Education in the Language of Conflict: Linguistic and Social Practice among Sri Lankan Ethnic Minority Youth.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the production and maintenance of difference among Tamil and Muslim adolescents in Kandy, Sri Lanka, under the conditions of an ongoing civil war between the Sri Lankan government and a Tamil insurgency group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In Sri Lanka, the national education system has contributed to the creation and perpetuation of conflict through its connection to political and economic inequities. In addition, by segregating students on the basis of language medium, ethnicity and religion, it has served to promote interethnic enmity and mistrust. In this project, rather than assuming that educational institutions are the primary sites for socializing Tamil-speaking adolescents into social differences, I investigate how social differences and conflict are being discursively configured across educational, familial, and peer contexts. My research addresses the following four interrelated themes: 1) educational policy and its relation to sociolinguistic, ethnic, and religious divisions, 2) the discursive configuration of social difference among adolescents and adults, 3) how adolescents employ interactional strategies to manage the constrains of school settings and Sinhalese-majority public spaces, and 4) the way in which both adolescents and adults, in their interactions in the home, convey underlying assumptions about social difference and conflict. Throughout the dissertation, I chart the relationship between language ideologies (beliefs or ideas about language and its relationship to social formations) inherent in explicit assertions and those that are more underlying (Irvine 2001; Silverstein 1979). I argue that Tamil and Muslim adolescents are constructing “cosmopolitan” futures which are not based on ethnicity, sub-ethnicity, or religion, but educational status and ties to urban centers. Beneath this, however, are deeply problematic divisions between ethnic minority groups and the Sinhalese Buddhist majority.