Abstract
One of the greatest challenges for humans in this age of conflict is how to live together with at least the minimum degree of security and harmony. I once heard a Palestinian film-maker say to an audience in Delhi that he was tired of being asked how Palestinians and Israelis could live together because they already lived together. While the outside world sees only tension, there exists, even in this fraught region, an everyday practice of living together.
Anton Piyarathne’s book Constructing Commongrounds: Everyday Lifeworlds Beyond Politicised Ethnicities in Sri Lanka intervenes on this question at a time when entire regions of the globe are engulfed in crises around immigration, minorities, refugee flows and genocide. Sri Lanka’s own recent past has been marked by Tamil–Sinhala conflict that only ended with the state’s resort to indiscriminate violence. But, for Piyarathne, the question is not the more common place one of why the Sinhala majority and Tamil minority do not get along but how they have lived together for as long as they have. According to Piyarathne, both the state and academic researchers (including the late Stanley Tambiah) have tended to overemphasise ethnic division and strife. He argues that the two communities have lived together and cooperated while continuously transgressing ethnic lines via the creation of ‘commongrounds’ that lie at the heart of an everyday work and life of ethnicity (p. 12). He sees his task as rendering these hitherto ‘invisible commongrounds visible’ (p. 2). So what is a ‘commonground’ according to Piyarathne? It is a survival strategy. It is a solution to an ethnic problem that is primarily a political creation. It is the creative use of shared ‘embodied’ and ‘enminded’ understandings of the social and material world by Sri Lankans of different ethnic groups (pp. 7, 8). These commongrounds are not static or tension free and are not necessarily passed down generationally. But, as they evolve, they are a source of some of the most creative thinking around the business of living together.
In Chapter 1, Piyarathne reviews the theoretical literature on ethnic strife and concludes that ethnic identity is situational and contextual, and that boundaries between ethnicities are more about the denial of cultural resemblance than about establishing cultural difference. Moreover, the conduct of everyday life challenges the Sri Lankan nationalist metanarrative of antagonistic ethnic identities.
Chapter 2 recounts a familiar history of colonial knowledge highlighting caste, ethnicity and division. This, intertwined with the political history of post-independent Sri Lanka, makes for a fascinating account of the ways in which colonial attempts to ‘understand’ Sri Lankan society resulted in ‘communalization’ around ethnicity. The colonisers, colonial native elites, and after independence in 1948, the political class, exploited ethnicity for political gain.
Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 test, elaborate and illustrate his commongrounds thesis. He looks at four different locales—Crow Island, the De Mel Watta neighbourhood, Panama and Pottuvil villages—covering the entire spectrum of ethnicity and class. The middle-class, English-speaking, multi-ethnic residents of Crow Island meet at events like picnics and in shared spaces of leisure like the beach. By strategically avoiding inflammatory talk of politics and sharing different cuisines, the residents create commongrounds and embodied habits of living together. At the other end of the spectrum, the residents of De Mel Watta create commongrounds in ‘unorganized’ ways to forge a social life in their shanty town despite tension over limited resources, through the use of kinship terminology, and inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriages. In Panama village, Tamils and Sinhalas live in such close proximity that a tremendous degree of ‘resemblance’ has emerged between the two cultures. Again, caste, marriage, kinship and religious practices lead to commongrounds. Of all these locales, Pottuvil is the most marked by the Tamil–Muslim–Sinhala ethnic tension. Yet, members of all communities have similar moral codes, aesthetic tastes, marriage rituals and kinship systems and assist each other in times of need such as when the Tsunami hit in December 2004.
In his summary of his research findings in the concluding chapter of the book, Piyarathne writes that he does not have a ‘magic formula’ for peace but emphasises the importance of understanding how diverse ethnic groups live and engage with each other on a daily basis in different locales even while the dominant ethno-nationalist narrative suggests hardened ethnic boundaries and hostility.
In in this project, he is largely successful. Yet, one is still left wondering how to reconcile the two stories—one of horrific inter-ethnic violence, and the other of living together and forging successful social worlds. Too often, Piyarathne falls back on the model of ‘outsider’ forces in the shape of political parties with their ethno-nationalist rhetoric as the main culprits in inter-ethnic strife. Moreover, there are clear fault lines within the communities he examine. For instance, in the case of Panama, he makes the contentious claim that caste acts as a stabilising force—all residents respect caste hierarchies, irrespective of their ethnicity. While caste might result in a certain social stability, it surely cannot be without tension. Similarly, he contends that Buddhist Sinhalas and Hindu Tamils in Pottuvil are united in their general anti-Muslim sentiment. Being attentive to commongrounds need not be to the neglect of fault lines, ethnic or otherwise.
This book is full of interesting stories, anecdotes and insights. For instance, in his chapter on Crow Island, he provides a fascinating history of the beach. His description of the Ankeliya festivities, the ‘Greased Devil’ scare and commodity exchange around the betel nut are just a few further examples. Occasionally, the reader may feel like parts of the book needed a little more time to ripen. With his clear sense of urgency in putting out his research, one casualty has been sharper editing.
Piyarathne’s work is strongest when he is recounting the stories of individuals and their negotiation or negation of difference in each of his locales. Stories of the ordinariness of warm interactions between people abound in this book. We can only hope that more such studies of the Indian subcontinent illuminate similar stories of commongrounds in times of intense sectarian and ethnic conflict. Piyarathne’s is a timely reminder that people have lived together peacefully for longer than they have not and that it is possible to effectively theorise that fact.