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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

The formation of the modern Sri Lankan state and the relationship between this formation and patterns of civilian and ethnic violence constitute the central themes of this paper. Within this context, the paper explores orientations to nationalism and the nature of the post-colonial state, forces of identity and violence. It takes issue with some conventional arguments concerning ethnic identity, arguing that the force of ethnicity is grounded in social relations and only secondarily in particular constructions of identity. It is through the historical processes of colonial and post-colonial state formation that ethnicity and its subjectivities have come to have the force that they do. This does not ignore the importance of how the state is imagined, ethnicity being an aspect of the state imaginary. The paper discusses the role of ritual and religion, particularly Buddhist revitalization, as well as the ancient chronicles of religious history, in the production of the imaginary of the state. The argument then moves to a discussion of state and anti-state terror and violence and describes how they are shaped in different kinds of political process, the violence of the state being distinct from that of the terrorist groups that confront it. Overall, the article explores the various social and ideological threads that weave through the long history of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. This history is one that passes from the era of the post-colonial nation-state to a contemporary globalized era of weakened post-colonial state forms. The discussion concludes with a brief consideration of the social and political circumstances that may lead to the resolution of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict or further inflame it.

Transnationalism is generally juxtaposed to the national as a process in which the former grows at the expense of the latter. This paper explores the way in which transnational ethical and legal movements are being used to reconstitute, rather than undermine, the national. The focus of the paper is political amnesty, justice and the limits of national reconstruction in Lebanon after the 1975-90 civil war. The predicament of the ‘disappeared’ is used to measure the extent of national reconciliation and the lack of international interest in the individual/ human rights of Lebanese. The inability to redeem the casualties of the war, including the disappeared, is indicative of the cost of impunity and non-accountability for past as well as present crimes. The anthropological significance of recovering the disappeared as part of national reconstruction goes beyond the desire for a ritual socialization of individual death. It is an important medium for the social reconstitution of the individual citizen and the recovery of identity and law within the national community. The paper explores the role transnational human rights movements and legal prosecutions for ‘crimes against humanity’ have played in national reconciliation elsewhere and how they apply to the Lebanese case. It also points to the potential role of the transnational Lebanese diaspora in reconstituting Lebanese state sovereignty and citizenship.

This paper deals with the migration of people from Hadramaut, in Yemen, to Singapore, looking both at the historical circumstances that led to their early success in the city and also at the contemporary ones that constrain the maintenance of Hadrami identities and the community’s continued involvement in its traditional adaptations to the Singaporean environment. The paper discusses transnational movement, the character of the nation-state and the nature of contemporary globalization as frameworks for the various ways in which different groups of Hadramis define themselves within a global city such as Singapore. It also examines internal Hadrami ways of organizing themselves. Traditional factors, such as kinship and marriage, are central, as are associations like the Tariga al-Alawiyya, a network based partly upon the bonds of kinship and partly upon the organizational principles found among Muslim Sufi groups. More modern cultural organizations, such as the Arab Association, are contemporary adaptations for the maintenance of identity and for the promotion of links to the Middle East and to the Yemeni homeland, links through which commercial interests can be pursued. By way of these discussions, the paper tries to deal with issues of importance to the further development of an historically-oriented anthropology.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Uruguay experienced a dual process of denationalization that occurred when economic and political crisis culminated in a repressive military dictatorship. Denationalization involved actual flight from the country (exilio) or retreat into private worlds (insilio or ‘internal exile’). The oppressive coercion of the dictators stripped Uruguayans of their individual rights and put approximately one in six of them into prison, where many were tortured. The dictators not only abandoned the ideals that had united Uruguayans, but also the social welfare system that they had constructed. The return of democracy has not reversed the experience of denationalization. The economy has not recovered and many returning exiliados re-migrated when they were unable to find employment. Politically, individual rights have been circumscribed by amnesty laws that have given complete impunity to the former military and pontical élite. At present, insiliados and victims of state repression are collecting evidence to seek legal redress in third-country prosecutions, while human rights activists are pursuing transnational strategies to recover legal rights at home. From across national boundaries, the diaspora community has been instrumental in achieving this goal by providing the necessary links to international bodies. It remains to be seen whether this attempt to recover individual rights will help in the reconstruction of Uruguayan national citizenship and identity.

Singapore is an Asian city-state in which the contradictions of becoming modern are seemingly resolved by state-directed technological or technocratic means. Its post-colonial urbanism represents a radical statist modernity that seems to be part of a now-lost world of liberal and Enlightenment confidence and that has been achieved in an illiberal political environment open to globalization. It is necessary to understand what it means when the West’ becomes part of a self-administered and not neo-colonialist process of modernization, one in which cultural translation has effectively taken place. This statist modernization, though, is not one necessarily fully embraced by the city-state’s population. There are now assertions of the importance of’culture (only recently considered by the government to be a resource useful for economic development) which, in the case of recent fums that try to reflect local identity, demand both a ‘Westernization’ and an ‘Asianization’ of depth, rather than of surfaces, to gain what might be described as other experiences of the present’ apart from the dominant economism. The globalized ‘condition’ is a multi-layered one. In Singapore—modernization in its pure form—the forces of modernity are enlisted against the demands of modernism. . . . [It] has adopted only the mechanistic, rationalistic program and developed it to an unprecedented perfection in a climate of streamlined ‘smoothness’ generated by shedding modernism’s artistic, irrational, uncontrollable, subversive ambitions—revolution without agony. Rem Koolhaas (1995) (1)

Recent books discussed in this article include Richard Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes: Studies in History (London: St. Martin’s Press and New York: Macmillan, 2000), 217 pp., Hb. ISBN 0 312 23523 2; Thomas Gallant, Modern Greece (London: Arnold, 2001), 320 pp., Pb, ISBN 0 340 76337 X; Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 272 pp., Pb. ISBN 0 691 08902; Mark Mazower, ed., After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943-1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 352 pp., Pb. ISBN 0 691 05842 3; Robert Shannan Peckham, National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London: I. B.Tauris, 2001), 256 pp., Hb. ISBN 1 860 64641 7. I woke up with this marble head in my hands; it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down. It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to disunite again. George Seferis, “Mythistorima,” pt. 3.1‬

This paper argues that contemporary international human rights have traditionally been marked by a conceptual and structural imbalance between the relative recognition and enforceability of civil and political rights, on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights, on the Other. This disequilibrium is inherently unstable and unsustainable, producing a ‘poverty of rights’ amid the unprecedented globalization of concentrated wealth and generalized misery, and is historically grounded in the dialectics of the origin of international human rights law in the intertwined processes of the European conquest of the Americas—colonialism, imperialism and slavery—and their epistemological implications. The issue of social justice is addressed in this context and explored in terms of its importance for the duality between neglected rights and neglected peoples, With emphasis on the case of indigenous peoples in Latin America. The paper further argues that there is an emerging paradigm of ‘international poverty law’ rooted in the demands of 80% of the world’s population for the satisfaction of their basic human needs and reflected in efforts to secure recognition for a ‘new international economic order,’ the ‘right to development’ and, more recently, the construction of a new ‘global moral economy, as set forth in critiques of the devastation of ‘neoliberal’ globalization.‬

The aim of this paper is to examine how a society such as Cambodia’s, which has undergone massive trauma, might heal and, in particular, whether traditional healers can help With the healing. The paper draws upon a participant observation of more than 1,100 healers carried out over 12 years in order to reveal how various forms of traditional healing instill illness and suffering With meaning and how the Khmer Rouge manipulated and reconstructed local explanatory models of illness to reflect their fundamentalist ideology. It describes the fate of traditional healers under Pol Pot and examines the cultural meanings assigned to mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases (including AIDS) and malaria by both traditional healers and Khmer Rouge cadres. As Pol Pot showed, the dismantling of systems that provide social justice is most effectively done by those Who know the culture. This paper asks whether the retooling of social justice might also be most effectively handled by the traditional harbingers of cultural meaning, namely, the healers. The challenge posed by the ‘outbreak of peace’ matches the one that accompanied war. In Cambodia, it encompasses alarming new incarnations of trauma as AIDS sweeps the country, parents traffic daughters, children Shoot parents, lovers hurl acid and youths descend into Ecstasy. ‬

The field of international psychosocial response to disaster and massive violence has much to contribute to an understanding of the social impact of the September 1 terrorist attacks and subsequent events in New York City. The author presents lessons learned from his experience in Kosovo and other international contexts that have been applied to promoting collective recovery in the his own Ground Zero community in lower Manhattan. Programs that promote healing in trauma-affected communities may contain a number of themes. First, they bring people together to promote positive connections as a foundation for social support, education and access to existing resources. Second, these programs can provide opportunities for people to organize their experience and emotions and tell their stories in ways that can be affirmed by the community. Third, these programs can facilitate conversations, which shift the focus from stressful experiences and haunting memories to affirmation of strengths, problem-solving and positive visions of the future. And, fourth, people can come together to reaffirm their connection to nature, spirit, the seasons, holidays and other events, which are life-affirming and growth-promoting. One of the challenges faced has been the shifting of the dominant discourse of institutions and funders from one that focuses primarily upon a medicalized view of psychological trauma to one that recognizes and enhances the inherent strengths and resilience of individuals, families, communities and cultures to recover from such events.‬

Sorcery in Sri Lanka is entirely about human suffering and issues of personal injustice, which are viewed in terms of cosmological/mythological conceptions of the state and its transition from a pre-Buddhist to a Buddhist socio-political order. This paper argues that personal injustices and self-perceptions of individuals as victims are grasped through conceptions of sorcery as a failure in the moral order of state and society. Sorcery discourses in Sri Lanka are concerned with the remoralization of social processes. This is particularly true in the contemporary circumstances of globalization and nationalism. The paper presents information on the emergence of innovative sorcery shrines (thoroughgoing inventions of colonialism and post-coloniality) in the mainly urban contexts of contemporary Sri Lanka. One critical implication of the argument that is presented here is that contemporary political developments have crented a moral crisis in the order of the Sinhala Buddhist state. Paradoxically, the emergence of new forms of sorcerous activities- and the persistence of long-term ones dire intended to bring the state and its agents and agencies (which are seen as being at the root of personal distress, injustice and suffering) back within an encompassing moral order in which injustice is ultimately redressed and suffering and overcome.‬