A war between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has continued for more than 20 years (a fragile ceasefire threatens to crumble in mid-2006). Alongside the civil war, a violent youth revolt from 1988–91 by a Sinhala youth group called the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) nearly captured state power. The government, in turn, responded to the JVP with a brutal crackdown. During mid-1990s fieldwork in a southern Sinhala village, Alex Argenti-Pillen encountered residents who were, daily, living out and making sense of the consequences of the JVP revolt and the civil war. Villagers had been brutalized by the revolt and government response, and many of the area’s men were now soldiers in the war against the LTTE. Whereas scholars of Sri Lanka often examine Sinhala–Tamil violence for its interethnic dynamics, Argenti-Pillen attempts “to deconstruct the notion of interethnic violence.” She strives to do this by examining the “wider cycle of violence in which the war against the Tamil minority forms just one component” (p. 3). The author has two key aims: to analyze the diverse everyday discourses of violence and to examine the effects of Western trauma discourses on these violent contexts.

Argenti-Pillen examines “the social context that provides the breeding ground for the successive waves of young men destined to enroll in the armed forces” (p. 2). Some scholars have shown that poverty is a primary motivation for poor villagers to enlist. Others emphasize the success of urban elite nationalist discourses about the LTTE’s threat to the nation. Argenti-Pillen analyzes a third factor: the violent social contexts in which these men grow up. Argenti-Pillen argues that the government’s violent suppression of the JVP fostered the violence that villagers have come to experience daily. “The Sri Lankan government has thus constructed what may be conceived of as a reservoir of violence: a seemingly bottomless pit of bitterness from which it is now able to draw its coolie soldiers at will” (p. 6). She provides an extended analysis of the discourses of violence articulated by many Udahenagama residents, particularly the mothers, wives, sisters, and grandmothers of soldiers. She focuses on participation in religious practices intended to alleviate suffering (e.g., “cleansing rituals” to counter sorcery) as well as the deployment of forms of speech (e.g., euphemisms and reported speech) that prevent direct discussion of violence.

Argenti-Pillen also investigates the implementation of Western trauma counseling programs in Sri Lanka. She argues that some scholars steeped in Western perspectives might assert that soldiers, socialized in violence, have a “willingness to kill and be killed” (p. 4) because they have been “traumatized” during the JVP revolt. The trauma has resulted in a predisposition toward violence. But Argenti-Pillen is suspicious of imposing Western knowledge models on this context. She aims instead to develop an ethnographic analysis attentive to local beliefs and actions.

Argenti-Pillen argues that women in Sri Lanka play a unique role in containing violence, thereby preventing outbreaks of widespread violence such as occurred in Rwanda, East Timor, and Bosnia. In the JVP period and afterward, only the perpetrators of violence were killed and reviled for killing, not their families. However, Argenti-Pillen argues that over recent years some women have changed to become “fearless” (an attribute previously reserved for men), thus violating local moral codes and failing to enact the everyday social practices that previously contained violence. Interestingly, it is precisely these “fearless” women who are beneficiaries of NGO trauma counseling. Argenti-Pillen indicts the introduction of trauma discourse and portends that it leads to an inversion of local values. Women’s traditional roles of “presenting distress” contained violence; women who now “opt out” of those traditions threaten to cultivate violence (p. 210). With fearless mothers raising fearless children, Argenti-Pillen worries that nobody will contain violence and prevent widespread outbreaks in the future.

Argenti-Pillen misses an opportunity to make an important analysis of the different ways men and women experience and understand violence in contemporary Sri Lanka. She makes passing comments on what good women are expected to do or say. She describes concerned responses to the many unemployed violent men who loiter in the village. She argues that men embrace modernist discourses on violence (e.g., context-independent generalizations about Sinhalas and Tamils) but women contain violence in their everyday acts of “domestic cleansing.” But her gender claims are untheorized and uncontextualized. Why are men and women so differently situated and responsive to these discourses? Argenti-Pillen discusses only one or two of the numerous scholars who have examined Sri Lankan gender discourses and practices. Moreover, her lamentations about fearless women “opting out” of traditions come across as undertheorized and potentially dangerously conservative. Is everything that is “traditional” always good for women? Is there no negative side to the role they are expected to play to contain violence? The power dynamics of this “traditional role” (and the history of such a “tradition”) beg further analysis.

Masking Terror provides powerful ethnographic data about complex understandings and experiences of violence in the wake of the JVP revolt. The ethnography of trauma discourses is multileveled and provides the perspectives of different actors and interests. This section may especially interest scholars and activists working in post-tsunami Sri Lanka and other regions where the discourse of trauma has found a new life. Argenti-Pillen notes the advantages of trauma discourse that allow suffering to be discussed in a depoliticized context (p. 180), but she also provides a cogent argument to caution one against universalizing suffering. The language and organization are sometimes overly complicated and the discussion lacking in explanation, thus requiring a dedicated reader to appreciate the argument’s nuances. However, the rich conversation transcripts allow readers to begin to feel the suffering of the many quoted individuals and to appreciate the complexity of the situation under discussion.
[map, photographs, tables, notes, references, index]