ABSTRACT
The ‘problem’ with language in a Tamil Sri Lankan context is both epistemological and political, this being a society that is suspicious of how outsiders define indigenous knowledge and the construction of meaning. There are dangers in imposing ill-considered views when these views can pose a threat to the foundations of identity within spheres of conflict. The scope of knowledge that is attainable will always be in question with ethnographies outside home territory, and epistemological enquiries must acknowledge these limitations. In many respects this study is empirical in nature because it constitutes a view of uneasy post-war dynamics that relies more on sensory experience and information than on a priori knowledge or the ability of language to portray suffering in adequate depth. Hence, primacy is given to expressions of suffering that, as already stated, employ other means – that is to say, rituals that transcribe past experience of pain in the body and the current oppressions on civilian life in the north.
