In Sri Lanka, staggering numbers of young men were killed
fighting in the armed forces against Tamil separatists. The war
became one of attrition-year after year waves of young foot
soldiers were sent to almost certain death in a war so bloody that
the very names of the most famous battle scenes still fill people
with horror. Alex Argenti-Pillen describes the social fabric of a
rural community that has become a breeding ground and reservoir of
soldiers for the Sri Lankan nation-state, arguing that this
reservoir has been created on the basis of a culture of poverty and
terror.
Focusing on the involvement of the pseudonymous village of
Udahenagama in the atrocities of the civil war of the late 1980s
and the interethnic war against the Tamil guerrillas, Masking
Terror describes the response of women in the rural slums of
southern Sri Lanka to the further spread of violence. To
reconstruct the violent backgrounds of these soldiers, she presents
the stories of their mothers, sisters, wives, and grandmothers,
providing a perspective on the conflict between Sinhalese and Tamil
populations not found elsewhere.
In addition to interpreting the impact of high levels of violence
on a small community, Argenti-Pillen questions the effects of
trauma counseling services brought by the international
humanitarian community into war-torn non-Western cultural contexts.
Her study shows how Euro-American methods for dealing with
traumatized survivors poses a threat to the culture-specific
methods local women use to contain violence.
Masking Terror provides a sobering introduction to the
difficulties and methodological problems field researchers, social
scientists, human rights activists, and mental health workers face
in working with victims and perpetrators of ethnic and political
violence and large-scale civil war. The narratives of the women
from Udahenagama provide necessary insight into how survivors of
wartime atrocities reconstruct their communicative worlds and
disrupt the cycle of violence in ways that may be foreign to
Euro-American professionals.
eISBN: 978-0-8122-0115-4
Subjects: Anthropology
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