Abstract
This chapter explores how postwar transformations in northeastern Sri Lanka were being interpreted among diverse fisher collectives through locally grounded ideas of entropy or socioecological and moral decline and collapse. At its core, the chapter delves into how creeping depletion of fish catch size, politicised rule breaking and other forms of resource utilisation that were at times ambivalently construed in the light of postwar “liberalisation” are characterised by new material circulations of trade, labour and capital. Within this dynamic landscape of resource exploitation and perceived overfishing, implicating locals, migrants and settlers in diverse ways, the chapter focuses on two intertwined social practices that were intimately bound with the micropolitics of wartime. These entailed the interrelated dynamics of small-scale‘piracy’ and the incidence of kappam (a localised form of rent-seeking) that came to be associated with the northeast’s lucrative purse-seine fishery operations that grew markedly since the turn of the postwar decade.
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.
Fieldnotes: March 3, 2013, Kantale town.
- 2.
Fieldnotes, July 14, 2012, Town and Gravets.
- 3.
Fieldnotes: August 11, 2012, Irrakakandy.
- 4.
The sentience of living things often emerges as a dominant theme when discussing the morals of extraction and killing, and these cut across fishers’ diverse religious belief systems. The extraction of live shellfish and anchovies, for example, is seen to have a lower ethical impact than larger fish that need to be grappled with, for example, sharks or stingray. Typically mammalian species (dolphins and dugongs) as well as sea turtles are perceived as higher-order beings for their ability to express pain and emotion.
- 5.
Despite the marked polarisation in debates that sought to explain the declining fortunes of local small-scale fishers, official discourses concerning the way forward have largely fallen within three dominant tropes. First, changes in livelihood decline have been framed as a technological problem, with respect to ostensible capitalisation gaps, further augmented by legislative discourses on rule making and the establishment of universally applied norms across coastlines. As internally diverse as their narratives may be, they raise normative questions about the “rational” exploitation of resources, cloaked in the nomenclature of managerial logic.
- 6.
In this context, liberalisation is not taken to mean deregulation in a neoliberal sense. It alludes more to a relaxation of wartime restrictions.
- 7.
During comparative visits to Batticaloa, areas like Kalapadu were witnessing an expansion of local markets that were dialectically associated with recent increases in local petty fish traders and mudalalis . In part, this meant that fish, particularly from small-scale migrant camps , were not always iced, packed and sent across the island to densely populated urban spaces but were sold within the district itself.
- 8.
Locally, the term “coolie” or kuli is often used to refer to beach-seine workers. Given its emergence as a derogatory colonial term used to refer to indentured Asian migrant labour across the British Empire, I use the local term kuli to signify both its linkages and separation from the former category. Kuli (Tamil and Sinhala) meaning paid work often used to refer to casual waged labourers. Though arguably the term does not have the same derogatory overtones of its colonial variation, it is still used to refer to an unskilled workforce, usually males who engage in heavy work, from harbour workers to field hands.
- 9.
This period was marked by displacement to areas of the Vanni, while some of the respondents settled in spaces such as Selvapuram, Matalan and Mullivaikal in the Mullaitivu District.
- 10.
Thanks go to Maarten Bavinck and Joeri Scholtens for sharing the preliminary findings of a survey in Jaffna.
- 11.
Among these, 40.2% stated that their household economic situation remained the same. As all the respondents indicated fishing as their primary livelihood, this subgroup was seen to have diversified their incomes through other activity such as three-wheeler driving, livestock rearing and remittances from family members working abroad.
- 12.
Fisher’s exact test was used in establishing associations.
- 13.
These calculations have been adjusted for age effect.
- 14.
In other words, the probability of Muslims who expressed declines in landings was 70%.
- 15.
Entropy in scientific discourse in the field of thermodynamics used to measure states of disorder. The term seeped into narratives on environmental change to illustrate notions of socioecological collapse, degeneration and tipping points, very much within the lexicon of complex ecological systems (CES) thinking. Social philosophers like Levi Bryant have further reworked the concept to reflect upon fluid notions of work that take into account their more relational dynamics.
- 16.
Fieldnotes: 7 August, 2012, Town and Gravets.
- 17.
Fieldnotes, 12 March, 2013, Town and Gravets.
- 18.
See Hasrup’s (2011) study in a post-tsunami southern Indian fishing village that registers similar responses to catch decline. What this work does is render more “sophistication of local conceptualisations of calamity” in which disaster recovery is seen as an open-ended process (p. 14) and the tsunami itself as having ushered in a “new order” in which the climate, the depth of the sea, the fickleness of rains, the movement of fish, oceanic currents and winds all become conflated into narratives of unpredictability (p. 4).
- 19.
I was told the Norwegian vessel Fridtjof Nansen later began its work in 1987, but only in the south and southwest, using aerial surveys and satellite imagery. This was followed by the National Foundation’s checklist of species. However, marine scientists concur that there was little focus on breeding grounds, among other aspects. Taken together, both these studies are seen to be relatively threadbare and outdated.
- 20.
Deep-sea/multiday boat crewmembers and ornamental fish divers have been excluded.
- 21.
For example, with the expansion of the ornamental fish and sea cucumber trade, ethnically mixed villages like Manayaveli diversified their livelihoods with younger men training as deep-sea divers. Manayaveli has a long history of diving, particularly when taking into account skin diving. However, the professionalisation of its diving teams was more of a recent wartime shift, and its trajectory is interesting to trace particularly as those who took up diving were sons of older craft-based fishermen who saw their livelihood earnings decline during the armed conflict. Subsequently, local export companies took root in these villages that sent ethnically diverse diving crews to places in Batticaloa, Jaffna and Mannar. These were rather perceived as wartime developments, in order to break cycles of dependence from large commercial ornamental fish companies located in Negombo and Colombo.
- 22.
Fieldnotes: July 16, 2012, Pulmoddai.
- 23.
Conflicts often arose when padu spaces were locally contested for, not otherwise.
- 24.
In this context, artisanal fishing practices were determined by the use of non-mechanised gear and crafts.
- 25.
Fieldnotes: 12 September, 2012, Mullaitivu (village undisclosed).
- 26.
Note that the PTA was first instated in 1979. However, residents in Trincomalee felt it was applied with renewed vigour after the Rajapaksa regime gained power in 2006.
- 27.
Fieldnotes: 7 August, 2012, Town and Gravets.
- 28.
Fieldnotes: 5 March, 2013, Nilaveli.
- 29.
Fieldnotes: 28 August, 2012, Pulmoddai.
- 30.
Fieldnotes: July 16, 2012, Pulmoddai.
- 31.
In this context, the question did not directly ask if they ever paid kappam but was worded as whether they were compelled to make a payment or give something in kind for a service that otherwise would not have required such an exchange or were coerced into paying something in order to receive some form of protection or guarantee.
- 32.
However, a small proportion of migrant boaters indicated that they were at times accosted for kappam at local marketplaces.
- 33.
Fieldnotes, 7 August, 2012, Kinniya.
References
Chaaminda S (2012) Fishing in turbulent waters, ICES working paper no. 2, Colombo, International Center for Ethnic Studies
Hasrup F (2011) Weathering the World: Recovery in the Wake of the Tsunami in a Tamil Fishing Village. Berghahn Books, Oxford
Lambek M (2010) Towards an ethics of the act. In: Lambek M (ed) Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language and action. Fordham University Press, New York, pp 39–63
Malkki L (1995) Purity and exile: violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania. Chicago University Press, Chicago
Merlan F (2010) Ordinary ethics and changing cosmologies: exemplification from North Australia. In: Lambek M (ed) Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language and action. Fordham University Press, New York, pp 207–225
Scholtens J, Bavinck M (2014) Lessons for legal pluralism: investigating the challenges of transboundary fisheries governance. Curr Opin Environ Sustain 11:10–18
Scholtens J, Bavinck M, Soosai S (2012) Fishing in dire straits: trans-boundary incursions in the Palk Bay. Econ Polit Wkly XLVII(25):87–96
Weeratunge N (2010) Being Sadharana: talking about the just business person in Sri Lanka. In: Lambek M (ed) Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language and action. Fordham University Press, New York, pp 328–248
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. (2018). Change and Continuity After Wartime. In: Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood. MARE Publication Series, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78837-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78837-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-78836-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78837-1
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)