Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood: Coastal Socialities in Postwar Sri Lanka

255 Pages·2018·3.73 MB·English

by  Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa

MARE Publication Series 20
Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa
Fishing, Mobility
and Settlerhood
Coastal Socialities in Postwar Sri Lanka
MARE Publication Series
Volume 20
Series editors
Maarten Bavinck, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[email protected]
Svein Jentoft, UiT-The Arctic University of Norway, Norway
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Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa
Fishing, Mobility
and Settlerhood
Coastal Socialities in Postwar Sri Lanka
Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa
Department for Social Sciences
Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT)
Bremen, Germany
ISSN 2212-6260 ISSN 2212-6279 (electronic)
MARE Publication Series
ISBN 978-3-319-78836-4 ISBN 978-3-319-78837-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78837-1
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In memory of Regi, Theja and Gnanaratnam
and the bold, compassionate politics for
which they stood
Foreword
I grew up by the sea in Colombo and the back wall of my school ran alongside the
Colombo-Galle railway line. The waves of the ocean crashed on the rocks that
fringed the railway line. It might seem an idyllic picture, but there were several
occasions when dead bodies were found on the railway lines. Given this childhood,
I find Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood to be a meaningful and rich empirical study
of what it means to live with the sea in wartime and post-war Sri Lanka. For to think
with the sea is to revisit standard frames of theorizing in the social sciences and
humanities; it is to consider programmes of boundary-making and self-fashioning
anew and to trouble models for explaining the island of Sri Lanka built from genera-
tions of scholarship devoted to interior polities, plantation systems, ethnic conflict,
land tenure, agriculture and development. It is to denaturalise the island as a space
of intellectual work, connecting it across the waters while scrutinising its bounding
by polities and forms of capital and work.
In the words of Sisira and Laksiri recorded below, their ‘quarrel was with the
net’; the sea, in other words, was a way of working out the meaning of oppressive
times while countering such times in a narrative of what was shared. Siriwardane-de
Zoysa’s book covers more than a dozen villages and settlements in Northeast Sri
Lanka in the liminal space not only of the beach, but across the thresholds of war
and peace, the tsunami and reconstruction and across ethnic and cultural divides as
well as modes of settlement and migration. In this sense, it uses the space of the sea
to get to a series of in-between acts of making place, memory and identity. If there
is a key concept here it is sambanda/m, meaning co-operation, but including at least
three valences, ‘the lateral, a-sociative and hierarchical’. Siriwardane-de Zoysa
explains that the term literally means a relationship, ‘often embodying a dynamic of
interdependence’. It stretches across formal and informal means of association,
relations of instrumentality as well as affect and romantic and conjugal associations
too. As a concept it allows her to get to the myriad contradictions of life for these
fishing communities; it doesn’t only mean peace but also conflict. Perhaps the con-
tradictions are best illustrated here with respect to some of the wonderful vignettes
which I noted in reading this manuscript.
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viii Foreword
The role of co-operation emerges for instance in how rule-breaking with respect
to fishing has collective consequences: there is a local saying that one wo/man’s
lavish meal was another’s empty plate, or in other words to over-fish was to break
the rule of collective and ethical acceptability. Fortune itself was perceived as rota-
tional in these communities. Yet such meanings of co-operation were in turn twisted
by periods of war and peace: at some times, but not others, militarisation and eco-
logical depredation interlocked, allowing a continually changing sense of how and
how much to fish. Ethnicity was certainly not effaced, but co-operation could at
times create everyday forms of associational culture and protest that crossed ethnic
communities. Fascinating here is how fishermen utilised dynamite; yet as
Siriwardane-de Zoysa explains, dynamiting, purse-seining and the use of strong
lights increased in the context of post-war liberalisation. The tsunami also twisted
co-operation, and here I note how householders sought to damage their own prop-
erty when a second tsunami was expected in 2012, in case the sea ‘failed to ade-
quately do its work’. Further valences of sambanda/m are evident, below, for
instance in practices such as kappam, keeping rule-breakers in check by levying
protection money, in order to redistribute illicitly harvested catches among the
janathawa or community. The particular role of the sea and its relation to land as a
way of working out relationships is clear for instance in the story of the only woman
fisher who Siriwardane-de Zoysa encountered, a migrant from a Catholic village in
Chilaw: ‘[t]here were references made to “masculinised” women who fished and
subverted gendered norms by consuming copious quantities of kasippu, and don-
ning sarongs.’ The way in which conflict and the sea are interlaced is powerfully
illustrated in how some fisherfolk saw the tsunami as completing the work of the
war on land.
These are just some stories that caught my eye – indeed this book is laced with
dozens of them. I leave it to colleagues in the field of anthropology to scrutinise the
precise theoretical and scholarly contribution of this work, but reading this work
from Indian Ocean historiography, I look forward to further research that can pro-
vide a historical context for it. There is still much to know about the patterns of
migration of fisherfolk over the longue durée, the nature of the long-distance con-
nections sustained from the shores towards Southeast Asia and the Middle East over
time, or the ways in which seaborne collectivities were reforged across time as a
result of differing imperial and postcolonial regimes. For a historian, every-day
maritime sociabilities and interdependences are notoriously difficult to extract from
the historical archive and so this work is wonderful too for it what evokes for the
past. For opening up questions while presenting us with excellent ethnography,
Siriwardane-de Zoysa deserves congratulations. I welcome this book into the field
of not only Sri Lanka Studies, but also within contemporary scholarship in oceanic
and island studies.
Reader in World History and Fellow, Sujit Sivasundaram
Gonville and Caius College
University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK
Series Editors’ Preface
South Asia has bred social anthropologists of repute and is also the site of important
anthropological studies on fishing peoples. Paul Alexander’s ‘Sri Lankan Fishermen’
(1982) is a classic, as is Jock Stirrat’s ‘On the Beach’ (1988), with Kalpana Ram’s
‘Mukkuvar Women’ (1991) and Ajantha Subramanian’s ‘Shorelines’ (2009) follow-
ing closely behind. To this set we are now happy to add Rapti Siriwardane-de
Zoysa’s fascinating study on coastal socialities in post-war Sri Lanka. Not only is
her work placed apart from earlier Sri Lankan studies by a 25-year-long civil war
that has affected the country in profound ways, but her fieldwork also took place in
a relatively unfamiliar and distinctive part of the country, the Eastern Province. This
region is characterized by strong ethno-religious diversity, and it is on the implica-
tions hereof that this book speaks loudly. But Siriwardane-de Zoysa’s work also
stands out through its emphasis on cooperation rather than rivalry, and the manifold
meanings and practices this involves. The book will be of value to all those con-
cerned with ‘salt water life worlds’ and the relational dynamics of their inhabitants.
It also provides a unique window on one important fishing society in what John
Kurien (2002) has called the ‘tropical majority world’.
The MARE Publication Series, which commenced in 2004, has hitherto con-
tained nineteen edited and single-authored volumes on a variety of regions and top-
ics in the field of people, coasts and seas. As Series Editors, we are more than happy
to be able to host this new and exciting monograph on Sri Lanka, and expect it to be
followed by studies on other coastal regions of the world. Fritz Schmuhl and other
staff of Springer have again facilitated the production process, for which we are
more than grateful.
UiT-The Arctic University of Norway Svein Jentoft
Tromsø, Norway
University of Amsterdam Maarten Bavinck
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ix
Acknowledgements
In many ways, it seems fitting for a book on multiple mobilities and social entangle-
ments to have lived its fair share of wayfaring. Considering its formative conceptual
stages at the Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment, and
latterly at the CGIAR WorldFish Center in Penang and the University of Bonn, lead-
ing up to fieldwork in Sri Lanka between 2011 and 2016, every step of the way has
enriched its narrative development until its completion in Bremen, Germany.
This book began as a doctoral thesis presented at the Center for Development
Research (ZEF), University of Bonn under the title Sambandam: Cooperation,
Contestation and Coastal Lifeworlds in Postwar Sri Lanka. There I am indebted to
Conrad Schetter, Aram Ziai and Katja Mielke, my advisors and tutor respectively,
for their steadfast encouragement and critical feedback given throughout my years
as a PhD candidate.
The research was funded by a Doctoral Fellowship from the German Federal
Ministry of Economic Co-operation and Development via the German Academic
Exchange Program (DAAD), together with a fieldwork grant from the Dr. Hermann
Eiselen Doctoral Program of the Foundation Fiat Panis.
Meanwhile, there are those who make a life by what they give, and my debts of
gratitude in this project are plenty. My deepest appreciation to the many participants
across the districts of Trincomalee, Batticaloa, Mullaitivu, Jaffna, and Puttalam, Sri
Lanka, who so unreservedly shared their stories and insights with me, for without
their lively engagement this study would not have been possible. I also thank the
great many district- and village-level Fisheries Co-operative Societies that unre-
servedly let me sit in on their meetings, and who shaped this research by contribut-
ing a wealth of historic and institutional knowledge.
To the many friends and colleagues during my Bonn days who were so crucial in
shaping earlier renditions of this book: Guido Lüchters and Milena Djourelova for
their assistance with the statistical component; Sebastian Ekhert for the film editing
support; Epifania Amoo-Adare, Mibi Ete, Elena Kim, Günther Manske, Volker
Merx, Stefanie Rinn, Antonio Rogmann, Karsten Schulz, Ruchika Singh and Anna
Schwachula for their inspiration and luftmensching throughout these past few years;
Ulrike Guthrie and Yana Felber for their editorial assistance.
xi