In Sri Lanka all public signs are required by law to be in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. This article investigates the multiple, clashing ways that Sri Lankan Tamil speakers (Tamils and Muslims) living in-country and abroad interpret Tamil signage blunders in relation to the position of ethnic minorities in the postwar nation. I incorporate ethnographic interviews to examine how three Tamil speakers made sense of a signboard, displayed in several government buses in Colombo, in which the Tamil portion read "reserved for pregnant dogs" instead of "reserved for pregnant mothers." I situate their responses in an account of the circulation of Tamil signage errors on Facebook. I argue that Tamil speakers' disparate interpretations reflect contrasting semiotic ideologies concerning the intentionality of the blunders and the relationship between the posted signboard images and lived sociolinguistic practices (Keane 2003, 2018), which have implications for imagined postwar futures and transnational Tamil political activism. I n 2015 a Sri Lankan Muslim friend named Arshad wrote to me on Facebook Messenger to tell me he had something funny to show me. He sent a link to an article from a February 5, 2014 edition of the investigative news website, the Colombo Telegraph (available in English and Sinhala). It detailed a blunder on a trilingual sign posted in several government buses in Sri Lanka's capital city, Colombo. By law, all public signs in Sri Lanka are required to be in Sinhala,
derivatives is constantly at risk of collapsing if it cannot continually expand into new promises and agreements. This is "predatory dividualism," which can be fought only through a radical rethinking of human agency, action, and social collectivity in order to harness the progressive potential of the dividual. Appadurai suggests that such a move is not only possible, but necessary in order to contest the growing economic inequalities that shape our everyday lives and futures around the world.This book is not intended for a novice audience, and those without a thorough background in the texts and authors Appadurai discusses may find themselves wishing for some basic definitions of concepts, additional ethnographic elaboration, and more robust elaboration of contemporary debates. The value of this text, however, lies in its insights about the relationships of modern selves to the market, the rotten promise of derivatives and their corruption of contemporary markets, and new ways of understanding late capitalist forms of value. Appadurai's elaboration of the ontological reversal represented by the dividual is of particular value, as it breaks new ground in theorizing the penetration of market logics into domains of selfhood. For linguistic anthropologists, the book may act as a challenge to bring our theoretical and methodological tools to bear on crucial contemporary issues such as global finance markets, the current conditions of severe socioeconomic inequality, and the potential for collective action.
Sri Lanka is a conflict-ridden postcolonial nation-state that was ravaged by a civil war. Largely excluded from mainstream representations of the ethnic conflict, Muslims constitute the country’s second largest minority group. In contrast to Sinhalas and Tamils, they define their ethnic identities on the basis of religion rather than language. In this article, I draw on research at a multilingual government school to explore how Muslim teachers and students made sense of Tamil- and English-medium education in relation to ethnic, religious, and class differences. I investigate how Tamil-medium Muslim teachers responded to critiques of their speech by asserting that their heterogeneous linguistic practices were inextricably connected to their distinct ethno-religious identities. Muslim students’ lack of fit with the ethnolinguistic affiliations presupposed by the school enabled them to embrace English-medium education. However, the English bilingual program complicated Muslims’ narratives of identity by underscoring the relevance of English to class dispositions. I argue that English impacts the fraught relations of Tamil and Sinhala to ethnopolitical identities and mediates everyday social relations.
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