To be a good woman? Caste, respectability and violence in South India and postwar Sri Lanka

This talk will focus on gendered lives in the midst of profound transformation. "It is hard to be a good woman", one of the older women I worked with in Kerala told me. She was an agricultural laborer from a Dalit community, and had latterly managed to achieve some form of stability from what had been an unhappy marriage. Like many of the older Dalit women i worked with, for her questions of caste, gender and negotiating with inheriting manual labor were fundamentally entangled with the ongoing realities of deep caste discrimination and also the context of working with one's relatives in the midst of neighborhoods for whom transforming the future were seen as major individual and collective duties. There is a long standing feminist discussion of the burdens and models of respectability that I draw from and challenge in discussing the specificities of how what women inherit and hope to transmit shapes their struggles. This was a question laid in earlier work in Sri Lanka around the challenges of moving beyond scholarly romanticisation of armed women to understand the struggles of ordinary minority Sri Lankan Tamil women when communities are focused on transformation that impose profound gendered costs and losses. I will thus briefly reflect upon the ongoing scholarly fascination with the armed militant which has signally overshadowed more critical analysis of women's lives in wartime and postwar Sri Lanka. This talk will span ethnographic work on Sri Lanka and India over two decades, and hopes to contribute to a larger feminist discussion of how we can sharpen our analysis of local struggles for transformation through centering gender, race and caste.

Sharika Thiranagama is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Sharika Thiranagama’s research has examined how political mobilization and domestic life intersect, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. Her work on Sri Lanka explores changing forms of ethnicisation, the effects of protracted civil war on ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement and the transformations in and relationships between the political and the familial in the midst of political repression and militarization. Most recently, she has written on the effects of deep militarization in post-war Sri Lanka, the deification of the LTTE leader Prabhakaran among other works. She has also conducted research in Kerala, South India based in the Palakkad district, primarily on caste and with Dalit communities. She examines how communist-led political mobilization reconfigured older caste identities, re-entrenching caste inequities into new kinds of private neighborhood life. Her work focuses on the household as the prime site of the inheritance of work, stigma and servitude, as well as the possibility of inheritance, dignity, and social mobility.

The Bernd Lambert Memorial Lecture Series, inaugurated in 2017, was established by the Cornell University Department of Anthropology in honor of one of its distinguished emeriti, Bernd Lambert. A transnational refugee from the Holocaust and an ethnographer of the Pacific Islands, Lambert joined the Cornell faculty in 1964 and is remembered for his kind and generous presence. For over 50 years, his research and teaching ranged widely from issues of kinship, adoption, and social organization to myth and symbol. The Lambert lectures honor Prof. Lambert’s legacy by bringing similarly broad-minded scholars to the Cornell campus.

Co-sponsored by South Asia Program; History; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies; and the Society for the Humanities. Thank you.