What Am I Doing?

It’s been a long and difficult afternoon of napping and thinking, napping some more, thinking a little more, and writing. But I feel it’s been useful.

I started out with a mind map:

The ‘What Am I Doing?’ Mind Map

And then moved on to write up ‘The Situation’:
• A large employment site, employing multiple ethnicities: Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese work side by side in a garment factory in a rural area in post-war Sri Lanka. They usually choose to have their tea and lunch separately to one another. This is likely a language issue: the main language in the factory is Sinhalese. Most of the employees are Sinhalese.

• The factory is situated in Ampara Town. Ampara Town is about 97% Sinhalese. Old laws prohibit any other ethnicities from settling here or setting up businesses here. Very few of the factory employees live in the town itself.

• Ampara Town is the main town in Ampara District. According to 2007 statistics, the ethnic composition of the district is roughly 44% Muslim, 38% Sinhalese and 18% Tamil.

• The Eastern Province suffered, supposedly, during the 30 year long civil war, that ended in 2009. There are claims that ethnic tensions persist.

• Large employment sites such as the factory are amongst the only outlets in the district where ethnicities come into contact with one another. They do so peacefully and amiably, despite some language barriers. I am told there are no tensions between ethnicities. Any worker disputes are entirely unrelated to ethnicity.

• Meanwhile, peace building and reconciliation groups in Sri Lanka promote the importance of ethnic integration

• Yet the ethnic groups in Ampara District live peaceably apart.

• Settlements have been divided since their establishment, many of them dating back to centuries ago. The British colonisers and colonists play a large part in the settlement patterns in Ampara District.

• Despite alleged tensions between ethnicities, ethnic conflict of any sort does not appear to be present in the everyday fabric of the workers’ lives

• It would appear that the tensions are purely political, at a ‘higher’ level, as I’ve been told a number of times, the rural poor have more important things to think about, like how they will feed their families each day.

• So is ethnic integration through employment a good thing? Could it help with post war reconciliation? Is it needed at all?

• Is this… ‘an investigation into the importance/relevance/necessity of ethnic integration through employment in rural, post-war, Sri Lanka’?

Maybe.

So having summarised (and simplified) a lot, I have come up with the following:

Title:

An investigation into the importance/relevance/necessity [select your favourite or suggest another and we’ll roll with it] of ethnic integration through employment in rural, post-war, Sri Lanka

Research Questions:

What opportunities exist for ethnic integration in Ampara District, both at the workplace and in the wider community?

What is the ethnic distribution in Ampara District, and when do people of different ethnicities come into contact?

What ethnic tensions are present in Ampara District, where, and why, and what causes these to build to the point of conflict?

These questions should help me investigate the topic thoroughly and come up with some kind of answer as to how important ethnic integration in the workplace is, and why.

All of the above is entirely subject to change, as always. Although I’m leaving Sri Lanka in just a few days, I’ve barely skimmed the surface with all the literature there is out there to read, and I’ll be continuing a few threads of research too. But for now, it’s good to remind myself of where I am and what the point of my research is. My mother kindly mocked me earlier for having to ask myself what I’m doing, but it really is so important to keep track of things! Hence why I don’t feel one iota of guilt for having such a seemingly lazy afternoon.

Also, just for reference, here’s a mind map I made at the beginning of my research – look how much it’s changed!!

Some ideas for research topics surrounding a preliminary title.

A New Group Activity Idea?

All four participatory mapping groups are complete, although I do still have another week in the factory (after a short ‘break’ in Colombo – hopefully some more interviews and meetings with some NGOs and researchers), so I could do some more when I’m back. Interestingly, I’ve called in Chamila’s help to arrange the last two sessions, and although up until now all the sessions have been girls only, yesterday she brought a couple of boys along too. I considered this, and then shrugged it off and thought that right now, for this activity, gender couldn’t matter less to me. The gender thing did then make me think a little more though: I can’t distinguish at all between boys of different ethnicities, whereas with girls there are very obvious markers, in terms of clothing and adornments. Food for thought.

Mapping sessions aside, however, I’ve had another idea. The direction my research is taking is slanting heavily towards looking at integration in communities and the benefits of it, so I thought I might do this:

Host several ‘build the ideal (imaginary) community’ sessions, without any input from me as to what ‘ideal’ is supposed to be (I may use a different word… like, build a good community, a perfect community, a happy community, a peaceful community, not sure yet).

I would do this by…

1. Cutting out a number of paper squares, and colour coding them according to ‘ethnicity’ – same colour code as for the mapping – black = Sinhalese, blue = Muslim, red = Tamil. I would cut out about 30 or 40 squares, and the ethnicity ratio would be roughly the same as the district ethnicity ratio, obtained from population statistics in a special enumeration report from 2007. This data is about as reliable as it’ll come.
2. Each square would represent 5, maybe 10 families.
3. I would also cut out basic outlines of a church, a mosque, a Hindu temple and a Buddhist temple, and include some symbols to clarify what they’re supposed to be. These are the four main religions in the country. Although, from the mapping sessions, religion doesn’t seem to play a huge part in the day to day routine, these buildings are still one of, if not the main landmark in each community to indicate which ethnicity the community is.
4. I would also provide four stretches of road, which when it comes to building the community, provides a few options for community layout. This could be simplified with just two stretches of road, giving options of one straight road, a t-junction, or a crossroads in the community.
5. Most communities seem to follow a river, so I would provide a couple of stretches of ‘river’, and I would also provide a ‘lake’ – another popular element to any community (hence four stretches of road – I’d be interested to see if they positioned the community around all four sides of the lake, dividing ethnicities up that way – physical barriers to integration are important to explore too, and at this scale the only real physical barriers are water sources).
6. With these props, I would ask participants, together, to build what they think would make for the ideal community.
7. This activity would hopefully last for about 15 minutes, and I hope it would stimulate group discussion.
8. Once the activity was finished, I would give them a few more black pieces of paper, and invite them to add in any amenities they thought their community should have, and place them in the appropriate places.
9. Although I could provide them with shops and schools at the beginning, I wouldn’t want to introduce the bias of there being a predefined number. For example, if I give them three shops, then they might automatically assume the community should be divided into three, according, obviously, to ethnicity. The same goes for schools.
10. The session would be followed by a brief discussion about why things have been placed where they have. These sessions would need to be smaller than the mapping sessions, otherwise there’s a risk of shyer participants not contributing. I think three or four would be the ideal number, and a mix of ethnicities would be perfect, although it may be difficult to find one Muslim, one Tamil and one Sinhalese girl who all can speak English well enough to get what’s going on. I’ll think on it.

The aim of all this is to see, without asking directly, whether people think communities are better divided by ethnicity, or integrated. When I ask directly, people seem a little put on the spot as it’s not something they’ve thought too much about. Chamila’s father, for instance, when asked whether he thought it was good for ethnicities to mix in the community, shrugged and almost asked, ‘I suppose it’s good, yes?’, but he seemed very unsure and I think he was just repeating things to give me the answer he thought I wanted to hear.

The reason I’m doing this, is that with the reading I’ve been doing and the results I’m getting, I’m not sure that integration is actually desired. Not in a hostile sense, but I think people are perfectly happy to just rub along with each other. Peacebuilders are often quoted to say that integration is key, but I think this assumption needs to be explored a little more before I decide one way or another. Before I came, I thought, well, of course integration is the way forward when it comes to peaceful communities. Now, I’m not sure, and I think it’s really important to question it further.

Feedback on this idea would be really helpful, so if you have any suggestions or improvements please leave a comment!

Ethnic Tensions, or not!?

All of my research so far has shown me that here, in this rural area, to the everyday person, ethnicity is not an issue. Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese communities are certainly separate from one another, but whenever I ask anybody about tensions between the ethnicities I am told there are none.

And then I read this online:

“In August the Sri Lankan government celebrated the fourth anniversary of its victory over Tamil rebels in the civil war that ravaged the country for a quarter of a century. Yet peace remains unstable as the government has not yet resolved the root causes of the war – bitter tensions between the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the largely Hindu Tamil minority” (Zimmerman, Q., 30/08/13, on peacedirect.org).

This is clearly a very complex issue – I’ll send out some emails tonight and hopefully I might be able to organise some focus groups with some activist groups regarding the matter. I feel it would be helpful.

http://www.peacedirect.org/sri-lanka-end-war-not-peace/?utm_source=Main+List&utm_campaign=c740c136fb-Practical_Peace_July_20137_26_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_72c3c9e100-c740c136fb-300729373

 

Oops. Assumption Made. Lesson Learnt.

I think I’ve been working on a big assumption. I got excited about the idea of conflict and reconciliation, because I really think multi-ethnic employment sites have the potential to play a huge role in post-war reconciliation.

Researching this is dependent on quite an important factor, and this is something I’ve been assuming since I started. I have been assuming that there were tensions between Tamil and Sinhalese people during the civil war. I think now I may be wrong.

I’m learning (and somewhat reluctantly because I was/am so keen on the idea of researching outlets for reconciliation) that the truth of the matter is that in rural people’s normal, everyday lives, they have far more to be concerned about than another person’s ethnicity. There were and are no tensions between Sinhalese and Tamil people. At least not here in Ampara. During the civil war, it was not Sinhalese versus Tamil, rather it was the Sri Lankan society versus the LTTE. Rather than becoming concerned with ethnic politics, poorer rural people are more concerned with how they’re going to feed their families, how they’re going to bring in some income.

So my assumption was wrong. I will keep talking to people and interviewing people, but this is the message I have had from everybody I’ve spoken to. There are no problems between civilians. What this certainly does not mean is that my research has hit a dead end. Quite the contrary.

What I have learnt is that there is very little integration between Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese people in the Ampara District, and this is problem so deeply rooted that it goes back centuries. Each ethnicity lives separately and there is very, very limited crossover. In Ampara Town itself there are old local laws that forbid the settlement of, and establishment of businesses by, any ethnicities other than Sinhalese.

It’s a very divided district, and employment in factories such as this one are really the only opportunities that the ethnicities will have to integrate (although I now want to try to find out what local schools’ student demographics are like, although I assume that as the areas are so ethnically distinct, the schools will be too for language reasons).

This has made me think more about the causes of the civil war in the first place, and about how rural employment like this may actually be an important component in conflict prevention, due to these opportunities for integration. Perhaps, in countries where there is actually ethnic tension at all levels of society, multi-ethnic employment sites may well help reconciliation, but I don’t think I’ll be able to look at the reconciliation side of things here. But I can look at the benefits of integration of ethnicities in rural employment in divided countries.

To hugely simplify things to explain where I’m coming from: The LTTE were Tamil, fighting initially for the lack of rights for Tamil Sri Lankans. The campaign for a separate Tamil state (Tamil Eelam) continues. I believe this desire to be separate stems from earlier feelings of exclusion and isolation, not helped at all by previous Sinhalese nationalisation programmes, which did a very good job of ignoring Tamils in the country. So by providing more jobs that employ people from all ethnic backgrounds, bridges can be built between ethnic groups to promote a sense of unison, integration and inclusion, thus reducing the likelihood of ethnic tension.

The factory I’m in successfully promotes the integration of Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese employees by hiring multi-lingual managers, greeting the workers in their respective languages, writing signs in multiple languages, having mixed lines, sections, and buses, offering suitable prayer and worship spaces for the different religions and being flexible with the clothes that employees wear, which can vary quite significantly between ethnicity. A very large part is language, so I think this is something to investigate further. All my research will continue as planned, just with a slightly different focus.

As I say on my homepage, Geography is all about misunderstandings, and it is only from these misunderstandings that we begin to learn about the world in new ways. I’m glad I’ve realised my mistake now (unless some big discovery suddenly unearths hatred between the workers of different ethnicities, which I’m highly doubting), because I can take this on board and progress with my research. Let’s see where it goes.