How does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make
sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without
compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can
he remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is
engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage
Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in
contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel "walked into the ashes and
mortal residue" of the violence that had occurred in his homeland.
His planned project--the study of women's folk songs as
ethnohistory--was immediately displaced by the responsibility that
he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and
friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen
and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place
and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior,
what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances
to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he
write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author's
term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence? In
avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he
avoid flattening it with theory? The ways in which Daniel grapples
with these questions, and their answers, instill this
groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and
intellect.
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