Once in a country there was a raksha [a dangerous spirit] and he was very foolish. People lived in houses with two stories. The people too were foolish and the raksha too. The raksha wife was very rich. She was brought to her husband’s house from a rich family. The raksha husband was poor and he got his wife because she was rich.

One day there was no rice for lunch. The raksha wife said, “This man brought me here and said that we would have everything we need, but see, there is not even a flower of a banana...

The previous chapter examined the ways Udahenagama people use idioms related to domestic conflict and violence to talk about more public or political forms of violence. For the purpose of this analysis, I have thus far extracted the discourse on the gaze of the wild from its social and political context. In this chapter I recontextualize this discourse within each of the five neighborhoods in which I worked and attempt thereby to reconstruct local histories of violence. I question in which ways the application of idioms typically used for domestic violence to a context of large-scale political violence affects the...

Before describing the characteristics of discourses about the wild in Chapters 5 and 6, I want first to set these discourses in the context of Udahenagama acoustic space. A discourse is not only a flow of information or a style of talking. Discourse is voiced; it sounds, resonates, and has a presence among all the other sounds that characterize daily life. Its enunciation thus crucially depends on the ways acoustic space in general is organized and experienced. In this chapter I reinsert verbal discourses into the general economy of sounds in order to be able to highlight the connections between...

In this chapter I look at the discursive strategies that are used when people refer to the wild and the terrifying and divulge or receive such potentially dangerous or illness-provoking messages. The following gives an initial impression of the type of communicative events I will describe:

[1] My husband’s father had three brothers and two sisters. One of them was from another father. His mother was one of three siblings. That uncle does not believe in the wild spirits. He only believes in Buddhism. He is called Perera. Before, when that “Mātin elder brother” was alive, he was the father...

He came back (from the front) because it seems to have been said that his mother said: “You should come home because I am scared.” (gossip about a deserter)

While in the previous chapters I discussed the discursive strategies that people use when speaking for themselves, in this chapter I analyze the ways in which Udahenagama people quote one another. Quoting is a game that is firmly woven into the fabric of discourses in many cultures. When trouble looms on the playground, the toddler quotes his father. Journalists quote cunning politicians and ethnographers quote the discipline’s forefathers to similar effect....

The question arises whether the discourses on violence I describe in Part II should be interpreted as one aspect of the cultural impact of the civil war or as styles of communication that existed prior to the violent conflict. In other words, are these particular discursive styles the outcome of a violent history—a response to violence and war—or were they normal before the war? Considering the long history of colonial and postcolonial violence in southern Sri Lanka, however (cf. Risseeuw 1988; Roberts 1990, 1994), the notion of a prewar era of peace is largely notional. Styles of acoustic...

The history of the Southern Province of Sri Lanka is replete with violent events. First colonial violence and then counter-insurgency violence terrified generations of civilians in the rural south. I refrain from using the term “culture of extreme violence” or “culture of terror” to refer to this situation of chronic violence. I find such terms misleading since they give the impression that the principal origin of violence and terror can be found locally, in a local culture. This is certainly not true in Udahenagama. In this final chapter I recapitulate some of the main ideas of my argument and conclude...