Modern Asian Studies

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Asian Studies:

Collective Violence and Everyday Practice in Sri Lanka

Jonathan Spencer
Modern Asian Studies / Volume 24 / Issue 03 / July 1990, pp 603 - 623 DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X00010489, Published online: 28 November 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/ abstract_S0026749X00010489 How to cite this article: Jonathan Spencer (1990). Collective Violence and Everyday Practice in Sri Lanka. Modern Asian Studies, 24, pp 603-623 doi:10.1017/ S0026749X00010489 Request Permissions : Click here

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Modern Asian Studies 24, 3 (1990), pp. 603-623. Printed in Great Britain.

Collective Violence and Everyday Practice in Sri Lanka

JONATHAN SPENCER
University of Edinburgh

The Problem In July 1983 communal violence in the southern towns of Sri Lanka left between 300 and 3,000 people dead, nearly all of them members of the minority Tamil population. While such a disturbing manifestation of social pathology would seem to demand a response from concerned social scientists, there are special difficulties in confronting such events. Dominant trends in the historical study of popular disturbance, for example the concern to recover the rationality and dignity of participants in food riots (Thompson 1971), or the current interest in manifestations of'resistance', may look altogether inappropriate in this context. Explanation can all too often look like apologetic, and this may explain why much of the existing writing on communal violence in South Asia deals with virtually everything except the violence itself. One recent study in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer's Legends ofPeople, Myths of State (Kapferer 1988), has recently tackled this question head on, arguing that there is a clear link between collective violence in Sri Lanka and what the author describes as a 'logic of being in the world', or 'ontology' to be found in everyday Sinhala life. While Kapferer has earned our gratitude for even raising the issue of the connection between collective violence and everyday life, his specific argument, as I shall show below, is based on a limited reading of the available evidence. The connections I outline in the latter parts of this paper are a great deal more complex (and inconclusive) than the simple continuity between everyday action, nationalist ideology and the violence of the rioting postulated by Kapferer.
Fieldwork in Sri Lanka was supported by a grant from the Social Science Research Council (now the Economic and Social Research Council). I am grateful to Michael Carri there, Jock Stirrat, and especially John Rogers, as well as audiences in Boston and Austin, for their valuable criticisms of earlier versions of this paper. oo26-749X/go/$5.oo + .00 1990 Cambridge University Press

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First, though, I shall summarize as best I can Kapferer's rather complex argument. He argues that the myths of nationhood which are frequently invoked in modern Sinhala Buddhist nationalismhis examples are taken from the sixth-century chronicle, the Mahavamsa are based on what he describes as a hierarchical ontology which links ideas of state and ideas of personhood such that an attack on one is an attack on the other. Evil is embodied in the figure of the outsider who must be encompassed by the state. Violence is an appropriate, even necessary response to the appearance of foreign evil. Kapferer detects a similar pattern in his ethnography of sorcery and anti-sorcery rites. Sorcery ritual and nationalist myths share a common ontology, an ontology which orients actors in everyday life. The power of nationalist myth derives from its ontological 'fit' with everyday practice, a fit which allows it to penetrate deep into the actor's 'being' and, in certain circumstances, reorient the actor, 'charge the emotions and fire the passions' (Kapferer 1988: 47). So violence is a necessary response, according to this reading of the 'cultural logic', to certain kinds of challenge, challenges to the state or challenges to the person. This argument is in apparent contrast to most reports of Sinhala Buddhist values, in which non-violence is consciously avowed as an important moral principle (e.g. Gombrich 1971: 266). It might, though, explain the mystery of Sri Lanka's relatively high murder rate, as well as the incidence of communal violence in recent years. In the next part of this paper I present some of my own ethnographic evidence on violence and aggressionbroadly conceived to include a range of ways of attacking one's enemiesin everyday life. As this evidence is necessarily partialit is the work of a single male anthropologist living in one idiosyncratic rural community I have attempted to relate it to other, more general evidence on the place of violence in Sinhala Sri Lanka.1 In the final part of the paper I turn specifically to the riots of July 1983, and examine the different political, social, and cultural factors which combined in that week of violence.

"The most important of these are Wood (1961), Obeyesekere (1975, 1984b), Carrithers (1982), Selvadurai (1976), Amunugama and Meyer (1984), Kearney and Miller (1985), Nissan and Stirrat (1987), and especially Rogers (1987a, 1987b); of these Kapferer only cites Obeyesekere. Kapferer's book also involves a comparative analysis of Australian political culture; in this paper I shall not concern myself with this side of his argument.

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Violence and Aggression in Everyday Practice

In 18 months' fieldwork the only overt violence I saw in the Sinhala village where I worked were two short scuffles, both involving the same man. In addition to these cases there were a number of murders and suicides in the area during my stay which I discussed with friends in the village, and I also learnt of cases of murder and suicide involving villagers in the past. Of the events from the past which I was told about, two are of particular relevance here. In the early 1970s a village woman (Sinhala) was accidentally killed by a Muslim man out hunting. On the afternoon of her funeral a group of young men from the village rampaged through the neighbouring Muslim settlement causing whatever damage they could. Some of the older villagers, including the woman's widower, chastised them for this unseemly response. In 1981, in what was to prove a dry run for the 1983 violence, Tamil properties in the nearest towns were burnt in response to a Tiger attack in the north (allegedly by cadres of the ruling UNP [United National Party]). In the village someoneno one I knew would tell me whoburnt down the house of a Tamil ganja (marijuana) dealer. The arson occurred in the middle of the night when most of the village was asleep. The few other Tamilsex-estate workersliving in the neighbourhood were left alone, as they were again during the 1983 violence. In neither of these cases could it be said that more than a small proportion of the population were involved: in the first case, some of the young unmarried men; in the second a smaller group of unknown composition, although rumours from elsewhere in the district lead people to suspect one or two of the village's more volatile UNP members. Perhaps as in all societies, violence occupies a problematic position in Sinhala everyday life as I encountered it; it is a source of both aversion and fascination. In the event of a murder, it is quite usual for anyone who is free to set off for the scene of the crime, there to gaze fascinatedly at the victim's body during the long wait for the police to arrive. On the other hand I not only saw very little public violence myself, I also saw very little public dispute, argument or anger during my fieldwork; what I did see was concentrated into 3 months at the end of 1982 when the village was overtaken by national politics in the form of an election and subsequent referendum.2 Even watching children
I argue elsewhere (Spencer n.d.) that party politics forms an invaluable cultural form for the expression of tensions and disputes which cannot be expressed in the pacific mode of'normal' village relations.
2

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playing I was struck by the relative gentleness of their arguments and games; an English child I knew, placed among Sinhala children, appeared impossibly boisterous by comparison. There was, though, a general interest in what we might call vicarious violence: some people travelled quite long distances to view murder victims or the wreckage of bad traffic accidents;filmsand comics with violent scenes were popular among many young people; older ideas about hell and demons dwell upon recurring motifs of violence (Carrithers 1982; cf. Gombrich 1971: 265; Malalgoda 1972: 167-8). A link of sorts can be discerned between these popular representations of violence and the style of public violence. For example, as Carrithers points out, 'flames and cutting' are dominant images in Buddhist representations of hell (Carrithers 1982: 41); and in the violence of 1983 victims were often hacked or burnt to death (rather than, say, beaten, stoned, or lynched). In the same way it has been shown that Protestant and Catholic mobs in early modern France differed in their styles of violence in ways which were consistent with their particular religious background (Davis 1975). But the hellfire sermons discussed by Carrithers are not offered up as examples of what people should do, but rather as warnings of what might happen if they fail to do what is proper in this life. Moreover, popular representations of violence usually portray violence as emanating from either demons or kings, categories of being who, in their different ways, embody all the things which ordinary people are not. In this respect, violence functions as one among many signs of the other. It would follow that the employment of a style of violence which borrows motifs from these popular representations, implies some kind of'crossing over' from the world of everyday normal sociability into the extraordinary realm of demons and kings (cf. Juergensmeyer 1988). The imaging of violence as a mark of difference and the relative invisibility of violence in day-to-day life can both be linked to the strong emphasis on restraint in everyday village social life, an emphasis which I have described elsewhere as holding 'the world at arm's length' (Spencer n.d.: 165-207). This is easiest to grasp through the concept of lajja, translated by other writers as 'shame' (Obeyesekere 1984a: 504; Carrithers 1982: 40; Nissan and Stirrat 1987: 22), but which also covers some of the semantic terrain denoted by the English words 'embarrassment' and 'shyness'. So the tiny child who ran away when I called on her parents was, I was told, merely suffering from lajja; the bride who arrives at her wedding feast with eyes downcast in modesty is displaying exemplary lajja; the man who was arrested by the police

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and kept himself out of the way of his neighbours in the following weeks was, I was told, a victim of lajja. Obeyesekere describes how children are inculcated with a fear of public humiliation {lajja-baya 'shamefear'), through the repeated childhood imprecation ' lajja nddda mokada minissu kiyanne? 'without lajja what will people say?' (Obeyesekere 1984a: 505). This is but a domestic version of a dominant public theme, the creation of a shaky consensus by the aggressive use of the threat of humiliation. In the past this was manifest in the form of rituals like the horn game (an keliya), in which the men of a village would divide into two teams and, inter alia, exchange obscene insults. In the present it can be seen in a wide variety of contexts: in the celebratory behaviour of the winning party after elections; in the extraordinary ragging rituals which welcome village youths to Sri Lanka's universities; in the bizarre carnival of the Colombo big school cricket matches {ibid.: 508). Again the desire to humiliatethe urge to obliterate the victim's claims to social positioncan be seen in some of the 1983 violence; for example, the Tamil prisoners massacred in a Colombo prison were allegedly first forced to kneel in submission before their murderers. But this pattern is in fact most manifest in intra-Sinhala political violence. During the 1971 insurrection there are tales of soldiers forcing a woman suspected of being a member of the insurrectionary J V P to walk down the main street of her home town naked, while other suspected insurgents were paraded through the streets of Kandy to the jeers of the populace. In the violence following the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka peace agreement, antigovernment groups have not only assassinated political figures associated with the accord, they have also insisted that their victims be refused the dignities of a normal funeral, a gesture which ensures not merely physical destruction of the enemy, but also, given the importance of funerals as both social and religious occasions in Sri Lanka, the destruction of their social personality (Anon. 1988). In village discussions violence was usually described as the result of a loss or suspension of lajja. After one of the fights I witnessed, a friend explained the aggressive behaviour of one of the protagonists as a consequence of the death of his mother when he was young: 'he has no mother, he does not know lajja'. After a particularly angry altercation in the build-up to the 1982 election the same friend explained that one of the most visibly angry participants had been drinking: 'when these people drink they no longer know fear (baya) or shame (lajja)'. Violence, like visible displays of anger, is defined as the loss of the necessary quality of shame and self-control which should be evident in

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all public encounters. Lajja is moreover believed to be unevenly distributed within the population. It is most important for those with the greatest claim to social standing and position: 'It is said that lowcaste people have little lajja-baya; they have no status to lose' (Obeyesekere 1984a: 504). And it is most emphasized in the socialization of girls rather than boys, even as in adult life it is most important for those with the greatest public roles to play, men rather than women {ibid.: 505). So the insistent emphasis on restraint and holding back is intensified along three dimensions: it is part and parcel of aspirations to standing and respectability; it is most expected of women rather than men; and, partly in contradiction to this, it is most important for those with the most public social roles, i.e. men rather than women. This same pattern recurs in the evidence on manifestations of violence and anger. Here, too, both the incidence and the style of violence can be plotted along the linked axes of gender, standing, and public visibility. Women, as morally weak beings, are often regarded (as far as I could tell, by at least some women and by virtually all men) as the source of violence and conflict in everyday life: women, it is said, are gossips and scolds and tell lies about men; the men believe the lies and this leads to conflict. But women are not usually agents of violence, and I heard of no cases locally where two women had fought, or in which a woman had physically attacked a man. When a young woman was arrested 50 miles away for allegedly murdering her motherthus transgressing two very powerful cultural normsthe case was clearly thought to be extraordinary and received wide publicity, including the publication of broadside ballads as well as newspaper coverage in the Sinhala press, and was much discussed by villagers. The ideal for women is restraint, and the consequent avoidance of public attention. Physical violence, or even the expression of overt anger, is the antithesis of such restraint. So, too, for men with aspirations to village respectability, for whom the ideal public persona is one ofsanta danta 'quiet self-control' (Gombrich 1971: 266). Fighting is an example of the loss of self-control, but so is harsh (sdra) speech and scolding (dos kiyanava 'speaking harm'), and thesealong with stupidity (moda) and unjustified pride (adambara)are the aspects of behaviour I found most frequently invoked in pejorative judgements upon fellow villagers. In talking of the past, some men complained that in matters of caste, and in dealing with headmen and other local representatives of the colonial state, relations of inequality were more often accompanied in those days by matter-of-fact expressions of verbal aggression or physical violence. In other words, an increased emphasis

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on cultured restraint, rather than unalloyed power, as the mark of standing may be a product of change in the moral atmosphere of village life, another aspectwith the avoidance of hunting and alcohol, and increased delay and formality in the regulation of sex and marriageof the growing dominance of that brand of worldly revivalist Buddhism which Obeyesekere has aptly characterized as 'Protestant Buddhism' (Obeyesekere 1970; Gombrich 1988: 172-97). But these are village ideals, and I was party to many discussions in which people tried to explain, both to me and to themselves, what they saw as the lamentable failure of the village and the country to live up to its own ideals. Earlier writers on violence in Sri Lanka have noted that many Sri Lankans believe the country to have the highest murder rate in the world, and homicide has been long perceived as a major problem (Wood 1961: 53; Rogers 1987b: 122). One explanation offered to me in village discussions, was that Buddhist ethics allow no space between complete non-violence and the sin of violence; so the appearance of violencean inevitability in some situations of conflict and tension tends to be impulsive and uncontrolled (cf. Amunugama and Meyer 1984: 58; Meyer 1984: 149). Everyday life is dominated by considerations of lajja, necessary restraint, while violence is usually described as a result of the absence or forgetting of this essential value. At this point local ethnographic knowledge can be tested against wider data. Whether or not the impulsive and uncontrolled pattern of violence really is a product of Buddhist values (and the human frailty of those who hold them), there is certainly a lot of evidence to support the view that violence comes suddenly and wildly in everyday life. The homicide rate in Sri Lanka in modern times is indeed high in crosscultural perspective; between the 1860s and the 1970s the annual average homicide rate fluctuated between 4 and 8 per 100,000 population. The most recent available figure, for the period up to 1970, is 6.2 per 100,000 (John Rogers, personal communication). Allowing for historical variations, this was much higher than Britain and many other West European countries, roughly the same as the United States, but lower than a number of other colonial or post-colonial societies (but consistently higher than India) (Rogers 1987b: 125-6; cf. Wood 1961: 54, 57). There is a very marked gender bias in the figures: only 1 in 20 homicides were committed by women, and 1 in 5 homicide victims were women; both proportions are far lower than those recorded in Europe (Rogers 1987b: 132; Wood 1961: 67). Only 1 in 5 homicides were categorized as 'premeditated'; the rest were the product of 'sudden quarrels' (Wood 1961: 71; cf. Rogers 1987b: 141-3).

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This last point has been challenged by Obeyesekere (1975). He has argued that premeditated aggression is certainly present in the Sri Lankan setting, but is channelled into sorcery rather than direct violence. This alternative direction has been ignored by Western criminologists who have instead employed narrowly European assumptions about violence. His own research at a number of sorcery shrines in the early 1970s suggests that sorcery is a very popular means for attacking one's enemies; that it represents an alternative to direct violence (although its perpetrators believe it to be every bit as harmful); and that it is especially popular among certain groups in society. It is instructive to compare homicide and sorcery in terms of what we know of their sociological context.3 Sorcery is more often employed by those living in an urban or semi-urban context (Obeyesekere 1975: 14); homicide is more usually rural (Wood 1961: 61; Rogers 1987b: 130-1). A high proportion (at least 38%, but definitely higher) of homicides take place among close kin (Wood 1961: 70; cf. Rogers 1987b: 132-3); most sorcery is aimed (between 67% and 80% at the shrines studied by Obeyesekere) at non-kin (Obeyesekere 1975: 14; cf. Selvadurai 1976: 95). Sorcery is covert rather than overt: most people (80% in Obeyesekere's sample) travel more than 1 o miles to sorcery shrines in order to escape detection by those at whom the sorcery is aimed; by contrast, few murderers make any serious attempt to avoid detection and a recurring feature of homicide cases is the murderer's voluntary surrender to the authorities (Wood 1961: 74; Rogers 1987b: 143). The most recent research suggests that the homicide rate, while high, has remained remarkably stable despite the social upheavals of the colonial and post-colonial period (Rogers 1987b: 124). Obeyesekere relates the incidence of sorcery to recent social and economic change; although we have no comparable runs of historical data, it would seem quite likely that sorcery has steadily increased in recent years (Obeyesekere 1975: 12-18; cf. Kapferer 1988: 235 n.i 1). And, although Obeyesekere does not present a breakdown of his cases by gender, circumstantial evidence suggests that sorcery is much more commonly practised by women than overt violence (e.g. Kapferer 1988: 31-2, 104-5). The comparison is exactly what village discussions of lajja would lead us to expect. Sorcery is most popular among those groups of peoplewomen and what Obeyesekere impressionistically but tell3 Almost every criterion employed here'kin', 'non-kin', 'urban', 'rural', 'middleclass'begs some further question of applicability or comparability. We are, though, prisoners of the available data which can only be improved by further qualitative study.

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ingly describes as 'the good middle class of the village or small town' (1975: 14)whose everyday conduct is most heavily circumscribed by the imperatives of necessary restraint and self-control. And Obeyesekere's juxtaposition of homicide and sorcery should encourage us to look for other possible channels for the expression of dispute and aggression in Sri Lanka. Another researcher's detailed case histories of sorcery in a low country village show that sorcery is but one medium employed in disputes which may stretch over many years and employ many other tactics; and the disputes, while involving land claims, the courts, and sorcery, are not necessarily 'about' any one of these things. The disputes are 'about' claims to standing and personhood which can become expressed through landholding or politics, overt or covert violence (Selvadurai 1976: 88-92; cf. Rogers 1987b: 144). The third example of aggressive action which I want to compare with sorcery and homicide is suicide. While the homicide rate has remained largely stable in the long run, suicide rates have increased dramatically in the years since Independence, from 6.5 per 100,000 in 1950 to 21.2 per 100,000 in 1978 (Kearney and Miller 1985:91).In that period, too, the demographic profile of suicide has also changed. More men than women commit suicide by a ratio of something less than 2 to 1, but the proportion of suicides committed by women is steadily increasing. Suicide has become associated with youth: between 1955 and 1974 the suicide rate among men in the 20-24 a g e group increased from 18.7 per 100,000 to 76 per 100,000. In 1955 38% of male suicides and 59% of female suicides involved those between 15 and 29 years of age; by 1974 48% of male suicides and 72% of female suicides took place between 15 and 29 (ibid.: 83). The incidence of suicide, like that of homicide, varies from region to region. The lowest rates are found in Colombo and the densely populated south-west littoral; the highest rates are found in the north and east. The most spectacular rates are found in Tamil-dominated areas, and those parts of the northern and eastern dry zone with very high rates of rural immigration in recent years (ibid.: 93). So, by the 1970s suicide accounted for 1 death in 10 in Vavuniya district in the north (ibid.: 84). While I am not in a position to discuss the sociocultural context of Tamil suicides, it is worth noting that the rate of increase in suicide, and the increased skew toward the young, are evident in all areas of the country. In other words while there may be distinctive social or cultural factors which account for a higher longterm predilection for suicide in Sri Lanka Tamil society, there seem to

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be structural factors at work causing steady increases in the incidence of suicide in both Tamil and Sinhala populations.4 We should not be surprised at the rapid growth of suicide in the 15 to 29 age group. Since Independence, a combination of rapid population growth and improved educational provision has created a very large stratum of relatively well-educated but woefully underemployed young people. They are young people with ambitions which extend beyond the village and the old ways of agricultural life, not surprisingly as the limited resources of rural agriculture could barely accommodate a population which has more than doubled in this period. The growth of this stratum of ambitious but often frustrated youth has provided a reserve army of rural desperation which has played a key role in recent politics. The 1971 Insurrection in the south was entirely the work of young Sinhala men and women, eager to gain access to state employment (Obeyesekere 1974; Alexander 1981); in the north the same kind of young people were recruited to the Tamil militant cause from the mid-1970s onward (Hellman-Rajanayagam 1986); in the south they supplied the footsoldiers for the victory of the UNP machine in the elections of 1977 and 1982; since the 1987 peace agreement many have been drawn to the resurgent militants of the JVP. If nothing else, the suicide figures help us situate Sri Lankan youth politics in a context which explains much of their desperation and bitterness. The military success of the Tamil militant groups (the Tigers and their rivals) is less surprising if we remember that, for many of their young members, the most meaningful alternative outlet for their frustrated sense of personal worth may well have been the insecticide bottle. But even suicide is a socially meaningful act. Consider the following case from Wood's 1961 survey. It concerns a young couple living in a poor area of Colombo. The man, Martin, has got involved in an argument with his mistress: Martin then struck her across the thigh with a piece offirewood;next he pulled out a clasp knife and threatened to stab her. She worshipped him and pleaded on her knees not to harm her. With this, Martin said, 'All right! I won't stab you! I will stab myself.' And he plunged the knife into his abdomen. (Wood 1961:64) Very few of the suicides reported every day in the Sri Lankan press (from which Wood took this case) take the form of solitary acts. 5 The
4 For the record, the evidence suggests a slightly higher homicide rate for the Sinhala population, but the Sinhala and Tamil homicide rates would seem to diverge much less than those for suicide (Rogers 1987b: 130). 5 Here, even more than elsewhere, I am relying on a very unsystematic melange of

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most characteristic method employed now is the swallowing of insecticide, which ensures a slow and agonizing death. The victim often swallows the poison after an apparently minor domestic disagreement, and then returns home to confront the parents or spouse, who have to watch in horror as the poison slowly works its course. In other cases usually involving thwarted lovethe victim leaves a note addressed to the person whose actions they feel have brought them to this desperate act. As Wood points out, on the basis of cases like the one quoted, suicide and homicide are much closer alternatives than we may ordinarily suppose (ibid.: 73-4). Martin pulls out the knife to attack his mistress but, at the last moment, turns it on himself. So, too, the young suicides, whose anger and frustration is at once turned inward and outward. Physically, it is their own body they assault and rack with pain. Morally they are attacking the person or persons who have to watch the death or live with the remorse of the suicide note. As a village monk put it to me when we were discussing the rise in suicide: 'they do it to cause suffering (duka) to the mind/heart (hita) of the other'. In a world in which the law of karma decrees that those who cause suffering will inevitably suffer in turn, the action of the suicide morally entraps the person at whom it is directed. And the people to whom suicides address their actiontheir karmic victimsare characteristically people like mothers, fathers, spouses, and lovers; people whose relations with the victim are a tangled mix of affect and authority, and against whom overt physical violence would be unthinkable, but who instead receive the moral and emotional consequences of the suicide's self-inflicted violence. Suicides usually only hurt the ones they love, honour, or obey. Let me sum up the discussion by returning to the three variables I started with: gender, status, and visibility. Overt violence is most obviously patterned in terms of gender: women very rarely have recourse to physical violence and very few murders are committed by women; more murders are committed on women, but generally speaking murder is something that happens between male acquaintances. A higher and growing proportion of women commit suicide, and suicide provides an alternative outlet for aggression against those whom it would be unthinkable to attack more directly, people like parents and husbands. Those whom women might want to attack physically, but are prevented by physical fear and the threat of shamedeserted
newspaper reports and local gossip for my account of the significance of suicide as social practice. The synthesis presented here must be regarded as very tentative.

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husbands, thieves, conspiring work colleaguesare the likeliest victims ofsorcery. Murder, suicide, and sorcery can all be seen as responses to threats and challenges to status and self-esteem (Rogers 1987b: 150; Wood 1961: 92; Selvadurai 1976: 94-5). Murder is impulsive, usually unpremeditated, and directed at close kin and neighbours; as far as we can tell from the available data, the average murder victim is a male member of a different household, related to the murderer either by kinship or neighbourliness.6 In other words, in these cases murder is a continuation of inter-household relations by other meansrelations which are usually constrained by heavy imperatives of restraint and amicability. But murder involves a loss of self-control and constraint and is always condemned by others. As a response to a challenge to one's sense of personhood, it is doomed to failure. There were a number of convicted murderers who, having servedjail sentences, were living in the village in which I worked or in the surrounding area; they were invariably regarded as bad people and their past crime was swiftly pointed out to newcomers like me. Suicide seems to be most often directed at closer relations; it is often the continuation of intrahousehold relations by other means. As an answer to challenges to one's position it is less futile than murder and assault; suicide ends the individual's problem of status, whereas murder is more akin to a selfinflicted social wound. Sorcery, so long as it remains covert, leaves the perpetrator unharmed in terms of social esteem, but is most often directed at enemies with whom there is no bond of kinship or friendship; to commit sorcery or suspect sorcery 'is to acknowledge that there is a separateness or boundary between the victim and the persecutor, that they do not share solidary relations, and that they are not the same category of person' (Selvadurai 1976: 95). Sorcery, as Obeyesekere points out, is (in Weberian terms) a rational response to a personal problem, not least because its practice is invisible in everyday affairs. Those who use sorcery are the kind of people who, if provoked, 'tend to control their impulses rather than
6 A slightly simplified reworking of Wood's classifications of victims produces the following categories: spouse, children, parents, grandparents (12%); siblings (10%); 'uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, lovers' (18%); 'close friends and neighbours' (including more distant kin) (33%); 'mere acquaintances' (13%); strangers (6%) (Wood 1961: 70). Only thefirstcategory, and some but not all of the second, would be likely to be members of the same household. The cases I heard discussed during my fieldwork seemed to involve a disproportionate number of brothers-in-law/crosscousins (massina), and I was also told by friends that the relationship between a man and his father-in-law (mamalbdna) was notorious for its mixture of amicable expectations and barely suppressed hostility.

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resort to personal retaliation' (Obeyesekere 1975: 15). But not all discontents can be channelled in this direction. Sorcery is especially suitable in cases where the victim is unassailable by other means but where the attacker has no scruples about the assault. Many discontents occur in contexts where there is a heavy weight of expected friendship and amity; given sufficient desperation, suicide is a more rational response in these circumstances than murder. Recent social change has created massive tensions in Sri Lankan society, and suicide is one of the most prominent symptoms of these tensions. The fault lines along which society has split are the emotionally charged relations within the immediate family.7 Murder has not grown as alarmingly as suicide, and it tends to work in the penumbra of familyalong lines of kinship and friendliness, of shared but increasingly strained moral expectation. All the evidence on murder, and the comparison with sorcery and suicide, stresses the impulsive and apparently unstructured pattern of overt violence in Sinhala society (Rogers 1987b: 141; Wood 1961: 74). Murderinchoate, sudden, messyis, in this setting, the real cry of despair.

Collective Violence It is not my intention here to provide a new or in any way definitive account of the violence ofJuly 1983.8 What I want to do is concentrate on certain aspects of the violence, and attempt an explanation in terms of three converging causes. One of these is the particular political circumstances which preceded the violence, in particular the growth of organized political violence in the Sinhala areas of Sri Lanka. The second is the history of the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in the postIndependence era, and the way in which Tamil resistance, particularly violent resistance, was perceived by Sinhala people. The third is a kind of logic within the violence itself, in which, once everyday order had been disrupted by the outbreak of violence, rumour and fear were
Cf. Obeyesekere's remarks on the 'ambivalence of feeling in kinship' as manifest in ideas aboutpretas (ancestral spirits) (Obeyesekere 1981: 115-19); I explore this theme further in Spencer (n.d.: ch. 6). 8 The 1983 violence has been the subject of a large literature: see Goonetileke (1984), Manor (1983; 1984), Meyer (1984), Piyadasa (1984); Tambiah (1986) provides an accessible and balanced recent account; a number of the points made here are anticipated in Nissan and Stirrat (1987). In some respects the 1983 violence has more in common with earlier outbreaks of collective violence (1958, 1915) than with the pattern of political violence which has followed the 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan peace agreement.
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able to dominate people's perception of the world. This third factor is the point at which we encounter Kapferer's demons but, as I shall argue, demons were but one figure by which people attempted to make some sense of something which appeared terrifyingly new and senseless. Like murder in everyday life, collective murder was a product of a loss of control, of a breakdown in everyday restraint. The patterns to be discerned in it are not quite the patterns of everyday life, but the patterns which lie behind everyday repression. July 1983 wasand remains a dark night of the collective soul. On 23 July 1983 13 Sinhala soldiers were killed in an ambush in the Jaffna peninsula. The next day their bodies were brought back to Colombo for a mass burial at the main cemetery. A large crowd had gathered there and moved on from the funeral to attack Tamil properties in the immediate area of the cemetery. In the following week whole suburbs of Colombo were razed to the ground and Tamil property in a number of other southern towns was systematically destroyed. In addition an unknown numberprobably 2,000 to 3,000 of Tamil civilians were killed, and many more were rendered homeless. I spent the week of the riots between my field site on the eastern boundary of Sabaragamuva Province and the pilgrimage centre of Kataragama some 50 miles further east. I saw no violence and, when I travelled to Colombo after the riots, managed to drive 70 miles through towns and villages before I saw my first ruined building. In other words, the violence was confined to certain specific areas, and many towns with Tamil populations in Sinhala areas were unaffected. Secondly, most of the violence in the areas where it occurred was the work of fairly small groups of people; as with other manifestations of violence the participants seem to have been predominantly male. The French historian Eric Meyer was in Colombo at the time: The operations that I witnessed were methodically organized. Their leaders often dressed in European clothes and had written instructions and lists of places to attack. Groups offiveor six youths in sarongs armed with Molotov cocktails and clubs would empty houses and shops of a part of their contents and set fire to them, continuing on their way forthwith, often by car. The looters from the nearest shanty town would then arrive whilst the generous distribution of arrack would help to maintain the excitement. (Meyer 1984: '39)In cases I heard of, the residents of the property were forewarned by the police who simply told them to leave for refugee camps before the gangs arrived to burn the house; although members of the security forces were

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in evidence in the city there is no evidence of them intervening to halt this systematic and organized destruction. It is widely believed that the groups involved in the destruction were members of the ruling UNP, probably representing a clique of chauvinists within the cabinet rather than acting on direct orders from the top.9 If this is true, the problem is not what Kapferer describes as the 'transformation of a normally peaceful people' (Kapferer 1988: 101), but rather the political circumstances under which a government allowed, encouraged, or failed to prevent its agents or associates attacking a section of its own population. A full answer to this problem would be long and complex. Politically powerful figures controlling illegal operations in the shadow of the state frequently appear in accounts of Sri Lankan society in the colonial period (Rogers 1987b: 94, 212-15; Meyer 1983: 26; Wood 1961: 51). Since Independence the pattern has continued, but has been channelled more and more along political party lines. Since 1970 in particular, politicians from both the major parties in the south have built up substantial private armies of goondas or thugs. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the UNP government (like its SLFP predecessor in the 1970s) became increasingly dependent on the use of semi-official violence against its opponents (Obeyesekere 1984b: 163-6; Tambiah 1986: 52-4). In December 1982 the life of the UNP-dominated parliament was extended for a further term by a majority vote in a referendum. The referendum was accompanied by widespread accusations of fraud and intimidation (Samarakone 1984; Warnapala and Dias Hewagama 1984). Previous governments had used violence and intimidation, but no previous regime had been so apparently dependent on the illegal tactics of its own supporters for its survival. Not surprisingly, in the first six months of 1983 there were increasing signs that the government could no longer control the excesses of its own cadres who are alleged to have been at the centre of the destruction in July. If the political circumstances may explain who some of the people on the streets were and why they were there in 1983, they do not explain the escalation of the violence from burning and looting to killing and massacre. In all the detailed cases of killing I have heard of, it appears
The accusation of UNP involvement, although widely believed at the time, has never been conclusively documented: see. Obeyesekere (1984b: 166); Tambiah (1986: 32-3); Piyadasa (1984: 93-8); Meyer (1984: 142-3); De Silva (1986: 339); Roberts (1988: 42-3); De Silva (1988: 65-7). Parallel accusations have been levelled against members of the Congress Party said to have been involved in the attacks on Sikhs in Delhi after Mrs Gandhi's assassination in 1984 (Das et al.\ 1984).
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that the crowd involved believed that those they were attacking were not 'ordinary Tamils', but Tigers; in some cases once the crowd had identified a group of Tamils as Tigersbecause, for example, they had tried to resist the lootingthey summoned the police or army to attack them. On July 27 in the highland town of Badulla, for instance, a crowd started to attack Tamil homes in one particular street. The police failed to respond to the families' desperate attempts to summon them. A wellknown local Tamil merchant who lived in the street fired a shotgun in the air to scare the crowd away. At this point soldiers from the Sri Lankan army arrived and started to fire on the house. The men in the Tamil houses in the street who were not beaten and hacked to death by the now frenzied crowd, were shot by the soldiers. The merchant's wife was then told by the soldiers 'to go into her house and bring out "the other Tigers and guns" '.10 Similarly, local people assured me that in the 1981 violence in Ratnapura District the Tamils whose houses were attacked were really 'Tigers'. In fact, at this time the Tigers had never operated within 100 miles of these southern towns. In the months before the rioting, fear of the Tigers, and the possibility of attacks in the south, had been built up in the Sinhala press. Even in the remote village where I was working people reported to me that they had 'seen' Tigers in the area. With the imposition of curfew and censorship and the apparent breakdown of the civil administration, rumours about the Tigers grew and developed dramaticallyhow they were on their way to attack the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, how they were going to poison the water supply of major towns, how they had travelled south from Jaffna hanging on the underside of trains (for 300 miles in a week when the trains were not running) or dressed in military uniform under a disguise as priests (Spencer 1984; Nissan 1984: 176; Nissan and Stirrat 1987: 21). In other words, the actions of the Tigers in the north, filtered through a propagandist press and a mesh of cultural stereotypes about the violent Tamil (cf. Wriggins i960: 254-5), provoked an air of panic in which ever more outlandish rumours spread and flourished. Similar rumourssometimes the same rumours, e.g. of an impending attack on the Temple of the Tooth in Kandyare reported from the 1915 antiMuslim riots (Kannangara 1984: 155-8; Rogers 1987b: 190-1). The worst attacks in 1983 were, in this atmosphere, conceived as defensive
D. Beresford 'Survivor describes Sri Lanka massacre', Guardian 13 August 1983; I received detailed corroboration of Beresford's account from a Sinhala friend who was unaware that the affair had been reported in the press.
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responses to the threat of superhuman Tamil violence, just as the 1915 rioters thought they were defending themselves against a Muslim * attack. It is worth pausing to consider the image of the Tamil revealed in the events of 1983. Kapferer's source of ontological insight, the Mahavamsa, does indeed provide the most popular and powerful contemporary model of Sinhala-Tamil relations, but it is a model apparent on the surface of the text and requires little anthropological intervention to be rendered explicit. In the modern reading of the chronicle, the Buddha gave the island to the Sinhala people as guardians of his teaching (dharma); the Tamils are later arrivals who, in the past, have attacked and destroyed Buddhist monuments and monasteries. The exemplary answer to the threat of Tamil attack is provided in the story of the warrior-king Dutugemunu who assembles an army of champions and, with the blessing and support of the sangha (Buddhist monkhood), marches off to defeat the Tamil king and unite the island under his rule. This model means, for example, that Tamil complaints about discrimination are often read by the majority community as covert attempts to re-establish islandwide domination. And it meant that when, in desperation, the Tamil youth of the 1970s turned to violence there was a ready answer provided: off to the north went the champions of the Rajarata Rifles and Gemunu Watch, regiments with names which deliberately echoed the glorious past of Dutugemunu and his unifying conquest of the Tamil usurper. But this is where things went wrong. The champions, far from disposing of the alien threat as the model provided, were instead humiliated by a group of under-equipped youths on bicycles. The Tigers were not vanquished as they should have been, but appeared to progress from strength to strength. The chronicles confirmed the idea that the Tamils posed a threat to Buddhism and the Sinhala; they did not provide for the awful possibility of a Tamil victory. The Sinhala security forces were following the script laid down in modern readings of the Mahavamsa but their Tamil antagonists were refusing to speak their allotted lines. It was as if the country had gone to the movies and found itself watching in horror as first the cavalry failed to arrive, and then the bad guys climbed out of the screen and set about the audience. And so the actions of the Tigers began to be interpreted in terms of dominant representations of violence and otherness. They were believed to be superhumanly cruel and cunning and, like demons, ubiquitous (Nissan and Stirrat 1987: 21); and, in a deadly conflation,

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the everyday ethnic otherTamil workmates and neighboursbecame vested with the attributes of the violent and terrifying supernatural other. This is the background to the panic which gripped the country in July 1983. Small groups of violent men, apparently acting in the shadow of the state and responding to Tamil violence in the north, set out, as they thought, to 'teach the Tamils a lesson'. This created a situation of obvious insecurity in those parts of the south targeted for anti-Tamil reprisals. Within this situation rumours grew and flourished. The rumours are revealing for they clearly express partly developed but usually unacknowledged collective fears, and in their rapid development and dissemination they seem to represent a kind of instant mythologizing in which terrifying new experiences were reinterpreted in terms of more familiar cultural structures. The image of the all-powerful Tamil terrorist which took shape in those rumours obviously drew on an elaborate cultural repertoire of ideas about violence and otherness of which images of hell and the idiom of the demonic have been best documented by anthropologists (Carrithers 1982; Obeyesekere 1981; Kapferer 1983). In these new, frightening circumstances people's fears coalesced around the image of the ubiquitous and powerful Tiger; as the image hardened, so the actions of innocent Tamilsfiring shots in the air to disperse the crowd, running away, boarding a train or bus to get out of the citywere read as evidence that they were Tigers. With that reading their fate was usually sealed. The violence of the killing and massacre appeared impulsive, sudden, and uncontrolled because, like overt violence in everyday practice, it was taking place outside the world of normal social expectation and everyday constraint. The treatment of Tamils was not dictated by some old ontology embedded in the myths of the Mahavamsa as Kapferer suggests, nor were Tamils simply identified as demonic. Nobody attacks demons with clubs or burns them to death with petrol. Tom Nairn likens the powers of nationalism to Freud's description of the power of the Id (Nairn 1981: 349). Under circumstances of acute social contradiction and breakdown all manner of inchoate and apparently irrational forces may be released. But these forces are themselves shaped and conditioned by their cultural context; even apparently irrational violence, as Kapferer rightly points out, has a structure, pattern, and meaning. The political circumstances ofJuly 1983 created a situation in which many Sinhala people gazed at the world and saw a nightmare of their own making. Some of these responded by attacking the nightmare and some

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of those attacks assumed the shape of popular representations of violence and otherness. Most people, though, were simply frightened, puzzled, and defensive. None of this is to deny either the hold of nationalist ideology within the Sinhala population, nor that that hold is in many cases passionate. But most passionate nationalists most of the time do not physically attack their opponents, and most Sinhala people did not attack Tamils in 1983, nor have most Tamils attacked Sinhala soldiers in the north. What, then, can we learn by comparing collective violence with everyday practice? We can confidently say, in gross terms, that the same kind of people who participate in collective violence are likely to be associated with visible manifestations of violence in everyday practicemost obviously they are likely to be men rather than women. This is one sociological variable unaccounted for by Kapferer's generalized 'ontology'. We can also say that violence in everyday practice is a sign of the abnormal or untoward and is associated with circumstances (drinking, politics) which encourage a flouting of the inhibitions of everyday constraint. Obviously collective violence takes place in circumstances of extreme abnormality." Oddly enough, there is more evidence of cultural patterning in the actual manner of collective violence. Most individual murderers stab or bludgeon their victim to death, usually with some clumsiness. I know of no evidence of murder victims being forced to kneel before their assailants, or being covered in gasoline and torchedmeaningful acts of punishment and destruction encountered in the behaviour of the 1983 mobs. The recent increase in suicide amongst young people in Sir Lanka is one symptom of increasing social and domestic tensions, but there seems to be no sensible way in which this evidence can be interpreted in terms of Kapferer's 'ontology', while sorcery, from which Kapferer draws much of his evidence, is, in terms of both personnel and social context, far removed from collective violence. Anthropologists can contribute to understanding political events like those in Sri Lanka, but only if they recognize the inevitably partial nature of their knowledge. For example, Carrithers' excellent essay on hell and the imaging of authority relations (Carrithers 1982) provides one key to the frightening pattern of collective violence in modern Sri Lanka. What it does not do is explain how it is that, under certain very specific and extreme circumstances, some people may 'cross over' and
The 1983 violence, like that in 1971 and 1981, coincided with a religious holiday; such days are normally associated with an above average number of murders (Wood 1961: 68 n.g).
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start to act out their collective representations of hell and the other.12 This was what seems to have happened in 1983 and this was in no simple sense a matter of everyday practice; if any thing it was something born of a frightening combination of everyday fear and extraordinary circumstances. Bibliography
Alexander, P. 1981 'Shared Fantasies and Elite Politics: The Sri Lankan "Insurrection" of 1971' MankindWl 2 113-32 Amunugama, S. and E. Meyer 1984 'Remarques sur la violence dans l'ideologie bouddhique et la pratique sociale a Sri Lanka (Ceylan)' Etudes Rurales 95-6 47-62 Anon. 1988 'A note on the present situation: Sri Lanka, October 1988' Typescript. Carrithers, M. B. 1982 'Hell Fire and Urinal Stones: An Essay on Buddhist Purity and Authority' in G. Krishna (ed.) Contributions to South Asian Studies 2 Delhi: Oxford University Press Das, V., R. K. Das, M. Mohanty, A. Nandy 1984 'A New Kind of Rioting' Illustrated Weekly of India 23 December 1984 203 Davis, N. Z. 1975 'The Rites of Violence' in Society and Culture in Early Modern France Stanford: Stanford University Press
De Silva, K. M. 1986 Managing Ethnic Tensions in Multiethnic Societies: Sri Lanka i88o-ig8j

Lanham: University Press of America 1988 'Political Crisis and Ethnic Conflicts in Sri Lanka: A Rejoinder to Roberts'
Ethnic Studies Report VI 1 63-74 Gombrich, R. F. 1971 Precept and Practice Oxford: Clarendon Press 1988 Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modem Colombo

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Goonetileke, H. A. I. 1984 'July 1983 and the National Question in Sri Lanka: A Bibliographical Guide' Race and Class XXVI 1 159-93 Hellman-Rajanayagam, D. 1986 'The Tamil "Tigers" in Northern Sri Lanka: Origins, Factions, Programmes' Internationales Asienforum XVII 1/2 63-85 Juergensmeyer, M. 1988 'The Logic of Religious Violence: The Case of the Punjab'
Contributions to Indian Sociology n.s. X X I I 1 65-88

Kannangara, A. P. 1984 'The Riots of 1915 in Sri Lanka: A Study of the Roots of Communal Violence' Past and Present 102 130-65 Kapferer, B. 1983 A Celebration of Demons Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1988 Legends of People, Myths of State Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press Kearney, R. N. and B. Miller 1985 'The Spiral of Suicide and Social Change in Sri Lanka' Journal of Asian Studies XLIV 1 81-101 Malalgoda, K. 1972 'Sinhalese Buddhism: Orthodox and Syncretistic, Traditional and
Modern' Ceylon Journal ofHistorical and Social Studies n.s. II 2 156-69

Manor, J. 1983 'Sri Lanka: Explaining the Disaster' The World Today XXXIX 11 450-9 (ed.) 1984 Sri Lanka in Change and Crisis London: Croom Helm For a recent attempt to address this question in comparative terms see Juergensmeyer (1988); ironically Buddhism is the one major religion he thinks may be unmarked by the tendency to act out its ideas of cosmic struggle in violent temporal action, but he readily admits this may be a function of his own lack of information {ibid.: 82).
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Meyer, E. 1983 'The Plantation System and Village Structure in British Ceylon: Involution or Evolution?' in P. Robb (ed.) Rural South Asia Linkages, Change and Development London: Curzon 1984 'Seeking the Roots of the Tragedy' in J. Manor (ed.) Sri Lanka in Change and Crisis London: Croom Helm Nairn, T. 1981 'The Modern Janus' in The Break-up ofBritain 2nd edn London: New Left Books Nissan, E. 1984 'Some Thoughts on Sinhalese Justifications for the Violence' in J . Manor (ed.) Sri Lanka in Change and Crisis London: Croom Helm and R. L. Stirrat 1987 'State, Nation and the Representation of Evil' Sussex Research
Papers in Social Anthropology I

Obeyesekere, G. 1970 'Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Sri Lanka' Modem Ceylon Studies I 1 43-63 1974 'Some Comments on the Social Backgrounds of the April 1971 Insurgency in Sri Lanka (Ceylon)' Journal of Asian Studies XXXIII 367-82 1975 'Sorcery, Premeditated Murder and the Canalization of Aggression in Sri Lanka' Ethnology XIV 1 1-23 1981 Medusa's Hair Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984a The Cult of the Goddess Pattini Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984b 'The Origins and Institutionalisation of Political Violence' in J. Manor (ed.) Sri Lanka in Change and Crisis London: Croom Helm Piyadasa, L. 1984 5ri Lanka: The Holocaust and After London: Marran Roberts, M. 1988 'Sri Lanka: Ethnic Conflict and Political Crisis' Ethnic Studies Report VI 1 40-62 Rogers, J. D. 1987a 'Social Mobility, Popular Ideology, and Collective Violence in Modern Sri Lanka' Journal of Asian Studies XLVI 3 583-602 1987b Crime, Justice and Society in Colonial Sri Lanka London: Curzon 'Samarakone, P.' 1984 'The Conduct of the Referendum' in J. Manor (ed.) Sri Lanka in Change and Crisis London: Croom Helm Selvadurai, A. J. 1976 'Land, Personhood, and Sorcery in a Sinhalese Village' Journal of African and Asian Studies XI 1-2 82-96 Spencer, J . R. 1984 'Popular Perceptions of the Violence: A Provincial View' in J. Manor (ed.) Sri Lanka in Change and Crisis London: Croom Helm n.d. A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble Delhi: Oxford University Press (forthcoming) Tambiah, S. J. 1986 Sri Lanka Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy London: I.B. Tauris Thompson, E. P. 1971 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century' Past and Present L 76-136 Warnapala, W. A. Wiswa and L. Dias Hewagama 1984 Recent Politics in Sri Lanka Delhi: Navrang Wood, A. L. 1 g61 'Crime and Aggression in Changing Ceylon. A Sociological Analysis of Homicide, Suicide, and Economic Crime' Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. LI 8 Wriggins, W. H. i960 Ceylon: Dilemmas ofa New Nation Princeton: Princeton University Press

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