A Canal in Colombo This is just a picture of one of the many little canals running through Colombo. I haven’t taken any photos of these canals, as I’ve only ever passed them in the car, but they all struck me as being very pretty, with grassy banks running down from little wooden houses with corrugated rooftops. There are always people ...
A rural scene I thought it was about time to pop one of these up. For those of you who’ve come across to this blog from my Bangalore blog, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to do a sketch! I know I said I’d try but I’ve just been too busy. Today was a day off for the packing ...
If Sinhalese can be used as a metonym for Sri Lankan, then where do Tamils and Muslims fit in? Tagged: identity, Muslim, nation state, national identity, Sinhalese, Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan, tamil
JAYATISSA, JEYARAJ AND JACOBINISM: DEBATING ‘SRI LANKAN-NESS’ IN POST-WAR SRI LANKA (via Ground Views) Photo courtesy Sri Lanka Guardian Much is being written nowadays about post-war Sri Lankan identity and the challenges of unity in diversity, among which are well-meaning interventions extolling the virtues of building a modernist, inclusive Sri Lankan… [Please click on the title of the article ...
My recovery nap today was rudely interrupted by Mrs G, returning from work. Both she and Baba G have the habit of shouting somebody’s name repeatedly, whether or not that person is in earshot or not, and even though from my bed I was shouting back ‘Yeeeessss!!!’ she obviously hadn’t heard me, so I hurriedly jumped out of bed and ...
(Before I start, no… Not crack) Coca-Cola (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I woke up feeling great, and the first half of the day wasn’t too taxing. There was an auditor lurking around, and apparently untrained foreigners shouldn’t really be working, so I spent a lot of time sitting and making notes. It was perhaps even a bit cooler than usual, due ...
One of the most unnerving things is when you can hear the whining, whizzing, whirring sound of a nearby mosquito, but you can’t figure out where the little b****r is; even worse is when the main question going round in your head is, “is it outside my bed net, or inside…?” Tagged: mosquito net, mosquitoes
I’ve now completed two participatory mapping sessions with groups of workers at the factory I’m researching. The aim of the maps is to understand where and when workers of different ethnicities come into contact with people of other ethnicities. In a district where Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese reside, it is surprising to see that so far, the only time my ...
I just spotted this on another blog [The Hampshire Feminist Collective: 'The legacies of Orientalism and the exoticizing of women']: “The brilliant Emi Koyama once said “There’s no innocent way of being in this world”, meaning that no one, not even the most enlightened among us, can exist outside of history, outside of the legacies of colonial violence that shaped the ...
Before diving in and talking about this, I should probably first explain what on earth I mean by my positionality. I mean, how I am perceived by the participants of my research. I mean how I perceive them. What pre-existing factors are influencing the relationship between me and my participants? I need to be considering how things such as my ...
All of my research so far has shown me that here, in this rural area, to the everyday person, ethnicity is not an issue. Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese communities are certainly separate from one another, but whenever I ask anybody about tensions between the ethnicities I am told there are none. And then I read this online: “In August the ...
Earlier on last week Chamila asked if I’d like to go to her house. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was joking, but I was keen regardless. The next day she had asked again, and asked if ‘Baba G’ would come too, so I spoke to Baba G about it and we checked with Mrs G, and were given ...
Ampara clock tower in evening sunlight. For the first week in Ampara I would walk to and from the factory, which was bliss. Hot, but bliss. After the 3pm tea break, I would watch the glow outside gradually turn from white, to yellow, to orange, as the languid sun slowly settled herself into a bed of darkening greenery. It would ...
Today I held the pilot run for my participatory mapping sessions. I’ll explain this in more detail in a later post (when I’ll also explain time geography – having promised in one of my previous posts to talk more about this I’m very aware that I have ignored the topic entirely), but I’m basically asking girls to map their daily routines ...
This past week has been spent in the factory, participating, observing and learning, and my goodness I’ve learnt a lot, and I’ve come on leaps and bounds in terms of my relationships with the employees. But now it’s time for me to move onto putting into practice all the research methods I talked about in the run up to this. ...
I bought breakfast on the way to work today – two sweet bread things from the bakery and a bottle of mango juice, all for about 50p. I hadn’t quite finished by the time I got to work, and I didn’t want to risk missing the start of the morning routine, so I took the last morsels through to the ...
Reblogged from Thuppahi's Blog: Gerald H. Peiris, reprint from Ethnic Studies Report, Vol.IX, No.1, January1991 Among the various exemplifications of Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka, those that relate to claims over territory have acquired increasing prominence during the recent past. These claims are based upon the perception that certain parts of the country belong exclusively to the Sri Lankan Tamils – a ...
