ABSTRACT

This chapter is a study of the loss of lived spaced, catalyzed by conflict and violence. Loss is understood psychoanalytically, through Freud and Lacan with recourse to the distinction between mourning and melancholia, which is examined. Space is understood through practices of mapping: lived, imagined, and iconic. Human migration is the third theme of the paper, which traces movement, revisitation, and recovery. Key to the argument is the idea of the layering of the lost object, in the multiple registers, of the lived, imagined, and recovered. Ethnological materials are used from northern Sri Lanka, where violence and conflict have caused much devastation between 1983 and 2009.