Back to the Beginning: A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble

Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

John Harriss

I think the first time we never met, Jonathan, must have been in 1986 or 1987 when you invited me to participate in a workshop that you were organizing on events in Sri Lanka. I declined, because by that time it had been seven or eight years since I’d last spent time in the Island of the Blessed. And if I’m honest also because, at that time, I found thinking about Sri Lanka emotionally difficult. But I retained an interest and I read A Sinhala Village in a Time of Trouble not too long after it was published.

It is to this early work of yours that I’d like to speak and pay tribute to. It had a big influence on me at first in making better sense of some my own observations in Sri Lanka, and much more recently in understanding contemporary political developments, including those far away from Sri Lanka. It’s a wonderful ethnography. The fact that the book should have survived the withering criticism of Michael Roberts—that you seriously underestimated the ability of a Lankan villager to walk a great deal more than eight miles, and so overestimated the isolation of Tenna—and that the book went to a second publication, is one marker of just what a fine piece of work it is.

Sinhala Village was one of the last—perhaps the last—of the village studies that had been the stuff of a lot of the anthropology of Sri Lanka, as it had been in that of India. And in common with the best of the village studies your book offers a comprehensive portrait of Tenna society. Given my own interests in land and agriculture, I particularly appreciate your discussion of the relations of the paddy fields and the shifting cultivation of the chena, and of their different sets of values.

But Sinhala Village is very different, nonetheless, from all the earlier studies, including the one that was focused on politics, by Marguerite Robinson (1975). As you argued, much later, in your Malinowski lecture, Robinson’s work represented very well what had been the mainstream of the anthropology of politics (Spencer 1997). This had taken its cue from political science and focused on formal political behavior and instrumental action. Your work represented a turn towards interpretation and to a focus on values, and in doing this you wrote a study that anticipated the renewal of the anthropology of politics that you called for in the Malinowski lecture. But Sinhala Village is different from earlier village studies, too, because you rather knock the idea of “the disintegrating village”—that had been such a preoccupation among researchers—on the head. It is different, as well, and in a delightful way, because of the autobiographical style of the ethnography. There is a reflexivity in the writing that marks out the book still, I think, by comparison with the vast majority of ethnographies from South Asia, and might still be learnt from by others.

The book shows how changes in the local economy—perhaps especially the decline of chena cultivation—but generally changes in the way people make a living, had fragmented their experiences. They no longer had shared understandings—connecting work, birth, and belonging—based in production relations. So, you argued, they needed to create a common experience for themselves. Hence the focus in your account on “rituals of unity” which are then upset, however, by “carnivals of division.” I was especially struck by what you say about the importance of maintaining the appearance of unity, and how this ties up with Buddhist ideas about the relationships between people and desirable modes of behaviour—that people should behave towards one another with courteous civility. These ideas and behaviours, however, overlay deep-seated fears, bitter antagonisms between people, their feelings of insecurity over their standing in society, and mistrust of others. The tensions are summed up in the powerful image of the poisoned betel leaf in the classic gesture of friendship. All this illuminated for me what I’d experienced living in a hamlet in Hambantota in the mid-1970s. You helped me to make more sense of what I’d known of the suspicions between people, expressed in the frequency of muttered rather than open accusations of witchcraft, or of the unstated battle for territory in the bedda, between Goyigama and Karava. I’d not experienced anything comparable with this in my fieldwork in Tamil Nadu. Other readers, too, noted the richness of these observations of yours, and commented on how they illuminated national politics.

People’s expectations that they are surrounded by evil forces and the jealousy of others seem to parallel the fears of Sinhalese in relation to Tamils. Your description and analysis go some way to explaining the intensity of feeling among Sinhalese about the Tamil other—expressed even by people who’ve had little contact with Tamils. The groundwork for the attribution of evil intent is laid, no doubt, by monks and teachers using their particular version of history—but you show how these teachings resonate so intensely with everyday experience. You help us to understand how and why it can come about that ordinary people who have been peaceable neighbors start killing each other—actions such as those I observed years ago in Tajikistan. I remember very well the old woman rushing up to me, weeping, and pointing to the ground at the entrance to a yard. “This is where they killed him”—the men with whom her husband had played cards for every Sunday for many years. You help to explain this kind of action.

The other set of your observations from Tenna that is particularly penetrating follows from the distinction that you found your friend Appuhami making between “politics,” seen—as in India as well—as “dirty,” and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, which is seen, I think you show, as a site of redemption. You argue that there is in the village “a kind of endogenous nationalism, created and recreated at the local level, by local agents, for whom it perhaps provides the only clear image of the good social life, in a world of dizzying social change” (239). This is a reflection that helps us to make sense of what is going on in many parts of our world today, including this one.

So, to conclude, Sinhala Village is a work of enduring significance. Hats off to you, mahatteya.

John Harriss, sometime member of the Department of Anthropology at the LSE, is now Professor Emeritus of International Studies at Simon Fraser University. His own fieldwork on state and village society in Sri Lanka was carried out in the 1970s.