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" Violence and shame : "
De Silva, Jani Ravina.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1093983
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| Doc. No
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TLets311948
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| Main Entry
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De Silva, Jani Ravina.
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| Title & Author
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Violence and shame :\ De Silva, Jani Ravina.
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| College
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London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)
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| Date
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2000
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| student score
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2000
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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My thesis explores a violent episode which took place in a Sinhala village in Sri Lanka. Thisepisode involved a series of events which unfolded between November 1989-January 1990,when 22 schoolboys were abducted from their homes, tortured and killed by personnel basedat a neighbouring army camp.This episode took place in the wake of a popular armed upnsmg. Yet an Intelligenceinvestigation conducted by the regime-in-power in 1991 exonerated all the boys from anycomplicity in insurgent activity.Though Sri Lanka has seen collective violence ranging from inter-ethnic to class-based togender-specific, in this event, both victims and perpetrators share the same Sinhala-Buddhistethnic, linguistic and religious ethos and male gender. Thus local constructions of masculinitieswithin Sinhala society become increasingly pivotal; it was not their politics, I argue, but theirdemeanour as young boys which was central to their fate. This involves the posture ofdeference (lajja-bhavu or the 'fear of being [publicly] shamed') that adolescent offspring inSinhala society almost involuntarily assume vis-a-vis parents, older sibling and other figuresof authority. Bodily demeanour, remarks Bourdieu, exemplifies social class and genderidentity (1977; 1984). But I would argue that in the South Asian context demeanours ofdeference do not always imply hierarchichal relationships of power, though sometimes ofcourse they may. They remain a courtesy which retains the fiction of precedence. Withdrawalof such deference creates anxiety and unvoiced rage.But with the incursions of the global into everyday life, local demeanours of self-hood arepervaded by the effects of the tabloid/electronic media, mass education, discourses on politicalrights etc. and fraught with new ambiguities. And even more than a withdrawal of deference,such ambiguity provokes unease. But since - much of the time - demeanour is involuntary,the young actor may not always perceive that his demeanour is now more charged, and he maynot grasp the enormity of the emotions this occasions. It is in the public domain that suchwithdrawal/ambiguity is most clearly seen to undermine the role of it's receiver, whose outragebecomes to that extent culturally validated. This creates a space for the performative acting outof such emotions.The act or violence now becomes an attempt to restore meaning/significance to the life of theactor. seen to have been in some way untenably diminished by the withdrawal of deference.
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| Subject
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Sri Lanka; Self-hood
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| Added Entry
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London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London)
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