Separating spaces? Ethno-gendering social networks

Contemporary South Asia

Volumn 16, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 413-426

  Ruwanpura, Kanchana ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER RELATIONS; IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION; SOCIAL NETWORK;

EID: 56749173277     PISSN: 09584935     EISSN: 1469364X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09584930802472764     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Kate Boyer, 'For home and country? Engendering nationalism in the workplace', Social and Cultural Geography, Vol 6, No, 2, 2005, pp 183-199
2. Partha Chatterjee, 'The nation and its women', in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp 116-134
3. and Malathi De Alwis, 'Towards a feminist historiography: Reading gender in the text of the nation', in Radhika Coomaraswamy and Nira Wickramasinghe (eds), Introduction to Social Theory (Colombo and New Delhi: Konark Publishers Pvt Ltd and International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 1994), pp 86-107.
4. Chatterjee, op cit, Ref 1
5. De Alwis, op cit, Ref 1
6. and Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women in South Asia during the British Rule (London: Routledge, 1995).
7. Boyer, op cit, Ref 1
8. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, 'Introduction: Women's colonial and postcolonial geographies', in Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (eds), Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies (New York and London: The Guildford Press, 1994), pp 1-25
9. Mona Domosh and Joni Seager, Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World (New York: The Guildford Press, 2001)
10. and Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographers (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
11. Chatterjee, op cit, Ref. 1
12. and Sitralega Maunaguru, 'Gendering Tamil nationalism: The construction of "woman" in projects of protest and control', in Pradeep Jeganathan and Qadri Ismail (eds), Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka (Colombo: Social Scientist Association, 1995), pp 158-175.
13. Frequently Sri Lankan scholars are challenged as to how a 'religious' group - Muslims - are categorized as an ethnic community; see Jennifer Hyndman and Malathi de Alwis, 'Bodies, shrines, and roads: Violence, (im)mobility and displacement in Sri Lanka', Gender, Place and Culture, Vol 11, No 4, pp 535-557
14. and Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, Matrilineal Communities, Patriarchal Realities: Uncovering a Feminist Nirvana (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press and New Delhi: Kali for Women/Zubaan Books, 2006). Existing Sri Lankan scholarship highlights how colonial and postcolonial trajectories were instrumental in the constructions of 'Muslims' as a distinct ethnic category in Sri Lanka
15. see Qadri Ismail, 'Unmooring identity: The antinomies of elite Muslim self-representation in modern Sri Lanka', in Jeganathan and Ismail (eds), op cit, Ref 4, pp 55-105.
16. More generally, ethnic identities in the country are neither linked to religion nor language. Sinhalese predominantly speak Sinhala but are Buddhist or Christian, Tamils mostly speak Tamil but are Hindu or Christian, Muslims are followers of Islam but speak Sinhala, Tamil or both; see Arjuna Guneratne 'What's in a name? Aryans and Dravidians in the making of Sri Lankan identities', in Neluka Silva (ed.), The Hybrid Island: Culture Crossing in the Inversion of Identity in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Social Scientist Association and London: Zed Books, 2002), pp 22-25.
17. See Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (London: Hurst & Company, 2006) for the historico-political construction and the contested nature of identities in Sri Lanka
18. see also Ruwanpura, op cit, Ref 5, p 188. Burghers, however, speak Tamil, Sinhala, English and sometimes are bilingual or trilingual even (!) but are primarily Christian/Catholic. The slippages and interfaces between religion and language point to the fluidity of identity construction in Sri Lanka - and indeed the salience of caste over ethnicity or ethnicity over caste is a confluence of political and historical factors. Quite critically, during my fieldwork visits to Eastern Sri Lanka during the past 8-9 years, the Muslims were keen to identify themselves as a distinct ethnic community - and it is this self-identity that I go with in my categorization of ethnic communities in Sri Lank; see also Jayadeva Uyangoda, Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka: Changing Dynamics, Policy Studies 32 (Washington, DC: East-West Centre, 2007).
19. I use 'female-heads' as the social group to analyse issues related to women's subjectivity, but this paper is not about making a distinctive contribution to the wider literature on female-headed households; see also Sylvia Chant, Women-Headed Households: Diversity and Dynamics in the Developing World (New York and London: McMillan Press, 1997)
20. Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Jane Humphries, 'Mundane heroines: Conflict, ethnicity, gender and female-headship in eastern Sri Lanka', Feminist Economics, Vol 10, No 2, 2004, pp 173-205
21. and Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, 'Shifting theories: Partial perspectives on the household', Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol 31, No 4, 2007, pp 525-538.
22. Bina Agarwal, A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
23. Dennise McGilvray, 'Mukkuvar vannimai: Tamil caste and Matriclan ideology in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka', in Dennise McGilvray (ed.), Caste Ideology and Interaction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp 34-97
24. and Dennise McGilvray, 'Households in Akkaraipattu: Dowry and domestic organization among matrilineal Tamils and Moors of Sri Lanka', in J. N. Gray and D. J. Mearns (eds), Society From the Inside Out: Anthropological Perspectives on South Asian Household (London: Sage Publications, 1989), pp 192-235.
25. Maunaguru, op cit, Ref 4
26. Yuvi Thangarajah, 'Narratives of victim-hood as ethnic identity among the Veddas of the east coast', in Jeganathan and Ismail (eds), op cit Ref 4, pp 191-218.
27. Gunaratne, op cit, Ref 5
28. Kumari Jayawardena, 'Some aspects of religious and cultural identity and the construction of Sinhala Buddhist womanhood', in Douglas Allen (ed.), Religion and Political Conflict in South Asia: India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (London: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp 161-181.
29. Sepali Kottegoda, 'Female-headed households in situations of armed conflict', Nivedini, Vol 4, No 2, 1996, pp 10-19
30. Kumidini Samuel, 'War and survival - women heads of household in the East', Options, August 1994, pp 16-18
31. and Selvy Thiruchandran, The Other Victims of War: Emergence of Female-Headed Households in Eastern Sri Lanka: Volume II (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1999).
32. Ruwanpura and Humphries, op cit, Ref 6.
33. Henrietta Moore, 'Mothering and social responsibilities in a cross-cultural perspective', in E.B. Silva (ed.), Good Enough Mothering? Feminist Perspectives on Lone Motherhood (London: Routledge, 1996), pp 58-75.
34. Ruwanpura and Humphries, op cit, Ref 6.
35. I follow convention and preserve the anonymity of the villages visited and the female-heads interviewed, in particular because divulging this information may unnecessarily affect the welfare and security of the villages and households.
36. Domosh and Seager, op cit, Ref 3, p 34
37. and McDowell, op cit, Ref 3, p 30.
38. Mutthukrishna Sarvananthan, Economy of the Conflict Region in Sri Lanka: From Embargo to Repression, Policy Studies 44 (Washington, DC: East-West Centre, 2007).
39. Sarvananthan, op cit, Ref 16.
40. Nur Yalman, Under the Bo Tree: Studies in Caste, Kinship, and Marriage in the Interior of Ceylon (Berkley: University of California Press, 1971), p 16.
41. Ruth Palriwala and Carla Risseeuw (eds), Shifting Circles of Support: Contextualizing Kinship and Gender in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001).
42. Palriwala and Risseeuw, op cit, Ref 19.
43. John L. Comaroff, 'Sui genderis: Feminism, kinship theory, and structural domains', in Jane F. Collier and Sylvia J. Yanagisako (eds), Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p 83
44. and Sylvia Yanagisako and Jane F. Collier, 'Toward a unified analysis of gender and kinship', in Collier and Yanagisako (eds), op cit, Ref 21, pp 14-50.
45. Blunt and Rose, op cit, Ref 3, pp 4-5.
46. My initial fieldwork was done during 1998-99, nearly a decade after the most violent abductions and killings of men by the state, the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and other para-military units; the interval of a 12-year period (many high-intense abductions and killings took place during the 1987-89 period) may have given these progressive women pause for thought and quiet reflection as to the ways in which they are a 'sisterhood' divided.
47. The irony of such utterances, which were repeated often enough, was not lost on me because a cornerstone of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism is the contention that Sinhala-Buddhist culture is uniquely 'native'. The postcolonial inferences of this issue will be picked-up in the fourth section of the paper.
48. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)
49. Tony Lawson, Economics and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, 1997)
50. and McDowell, op cit, Ref 3.
51. Suzanne Bergeron, Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004)
52. Domosh and Seager, op cit, Ref 3
53. and McDowell, op cit, Ref 3.
54. Sarah Mills, 'Knowledge, gender, and empire', in Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (eds), op cit, Ref 3, pp 29-50.
55. Ibid, p 41.
56. The distinction between evolving changes that the Portuguese and the Dutch introduced to customary practices through an embryonic judicial system and the British implemented through legal codes and legislative changes as instrumental in modifying notions of property and affecting family structures are already documented; see Wickramasinghe, op cit Ref 5, pp 25-43
57. see also Elizabeth Harris, The Gaze of the Colonizer: British Views on Local Women in 19th Century Sri Lanka (Colombo: Social Scientist's Association, 1994)
58. and Carla Risseeuw, 'Gender, kinship and state formation: Case of Sri Lanka under colonial rule', Economic and Political Weekly, 24-31 October 1992, pp 46-54.
59. Chatterjee, op cit, Ref 1
60. and De Alwis op cit, Ref 1.
61. There is a plethora of feminist literature that shows how binary categories are a hallmark of the modernist period and how such categorization is an integral aspect of modernist thinking; see Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York and London: Routledge, 1991)
62. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986)
63. and Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). I refer the interested reader to this corpus of work.
64. McDowell, op cit, Ref 3, p 111.
65. Ibid, p 101.
66. Ibid, p 100.
67. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, 'Post victimization: Cultural transformation and women's empowerment in war and displacement', in Selvy Thiruchandran (ed.), Women, Nation and Narration (New Delhi: Vikas, 1999), pp 136-151.