ABSTRACT
Sri Lanka’s tea plantations have been long-standing, robust sites of socio-ecological conversions and capital accumulation. These industrial landscapes have also been gendered sites of minority wage labour, particularly the valuation and survival of Malaiyaka (“Hill Country”) Tamil life and community. Using the narrated life story of Vasanthi as collected through longitudinal ethnographic research in Sri Lanka’s south-central tea plantations, the author argues that Hill Country Tamils’ ritual and individual expressions of faith and fixing of faith directly address gendered, labour investments and caste relations within the plantation’s larger historical legacies of socio-ecological convertibility and survival. This chapter engages anthropological discussions of conversion that foreground intersections of gender and migrant labour, relational practices of placemaking, caste inequality, and kinship investment. In doing so, the author advocates for a grounding of conversion as an innovative and necessary unsettling of paternalistic forms of care – forms that are intimately practised within worker communities, the plantation industry, and Sri Lankan state structures.
