Ethnic entanglements

The BBC Tamil and Sinhala services amidst the civil war in Sri Lanka

Bibliographic Data

ID7477566
AuthorsSharika Thiranagama (The New School for Social Research, New York, USA,, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume12
Issue2
Pages153-169
Publication date2011-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournalism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-8849 • E-ISSN: 1741-3001
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1464884910388584
OpenAlexW2007632878
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited14

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 the BBC, far from being a global dispassionate observer, is imbricated in Sri Lanka’s fractured ethnic landscape. It argues that the two services became both ethnicized and also ethnicizing ‘love objects’. The two audiences, and the exchange of confidences between diasporic journalists and audiences, are analysed as constituting separate ‘knowable communities’, in Raymond Williams’ terms. Through an analysis of a mutual mirroring — or the ways in which BBC journalists imagine Sri Lanka, and how Sri Lanka’s ethnically segmented audiences imagine the BBC — I explore how the BBC World Service both mediates and is structured by local cultural and ethnic identities

Art · Ethnic conflict · Ethnic group · Ethnography · Literature · Media studies · Mirroring · Sociology · South asia · Sri lanka · Tamil · Anthropology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Gender Studies

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