The post-colonial critic: interviews, strategies, dialogues (London, Routledge, 1990).
99. S. Bulathasinha, 'Yala terrorists to be flushed out', The Island (15 Nov. 1995) (newspaper clippings file on 'Yala', Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. Library, Lake House, Colombo).
100. Rodrigo, 'The Yala bungalow'.
101. S. Williams, 'Whither Yala? Tigers make inroads to South via Yala park', Midweek Mirror (3 Oct. 1996) (newspaper clippings file on 'Yala', Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. Library, Lake House, Colombo).
102. 'Yala. another casualty?', The Island (n.d.) (newspaper clippings file on 'Yala', Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. Library, Lake House, Colombo).
103. 'The jungle awakes', Sunday Times Plus (9 Nov. 1997) (newspaper clippings file on 'Yala', Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. Library, Lake House, Colombo).
104. Despite the influences of cultural and posthuman geographical theory, signposted throughout this paper, this approach is also politically influenced by feminist perspectives that conceive of the necessity to decouple embodiment and Nature. For an outline, see V. Bell, Feminist imagination (London, Sage, 1999), pp. 113-38.
105. On 26 Dec. 2004, Yala National Park's coastal areas were badly hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami. At the time this paper went to print the park was closed for ongoing assessment and clear-up work. On the morning of the 26th, the tsunami claimed the lives of nearly 200 tourists and officials in the park.