Sharika Thiranagama
Biographic Data
| ID | 3584552 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sharika Thiranagama |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sharika |
| FAMILY NAME | Thiranagama |
| SIGNATURE | THIRANAGAMA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 115 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
A Landscape of War (Munira Khayyat 2022)
Khayyat, Munira. 2022. A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon. Oakland: University of California Press
The Time of the Migrant
I measure every Grief I meetWith narrow, probing, eyes—I wonder if It weighs like Mine—Or has an Easier size.I wonder if They bore it long—Or did it just begin—I could not tell the Date of Mine—It feels so old a pain——Emily Dickinson, “I measure every Grief I meet”Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived.—John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as PhotosWriting my dissertation in my small studio apartment in Edi…
Figures of Menace: Militarisation in Post-War Sri Lanka
In 2011, Sri Lanka experienced a wave of ‘grease devil’ attacks—men covered in grease assaulting women. In minority Tamil and Muslim areas, these incidents provoked vigilantism and clashes between locals and the police and the military. This essay examines these incidents through situating them in histories of intense militarisation and current post-war anxieties for ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka. Drawing inspiration from anthropologist James Si…
The names of the leader: The Political Deification of Prabhakaran
This essay investigates the deification of Prabhakaran, the leader of the Sri Lankan Tamil insurrectionary group, the LTTE. I describe the centrality of death in the ideological economy of the LTTE, with the leader Prabhakaran as the love-object who consecrated and directed such death. Following Ernesto Laclau, I propose that a chain of equivalences is forged in LTTE ideology: to get to Tamil Eelam is to love Prabhakaran. While Tamil militancy’s …
Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate
Reviewed by: Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate Sharika Thiranagama Bernard Bate. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia. E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 264 pp. In 2016, when Bernard Bate passed away, he left beh…
Rural civilities
This chapter investigates how public life in Kerala is shaped by spatially distributed gendered caste practices. The chapter first investigates rural publics, such as rural libraries, and suggests that forms of progressive civility in seemingly caste-free associational publics should be understood not as the elimination of caste practices but their reconstitution. Second, while it is commonly accepted that caste is naturally practised in the ‘pri…
Afterword: "A "Division of Laborers
Rural Civilities: Caste, Gender and Public Life in Kerala
This essay investigates how public life in Kerala is shaped by spatially distributed gendered caste practices. The essay first investigates rural publics, such as rural libraries, and suggests that forms of progressive civility in seemingly caste-free associational publics should be understood not as the elimination of caste practices but their reconstitution. Second, while it is commonly accepted that caste is naturally practised in the ‘private…
Respect Your Neighbor as Yourself: Neighborliness, Caste, and Community in South India
This essay explores a global and existential problem-how ordinary people live and contend with historically deep subordination, humiliation, and exclusion-through an examination of the everyday lives of formerly untouchable caste Dalit communities in Kerala, India. I look at this through the lens of neighborliness: how people discuss how theylive togetherwith other castes and classes in small town and rural Kerala. Their continuing struggles with…
Introduction: Whose civility
This article is an introduction to this special issue on civility. It asks what can anthropological insights contribute to debates about civility? We propose to understand civility as a "worldly concept." We mean this in two senses. First, it is a concept that has traction in the world: a concern with civility and incivility can be found equally in public debate as in academic work. Second, civility is worldly in a more Arendtian sense. For Hanna…
The civility of strangers? Caste, ethnicity, and living together in postwar Jaffna, Sri Lanka
The question asked by this article is as follows: How do different kinds of people live together in a hierarchical world that has been challenged and transformed through the leveling effects of deep ethnicization and war? I examine two different kinds of relationships in contemporary postwar Jaffna: first, an inter-ethnic, external Tamil/Muslim division that has led to people relating to each other as categorical strangers; and second, an intra-e…
Sri Lanka's Lingering State of War
Civil war ended in mass slaughter five years ago. Since then, the militarization of Sri Lankan society has intensified, and violence against civilians continues
Political Crime and the Memory of LossJohnBorneman (Bloomington): Indiana University Press2012
Making Tigers from Tamils: Long-Distance Nationalism and Sri Lankan Tamils in Toronto
This article discusses the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto and its relationship to the Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Taking the case of the Sri Lankan Tamils, oft-cited as the example par excellence of long-distance nationalism, I argue against naturalizing diasporic ethnonationalism to investigate instead how diasporas are fashioned into specific kinds of actors. I examine tensions that emerged as an e…
Claiming the State: Postwar Reconciliation in Sri Lanka
Civil war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009 with the military defeat of the separatist LTTE. International and local pressure around war crime allegations and the lack of political reform subsequently forced the state to initiate the 2010 Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission. This essay first takes the LLRC and the minority response to it to argue that this reconciliation process in Sri Lanka is very little about ethnic reconciliation between co…
The Self at a Time of War in Northern Sri Lanka
The article takes one young Tamil woman, Vasantha, and her account of growing up in the northern war zone of Jaffna in Sri Lanka. Vasantha's narrative and her adolescence, like others of her generation, was framed by living at the margins of the Sri Lankan state (though under its bombardment) and under the control of a repressive quasi-state actor, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In this article, I twin Vasantha's fashioning of her l…
A Railway to the Moon: The post-histories of a Sri Lankan railway line
This paper takes as its subject the 1905 opening and 1990 closure of the Northern Railway Line, the major Sri Lankan railway which ran the length of the island from south to north. It argues that it can been seen as a social compact in which the life of the individual, the community, and the state became integrally intertwined. It focuses on two dimensions of what the Northern Railway Line enabled in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon): first, a physical…
In My Mother's House: Civil War in Sri Lanka
Note on Transliteration Foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere Introduction 1. Growing Up at War: Self Formation, Individuality, and the LTTE 2. The House of Secrets: Mothers, Daughters, and Inheritance 3. From Muslims to Northern Muslims: Ethnicity, Eviction, and Displacement 4. Becoming of This Place? Northern Muslim Futures After Eviction 5. The Generation of Militancy: Generation, Gender, and Self-Transformation 6.
Ethnic entanglements: The BBC Tamil and Sinhala services amidst the civil war in Sri Lanka
The BBC has a major presence within the Sri Lankan media landscape and is a critical commentator on its long-standing ethnic conflict. In this article, the BBC’s two regional language services in Sri Lanka, BBC Tamil and BBC Sinhala, are examined. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in BBC Tamil and Sinhala Services at Bush House in London, and archival research at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre (WAC) in Caversham, UK, the article suggests that th…
Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building
This volume examines political, ethnic, and personal trust and betrayals in modern times from Mozambique to the Taiwan Straits, from the former Eastern Bloc to the West Bank, revealing that treachery is a constant and essential part of the processes through which social and political order is reproduced.
In Praise of Traitors: Intimacy, Betrayal, and the Sri Lankan Tamil Community
Introduction – South Asian diasporas and the BBC World Service: Contacts, conflicts, and contestations
This article sets out the analytical framework of this special issue and outlines the development of BBC radio broadcasting in South Asia. It analyses the ways in which the BBC in South Asia is integrally and indissolubly intertwined with ‘critical events’ and shifting geopolitical priorities: from the imperial and diasporic imaginings of the Empire Service, to its dissolution and the expansion of South Asian language services during World War II…
Partitioning the BBC: From colonial to postcolonial broadcaster
This article explores the BBC's transition from colonial to postcolonial broadcaster in South Asia from 1940 to 1955. It argues that the BBC occupied a special place within the subcontinent in its own, and others' imaginations, by virtue of its (disavowed) yet (for it) productive colonial origins. The article focuses in particular on the Indian staff of the BBC pre and post independence and takes the BBC as a hierarchically constituted but creati…
A new morning
Charting the life course of Malathi, a young Sri Lankan Tamil woman, this article attempts to discuss the ways in which people and places in Sri Lanka are remade through experiences of violence. The article suggests moving away from a notion of 'home' as fixed on one place; instead, it considers the movement of people between different places. Further, it suggests that senses of home are also embedded within uneasy, constantly negotiated relation…
Introduction: Whose civility
This article is an introduction to this special issue on civility. It asks what can anthropological insights contribute to debates about civility? We propose to understand civility as a "worldly concept." We mean this in two senses. First, it is a concept that has traction in the world: a concern with civility and incivility can be found equally in public debate as in academic work. Second, civility is worldly in a more Arendtian sense. For Hanna…
Making Tigers from Tamils: Long-Distance Nationalism and Sri Lankan Tamils in Toronto
This article discusses the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto and its relationship to the Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Taking the case of the Sri Lankan Tamils, oft-cited as the example par excellence of long-distance nationalism, I argue against naturalizing diasporic ethnonationalism to investigate instead how diasporas are fashioned into specific kinds of actors. I examine tensions that emerged as an e…
Claiming the State: Postwar Reconciliation in Sri Lanka
Civil war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009 with the military defeat of the separatist LTTE. International and local pressure around war crime allegations and the lack of political reform subsequently forced the state to initiate the 2010 Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission. This essay first takes the LLRC and the minority response to it to argue that this reconciliation process in Sri Lanka is very little about ethnic reconciliation between co…
In My Mother's House: Civil War in Sri Lanka
Note on Transliteration Foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere Introduction 1. Growing Up at War: Self Formation, Individuality, and the LTTE 2. The House of Secrets: Mothers, Daughters, and Inheritance 3. From Muslims to Northern Muslims: Ethnicity, Eviction, and Displacement 4. Becoming of This Place? Northern Muslim Futures After Eviction 5. The Generation of Militancy: Generation, Gender, and Self-Transformation 6.
Respect Your Neighbor as Yourself: Neighborliness, Caste, and Community in South India
This essay explores a global and existential problem-how ordinary people live and contend with historically deep subordination, humiliation, and exclusion-through an examination of the everyday lives of formerly untouchable caste Dalit communities in Kerala, India. I look at this through the lens of neighborliness: how people discuss how theylive togetherwith other castes and classes in small town and rural Kerala. Their continuing struggles with…
The Self at a Time of War in Northern Sri Lanka
The article takes one young Tamil woman, Vasantha, and her account of growing up in the northern war zone of Jaffna in Sri Lanka. Vasantha's narrative and her adolescence, like others of her generation, was framed by living at the margins of the Sri Lankan state (though under its bombardment) and under the control of a repressive quasi-state actor, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In this article, I twin Vasantha's fashioning of her l…
Ethnic entanglements: The BBC Tamil and Sinhala services amidst the civil war in Sri Lanka
The BBC has a major presence within the Sri Lankan media landscape and is a critical commentator on its long-standing ethnic conflict. In this article, the BBC’s two regional language services in Sri Lanka, BBC Tamil and BBC Sinhala, are examined. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in BBC Tamil and Sinhala Services at Bush House in London, and archival research at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre (WAC) in Caversham, UK, the article suggests that th…
A Railway to the Moon: The post-histories of a Sri Lankan railway line
This paper takes as its subject the 1905 opening and 1990 closure of the Northern Railway Line, the major Sri Lankan railway which ran the length of the island from south to north. It argues that it can been seen as a social compact in which the life of the individual, the community, and the state became integrally intertwined. It focuses on two dimensions of what the Northern Railway Line enabled in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon): first, a physical…
Rural Civilities: Caste, Gender and Public Life in Kerala
This essay investigates how public life in Kerala is shaped by spatially distributed gendered caste practices. The essay first investigates rural publics, such as rural libraries, and suggests that forms of progressive civility in seemingly caste-free associational publics should be understood not as the elimination of caste practices but their reconstitution. Second, while it is commonly accepted that caste is naturally practised in the ‘private…
The civility of strangers? Caste, ethnicity, and living together in postwar Jaffna, Sri Lanka
The question asked by this article is as follows: How do different kinds of people live together in a hierarchical world that has been challenged and transformed through the leveling effects of deep ethnicization and war? I examine two different kinds of relationships in contemporary postwar Jaffna: first, an inter-ethnic, external Tamil/Muslim division that has led to people relating to each other as categorical strangers; and second, an intra-e…
Figures of Menace: Militarisation in Post-War Sri Lanka
In 2011, Sri Lanka experienced a wave of ‘grease devil’ attacks—men covered in grease assaulting women. In minority Tamil and Muslim areas, these incidents provoked vigilantism and clashes between locals and the police and the military. This essay examines these incidents through situating them in histories of intense militarisation and current post-war anxieties for ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka. Drawing inspiration from anthropologist James Si…
The names of the leader: The Political Deification of Prabhakaran
This essay investigates the deification of Prabhakaran, the leader of the Sri Lankan Tamil insurrectionary group, the LTTE. I describe the centrality of death in the ideological economy of the LTTE, with the leader Prabhakaran as the love-object who consecrated and directed such death. Following Ernesto Laclau, I propose that a chain of equivalences is forged in LTTE ideology: to get to Tamil Eelam is to love Prabhakaran. While Tamil militancy’s …
A new morning
Charting the life course of Malathi, a young Sri Lankan Tamil woman, this article attempts to discuss the ways in which people and places in Sri Lanka are remade through experiences of violence. The article suggests moving away from a notion of 'home' as fixed on one place; instead, it considers the movement of people between different places. Further, it suggests that senses of home are also embedded within uneasy, constantly negotiated relation…
A new morning
Charting the life course of Malathi, a young Sri Lankan Tamil woman, this article attempts to discuss the ways in which people and places in Sri Lanka are remade through experiences of violence. The article suggests moving away from a notion of 'home' as fixed on one place; instead, it considers the movement of people between different places. Further, it suggests that senses of home are also embedded within uneasy, constantly negotiated relation…
Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building
This volume examines political, ethnic, and personal trust and betrayals in modern times from Mozambique to the Taiwan Straits, from the former Eastern Bloc to the West Bank, revealing that treachery is a constant and essential part of the processes through which social and political order is reproduced.
In Praise of Traitors: Intimacy, Betrayal, and the Sri Lankan Tamil Community
Introduction – South Asian diasporas and the BBC World Service: Contacts, conflicts, and contestations
This article sets out the analytical framework of this special issue and outlines the development of BBC radio broadcasting in South Asia. It analyses the ways in which the BBC in South Asia is integrally and indissolubly intertwined with ‘critical events’ and shifting geopolitical priorities: from the imperial and diasporic imaginings of the Empire Service, to its dissolution and the expansion of South Asian language services during World War II…
Partitioning the BBC: From colonial to postcolonial broadcaster
This article explores the BBC's transition from colonial to postcolonial broadcaster in South Asia from 1940 to 1955. It argues that the BBC occupied a special place within the subcontinent in its own, and others' imaginations, by virtue of its (disavowed) yet (for it) productive colonial origins. The article focuses in particular on the Indian staff of the BBC pre and post independence and takes the BBC as a hierarchically constituted but creati…
In My Mother's House: Civil War in Sri Lanka
Note on Transliteration Foreword by Gananath Obeyesekere Introduction 1. Growing Up at War: Self Formation, Individuality, and the LTTE 2. The House of Secrets: Mothers, Daughters, and Inheritance 3. From Muslims to Northern Muslims: Ethnicity, Eviction, and Displacement 4. Becoming of This Place? Northern Muslim Futures After Eviction 5. The Generation of Militancy: Generation, Gender, and Self-Transformation 6.
Ethnic entanglements: The BBC Tamil and Sinhala services amidst the civil war in Sri Lanka
The BBC has a major presence within the Sri Lankan media landscape and is a critical commentator on its long-standing ethnic conflict. In this article, the BBC’s two regional language services in Sri Lanka, BBC Tamil and BBC Sinhala, are examined. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in BBC Tamil and Sinhala Services at Bush House in London, and archival research at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre (WAC) in Caversham, UK, the article suggests that th…
A Railway to the Moon: The post-histories of a Sri Lankan railway line
This paper takes as its subject the 1905 opening and 1990 closure of the Northern Railway Line, the major Sri Lankan railway which ran the length of the island from south to north. It argues that it can been seen as a social compact in which the life of the individual, the community, and the state became integrally intertwined. It focuses on two dimensions of what the Northern Railway Line enabled in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon): first, a physical…
Claiming the State: Postwar Reconciliation in Sri Lanka
Civil war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009 with the military defeat of the separatist LTTE. International and local pressure around war crime allegations and the lack of political reform subsequently forced the state to initiate the 2010 Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission. This essay first takes the LLRC and the minority response to it to argue that this reconciliation process in Sri Lanka is very little about ethnic reconciliation between co…
The Self at a Time of War in Northern Sri Lanka
The article takes one young Tamil woman, Vasantha, and her account of growing up in the northern war zone of Jaffna in Sri Lanka. Vasantha's narrative and her adolescence, like others of her generation, was framed by living at the margins of the Sri Lankan state (though under its bombardment) and under the control of a repressive quasi-state actor, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In this article, I twin Vasantha's fashioning of her l…
Sri Lanka's Lingering State of War
Civil war ended in mass slaughter five years ago. Since then, the militarization of Sri Lankan society has intensified, and violence against civilians continues
Political Crime and the Memory of LossJohnBorneman (Bloomington): Indiana University Press2012
Making Tigers from Tamils: Long-Distance Nationalism and Sri Lankan Tamils in Toronto
This article discusses the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto and its relationship to the Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Taking the case of the Sri Lankan Tamils, oft-cited as the example par excellence of long-distance nationalism, I argue against naturalizing diasporic ethnonationalism to investigate instead how diasporas are fashioned into specific kinds of actors. I examine tensions that emerged as an e…
Introduction: Whose civility
This article is an introduction to this special issue on civility. It asks what can anthropological insights contribute to debates about civility? We propose to understand civility as a "worldly concept." We mean this in two senses. First, it is a concept that has traction in the world: a concern with civility and incivility can be found equally in public debate as in academic work. Second, civility is worldly in a more Arendtian sense. For Hanna…
The civility of strangers? Caste, ethnicity, and living together in postwar Jaffna, Sri Lanka
The question asked by this article is as follows: How do different kinds of people live together in a hierarchical world that has been challenged and transformed through the leveling effects of deep ethnicization and war? I examine two different kinds of relationships in contemporary postwar Jaffna: first, an inter-ethnic, external Tamil/Muslim division that has led to people relating to each other as categorical strangers; and second, an intra-e…
Rural Civilities: Caste, Gender and Public Life in Kerala
This essay investigates how public life in Kerala is shaped by spatially distributed gendered caste practices. The essay first investigates rural publics, such as rural libraries, and suggests that forms of progressive civility in seemingly caste-free associational publics should be understood not as the elimination of caste practices but their reconstitution. Second, while it is commonly accepted that caste is naturally practised in the ‘private…
Respect Your Neighbor as Yourself: Neighborliness, Caste, and Community in South India
This essay explores a global and existential problem-how ordinary people live and contend with historically deep subordination, humiliation, and exclusion-through an examination of the everyday lives of formerly untouchable caste Dalit communities in Kerala, India. I look at this through the lens of neighborliness: how people discuss how theylive togetherwith other castes and classes in small town and rural Kerala. Their continuing struggles with…
Rural civilities
This chapter investigates how public life in Kerala is shaped by spatially distributed gendered caste practices. The chapter first investigates rural publics, such as rural libraries, and suggests that forms of progressive civility in seemingly caste-free associational publics should be understood not as the elimination of caste practices but their reconstitution. Second, while it is commonly accepted that caste is naturally practised in the ‘pri…
Afterword: "A "Division of Laborers
Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate
Reviewed by: Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate Sharika Thiranagama Bernard Bate. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia. E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 264 pp. In 2016, when Bernard Bate passed away, he left beh…
Figures of Menace: Militarisation in Post-War Sri Lanka
In 2011, Sri Lanka experienced a wave of ‘grease devil’ attacks—men covered in grease assaulting women. In minority Tamil and Muslim areas, these incidents provoked vigilantism and clashes between locals and the police and the military. This essay examines these incidents through situating them in histories of intense militarisation and current post-war anxieties for ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka. Drawing inspiration from anthropologist James Si…
The names of the leader: The Political Deification of Prabhakaran
This essay investigates the deification of Prabhakaran, the leader of the Sri Lankan Tamil insurrectionary group, the LTTE. I describe the centrality of death in the ideological economy of the LTTE, with the leader Prabhakaran as the love-object who consecrated and directed such death. Following Ernesto Laclau, I propose that a chain of equivalences is forged in LTTE ideology: to get to Tamil Eelam is to love Prabhakaran. While Tamil militancy’s …
The Time of the Migrant
I measure every Grief I meetWith narrow, probing, eyes—I wonder if It weighs like Mine—Or has an Easier size.I wonder if They bore it long—Or did it just begin—I could not tell the Date of Mine—It feels so old a pain——Emily Dickinson, “I measure every Grief I meet”Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived.—John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as PhotosWriting my dissertation in my small studio apartment in Edi…
A Landscape of War (Munira Khayyat 2022)
Khayyat, Munira. 2022. A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon. Oakland: University of California Press
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Tamil (10 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · South asia (8 works)