“A Letter To Lanka: Soil that Breaks, Soil that Binds” by by Ilakkiya Mariya Simon

We would like to share an article by Ilakkiya Mariya Simon about her documentary “A Letter To Lanka” and her reflection on the question of identity for a person from the second generation of an exiled family living in Norway.

to read the article

About “A Letter To Lanka” documentary

A Letter To Lanka moves between memories of the civil war to the present political turmoil during Aragalaya’s protests. Told through a poetic and personal journey of the filmmaker`s reconnection to land, soil and people, it invites the audiences into existential questions of belonging in a chaotic world. What does it mean to be at home in the world? What binds people together, and what can break them apart?

About Ilakkiya Mariya

Ilakkiya Mariya Simon has recently completed her Master of Visual Anthropology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She holds a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen, where she founded The Ethnographic Film Club. Prior to getting into anthropology, she was a teacher and movement practitioner from different disciplines and arts. Her experiences with movement and her Sri Lankan ancestry are what underpins her anthropological interest exploring existential themes of home, belonging, identity, and the environment. Ilakkiya is passionate about her intimate and fragmented relationship to Sri Lanka.

“Anthropology, Politics, and Place in Sri Lanka: South Asian Reflections from an Island Adrift” by Jonathan Spencer

Abstract

How does the idea of ‘South Asia’ play out in the politics and public culture of Sri Lanka? As an island, long connected by the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, it has always been a place of comings and goings. Yet, paradoxically, this fact seems to often generate efforts to imagine it as necessarily bounded and unattached to the adjacent subcontinent. The problems of place-making that follow from this move, it is suggested, may be a source of Sri Lanka’s success as a producer of extraordinary anthropologists—anthropologists like the late Stanley Tambiah, whose research in Thailand was self-consciously conceived as a way of understanding the peculiar dilemmas of his homeland.

via: http://samaj.revues.org/3812