Abstract
Focusing on the practice of calling one’s male partner ayya (older brother) and the female partner nangi (younger sister), this chapter illustrates how my interlocutors positioned themselves within their relationships as women who nourish and men who protect, among other things. The structures of feeling that were associated with these terms helped them communicate the new roles they have founded for themselves to each other and well as the world who was witness to their relationship. Implanting the terms in the relationships and embedding the roles they found in the terms helped them ward off the generic-ness of forms of address such as ayya and nangi. When embedded in love relationships, such terms did the exact opposite for they became strong signifiers of the relationship and the roles these young men and women took on in these relationships.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I rely on Williams (1973) in my interpretation of an affective relational structure, where I am generalising Williams’ reference to structures of feeling that arise out of hegemonic cultural configurations that justify and maintain productive forces and relations between them and the resistance against these cultural configurations. My argument here is that kin terminology reflects such structures of feeling—cultural configurations that manage, justify and facilitate favoured affective relations.
- 2.
Many women I met did not fit this representation of a lāmaka, for the innocence associated with lāmaka insinuated dependency. Majority of the women I met were capable of and were fending for themselves; however, they resisted being labelled independent and tried to fit in with this expectation of being lāmaka, through yielding control over their business to close men, when possible, such as letting a male friend walk them home, if they offered.
- 3.
These acts and expectations highlight that as Zelizer (2007) argues, intimacy and money/economy are not incompatible and competing phenomena as most social theorists assume it to be, but that monetary exchanges form an important element in relational work most individuals engage in intimate social transactions.
- 4.
While Collier and Yanagisako invited anthropologists to analyse social wholes with a view of questioning the universally assumed difference between men and women and its implied association with gendered hierarchies, works such as Abu-Lughod (2000) and Rajeha and Gold (1994) point to intricate workings of compliance and defiance to gendered restrictions managed and maintained through kinship networks.
- 5.
Buses are the cheapest mode of transport in Sri Lanka. There are state-run buses as well as those managed by private operators. While there is no great difference in cost of single tickets in state-run and private-run buses, private-run buses tend to be more frequent but do not support concessional fares such as season tickets.
- 6.
My interlocutors did not seem fazed by the fact that most university students did not manage to secure employment, let alone prestigious employment after the completion of their degrees. In their imagination, as did most Sri Lankans, tertiary education appeared as a ladder for upward mobility . The logic seems to follow that, ‘for us, it will be different’ and they enhanced their employability by acquiring other skills and trainings.
- 7.
Fair & Lovely is a brand name that has become synonymous for “fairness cream”, which promises lighter tone of skin as a result of its frequent use. For as long as I remember, in Sri Lanka, this particular brand carried out rather brutal advertisement campaigns, which portrayed women with darker skin being denied of diverse social privileges—such as marriage or jobs—because of the colour of their skin.
- 8.
- 9.
Sinhalese use the coinage ‘foreign country’ to refer to overseas countries, more often than not, Western countries.
- 10.
E. S. Ruwanpura (2011) presents similar accounts of women’s experiences where they encounter social criticism if they had countered social expectations of womanly dispositions.
- 11.
I will return to the topic of baya næthi kama and its associations with violence in Sri Lankan society later in the book.
- 12.
Aravinda’s sense of victimhood seems quite similar to that which Chisholm (2014) describes, where she cites a range of case studies to illustrate that masculinities are diverse and that men could become victimised through the prevalence of a single omnipotent sense of masculinity and the expectations out of it.
References
Abu-lughod, L. (2000). Veiled sentiments: Honor and poetry in a Bedouin society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bloch, M. (1971). The moral and tactical meaning of kinship terms. Man, 6(1), new series, 79–87.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York and London: Routledge.
Carsten, J. (1995). The substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth: Feeding, personhood, and relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi. American Ethnologist, 22(2), 223–241.
Chisholm, A. (2014). The silenced and indispensible. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16(1), 26–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.781441.
Das, V. (2007). Life and words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
De Mel, N. (2001). Women and the nation’s narrative: Gender and nationalism in twentieth century Sri Lanka. Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association.
Dumont, L. (1953). 54. The Dravidian kinship terminology as an expression of marriage. Man, 53, 34–39.
Dumont, L. (1957). Hierarchy and alliance in South Indian kinship. London: Royal Anthropological Institute.
Jeganathan, P. (2000). A space for violence: Anthropology, politics and the location of a Sinhala practice of masculinity. In P. Chatterjee & P. Jeganathan (Eds.), Subaltern studies XI: Community, gender and violence. New Delhi: Permanent Black and Ravi Dayal.
Menon, R., & Bhasin, K. (1998). Borders and boundaries. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Rajeha, G. G., & Gold, A. G. (1994). Listen to the Heron’s words: Reimagining gender and kinship in north India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ruwanpura, E. S. (2011). Sex or sensibility?: The making of chaste women and promiscuous men in a Sri Lankan university setting (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh.
Stirrat, R. L. (1977). Dravidian and non-Dravidian kinship terminologies in Sri Lanka. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 11(2), 271–293.
Swidler, A. (2001). Talk of love: How culture matters. Chicago and London: University of Chicago press.
Williams, R. (1973). The country and the city. New York: Oxford University Press.
Yalman, N.(1962). The structure of the Sinhalese kindred: A re-examination of the Dravidian terminology. American Anthropologist, 64(3), 548–575. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/667927.
Yalman, N. (1967). Under the bo tree: Studies in caste, kinship and marriage in the interior of Ceylon. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and nation. London: Sage.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sirisena, M. (2018). Ayyas and Nangis in Love. In: The Making and Meaning of Relationships in Sri Lanka. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76336-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76336-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76335-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76336-1
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)