Making of the merchant middle class in Sri Lanka: a small town ethnography
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Date
01/07/2015Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
31/12/2100Author
Heslop, Luke Alexander
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Abstract
This thesis is an ethnographic study of middlemen and business families in a commercial
town in central Sri Lanka. What I present is based on almost two years of ethnographic
fieldwork, in which I followed entrepreneurial families as they started and developed
various businesses, built new homes, found suitors for their children, extended their
networks of effective social relations, and campaigned for political office. At the heart of
the town, and at the centre of the project, is Sri Lanka’s largest wholesale vegetable
market. Through an exploration of vegetable selling, I examine various types of work
that transcend the boundaries of the market itself: the work of kinship within business
families, in particular dealing with extending families and the task of producing new
homes, the work of belonging and status among merchants, and the work of politics in a
merchant town. These themes are explored in three ethnographic settings – in the
households of business families, at work in the vegetable market, and at social and
political gatherings.
My account of the activities of merchants and merchant families in Dambulla engages
and builds upon a body of anthropological literature on the production of kinship, class,
and politics in Sri Lanka against the backdrop of a much broader set of social
transformations that have shaped Sri Lanka’s tumultuous post-colonial modernity;
notably the war and development, economic and agrarian change, and Sinhala-Buddhist
nationalism. The thesis provides new empirical data from ethnographic research into
under researched areas of Sri Lankan social and cultural life, such as everyday
domesticity and male sociality, as well as life and work in a small town in rural Sri
Lanka. The ethnographic material also draws on theories from economic anthropology
and economic sociology in its analysis. While some of the bigger questions in the thesis
address identity and belonging among merchants, as well as the cultural implications of
material change; throughout the thesis I also explore what goes on in houses, which
relationships matter, how hierarchies are maintained and circumvented, how people
make deals, leverage influence, protest, pursue strategies to get ahead, and transpose
local issues onto broader political spheres. This, I argue, is the work that goes into the
making of the merchant middle class.