“…Pastors would often be presented to villages as the face of the relief work carried out by the NGO during handover ceremonies, so that: ‘People can see pastor doing something for the development of the village; pastor not an evangelical person, pastor not [a] church building person, but he's doing something for this village’ (Christian NGO, Vavuniya). In doing so, the ceremonies were used to build up a sense of goodwill, gratitude and indebtedness to the pastor rather than the NGO (see Fernando, ). The leader of a small, independent Christian NGO explained this situation in more detail:Every way … we can involve the pastors into the society.…”
Section: Christian Involvement In Post‐war Reconstructionmentioning
This paper demonstrates how disasters create sites of degradation – potent spaces of upheaval and engagement – that are readily filled and exploited by evangelical Christian groups. In doing so, it explores how disasters provide opportunities for evangelical groups to gain a foothold in localities where Christian presence, and evangelical praxis, may otherwise be restricted. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Sri Lanka throughout 2010–2011, two comparative case studies are presented that reveal the strategies of evangelical Christian praxis in and through sites of environmental and political degradation. Specifically, the case studies reveal how evangelical groups pursue ‘outside‐in’ and ‘inside‐out’ strategies of salvation, which, by blurring the boundaries of religion and relief, can lead to the formation of new hierarchies of power.
“…Pastors would often be presented to villages as the face of the relief work carried out by the NGO during handover ceremonies, so that: ‘People can see pastor doing something for the development of the village; pastor not an evangelical person, pastor not [a] church building person, but he's doing something for this village’ (Christian NGO, Vavuniya). In doing so, the ceremonies were used to build up a sense of goodwill, gratitude and indebtedness to the pastor rather than the NGO (see Fernando, ). The leader of a small, independent Christian NGO explained this situation in more detail:Every way … we can involve the pastors into the society.…”
Section: Christian Involvement In Post‐war Reconstructionmentioning
This paper demonstrates how disasters create sites of degradation – potent spaces of upheaval and engagement – that are readily filled and exploited by evangelical Christian groups. In doing so, it explores how disasters provide opportunities for evangelical groups to gain a foothold in localities where Christian presence, and evangelical praxis, may otherwise be restricted. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Sri Lanka throughout 2010–2011, two comparative case studies are presented that reveal the strategies of evangelical Christian praxis in and through sites of environmental and political degradation. Specifically, the case studies reveal how evangelical groups pursue ‘outside‐in’ and ‘inside‐out’ strategies of salvation, which, by blurring the boundaries of religion and relief, can lead to the formation of new hierarchies of power.
“…The latter gave them a different kind of memory, and voice in which the youth were active agents-God's warriors fighting against demonic forces of the Underworld (Shaw 2007: 88-89). 6 Fernando (2014) suggests how in post-war Sri Lanka, in the absence of 'LTTE terrorists', foreign invaders are no longer Tamils but evangelical Christians. 7 Until the eviction of the Muslims by the LTTE in October 1990, Perunkalipattu was a multi-religious Tamil-speaking community, and demographically, the village was like a peanut, containing two kernels: on the one side there were Muslim paddy cultivators, on the other, Catholic fishermen in equal number, and in the middle, in the narrow part, a small number of Hindu shopkeepers who lived in between the Muslim and Catholic neighbourhoods.…”
Section: Brucementioning
confidence: 99%
“… Fernando () suggests how in post‐war Sri Lanka, in the absence of ‘LTTE terrorists’, foreign invaders are no longer Tamils but evangelical Christians. …”
In April 2010, eleven months after the end of Sri Lanka's civil war, I participated in the Catholic Easter rite in a Tamil fishing village in the Vanni, where the last battle between the Sri Lankan government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was fought. This article explores the way in which the ritual enactments of the paschal mystery, called pasch, came to have enormously therapeutic effects for the survivors during Holy Week. The decisive factors in the villagers’ Easter experience included: the nature of the orthodox rite and accompanying local traditions, the unique historical context in which they found themselves, and their readiness to receive healing and start a new life. The article calls for the abandonment of methodological agnosticism in order for us to understand the villagers’ religious experiences, and contributes to the emerging field of ‘post‐secular’ anthropology.
This paper argues that the relationship between religion and violent politics is best understood through a focus on religious practice. The case study of the Tamil Catholic Church within Sri Lanka's civil war is presented against a back-drop of Buddhist monk participation in violent insurgency decades earlier. The discrete cases evidence a common preoccupation with management of physical borders and discursive boundaries as actors seek to reproduce themselves and their work as legitimately 'religious'. Despite relying on remaining 'pure' from the dirty political realm, in practice religion is bound to social action and reproduced through the violent circumstances it engages. Taking Liberties and Making Liberty --Religious Bounding and Political Violence in Sri Lanka Abstract This paper argues that the relationship between religion and violent politics is best understood through a focus on religious practice. The case study of the Tamil Catholic Church within Sri Lanka's civil war is presented against a backdrop of Buddhist monk participation in violent insurgency decades earlier. The discrete cases evidence a common preoccupation with management of physical borders and discursive boundaries as actors seek to reproduce themselves and their work as legitimately 'religious'. Despite relying on remaining 'pure' from the dirty political realm, in practice religion is bound to social action and reproduced through the violent circumstances it engages.
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