Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Brokering Marriages: War, Displacement, and the Production of Futures among Jaffna Tamils

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Graduate student Sidharthan Maunaguru, supervised by Dr. Veena Das, will undertake research on the growth of marriage brokers among Christian and Hindu Tamils on the Jaffna Peninsula of Sri Lanka, as an effect of thirty years of chronic civil conflict and violence. Families are employing marriage brokers to find Jaffna wives for sons who have migrated out of Sri Lanka to escape the violence. Based on preliminary research, Maunaguru hypothesizes that families are employing the marriage brokers for two primary reasons: to assure the short term safety of their children and to provide for the continuity of inheritance and social status when the situation becomes safer and children can return. Marriages of this type have become so common that the government and foreign embassies have set up new. Thus the contemporary Jaffna marriage broker not only has to contend with traditional concerns of caste, kinship, and status, but also must know the ins and outs of bureaucratic processes and cultures, and sometimes actively assists with marriage ceremonies. The research plan calls for: (1) two months of archival work to track changes in Sri Lanka's marriage policies since independence, as well as the changing immigration and marriage policies of the places to which Jaffna Tamils have migrated; (2) four months of survey work in Jaffna, collecting information on family, genealogies, marriage patterns, and marriage activities; (3) two months of survey to map marriage broker locations; and (4) four months doing participant observation in a marriage broker's office. The research is important as a contribution to the growing social science literature on the changing role of government in citizens' everyday lives; the new roles played by kinship and marriage in the contemporary world; and the role of cultural and social brokers in hierarchical relations (with the state) and horizontal relations (bridging spatial distances). It also will help social scientists understand how people cope with the subtle effects of long-term displacement and civil strife, a situation only too common throughout the world.