The civility of strangers? Caste,ethnicity,and living together in postwar Jaffna,Sri Lanka

Abstract

The question asked by this article is as follows: How do different kinds of people live together in a hierarchical world that has been challenged and transformed through the leveling effects of deep ethnicization and war? I examine two different kinds of relationships in contemporary postwar Jaffna: first, an inter-ethnic, external Tamil/Muslim division that has led to people relating to each other as categorical strangers; and second, an intra-ethnic, internal caste relationship through which different castes relate to each other as intimate strangers. These inter-ethnic and intra-caste distinctions have been forged through recent histories of violence and struggle, and indicate key tensions and transformations around postwar life on the Jaffna peninsula, part of the former warzone during the Sri Lankan civil war and long considered the ideological heart of Tamil nationalism. When ethnic mobilization—the possibility of egalitarian mutuality and solidarity as well as the pain, trauma and sacrifice of war, and ethnic cleansing—emerges within deeply hierarchical worlds that continually produce modes of distinction, what kinds of struggles arise within inter-ethnic and intra-caste relations? Given that public life is historically built on unequal participation, and that living together has been a historical struggle, we need to ask how we understand the particular embedded civilities that have made living together such a problem over time. Rather than see civility as an abstract code of prescriptions in relation to the maintenance of non-violent order, I suggest that it is possible to see different modalities of civility produced with regard to specific others/strangers. These modalities can conflict with each other, given that civility can be either hierarchically produced or governed by an egalitarian drive toward public forms of dignity and equality. I propose that civility has a social location, discourses, and understandings in hierarchical worlds that are necessarily different depending on who is speaking.