Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia 9780857455178

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For Clyde Mitchell Revised and updated edition published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012 Berghahn Books Previous edition © 1988 Smithsonian Institution All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-0-85745-436-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-85745-517-8 (ebook)

Contents

Preface to the New and Revised Edition Preface to the Paperback Reissue xiii Introduction xxxvii 1

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Cultures of Nationalism Political Cosmology and the Passions

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Part 1 Evil and the State Sinhalese Nationalism, Violence, and the Power of Hierarchy 2

Ethnic Violence and the Force of History in Legend 29

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Evil, Power, and the State

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Ideological Practice, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Passions 85

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Part 2 People Against the State Australian Nationalism and Egalitarian Individualism 5

When the World Crumbles and the Heavens Fall In War, Death, and the Creation of Nation

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But the Band Played “Waltzing Maltilda” National Ceremonial and the Anatomy of Egalitarianism 149

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Ethnicity and Intolerance Egalitarian Nationalism and Its Political Practice 183

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Nationalism, Tradition, and Political Culture 209

Notes 219 References 245 Appendices Legends of People, Myths of State and the Current Context: By Way of Introduction 259 Bruce Kapferer 1. In the Wake of ‘Legends’: The Need for an Ontological Understanding of Nationalism and Power 263 David Rampton 2. Violence, Evil and the State in Sri Lanka: Revisiting an Ontological Approach to Sinhalese Nationalism 291 Dr. Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne 3. Empty Spaces and the Multiple Modernities of Nationalism 319 Rohan Bastin 4. The Social Genesis of ANZAC Nationalism Barry Morris 5. The Australian Society of the State: Egalitarian Ideologies and New Directions in Exclusionary Practice 363 Bruce Kapferer and Barry Morris Index

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This new edition is published some twenty-three years after the first publication of the book—and after the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka in May 2009, which saw the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the death of LTTE founder Velupillai Prabhakaran, and the killing of most of the LTTE leadership by the Sri Lankan army. It was this civil war and the part that nationalism seemed to play in it that brought me to write this book, which is a reflection on both Sinhala nationalism and the nationalism in the country of my own birth, Australia. The first half of Legends was devoted to a discussion of the largely state-inspired Sinhala nationalism, as this drew on myths recorded in ancient and medieval chronicles that are also part of widespread ritual practices. It was written in the early years of the civil war that had followed upon the devastating anti-Tamil riots of 1983, both of which gathered their passionate shape, if not their cause, in the mytho-logics of Sinhala nationalist discourse. Now, with the civil war ended, the mytho-logics still hold their relevance. The Mahavamsa and its references to Vijaya and especially King Dutugemunu maintain popular appeal, and President Mahinda Rajapakse is presented as the most recent in the line of legendary Sinhala heroes.1 Australian nationalism discovered its signature during the First World War in the legendary action of volunteer Australian and New Zealand soldiers (Anzac) in Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, at what is now called Anzac Cove, in 1915. It continues to gather potency in the popular imagination. Later wars (e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan) and actions in other events closer to home (often natural disasters such as bushfires and floods) have sustained the lineage of a hero cult that celebrates national values of egalitarianism and the sacrifice of self to the community. Legends was about neither Sri Lankan culture, or more specifically Sinhalese Buddhist culture, nor Australian culture—common misunderstandings in various reactions to the argument—but about two kinds of contemporary vii

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nationalist ideology and their effects, mediated through dimensions of the sociocultural terrain of both contexts. My argument emphatically was not that the ideologies presented were identical or synonymous with the complex and diverse, highly differentiated and continually differentiating lived sociocultural realities of the populations concerned. Quite the contrary, in fact: it is part of my position in this book that nationalist constructions on social realities tend to be essentializing, often static in conception, and overly totalizing, if not totalitarian. These aspects contribute to the potency of much nationalism, although I chose to concentrate on the inner logic of nationalist mythology and how it might realize some of its constitutive potential through state-supported practice. Too often, I felt, the actual discursive structure of nationalism—the nature of its specific imaginaries rather than a notion of its imagination as a kind of universal (e.g., Benedict Anderson)—went unexamined. I held that different nationalisms in modernity did not necessarily reduce to the same thing and that the internal structures of their imaginary are vital to understanding more specific dimensions of their effect. The central thesis of Legends is that nationalist ideology can distort and skew what are otherwise diverse sociocultural possibilities in potentially disastrous directions for human populations. This is the reason for the quotation (at the head of Chapter 2) from Ernst Cassirer’s wonderful book The Myth of the State, written at the moment of the rise of Nazi terror. How specific nationalist ideologies may come to have certain effects, as in the ethnic war and violence in Sri Lanka or in the violence of social and ethnic exclusion or racism, sometimes as a paradoxical inversion of otherwise lofty ideals of individual freedom, as in Australian egalitarianism, were the critical themes of this book. I offered an interpretation of the core myths of Sinhalese and Australian nationalism through an examination of their articulation within ritual or ceremonial practice. This practice is concerned with acts directed to the reconstruction of the person (in the instances of Sri Lankan healing rites) or with the presentation of national identity and the ideal of the individual (in the case of the yearly national Anzac ceremonial in Australia) as the essential basis for the formation of society and community. The ritually displayed logics of mythic practice, I argued, had potentials for the orientation of social action when engaged via nationalist rhetoric as a technology for the organization and support of state practice. Both Sri Lanka and Australia are thoroughly modern contemporary societies with much in common relative to their different histories and the contingencies associated with their particular location within global forces (e.g., in terms of class dynamics and the concern to express independence from a colonial past), as well as numerous obvious differences. Australia, especially the population that celebrates Anzac, is a largely settler or immigrant society, whereas Sri Lanka’s population is indigenous, with genealogies stretching into the distant past. The argument I proposed was that regardless of such similarities or differences, the logics of the different nationalist

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ideologies were in themselves of vital importance to examine. These do not reflect sociocultural ground or realities external to them, as it were, so much as they contain potentials that, when introduced into political practice, have the capacity to direct populations to their ongoing existential realities in particular ways, sometimes regardless of any particular reflective or conscious intent. What I emphasized was the capacity of nationalist myths to achieve an overdetermining force, whereby diversities of sociocultural life—for example, those connected to class, ethnicity, kinship, or other local particularities—are suppressed or suspended in the often state-supported overriding terms of the mythological realities concerned. If I had written the book today, I would have set it more explicitly in the post-structuralist orientation of Badiou (2005) and Deleuze and Guattari (1994), in which the events of ideologically informed practice realize original potentials of mythic logics—their poiesis, as it were. In other words, the myths constitute a reality in their own right, a plane of potentiality or what Deleuze describes as a virtual (i.e., a reality that is not actual, see Deleuze and Guattari 1994; Kapferer 2005). However, it is in their actualization or realization in the practical engagement with the state political process that original potentials of the myths emerge through their use in the interpretation of social experience. This can involve the reinvention of experiential reality in the terms of the mythical realities and, furthermore, the setting of the direction of these realities in accordance with the embedded logics integral to the organization of events in the myths. These logics I indicated constitute what I referred to as their ontology, which is vital to the myths’ creative or generative capacity to discover new meaning and significance in ongoing and continually unfolding living contexts. I stressed the vitality of the myths as produced in ritual or ceremonial practice and their further vitalization in what could be considered as their ritualizing role in social and political life as a function of their ideological practice in nationalism. Through such ritualization, I indicated, the myths could have force in the structuring of self/other orientation and relations and thus become integral to the production of the passionate force of nationalist processes. The larger point of the book is in its comparative emphasis on nationalism and its effects. This provides the overt unity of the book. It is organized into two parts, the Sri Lanka part followed by the part concerning Australia. This division allows each nationalism to be examined on its own terms and in its own sociohistorical context. One aim was to demonstrate difference without reducing either to the conceptual terms of the other.2 Much comparison assumes difference and furthermore often presents one side of the comparison as the negative of the other. This was not the direction of the comparison I pursued. Sinhalese nationalism and Australian nationalism were presented, as Deleuze might have argued, in terms of their own respective positive singularities. What I described as the hierarchical mytho-logic of Sinhalese nationalism was not the obverse

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or negative aspect of egalitarian individualism. They are entirely distinct logics with very different processes that are implicated in destructive human effects. The anti-dualist point was developed from Louis Dumont’s (1977, 1980, 1986, 1994) major works on Indian caste hierarchy and on European and North American egalitarianism and individualism, in which he argued for underlying unities as well as distinct differences whereby the one was not a simple obverse or negation of the other. This is admittedly difficult, for in most commonsense Western as well as sociological thought hierarchy is the opposite of egalitarianism. But Dumont developed the concept of hierarchy to refer to a particular holistic system of value in which social and political relations were both subordinated to religious value as they embedded it. In his analysis, hierarchical systems are not the opposite of egalitarian individualist systems; nor are they lesser in a progressivist, evolutionist sense. Overall Dumont’s argument constitutes an anthropological contribution to social and political philosophical critiques of various universalist approaches to human being that are unreflectively enmeshed in Western assumptions and individualist assertions (see also Macpherson 2010, Polanyi, 1944 and Taylor 2007, with whom Dumont’s work is cognate). In Legends, the concern with hierarchical and egalitarian nationalism aimed to pursue this perspective, indicating, particularly in the Australian section, how aspects of contemporary cultural approaches in anthropology were vital in nationalist ideology, and demonstrating how both hierarchy and egalitarianism could, in the context of state-supported nationalism, be implicated in forms of violence against humanity despite, or perhaps because of, their heroic and other ideals. While I think many of the arguments in Legends still maintain their relevance, I must stress that the circumstances of state programs engaging nationalist ideology in Sri Lanka and in Australia have substantially altered since the book was written. I have not rewritten the text to take account of these changes or attempted to clarify any of my own conceptual uncertainties at the time, apart from what I have written in this preface and in the more extended preface to the first reissue (reprinted here). Instead, I have included an Appendix comprised of a set of essays written by other scholars working in Sri Lanka and in Australia who explore themes of direct relevance to the book in the context of more recent historical developments.

Notes 1. The Sri Lankan Cultural Affairs ministry has announced the addition of a sixth, companion volume to the Mahavamsa that will have three chapters devoted to Rajapaksa. According to the ministry’s Secretary Wimal Rubasinghe, “A panel of eminent writers have begun the work on the sixth

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volume. This will cover the period between 1978 and 2010.” Retrieved from http://www.adarana.lk/news.php?nid=12692 2. Another methodological/epistemological objective was to subject the nationalist ideology of my own originating context, Australia, to critical examination. Anthropologists working in sociocultural situations that are not part of their own historical background are willy-nilly engaged in a comparative exercise. They are likely to influence the understanding by perhaps unwittingly bringing to bear their own taken-for-granted concepts—conceptions that are so grounded in their everyday vision of realities that they appear to be the relatively unproblematic order of things. An individualist or individualistic pragmatic understanding of the Sri Lankan mythic materials is certainly possible (and, I think, underpins much of the political intent of politicians in Sri Lanka) , but I was also suggesting that the myths in themselves and in their ritual contexts had other potentials that could be realized through practice. In other words, they constitute an excess beyond individualist interpretation that can become part of their effect.

References Badiou, Alain 2005. Being and Event. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 1994. Difference and Repetition. trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dumont, Louis 1977. From Mandeville to Marx. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1986. Essays on Individualism. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1994. The German Ideology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kapferer, Bruce 2005. “Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning” Social Analysis Vol. 48 (2): 33–54.

Macpherson, C.B. 2010. The Political Theory of Posessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Polanyi, Karl 1944. The Great Transformation. New York: Beacon Press. Taylor, Charles 2007. The Secular Age. New York: Belknap Press.

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Appendices Legends of People, Myths of State and the Current Context By Way of Introduction Bruce Kapferer

The five chapters of this appendix address analytical, theoretical, and empirical issues raised in Legends of People, Myths of State as they relate to developments in the twenty-three years since the original publication. Although I continue to write on matters connected with Sri Lanka and Australia, younger scholars are working on similar matters but with new material collected from different angles and informed by distinct theoretical problematics. By inviting some of the scholars who have worked critically with some of the ideas that were initially broached in Legends (and in some of my other related ethnography), I aim to widen the discussion relevant to the work with reference to new empirical material. I think this is a relatively novel way to bring Legends up to date. Clearly the scholars that I asked to contribute are sympathetic to at least some of the analytical and theoretical tacks I take, but they are also open to other approaches and adhere to their own original intellectual commitments. Each of the chapters explores new lines of thought. David Rampton, a political scientist who has completed major work on the history of the radical JVP political group, which played a vital role in the various directions Sinhala nationalism has taken, places Legends firmly in the context of debates concerning nationalism and globalization. He surveys the theoretical field and critically takes up issues that extend beyond those I initially attempted. Rampton strongly stresses the diffusion or fractionalization of nationalist ideas through the population. Here I think he makes an important correction to an initial argument in Legends, which treated nationalist ideology as an overriding and relatively singular phenomenon largely controlled by an elite whose power rested in the colonial past. In the years since Legends was written, the articulation of nationalist sentiment and practice has radiated through diverse fractions of the population 259

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and become variously inflected. I concentrated on Sinhala nationalist ideology predominantly as an oppositional discourse between Sinhala and Tamil, but Rampton shows its discursive significance in the definition of political positioning within the Sinhala population. At the time I wrote Legends I traced major continuities of the expressions and mythologies of Sinhala nationalism into the present, but there are clearly major new developments, to which Rampton points. Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne, a lawyer who currently has a book in press on the constitutional history of the Sri Lankan state and the way this has intersected with nationalist and Buddhist visions of Sri Lanka’s history, connects Legends with my other ethnographic work in Sri Lanka, which provided the impetus behind the kind of argument I developed. In particular Wijeyeratne takes up the idea concerning the demonic. This was explicitly set in terms of the position of the demonic or yakku in Sinhala folk healing rites, which is quite distinct from the concept of the demonic in Judeo-Christian thought and its connection to the idea of evil, a confusion that some critics persist in. In my exposition the demonic is a dimension of a cosmological process signifying moments of decomposition in an otherwise hierarchical totality, the emergence of the demonic to power indicating a discourse of hierarchical inversion whereby subordinate and potentially fragmenting externalizing forces gain control. The point of exorcism is to put demonic and powerful fragmenting forces back into place—to re-subordinate the demonic within the cosmic totality. Wijeyeratne takes up some of the implications of this logic and its various actualizations in the progress of events that followed the writing of Legends. He connects aspects of the argument with those presented by others (e.g., Michael Roberts’s well-known study of the Asokan persona) and indicates its relevance in the contemporary situation. Most importantly Wijeyeratne shows that the logic of the demonic and the cosmic process discovers an originality as a force of the present becoming the future in a Deleuzian sense: it is a repetition as difference, rather than a repetition of the primordial same. The chapters by Rampton and Wijeyeratne are both concerned with new directions in the order of the Sri Lankan state, which has been greatly affected by contemporary globalization and geopolitical processes that had particular impact on the closing stages of the ethnic war. The nature of the state in Sri Lanka has undergone major changes, motivated in great measure by the civil war itself as well as by encompassing global political shifts that have, among other things, seen the rise of China and India as increasingly dominant global powers. A critical question concerns the continued relevance of Legends in the context of recent changes that render the global scene and the nature of the state in Sri Lanka substantially different from their shape when Legends was written. Rampton and Wijeyeratne raise the issue, but clearly the question can be pursued much further. Nonetheless, there are strong indications, I think, that many of

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the arguments of Legends maintain some of their value, especially in the currently parlous situation of the Tamils in the postwar context (see Kapferer 2010). Rohan Bastin takes up a more comparative point. Legends was not only a study of two nationalisms and their ideologies, but an exercise in comparative anthropology. This, I insist, was not based in a contrastive analysis that took Sri Lanka nationalism and Australian nationalism as polar opposites or as being in some kind of inverse relation. The approach I took was more a dialogue whereby different dimensions of the two nationalisms were brought into relation, and it was through the relation that distinctions as well as similarities were drawn out. Bastin takes up two sites of nationalist intensity—the throne of Sinhala kings and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier—and the ways they inflect different dimensions of nationalist discourse. The two final chapters in the appendix are concerned with Australian materials. The chapter by Morris explores the history of Anzac and makes the critical point that Legends was based on observations at the state capitals. Morris’s discussion shows how Anzac has become a dominantly state rite and indeed integral to the reproduction of the state. It is this fact, I think, that guarantees the future of Anzac. At the time I wrote Legends there was much discussion concerning whether Anzac Day ceremonial and commemorative rites would fade away as the memory of the war at the root of Anzac faded and those involved in the tragedies of war died. What remains vital is the institutionalization of Anzac, not only as a nationalist rite but as a key institution for the continuation of state power, as well as its highly significant part in the constant reinvention of collective identity. I might add that the changes that have occurred in Anzac relate to shifts from a context of the role of the state in the constitution of a Foucauldian disciplinary society to that of a more Deleuzian society of control. The latter, regarding Anzac particularly, may be conceived as already immanent in the former, the great role of the military and the legalization of the game of Two-up being expressions of the emergence of Australia as a society of control or, increasingly, what I (Kapferer 2010b) have elsewhere called a corporate state in the circumstances of contemporary globalization. The final chapter in the appendix focuses on the phenomenon of Pauline Hanson and the relation of egalitarian individualist ideology to the production of intolerance and exclusionary practice. One of the difficult arguments of Legends concerned the state-supported policy of multiculturalism and the observation that while it was directed at overcoming destructive prejudice it could actually contribute to ethnic enclaves and interethnic hostilities as a paradoxical dimension of the egalitarianism that was integral to its conception. Hanson played extensively on egalitarian individualist ideology and in fact turned it into a drum for prejudice. Current Australian state policies toward refugees and the degree of popular support for them would I think merit closer attention to aspects of the

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thesis that Legends initially set out and its concern with the negatives of egalitarian individualism that coexist with its positives.

References Kapferer, Bruce 2010a Sri Lanka: 60 Years of “Independence” and Beyond. Ed. Ana Pararajasingham. Emmenbrucke, Switzerland: Centre for Just Peace and Democracy, 2009. 2010b “The Aporia of Power Crisis and the Emergence of the Corporate State” Social Analysis 54, no..1: 125–151.

Appendix 1 In the Wake of Legends The Need for an Ontological Understanding of Nationalism and Power David Rampton

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Legends, History, Hegemony and Ontology The reissuing of Legends of People some twenty years after its first publication comes in the midst of an ongoing debate as to the continuing relevance of nationalism as a significant field of study. Hyper-globalization theorists have proclaimed the end of the relevance of bordered states (Ohmae 1994). Liberal theorists of globalization have (prematurely) proclaimed the end of history (Fukuyama 1993). Sociologists and anthropologists have similarly debated whether we are entering an age of reterritorialization or deterritorialization (Kibreab 1999; Malikki 1992, 1995). Students of international relations and political studies remain divided on whether our age is one of enduring territorial sovereign power and the persistence of the nation-state (Heller and Sofaer 2001; James 1999; Mann 1997) or whether sovereignty has been radically transformed and fractured. This has led some scholars to claim that we are ineluctably heading toward a global cosmopolitan future (Archibugi et al. 1998; Held 1995) and others to claim that a form of global governance or empire is already surreptitously emergent (Chimni 2004; Duffield 2001, 2007; Hardt and Negri 2000). All of these debates in some way impact on the significance of nationalism insofar as nations and nationalisms are frequently understood to be in search of states, territories, sovereignty, etc., and are frequently represented in these debates as a particular as opposed to a universalizing force. However, the argument I wish to make is that the polarized debates described above have really missed the point on at least two counts. Firstly, they presume that we must make a choice and come down on one or another side of the debate, as though we are inexorably heading for one or another of these teleological destinations. As Louis Althusser contended, history is a process without an overarching subject or goal (1976: 99), casting considerable doubt on proclamations that we are heading toward 263

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a singular and inevitable future when what is instead apparent is the simultaneity of multiple forces in tension. Secondly, what this chapter is arguing, through an engagement with Kapferer’s work on Sinhala nationalism, is that a dualistic conception of the universal and particular ignores the extent to which universal and particular currents exist in an interweaving union in which there can be both seamless alignment and tension (Laclau 1996: 20–35). In that sense nationalism is always and everywhere an interface of universal and particular forces, tensions, and apparatuses of power. There is therefore no need to consign the study of nationalism too hastily to the dustbin of scholarship. It is also patently clear that both of the nationalisms that Kapferer focused on in Legends remain powerful and persistent forms of sociocultural and political mobilization. Since 2005 we have witnessed a potent resurgence of Sinhala nationalism in Sri Lanka. This nationalist dynamic drove a robust militarization and securitization of social, political, and economic space as the Sri Lankan state sought to bring about the defeat of the LTTE, an aim that was accompanied by loss of life in the northeast estimated at 40,000 civilian deaths, accusations of war crimes against the government (United Nations 2011), and a lockdown on local and international forces demanding that the state allow effective monitoring of the human rights landscape. The May 2009 defeat of the LTTE has been followed by postvictory triumphalism and willful neglect of both meaningful reconciliation and the need to address the structural dynamics and grievances that have driven past conflict. The military victory has also strengthened a conviction on the part of the island’s political leaders that Sri Lanka has successfully recovered and reasserted a territorial sovereignty that had been in retreat in the face of increasing encroachment by international actors through liberal peacemaking, governance, and humanitarian and development activities. Likewise, Australian nationalism has thrived in the postmillennial period, most visibly on the global stage in the Australian state’s pursuit of a draconian, xenophobic immigration policy and through ongoing social and political movements that have mobilized on the basis of a frequently exclusive and populist nationalism (Mansouri and Leach 2009). As a result, one can only surmise that nationalism is far from dead and that the reissue of Legends is, if anything, a timely reminder of the strength and innovation of its approach to the phenomenon. Consequently, this chapter aims to explore the significance of Kapferer’s ontological study of nationalism as expounded in Legends, arguing that the understanding of nationalism in this work set firm foundations for the development of an approach that confronts a set of enduring challenges to the social sciences and humanities, including the structure/agency, subject/object, universal/particular, and matter/

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idea dichotomies. These dichotomies also continue to undermine the capacity of orthodox social science understandings to adequately resolve a series of problems that are manifest in the field of nationalism studies. This includes core understandings of the dynamics of nationalism itself as a phenomenon, the relationship between leadership and masses in ideological and discursive relays, and a related understanding of the extent and measure of the social diffusion of nationalist discourse and ideologies—discourse and ideologies that are, moreover, capable of fixing in place totalizing representations of the “social,” nations, people, and state. Indeed, what is contended here is that an ontological account of nationalism addresses itself to this relationship between power and nationalism in a manner that is lacking or incomplete in mainstream accounts, which tend, one way or another, to understand nationalism by reference to processes outside of its consistent reproduction as a channel of power. In other words, in mainstream accounts of nationalism, power is always elsewhere and nationalism itself is constantly denied a place in the channels of power, rather than nationalism itself being a channel of power that funnels other dynamics into its furrow in a process that accounts for its ontological depth and hegemonic tendencies. Accordingly, this chapter will firstly examine the intellectual legacy of Legends, exploring the manner in which this work overcomes the aforementioned set of dichotomies that are manifest in dualistic mainstream social science approaches. Secondly, some now-mainstream approaches to the study of nationalism will be explored, addressing the way in which such understandings tend toward explanations of nationalism as epiphenomenal to supposedly underlying, objective dynamics that are seen as its central drivers. Thirdly, it will be argued that Bourdieuan, post-Gramscian, and Foucauldian approaches, which are not incompatible with the ontological approach that Kapferer has developed since Legends (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: ix; 1997: 325), can be utilized to challenge and transcend the dualistic thinking problematized in Legends. Moreover, it will be contended here that some of the theoretical tools provided in the later work of Foucault and in the recent work of Ernesto Laclau prove invaluable in looking at the way that nationalism reflects a hegemonic ordering centered on populations that divides the world into Schmittian categories of the people/nation on the one hand and gradated hierarchic taxonomic categories of enemies or its outside/margins on the other. In other words, nationalism produces a discursive assertion of the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that divide the world into the good, the bad, and the ugly on the basis of a core populist representation of the nation. Finally, one of the case studies in Kapferer’s Legends, namely Sinhala nationalism in Sri Lanka, will be revisited to demonstrate both the enduring significance of Kapferer’s understanding of this case study and the way that his approach, when enriched with these aforementioned theoretical tools, can

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be taken to a new level of understanding in which—given that Kapferer’s account of nationalism has been (unjustly) accused of a structuralist (or even primordialist) imprisonment of agency in the past (e.g., Fearon and Laitin 2000)—a recognition of the fluidity and relationality of dominant discourses is not at all at odds with the ontological approach.

The Significance of Legends of People, Myths of State Kapferer’s 1988 work opens up a series of theoretical spaces, including the significance of phenomenological approaches to the social sciences and to studies of nationalism. Kapferer draws a comparison between two forms of postcolonial nationalism in the Australian and Sri Lankan contexts. Yet rather than delivering a mainstream comparative approach, which seeks to generalize findings for the study of nationalism across and beyond the two cases of Sinhala and Australian nationalisms explored, Kapferer argues for the irreducible difference and openness of nationalist phenomena across these contexts, even though certain clear parallels emerge (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: vii–ix, 3–4). For Kapferer, these differences emerge from the historical reproduction in the present and toward the future of a cosmological schema of the past in each respective nationalist sphere, namely an assimilatory egalitarian Christian ontology for Australian nationalism and a hierarchical encompassing Sinhala Buddhist ontology for Sinhala nationalism (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: xvii). Indeed, he asserts that nationalist history is not “in time” but acts to constitute time itself (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 210). For Kapferer, these reproductions are akin to a “fusion of horizons” in which the past is read and reproduced in the present and for the future, notwithstanding the loss of the Gadamerian possibilities for a refined historical reading due to the occlusion of the tensions between past and present temporal/historical spheres (Gadamer 1998 [1975]).1 As a result of this occlusion, as Kapferer puts it, “the ideological distortions of the past become the foundations for the ideological distortions of the present” (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 82). Nevertheless, at the same time Kapferer is clear—despite criticisms that he might be presenting a linear narrative of cosmological reproduction (Tambiah 1992: 168–181)—that his account of this schema is not of unbroken continuity but is cognizant of the significance of contextual changes. Again, as Kapferer puts it, “modern nationalist ideology that fuels and supports the present tragic situation of interethnic hostility and warfare was formed in the colonial and postcolonial situations of the modern nation-state” (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 90–91). In that sense, although it might be true that Kapferer has not fully or more explicitly pursued the implications of this relation between modern power, state formation, and nationalism (Tambiah 1992: 178), he has nonetheless at least implicitly raised a significant question about the relationship between

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the universal and the particular in the field of nationalist imagination and modern power that requires further elaboration and development. A second contribution of Legends to the social sciences that I wish to explore is the question of the subject/object divide. One clear tendency in mainstream accounts of nationalism has been to privilege a certain dynamic or series of dynamics over others in explanations of nationalism. For instance, nationalism is explained as a consequence of certain underlying sociological dynamics such as, for example, the advent of industrial modernity or print capitalism (Anderson 1991 [1983]; Gellner 1983). However, what is contended in Legends is that nationalism itself acts as a “magnetic attractor” that seeks to obscure or unite the social forces, fissures, and demands that are at work in contexts where nationalist passions are articulated. As Kapferer puts it, The ‘cone of light’ that a culture of nationalism casts over a diverse cultural and social reality is one that illuminates the same insistent message. They are totalitarian in form or tend increasingly in this direction in the historical and political settings in which they gather force. As such, supported dialectically by the political events to which they yield significance and further impetus, they mold diverse realities within their uniform message. Realities once multiple and even distinct begin to refract similar messages and begin to shine with the same burning light that is shone over them. (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 4)

What Kapferer is saying is that nationalism has both captivating and generative effects in the processes of its reproduction and articulation—captivating because it draws heterogeneous social forces into its orbit, and generative because it seeks to define, reproduce, and put into effect the world it either describes or desires, although this power is never absolute. Such an approach explicitly seeks the overcoming of matter/idea and subject/object dichotomies. The point here is thus not to insist that the world must be interpreted through a nationalist lens but to recognize that first, although the world is made up of a myriad of social demands, social forces, and layers of identity, nationalism itself acts to totalize these forces into nationalist channels; and second, it is in the process of this centering that one sees the emergence of a certain fixing of social representations that place the nation or the nation-state at the apex of a hierarchy of identities as a dominant social and political force amongst many others. Moreover, what occurs in generative terms is that where nationalism has potency, it also begins to influence the manner in which agents apprehend a whole series of identities and social demands. In that sense it is not simply a case in dualist terms of the subjective misreading or misrepresentation of objective dynamics, but the way in which subjective and objective are funneled into a space where understanding, representation, and the constitution of the world are fused. This is the ontological world of nationalist thought and practices.

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One final, groundbreaking area in Legends that overlaps heavily with the preceding point about the subject/object dichotomy is the challenge to another remnant of dualistic thinking, namely, the structure/agency divide. On the one hand, as indicated above, Kapferer has clearly sought to challenge reductionist and deterministic approaches that explain the practices of actors through reference to determining structures that lie above and beyond their world. As nationalism is a generative force, it is through the nationalist practices of actors that nationalism must be understood, not simply through the recourse to class, capital, and state formation that renders nationalist discourse irrelevant. Indeed, Kapferer’s point is frequently to show how these dynamics interweave and unite with nationalist discourses. Yet also core to the ontological approach adopted in the text has been an attempt to challenge the legacy of an excessively rationalist, agency-driven approach to comprehending the world of human action whilst at the same time recognizing that agents create the worlds that they inhabit. For Kapferer, the ontological is a “prereflective” space “beneath the level of conscious reflection” (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 84) in which the visceral, commonsense, taken-for-granted assumptions about the world are grounded (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 80). To understand the world ontologically is to recognize in a phenomenological sense that when agents are “in the room,” so to speak, they do not consciously reflect back upon the practices that they engage in. When you open or close a door or sit down, you frequently do not consciously instruct yourself to do it—you respond and act habitually, using the materials and environment at hand without constant interrogation (Dreyfus 1991: 10–29, 60–87). In that sense much of our world is ontological insofar as it governs our conduct through ingrained practices, habit, custom, and disciplinary regularity—and through ideology. Unlike ontology, Kapferer sees ideology, in a way that owes a debt to Gramsci, as another level of human interpretation and conduct “whereby certain significances relevant to experience are systematically organized into a relatively coherent scheme” (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 80). In that regard, however, the ontological is seen as prereflective: it is not some innate sphere that remains untouched by the world of human practices and action as long as “the terms and relations of an ontological scheme receive valuation” through ideology. Rather, the ontological is reinforced and achieves its significance through ideological practices. Just as “ontology is empowered through ideology, so is ideology empowered by its engagement of an ontology” (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 80). The significance of this ontological understanding for the structure/ agency question will become clearer later in this chapter. For now it suffices to say that for Kapferer, although the ontological is multiple, i.e., built of ontologies, “there is always the potential . . . for one ontology to become dominant in the historical ideological process and to provide the inherent logic for ideological coherence” (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 80). In a context of dominance, an ontological thread can pervade multiple groups

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and individuals to the extent that political leaders “share common ontological ground with their audiences” (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 84). This can occur to an extent that defies the rational-actor or reductive agency-driven understandings of political action and ideological relay that so frequently stress instrumental manipulation by elites and lack of understanding of ideological and discursive relations across social and political strata. A key strength of Legends is its analysis of the extent to which micro-processes in the form of rituals reproduce the macro-dynamics of Sinhala nationalism, thereby indicating the potency and pervasiveness of nationalism in social and cultural practices. We will return to this point later, as it is an essential ground from which to develop a much more nuanced and comprehensive model of hegemony, which in turn is key to understanding the enduring potency of nationalism and the relationship between nationalism and modern power. However, before addressing these issues, we need to look more closely at mainstream theories of nationalism and the way that these theories have hitherto continued to engage dualistic concepts in their understanding of nationalism, a tendency that both relegates nationalist imagination and practices to the periphery of analysis and impoverishes our appreciation of the phenomenon.

Theories of Nationalism Although a full review of nationalism literature is beyond the scope of this chapter, what will nonetheless be presented here is an understanding of how some seminal works on nationalism have continued to understand nationalism as epiphenomenal by reducing it to a core political, sociological, or cultural content that ultimately determines nationalism as a phenomenon and that is generalizable across contexts and nationalism case studies. Consequently, there is a tendency to emphasize, in a frequently overlapping way, the universal and objective dynamics of nationalism, which—at times intentionally and at others unintentionally—tends to disqualify a focus on the discourses and practices of nationalism themselves. According to such perspectives nationalism is disqualified as mere empty rhetoric, devoid of significant sociocultural or political dynamics. This intellectual dismissal of rhetoric has also been noted in other contexts and remains problematic for its failure to capture the ontological dimensions and mobilizing potential of rhetoric (Laclau 2005: 10–20). In the field of nationalism studies this epiphenomenal approach is rendered most clearly in the work of Ernest Gellner, for whom nothing is to be learnt from nationalist discourse itself as the whole process of nationalist imagination “suffers from pervasive false consciousness” (Gellner 1983: 124). Rather, for Gellner, the truth of nationalism is to be found in the transformation of social space from that of loose, culturally heterogeneous segmentary societies to the anonymous and culturally and linguistically

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homogenous mass societies that are required of industrialized modernity (Gellner 1983: 124–129). In his schema, this remains an elite-led process of high-cultural domination and absorption of lower folk traditions. In Gellner’s work, what is of historical and sociological significance is not the subjective thinking of nationalism but the objective dynamics of social mobilization, educational transformation, and the differentiation of labor that break down the capacity of the variegated social segments of “traditional” society to self-reproduce. However, there remains a profound and unresolved dualistic paradox in Gellner’s work insofar as he recognizes that it is nationalism that “engenders nations and not the other way round” (Gellner 1983: 55). So, despite the acknowledgement of nationalism’s generative power, there is a tendency to neglect any exploration or understanding of the discursive and generative power of nationalist mobilization and practices in favor of objective and universal processes. Although this unresolved dualism is at its most visible in Gellner, there is little doubt that it continues to be manifest in studies of nationalism that have attempted to place greater emphasis on the subjective processes of nationalist mobilization and imagination that emerged out of New Left scholarship. For instance, Tom Nairn and Benedict Anderson, both of whom were influenced by Walter Benjamin, seek to challenge preconceptions of nationalism that analyzed the phenomenon in negative terms (e.g., as false consciousness) or conceptualized it as a mere “growth stage” (Nairn 1981: 333). In this respect Nairn, on the surface at least, challenges objectivist and universalist approaches through an emphasis on nationalism as a “protean phenomenon,” “an autonomous mode of sociopolitical organization” for which there exists no single “archetype” or set of social conditions that can exhaustively “display its meaning” in a final or closed sense (Nairn 1981: 347). However, despite the outward departure from objectivism and universalism, Nairn clearly still pursues these threads through a “path dependency” that identifies the recurrence of nationalism within the universal history of capitalist development (Goswami 2002: 778). For Nairn, the processes that are significant in the production of nationalism are ultimately determined at the international level and specifically in core/peripheral tensions between the elites of postcolonial states and dominant metropolitan states within a global context of uneven but universalizing capitalist development. It is this universal framework that makes him emphasize that nationalism frequently emerges as a particular reaction to these processes by postcolonial elites from less developed countries. As a result, Nairn fails to transcend the dichotomization of the relation between the subjective/objective and the universal and particular, a charge that has also been directed at Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on nationalism. In the same way that Nairn has stressed the need to overcome the attribution of “false consciousness” to nationalism and at least attempts to underline the significance of the subjective and discursive realms of

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nationalism, Anderson has also emphasized the act of cultural imagination in the thinking of nationalism without recourse to defining the process in terms of truth or falsity. Instead he stressed the importance of the nationalist narrative for the reproduction of collective identity and for the affective identifications of persons within that collective, stressing also nationalism’s capacity for reproducing rites of sacrifice and shared belonging despite the anonymity of mass society (Anderson 1991 [1983]: 144). Anderson’s work is thus often cited as a paradigm shift in the literature on nationalism (Eley and Suny 1996: 24; Goswami 2002: 773), toward a “cultural studies” perspective and away from reductionist accounts of nationalism that locate the latter’s dynamics outside or beneath the so-called superstructural field of nationalism’s supposedly epiphenomenal appearance. Nevertheless, just as Nairn continued to stress an understanding of nationalism within a developmental framework characterized by poles of core and periphery in relation to world capitalism and the relation between colonial metropoles and subordinated local elites, Anderson has also been accused of sociological reductionism through his identification of certain key generalizable processes that are productive of nationalist space (Chatterjee 1986: 21–22). In Anderson, these facets are reflected in, first, the significance of novel forms of communication that strengthen the reproduction of community in modern anonymous society. This process is manifested in, for instance, the spread of vernacular language, often at the expense of high languages and culture (note the dissonance here with Gellner’s stress on high culture) as well as the development of print capitalism, which allowed previously segmented societal groupings to imagine themselves, through newspapers and novels, as inhabiting a shared space (Anderson 1991 [1983]). Second, Anderson also stresses top-down processes of mapping, enumeration discipline, and surveillance in his later addendum chapter, “Census, Map, Museum,” in which colonial and postcolonial state authorities engage in the reinscription of borders, social categorizations, and narratives along nationalist lines (Anderson 1991 [1983]: 163–185). Along these same lines, national space is also reinforced through the cohesive flows of the educational and administrative “colonial pilgrimages” undertaken by colonial elites (Anderson 1991 [1983]: 114–115). Finally, Anderson stresses the way in which the nationalist moment, through these processes, was one that announced the reproduction of what Benjamin called “homogeneous empty time,” displacing the preceding domination of religious cosmological time and allowing for the production of a secular, co-temporal, unified simultaneity (Anderson 1991 [1983]: 22–36; Benjamin 1973: 243)2—in other words, the move from a fuzzy logic of segmentary, dislocated social space toward an increasing homogenization of collective imagination. Thus, the identification of these sociological processes, all of which facilitate nationalist thinking whilst not necessarily subscribing to another systemic or structural place outside nationalism, nonetheless does

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bear some resemblance to the earlier objective, universalizing analysis of nationalism. This is how Anderson isolates the generalized and transplantable features of nationalism, which can be used as conceptual and analytical tools applied to differing localized contexts in order to understand how nationalism has spread on a global scale. Consequently, these sociological features and processes act as the foundations for Anderson’s concept of “modular” nationalism, describing the way in which differing historical moments of nationalist development—“Creole” anti-colonial nationalism in America, the “linguistic nationalism” of nineteenth-century Europe, the “official nationalism” of twentieth-century British imperialism and of Russia—all gradually come to serve as models of the nationalist moment that can be mimicked by and transplanted to other sociocultural spheres at different historical junctures (Anderson 1991 [1983]). In this sense both Nairn and Anderson, despite their stated desire to depart from objectivist accounts of nationalism, have sought to stress nonetheless the general universal sociological processes of nationalism shared across the globe. As a result, critics, including both Goswami and Chatterjee, have argued that Anderson, like Nairn, has failed to grapple with the tension between the objective/subjective and universal/particular and tends therefore to reduce the nationalist moment in the colonial and postcolonial world to a derivative discourse wherein the “parochial history” of the West becomes the history of the rest of the world (Chatterjee 1993: 238). This is a perspective that furthermore reduces the agency of colonial and postcolonial actors and societies, misses the differences in nationalism across diverse contexts, and fails to recognize the generative effect of specific nationalist movements. Additionally, there remains a still ongoing tendency to identify a “point of origin” in explanations of nationalism (Calhoun 2007:47), whether this is historical or sociological. This remains apparent in approaches that stress state capture or state formation as key to nationalism (Breuilly 1993; Tilly 1990), and in those that still seek to reduce the phenomenon to an identifiable and finite typology of routes to the modern (Greenfeld 1992). Or, where, scholarship has attempted to be as wide as possible in the identification of psychological, territorial, cultural, political, and territorial varying dynamics (e.g., Guiberneau 2007), it has still failed to explore this relationship between the universal and the particular, between nationalism and modern power, and therefore to account for why it is that nationalism has been so enduring, not just in the face of globalization (a facet Guiberneau does address), but in the longer-term trajectory of the pact between nationalism and the modern in both the global North and South. Finally, it is also apparent that attempts to track the broad historical dissemination of nationalism across the globe do not adequately explain how and why nationalism has become so pervasive within societies that it can no longer be seen as a top-down process restricted to statecraft. Social science clearly needs a more developed understanding of the extent to which nationalist discourses continue to dominate the reproduction of

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subjects. To explore this last point, I now turn to address some potential theoretical openings.

Theorizing Nationalism and Power This section intends to show how Foucauldian and post-Gramscian analyses of power can fill out our understanding of nationalism and form the basis for a challenge to the kind of dualistic thinking that has continued to problematize mainstream approaches. Whilst an exhaustive overview of Foucault’s conception of power is beyond the scope of the essay, an exploration of Foucault’s core paradigms of power will nonetheless prepare us to relate the relevance of both hegemony and these Foucauldian frameworks of power to the postcolonial context of nationalism in South Asia. Foucault’s novel conceptions of modern power are somewhat prolific, covering discipline, governmentality, and biopolitics. Although there are significant differences in these forms, they have some key facets in common. First, it is clear that the gradual spread of both disciplinary and governmental “techniques” and “apparatuses” (dispositifs) emerged as an undermining of the sovereign paradigm of power (a paradigm shift upon which Foucault instituted a novel discourse of power) (De Certeau 1984: 46). Within sovereignty, “the Prince” was external to the social space over which he ruled. Coercion and terror as staged spectacle were used to ensure obedience in a segmentary society where the penetrative and diffuse capacities of the state were weak and where the Prince had little interest or mastery over the population that happened to inhabit a territory that he had inherited, conquered, or won by treaty. In this sense the Prince “does not form part of it [the principality], he remains external to it” (Foucault 1994a [1979]: 204–205). However, both discipline and governmentality as novel modes of power act through “scattered technologies” (De Certeau 1984) or “techniques” and “tactics” that are diffuse and socially penetrative in radically new ways that are not captured in standard political or historical accounts of the centralizing state (Foucault 1994a [1979], 1994b [1979]). Discipline emerges as a series of interlinked techniques of control, surveillance, and punishment operating through dispersed channels and sites—the factory, military, medicine, education, penal practices, etc.—that act upon bodies to render them docile and malleable to the demands of modern political, social, and economic practices (Foucault 1978 [1976]: 135–145; Foucault 1977). Governmentality emerges from the historical roots of Judeo-Christian pastoral care, which seeks to guide the conduct of the flock at an intense and more diffuse social level, in which the shepherd and the flock, in contrast to the Prince and principality, are no longer in a relation of externality (Foucault 1994a [1979], 1994b [1979]). Additionally, it marks the point at which “economy was introduced into political practice . . . at the

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level of the entire state, which means exercising toward its inhabitants, and the wealth and behavior of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and goods” (Foucault 1994a [1979]: 207). As such, Foucault’s work resonates with that of Hannah Arendt, who also tracked the increasing penetration of state and non-state apparatuses into areas of human life where, in the premodern era, political action and economic needs had been parceled into separate spheres as a condition of freedom and human flourishing (Arendt 1998 [1958]). With modernity one sees the rise of the “social” and the “economic” as discursive formations that signify the privileging of the “life process itself” (Arendt 1998 [1958]: 45) and the increasing encroachment and dominance of modern technologies of power and “government” into spheres that aim to directly influence behavior and conduct. Whilst Foucault has indicated that these were dispersed “techniques and tactics” (as with discipline), what is clear in his account is that these techniques and tactics begin to increasingly colonize the state through its increasing interventions in the form of “police” so that the state becomes increasingly “governmentalized” (Foucault 1994a [1979]: 220). Whilst Foucault has hinted that the monarchical and administrative European states initially thrust toward this dynamic through “reason of state,” wherein greater strength externally demands an increase in knowledge and power over subjects (and over their welfare) internally (Foucault 1994b [1979]: 312–325), he also suggests that the ascendant logic of governmentality could not emerge until the interconnections established between the science of economy, statistics, and the concept of population had displaced the family. This process revealed that “population has its own regularities, its own rate of deaths and diseases, its cycles of scarcity” as well as “phenomena that are irreducible to those of the family, such as epidemics, endemic levels of mortality, ascending spirals of labor and wealth; and it shows that, through its shifts, customs, activities and so on, population has specific economic effects” (Foucault 1994a [1979]: 216). In fact, the interconnection between a burgeoning science of economy and the enumeration of population as an object of knowledge revealed that population had an autonomous existence beyond the requirements of sovereignty. This is the sine qua non of governmentality’s dominant emergence amidst a myriad of scattered practices that might otherwise have assumed the foreground. In a sense “biopolitics” remains an intensification of this process, or as Foucault puts it, a rationalization of “the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as population” (Foucault 1994c [1976]: 73). The consequent conclusion is that the work of Foucault focuses on techniques and tactics, produced by both state and non-state actors, that increasingly intervene into the work practices, health, education,

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sanitation, morality, sexuality, and identities of the population and therefore seek to mold and channel the lives and conduct of subjects in an ever more pervasive and penetrative way. However, a series of theorists including Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, Hannah Arendt, and others (e.g., Arendt 1998 [1958]; Donzelot 1997 [1979]; Laclau and Mouffe 1985) all see the birth of the “social” as critical to the production of modern rationalities and apparatuses. Thus emerges the development of frameworks for the penetration, administration and imagination of the “social,” which itself channels conduct and impacts upon the imagination of conceptions of identity, acting upon life itself. Again Foucault has traced the manner in which a power, centered on populations and tied to the state form, transforms race discourse into the exclusifying logic that one finds in the contemporary political landscape articulated through forms that have moved from a biologically to a culturally determined discourse (Foucault 2003 [1976]; see also Duffield 2006). Such race discourses frequently historically inform and reinforce nationalist discourses and the violence of nationalist passions (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: 91–92; Mamdani 2002). In this sense, the novel logic of targeting populations brings into stark relief the significance of fixed conceptions of “the people” or “nation” in nationalist discourses. Such discourses infiltrate the hierarchic ordering of frameworks of citizenship that govern the relation between identity and the state and a whole series of identity-related exclusions and inclusions that infuse the realm of social, political, economic, and cultural practices. A perceptive reader may already be joining the dots and seeing the already profound relevance of governmentality and biopolitics to issues of nationalism, but it is worthwhile to trace these interconnections more explicitly. First, it is clear that the significance of a power centered on populations and on the life processes of taxonomic categories of populations is itself highly significant. This is reinforced in a context of a modernity that has been plagued by the construction, across both liberal democratic and authoritarian spaces, of a politics of number wherein dominant identities are tied to and define nation-state spaces, and majority/minority complexes form a substantial part of the ground of ethnic and nationalist conflict. Moreover, when power is capable of impacting on the reproduction of the “social” as a space, it becomes highly significant itself in the consistent reproduction of bounded and territorialized representations of nation, people, and state tied to singular or monolithic notions of identity. Furthermore, these dominant and hierarchical representations of “people” and “nation” become axes of social groups’ inclusion in, and exclusion from, access to a wide range of political, sociocultural, and economic resources including citizenship and political participation, social policy, development programming, and welfare—in other words, the whole gamut of resources and dynamics that impact on the life process itself. However, before we merely accept the significance of Foucauldian power in an understanding of nationalism, we should also take care to

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say that the trinity of governmentality, biopolitics, and discipline requires some further theoretical filling out. One of the potential barriers to utilizing these forms of power in an analysis of nationalism lies in the fact that Foucault was expressly working through and toward a theory of power in which power has no center but is dispersed through a multiplicity of institutions, apparatuses, modes of knowledge, and subject positions. Indeed, Foucault was himself more than candid about this when he stated that his intent was to “cut off the king’s head” and to thereby challenge the notion of power as centered or possessed in traditional political theory (Foucault 1980: 121). However, the key to an understanding of nationalism is understanding how a logic of power that categorizes populations and defines the social reasserts a political center in the course of its machinations. For this reason a Foucauldian analysis is insufficient, and the work of postGramscian scholarship becomes invaluable. The scholars Laclau and Mouffe have asserted that although a singular representation of the social is impossible due to the heterogeneity and dispersed character of modern political and social demands and differences, modern political mobilization is still strongly inclined toward the representation of fixed social and political centers (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 2005). Indeed, Laclau’s work on populism tracks how diverse demands and differences become articulated in populist political mobilization and how in the process, dominant or hegemonic representations of social and political space emerge, are reproduced, and remain in place for enduring historical periods (Laclau 2005: 111). Although Laclau and Laclau and Mouffe’s works tend to concentrate on populist mobilizations, their approach evidently benefits the study of nationalism as a set of populist discourses that again fix in place a hegemonic center revolving around conceptions of nation, state, and people (Rampton 2010: 29–48). Laclau’s model points to a modern political logic in which diverse heterogeneous demands become articulated and conjoined precisely through ideological rhetoric and mobilization. In this way, social forces are linked by an ideological and discursive dynamic that simultaneously produces a representation of social and political space and establishes a Schmittian frontier dividing “friend” and “enemy,” “us” and “them,” through processes of identification and othering. In the process of this coagulation of forces, a particular demand may stand in to act as the universal for other demands and over time may act over and transform them ideologically. This process ultimately produces a set of ideologies, discourses, or signifiers that are “floating” or “empty” insofar as their content is no longer specific to a single set of demands but is sufficiently dilute and dilated to facilitate a wider encompassment of social forces, all of which, in some sense, invest in these looser signifiers (Laclau 2005). Similarities here between Kapferer’s understanding of nationalism as a “strange attractor” or “cone of light” on the one hand, and Laclau’s logic of populist articulation on the other, are clearly apparent

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(Kapferer 1999 [1988]: xv, 4). Both perspectives stress the significance of ideological and discursive mobilization in a manner that is not beholden to dualistic approaches, which dismiss such mobilization as purely epiphenomenal to other social, political, and/or economic processes.3 Indeed, I would go further and say that such ideological mobilizations and discursive representations have the potential to act upon and frame the manner, style, and character in which biopolitical and governmental targeting of the life process itself plays out and forms the engine through which processes of inclusion and exclusion are rendered.

Revisiting Sinhala Nationalism in Sri Lanka The last section of this chapter will briefly revisit Sinhala nationalism in Sri Lanka, one of the key areas of focus for Legends. I intend to trace only a schematic account of the emergence of a biopolitical and governmental logic in Sri Lanka as this is a task that is beyond the scope of this study and which has been dealt with comprehensively elsewhere (Rampton 2010, 2011). An understanding of the reproduction of nationalist discourses in Sri Lanka requires first an engagement with the way that the colonial intervention itself formed a key moment in the introduction of governmental and biopolitical ordering, which in turn was itself subject to a number of shifting layers of application. As a range of scholars have noted, this intervention occurred in a particular historical period when the logic of colonialism shifted from one of loose extraction of resources from the colonial sphere to that of a deeper penetration of colonized societies. This shift impacted and shaped the conduct and behavior of populations and affected the life process itself through the introduction of apparatuses of power targeting politics, law, health, sanitation, sociological knowledge, education, development, etc. (Kaviraj 1991; Rampton 2010; Scott 1999). This governmental and biopolitical intervention was layered because its logic and effect operated in multiple ways. For instance, from the early-to-mid nineteenth century onward, British colonial authorities sought to unify the island of Sri Lanka by creating a single bounded territorial space out of the multiple political and sociocultural polities and communities that existed. To this end they produced a centralized system of local government over these previously loose spaces and inculcated an “indigenous” elite to collaborate with the colonial project of administering this space. The conduct and behavior of elites would be influenced by the introduction of educational channels and public services, political and administrative responsibilities, a free press, etc. (Scott 1999: 23–52). This governmental layer resulted in an All-Island Ceylon framework that in time would produce tentative modes of All-Island Ceylonese nationalist identification and political movements—tentative in that

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these movements remained elite, reformist, and weak because of their ultimate lack of wider mobilization. However, another layer of the same biopolitical intervention tended to produce orientalist knowledge of the island, with its populations enumerated (through censuses, for example) in terms of various Sinhala, Tamil, Moor, and Burgher identities, tantamount to an ethnicized and racialized biopolitical mapping and representation of the social landscape. This tendency also influenced the “communal” form of representation operative in the colony’s Legislative Council, a fact that evidently politicized ethnicity (Nissan and Stirrat 1990). As numerous scholars have argued, this contributed to the transmutation of pre-existing but fluid differences into a harder, more discrete and rigidified form (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: ix; Nissan and Stirrat 1990: 26–30; Stirrat 1992; Tambiah 1986). Later colonial attempts, via the introduction of all-island universal suffrage under the Donoughmore Constitution in 1931, to efface the earlier racializing and ethnicizing biopolitical logic by aligning the reproduction of a hitherto elite secular All-Ceylon identity with political representation failed in their intentions and actually served to reveal the prospects of the more potent enumerative logic of Sinhala nationalist majoritarianism (Scott 1999: 158–189). Basically, ethnic identities operating within the taxonomic ordering of the colonial state and its governmental frameworks endured, setting in motion what would become an ethnicized “tyranny of the majority.” However, this is only one part of the narrative through which the biopolitical logic of Sinhala nationalism would become ascendant. A number of scholars have neglected both the unevenness of the colonial governmental and biopolitical intervention and the role of Sinhala nationalism itself in the diffusion of this logic to wider social strata. This is either because they overestimate the reach and role of the colonial state in the construction of identity and governmental structures (e.g., Nissan and Stirrat 1990; Scott 1999) or because they do not fully understand that Sinhala nationalism has not remained simply an elite project of instrumental manipulation (e.g., DeVotta 2004; Stokke 1998) but has also been the link that inextricably fused the universalizing discourses of modern power and the particular discourses of nationalism and disseminated them beyond the elite sphere. In essence, Sinhala nationalism, from its emergence in the nineteenth century to the present day, is a project that seeks to further and reproduce the biopolitical logic first instituted through colonial intervention, but in novel ways. Sinhala nationalism institutes a biopolitical ordering of ethnic populations in a framework that places Sinhala at the apex and subordinates Tamil, Muslim, and other groupings lower down on the social and political register, a pattern that was clearly identified by Kapferer in Legends. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to trace the manifestations of this logic in full, it is worth exploring some key ideological and discursive motifs potent with biopolitical significance and impact.

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In the nineteenth century, Sinhala Buddhist nationalists such as Anagarika Dharmapala privileged the rural sphere and the Sinhala Buddhist smallholder peasant as the moral core of the nation whilst also racially excluding Tamils and Muslims and castigating them for collaboration with the colonial political and economic system (Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988: 213; Guruge 1965: 540; Rampton 2010: 90–94; Tambiah 1992: 7–8). This hierarchical design was entirely symptomatic of the way that universalizing governmental modes and apparatuses of power and knowledge at the service of the colonial state interlocked with and transformed the particular identity and community complexes in Sri Lanka. What nationalism in fact did was therefore to further entrench the ethnicized biopolitical logic of nineteenth-century colonial rule, provide its modes of dissemination with nationalist legitimacy, and further disseminate the tendrils of governmental and biopolitical practice and discourses amongst much wider social strata than the colonial state had hitherto had the capacity to reach. To put it crudely, governmentality was gradually nationalized by Sinhala Buddhist discourses that increasingly represented the social, cultural, political, and economic space and territory of Sri Lanka as Sinhala Buddhist. What is also of significance here is that this interface between modern power and nationalism was not simply restricted to its dissemination through state apparatuses but in fact spread its tendrils through the wider society. Accordingly, this process was operative at multiple sites through political discourse, social associations, religious and labor movements, and the temperance movements at the turn of the twentieth century, through the creation of Buddhist theosophical schools, Buddhist dhamma schools, a Sinhala Buddhist media, etc. (Malalgoda 1976: 191–255; Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1990: 201–240). However, it did not achieve hegemony, understood in a Laclauan sense as an articulation between social demands and forces, until 1956, when the Bandaranaike-led Mahajana Eksath Peramuna coalition produced a political platform linking together language nationalists, sangha-based movements, and village-level groups and intellectuals, all coalescing around the signifiers of Buddhism and “Sinhala Only” language policy, claims which were presented as a majority right whilst Tamil demands for autonomy were represented as “communal” (e.g., see Vijayavardhana 1953: 96–97). From this point on, diverse fields and sites of practice and policy began to assume a shared hegemonic Sinhala nationalist logic, whether the focus was constitutional change and state reform, education and employment, development and welfare strategies, language policy, or the wider banal symbols and motifs pursued by the Sri Lankan state since 1956. All of these areas, with periodically varying degrees of intensity, have witnessed the deepening logic of Sinhalization of social and state apparatuses and the hierarchical logic of Sinhala nationalist domination with respect to Sri Lanka’s minority communities.

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These dynamics, which have been most clearly visible in the Sri Lankan state’s pursuit of development through colonization and irrigation schemes aimed at settling predominantly landless Sinhala farmers in areas of Tamil and Muslim demographic concentration that Tamil (and increasingly Muslim) nationalists identify as homelands, have intensified in relation to the counterprojects of Tamil nationalist resistance (Herring 2003; Nadarajah and Rampton 2010; Peebles 1990; Rampton 2009). The development programs have frequently been depicted in nationalist discourses as a return to and recovery of ancient Sinhala Buddhist hydraulic kingdoms (Moore 1985: 45). Such programs clearly demonstrate a profound biopolitical logic in which developmental and welfare interventions aimed at the sustenance of the “life process” itself are ethnically ordered and aimed at the inclusion and promotion of Sinhala Buddhist populations and the exclusion and marginalization of so-called minorities. That programs aimed at “life”—at the core of human existence—have become heavily invested with a nationalist logic indicates that nationalism is significant for broad strata of society, including marginalized rural groups (Brow 1996, 1988), the so-called partners in development who are absorbed into and reproduce nationalist hegemony through the very mode of their survival. This perspective highlights the fallacy of continuing to understand nationalism as ultimately restricted to an elite- or state-led project of ethnic outbidding or political legitimation in which elite politicians and mainstream parties are responsible for intra-group dynamics of competition for the mantle of Sinhala nationalist leadership (e.g.. Stokke 1998; DeVotta 2004; Bush 2003).4 Such a perspective evidently is rarely anything other than elite-focused and concentrated on formal procedural politics rather than wider political and sociocultural effects. Meanwhile, the mainstream instrumental view of nationalism completely fails to grapple with the relationship between leaders and followers, elites and masses in nationalist and populist mobilization. Masses and followers are merely rendered cultural dopes at best, or at worst tabulae rasae, by the failure to analyze how leadership must be primus inter pares in terms of its appeal and attraction to a following (Laclau 2005: 31–64). What is it that cadres and leaders share that makes a leader, and what he says or does, such a magnetic point of attraction? A theoretical framework that answers this question poses an intellectual challenge to the continuing trend toward rational-actor, economistic, and reductionist accounts of conflict and political violence, which again place all the agency in the hands of political or conflict “entrepreneurs” (e.g., Collier et al. 2003; Eide 1997; Moore 1993: 596–597). These approaches frequently lay claim to being agency-based, but in actuality they rely totally on the dualistic frameworks characteristic of economism and rationalism. Another shortcoming of such instrumental accounts is their failure to acknowledge that even where political actors deploy instrumentalism and cynical, insincere manipulation of nationalist discourses, these actions

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themselves often serve to further reproduce and entrench nationalist discourses at wider social levels. Whilst I do not deny that dynamics of outbidding are clearly reproduced by political elites, it is an error to neglect the extent to which the hegemonic sway of Sinhala nationalism and the contestation for nationalist authenticity has spread well beyond the elite camp, a social diffusion that covers and is articulated by diverse Sinhala political actors and social strata as a precise result of the consistent reproduction of Sinhala nationalist hegemony. Only a few scholars (e.g., Brow 1996; Kapferer 1999 [1988]; Rampton 2010) have really appreciated this understanding of the increasingly hegemonic and ontological force of nationalism. To explain, albeit schematically, recent research on insurgent, counterstate youth movements centered on the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) (Rampton 2010)5 indicates that this populist and rapidly spreading socially rhizomatic revolutionary project did not, as one might expect, produce a radical counter-hegemonic discourse challenging the dominant ideological framework, but in effect reproduced core Sinhala nationalist motifs and demands. These demands, furthermore, can be genealogically traced back to the nineteenth century, although the frontiers of this nationalist mobilization were reassembled within JVP discourse to undermine the legitimacy claims of postcolonial elites who were sited on the outside as classic “comprador” “enemies.” Key motifs that the movement has consistently reproduced stress the representation of Sri Lanka as an authentically rural space centered on peasant cultivation; seek the preservation of the unitary, centralized state; and consistently reproduce the same hierarchic logic that privileges the Sinhala Buddhist community over and above the subordinated agency of other minority communities, especially when faced with an ontological threat to the territorial integrity of a unitary Sri Lanka (Rampton 2010: 116–240). That this movement coalesced and gathered ideological steam expressive of these discursive currents as early as the mid 1960s indicates that Sinhala nationalism, rather than remaining the preserve of anglicized postcolonial elites, extended its hegemony by thoroughly permeating the politically and socioeconomically marginalized rural vernacular-educated youth of the intermediate and lower subaltern classes that acted as the core constituency of this party (Rampton 2010: 119–130).6 Moreover, this same research confirms the ontological and habitus-like depth of the Sinhala nationalist architecture that Kapferer had identified in Legends. This is apparent in the extent to which the JVP’s ideological understanding of Sri Lanka’s socioeconomic and political problems, including issues of class, have been consistently filtered through an ontological nationalist register that has fed both from and back into a Sinhala Buddhist ontological habitus (Rampton 2010: 119–129). In this sense, structure and agency are unified rather than dichotomous—and they are so in a way that transcends subject/object dualism, as it is clear that nationalist imagination,

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discourse, practices, and representation in turn influence the generation and reproduction of social and political landscapes. These two key points, which Kapferer emphasized in Legends, suggest that nationalist discourse must be studied in its own right and not merely analyzed and understood as epiphenomenal. However, the approach here goes beyond Kapferer in that whereas he delineated a dominant structure or architecture in which both microscosmic rituals and state practices reproduced the same design, he did so without really mapping out both the extent of hegemonization and the gradual shifts and fluidity in hegemony itself—i.e., the wars of position, maneuver, and arrival that Gramsci identified in frameworks that, despite the periodic possibility of a breach, nonetheless act as a ceiling over what can be thought and done. This image of slow fluidity is also evidently at work in Laclau’s conception of shifting assemblages of hegemony in which frontiers are rearranged and social forces and demands placed within and without such borders in mobile ways (Laclau 2005). A focus on the JVP indicates that it is not simply elites who reproduce and recycle nationalist hegemony. For the JVP, a party whose values have privileged the rural and vernacular, Sinhala-educated strata of society, has consistently reproduced a discourse that regularly places postcolonial elites outside the frontiers of the nation in a more fluid contest of authenticity within the envelope of Sinhala nationalist hegemony. Indeed, by virtue of the fact that its support lay in the marginalized groups from the rural and urban sphere, the JVP also sought to claim the prize of authenticity in these struggles by virtue of its subaltern constituency. Seen in this light, nationalism is clearly too diffuse a phenomenon to be the preserve or possession of a single actor (Rampton and Welikala 2005: 59). The logic of nationalism is too dispersed for such containment, even if particular political forces can attempt to take the nationalist high ground in struggles for authenticity. These sites of contestation between the JVP and elite forces have manifested themselves most starkly at moments of ontological threat. Classic instances have included, for example, the period of the Indo-Lanka Accord and Indian Peace-Keeping Force between 1987 and 1990, when India intervened militarily and sought to impose a (weak and ineffectual) federal solution to the ethnic conflict. This intervention provoked the JVP into spearheading protest and violent insurgency ideologically mobilized against the Indian intervention but for the most part targeting deadly and brutal attacks against the mainstream Sinhala elites and the leadership of the political left (Gunasekera 1999). These dynamics recurred in the JVP’s opposition to the proposed PA (People’s Alliance) Devolution Bill of 2000, which sought to decentralize and devolve the centralized power structures of the state. Again they emerged in opposition to the more recent ceasefire agreement and peace process initiated by the Ranil Wickremasinghe regime and the LTTE in the 2001–2005 period (Rampton with Welikala 2010).

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In this way nationalist hegemony is subject to re-articulations as different political actors find themselves inside and outside the frontiers of authenticity constructed in nationalist discourse and mobilization. A nationalism of hegemonic and ontological depth, then, does not preclude the possibility that the hegemonic formation itself will be fractured by conflict, a point that is not sufficiently acknowledged in understandings of nationalism.7 Yet despite the conflicts within the battle to take the high ground of nationalist authenticity and the fluidity that is apparent in this process, such fracturing rarely challenges the reinforcement of the nationalist representation of the island that continues to inform a range of biopolitical practices. If anything, nationalism still wins out despite the conflicts within the hegemonic formation. The recent ascendancy of the contemporary Rajapakse regime in Sri Lanka attests to this. President Rajapakse and his UPFA regime have completely wrested the mantle of nationalist authenticity from the range of other mainstream and subaltern actors in the political arena, notably including the JVP. This was achieved by appropriating nationalist developmental discourses, pledging to reassert territorial sovereignty over and against internal “enemies” and international forces, and winning a military victory over the LTTE. Another increasing tendency is to turn toward India and China, donors that are less pressing in their pursuit of specific neoliberal political and socioeconomic agendas for development.8 What is clear from all of these combined dynamics is that they overlap with the delivery of Sinhala nationalist goals to a society in which Sinhala nationalist hegemony has become profoundly embedded, a cycle in which Sinhala nationalism as an ideology produces generative and concrete impacts on social and political existence.

Conclusion This chapter has aimed to demonstrate that nationalism acts as an interface between universalizing modes of governmentality introduced by the colonial state that are then taken up by a diverse array of nationalist actors and engines. This ultimately produces a more profound penetration and transformation of colonial space as the dissemination of dominant discourses of social representation fixes in place a nexus of people/nationstate/territory. Such an analysis of nationalism indicates that rather than analyzing nationalist phenomena through the dualistic lens of the universal and particular, these forces must be understood as confluent and interweaving, at times in tension and at others in seamless symmetrical alignment. This confluence has differential effects on nationalism, preventing nationalism from producing recurrence or modularity beyond the contexts of its emergence (Kapferer 1999 [1988]: viii–xiv). The essay also asserts that nationalism is a diffuse phenomenon, and that the governmental, biopolitical, and hegemonic engines of its reproduction

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produce tendrils of power that include and go beyond state and elite actors. Because governmental and biopolitical power is intimately concerned with the knowledge and taxonomic ordering of populations, and because it is targeted at the life process itself, it tends to both capture and constitute subjects in a socially pervasive fashion. In this way nationalism achieves a habituslike ontological depth that challenges both structure- and agency-focused approaches in equal measure by demonstrating how agents are both constituted by and yet serve to constitute the ontological register. Finally, to stress nationalism’s capacity for generative effects in the transformation of the world it seeks to describe is to explicitly question the dichotomies of subject/object and matter/idea, which frequently relegate nationalist discourse itself to the merely epiphenomenal and seek its explanation through processes outside of nationalist channels of power. As Kapferer stated in Legends, the rarity with which nationalism is taken seriously is a specific consequence of both a premature proclamation of cosmopolitan postnational order (Calhoun 2007: 11–26; Mann 1997; Nairn 1997) and, more generally, the ongoing preponderance of the dualistic and dichotomous approaches that continue to dominate thinking about nationalism in the social and human sciences. Despite the vital contribution of Legends in this regard, much work is yet to be done to build upon its legacy.

Notes This chapter both draws from and develops research expounded at greater length in Rampton (2010). 1. For Gadamer the difference between contexts can be extrapolated from these tensions, thus producing a more sensitive reading of history. 2. It is worth contrasting this with Kapferer’s approach, which emphasizes both the sacralization of the nation in modernity and the framing of time through a nationalist cosmology. Again, rather than understanding the world through a dichotomy of the secular-religious, these spheres are recognized to be in ongoing interaction. 3. In Laclau this recognition is starkly apparent in his rejection of analyses of populism that dismiss rhetoric as “empty,” thus neglecting its mobilizing force (2005: 3–20). 4. This not to deny that elite-led instrumentalism or ethnic outbidding occurs. The point is rather that an understanding of Sinhala nationalism cannot be reduced to these dynamics as they fail to capture both the wider effect of these dynamics and the wider reproduction of nationalist practices. 5. The JVP emerged as an offshoot of the Maoist section of the Ceylon Communist Party in the mid 1960s, with its chief constituency drawn from the subaltern, vernacular-educated youth of the universities and the rural sphere. Although this subaltern constituency has expanded over time to include more urbanized constituencies, the vernacular educated and rural component has remained constant.

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6. It is also worth noting that at the point of its emergence between 1966 and 1971, the JVP was only one a of a number of New Left Maoist or Guevarist groups competing for the mobilization of the same constituency base. While other groups remained marginal in number and political impact, the JVP accelerated because of the populist potency of its recruitment program, which relied on the nationalist content of the panti paha (“five classes”). 7. However, James Brow has recognized the fluidity of these dynamics of hegemonic Sinhala nationalism. See Brow (1996). 8. This shift should not, however, be overstated. Institutions like the IMF clearly remain significant in the provision of sizable loans to Sri Lanka in the recent context.

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Appendix 2 Violence, Evil, and the State in Sri Lanka Revisiting an Ontological Approach to Sinhalese Nationalism Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne

2 Our topic is the essence of truth. —Martin Heidegger

Introduction Bruce Kapferer’s account of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, initially published over twenty years ago, has lost none of its prescience. The defeat of the LTTE in May 2009 by the Sri Lankan state and the subsequent unfolding of the Rajapakse dynastic project have precipitated an extraordinary resurgence in Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, both within civil society and as an official state narrative in Sri Lanka.1 The Sri Lankan cum Sinhalese Buddhist state that the Rajapaksesare refashioning draws on the symbolic capital proffered by the fetishzed cultural forms of Sinhalese nationalism and has been highly successful in consolidating a monopoly on the means of force within the island, focusing on the military encompassment of the Tamil people through what masquerade as civilian projects (ICG 2011: 15). The postwar Sri Lankan state that is emerging is a militarized actualization of the Sinhalese nationalist imaginary initially put to brilliant performative use by Rajapakse’s political hero, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) founder S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, in 1956.2 Like previous Sinhalese leaders, the Rajapakse’s have imported “notions of cosmic hierarchy into their rhetoric” (Kapferer 2001: 59) as a dominant aspect of their political persona, Sinhalese leaders seeking to refract the aura of Sinhalese kings. While hierarchy in the context of classical Buddhist kingship has an ontological ground, once its form and content are mediated through a modern bureaucratic order the consequences can be over-determining. Contemporary Sinhalese practices that invoke cosmological tropes, legendary kings, 291

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and mythic heroes can generate Sinhalese nationalist meaning by transforming the local production of such tropes into the national arena. My task is threefold. First I elaborate on the manner in which Kapferer utilizes the phenomenological legacy to generate an ontological account of Sinhalese nationalism, which, contrary to much of the literature in the sociology of nationalism, takes the question of consciousness seriously (Kemper 1991: 11). Second, I take Kapferer’s approach to a realm thus far ignored: the constitutional imaginary of Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history. Since self-government was achieved in 1931, the constitutional imaginary has been a key domain for the competing claims of Sinhalese, Tamils, and others, claims that reveal the motivating power of cosmological metaphors. Finally, I argue that the ontological ground of Sinhalese nationalism is contingent upon its modernity, and that this very same ontological ground made possible a pre-European state imaginary that was not centralized but thoroughly devolved in the idiom of the contemporary non-unitary state.

A Social Phenomenology of Nationalism Kapferer’s argument in Legends hinges on a key observation in A Celebration of Demons, first published in 1983. There he observes that “[e]xorcists call upon the power of the Buddha and invoke the gods—who symbolize the power in hierarchy and whose power is dependent [on the hierarchical potential of the Buddha]—to restore the cosmic order, an order threatened by demonic malevolence and the illusion of demonic power” (Kapferer 1991: 158, my interpolation). The demonic constitutes an intrinsic, intimate aspect of the cosmic order of Sinhalese Buddhism as that which threatens its hierarchical telos and as an agent who, once transformed into a force of benevolence, is integral to the re-hierarchilizing logic of the cosmic order. Possession by demonic forces is tantamount to a fragmentation of the cosmic order, and restoration of the patient to health is synonymous with a reordering of the cosmos. At the apex of this cosmic order stands the Buddha. Below the Buddha is the world of the gods, headed by the four guardian deities of the island, Natha, Vishnu, Kataragama, and Saman.3 Beneath them stands the world of other powerful deities and, lastly, the world of the demonic inhabited by disordering spirits and ghosts. Within this layered cosmos the Buddha is seen as pure, while demonic beings vary in their polluting capacity depending on their degree of orientation toward the Buddha and his teaching. This orientation in turn is determined by their capacity to personify the disordering and ordering potential of the cosmic order. Consequently the Buddha and the demonic both define the boundaries of existence—the points of entry into nonexistence or extinction. The forces of beneficence headed by the Buddha ultimately encompass the demonic.

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In the Theravada Buddhist world the dynamics of encompassment are essentially symbiotic. Here the dhamma, as both truth and cosmic law, embodied in the renouncing bhikkhu, encompasses the “dharma of the righteous ruler which attempts to give order to this world” (Tambiah 1976: 40). This symbiotic relationship between the dhamma and the king generates a hierarchical cosmic order. What is encompassed in this relation is the potentiality for the emergence of contrary forces that may in some way challenge the ordering power of Buddhagama (Dumont 1980: 239). Within this relationship, Kapferer explains, the “whole is determinate of the parts and their interrelation” (Kapferer 1998: 11), the values of holism being those “of religio-cosmic encompassment, which places knowledge and reason (dharma) in the dominant relation to political power (artha)” (ibid.).4 Its cosmological import is such that “the teaching and way of the Buddha . . . [stands] . . . in a relation of virtual complementary opposition to nonreason, the demonic” (ibid, my interpolation).5 In terms of the dynamic relationship between the two that determines the order of life and death, the “cosmic principles defined by the Buddha are dominant and determinate” (ibid.). Within this multilayered cosmological order, the beneficent power of the Buddha encompasses the fragmenting logic of the demonic. Moreover, as Kapferer elaborates elsewhere, “the innumerable Sinhalese deities and demons are inversions, refractions or transformations of the possibility of each other, by virtue of their common constitution” (Kapferer 1991: 162) in the five elemental substances earth, water, fire, wind, and ether. The deity Suniyam, for example, “combines in his being the highly dangerous and polluting aspect of the demonic (in which case he is referred to as Suniyam Yaka) with the protective and purifying aspect of the deity (and when this is dominant, he is referred to as Suniyam devatava)” (ibid.: 164).6 This transformational capacity alludes also to “their often highly ambiguous character as they appear to everyday Sinhalese consciousness” (ibid.: 164). Furthermore, that demons and gods can on occasion reveal “their ontological opposites, supports the general view . . . that deities and demons constitute multiple refractions of the possibilities underlying the process of cosmic unity” (ibid.: 164). The demonic is then immanent in the divine and vice versa, and this ambivalence symbolizes “both the order and disorder of the cosmos and the corresponding condition of the world of human beings as this is constituted within the encompassing cosmic order” (Kapferer 1991: 173). While an encompassing unity can at any moment “break down into a less unified and more fragmented form” (Kapferer 1998: 12), these very same deities “in their power of transformation can change a threatened disorder into order” (Kapferer 1991: 173). As with the restoration of the cosmological order from its fragmentary potential, “[t]he demonic and the destructive conditions of existence are also the source of the regeneration of the hierarchical order of society” (ibid.: 12). In a Nietzschean vein, it is the demonic

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potential of the cosmos that gives rise to the restorative processes of the cosmos. The capacity of the Buddha and the deities associated with the Buddha to progressively encompass the demonic “recreates the ordered worlds of existence” (ibid.). In his account of the Suniyama (the principle anti-sorcery ritual of the Sinhalese in the southwest of the island), the reordering of the patient into a coherent being is “conditioned by the ordering principles of the coherent Buddhist state and society” (Kapferer 1991: 76; see also Kapferer 1998: 67–79). The consequence of the destruction of the cosmic palace at the end of the ritual is that the “cosmic state is made internal to the person, its principles vital to internal coherence” (Kapferer 1991: 76). The cosmic state of the ritual is in a mimetic relationship with the rituals of state, the masquerade of power characterized as an Asokan persona.7 These rituals were hierarchical in nature, having a genealogy that can be traced back to the Pali Canon as well as to the performative structure of kingship in the Buddhist polities of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia (Roberts 1994: 60–72; Strong 1983). As an ontic category, the structural and performative logic of these state rituals was motivated by the ontological ground of the Buddhist cosmic order, particularly its hierarchical aspect. An ontological ground like the “cultural order is only virtual. It exists in potentia merely” (Sahlins 1986: 153), awaiting its moment of arrival in diverse ontic registers. The potentiality of an ontological horizon that is fundamentally virtual in nature found a contingent mode of actualization in the performative and structural logic of these state rituals, which, although fundamentally hierarchical and totalizing in intent, also actualized a state order that was essentially decentralized (Kapferer 2005: 130–131). Even as they reinforced a hierarchical relation between Buddhist kings and the laity, these rituals of state were also practices of world renewal that regulated temporal relations between Buddhist kings, society, and the Sangha, as well as re-hierarchializing the cosmic order. In the pre-British period these state rituals received their performative force in the all encompassing logic of Buddhist kingship as depicted in the Pali Chronicles— the Mahavamsa-Culavamsa textual tradition that spanned the fifth to the eighteenth centuries. Kingship became a functional link between the cosmological and the temporal world (Tambiah 1976: 108). The role of a cakkavatti king, foretold in the Buddhist account of the origins of both the social and the state (in the Agganna Sutta), is that of a “virtuous wheelrolling world ruler who . . . in his exalted capacity maintains in human affairs as much of the dharma” as possible (ibid.: 38; also see Collins 1996: 421–446). This is a totalizing claim for the role of Buddhist kingship, one that lent itself to easy capture and ideological transformation by the centralized colonial state of the nineteenth century (Kapferer 2001: 33–67; Tambiah 1976: 62). The cakkavatti kings, who modeled themselves as Asokan monarchs, were cosmo-creators, the embodiment of both the Buddha and

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the dhamma, the objective of which was to lead not just him but those he ruled on the path to nibbana (Aung-Thwin 1985; Huxley 2002: 129, 138–140). What is integral to the “metaphors of cosmic rebuilding and personal restoration” (Kapferer 1998: 76) is not the exclusion of evil, but its subordination as a benign entity, a force that no longer has the capacity to challenge the hierarchical social and state structure that the cosmic order conditions. The violence of re-formation that is intrinsic to both the Suniyama, and the cosmo-mythic tales of Sinhalese kings like Vijaya and Dutthagamani ultimately leads to a “transcendent equanimity” (ibid.: 76), which in the postcolonial Sinhalese nationalist imagination has been existentially challenged by the Tamil demand for radical autonomy cum separation in the northeast of the island (ibid.: 57–65).8 The violence that regenerates the Buddhist state order re-encompasses the victim of sorcery or the mytho-historical figures of Sinhalese Buddhist history as benign beings. It is an “ordering violence” that forms or reforms “the wholeness and health of the state, the person of the state, and . . . the person within the state” (ibid.: 78; see also de Silva and Bartholomeusz 1998, 11). The Sinhalese Buddhist rituals of healing and the myths of Sinhalese Buddhist kingship are “variations within the one culturally and historically formed cosmological understanding” (Kapferer 1998: 76).9 Hence “the principles that condition the inner being of the person are also those that condition” (ibid.: 76) social and political relations that surround the person. In the contingent flesh-and-blood world of the social, this ontological horizon and its valuation of good and evil realizes its full potential meaning in “its active conjunction with lived realities” (ibid.: 80) in the material world. As an ontology of the everyday, the Buddhist cosmic order not only generates the force of transformation intrinsic to healing rituals but also conditions the transformative logic of modern Sinhalese nationalism. Modern Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism shares a common ontological ground that “establishes a metonymic exchange of meaning” (Kapferer 1997b: 186, fn. 10). Sinhalese Buddhist mythology, Sinhalese Buddhist healing rituals, and modern Sinhalese nationalism draw on a “logical connection with the ontologies of being” (Kapferer 1998: 19), the practices of the everyday. Thus, the constitution of meaning in practice is an actualization of a potential that is integral to the ontological dimensions of the virtual (Kapferer 2005: 134–135). Its penetrative capacity enables this ontological ground to generate nationalist meaning in relation to a number of performative modes that would otherwise be devoid of nationalist import (Kapferer 1991: 9). The metonymic dynamic of the cosmic order’s ontological ground is such that “in some healing rites, the exterior and flattening power of the demonic is sometimes represented as Tamil” (Kapferer 1997a 290). The practices of modern Sinhalese nationalism enable such events to expand their meaning “beyond their immediate practical concern of ending a patient’s affliction. The affliction of a patient and household [become] open

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to broader interpretational import, a metaphor of exteriority grounded as political actuality and patient reality” (ibid.), the demonic agent morphing into a demonized (Tamil) other who threatens not only the integrity of the Sinhalese subject, but the integrity of the Sinhalese nation too. The argument that Sinhalese nationalism possesses “ontological dimensions” (Kapferer 1998: 19), which orients its telos “beneath the level of conscious reflection” (ibid.: 84) was and continues to be a radical departure from the existing literature on Sri Lanka. Kapferer is not suggesting that the past has a “hold over the present” (Scott 1999: 105) in some simple fusion of horizons (Abeysekara 2002: 202–203; Kemper 1991: 19–21). The cosmic order is rather refracted in these myriad practices, the “terms and relations of an ontological scheme . . . [receiving] . . . valuation laden with import in a historically lived reality” (Kapferer 1998: 80). The production of meaning is thus temporally contingent and not transcendental, as some forms of fundamental psychology might have it (Kemper 1991: 19). It is the contingent nature of the ontological that makes for a complex relation between the cosmic order, myth, the rituals of state, and what appears the triumphant moment of colonial modernity. The force of this ontological scheme gives increased vitality to a set of relationships that colonial/postcolonial modernity framed through an orientalist lexicon that privileged the categories of positivist historiography. This historiography mapped the population of the colony through a taxonomy of race and place, which, once appropriated by the Sinhalese nationalist movement, had devastating consequences for ethno-territorial relations between Sinhalese and Tamils in the postcolonial period (Abeysekara 2002: 20). Under British rule the governmentalization of identity, people, and place marked the entry of a new colonial bureaucratic order and the concomitant generation of a set of relations that were reified through the bureaucratic state (Scott 1999: 23–52). Classical epistemology, once appropriated by European historiography’s account of the non-European world, distinguished the claims of the other as either true (identity) or false (difference). In the colonial Sri Lankan imaginary, European writers informed by Indology “denied the possibility of a Sinhala historiography that was not myth or fable” (Kemper 1991: 85), as the Pali and Sinhala-language texts deploy mythic tropes as a means of engaging with ontological concerns intrinsic to the telos of Buddhism, nibbana. While this emerging colonial historiography was a thoroughly contingent regime of truth—an “ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and the specific effects of power attached to the true” (Foucault cited in Jeganathan 1995: 109)—its consequences were far-reaching.10 Once claimed by the Sinhalese nationalist movement from the late nineteenth century, this historiography effaced the various past historical actualizations of a virtual ontological ground. Thus was born modern Sinhalese nationalism. This process of reimagining the past, driven by a

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modern epistemology, drew lines of unity between a non-cosmological understanding of space cum territory, race, and an orientalized Sinhalese Buddhism.11 Through this modern epistemology, the British colonial state and anti-colonial Sinhalese nationalists reconstructed the chronicles (privileging a mode of reading that stressed their value as a medium for seeing the world), reimagining them as vocalizing a Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-cultural community cum nation that had existed prior to European intervention in Sri Lanka’s history. Modern Sinhalese nationalism, however, has never been wholly modern. The epistemological moment of the nineteenth century never effaced the continued resonance of a set of older practices that were ontologically grounded. Rituals that were intrinsic to the Asokan and post-Asokan state were transformed through the imaginary of the bureaucratic state, the cosmic order becoming “active in state processes toward greater centralization, totalitarian action, and the way its agents and agencies react to events in the environment of the state” (Kapferer 2001: 57). Sri Lanka’s postcolonial present has its antecedents in the colonial imaginary. While the colonial state was not strategically immune to making links with the ontological possibility of Asokan state rituals, for the Sinhalese nationalist movement of the late nineteenth century it appeared natural (Roberts 1994: 107). While in the pre-British period the presence of the cakkavatti “gave a certain fixity to the textual model of Asokan authority. . . . In the colonial and postcolonial eras the possibilities multiplied” (Roberts 1994: 109).12 Thus it became possible for the postcolonial Sinhalese constitutional imaginary to be directed at ensuring that the modern Sinhalese Buddhist nation remains whole and unified vis-à-vis the disordering Tamil claims for radical autonomy. Classical Asokan rituals (now mediated through a modern bureaucracy) have become intimate with the Sinhalese nationalist imaginary. Hence religion and race became the criteria of difference that “overrode practices and beliefs that Sinhalas and Tamils shared” (Kemper 1991: 159). Categories that were ontologically grounded now became increasingly reified through a taxonomic process that was the handmaiden of the late colonial bureaucratic state, thus rendering meaning that was partially fluid wholly concrete. This was not so much a case of effacing the cosmic, but rather a matter of the bureaucratic transformation of the cosmic. It was also an ideological process by which the past was elided with the present. Old precolonial signifiers discovered novel import within the bureaucratic territorialization of the colonial and postcolonial state (Kemper 1991: 139–140). Critically though the relation between the ideological terrain of Sinhalese nationalism and its ontological ground, ideas that are brought into an ideological relation “may have a grounding in a variety of different ontologies” (Kapferer 1998: 80). However, where mythic traditions are read through an epistemological prism in the formation of ideology, it becomes possible for one aspect (the hierarchical, for example) of an ontological

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ground to “become dominant in the historical ideological process and to provide the inherent logic for ideological coherence” (ibid.: 80).13 Ideology in my usage does not refer to an epiphenomenal moment that obfuscates material conflict, but rather to an array of cultural practices (such as the discursive economy of Sinhalese nationalism) whose coherence could contingently achieve hegemonic status (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: x–xi). Ideology must be understood on its own terms—for both leaders and the ruled reveal a commitment to the myths, rituals, and grammar of modern Sinhalese nationalism—as an ontic revaluation within an ontological frame that is actualized in the historical processes of Sinhalese nationalism. The primordialism that Kapferer alludes to as conditioning the essentialist logic of modern Sinhalese Buddhism qua nationalism alludes to a process by which the imaginary of the modern Sinhalese Buddhist nation is partially resacralized through a modern epistemology. The religious aura that the modern Sinhalese Buddhist nation acquires was only possible by virtue of the systemic revisionist project of the Buddhist reform movement of the late nineteenth century. Sinhalese nationalism, qua Buddhist modernism, was thoroughly derivative of Western modernity. It directed significant energy into reimagining Sinhalese Buddhist historiography, as well as the “sacredness” of Buddhism.14 The dominant organizing trope of modern Sinhalese nationalism became race. Thus, Sinhalese Buddhist revivalists such as Anagarika Dharmapala and others after him such as Walpola Rahula in the 1940s were highly selective in their modernist reconstruction of the past. (Anderson 1991:111; Rahula 1974 [1946]). The subsequent reification of categories such as “Sinhalese” and “Buddhism” and the transformation of the revivalist moment into a nationalist movement changed the basis on which Sinhalese claims about the organization of the state would be made. While the Pali Chronicles expressed a specific Theravada consciousness, the impact of the revivalist movement, together with the Aryan theory of race, meant that in future the chronicles would become subjected to an epistemological revaluation that projected race on to the events of the past (Kemper 1991: 135–160). I agree with Kapferer that the ideational transformation of the Buddhist cosmic state (as described in the Agganna Sutta and performatively brought to life in the Suniyama) into “the context of modern usage can intensify destructive potentialities of contemporary state bureaucratic processes” (Kapferer 2001: 59; de Silva Wijeyeratne 2007: 156–178, 2003: 215–237, 2000: 319–344, 1996: 364–381). However, I juxtapose this dynamic with what I consider to be the continued resonance of the spatial organization of the galactic polity, which contrasts with the hierarchical logic of the Asokan state. The former reveals the diverse ontological potentiality of the cosmic order and confirms that its hierarchical nature is only one aspect. Its alternative devolutionary aspect holds out the prospect of reimagining the Sinhalese state beyond its colonial/postcolonial centralizing telos.

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The Seamless Genealogy of Sinhalese Nationalism In the 1930s Minister for Agriculture D. S. Senanayake initiated a policy of resettling landless Sinhalese peasants in the borderlands of the northeast as well as in the center of Tamil habitation in the Eastern Province. There is a seamless genealogy between these policies, their continuation from the 1950s on, and the most recent examples of the sustained dispossession of the Tamils (and now Muslims) from their ancestral lands under President Rajapakse since the end of the civil war in 2009 (Minority Rights Group International 2007; Fonseka, Bhavani & Mirak Raheem 2009; Fonseka, Bhavani & Mirak Raheem 2010).15 Senanayake invoked the protection of the Sinhalese peasantry and drew on the rhetoric of restoring the Sinhalese to the Rajarata,16 when in 1937 he initiated a program of land resettlement in the Rajarata or what the Tamil imaginary knew as the Vanni (Roberts 2004: 72). The resettlement of landless Sinhalese in the borderlands of the northeast then brought into sharp focus the contested imaginaries of the Rajarata/ Vanni. While the Vanni was an area of shared identities between Sinhalese and Tamil, such categories had far greater emotional purchase in the south and north of the island, the respective centers of Sinhalase and Tamil culture. The Vanni had been the historic site of polities that had exhibited some autonomy from both the Jaffna and Kandyan kingdom’s at different historical moments. The Vanni chieftaincies had come into being following the collapse of the Buddhist polity centered on Polonnaruva in the thirteenth century, and while many were Tamil, some were also Sinhalese and Vadda (indigenous people of the land) (Ibid: 72; Kemper 1991: 138; Indrapala 1970: 111–140). Following Polonnaruva’s collapse, the majority of the Sinhalese population began a southward drift that culminated in the Kandyan kingdom, which emerged in the sixteenth century. By that time the Vanni was composed of the remainder of older Sinhala-speaking peoples, people who had originated and identified with the Vaddas (some of whom had become Sinhalese), and the descendants of South Indians who migrated between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries (Roberts 2004: 72–73). The Vanni chieftains’ relationship to both the Jaffna kingdom in the fourteenth century and the Kandyan kingdom from the sixteenth century was tributary in nature, characteristic of sub polities at the periphery of a much larger galactic polity (Roberts 2004: 74; Arasaratnam 1966: 103). Tribute or gift giving was a feature of the relationship that the Vanni chiefs exhibited toward the Kandyan kings (Roberts 2004: 75).17 However, the subordinate relationship of the Vanni chieftaincies was not static, for the very nature of a galactic polity allowed for “paradoxes . . . pulsations and oscillations” (Tambiah cited in Roberts 2004: 75) between the center and the periphery (ibid: 74–77; de Silva 1981: 99). These historical nuances, central to understanding the Vanni, were eschewed by Senanayake’s land resettlement policy. His policy also had

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colonial antecedents—the 1856 Irrigation Ordinance had begun the process of restoring a “number of irrigation systems” in the Rajarata. In the 1870s Governor Gregory began a process that would continue into the years before the First World War when he initiated a number of “irrigation projects in the cause of peasant welfare” (Kemper 1991: 139). Looking back from the 1930s, in Yagirala Pannananda’s imaginary, Gregory’s rule resembled that of early Sinhalese kings, for he made “Anuradhapura the center of the North Central Province, renovated ancient tanks and viharas, such as the Ruvanvalisaya which Dutugamunu had built, and established an allowance for monks to look after such places” (ibid.: 101).18 Here was an instance of British governors engaged in a performative revaluation of meaning within ontological ground, such that the meaning of an ancient system (the symbiotic relation between kingship and karma) was made relevant to a modern audience.19 Colonial/postcolonial modernity seamlessly inhabited the same discursive space as the pre-European imaginary and shifted the register of its activation to that of the bureaucratic order. Herein resided the possibility of an over determined (fetishized and reified) reproduction of the pre-European imaginary(Kapferer 2001: 48–63). The shift in register, however, functions through the logic of inversion: modernity is legitimated in a revalued understanding of the past, the past being ideologically read as static and seamlessly continuing through to the colonial/postcolonial present. If British governors could draw on the same ontological ground as cakkavatti kings (and the performative power of the rituals they partook in prior to the severance of the link between the colonial state and Buddhism made this possible), then it was inevitable that Sinhalese notables could do the same (Kemper 1991: 100–101). In the absence of unifying Sinhalese heroes, for Pannananda, “the best one can hope for are leaders who resemble ancient kings” (Kemper 1991: 100), a political narrative embraced by postcolonial Sinhalese leaders (Kapferer 1998: 85–86).20 Transforming the aesthetic imaginary of the postcolonial state was integral to the Sinhalese nationalist movement. The genius of this transformation, one that transforms the articulating relationship between the state and the governed (Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher, etc.) resides in the fact that its ontological grounding is also the horizon of the everyday, one that orients the “interpretation of lived experience” (Kapferer 1998: 83)—the rituals of healing are testament to the logic of shifting registers. Once it informs the institutional practices of the state and the Sinhalese Buddhist nation, a practice that challenges assumptions integral to the being of both the state and the nation “also attacks the person at his or her ontological depth, at the very source of being and existence in the world” (ibid.). Once the practices of the Sinhalese Buddhist nation engage the person at this ontological depth, in “what may be experienced as a ‘primordial’ way . . . the passions are fired and people may burn” (ibid.). Only in such terms can we conceptualize the telos of the Sinhalese state from the 1950s on. In the 1950s Sinhalese Buddhist civil servants

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organized themselves into a group called the Dutthagamani rahas Sanvidhanaya (Dutthagamani’s Secret Organization) in order to campaign against Christian influence in the Ceylon Civil Service, an elite core of highly educated and anglicized Sinhalese, Tamils, and Burghers who controlled the administrative machinery of the state. When the Pancha Maha Bala Mandalaya began to campaign for S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s SLFP, they took “oaths to protect Buddhism” (Kemper 1991: 126) standing in front of Dutthagamani’s statue in Anuradhapura.21 Cosmological metaphors were thus redolent in the organizations that challenged the liberal postcolonial settlement of 1948. These interests ensured Bandaranaike’s victory in the 1956 general election. His victory was ontologically grounded in cosmic metaphors, the auspiciousness of his victory, coinciding as it did with the Buddha Jayanthi, being reinforced by a popular tradition that “associated Bandaranaike’s victory with the belief that King Diyasena would appear at the Buddha Jayanthi, conquer Anuradhapura with a great army, and re-establish a Buddhist polity” (Kemper 1991: 164), an association that became more pertinent after his slaying by a Buddhist monk in 1959.22 Upon securing power in 1956, Bandaranaike announced that Sinhala would become the official language of the state, thus ensuring with the stroke of a pen (given the administrative rules that were implemented subsequent to the Official Language Act) that non-Sinhala-speaking minorities would be at a disadvantage in seeking employment and promotion in the public sector if they failed to pass a Sinhala language exam (Hoole 2001:38–41).23 The apocalyptic tone of the parliamentary debates on the introduction of Sinhala as the official state language drew on the same ontological ground as the debates about citizenship in the late 1940s that had disenfranchised a section of the Tamil population (de Silva Wijeyeratne 1998: 37–68). The justification for elevating Sinhala to the status of official state language, like the earlier disenfranchisement of tea estate Tamils, drew on the cosmological metaphor of reordering a fragmented state of being, one challenged by the existential threat of the Tamil other. Only by restoring both Buddhism and the Sinhala language to its precolonial status could the state, much like the Sinhalese victim of sorcery, be reborn. The parliamentary debates projected the Tamil language as possessive of the demonic capacity to eviscerate Sinhala and by implication the Sinhalese people, just as in the cosmic order demonic agents threaten the ordering logic of the Buddha (de Silva Wijeyeratne 2000: 319–44). Indirectly invoking the encompassing logic of the cosmic order in which the Buddha encompasses the fragmenting force of demonic agents, the Official Language Act marginalized the demonic potential of the Tamil language to both extinguish the Sinhala language and divide the Sinhalese Buddhist nation. Just as the Buddha ultimately encompasses the demonic, Sinhala encompasses Tamil in a hierarchical relation. The ideological force of the Official Language Act was rooted in an ontological ground

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that constituted its inner “structure of reasoning” (Kapferer 1998: 45). The parliamentary debates about the official language reveal an interpretational possibility latent in the ontological ground of the cosmic order, the performative structure of the debates drawing on the metaphors of unity, fragmentation, and reordering. Thus the restoration of Sinhala (and by implication Sinhalese cultural and literary traditions) to preeminence simultaneously reordered the cosmos (ibid: 319–344). The passage of the Official Language Act signaled the motivating power of a reiterative cultural logic that would structure the discursive and non-discursive practices of the state for much of the twentieth century and beyond.24 The hierarchical aspect of the cosmic order, capable of making a seamless link with the hierarchical logic of the unitary state forged in the nineteenth century, has provided an ontological ground for the practices of the state—an ontological ground now mediated by the centralized state, whereas once it was mediated by a classical Buddhist state that was galactic in nature. Tamil opposition to both discriminatory legislation and state practices that marginalized them further has been fashioned as “ontologically foreign and threatening to the hierarchical and encompassing unity of the state” (Kapferer 1998: 100–101). In 1970 the government headed by Mrs. Bandaranaike summoned a constituent assembly to draft a new Republican Constitution. The Federal Party, which had emerged as the principle representative of the Tamils, advocated the decentralization of executive, legislative, and judicial powers through a federal state structure. This was unanimously opposed by the government and the United National Party (UNP) opposition now led by J. R. Jayewardene, who maintained that it would fragment the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka and by implication the Sinhalese Buddhist nation (Constituency Assembly Debates 1970–1972). The Sinhalese fear of federalism was given voice to by a prominent Sinhalese MP, Prins Gunasekera, who observed that: For over 2000 years the Sinhala people have lived in Ceylon. To them Ceylon is their motherland. This motherland was frequently invaded from South India . . . The history of Ceylon tells us that the Sinhala people fought incessantly against Indian invaders to keep this country for themselves . . . [and] the Sinhala people look upon the Tamil people now inhabiting the Northern and Eastern provinces as descendants of the invading forces whom they have been fighting to keep this country for themselves. This . . . explains why the Sinhala people fight against all proposals to grant concessions [such as federalism] to the Tamil people. (Constituency Assembly Debates (1971: Vol. 1, No. 13, Col. 473, my emphasis, my interpolation).

The performative structure of Gunasekera’s speech had been commonplace ever since the Donoughmore Constitution, when the logic of number enabled the consolidation of Sinhalese majoritarian politics (Scott 1999: 23–52).25 While Gunasekera’s account is an ideological distortion of

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the past, it is constitutive of a specific reality, such that when Sinhalese political actors speak of the past through the trope of Tamil invasion they act reflexively, speaking the world that they and others are already within. Gunasekera’s ideological distortion is laden with ontological import. Like the Sinhalese victims of possession who are attacked by demonic beings from the margins of the Buddhist cosmos but ultimately encompass the agents of demonic fragmentation, modern-day Sinhalese must maintain constant watch against the demonic claims of federalism that emanate from the northeastern periphery of the Sinhalese state. It is the hierarchical order of the unitary state that encompasses the demonic potential of Tamil political actors and transforms that demonic potential into a benign state of being that no longer threatens the state’s hierarchical logic. Just as the Sinhalese victim of sorcery is encompassed and made whole by the ordering principles of the cosmic state, the ordering logic of the unitary Sinhalese state (and its bureaucratic order) similarly encompasses and makes whole the Sinhalese Buddhist nation, the latter subordinating evil (the Tamils) into a benign entity. This dynamic struggle between Sinhalese and Tamils that Gunasekera projects refracts the cosmological struggle between the Buddha and the demonic, a struggle that similarly sees hierarchy restored by virtue of the Buddha’s greater encompassing power. The ontological ground of the cosmic order is such that an attack on the integrity of the state is synonymous with an attack on the body of the Sinhalese subject. The 1972 constitution, as the performative embodiment of the unitary state, firmly encompassed the Tamil minority at the base of this hierarchical enterprise. Hence the cosmic order as a temporally contingent ontological ground, ever searching for new meaning in ever-new ontic registers, found a powerful ideological tool in the 1972 constitution. Within this ontological ground violence is regenerative, the demonic potential of the Tamils to disorder the state being systematically encompassed by the hierarchical logic of the centralized state. Since the late 1950s, attempts at devolving power to the Tamil-dominated northeast of the island have come undone as a result of the organizational power of Sinhalese nationalist interests. When J. R. Jayewardene became prime minister in 1977, his first act was to further centralize the state with the introduction of the 1978 constitution, making Jayewardene the first executive president. Despite a marginal alleviation of the most onerous forms of anti-Tamil discrimination instituted by SLFP-dominated governments between 1956 and 1977, Jayewardene’s period of government witnessed the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 and then the failure to adequately implement the Thirteenth Amendment of 1988, which gave life to the provincial councils—the most developed model of decentralization yet introduced—as a means of granting limited self-government to the Tamils of the northeast. Intrinsic to his self-imaginary was Jayewardene’s invoking of the tropes of Asokan monarchy, especially its centralizing aspect, which allowed him to see himself as the successor to a line of Buddhist kings from Vijaya, the

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mytho-historical founder of the Sinhalese polity (Kemper 1991: 169–72). He failed to grasp the irony of this claim: Vijaya was never a consecrated Buddhist monarch. These Asokan pretensions, echoed by his prime minister, Ranasinghe Premadasa, sought to link the virtues of Jayewardene’s rule with that of Asoka, the modernist refraction of Asokan rituals signaling an ontological revaluation such that in an ideological gesture, Asoka becomes integral to the thoroughly modern moralization of the hierarchical dynamics of the Sinhalese state. The invocation of Buddhist virtue did not extend to the development of a policy framework that would address Tamil grievances. By the early 1980s an armed Tamil youth insurrection in the north was imminent. Jayewardene exploited this, and his inaction precipitated the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983. Tamil separatism was analogous to a demonic disordering force that threatened the physical integrity of the body of the Sinhalese nation. Just as Jayewardene, like Sinhalese leaders before him, invoked tropes of cosmic hierarchy in his rhetorical flourishes and used it to justify his authority, the same cultural logic structured the regenerative violence directed against the Tamils in 1983. Refracting the logic of a healing ritual, and acting “with the force of their own cosmic incorporation” (Kapferer 1998: 101), Sinhalese rioters fragmented “their demonic victims, as the Tamils threatened to fragment them, and by doing so resubordinate[d] and reincorporate[d] the Tamil demon in hierarchy” (ibid.: 101). Such violence, by restoring the integrity of a fragmenting Sinhalese social order, also restored the personal integrity of the Sinhalese individual cum collective, as both individual and national anguish were “overcome in the power of hierarchy” (ibid.: 111). The “crushing absolutism of power contained in cosmic metaphors” (Kapferer 2001: 61) was brilliantly invoked by President Mahinda Rajapakse in 2006, when posters appeared declaring Rajapakse a reincarnation of Dutthagamani who would, like the king in his struggle with Elara, vanquish the demonic forces of the LTTE (De Votta 2007: 9).26 This mytho-historical association intensified in the popular Sinhalese imaginary following the defeat of the LTTE in 2009. In some Sinhalese quarters Rajapakse had achieved the status of a cakkavatti king. Like Dutthagamani, whose own journey toward encompassing his own demonic potential began from the margins of the polity (Magama) in the south controlled by his father, Rajapakese’s own transformation in status to that of ordering beneficence began in Hambantota, in the deep south of the Sinhalese heartland. While the analogy with Dutthagamani’s confrontation with Elara is an ideological elision (and distortion) of the past and present, its ontological grounding renders its imaginative force all the more powerful as an organizing vehicle for postwar Sinhalese-Tamil, state–civil society, and center-periphery relations. Since the defeat of the LTTE, rather than initiate a policy agenda restoring Tamil self-respect by developing political institutions that give meaningful roles to minority leaders and empower the communities they represent, the government

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has been moving in the opposite direction. Many analysts believe the government aims to reorient Sri Lankan politics along the lines of Malaysia’s “bumiputra” mode. This would feature a ruling national party controlled by the majority Sinhalese but incorporating politicians of other ethnicities and granting them patronage to distribute to their ethnic constituencies, with some limited regional power but no independent political power at the center. (ICG 2010a: 13–14) 27

We are currently witnessing the physical and existential encompassment of the Tamils (and Muslims) in the northeast of the island, their demonic potential seemingly managed within the unitarian logic of the postwar state. The ICG recently observed: With the expected establishment of military cantonments, high security zones and special economic zones, many thousands may never be resettled. Those who lived in the north for years either were given their land by the LTTE or bought it without government approval. With the vast majority of the land in the north formally owned by the government, Tamils and Muslims fear that it will be redistributed to the politically connected, with Sinhalese settled with military support or through state supported business opportunities, resulting in a slow but defi nitive shift in the demographics. There are growing reports of large numbers of Sinhalese moving (back) to the east. In the absence of meaningful, well-intentioned consultation with and between Tamil and Muslim political and community leaders, there is also a high risk of renewed land disputes as Muslims attempt to return to land in Jaffna, Mannar and other parts of the north they were expelled from by the LTTE in 1990. (ICG 2010a 10–11) 28

The conditions of future conflict are being sown by the current regime.29 Continuation of the cultural logic of the physical, administrative, and legal cum constitutional violence directed at the Tamils for much of the twentieth century has been made possible by a powerful marriage. The tendency toward intolerance in the Sinhalese state imaginary through what may be imagined as an “egalitarian bureaucratic state logic is increased when married to the hierarchical logic of cosmic states and other symbolic practices of everyday life” (Kapferer 2001: 59). Ethnicity once “defined in hierarchical terms enters an imaginary where the category of the ethnic other can by definition be demonized and viewed as radically dangerous” (ibid.). The consequence, as with a healing ritual such as the Suniyama, is a radical semi-extirpative transformation of the agents of disorder. However, the cultural logic of the postcolonial Sinhalese state stands in radical contrast with the historical trajectory of the classical Buddhist polity.

Buddhist States and Galactic Polities In the classical Buddhist polities of pre-British Sri Lanka, the rituals of royal legitimization were subject to constant expansion (Seneviratne 1978: 90–114). Many of these revolved around the worship of alleged relics of the

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Buddha and a symbolic expansion of their ontological status, so that by the “twelfth century the tooth and bowl relics [of the Buddha] were being treated as the symbols of legitimate kingship” (Roberts 1994: 67). By the fourteenth century this had developed into the Asala perahara (procession), a festival of renewal (ibid.). It was a powerful “ritual of protection that was understood to be a recharging of [the] cosmic power” (Roberts 2004: 60) of kingship, which in turn refracted the ontological status of the Buddha as a “sovereign regulator” (Tambiah 1976: 52). By the Kandyan period, kingship and state power were firmly embedded within a Buddhist cosmological frame. This was the culmination of a number of developments in the polities preceding the Kandyan kingdom. From the third century C.E on, many kings were referred to as mahasattva (an epithet of bodhisattva—Buddha-to-be). By the fifth century, the king was venerated as a bodhisattva, and by the tenth century, at the end of the Anuradhapura period, the notion that kings imagined themselves as kinsmen of the Buddha was firmly entrenched (Kemper 1991: 48–49; Wickremeratne 1987; Gunawardana 1978). The consequence was that kingship refracted the aura of the Buddha himself. This dynamic was reinforced in consecration cum coronation ceremonies known as abhiseka, which were sometimes performed annually. These ceremonies, at which nobles and others paid homage to the king, turned kings into gods and were essentially “rituals of integration” (Roberts 1994: 68) by which the king was accorded the status of a Buddha. The rituals confirmed the king’s geographical reach as ruler of the whole island, taking the form of a dipacakravarti (universal conqueror of the island) (Roberts 2004: 46–47). The renewal of sacral power was synonymous with the renewal of profane power in the here-and-now world of the sociopolitical domain (Roberts 1994: 69.) The myriad forms of obsequiousness that marked the Sinhalese Buddhist social order were also replete in the spatial organization of the Sinhalese Buddhist polities. What was striking about these polities was the manner in which their physical layout also drew on cosmological metaphors and pantheons, as the cosmos was symbolically refracted in the material domain of the polity (Heine-Geldern 1942). The ontological potentiality of this cosmic order was such that “Mount Meru became a paradigm for the spatial organization of state, capital, and temple” (Duncan 1990: 48) in both Sri Lanka and Buddhist Southeast Asia (Wheatley 1977). In the Theravada world of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, the cosmic axis of the polity was usually centered on a “relic of the Buddha, or on the palace of the king, the representative of the Sakra, the king of the gods” (Duncan 1990: 50). In its geographical construction, the Kandyan kingdom mirrored the world of the gods, and the ontological ground of the cosmos refracted in the Kandyan landscape, “its architects (the rulers) were seeking to partake of the power of the gods” (Roberts 1994: 67). The organization of space drew on the ontological potential of the cosmic order.

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Building programs initiated by Buddhist kings such as Dutthagamani and Parakarmabahu I in the second century B.C.E. and twelfth century C.E., respectively, were meticulous in drawing on the sacred organization of cosmic space. Such actions were at the heart of righteous Buddhist kingship leading to the acquisition of karma, which in turn would have a “cumulative effect [that] would compound blessings” (Roberts 1994: 60) on the laity. Through such meritorious acts, individual kings were giving effect to the principles of righteous Buddhist rule (dhammiko dhammaraja), their kingship establishing a link between the domain of the gods and the domain of material existence. However, in their administrative functioning, these polities, which established a binary relationship between Buddhist kingship and the cosmic order, were non-centralized structures. They were pulsating entities, so that within “each major or minor principality, there were checks and balances such as duplication within administrative ‘departments’, interlocking and contesting factional formations of patrons and clients, and devolutionary processes of power parcelization” (Tambiah 1992: 173). There was an inherent tension between the claims of virtual cosmic sovereignty, as embodied in the holistic nature of Buddhist kingship, and the actual dynamics of state practice. In its structure, Asoka’s empire has been characterized as a galactic polity (Tambiah 1976). At first glance, it seems as if Asoka exercised centralized political and economic control over the empire. (Thapar 1961: 95). The disparate placing of the inscriptions and Pillar Edicts is seen “as evidence of actual direct control of a far-flung empire” (Tambiah 1976: 70). While this image attests to a form of dhammic virtuality in which the metaphor of an all-encompassing cosmic sovereignty is presented as the basis of Buddhist kingship, in actuality Asoka’s empire was much more diverse. Far from being a centralized monarchy, this vast empire was more likely to have been a “galaxy-type structure with lesser political replicas revolving around the central entity and in perpetual motion of fission or incorporation” (ibid.). At its apex stood the “king of kings subsuming in superior ritual and even fiscal relation a vast collection” of subordinate polities (ibid.). This model is consistent with the cakkavatti monarch, who as a “wheel rolling world ruler by definition required lesser kings under him who in turn encompassed still lesser rulers” (Tambiah 1976: 70). It is likely that the “raja of rajas was more a presiding apical ordinator rather than a totalitarian authority between whom and the people nothing intervened except his own agencies and agents of control” (ibid). Sections of the Pali Vinaya suggest that the political systems of at least eastern India [which incorporated its capital Pataliputra] during the time of early Buddhism were constituted on galactic lines” (ibid.: 70–71). To the extent that the cosmos constitutes an interlocking whole, with the Buddha at the center and the gods and the demons inhabiting the

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outward layers, and with the Buddha ultimately capable of encompassing these other beings, this process of cosmic contestation oriented the bureaucratic processes of the precolonial polities. Tambiah notes, “within each major or minor principality, there were checks and balances, such as duplication within administrative ‘departments’, interlocking and contesting factional formations of patrons and clients, and devolutionary processes of power [distribution]” (1992: 173). The Kandyan kingdom refracted this diffuse cosmological order in its administrative arrangements. In terms of administration, the “royal domain surrounding the capital city of Kandy was made up of nine small districts . . . under the charge of officials called rate mahatvaru” (Tambiah 1992: 173). Around the central domain, there were twelve provinces, “an inner circle of smaller provinces and an outer circle of larger and remoter provinces” (ibid. 174). Just as the authority of the Buddha is subject to fragmentation by the demonic forces that inhabit the margins of the cosmos, the authority of the king “waned as the provinces stretched farther away from the capital” (ibid.: 174). This devolutionary dynamic was also replicated at the level of administration for the Temple of the Tooth, as functionaries were divided into the “outer and inner groups”, the outer being concerned with general administration and the inner with ritual work” (ibid.: 174). This devolutionary impact extended to land management “and the manpower settled on them (finely graded by caste and tenurial rights) in terms of monastic (viharagam) and temple (devalegam) endowments, estates attached to offices held by the nobility (nindagam) and the royal estates (gabadagam)” (Tambiah 1992: 174). Such a devolutionary dynamic extended to the use of non-Kandyans (Muslims and Sinhalese from the coastal plains of the island) in specialist roles within the Kandyan administration. This attests to an image of a galactic polity that reproduced its modes of administration at different levels of remove from the center. However, just as the authority of the Buddha waned the farther out from the center of the cosmic order one went, the authority of the king also lessened the further one went out from the centre. This allowed for the disava (provincial governor) of provinces on the Kandyan periphery and semi-periphery to assert a degree of autonomy from the center (Seneviratne 1978: 114; Tambiah 1992: 175). These devolutionary dynamics were ontologically grounded in the potentiality of a cosmic order that refused an absolutely determining hierarchical moment. The cosmic order fluctuated between moments of unity, fragmentation, and reordering, and this was refracted in the dynamic relation between the center, the semi-periphery, and the periphery of the Kandyan kingdom. Concomitant with Asoka’s empire, the center of Kandy was constructed to “mirror both the world of the gods and the cities of the cakravartis” (Duncan 1990: 107). The organization of the central domain of the city resonated with the cosmic order, of

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which kingship was an integral aspect. The hierarchical intent of the cosmic order conditioned the very architecture of the Kandyan kingdom and its environs. The ontological status of the cosmic order was such that the “city as a whole . . . was as a heaven to the kingdom as a whole” (ibid: 117). In its daily functioning, the Kandyan kingdom, like the earlier Buddhist polities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, actualized the concept of universal Buddhist kingship. However, while hierarchical intent informed daily politics and state practice in these polities, in their actual functioning they exhibited “both dispersed and unitary moments” (Inden 1990: 229). Let us recall that in the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta, the Buddha is reputed to have said that on conquering new territory, the cakkavatti king tells his vassals “to govern as you did before” (Collins 1996: 429), so that the conquered became client kings. The decentralized patron-clientalism that marked the Kandyan kingdom—and the galactic polities in general— may have been given canonical import by the devolutionary imperative that the Buddha, at least by implication, attributes to Buddhist kingship in the shadow of conquest.30 In practice, the model of the cakkavatti king gave rise to a galactic polity that revealed the ontological potentiality of a cosmic order that refused closure. The consciousness of the galactic polity, as revealed in the administrative practices of the Kandyan kingdom, was lost in the governmental logic of the modern unitary state shaped by the British from the nineteenth century. This was a unitary state driven by the interests of British mercantile capital, and as such it could not be legitimated by recourse to the hierarchical intent of the Kandyan kingdom as is common, for example, in modern Sinhalese nationalist rhetoric. Ironically, the British recognized the relative autonomy that the Kandyan kingdom had in relation to the rest of the island, with the result that between 1815 to the 1830s the Kandyan Department administered Kandy. What modern Sinhalese nationalism imagines as a centralized state that has existed from time immemorial is fundamentally the product of the modern bureaucratic order. The violent force with which this argument has been prosecuted for much of Sri Lanka’s postcolonial life (such that an encompassing violence has become the dominant metaphor in the performative logic of the state) reveals an over determined logic.31 This logic is ontologically grounded in a cosmic order that, while fundamentally diverse, lending itself to multiple possibilities, has come to be projected through the practices of the centralized state. Thus cosmological metaphors are realized through the “contemporary technologies of the state” (Kapferer 2001: 61), not in their essential diversity but as a unified singular echo. Such metaphors, once removed from their ritual imaginary or genealogy in Buddhist historiography and captured by a modern bureaucratic order, have the capacity to generate violent and murderous consequences.32

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Notes 1. While Mahinda Rajapakse is the president, his brother Gotabhaya is the defense secretary, while another brother, Basil, is now an MP and a personal advisor to the president; finally, Chamal is the speaker of the parliament. 2. http://inside.org.au/sri-lanka-anatomy-of-a-tragedy/ (27–05–11). The teleology of the state under the Rajapakses’ is classically Bonapartist (Kadirgamar 2010: 21–24). 3. Natha, derived from the Mahayana cult of Avalokitesvara, is the highest of the gods and in Sinhalese Buddhist tradition is “characterized as continually contemplating the teachings of the Buddha and as being so unattached to the matters of existence, that he is expected by the Sinhalese to be the next Buddha (Maitri). . . . Vishnu is conceived of as the protector of Buddhism on the island; Kataragama is closely linked with the ancient Sinhalese Buddhist resurgence against Hindu Tamil domination; and Saman is the god of Adam’s Peak . . . the site of Buddha’s footprint and the Buddha’s first visit to Sri Lanka” (Kapferer 1991: 159). Both Vishnu and Katagarama are concerned with affairs of the human world and combine both ordering and disordering powers “in their being” (Kapferer 1991: 160). These Hindu deities who came to prominence in the late Kandyan (eighteenth-century) period under the Tamil Nayakkar kings replaced an earlier group of guardian deities and were often incorporated into the Buddhist cosmic order, albeit in a hierarchical relation, the Hindu gods always subordinate to the Buddha. In Theravada Buddhism the gods are also in pursuit of dhamma and the “final spiritual goal of nibbana” (Holt 2006: 49). 4. Gokhale (1969: 731–738) notes that there are two distinct phases in the development of the usage of artha (attha in Pali), which in its Pali transliteration signals an expression of the early Buddhist bifurcation between the spiritual and the temporal (1969: 732). According to Gokhale, in “the first phase it was used generally to mean something that is vital and desirable both in this world and the next. In the second phase its use was more or less related to affairs of this world, especially of organized society, and came close to the Sanskrit technical term artha which [Kautilya’s Arthashastra] describes as varta (economy) and dandaniti” (1969: 732, my interpolation). 5. Contra Abeysekara (2002: 202), Kapferer is not alluding to a Jungian “dark underside” in Buddhism’s potentiality to violence that takes on a “demonic” character. He is instead alluding to a hierarchical logic in which violence is included but transcended in a hierarchy of reason. In this sense transcendence is an immanent aspect of violence that the textual tradition itself reveals to be wholly intrinsic to Buddhist kingship and its account of the classical Buddhist state (Collins 1996: 421–446). 6. Yaka is the archaic Sinhala word for demon and the root of “devatava,” devata signifying those supernatural beings “who are transitional between the classes of deity and demon” (Kapferer 1991: 164). In the contemporary Sinhalese nationalist imaginary, the Tamil other has descended to the status of a yaka who must by analogy be subordinated within the cosmic state invoked by the Sinhalese ritualists in the Suniyama (Kapferer 2001: 59–60, 1997a: 73–81). There is a degree of slippage between these metaphors

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of subordination and transformation and the eugenic trope in modern Sinhalese nationalism, which advocates the possibility of breeding out the genetic element of “Tamilness”. See http://www.groundviews.org/2007/06/08/thegovernment-in-the-nude-a-revolting-sight (27–05–11). 7. Georgio Agamben has argued that the ‘persona’ announces a mask through which the individual “acquires a role and a social identity” (2010: 71) intrinsic to the formation of a juridical relation. The Asokan persona does not aim at the historical description of Asoka’s rule, but rather is an ideal type, a cultural paradigm that describes a set of hierarchical ritual practices associated with Asoka’s rule and their subsequent evolution in the Buddhist polities of South and Southeast Asia (Roberts 1994: 57–72). 8. The Mahavamsa records that Dutthagamani defeats the Tamil ruler Elara and thereby restores Sinhalese Buddhist kingship to Anuradhapura in the second century B.C.E. The narrative form that this account takes is oft repeated in the Pali Chronicles, where Sinhalese hero-kings mimic the Buddha’s earlier act of claiming the island for the dhamma, their violence regenerative as they confront and defeat Tamil rulers and hence restore Buddhist rule to the island. While a literal reading of the Mahavamsa appears to justify violence toward a cultural other, a more nuanced reading conscious of the ontological ground of the text would suggest that the author may have been alluding to the “ethical dilemma involved in Buddhist kingship” (Berkwitz 2004: 78; Obeyesekere 1988: 19–25). Such nuance is wholly absent in the Sinhalese nationalist reading of the Pali Chronicles, which projects onto them an epistemological problematic, reading them for what they said about the world of their discursive production (Daniel 1996: 43–45). 9. Such an understanding finds expression in the education system and in patterns of familial upbringing that involve storytelling, for example (ibid., 12; Obeyesekere; Obeyesekere, Ranjini 1991: x). Kapferer notes that “myths and practices of magic and sorcery announce the dynamic of this ontology [and] the vital processes engaged in the construction and destruction of human being and their realities” (1997: 3, my interpolation). 10. Discourses are “practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 1971: 49). Kapferer takes this principle of discourse as a priori in his account of the modernity of Sinhalese nationalism. Of far greater concern is the interpretation of historical processes as ontic categories that are ontologically grounded. 11. Sri Lanka’s Buddhist polities delineated space through a relatively non-bounded galactic configuration (Tambiah 1992). 12. British rule involved a fundamental “reordering of Sinhalese social and political relationships” within the overarching confines of the “ideological and symbolic order of the colonial state” (Kapferer 1991: 31). 13. Given that the ontology of Sinhalese Buddhist myth is one of the everyday (of healing rituals, for example) such an ontology (in which good is immanent in evil and ultimately encompasses evil) is made “relevant in the motion of a historical world and once subservient to such a world can come to have a more determining force” (Kapferer 1998: 80).

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14. Contra Chatterjee (1993: 6) it does not appear that the sacred was as autonomous a sphere as he suggests, given its circumscription within a modernist narrative. 15. This land has been expropriated with a view toward either resettling Sinhalese families or developing niche tourist resorts over which there exists no local accountability, including tourist resorts controlled by the Sri Lankan armed forces. The evolving framework of post-war economic policy (but identifiable as early as 2006) attests to the overtly militarized forms of securitized development which has become another vehicle for the physical and existential encompassment of the Tamils in the Eastern Province in particular (Rampton 2007). 16. Restoring the Sinhalese to the Rajarata (the ancient heart of Sinhalese Buddhist kingship in the north central region of the island) was also synonymous with restoring Buddhist sacred places in the Rajarata. This would become an intensely passionate confrontation between the colonial state and monks, who had been immersed in Dharmapala’s Sinhalese nationalist renaissance in the late nineteenth century. It was initially focused on the restoration of Anuradhapura (the island’s first Buddhist polity) as a sacred place par excellence (Kemper 1991: 142–143). The logic of restoration was organized around an epistemological problematic whose focus was one of producing a Sinhalese Buddhist identity organized around race at the expense of ethnic and religious others. Such acts of discovery are analogous to the subordination of the disordering potential of demonic agents that challenge the Buddha from the margins of the cosmic order, in the Eastern Province the discovery of sacred places playing an “expressive role in establishing the spiritual unity of the island while they simultaneously enabled its political unification” (Kemper 1991: 137). Tamils’ claims for the recognition of Hindu sacred places in the east have been met with contempt and racialized derision by Sinhalese archaeologists and epigraphers (Hoole 2001: 75–78). 17. The Culavamsa records that a Sinhalese cakkavatti had to subdue Vanni chiefs who were also Sinhalese. 18. In his extension of the Mahavamsa covering the period 1815–1935, Pannananda focuses on British governors, who are the subject of either adulation or critique depending on their relationship to the welfare of the Sinhalese (Kemper 1991: 95–104; Seneviratne 1999: 133–134). 19. In the 1920s Governor Herbert Stanley was welcomed by the Vidyodaya monks in a manner that invoked his status as a cakkavatti king (Seneviratne 1999: 131–133). 20. In the late nineteenth century, Senanayake’s family had allegedly fabricated a genealogy to King Parakramabahu I, who had briefly unified the island in the twelfth century. It was Parakramabahu’s association with irrigation construction and agricultural production that Senanayake sought to emulate (Kemper 1991: 61–63). 21. The Pancha Maha Bala Mandalaya was a body that brought together a coalition of Sinhalese schoolteachers, Sinhala language writers, Buddhist monks, and ayurvedic doctors and representatives of the Sinhalese peasantry

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who campaigned for the introduction of Sinhala as the sole official language and hence the sole medium of administration in the island. 22. King Diyasena was a mythical maitreya figure in the Sinhalese Buddhist imaginary (Manor 1989: 319). 23. Hoole (2001:38–41). 24. While the Thirteenth Amendment to the 1978 Constitution declared Tamil an official language, its implementation has bordered on the nonexistent. It was recently reported that the Road Development Authority in the Eastern Province were using Sinhala-only name boards, suggesting in the ongoing encompassment of Tamil cultural forms. http://www.tamilnet.com/ art.html?catid=13&artid=32810 (27–05–2011). 25. The 1931 Donoughmore Constitution introduced universal franchise into the Crown Colony of Ceylon. 26. The ontological alignment of Tamil separatists with the demonic had already been made in 1985, when the chief monk of the Dutthagamani Vihara near Galle, the heart of the Sinhalese south, raised the subject of monks disrobing in order to join the armed forces in the fight against the LTTE. One of the sutras chanted at this gathering was alleged to have been the one used by the Buddha to expel demons (Kapferer 1998: 87). 27. Both Douglas Devananda and Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, of the EPDP (Eeelam Peoples Democratic Party) and TMVP (Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal) respectively, fulfill the role of client Tamil political leaders, although the latter has recently voiced his displeasure at the continued postwar disempowerment of the Tamils in the East. 28. http://www.groundviews.org/2010/01/01/dayan-jayatilleka percentE2 percent80 percent99s-critique-of-tamil-nationalism-a-comment/ (27–05–2011). 29. Tisaranee Gunasekara notes that, more “than a year after the victorious end of the Eelam War, defence remains the topmost budgetary priority of the Rajapaksa’s. A defence budget at a stratospheric Rs.215 billion cannot but gobble up the peace dividend (the health budget at Rs.6.2 billion is about 3 percent of the defence budget while education and higher education budget at Rs.24.7 billion is around 12 percent of the defence budget). Defence remains the cardinal consideration of the Rajapaksas, over and above economic or social development, even in peace time.” http://www.thesundayleader.lk/2010/10/24/the-land-of-the-indifferent/ 30. The Buddha almost certainly is engaged in a parody on the horrors of war tinged with irony (Tambiah 1976: 46). In this context it is interesting to note that Hindu-Buddhist thought had no idea how to extinguish a conquered territory “as a sovereign entity, or to annex it in the modern sense” (H. L. Shorto, cited in ibid.: 111). 31. IGC (2010a). 32. At the time of writing these bureaucratic orders “are in the process of taking a more corporate form, operating far more intensely than before in the familial and managerial interests of a new elite that is detaching the state

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from its previous colonial/imperial nexus and affiliating itself more closely with China” (Kapferer 2010: 135).

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Obeyesekere, Gananath 1988 A Meditation on Conscience. Occasional Papers 1. Colombo: Sri Lanka Social Scientists Association.

Obeyesekere, Ranjini 1991 Jewels of the Doctrine: Stories of the Saddharma Ratnavaliya. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Rahula, Walpola 1974 [1946] The Heritage of the Bhikkhu. New York: Grove Press.

Rampton, David 2007 “Development, Humanitarianism and the Spectre of Colonization in the Eastern Province, International Seminar: Humanitarian Action in the ‘Undeclared War’ in Sri Lanka, Geneva, Switzerland 22–09–07” (personal copy).

Roberts, Michael 1994 Exploring Confrontation. Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History. Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers. 2004 Sinhala Consciousness in the Kandyan Period: 1590s to 1815. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications.

Sahlins, Marshall 1986 Islands of History. Chicago. Chicago University Press.

Scott, David 1999 Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Seneviratne, H. L. 1978 Rituals of the Kandyan State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999 The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strong, John 1983 The Legend of King Asoka: A Study and Translation of the Asokavadana. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Tambiah, Stanley J. 1976 World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity against a Historical Background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992 Buddhism Betrayed: Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thapar, Romila 1961 Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Wheatley, Paul 1977 “The Suspended Pelt: Reflections on a Discarded Model of Spatial Structure.” In Donald R. Deskins, Jr., ed., Geographic Humanism, Analysis and Social Action. Michigan Geographical Publications, No. 17. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

Wickremeratne, Ananda 1987 “Shifting Metaphors of Sacrality: The Mythic Dimensions of Anuradhapura.” In Holly Baker Reynolds and Bardwell Smith, eds., The City as a Sacred Center: Essays on Six Asian Contexts. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Appendix 3 Empty Spaces and the Multiple Modernities of Nationalism Rohan Bastin

3

Concepts of health and illness often feature in different nationalist ideologies, something that makes sense when framed in the terms of ontology and ideology argued in Legends of People, Myths of State and the part/ whole logics of hierarchy and egalitarianism the book explores. At the core of any sense of health is wholeness (suggested by the Old English hael) and thus concomitantly the part/whole relation that gives nationalism so much of its energy and symbolic possibility for linking the health of the person with that of the nation. In Australia, for example, the annual Australian of the Year award is routinely won by medical researchers or sporting celebrities.1 Successful Indigenous Australians or others who demonstrate a close affiliation with nature have also been recognized. Together they represent the principle of a healthy nation founded upon ideal individuals with bodies attuned, both physically and intellectually, to the perfection of nature. The theme is also evident in the healing rituals that Kapferer (1988, 1997b) describes as informing Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and Christopher Taylor (1999) describes as informing the Rwandan genocide. In these instances, however, the issue is illness and how violence is used to reconstitute a social and political order deemed to be upset by a pathogenic agency—an other—that must be addressed. Related themes are evident in Australia’s history of its treatment of its indigenous population, where social Darwinism and the pathologization of race in the so-called Doomed Race Theory show strong parallels with Nazi Germany’s treatment of the mentally ill and pathologized races (Burleigh and Wippermann 1991; McGregor 1997). The healthy citizen and the healthy nation thus become entwined as a great idea that can draw upon the content of medical knowledge, whether that is associated with sorcery and demonic usurpation in Sinhala Buddhist 319

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healing rites; the concept of flow and the articulation of person, land, and kingship in Rwanda; or futurist eugenics in Australia, Germany, and elsewhere. Critically, however, these cultural knowledge systems do not determine or direct the course of action. Human agents are not cultural automatons. Rather they engage meaningfully and interpretively with their worlds and, above all, with the contingent and event-filled nature of their worlds, making use of the discursive registers available but also, very importantly, filling these registers or semantic domains with new content. A further critical point of Legends that relates directly to this prevalence of paradigms of health and illness in nationalism is the insistence that the part/whole relations evident in any particular nationalism are, like the systems of medical knowledge they draw upon, not uniform to the broad phenomenon of nationalism. This is not simply difference of the cultural-lens or butterfly-collecting variety, but difference in the structural configuration of social values relating to concepts of personhood and cosmos. Here Kapferer draws upon Dumont’s comparison between the ideologies and values of hierarchy, where the whole is qualitatively different from and thus “greater” than the sum of its parts, and of individualism, where the whole is reducible and thus “equal” to the sum of its parts. Hierarchical systems thus preserve difference in identity according to an encompassing and differentiating value such as purity, whereas individualist systems become premised on a detachable part that stands for the whole, rendering that whole homogeneous and constituting the other as both external to the whole and itself a homogeneous category (e.g., race). In the individualist logic, the part can stand for the whole, whereas in the hierarchical logic of, for example, purity, no one category totalizes the whole. It is rather a relationship, a hierarchical opposition (of pure and impure) that informs the ideological poles of the whole. Critical to these depictions of values and ideologies is the principle of comparison, a point that Legends applies rigorously. Kapferer argues that nationalism is a global phenomenon that appears to owe much of its ontological debt to European modernity and, with that, the individualism of homo aequalis. However, in comparing Sri Lankan and Australian nationalism, he demonstrates that while nationalism as a global phenomenon owes much to European modernity, it is not reducible to that modernity either as a function of capitalism, bureaucracy, and the formation of the nation-state (Gellner 1983) or as a product of resistance to colonialism by an indigenous elite (Anderson 1991). Despite the congruence of global forces acting on nation-states—which are not denied—there are distinctions in the way that the nationalisms of these states articulate the nature of their sociopolitical realities and, in a vital and potentially tragic way, come effectively to constitute them. Thus, the ideological constructions of nationalism are not all reducible to one specific idea of the nation-state or to one sense of modernity, because embedded within these nationalisms

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are distinct orientations that are themselves emergent from particular sociohistorical and culturally influenced contingencies. Such orientations, moreover, are not abiding essences, mere legacies of the past, or persistent traditions, but ontological possibilities that form and reform in dynamic processes of human engagement, appearing to be survivals and often celebrated as such, though actually they are always different. Part/whole relationships—the articulations between microcosm and macrocosm that are so central and varied in the axioms of medical knowledge systems—alert us to these possibilities of differences in nationalism, for critically, nationalisms take as central the relationship between the whole and the part, between the universe and the self, between the health of the person and the order (cosmos) of the world. European modernity has developed one set of configurations of this relationship within which significant variations like totalitarianism occur (Dumont 1986; Lefort 1986; Taylor 1989). European modernity has also been hegemonic and instrumental in the formation of the “world-system”. However, as Wallerstein (1991) recants, the world-system is not singular, and, as Eisenstadt (2000) argues, the modernities are multiple. Nationalism, a global phenomenon actualized only as localized instances, is part of this. It is a singularity in the sense that it describes the unfolding levels and disparities of a multiplicity. The task for the anthropologist of nationalism is, therefore, a task of unpacking the specificities, but always from a comparative and critical perspective, because, as Dumont cautions, the anthropologist is always embedded within a specific nationalist fold while committed to a discipline itself underpinned by axioms pertaining to the whole and its parts and at risk, therefore, of detaching its part to stand for the whole.2 Part/whole relations reveal their flux and their tension most intensely in political orders and especially around ideas of the state and concepts of kingship (what I will refer to as sovereign power) that transmute from predemocratic times to the modern nation-state, albeit with intense and often bloody contestation. However, more than simply challenging the concepts and appearing to disenchant them, the violence of contestation, which acquires powerful impetus in democratic and modernist mobilization, invigorates the concepts with renewed sacredness and value. The symbolism and meaning of kingship or sovereign power, never strictly limited to political command but infused to varying degrees with the qualities of the sacred, opens to other forms of political leadership and remythologization (Kapferer 1997a). Hobbes’s idea of the “Leviathan”, for example, is imagined precisely in the conditions of civil war and the radical challenge to divine kingship. Similarly, the Bhagavad Gita’s description of Krsna’s universal form appears immediately prior to the climax of a dreadful internecine struggle for the “great country” or kingdom (mahabharata). The two concepts share in common qualities of the sublime: beauty, transcendence, sacredness, terror, and above all, cosmologically encompassing

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order.3 They are also different from each other in respect to their humanism, the “Leviathan” being a man among men while Krsna describes a more differentiated sense of being and divinity. The task of comparison, though, is not merely to highlight their differences, as important as these are, but to recognize their commonalities—such as the legacies of suffering that inform them both. Legends is, I reiterate, a comparative work, with intellectual precedents in both the Manchester School and the comparativism of Louis Dumont. One does not grasp fully its representation of hierarchy in Sinhala Buddhist nationalism without also grasping its account of egalitarianism in Australian Anzac nationalism and vice versa. The study is not a study in opposites (contra Spencer 1990), nor is it a study of a traditional system versus a modern one, because although nationalism is thoroughly modern, it is not uniform. To emphasize this point, Kapferer is specific about the hierarchical logic of Sinhala Buddhism as a critical variant of the South Asian form where special emphasis or value is placed on the renouncer, the out-worldly individual who, through the inspirational idea of extinction, challenges the Brahmanical idea of sacrifice as cosmic process. That value—the reason of the Buddha made available as his teachings—then becomes the encompassing value informing a new concept of the whole as a cosmopolis ruled by kings as well as contemporary political leaders who acquire the trappings of kingship, and inhabited by deities, demons, and humans who are oriented, albeit in different ways, to the Buddha. Buddhism thus challenges hierarchy, but the structural encompassment, based on a radical new value, remains. While it is radical—extinction and thus release from (sacrificial) rebirth—it replaces purity; it does not overthrow it.4 It celebrates a different form of holism, just as individualist holism is of a different order than the hierarchical.5 In the rest of this essay I illustrate this reading of Legends with regard to the history of some Sinhala Buddhist national symbols, through which I explore some aspects of the multiple layers of meaning informing these symbols. My principal focus is the Kandyan throne that was repatriated to Sri Lanka in conjunction with the promulgation of the colony’s new, universal suffrage-granting constitution in the 1930s.6 I argue that the throne became a symbol in itself, as an empty chair, in the circumstances of modernist democracy filling the world with similar “place holders of the void” (Zizek 1991: 267) that were, nonetheless, significantly different from each other and thereby informing the multiple modernities of nationalism with their varied part/whole articulations as well as their potentiality for violence and not simply their content as a set of variations on a common modern theme. The “place holders of the void” I am describing are examples of a Deleuzean virtuality as that which inheres to a phenomenon and governs its actuality while itself being nothing more than a structure and movement of articulation—an ontology, in Kapferer’s terms—such as a

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structure of part and whole, interior and exterior, and self and other.7 By describing something seemingly as banal as an empty space, in a throne and a cenotaph, I hope to convey a sense of this virtuality, its singularity or potentiality to exist both now and in the future as simultaneous multiplicities whose form and content are real in the sense of being both actual and not yet determined. The virtual is thus real but not actual. It bears the potentiality of what is to come: to be guided or informed by what is already there, but, importantly, not to be reducible to what is already there. For if an object’s potentiality were always there as some kind of abiding essence, latent or otherwise, and only ever contained within it, then the object would quickly have no life and no further relevance. Perhaps this is easily identified with an empty space—a void that can be, therefore, whatever one wishes. However, I suggest that this highlights a broader feature of nationalism and what I would call the national sublime.

The Empty Throne Thought to have been a gift from the Dutch governor Thomas van Rhee to the Kandyan king Wimala Dharma Suriya II in 1692, the Kandyan throne was seized by the British when they suppressed the 1818 rebellion of Kandyan aristocrats led by Keppetipola, and taken to England (along with the Kandyan royal lion standard and Keppetipola’s decapitated cranium). The throne was presented to the prince regent and used for over a century at Windsor Castle for the investiture of Knights of the Garter (Wickramasinghe 2004: 74–77, 2006: 107–108). In 1934 the throne was returned at the behest of segments of the Kandyan elite and briefly installed in Kandy before being placed in the Colombo Museum, where it drew massive crowds and acquired a new provenance linking it to Kandy’s most powerful king, Rajasinghe II (regnum 1635–1687) or more generally to the last Kandyan king, Vikrama Rajasinghe (1798–1815), losing any suggestion of Dutch design features (Wickramasinghe 2006: 110). The throne never returned to Kandy because it became a potent symbol of national sovereignty during the period when the Ceylon Legislative Assembly was transformed under the terms of the 1931 Donoughmore Constitution to become the State Council. Universal suffrage, which served to assert both a sense of nativism (in the way plantation Tamils of Indian descent were excluded) and concomitantly ethnic majoritarianism, was the definitive feature of this new institution (Russell 1982; Tambiah 1986: 67f., 1996; Wickramasinghe 1995, 2006: 124ff.). At the same time, universal suffrage consolidated the emergence of challengers to the Kandyan aristocracy who had successfully lobbied for greater representation in the Ceylon Legislative Assembly from the 1890s on, as well as for plebiscites that became more inclusive starting in the 1920s. These challengers belonged to an emerging bourgeoisie including

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educated, mostly dominant-caste (Vellala) Tamils who were mainly Hindu; Eurasians, specifically Dutch Sri Lankans known as Burghers; dominantcaste (Goyigama) Sinhalese from the lowland areas of lengthy colonial and capitalist impact; and erstwhile inferior Sinhalese castes (Karava, Salagama, and Durava) from this same broad zone of social mobility. Many of these Low Country Sinhalese (Goyigama and otherwise) were recent or soon-to-be Buddhist converts from Christianity. Along with sections of the Buddhist Kandyan elite, itself dominated by Radala aristocrats of the Goyigama caste, members of these groups formed a bourgeoisie within a larger social formation of caste, ethnicity, and race (including the presence of the British as administrators and planters) partly captured by colonial census and other administrative categories and thereby mobilized in the developing state apparatus that would become independent and democratic Ceylon in 1948. This social formation was fractured by intense forces of competition (Jayawardena 2000; Peebles 1995; Roberts 1982; Wickramasinghe 1995) that to some extent appear to have motivated the pursuit of national symbols, including Buddhism, but also the conversion of elitist symbolic capital, like the throne that had been repatriated at the behest of the Kandyan elite as their symbol, into demotic national symbols.8 On permanent and public display in the whitewashed colonial structure of the Colombo Museum, the throne was both ubiquitous and empty—a symbol of a national imaginary that appeared to recapture the past and its spirit of resistance to colonialism while at the same time drawing life from that colonial order whose capture of the throne had invested it with continuity. In other words, the century that this piece of Dutch furniture spent making English knights recapitulated its charisma, but did so with a difference that rendered the subsequent recapitulation—the return of the throne—as something different yet again. The history of the throne from its original gift by a Dutch governor in 1692 to its return gift in 1934 is thus a history tied to social formations and orientating and reorientating events fashioning recapitulations of ideas of sovereign power, but always doing so with a difference. In these terms, the impact the Kandyan throne had on the British monarchy and British nationalism during its time spent as a trophy is also recognized, along with its transmutation into a gift and thus a legacy of the British Empire in 1934, when the British were simultaneously and for their own reasons promoting individual rights and the common man, including the colonial commoner. Framed in the terms of ontology and ideology, of orientations to practice and to ideas and events, one cannot reduce this history of the throne to any abiding essence other than the actuality of a piece of furniture. But even if one were to counter this and assert that the throne is symbolic and that its symbolism is polysemic, somehow condensing all of its possible meanings into itself and, like a floating signifier, ordering or determining the symbolic domain around itself, one would still not capture a sense of the multiple potentialities that have been realized around it. The throne

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is an enduringly open assemblage as well as a symbol of sovereignty or sovereign power that is itself a dynamic virtuality, a structure not simply of practice but of orientation or conjuncture. The throne thus has potential to be more than itself, but it cannot determine what that potentiality is. This is not a surplus of meaning, but a surplus of becoming. Moreover, pace Wickramasinghe (2004, 2006), its surplus is not simply hybridity. The conjuncture is not a conjuncture of cultures, but of events and practices that reveal new dimensions as excrescences to the taken-forgranted. The story of the throne is not to be imagined simply as a story of a Dutch artefact that becomes Kandyan, then British, then Kandyan (albeit briefly), then Sri Lankan, and finally Sinhalese, for that would be to presume that the constituting agents (governors, monarchs, and bureaucrats) and their identities (Dutch, Kandyan, British, etc.) are even more fixed and permanent than the throne itself. Understand, therefore, that while I fall into the trap of that discourse when, for example, I call the throne a piece of Dutch furniture, I do so simply for the effect of highlighting the inadequacies of reductionist accounts, such as accounts that treat hybridity as analytically remarkable. I will illustrate my point with some further history of the throne.

The Mobile Throne The Kandyan throne became prominent and controversial once again in the early 1990s when the Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa (ruled 1989–1993) used a replica, provoking outrage among the Sinhalese elite, who regarded Premadasa’s actions as tantamount to a self-coronation reflecting the president’s autocracy and sense of triumph following the brutal suppression of the JVP insurgency and the departure, at his insistence, of the invasive Indian Peace-Keeping Force. Premadasa was an upstart political leader with a marginal social background as a Colombo working-class member of the Hinna caste (a type of Washer caste)9 whose rise to prominence through the 1970s and 1980s coincided with the decline of democratic institutions and the rise of political violence. He secured the United National Party (UNP) nomination for the executive presidency under dubious circumstances in 1989 and thereby become the first head of state since Independence who was not a member of the two rival (and related) factions of the Sinhalese elite—the Senanayakes and the Bandaranaikes (Jiggins 1979).10 Premadasa’s replica throne traveled about the country on a special trailer in his motorcade so that it could be used at public engagements. This Hinna son of a Colombo rickshaw owner was now towing around the country a simulacrum of the throne and, very importantly, sitting on it, often amidst other simulacra such as small models of the Colombo Town Hall erected at sites for the grand openings of his Village Reawakening

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program’s “Model Villages” (Seneviratne 1999: 224, n. 59). But if Premadasa’s world was thus a world of models—of thrones, government buildings, and even villages—these models themselves were simulacra of models in the sense that they contained potentialities of the real. The throne was a simulacrum of a piece of Dutch furniture that was no longer Dutch, no longer furniture, no longer Kandyan, and no longer British but a simulacrum of all of these without being determined by any one of them, because, on its trailer, it was now also in effect a simulacrum of a rickshaw—that is, a defiant triumph by a “People’s President” (Cooray 2008) who was, moreover, sitting on it.11 He was thus more real than the actual throne, because he had revealed new possibilities of that throne. Meanwhile, back at the museum, the original throne was still there and still unoccupied. Critically, though it was completely inert, its meaning had changed yet again, and thus its virtuality had been renewed. Josine van der Horst (1995: 113) argues that Premadasa used an imitation throne because he was too self-conscious of his humble background and knew that were he to sit on the actual throne the caste-conscious elite would be mortified. For the same reason, she contends, Premadasa elided any celebrations of the Sinhalese regal culture heroes Vijaya, Dutugemunu, and Parakramabahu the Great because he was not made of the right stuff (ibid: 129ff.). Instead, he promulgated the mythology of Asoka, the ideal Buddhist king, the embodiment of compassion. This also suited the situation, because at the time of the Premadasa regime, something in the order of 50,000 Sinhalese had been killed during the JVP insurgency. With so many of his own people killed, therefore, Premadasa could not identify with one or more of the Sinhalese culture heroes. Van der Horst’s analysis is flawed on different levels. Among these is its neglect of Premadasa’s intense celebration of the culture hero Dutugemunu, about whom he wrote a novel; also, at the Kataragama temples where Dutugemunu is believed to have made a vow prior to his campaign against Elara, he installed several statues. One might dismiss this evidence as having all occurred before the slaughter of the JVP, when Premadasa was not burdened by guilt.12 However, that would ignore the Dutugemunu and Asokan mythologies, specifically their resonances. The myth of Asoka is the myth of a king who founds a new concept of power when, rueful over the state-forming blood on his hands, he converts to Buddhism and gives meaning and purpose to his actions. And the myth of Dutugemunu is, as Kapferer shows, a similar progressive transformation in hierarchy oriented to an encompassing ideal of “Buddhist beneficence” (Kapferer 1988: 64). Premadasa was, then, celebrating both Asoka and Dutugemunu. Moreover, in doing so he recapitulated their relationship to each other and thus to him. Sitting on his replica throne and traveling about the countryside (dare I say atop the symbolic equivalent of Dutugemunu’s marvelous war elephant Kandula), Premadasa was not only thumbing his nose at the elite, he was challenging their authenticity and claiming a new

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Buddhist order. The mobile throne, like the models of Colombo Town Hall that Premadasa was bringing to the people precisely as he was urbanizing the countryside with “model villages” (many of which included factories), was part of his broader deterritorialization of Sri Lankan society through a form of agency bearing the rhizome-like attributes of a war machine (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).13 The urban working-class upstart thus challenged the idyllic rural self-image of the existing Sinhala Buddhist nationalism by sprouting urban factory villages all over the south of the country while insisting that he was glorifying the past. More problematic than the errors of detail concerning Premadasa’s celebrations of Dutugemunu, however, are the lines of simplistic reductionism Van der Horst deploys. First there is the issue of caste, which is given an overwhelming sociological and psychological significance and hence determinacy as we learn that Premadasa did what he did because he had internalized his own sense of inferiority: he would not sit on the real throne, because otherwise he might defile it. Then there is the ethnic factor to explain why Premadasa did not celebrate the Sinhalese kings but a more generic (Indian) king instead. Once again, we see a massive assumption about identity and emotion. Thus the choice of national symbols and even the choice of the forms of the national symbols (replicas) are determined by the seemingly concrete actualities of caste and ethnicity, which have the status of facts as they impact on an individual psyche as shame and guilt—psyche, shame, and guilt also being facts. The implication is that nationalism is a social psychology affected by the personalities and choices of a nation’s leaders, whose motivations and emotions are thoroughly recognizable as common individual human traits modified simply by cultural and historical variables (being Hinna, being Sinhalese). This is precisely the fundamental psychology—but more than that, the narrow determinacy—that Kapferer’s analysis of nationalism seeks to avoid as a deeply essentialist and individualistic approach characteristic of European modernity and its overarching ideologies. Here we see the intellectual debt to Dumont, whose project of unpacking modern ideology, Eurocentric bias, and its limitations for understanding non-modern phenomena as well as modernity remains tremendously important to the discipline, albeit frequently misunderstood or too easily neglected because the examples of explanation, such as Premadasa’s caste-driven motivations, too readily make sense to a modern individualist audience. I stress that this is not to say that there is nothing modern about Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Nor am I saying that Premadasa lacked motives. Regardless of their terminological appearance, Dumont’s categories of the modern and non-modern are not exclusive opposites, but like the Foucauldian concepts of discipline and control they infuse each other in specific sociohistorical configurations (Deleuze 1998). Modern ideology is evident in the history of Sri Lanka in the provision of quasi-universal suffrage as well as in the bureaucratic categorizations of ethnicity and caste

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as types of collective. The manner in which homogeneous collectives or macro-individuals are analytically imagined, as either discrete totalities or their hybrids, in the country’s bureaucratic and social scientific traditions and, in more recent years, in the popularity of postcolonial and subaltern studies, particularly among the elite, extends this modernist influence. It does not, however, overwhelm the total social field, and one of the sources of resistance is, some might say paradoxically, nationalism. Nationalism, which I am describing as a sublime virtuality, does not overwhelm the symbolic order. It is a master signifier precisely because it has no content, or rather is constantly amassing content. Ethnic nationalism can thus be recognized as infused with modernist and individualist concepts such as the racism the British and other Europeans routinely displayed in their colonies, which has been preserved in the post-colony. It would be wrong, however, to imagine that Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict is simply the legacy of bureaucratic categorization according to an individualistic or particularistic orientation, for that would extend the old racism as a patronizing conceit. It would, in effect, claim the Kandyan throne as occupying some corner of a foreign field that will be forever England. In other words, it is too simple and reductionist. Modernity and its individualism are certainly evident, but the larger context is more open and complex. To illustrate this I will say something more about the emptiness of the throne, because this feature resonates strongly with the use in modernist nationalisms of cenotaphs or empty tombs in memorials from the First World War in conjunction with the phenomenon of the Unknown Soldier—the symbol par excellence of modern nationalism (Anderson 1991: 9)—which achieves its symbolic potential as an articulation of sovereign power.

The Empty Tomb George Mosse describes how every nation that participated in the First World War created an Unknown Soldier ritually disinterred from the battlefield where he had died and reinterred in the capital as an anonymous Everyman (Mosse 1990: 94ff.). In England, for example, the consecration of the Unknown Soldier in 1920 included King George V walking behind the gun carriage catafalque that took the Unknown Soldier from the unveiling of the cenotaph to Westminster Abbey, where the tombstone declares: “They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward his house.” The Unknown Soldiers thus symbolized the new age of mass politics, albeit with the secularism of that mass politics colored, to different degrees in different contexts, by Christian religious motifs (ibid.: 94). In Italy, for example, the Unknown Soldier, arbitrarily chosen from an assembly of caskets by the mother of a war dead (a Mater Dolorosa), was added to a 1910 monument to national unity itself filled

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with classical motifs as well as the iconography of Christian saints (ibid.: 96f.). In England he was chosen by a high-ranking officer, his coffin was made from an English oak felled on the grounds of the royal palace of Hampton Court, and he was buried with both a contemporary army helmet and a crusader’s sword (ibid.: 95). Early examples of German memorials display a synthesis of the Germanic and the ancient Greek, such as the Bavarian monument constructed at Regensburg in the 1830s that represented the Norse god Odin’s hall Valhalla as a Greek temple (Mosse 1975: 28ff.). Ultimately, these concepts would merge with Christian motifs to disappear in a Romantic sublime form symbolizing Nature, pastoral in Europe and wilder in the colonies. For example, in the Australian War Memorial, art deco busts of Australian fauna as well as an Aboriginal man and woman maintain a continuous vigil at the Pool of Memory (Bastin 2010b). The memorial thus condenses motifs of the capital itself, occupying a site that the city’s modernist American landscape architect Walter Griffin originally designated as a park for the people, to celebrate national unity in a “city of the future.”14 The Griffin vision for Canberra was not so much of a garden city, but of a city-in-the-country (the “Bush”) where the order of Nature was conceptualized as fundamentally democratic and anti-war.15 Completing their plan in 1913 and falling out quite quickly with the Canberra planning committee, the Griffins neither included a war memorial nor had any role in its subsequent design. However, they shared the sentiment of the memorial’s champion, Charles Bean, who insisted that the memorial would not glorify war (Inglis 1998: 333ff.). In this way, both the memorial and Canberra itself not only demonstrate Kapferer’s point in Legends about the anti-state militarism displayed during Anzac Day ceremonies (1988: 153f.); they also offer examples of his argument about ontology and nationalist ideology as a multiple potential realizing itself in the future. Erected as a new addition to the Griffins’ original vision for the city, which had barely been realized in what was still largely an urban construction site, the memorial recapitulates that vision in a process similar to the way Valhalla in Regensburg recapitulates, so to speak, Valhalla in Ancient Greece. In other words, by forming a national sublime, both time and space are reordered into a condition of permanent substitution so that the whole becomes a continuous present where all historical moments and locations are interchangeable. On the surface, it resembles the Eternal Law of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, a perfect whole greater than the sum of its parts, which are themselves finite. But on closer inspection one discovers that a “detached part” (Lefort 1986: 299)—the hero—now stands for the whole, and the whole—the nation—now becomes the hero’s potentiality. In addition, the detached part becomes the potentiality, but I stress potentiality, for the “Egocrat”—the totalitarian state (ibid.).16 This then extends to the Aborigine and to Aboriginal cosmology, which becomes timeless— the “Dreamtime”—as the Aborigine, with Nature, becomes pristine, in the

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terms of a modernist White Australian nationalism that condemns both itself and more importantly the Aborigine to exist in actuality as a failure, a poor approximation to an ideal (Kapferer 1988: 142). All of these become ordered in relation to an absence, the perfect abstraction and thus totalization of the national sublime present in the Australian War Memorial as the Pool of Memory. The coins that worshippers throw into the pool, I suggest, form a social contract between the individual worshipper and the heroic totality, a contract whereby the coins cease to be money (although doubtless they are used by the Memorial as donations) and become instead individual stars lining the dark stone base of the shallow pool, which in 1988 as part of the bicentenary celebrations was augmented by an eternal flame.17 The anonymity of the Unknown Soldier and the emptiness of the cenotaph thus symbolize the modernist national sublime and inform the empty space of the repatriated and enshrined Kandyan throne as well as the triumph of mass politics celebrated in the democratization of Sri Lanka’s decolonization. By this I mean they inform the abstraction of the national totality and create the space within which that totality can be imagined. However, these powerful symbols no more determine that empty space than the ideas of Dutch furniture-making determined the nature of Kandyan kingship or the ideas of Athenian democracy determined modernity. Like myths, they are made “congruent with a rationalist world” and achieve thereby a potency (Kapferer 1988: 46), but this world, a world of events and social formations, is not simplistically contained and thereby reduced to fundamental causes—an essential void that determines every void and sets its meaning forever. The empty throne did not cease to exist with Premadasa’s replica but remained more strongly than ever, because the replica was a celebration. It might have been defiant vis-à-vis the Sinhalese elite, but it was also celebratory. And like the cenotaph and tomb, the throne represented sovereign power, a concept that is not fixed but immanent and structured in relation to events. Above all, sovereign power exists as a dynamic whole wherein the relations between part and whole are in continuous movement and process of becoming. Buddhism is critical to this process in the Sri Lankan context, as it describes the origins of power as constituted in the reason of the Buddha. This point is not epiphenomenal but fundamental to Sri Lankan concepts of kingship and to the larger articulations of person and cosmos as these are evident in a variety of ritual contexts ranging from the rituals of the Kandyan state (Duncan 1990; Seneviratne 1978) to the festivals of both Hindu and Buddhist deity temples (Bastin 2002) as well the Suniyama anti-sorcery rite analyzed by Kapferer (1988, 1997b). In all of these, as well as in new rituals of state, like Buddhist monks’ collective and public cursing of wayward politicians (Bastin 2010a) or protest pilgrimages to major temples like Kataragama (Van der Horst 1995: 171–188), concepts regarding the origins of power are explicated in ways that reproduce the whole/ part logic of the state and the individual, and the majority ethnic group

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and its relation to the minorities. At the heart of these Buddhist concepts one finds another void, Lord Buddha’s nibbana or extinction of the flame from which emerge ideas of worldly power oriented to Buddhist principles. And while that empty space of the Kandyan throne stands open to these concepts of extinction and Buddhist kingship, it is not solely determined by them because it is also informed by those totalizing abstractions of modernity and nationalism—the empty space of the cenotaph. Premadasa’s mobile simulacrum throne thus established new meanings for an old and seemingly inert symbol captured in the democratic state apparatus of the museum. The elite, who saw the upstart usurper as filling the void like a despotic egocrat, feared for democracy—or at least, the democracy that had protected their interests for so long. Premadasa, who had been so useful in eradicating the JVP, was no longer needed, but he was not going away. Indeed, he was beginning to resemble a very bad idea. Stories began to proliferate that he had gone mad and that he had become utterly obsessed with sorcery, astrology, animal sacrifice, and absurdly large deity offerings clearly designed to assuage his intense feelings of guilt over the slaughter of the innocents. In one political cartoon described by Van der Horst (1995: 155), Premadasa was depicted as a Bereva ritual exorcist whose presidency had been concerned with ridding the country of demons. The underlying logic that Kapferer (1988: 88f.) identified at work in political cartoons aimed at Premadasa’s predecessor thus appeared again as the sovereign ruler was deemed to be outside the encompassing Buddhist order and consorting with the demonic. In effect, therefore, it was Premadasa whom the elite were trying to exorcise, as they associated him with the superstitions of the rural peasantry and the poor. At a more serious level, his political rivals tried in vain to impeach him, raising his obsession with ritual as one of the symptoms of his malaise (Van der Horst 1995: 205ff.; Wijesinha 2007: 183ff.) even as they obsessively pursued the ritual of impeachment in order to dethrone him. They were thus labeling him as despotic and as anti-democratic, but they were also mobilizing a Buddhist logic, accusing Premadasa of displaying an excessive and obsessive attachment, the kind of trait that defines a demon. Thus the cartoon, for all its frivolity, carried a deeper meaning that was expressed in the impeachment attempt.

Conclusion The empty spaces of the national sublime are, therefore, not reducible to a singular modernity as this is symbolized by the empty space of the cenotaph and its associated meaning of the People-as-One. Rather, the national sublime is also filled with—indeed, must be filled with and symbolized by— other content, both the meaningful content of systems of ideas, language, history, and other elements, and the structural configurations of person and cosmos that the semantic domains of nationalism organize and articulate.

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This other content and its structure are unique to specific nationalisms and draw heavily upon the content and structure of religious traditions, because the national sublime is itself religious, even when its religion is secularism and its totalizing concept of the abstract and differentiated sovereigns—the Nation and the State—appear to be thoroughly mundane and democratic. For all that, though, they remain sublime, and as such they remain as origins of great or stirring ideas. Thus the modernity of nationalism is always a multiplicity, because in and of itself the Nation of Nationalism is not simply an emptiness, but a virtuality that bears nothing but an overwhelming reality and capacity for becoming. This is why I refer to it as the national sublime, highlighting both its beauty and its terror. In this essay I have considered the empty spaces of the cenotaph and the Kandyan throne, arguing that to different degrees these “place holders of the void” informed each other as they carried the ghosts of their previous occupants as well as their concepts of sovereign power, and with them the relation between the whole and its parts. Nationalism is itself such a sovereign power, a virtuality that becomes manifest in the multiplicity of national forms even though it has no form, other than the tremendous and terrifying power of a great idea inspiring sublime beauty and horror in equal measure. Nationalism cannot, therefore, be reduced to some historical origin or to the fixed and essentialist categories that reflect the limits of particular ontologies such as the individualism that permeates Western modernist accounts, the notions of hybridity in national symbols, or the psychological motivations of a low-caste president embracing and transforming a populist revolt. It is larger and more real than these specific instances upon which it feeds. More than anything, this chapter has argued that the empty space of the Kandyan throne was informed by the empty space of the cenotaph. One can read these spaces as modernity and read what surrounds them as nationalism. In doing so, one should see how Sinhala Buddhist nationalism owes something to the same sources as Australian Anzac nationalism, something more than the bureaucratic state and the modern world system. Critically, however, each nationalism is distinct, its distinctness being a characteristic emergent from its comparison, a difference born of a repetition, and with that, a reason why such comparison is necessary.

Notes 1. See also Judith Kapferer (1996: 7ff.). In 2010 mental health was acknowledged for the first time, and in 2011 the award was given to a philanthropic investment banker described as a “social entrepreneur” who straddles the corporate domain and global civil society. 2. See Kapferer (2010: 191) concerning Dumont’s insistence on the universality of the social and its non-reduction to the individual, especially as the Universal Man who underpins modern social theory. Compare this, for example, with the conventional structure of introductory textbooks to

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anthropology, especially those taking the North American four-field approach, which routinely start with genetics and human evolution before shifting to language and culture and then concluding with social change and global homogeneity without actually realizing that this (modern individualism) was their starting point via a biological reduction (cf. Bubandt and Otto 2010: 3f). 3. See Mishra (1998) for an argument concerning what he terms an Indian sublime that makes extensive use of the famous Bhagavad Gita passage. 4. See Tambiah (1976) for the best account of the Buddhist transformation of the Brahmanical theory. Note too that the Brahmanical theory is not to be confused with the concept of kingship in the Mahabharata (and thus Krsna’s sublime revelation to Arjuna), because the Mahabharata is most likely a post-Buddhist text. Dumont alerts us to the importance of Buddhist influence when he notes the history of Brahmanic vegetarianism (Dumont 1980: 146ff.). See also his brilliant expansion on Weber’s contrast between the in- and out-worldly individual in the essay “World Renunciation in Indian Religions” (ibid.: 267–286). 5. In his discussion of Dumont’s analysis of holism, Kapferer (2010) distinguishes hierarchical holism from individualist holism, noting Dumont’s critique of Durkheim’s concept of the social as grounded in a principle of Universal Man that is essentially individualist. Kapferer extends this critique to more contemporary individualistic holisms, such as De Landa’s reading of the Deleuzean concept of the assemblage and Latour’s concept of agency in the actor/network. 6. Much of the story of the throne is drawn from Nira Wickramasinghe (2004, 2006: 107ff.). 7. See Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 118f.); Kapferer (1997b: 180f., 2006). 8. Similar transformations were worked on ancient monuments such as the old capital of Anuradhapura (Nissan 1988). In the 1930s new versions of the great Sinhala Buddhist chronicles began to incorporate common people in their politico-religious imaginary (Kemper 1991: 100). The royal standard was discovered in the Royal Hospital Chelsea in 1915 and brought home by the barrister E. W. Perera, who was traveling to London to protest draconian police measures following anti-Muslim riots. Keppetipola’s cranium was returned in 1948 upon the grant of independence (Wickramasinghe 2006: 103), whereupon the royal standard became the new national flag until 1951, when it was replaced with the prototype of the current flag. 9. More specifically, the Hinna were a Washer caste for the Salagama, who were associated with cinnamon collection and transportation (Ryan 1953: 119). Premadasa’s great mentor A. E. Goonesinha, who founded the Labour Party, advocated universal suffrage, and became mayor of Colombo in 1943, was also Hinna (Roberts 1994: 220). 10. I am neglecting the six-month premiership of Wijeyananda Dahanayake (1959–1960), who gained office when S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was assassinated. Lest these elite factions be imagined as a perduring aristocracy, I note that the two key members of these dynasties, D. S. Senanayake (1884–1952) and S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike (1899–1959) were both Low Country

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Goyigama who converted from Anglicanism to Buddhism and married into Kandyan Radala families. In the latter case, the family was the Ratwattes, who in the 1930s developed an intense electoral rivalry with members of the Senanayake extended family, whom they regarded as parvenu (Jiggins 1979). 11. Here one could juxtapose a studio photograph of Premadasa, age one, taken with his parents and a darker-complexioned servant boy, possibly Tamil, who holds steady the rickshaw on which the child sits (reproduced in Cooray 2008: 306) with President Premadasa seated on his throne in the early 1990s (reproduced in Van der Horst 1995: 122). 12. Golu Muhuda (The Silent Sea) was first published in 1987 at the same time that his Village Reawakening campaign at Kataragama included the installation of statues of Dutugemunu as well as other figures from that mythical period. Indeed, it is evident that Premadasa and his supporters established ties with the JVP at this time, the beginnings of the insurgency provoked by the Indo-Lanka Accord. 13. The concept of the war machine describes a modality of power that stands external to the state. Unlike the territorializing or capturing capacity of the State modality, its principal motion is to break boundaries and move in any direction (like a rhizome, in contrast to a tree). It applies to the contrast I am drawing between the fixed throne in the Colombo Museum and Premadasa’s mobile simulacrum. The model villages are another example because they were less to do with village housing than the urban articulation of rural communities via new nodal points including, in some instances, garment factories that usually failed because Premadasa failed to develop the necessary logistical configuration and instead sprouted his factories variously (and rhizomically) around the countryside. Critical to the State/war machine modalities of power is their status as modalities dynamically configured in specific state forms. Thus, actual states capture these real modalities as human beings engage in practices and structural configurations with each other. See, for example, Kapferer (1997b: 292–294) for an analysis of the JVP insurgency and Premadasa’s counterinsurgency in terms of the concepts of State and war machine modalities of power (see also Bastin 2009). 14. Griffin, known in Australia as Burley-Griffin, and his collaboratorwife Marion Mahony were closely connected to Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School of modernist American architecture. The key axis to the Griffin plan separates the state (the Parliament) from civil society (the commercial sector) by an artificial lake. The same separation places the War Memorial with civil society, thus reflecting Kapferer’s argument about nation and state in Australian nationalism. 15. And the Australian countryside was not appreciated as a fire hazard, which the people of Canberra discovered to their cost in 2003 when bushfires that started well outside the city encroached upon the heart of the city itself. 16. Australian nationalism is not simply a totalitarian state nationalism because, as Kapferer notes, Australian Anzac nationalism preserves a deep sense of antagonism between civil society and the state, which displays itself particularly during the Anzac Day ceremonies. Nevertheless, the part-whole logic of the Anzac nationalist egalitarianism described by Kapferer matches perfectly

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Lefort’s description and thus resonates with Dumont’s argument concerning totalitarianism as a potentiality of modern individualism. As Lefort writes: This logic of identification, secretly governed by the image of the body, accounts in turn for the condensation that takes place between the principle of power, the principle of law and the principle of knowledge. The denial of social division goes hand in hand with the denial of a symbolic distinction which is constitutive of society. The attempt to incorporate power in society, society in the state, implies that there is nothing, in a sense, that can indicate an externality to the social and to the organ that represents it by detaching itself from it. (Lefort 1986: 299) In Anzac nationalism, the individual remains sovereign and external but, like Nietzsche’s funambulist, treads with a delicate balance above a totalitarian chasm. 17. The coins as stars thus mirror the stars adorning the dome of the Sydney Anzac War Memorial as symbols of the war dead and suggest thereby the identity—indeed, the social contract—of the well-wisher with the war dead. Kapferer interprets the star symbols as evidence that the Sydney memorial is “the most cosmically egalitarian of all the memorials in Australia” (Kapferer 1988: 181). Along these lines, it is significant that the coins in Canberra are spontaneous embellishments to the aesthetic by individual visitors. I also note that Kapferer celebrates the Sydney memorial as a native of that city and that the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance is generally regarded as “far beyond” Sydney’s for both grandeur and dominating presence (Inglis 1998: 328). The contrast reflects that same tension between state and civil society relating to the respective histories of the two cities and the long period of Melbourne’s dominance as the gold-based center of wealth and power and site of the first capital after federation in 1901.

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Bubandt, Nils, and Otto, Ton 2010 “Anthropology and the Predicaments of Holism.” In Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt, eds., Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Appendix 4 The Social Genesis of Anzac Nationalism Barry Morris

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In Legends of People, Myths of State, Kapferer describes Anzac Day ceremonies as expressing a people-versus-state dynamic. The ethnography is based on the rites performed at the state capitals. My concern here is with the sociohistorical evolution of the rite, especially in the contexts of small towns away from state centers and the processes whereby Anzac became systematized into the kind of state ceremonial upon which Kapferer concentrates. I will take up the matter of the internal dynamics of the rite that Kapferer outlines and explore its changing significance. In particular I discuss the rite as one in which the people/state dynamic has become increasingly a device of state control in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as an “apparatus of capture.” The differentiated historical evolution of the Anzac ceremonial reveals intimations of popular opposition, if not resistance, to the state, along with a critique of state authority and orders. These are not only gradually suppressed in the rites at the state capitals but converted into an artifice for the celebration of state power. In other words, dimensions of the dynamic are in part a product of the increasingly state ceremonialization of the rite, which has the effect of subduing the critique of the state that was once more integral to the rites. In this vein a vital playful and subversive element of Anzac ritual, the gambling game Two-up, once deemed illegal, is now officially authorized and condoned by the state. Furthermore, the formal military presence of the state is now overwhelmingly marked, in contrast to the emphasis in the rite that until recently expressed the informality of an essentially citizen volunteer force that could act effectively independently of the hierarchy and rule of the formal state-military order. This has intensified in the twenty years since the first publication of Legends. Central to Kapferer’s argument is that the Anzac ceremonial is a particular historically developed expression of what he describes as 339

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egalitarian-individualist ideology. In this regard, Anzac has significance as a specific variant in the broader sweep of nationalism as this was especially evident in Europe and North America and is important for a discussion of contemporary developments in individualist thought and practice. A key thesis of Kapferer’s argument is that inherent in individualist egalitarianism is a tension toward its opposite, inegalitarian hierarchy, which is a dimension of the people-versus-state dynamic of the Anzac ceremonial. While this may be a potential, its realization is through historical processes, which I address. His analysis extends from the work of the anthropologist Louis Dumont, who discusses the historical development of the centrality of the individual as value (Dumont 1977) in largely European and North American contexts. By this he argues that the idea of the individual receives sociocultural value as the fundamental unit and generative root of the social. Dumont’s key point is that although societies are made up of individuals, this should not be confused with notions of the individual as value, which is a thoroughgoing, historically produced cultural and social construction. It is trivial to state that groups and societies are composed of individuals. This is empirically observable everywhere. But it is something else to give the individual human being foundational value generative of the social as well as valuing the individual as in essence autonomous, egalitarian, and free. The understanding that these three attributes of value are essential to the individual is a value in itself and has consequence and effect. For this reason the individual as value, together with other values that form the set, demands concrete investigation. For Dumont, historically the value set that he examines as egalitarian individualism is relatively recent, and there are major human populations elsewhere who do not cleave to such views but insist on other values as integral to the formation and production of social relations and orders. Anzac gives heightened significance to individualism as value and achieves larger anthropological importance for the analysis of contemporary individualism, which is a major ideological force not just in nationalism but also in a wide array of global sociopolitical processes. Kapferer, following Dumont, does not conceive of ideology as a surface phenomenon but as operating at some ontological depth engaged within the class processes associated with industrial capitalism, for example, and not merely produced by them (see Dumont 1992). In other words, the individual as value is deeply layered in a diversity of sociopolitical practices, and Anzac is one kind of practice that expresses it intensely, enabling an examination of the dynamics of individualist logic and its potential import as embedded in the practices of state and citizen.

Anzac Revisited Since the First World War, it has been Anzac Day commemorations, rather than the day of the formal Independence of Australia from Britain at the

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time of the federation of Australian states in 1901, that have provided a focal point for Australian nationalism. The citizen rather than the state receives ceremonial attention.1 It was propelled by an outburst of nationalist sentiment following the catastrophe of loss and suffering born of the Great War as a whole, which found its most poignant expression in a singular event, that of the Gallipoli landings in the Dardanelles, the first major engagement of Australian troops in the First World War. Anzac Day commemorates the landing of the Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 at 4:30 a.m. My focus on Legends is concerned with Anzac nationalism and its commemorations, and that, to follow Kapferer’s argument, it is far more than a rite of commemoration. Kapferer has stressed the sacrificial structure of the rite and how, through the suffering of death, the nation is born. In effect, each event of commemoration is dynamic and therefore is not a stable structure. The narratives of Anzac are explored here in terms of a commemorative ritual. In this respect, I am interested in the parallels between Anzac nationalism and religious thought. As Kapferer has put it, “nationalism makes the political religious and places the nation above politics” (1988:1). In effect, he argues that the nationalism of Anzac manifests the passionate nature of a secularism that is virtually religious in its intensity. In this respect, a specific aim here is to consider aspects of the social scaffolding of Anzac nationalism as well as the social meanings that sustained it as a major commemorative ceremony in Australia and now the central rite of Australian national identity. Anzac draws from its social and political contexts and simultaneously transcends them or turns back on them, overcoming dimensions of its local world that could always be threatening to the state. Anzac occurred as an historical event, but it does not, as many historical accounts assume, have some fixed interior meaning to be discovered. It does have an internal logic that is always capable of achieving new meaning or, at particular moments, becoming suppressed. In this regard I expand on Kapferer’s notion of the ontological as a particular schema of orientation that realizes new meaning in the course of historical processes. Anzac, of course, is not one thing but develops in various state capitals—for instance, one way in Melbourne as distinct from Sydney (see Inglis 2005; Luttrell 1999)—as well as in its local variations in the country towns. It emerges from changing assemblages of social practices that connect to give it meaning and social force. There is, in effect, a continual reinvention of Anzac and new directions of its logic. It is far more than a commemorative ritual; it is a creative and generative space: an event always opening up to new potential. The current social analysis is critically informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). They assert that meaning and value are constituted through assemblages, that is, through the contingent and non-centered arrangements of social elements.

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The component parts of such assemblages retain degrees of autonomy and may detach from them to become part of other assemblages or be incorporated into larger assemblages. More importantly, the emphasis is on the intertwining of processes that are always in tension, going through different intensities within and between assemblages This is what Deleuze and Gauttari (1987) have characterized as rhizomic and open-ended in an approach that “stresses dynamics over form” (see Kapferer 2010). In their work, it remains possible to recognize the potential ambiguity of signification without reducing the social world to texts through an overemphasis on signifying practices as fundamental to culture independent of practice. The evolving of Anzac reflects the convergence of non-homogeneous social elements and their functioning together. For Deleuze and Parnet, “the assemblage is a co-functioning, it is ‘sympathy’, symbiosis” (2002: 52). Such unstable “symbiosis” occurs within and across the changing composition of assemblages. For Deleuze and Parnet, the “states of ‘things’ are neither unities or totalities, but multiplicities” (ibid.: vii, original emphasis). The emphasis is on relations between the entities rather than the entities themselves. It is not so much the elements, but “the between, a set of relations that are inseparable from each other” (ibid.: viii). For Deleuze and Parnet, “relations are external to their terms . . . [and] a relation may change without the terms changing” (ibid.: 55). It is the intertwining of elements that open assemblages to change. The meaning and structure of the Anzac rite has changed profoundly, yet its relation to nationalism appears unchanged. In the contemporary context, Anzac has been recoded as a “tradition,” as part of a historical claim to its authenticity. This is also a consequence of broader processes of state retraction relating to neoliberal global forces whereby Anzac, as a national rite of Australian identity, assumes a more critical hegemonic role as Australia comes to rearticulate its identity in a new global environment. Nevertheless, this “stabilizing” of identity includes a purging of anti-state and anti-authority elements of the rite and an increasing inclusion of elements affirming a more homologous relation between people and state. My focus will be on the social genesis of Anzac and its embeddedness in Australian life. The historical debates about Gallipoli and the First World War (1914–1918) are not the subject of this analysis. The numerous books written are indicative of an unending public fascination with Gallipoli and the Great War2 and the historical event’s constant openness to new interpretations. Anzac has a political force that politicians cannot ignore. It can be made to work for the state, especially in the contemporary period, to bolster and expand its credentials in support of particular forms of Australian sovereignty. However, what is integral to Kapferer’s original argument is that it expresses anti-state sentiment. The characterization of Australia’s involvement in the Great War continually celebrated the general anti-authority temperament of Australian troops. Indeed, Anzac can be seen to express an initial opposition between state and people that the

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history of the rite shows is progressively captured by the state. Throughout the twentieth century, Anzac nationalism and the social creation of war memorials across Australia fulfilled an immediate function. In the postwar years of the First and Second World Wars, Anzac memorials were sites of commemoration and remembrance, but also a principal locus of mourning for those directly affected by the tragedies of war (see Damousi 1999; Inglis 2005). As of the 1980s, the public, politicians, and media began to take a renewed interest in Gallipoli and Anzac that has reshaped its meaning and ceremonial structure. In the following, we will explore the contemporary practices, values, and meanings of Anzac and compare them with those of the past.

Egalitarianism and Mateship Egalitarianism, as it is expressed in the Anzac myth, defines the nationalist character of a people, their virtues and orientation.3 The understanding of egalitarianism here is as an ideology, something that exercises compelling cultural authority. As an ideology, it has not acquired closure in a political or social sense but, as discussed below, provides a diversity of interpretive frameworks that indicates its utility within Australian nationalism. The major work that frames Anzac mythology emerges from the official war chronicler C. E. W. Bean. His coverage of Australia’s military campaign in the Great War recorded not simply battles but how the Australians carried themselves in war. Indeed, Bean was consciously engaged in the construction of history as myth, or myth out of historical fact. C. E. W. Bean’s writings, as Kapferer (1988) points out, assert that the hostile environment of war heightens and refines these virtues and qualities of mateship.4 For Kapferer (1988), Bean’s construction of the war history portrays the Australian character as emerging out of a hostile environment, naturally tested in the field of battle. Kapferer stresses the positivist objectivism of Bean’s work and the egalitarian ideology that imbued both his setting out of the facts and the significance he attached to them. As Bean characterizes Australian sensibility, “[i]t lay in the mettle of the men themselves. To be the sort of man who would give way when his mates were trusting to his firmness, to be the sort of man who would fail when the whole line, the whole force, and the allied cause required his endurance . . . was the prospect which these men could not face” (1981 [1924]: 607, cited in Kapferer 1988: 123). Kapferer (1988) sees Bean as describing the Australian male belief in autonomy associated with individual egalitarianism—a belief in individual self-reliance combined with a belief in the competence of oneself and one’s peers. These qualities distinguish the Australian soldier from others. Whereas in other armies the weaker may be dependent on the resolve of the strongest, for Bean, the “Australian Force contained more than its share of men who

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were masters of their own minds and decisions” (1935: 606). These were men who carried the belief that “Jack was as good as his master,” characterized in the popular image of the larrikin. This egalitarian ideology carried a reconfiguring of preexisting relations toward social hierarchy, played out in acts of resistance to the etiquettes of social deference to superiors, especially the British. The literature on Anzac does much to affirm the ideological embeddedness of mateship (Adam-Smith 1978; Clark 2005; Gammage 1974, 1988; Inglis 1965; Serle 1965, 1974). In keeping with Bean, Gammage has echoed the same egalitarian sensibility that “they fought because their mates relied on them” (1974: 102). Kapferer (1988) moves beyond ideological description to analyze mateship in relation to egalitarianism. He too considers mateship as an Australian male belief. For Kapferer, the facts of mateship are thoroughly ideological facts; that is, they were selected to secure an egalitarian affirmation of the values of Australian society: “mateship is germane with egalitarianism, at once expressive of its ethos and a central principle of social coherence” (ibid.: 158). Egalitarianism is the basis of a social idea that expresses a fundamental principle of social relatedness. Mateship is more than friendship, for it extends beyond positive regard and affection. It assumes a level of mutual interdependence beyond friendship. Mateship, as Kapferer puts it, is “an egalitarian principle of natural sociality and reciprocity between equals. It is the basis of natural society, the way society forms, independent of artificial mediating institutions such as those implicit in the concept of the state. The force of mateship, of natural sociality intrinsic to human beings, is most powerful between those identical in nature and acts cohesively upon them. To reduce the idea of mateship to friendship is not to comprehend its meaning fully” (ibid.: 158). Egalitarianism is to be distinguished from objective social equality. Kapferer argues that it is based upon the premise of an essential similarity, as it works most powerfully on those identical in nature. The logic of construction is laden with ideological value. In this sense, mateship has operated as a tool of exclusion as much as inclusion, if group identity is to be sustained. Those regarded as “naturally different” are excluded or restricted in their participation in Australian egalitarian society.5 Australian egalitarianism emphasizes both the “natural differences” of those deemed to be essentially other and homogenizes the social differences of those deemed to be essentially the same. Egalitarian individualism has multiple dimensions of expression. Overriding emphasis is placed on the importance of a self-worth asserted in being self-sufficient and self-determining even when confronted with defeat. In Anzac, these ideals are corrupted by the orders of an inept, “unnatural” military hierarchy. In the more liberal strain of egalitarianism, mateship is often more highly individualist and liberal in sentiment and shows principally how mateship can overcome differences in backgrounds,

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values, and beliefs. In the more leftist strains of mateship, it emerges out of the conflictual world of capitalist social and economic relations (Ward 1958). Mateship is grounded in the working life of the bush and originated with convicts, the working class, and labor’s struggles for better conditions for the workingman through unionism. This leftist strain of egalitarian individualism emphasizes collective social action—namely, unionism— and solidarity in a hostile political and economic world. Mateship has a fundamentally social character, which operates, as Lohrey has put it, “as a defensive formation against a hostile world” (1982: 32) and is suspicious of social difference and contemptuous of social hierarchy. The power of egalitarian individualism lies in its multiple expressions, which accommodate both collectivist and individualist politics, indicating its utility within Australian nationalism. The contemporary assumption that an egalitarian ethos was universally accepted in Australia, however, passes over one of the major tensions of colonial settler Australia.6 This division, as Smith (2001) observes, arose between “Imperialist” and “Nativist” conceptions of a foundational nationalism. The former associated national identity with being an exemplary outpost of Britain society, which emphasized being British, Anglican, upper-class and steadfast for empire.7 Respectability and status depended on, as Hughes put it, “the assertion of their Britishness” (1996: xi) and, for Thompson, a “natural” position of deference (1994: 14–22). The nativist position, on the other hand, desired the creation of a distinctive nationalist culture and identified with essentially Irish, republican, Roman Catholic, and working-class origins (Smith 2001: 635). The social class divisions and tensions that emerged in Australia took on a particular colonial dimension that emerged from different immigrant and religious backgrounds, which solidified into distinctive social cleavages in the settler colonies and beyond federation (see Campion 1982, 1987).

The Social Genesis of Anzac Commemorative rituals emerged out of contemporary forms of citizen sacrifice and the modern nation-state’s capacity for mass destruction through war. Through such sacrifice, soldiers’ deaths—willing deaths in the service of the nation—find social significance beyond individual meaning. There is a strong convergence between what Aries has called the “cult of the dead,” commemorative rituals of the war, and the consolidation of nationalism in the modern state of the twentieth century (1975: 75). The Australian state’s commemoration of its war dead has given rise to a modern form of consecrated ground in Australia. Significant events did not occur in these places, nor do they contain power and agency in themselves, as do indigenous sites that contain ancestral potency. Anzac gained its social agency and political force through popular participation and consent. The memorials

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commemorate those who have fallen in wars for, but not in, Australia. The war memorials and cenotaphs memorialize and commemorate, in the public sphere, those who have died in the service of the nation fighting for the nation. Such memorials occupy a privileged place in most urban and rural communities that were in existence at the time of the Great War. These commemorations revolve around Anzac Day and the battle fought by Australian and New Zealand troops in what is now modern Turkey, but more generally they address all those who have died in war. The memorials held a consecrated place, as Frame suggests, “because of the feelings they evoke. Sensations of sadness, sorrow and anguish together with thoughts of courage, bravery and duty undergird the thousands of memorials scattered across the continent of Australia to the men and women killed in war. They allow us to enter the world of comrades who survived the horrors of war and the grief of the families who mourned their deaths” (2005: v). Frame’s evocation underscores the point that Anzac commemorations function as local rituals of loss and mourning. The assumption that the Anzac myth and nationalism can be measured only by their alignment with political values and beliefs, or represent dominant ruling-class values, underestimates the power of myth and of nationalism. The utility of myth depends upon how it addresses the specific conditions of history that give shape to the collective aspects of the life of a particular people. In this, myth encodes traces of affective life. Cassirer makes the point that myth does not arise from solely intellectual processes, but from deep human emotions (1979: 43). He continues, “Myth cannot be described as bare emotion because it is an expression of emotion. The expression of feeling is not feeling itself—it is emotion turned into an image. This very fact implies radical change. What hitherto was dimly and vaguely felt assumes a definite shape: what was a passive state becomes an active process” (1979: 43, original emphasis). Myth is a symbolic form that, though it arises from human emotions, cannot be reduced to them. Symbolically, it is open to new import. Hence the Anzac myth does not simply “represent” the historical event of Gallipoli, although it is shaped, in part, by that experience and transmits it. It is as much about its aftermath and the social responses to the human consequences of the Great War as to the event itself. It can never be a representation. Indeed, as Kapferer has argued, Bean’s objective was never simply about representation but always more, as he consciously engaged in the construction of war history as a myth of nationalism. In the period directly after the Great War, Anzac nationalism and the production of war memorials across Australia fulfilled a more immediate function. The memorials were not simply sites of commemoration and remembrance but for many were the principal locus of their mourning. The thousands of memorials that sprang up all over Australia were a testimony to the numbers of the dead. As Winter points out, over 330,000 Australians served in the First World War, and approximately 60,000 were killed in

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active service (1995: 35). This was a casualty rate at or above that suffered by the major protagonists, the British, French, and German armies (ibid.). The statistics give some sense of scale to the tide of grief that engulfed the small nation-state after the deaths of so many in the war. Unlike Germany and France, the Australian landscape bore none of the scars of war, as the men had died some 12,000 miles from Australia. Only one body of an Australian soldier was returned home in the war (Inglis 2005: 75; Bean 1981: 129, 130).8 In Australia, the war memorial was especially important, as the sites were the only place where one could grieve and engage in some form of personal as well as public commemoration. Many of the early ceremonies, especially in small country towns, were more like funerals, since those assembled were often the families of those who had died (Inglis 2005: 214). As the rural Wagga Gazette described in 1922, Grey haired mothers and fathers, widows and their fatherless children, and broken hearted sweethearts advanced from the portion of the enclosure that had been reserved for them, and laid floral tributes at the base of the monument. With that sad rite, the last barrier of self-control was broken down, and many wept, openly and unashamed, and were unable to discern the name, engraved on the stone, of the lost loved one that they would see no more. (Cited in Inglis 2005: 215) 9

The remains of their loved ones were interned and given commemoration on battlefields distant from Australia. The cemeteries of endless crosses were unlikely to be visited by most Australians, so the emotional focus of their grief and mourning was centered on the war memorial, which bore the names of all those who served and those who had fallen. In these affective connections to the trauma of war, the emergence of Anzac takes part of its form in local responses to tragedy. The war memorial sites are set apart from the spaces of everyday life as sites of passive secular reverence. They become the active locus of attention and emotional focus on the day set aside in April for the commemoration of Anzac Day. In this sense, Anzac operates in terms of contemporary notions of the sacred thoroughly embedded in modernity (Durkheim 1965 [1915]). The sacred is separated from the profane, as the focus of a nationalist rite. Unlike in other nations, however, such commemorative rituals have become the central ceremony for expressions of Australian nationalism. Anzac is a vehicle of social integration, establishing common bonds and purpose and a shared national experience to formally separate settler colonies in terms of nation and nationalism. As a vehicle of national integration, nevertheless, Anzac becomes no less an “apparatus of capture” fostering sovereign effects and essentially deterritorializing anti-state sentiments. In Deleuzian terms, the memorials are mechanisms of capture in that they sprang up in local communities as a way for people to deal with the disaster of distant death but were then, through the state-fostered memorials in state capitals, linked

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into the territorializing dynamic of the state and the exercise of sovereign power. The state has captured the people, as it were, and tied them into its purpose. The logic of Anzac is one that in effect specifies this. In Anzac, the rhizomic and the hierarchical are intertwined, as Anzac is constituted in an historical process whereby the rhizomic is folded into the hierarchical (Kapferer pers. comm). The initial opposition between state and people progressively becomes a synchrony of state and people’s interest. Nevertheless, Anzac commemorations and the war memorials must be distinguished from more common expressions of state nationalism.10 In Australian nationalism, the relations that exist between the nation, the people, and the state are complex rather than simple. Legends powerfully argues that Australian nationalism contains anti-state elements that emerge from within Anzac. The volumes written on the Anzac campaign and the Australian contribution to the war effort in Europe celebrate the anti-authority disposition of Australian troops, which is no less a construction. This is a nationalism not simply authored by the state, but captured by the state in a nonetheless continuing dynamic of capture. A more effective analytical focus of Anzac as productive of nationalism is to consider the subjects and objects of reverence it produced. The meaning of Anzac inheres as such in its practices. It began as a vehicle of national and social integration, but also from new imaginings of social possibility, redefining preexisting social and state relations. This involved disparate local elements coming together into assemblages that generated tensions with potential to destabilize this emergent social entity (see below). Anzac’s nationalist imaginary reflected as such new political sensibilities in which social order is a negotiated order. In the aftermath of the Great War, local committees and organizations formed in cities and towns across the nation. Above all, as Inglis suggests, the cost and the construction of war memorials bore the imprint of the circumstances of the local community (2005: 128). Yet, I would argue, it did more than this. The striking feature was that the local communities facilitated, funded, and coordinated the construction of commemorative sites. The Anzac memorials were created from the bottom up, through local participation rather than through the offices of the state.11 The commemorative sites were not always spontaneous events of collective purpose, for single-minded cooperation stood cheek and jowl with conflicting social interests and multiple priorities. The means to best represent the fallen, in what form, in what place, and with what symbolic representations were ever-present questions that sometimes became contentious. In Anzac’s nationalist imaginary, as is also evident in the egalitarian ethos, as suggested earlier, natural competition is integral to society, and to a sensibility that social order is a negotiated order. The commemorative monuments also symbolized a major shift in public sentiment. In the proliferation of memorials commemorating the war dead and war veterans alike, there occurred a profound democratization

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of the civic landscape. Anzac commemorative practices shared a critique of deference shown to social superiors that produced new social domains of action. As Davidson points out, “The unknown Australian soldier became the prototype of a more democratic form of monumental history, for increasingly it was the representative type of soldier, working man, women, athlete, rather than the heroic individual, who was honoured in Australian statuary” (2000: 46–47). This is the ordinary man as hero. Previously, as Davidson (ibid.: chap. 3) shows, public statutory of great men had served a didactic function as a source of patriotic instruction, community pride, and public gratification. Indeed, the egalitarian logic of the prototype mutated into a general opposition to public statues and their replacement with something “more useful.” From the 1940s onwards, the demands for “useful” memorials, such as hospitals, schools, playing fields, swimming pools, halls, and parks, gathered greater force (Davidson 2000: chap. 3; Inglis 2005: 352–358).12 The stress on the public utility of “living memorials” enriched public culture in a way that affirmed an egalitarian ethos and served commemorative purposes of remembrance as a secular living practice. The Anzac commemorative sensibility occurred as part of the democratization of public culture and social practice in Australia. They reflected more “rhizomic” modes of experience that were egalitarian in outlook and decentered in social practice, rather than the hierarchical and grid-like forms of state practice.13 The overall role of the state forms of governance was limited. Local committees, local enmities, regional and local rivalries evolved and came to fruition, as did those projects based upon undivided local support. The formation and expression of nationalist sensibility as expressed through the Anzac memorials, so central to the Anzac commemoration, retained an egalitarian form of local expression rather than a bureaucratic imprint of the state. The social formation of Anzac did not simply celebrate a more egalitarian ethos but shaped and transmitted it across a range of sites and through a range of social practices. In particular, the eastern colonies of Australia pushed through political reforms based on the notion of political enfranchisement that had brought access to the institutions of representative government. Indeed, as Thompson suggests, because of these early democratic reforms, Australia was conceived as the most advanced laboratory of democratic experiment in the English-speaking world and “inspired imitation in other English speaking countries and beyond” (1994: 11).14 In Australia such democratic institutions moved beyond the political and took on social forms so as to actualize new connections and new ways for people to act and respond. The memorials are no less sentinels marking the “bitter earnestness” with which people grappled with their sense of loss and the reasons why these men had laid down their lives. The ceremonies and monuments that sprang up in the aftermath of the Great War were in some ways an overcoming of a profound loss on a national scale. Yet the beginnings of the

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Anzac commemorative practices are part of a line of social mutations that released new powers and capacities that were part of a democratization of public culture. These new assemblages were grounded in an egalitarian order that contested the exercise of unilateral power and replaced it with the sensibility that social order is a negotiated order. This was set in opposition to a hierarchically ordered society in which social status was explicitly linked to the performance of prescribed institutional roles and claims to authority through hereditary privilege. In the Anzac commemorative rite, this is accurate up to a point, reflecting the double-voiced ambivalence inherent in the internal logic of Anzac. In the Anzac rite, egalitarianism and hierarchy are not realized as oppositional but as mutually affirming (see Kapferer 1988). Anzac, indeed, can be seen to subvert the radical dynamics of egalitarianism.

Sectarian Discord and Social Integration The power of nationalism through Anzac was not a social balm that automatically organized all classes, faiths, and creeds into a collective nationalist unity. The major source of the social discord that developed in the postwar period was the deeper preexisting social and sectarian division that existed between Anglican and Protestant faiths, on the one hand, and the Roman Catholic faith on the other. The form of representation the Anzac ceremonies should take vexed many communities. The catalyst for these differences over Anzac occurred, in part, during the war and continued in its aftermath. The Australian government and opposition party both had unanimously supported England’s war effort, but the execution of the war brought conflict when the state attempted to introduce conscription to maintain recruitment levels after the initially significant numbers of volunteers at the outset of the war began to wane.15 The opposition to conscription was unique to the Australian war effort—in the dominions of New Zealand and Canada and in Britain itself, conscription was unproblematic (Inglis 2005: 114). But in the emergent nationalism of Australia, the right of the state to command its citizens to war was defeated. Two referendums were held and lost.16 In the first referendum, an estimated 75 percent of the soldiers serving in Belgium and France voted “no” in the referendum. This was taken as evidence that members serving in the Australian Imperial Forces believed that the army should remain an all-volunteer army (ibid.: 116).17 The defeat of the referendums was also attributed to Irish Catholic disloyalty to the war effort and hence to the British Empire (ibid.: 116–118). The Anzac commemorations highlighted and intensified sectarian divisions. The Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to participation in the Anzac religious services was long-standing and firm (in Sydney, 1962, and Melbourne, 1938). As Monsignor John Lonergan (Melbourne) stated in

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1938, “It is strictly forbidden to Catholics . . . to participate in any form of worship or service other than their own where the religious element is involved” (cited in Luttrell 1999: 5). In that year, Melbourne’s Returned Soldiers League (RSL) conceded to Catholic sensibilities by requiring that the service remove every religious element (ibid.: 5). In response, Anglican and Protestant clergy boycotted the changed ceremony (ibid.: 12). General Harry Chauvel, a devout Anglican who had commanded the famous Light Horse Brigade in the Great War, refused to lead the march to Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance (Inglis 2005: 465). He denounced the changes on the grounds that the service had been “de-Christianized to accommodate Catholic sensibilities” (ibid.: 465). The control of the commemorative rite and its symbolic expression not only created divisions but, on occasion, enflamed them. In Sydney, the impasse was not resolved until 1962, with meetings between the RSL and the Roman Catholic Church. The common practice for Roman Catholics was to participate in the ceremony up to the united religious service. As Luttrell states, the marchers entered the Sydney Domain, but Catholics were expected “to leave the march and take part in a Solemn High Mass for the fallen” in nearby St. Mary’s Cathedral (1999: 4–5). A new format was devised in which prayers were conducted by a lay person and the clergy gave the commemorative address, which was to be patriotic rather than religious and would be rotated between denominations (ibid.: 12). Despite the sectarian discord, generations have assembled, on this date and at the time of the first landing, to participate in Dawn Services that honor the Anzacs at Gallipoli and, later, all Australian men and women who served in other theaters of war. Anzac Day remains the most significant day of nationalist commemoration, in contrast to Australia Day, which is commemorated with little nationalist fervor (Kapferer 1988: 131). Until recently, the day and date of Australia Day were moved to maximize holiday agendas. Anzac Day, by contrast, has only ever been held on the “one day of the year,” and commercial and leisure activities do not open until midday, after the Anzac ceremonies and religious services have ended. Anzac Day is considered more a holy day, as the flow of everyday life is suspended. The nation-state and people are joined in homage to the fallen. Veterans assemble at dawn for the commemorative march, joining their service units in civilian clothes and medals and thus declaring an absence of rank or hierarchical authority: a civilian army of volunteers. The streets are symbolically given over to the veterans, and the public forgo their personal pursuits and pleasures as homage to the dead who sacrificed their lives for the living. In this way, Anzac Day is separated from other legal holidays as a ceremony that is both sacred and secular.18 In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson draws out the deeper associations with the religiosity of nationalism present in nationalist imaginings, pointing out how, given their preoccupations with death and mortality, they share similar affinities with religious thought (1983: 18–19).

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Inasmuch as religious thought transforms fatality into continuity, it provides a link between the living, the dead, and the yet unborn. The commemoration of nations’ war dead provides for a secular transformation of sacrifice/ fatality into continuity, as the contingency of one’s existence is linked to the destiny of the nation. In nationalist ideologies, sacrifice/fatality affirms a link between the living, dead, and yet unborn, as it does in religious thought. In Deleuzian terms, this amounts to a change of the relations without the terms changing (2002: 55). Similarly, this secular ceremony commemorating a historical event takes a ceremonial form that invokes association with the Christian myth of rebirth through suffering and death. Fundamentally, in Legends, the Anzac myth provides the charter of Australian nationhood, expressed symbolically as a blood sacrifice. Kapferer’s application of sacrifice, separation, and rebirth provides a powerful analysis. The sacrifice of the Anzac soldiers is a consciously overt symbol of rebirth. The religiosity of the ceremony is most apparent in the Anzac rite itself. Participants congregate at a central memorial or cenotaph for the Dawn Service, which begins before dawn and ends after the sun has risen, bringing in the new day. Symbolically, the Anzac rite is organized in Kapferer’s sense around the Christian themes of death, sacrifice, and rebirth. The theme is repeated at the end of the service with a symbolic reversal as the bugler plays the Last Post19 first, then the Rouse or Reveille.20 The symbolism is reiterated in the reciting of the fourth stanza of the ode that follows: They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. . . 21 In Anzac, the self is transcended through sacrifice (“they shall grow not old”) and is central to the empowerment of a community of peers: “we that are left (to) grow old.” The Anzac commemorative ritual is deeply set in the Judeo-Christian belief that through sacrifice comes the possibility of new life. The war dead in Anzac have become a kind of secular holy within Australian nationalism.22

The Unknown Soldier and Egalitarian Individualism In the contemporary period, the major shift in the meaning of the Anzac commemorative rites makes apparent the historical trajectory of Anzac as an apparatus of capture. The hierarchical encapsulation of Anzac is more clearly apparent in the ongoing history of the rite, where recent changes have impacted upon the ideal of egalitarian individualism that has been so central to the meaning and ethos of the rite. In part, they reflect the changing status of nationalism and a more encompassing position of the state.

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The anti-authority elements discussed in Legends have been progressively removed. The first of these changes has been to legislate, making legal what had been illegal. The playing of Two-up, a unique Australian form of gambling, had been synonymous with Anzac Day. The widespread and frequent playing of Two-up by Anzac troops in the Great War generated a revitalization of its popularity and gave rise to its historical and symbolic importance on Anzac Day. Gaming laws passed at the turn of the century had made it illegal, but despite the state’s ban it was tolerated on Anzac Day and played in full public view in RSL clubs, hotels, and hotel parking lots, where “rings” would form wherever people assembled.23 The police were expected to, and did, turn a blind eye to this public transgression of state laws. Symbolically, the liminal nature of “the one day of the year” was affirmed as the veterans, and hence the people, were granted full rein while the state took an unaccustomed low profile. Yet in the late 1980s, state governments progressively legalized the playing of Two-up on Anzac Day, thereby stripping it of its symbolically transgressive power and its anti-authority status as homage to veterans and the people on that day. The most significant change, however, has occurred in the composition of the commemorative rite itself, which now incorporates regular soldiers to fill the depleted ranks of the march left by the death of the veterans through the years. In the last decade of the twentieth century, old age and death overtook the veterans of the Great War and increasingly cut into the numbers of Second World War veterans who had swelled the ranks since the late 1940s. The descendants of the veterans increasingly march in their place. It became commonplace for enfeebled veterans to march assisted, in wheelchairs or in motor vehicles. In the 1980s the incorporation, after an initial rejection, of Vietnam veterans—an army of regulars and conscripts—filled the marching ranks. Importantly, the final change in the composition of the march is the inclusion of members of the regular Army, Navy, and Air Force in the ranks today. The basis of national distinctiveness emphasized in Bean’s rendering of Australian egalitarian individualism was the existence of a volunteer army. Army regulars and conscripts are not volunteers, as they act involuntarily and not as independent individuals. In effect, the Anzac rite has undergone significant changes in meaning that involve the suppression of many of its previous anti-state sentiments. Perhaps more significantly, politicians, and hence the state, increasingly have taken a more prominent role in Anzac remembrance. Throughout the 1990s, the public, politicians, and media began to take a greater interest in Gallipoli and Anzac. The eminent death of the remaining veterans of the Gallipoli campaign saw federal and state governments taking a major interest in their lives and the commemoration of their deaths.24 Ted Mathews was the first of the remaining veterans, an ordinary soldier, to be given a state funeral, authorized by the prime minister (King 2003: 204). A number of state funerals followed, culminating with that of the

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last Gallipoli veteran, Alec Campbell, on 24 May 2002 (ibid.: 208). As King points out, the public accolades that were poured on a humble water carrier were befitting of a military commander (ibid.: 209). The prime minister, opposition leader, governor-general, and the minister for veteran affairs all presented eulogies setting out the Anzacs’ contributions to Australian history (ibid.: 207). Alec Campbell, who had lived anonymously for most of his life, became a national celebrity in his final years and death. The state funerals were not to commemorate these men as individuals or in view of their military careers, but as symbols of an inclusive past and Anzac as the source of Australian nationalism. In the early twentieth century, the focus on Anzac concentrated on defining and expressing a national identity and culture—on building a new society. By the late twentieth century, the emphasis was to maintain the “tradition” that Anzac has established. Anzac Day has moved beyond a day of homage to the fallen and a mourning rite for their sacrifice to take on a broader significance. Historically, in the renewed interest, we witness its shift from the living public memory of the veterans to a reliance on historical documents and the way the documents should be interpreted. In more recent times, major emphasis is increasingly placed on recognition of the importance of the ideals and values of Anzac in guiding and preserving the nation. The preservation of these ideals and values is held to have been what unified the original Anzacs and what the succeeding generations of servicemen and women fought for. Anzac Day, according to Prime Minister Howard in a speech about Gallipoli, is about “those great values that unite us as Australians—values of mateship, courage, initiative and determination” (25 April 2002). These abstract values transcend time and individual difference. Those surviving veterans of the Great War became the symbolic bearers of the spirit of the Anzac tradition, the cultural ancestors of Anzac and the nation. Over time, Anzac has been progressively incorporated into the sphere of the state. Gallipoli, as a site of national importance, has increasingly become a focus of nationalism (see Scates 2006). Anzac Day at Gallipoli has become a nationally televised event in which politicians make public pronouncements on Australian nationalism. The commemorations at Gallipoli, however, are negotiated between nation-states rather than the RSL, and the politicians’ accompanying nationalist speeches reflect their respective political agendas. At the first significant event in 1990, commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary, both Prime Minister Robert (Bob) Hawke and Margaret Thatcher gave addresses. Hawke gave two speeches, one at Lone Pine, where he revived C. E. W. Bean’s reference to Australian mateship, “the mettle of the men,” and the other at the earlier Dawn Service, focusing on what Anzac Day meant to Australia today. Hawke heaped high praise on Australia’s former enemy, Turkey, referring to Gallipoli as central to the birth of both nations and noting the “brilliant defence of the Gallipoli Peninsula,” in contrast to

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his more injudicious and critical evaluation of Britain’s role. Comments made prior to the commemorative services received attention in the press (MacLeod 2004: 241): Hawke criticized the British military hierarchy, especially Winston Churchill and Ian Hamilton, for their “unbelievably inept planning” of the Gallipoli campaign (ibid.: 241). In effect, he reproduced the anti-authority, anti-British sentiments long evident in Australian nationalist narratives of Gallipoli. In subsequent events, Anzac became incorporated into nation-state agendas in a way that it had never been before. In contrast to Hawke and, more recently, John Howard, Prime Minister Paul Keating privileged a republican Australia and gave his Anzac Day speech in 1992 at Port Moresby, in Papua New Guinea. New Guinea’s Kokoda Track, where a series of battles had directly involved defending Australia from Japanese invasion in the Second World War, was deemed a more suitable site for a republican Australia’s commemoration of Australian nationalism than a place on the other side of the world where Australians had fought for Britain. National attention was then drawn back to Gallipoli after the election of the conservative, monarchist John Howard as prime minister and leader of the Liberal and National Party Coalition. On 25 April 2005, Howard, his New Zealand counterpart Helen Clark, and Prince Charles of England attended the televised event of the Dawn Service at Gallipoli before thousands of Australians and New Zealanders had assembled to mark the Anzac Cove landings ninety years before. In perhaps the final irony, Howard said the Anzacs had “changed forever the way we saw our world and ourselves, they bequeathed Australia a lasting sense of national identity, they sharpened our democratic temperament and our questioning eye towards authority” (my emphasis). In defining “the tradition,” Howard effectively acknowledged and simultaneously reshaped the “questioning eye towards authority,” reinventing it anew. Egalitarianism was reduced to a general individual attitude, an ahistorical abstraction that removes the specificity of its historical meanings even as it is being commemorated. The state was now in control throughout, and it is the organized power of the state that now dominates. These shifts are most aptly demonstrated by the return of the “unknown soldier.” In 1993 the Australian government approached the Commonwealth Graves Commission with a request to bring back an unknown Australian soldier from the Western Front cemetery that had been his resting place since the end of the Great War. This “unknown soldier” was to be interned in the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. On 2 November 1993, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission duly passed on the remains, exhumed from an unknown soldier’s grave in Adelaide Cemetery in Villers-Bretonneux, France, and transported to Australia.25 Villers-Bretonneux Somme was the scene of a major battle in 1918 that involved the 4th and 5th Australian Divisions, with units of the 8th and 18th Divisions.26 Having fallen

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to the German advance of tanks and infantry in 1918, the village was recaptured by the combined Australian divisions on 23 April 1918, so that by Anzac Day it was under Allied control.27 The remains lay in state at Old Parliament House until 11 November 1993, Remembrance Day, when a funeral service was held and the soldier was finally interned in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Anzac rite continues to be conceived as homage by the state and the people to the fallen and the occasion when the state pays homage to the people. In symbolic terms, the state, in honoring the fallen, asserts a complementarity of identity between the people and the state. In other words, people and the state are realized symbolically through the Anzac ritual. As Prime Minister Paul Keating’s famous eulogy makes clear, We do not know this Australian’s name and never will. We do not know where he was born, or precisely how and when he died. We do not know where in Australia he had made his home or when he left it for the battlefields of Europe. We do not know his age or his circumstances— whether he was from the city or the bush; what occupation he left to become a soldier; if he was married or single. We do not know who loved him and whom he loved. If he had children, we do not know who they are. His family is lost to us as he was lost to them. We will never know who this Australian was. . . . One in the 100,000 Australians who have died in wars this century. He was all of them. And he is one of us. (Keating, 1995: 287)

The “unknown soldier” is the most explicit symbol of that ideal of complementarity between nation, state, and people. In the absence of differentiating marks of social status and rank, of local, regional, and state affiliation, and of religious and political association, the “unknown soldier” embodies quintessentially the egalitarian ideal of modern nationalism. Both individual and collective identities are rendered the same—and, in the eyes of the state, the unmediated relationship between individual and nation, and between the people, the nation, and the state, are rendered synonymous. Yet at another level, such an honoring violates the Australian egalitarian ethos. In this view, the “unknown soldier” should have been left with the mates with whom he fell and died, rather than disturbed and appropriated by the state. In effect, the tensions between individual agency and potency explicit in egalitarianism become subsumed within the collectivist anti-difference dimension of Australian nationalism (see Kapferer and Morris 2006). At another level, the return of the “unknown soldier” addresses the major paradox of Australian nationalism being a form of a nationalism that has its beginnings in acts of war waged on a foreign shore. The interment and commemoration of Australian dead in foreign lands had profound effects on the beginnings of Anzac commemorations. But although it significantly influenced the shaping of a nationalism of

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Australia, it is situated elsewhere. Anzac nationalism is grounded in an act of separation that is seemingly infinitely connected to Europe. Bringing the body home is a symbolic act of closure, a completion of identity. With the return of the “unknown soldier,” republican Australian nationalism breaks its European connection to become self-enclosed and independent. It is not coincidental that the 1990s also saw the restructuring of the nation-state in Australia in terms of the neoliberal polity. Neoliberal polity defeats the objectives of Anzac and changes its meaning. In the earlier versions of Anzac, the self is transcended through sacrifice (“they shall grow not old”) in relation to a community of peers that is central to the empowerment of “we that are left (to) grow old.” Deeply set in the JudeoChristian thought that through sacrifice comes the possibility of new life, these versions of Anzac posit the dead as a kind of holy social or secular holy within Australian nationalism. In the neoliberal version, however, (the radical individualism ascribed to) the self is self-enclosed and independent and augments the state, transcending the social by refusing the submersion of the self into a community of peers. The central values of mateship and egalitarianism have radically shifted. The socially empowering aspects of egalitarianism that found expression in dispersed and decentered social practice are replaced by an ideology that embraces individual acts of empowerment in the absence of reference to the social.

Notes 1. The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (UK) passed by the British Parliament on 5 July 1900 provided the guidelines for the Federation of Australia. On 1 January 1901, Australia officially became a nation, and the first Commonwealth Parliament met in Melbourne on 9 May 1901. 2. McKernan and Browne provide an important contribution to the social aspects of Anzac in their book, Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace (1988). 3. Thompson (1994) has given a broad rendering of the different uses of the notion of egalitarianism that is quite useful in breaking up the universalizing treatments that often homogenize distinct and varied historical usages. 4. Such a view is reiterated in Clark’s assertion that “man had in him a vision of mateship as a comforter against a harsh, indifferent environment” (1963: 169). 5. Women occupy an ambivalent place located outside of mateship, for they are not excluded as racial or ethnic others have been. Marilyn Lake argues that women are marginalized and trivialized when their sexuality threatens to constrain man’s autonomy or their activities overshadow his social achievements (1992: 4).

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6. The dispossession of indigenous Australians is not addressed at all. 7. For Peter Coleman, former Liberal Party politician and minister of the Crown, the Australian egalitarian ethos essentially violated civilized sensibilities and expressed a primitive vision of progress and democracy: The coexistence of . . . humanism and nihilism, democracy and violence, the open smile and the broken bottle, is not paradoxical. It is expected amongst people in a “new” country, many of whose settlers had, like the convicts, never really been part of the parent civilisation, or like the free settlers driven here by penury, ambition or sheer discontent, had more or less scorned it. Never having enjoyed and in any case being either unwilling or unable to live the British or European way of life . . . the Australians, or rather the Australianists, persuaded themselves that all they needed was their own good nature. (1962: 3) Coleman, like other conservative commentators, staked their respectability on the connection to Britain and viewed Australia as derivative of Britain, and, hence, second best. The Union movement was viewed not so much a social institution, but a violent expression of working class culture. 8. The body of Major-General Sir William Throsby Bridges was returned and buried near the Royal Military Academy, Duntroon, where he had been the first commandant (Inglis 2005: 75–76). Bridges, the general officer commanding the Australian Imperial Force, was fatally wounded inspecting his troops in Shrapnel Gully at Gallipoli (Clark 2005: 72). 9. In 1923 the Anzac parade was officially gazetted as a commemorative day in line with the recommendation of the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) (Lake 1988: 220). The Victorian Parliament legislated for Anzac Day to be a public holiday in 1925 and established an Anzac Day Commemorative Committee “made up almost entirely of RSSILA members to organize the day’s activities” (Lake 1988: 220). 10. Indeed, all too often it is as if Anzac was simply created by the manipulations of the state and the deaths were simply incidental grist to the mill of politics and nationalism (McQueen 1984; Seal 2004; White 1981). 11. No official number exists, but the RSL has estimated that there are over three thousand memorials in New South Wales. 12. The Returned Soldiers League’s publication Reveille stated in 1947: “If the fallen died that we might live, and have life more abundantly, they cannot adequately be commemorated in the cold bronze statue or the lifeless monuments of yesteryear” (cited in Inglis 2005: 353). 13. Deleuze and Gauttari (1987) begin their book with the paradigmatic distinction between “rhizomic” and “arborescent” modes of experience. 14. As Thompson states, in the United States of America, Liberals opposed to democratization dubbed voting by secret ballot “kangaroo voting,” which is still referred to as the “Australian ballot” (1994: 11).

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15. Eighty thousand men enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces between the outbreak of the war and the Gallipoli landing, and the Gallipoli campaign stimulated more volunteer recruitment (Inglis 2005: 113). 16. On 28 October, the voting pattern showed majorities in favor in Victoria, Tasmania, and Western Australia, and against in New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia (Inglis 2005: 115). 17. In Batemans Bay, New South Wales, the opponents of conscription unveiled an obelisk on 26 December 1917, shortly after the second referendum, inscribed “Batemans Bay and District Volunteers, 1914–1917 AIF” and recording seventy-four names, to make the political point that these men had enlisted under the voluntary system (Inglis 2005: 119). 18. The Federal Parliament added Anzac Day to the calendar of legal holidays in an act passed in 1923 (Luttrell 1999: 2). 19. The Last Post is the bugle call that signifies the end of the day’s activities. It is also sounded at military funerals and commemorative services such as Anzac Day to indicate that the soldier has gone to his final place of rest. The incorporation of the Last Post into funeral and memorial services symbolizes that the duty of the dead is over and they can rest in peace. 20. Reveille is the bugle call used to wake soldiers in the morning. On Anzac Day, in the Dawn Service, Reveille is associated with the Last Post. After a minute’s silence has been observed, the flag is raised from half-mast to the masthead, and Reveille is sounded. Reveille symbolizes the awakening to a better world for the dead and reminds the living of their ongoing duties and responsibilities to the memory of the dead. 21. The ode comes from a poem by the English poet and writer Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen.” It was first published in London in 1914. 22. See Kapferer’s analysis, situated in Canberra, which sets out the overall structure of the ceremony and organizational elements in its relation to people/state dynamics and the playing out of the anti-state aspects of the commemorative rite. 23. The version of the game played on Anzac Day involves a “spinner” who spins two pennies in the air with a piece of wood called a “kip.” The spinner occupies the center of a “ring” of players who bet against each other (side bets) in the ring as to whether the spinner will toss either heads or tails (one head and one tail is a “no throw”). 24. Jonathan King (2003) interviewed all the remaining veterans (nine in all) (see also Stephens and Siewert 2003). 25. http://www.ww1westernfront.gov.au/adelaide-cemetery/unknownsoldier.html, retrieved 5 September 2011. 26. http://www.cwgc.org/search/cemetery_details. aspx?cemetery=2701&mode=1, retrieved 5 September 2011. 27. http://www.cwgc.org/search/cemetery_details. aspx?cemetery=2701&mode=1, retrieved 5 September 2011.

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Bibliography Adam-Smith, P. 1978 The Anzacs. Melbourne: Nelson.

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Bean, C. E. W. 1935 The Story of Anzac, vol. 1. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. 1981 [1924] The Story of Anzac, vol. 2. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Campion, E. 1982

Rockchoppers: Growing up Catholic in Australia. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin. 1987 Australian Catholics. Ringwood: Viking.

Cassirer, E. 1979 [1946] The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Clark, M. 2005 Gallipoli. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Coleman, P., ed. 1962 Australian Civilisation. Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire.

Damousi, J. 1999 The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Davidson, G. 2000 The Use and Abuse of History. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin.

Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G., and C. Parnet. 2002 Dialogues II. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dumont, L. 1977 From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992 Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Frame, T. 2005 Foreword, 2005. In Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Inglis, K., assisted by J. Brazier. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press.

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Gammage, B. 1974 The Broken Years. Sydney: Penguin. 1988 “The Crucible: The Establishment of the Anzac Tradition, 1899–1918.” In M. McKernan and M. Browne, eds., Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. Canberra: War Memorial in association with Allen and Unwin.

Hughes, R. 1996 The Fatal Shore. London: The Harvill Press.

Inglis, K. 1965 “The Anzac Tradition.” Meanjin 24, no. 1: 25–44. 2005 Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Assisted by J. Brazier. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press.

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Legends of People, Myths of State. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. 2010 “The Aporia of Power: Crisis and the Emergence of the Corporate State.” Social Analysis 54, no. 1: 125–151.

Kapferer, B., and B. Morris. 2006 “Nationalism and Neo-populism in Australia,” in A. Gingrich and M. Banks, eds., Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond. New York: Berghahn Books.

Keating, P. 1995 “Funeral Service for The Unknown Australian Soldier,” in Advancing Australia: The Speeches of Paul Keating, Prime Minister. M. Ryan, ed. Sydney: Big Picture Publications

King, J. 2003 Gallipoli: Our Last Man Standing. Milton: John Wiley and Sons.

Lake, M. 1988 “The Power of Anzac.” In M. McKernan and M. Browne, eds., Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. Canberra: War Memorial in association with Allen and Unwin. 1992 “Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation— Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts.” Gender and History 4, no. 3: 305–322.

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Luttrell, J. 1999 “Cardinal Gilroy’s Anzac Day Problem.” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 85, part. 1: 1–19.

MacLeod, J. 2004 Reconsidering Gallipoli. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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McQueen, H. 1984 From Gallipoli to Petrov. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Scates, B. 2006 Return to Gallipoli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Seal, G. 2004 Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

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Stephens, T. and S. Siewert. 2003 The Last Anzacs. Lest We Forget. Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

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Appendix 5 The Australian Society of the State Egalitarian Ideologies and New Directions in Exclusionary Practice Bruce Kapferer and Barry Morris

5 I regard Australia’s social cohesion, born of a distinctive form of egalitarianism, as the crowning achievement of the Australian experience during the last one hundred years. —Prime Minister John Howard, 2000

Introduction Our discussion develops in relation to events in Australia that saw the momentary emergence to political prominence of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party, a phenomenon widely referred to in Australia as Hansonism. Weber might have recognized Hansonism as one of those switch moments in history where potentialities already apparent in ideas and practices suddenly crystallize into a relatively original form, influencing the development of new social and political directions.1 We are concerned to demonstrate the Hanson phenomenon as being one of these moments that is both a particular expression or formation of historically laid ideological and institutional currents, and also, more importantly, as giving form to relatively novel dynamics of ideas and practice. A further set of concerns guide our analysis. Hansonism is a particular social and political expression of a crisis that is affecting modern states perhaps worldwide and achieving specific interest in the Australian context. As we shall argue, Australia is a particularly strong example of a social formation that, for all its contextual diversity, is entirely a state construction. Australia is a society of the state, and the crisis that it manifests—of which Hansonism is a singular expression—sharply reveals, even in its distinction or particularity, some of the ideological and structural forces that are at work in many contemporary states. From its beginnings, Australia was through and through a modernist creation, perhaps more so than 363

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many other state/society systems, and it is this, we contend, that makes Hansonism and the crisis of the state that surrounds it of potentially general interest. This is so especially in the context of comparative analyses of state processes and discourses concerning citizenship and democracy in the contemporary climate of postcolonial globalization. It is tempting to see Hansonism as a reaction to what some commentators would describe as the liberal and socialist ethos of post–Second World War societies. While there is much to be observed in favor of this opinion, we wish to break away from such a dialectical orientation and the resulting confinement of analysis to an endless circularity. We will suggest that Hansonism is a positivity in the sense argued by Deleuze (1994): it is less a negative dialectic constituted by an imagination of the past or in the past tense than it is an ideological and practical formation created in the present future tense. That is, it is a construction completely thrown up in the circumstances of the present, which gains some of its orientation from a projection of what is believed to be a realizable future. Hansonism gave acute expression to a vision of state and society (however dismal) that is ultimately irreducible to earlier conceptions and practices.

Hansonism and Its Local and Global Context The 1996 Federal election in Australia, which saw the Liberal-National Party Coalition returned to power with a landslide popular vote (a fortyfour seat majority in the Federal Parliament), ended a long period of Labor Party government. Most significantly, it ushered in a wave of political attacks against the “politically correct” policies of the previous Labor government. The attacks concentrated on Labor’s opening up of a hitherto highly restricted immigration policy, its multiculturalism policy, and Labor’s program of extending citizen rights to the indigenous Aboriginal population. These crystallized around the issue of Australian identity, which successive Labor governments, from Whitlam to Hawke and culminating in the prime ministership of Paul Keating, had brought to the forefront of Australian politics.2 The Keating period (1991–1996) is perhaps the most important here, not just for understanding the landslide vote against Labor but also for comprehending some of the specifics of the Hanson phenomenon and its relation to larger global forces. The Keating government most clearly linked a policy of economic rationalism associated with globalization, on the one hand, with a presentation of a new national identity that stressed cultural heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, on the other. (With Keating, this also involved a reorientation of Australia toward Asia and away from its British, European, and North American metropolitan associations.) As Archer has argued, multicultural policies were often “portrayed as the creative force behind our rich, diverse and tolerant society” (1997:

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33). Both the economic reforms associated with contemporary globalization and the increasing intensity of transnational flows of goods and services were considered logically consistent with the unfettering of the “untapped economic potential of migrants and the freeing up of a discriminatory migrant policy in order to make Australia more open and competitive in the global economy” (ibid.: 32). Trade was the main game, and Australia, like the city-states of old Asia and Europe, “could achieve greatness from the wealth of ideas that flow at the ‘crossroads of cultures’”(ibid.: 33). For Keating and his government, Australia’s economic maturity was to be found in global economic competitiveness, in which migrant knowledge of overseas markets was the key element. At the same time, Australia was to achieve its political maturity as a republican nation by erasing its links to a British heritage. Critics, however, contended that multicultural policies promoted favoritism and inequality. While they appeared to deny, as Hirst (1990) suggests, “any superior legitimacy to the host culture,” such policies, in deploying public funds in the service of migrants for retaining their own culture, would be offensive “to the liberal and egalitarian values of our (Anglo-Celtic) culture” (cited in Jupp 1997: 137). The debates were as much about how Australians should view their past as they were about the contemporary Australian identity. These debates gained greater intensity in the early 1990s, when the recognition of past injustices committed against indigenous Australians moved from public debate to the legal judgement of the High Court of Australia. The High Court’s decisions in the Mabo (1992) and Wik (1994) cases meant that indigenous forms of ownership could be recognized under Australian common law. However, they did more than provide for recognition of indigenous claims to land: they also formed an acknowledgment of the past injustices of indigenous dispossession. This exposed the public to debates that, more than hitherto, were concerned with the non-indigenous treatment of Aboriginal Australians. The High Court decisions led to unprecedented attacks on the integrity of the High Court by politicians, public commentators, and historians.3 Indeed, the decisions brought to an end two decades of consensus between the major political parties in relation to indigenous land claims. Issues concerning the political use of history were now firmly placed in the open arena of public debate. The hitherto largely unquestioned moral authority of Anglo-Saxon values, so deeply embedded in the institutional habitus of Australia, was now an object of contest. The discursive field was thus set for the emergence of Hansonism as a kind of populist defense of values that were now felt to be marginalized. This was additionally significant because they formed the basis of the social power of the otherwise powerless (see Hage 1998). We underline the point that, at the time of the landslide political shift to John Howard’s Liberal-National Party Coalition, the populist orientation of the conservative turn had, as yet, not been clearly formulated. For many, as political commentators pointed out, the vote was not so

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much for conservatives as against Keating and his Labor government. It was the rise of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party that initiated, we will argue, the formulation of the populism that is integral to the contemporary ideological orientations of politically dominant forces in Australia. Hanson’s election to a normally secure Labor seat and the creation of her One Nation Party, which for a brief period was the third most powerful political party in Australia, facilitated the first major and relatively coherent articulation of the social and political discontent that was motivating the majority settler population of Australia. In her maiden parliamentary speech, Hanson gave public expression to disparate dissenting voices concerning immigration and indigenous rights, focussing them around a larger discussion relating to citizenship and, above all, the character of national identity. While Hanson and One Nation have disappeared from the political arena, their ideas largely have been absorbed into the neoliberal (or neoconservative) political tide that has overtaken Australia along with much of Western Europe and North America. Currently within Australia, there is little that separates the political “left” and “right” parties, although the present conservative government under John Howard represents the extreme of neoliberalism. This government has, in many ways, turned back the clock on Aboriginal rights, especially with regard to land claims. It has established barriers to immigration and refugees that are the envy of governments in Europe, and its programs of political, social, and economic “deregulation” are powerfully in line with the globalizing recommendations of the United States, underlined by the strong alliance of Australia’s Prime Minister, John Howard, with President George W. Bush in regard to the Iraqi invasion. We stress the degree to which Australia under Howard has been embraced by the neoconservative turn in the United States. Thus, Australia’s foreign policy is thoroughly in support of the U.S. policy of unilateral and preemptive intervention. In keeping with the American stance, Australia’s participation in the United Nations’ monitoring programs for international human rights has faced a general downgrade, and Australia has engaged in active noncompliance with UN directives concerning, for example, the treatment of refugees. Australia has also sided with the U.S. refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol or to recognize the international court at The Hague for war crimes.4 The contemporary crisis of the Australian state and its particular political direction are being echoed in a locally specific manner throughout the world. In numerous ways, they refract re-formations in sociopolitical alignments and structures (frequently, their hybridizing) as a consequence of the emergence of virtually uncontested U.S. imperial—and to a lesser extent North European—control over the different forms of global power (politico-military, technology, capital, media). What Hardt and Negri (2000), among numerous others, recognize as a new global totalizing force

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has perhaps brought to an end the interlude of nation-state autonomy, or at least its fantasy, especially for postcolonial states. Furthermore, such developments as those above have undermined Hobbesian or contractarian visions of the state. The phenomenon of “privatization” and the retraction of state agencies from the public sector (the cornerstone of neoliberal policies) have thrown into question the nature of the relation between people and the state and, more broadly, the character of democratic institutions, especially in essentially social-democratic states like that of Australia. These major political and economic developments have brought in their wake a local politics of redefinition and renegotiation that takes the form of reaction, like Hansonism, but that in its effects can also be seen as integral to the restructuring of relatively new sociopolitical formations. This dynamic of re-formation, as we show, often engages old discourse in radically new ways.

Egalitarian Individualism and Australian Identity: Lineages of Ideological Formation We are concerned here with the broad historical and ideological (cultural) processes that participate in forming the continuities and discontinuities in what we describe as egalitarian individualist thought and practice in Australia. Our aim is not to force a distinction between idea and practice, nor to treat history or conceptions of Australia’s past as constructions somehow independent of ideological practices. The direction of the analysis is rather to suggest some of the similarities, and more importantly the distinctions, that may be apparent in Hansonism as a discourse within egalitarian assumptions. On the surface Hansonism, and latterly the arguments of Howard and his government, appear to be (re)articulating, with contemporary content, a logic of orientation to the present (an ontology) that appears to be consistent with old arguments. The past seems to be manifesting itself as the present, which some might see as vital to its appeal. There are reasons why this may be so, for egalitarian ideology was embedded within political and social institutions and is a force in their reproduction. But we are also interested in demonstrating redirections in current Australian elaborations of egalitarian individualism, as well as the contemporary contextual factors that drive such reorientations. In particular, within Australia contemporary forces of globalization, shifts in state sovereignty, and transnational flows in goods and people have opened up new ruptures in the social fabric. Australian egalitarianism, as in the past, reemerges and functions to resolve such ruptures, but it does so distinctively. One aspect, we suggest, is that Australian egalitarian ideology, even more so than before, seeks to establish a factuality of community and broader unity in situations where the experience of social fracture and fragmentation is perhaps more intense than at earlier times in

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history. To some extent, what some might see as the intense fetishism of individualist communitarianism and culture in the political and social ideologies and practices of modern Australia is a teleological outcome of the deeply laid forces of individualist value in Australian social institutions. We indicate that egalitarian ideology or value is integral to the way many Australians attach significance to processes of social fracture. Moreover, we suggest not only that the very recognition of fracture (or communitarian unity) flows from egalitarian value, but also that such value is vital in the promotion of a discourse of exclusion and hostility to otherness. We begin by focusing on the ideological and related practices that were at the center of the nationalist imagination of Australia even before 1901, when the several colonies (now semi-autonomous states or provinces) of the continent were federated as the independent Commonwealth of Australia. Before we do so, however, we note that the egalitarian individualist ideology we discuss is akin to that which, variously described as egalitarianism and individualism, has long been conceived as integral to global modernities in Europe and North America (e.g., De Tocqueville 1968; Dumont 1980; Foucault 1977, 1979, 1991). We stress individualism as a value, and not the trivial fact that it is individual human beings acting in concert or separately who continually make and remake their existential and historical realities. This, as Dumont and others have tirelessly emphasized, is true for all social contexts. However, individualism as value is a relatively modern phenomenon connected with the development of secularism (including its religious forms, such as Protestantism), the spread of capitalism, and closely associated bureaucratic and managerial practice in state and non-state institutions. Individualism as an ideology (a discursive system of value, our concern here) constructs the individual subject as the primordial and generative center of all social and political realities. Egalitarian individualism insists on the fundamental equality of all human beings in nature, and it represents social inequality (often described as hierarchy) as the contradiction of egalitarian ideals. In Europe, of course, such an ideological vision was vital in the French Revolution and carried through as the characteristic ideal of the American Revolution. Many forms of such egalitarianism are apparent in pre- and post-Enlightenment discourse and were a force in anarchist and socialist movements worldwide. While they were integral to the social cries for human freedom and liberation, they were also appropriated by the pragmatic interests of power and control, resulting in denial or restriction of pressures toward freedom and liberation. Referring to Bentham’s individualist reformist pragmatism and orientation to a specular state (Bentham’s panopticon was actually built in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania), Foucault explores aspects of the individualism underlying the formation of the biopower of the modern state. Individualism is an aspect of the inhabitation of the person by the state and part of what Foucault describes as governmentality, whereby

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modern citizens govern themselves on behalf of dominant state interests. Hardt and Negri (2000) have recently expanded Foucault’s notion of biopower and governmentality to discuss the forces of control in what they call Empire, or the political orders articulating globalization. We make the reference to underscore the close affinity of individualism with state interest and, paradoxically, with hierarchializing and subordinating power, relations that are very apparent in contemporary Australian populism and developments in citizen conformity and protest. Our central argument is that egalitarian individualism, and particularly the shape it has achieved in Australian nationalist ideologies, is critical for understanding present political and social developments, which stress an exclusionary cultural and social homogeneity and an apparent reemergence of an hostility to otherness, for want of a better expression.

Ideological Formation in the Circumstances of the Colonial State An obvious feature of most colonial and postcolonial contexts is that their social and political realities were formed or reconfigured through the institutions and practices of the colonial state. The order of the state defined the social orders it encompassed and established the limits to the autonomy of those social formations already founded in the context of the colonial state. Australia is a particular but extremely radical instance of such a process. Although there was a sizable indigenous population at the time of colonization, the British colonial authorities declared the country to be terra nullius. This had disastrous consequence for the Aboriginal population, whose own institutions received virtually no government legitimacy. Their lack of legal and official recognition removed the capacity of Aborigines to negotiate the terms of their own existence in the context of the state. Their situation emphasizes the uncontested and totalistic character of the colonial state in Australia, whereby it was able to determine, effectively unchallenged, the social and political conditions of its existence. This was further facilitated by the fact that major centers of population were initially established as penal settlements—colonial hells governed by particularly brutal military regimes (see Hughes 1996). From the foundation of Australia, the colonial state was an absolutist state and a disciplinary society, achieving from its start what the modern state might have projected as its future (see Lattas 1985). The state was the circumstance within which social relations and their subjectivities were constituted, the process of exploration and settlement being more or less completely mediated through its offices. We reiterate to strengthen the point: in Australia the modern state did not so much emerge from within an already established and diverse scattering of settlements and communities; rather, these emerged from within and by means of the machinery of the state. Australian society was through and

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through a conception of the state, society in its colonial manifestations already being internal to it. The state did not become internal to the person so much as the person was instituted already as internal to the state. If the biopower of the state, in the sense that Foucault has described for Europe, grew as a process of historical evolution, in Australia the state as biopower was there from its inception. The all-embracing character of the Australian state (in both its federal and regional manifestations) from the start was influential in the development of an internal discourse of opposition to the state. This is apparent in two early ideological developments in Australian nationalist imaginaries and practice: the “pioneer legend” and the “Australian tradition”. To a large extent these refracted the fact that, while state power and the institutions for social control were concentrated in urban centers, much of the population was distributed through rural areas, which of course were central to the economy and initially provided the major labor opportunities. In the pioneer and Australian tradition, orientations are located in a state/people (also city/country; see Kapferer 1996) opposition that is strongly apparent in later ideological developments, especially that of Anzac (discussed below). Shades of the ideological positions are evident in Hansonism and in larger assertions and reaction to neoliberal programs. This is particularly so with regard to Hanson’s popularity in rural Australia and small-town communities. The “pioneer” and “Australian tradition” visions privilege rural Australia (referred to as “the bush”) as the primal scene. In contemporary Australia, they are reproduced to support values of mutual help in times of crisis and notions of citizen service, an idea to which the Anzac tradition lent particular poignancy. The pioneer legend depicts the pastoral pioneer as the hero in a battle with nature in which individual perseverance and effort overcomes hardship. As Hirst has put it, the pioneer legend is the core element in Australian nationalism, as it deals “in an heroic way with the central experience of European settlement in Australia: the taming of the new environment to man’s use. . . . Their enemies are drought, flood, fire, sometimes Aborigines” (1978: 316). Not only did the pioneers “show the way for following generations,” but they also bear historical witness to the egalitarianism and camaraderie that emerged across class lines between owners and workers in collaboration against the hardships of the unfamiliar and hostile Australian environment. The “pioneer” largely refers to the smallholder who developed the land and shared the early hardships with laborers. The bush is more than an escape from unsatisfying society; it is the ideal community central to the reproduction of a national subjectivity and differentiated from class and conflict-ridden city and society.5 The Australian tradition also makes the bush vital in the national imaginary, and as with all imaginaries, this did not arise de novo. The country regions were sites of early workers’ struggles. Some of the most important union and labor movements had their origins in the bush. The

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Australian socialist movements saw their early impetus in rural regions. The infamous “White Australia” policy had its roots in a labor movement—largely rural—concerned to protect its interests and oriented to maintain what it conceived to be the homogeneity integral to its projection of class and egalitarian solidarity (see Hancock 1961; Turner 1982; Ward 1958). The imaginaries of Australian nationalist ideologies combine senses of stoicism and fatalism (of the individual pitted against all odds, who in a Nietzschean way can be expected in all likelihood to succumb even despite superhuman efforts). Such sentiment holds an echo of the experience of the penal system. Many of the terms associated with rural life (e.g., station, muster) are derived from colonial prison practice.6 The bush is an ambiguous and historically complex conceptual category that does not fall into easy semiotic dualisms of nature/culture. It is the place where human beings were subjected to the harshness and vagaries of dominant elites and of government authority and regulation. Convicts were sent to the bush to work as virtual slave labor on the properties, building roads, etc. But it was also a place to escape from authority, and therefore was potentially as liberating as it was imprisoning. It was in the bush, following the end of transportation in 1868, that the intense efforts to invert the master/ servant relations took early form.7 Overall, the mix of optimism and pessimism still apparent in modern egalitarian ideologies in Australia might be seen as continuous in some respects with these earlier sentiments and their ground. Generally, the bush continues to hold a place in the Australian nationalist imagination as a place where self-regulating individual common sense and goodwill had their source. These were to flower in the Australian legend of Anzac (a voluntary army of largely rural men) and its ideology of “mateship.” In Anzac, however, a stronger communitarian idea (impelled in Australian notions of mateship that refuse distinction) developed, appropriate to the nationalist vision of Australia as a new and original kind of society in which bush ideologies, with their often dominant reveries of isolation and loneliness, had less place. From this it should be clear that the bush in early nationalist imaginaries was no Arcadian realm, although aspects of this have more recently emerged (e.g., in representations of traditional Aboriginal society, reevaluations of desert wilderness, etc.). Furthermore, the ideas it spawned were, through and through, modernist urban visions of class struggle, excoriating working conditions, general hardship, and poverty. They were less romantic constructions of the idyllic kind than they were views that were thoroughly integral to the experiences born of modernism (industrialism, urbanization). This extends an understanding of why ideologies associated with the bush could continue to be relevant in the growing city contexts of Australia: not merely because country people migrated to the towns (making Australia one of the most urbanized countries in the world), but

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because the sensitivities of bush ideologies were already urban in the encompassing notion of modernism that we use here. (We note that bush ideas of personal loneliness and of wilderness translate into common urban characterizations of individual alienation.) Australia, as a modernist society from the very start, one in which the state played the key mediating role, expands understanding of the egalitarian ideas that developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and of these ideas’ instrumentality as an agency of government and populist expression. Further observations in this regard should be made. Australian egalitarianism is a continuing, if heterogeneous, construction of Australia as a modernist society of the state. We stress the particularity of this ethos, its historical specificity. While Australian egalitarianism resonates with other populist egalitarianisms elsewhere, contrary to some interpretations (see Davidson 1997), both the history of its evolution and its circumstances are significantly distinct from overtly similar developments in Europe and the United States. Colonizing forces are conventionally seen as a major mechanism of modernization at metropolitan peripheries, and Australia is certainly no exception. But we add that there was no gradualist formation of modernism in Australia; it was modernist through and through from the very start. Moreover, it was virtually completely British in its modernist political, social, and economic institutions. This was rather different from comparable political orders such as North America, where colonial beginnings were far more diverse and social formation took place outside of the regulatory eye of the state. In North America (especially the United States), British and other Europeancentered institutions were regarded with suspicion (encouraged perhaps in strong nonconformist influences), and there was a powerful energy to start something new. The egalitarian cultural and social conformity of Australian ideology and institutional practice relates to its greater social homogeneity as compared with other colonial situations. Largely British, the immigrant population brought with it social conflicts and other divisions that certainly had ideological and practical roots in Britain. In the context of Australia, these achieved an added dynamic and value, becoming a force for a sense of unity despite conflict. More to the point, they were active in the institutional construction of modern Australia and vital in producing a taken-for-granted cultural hegemony: the assumed dominance of what are now termed Anglo-Celtic values or, more recently, the often hidden power of “whiteness” in much Australian governmental and social practice (Hage 1998).8 It was this value that influenced the White Australia policy when sections of the population felt their interests and hegemony threatened, and it has reemerged in Hansonism and the unabated hostility toward refugees. One general point should be re-insisted upon at this stage. This relates to the internality of the state within the formation and use of egalitarian

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thought and practice. The liberal historian W. K. Hancock (incidentally an ambivalent supporter of the White Australia Policy), writing in 1930, asserted that the state had an essential role in the creation of Australian egalitarian society.9 He recognized the identity of state interest with the promotion of egalitarian individualist value. Hancock articulated the state formation of the individual subject as a self-governing entity as being vital to government control and social coherence. For Hancock, the prevailing ideology of Australian democracy was simple—justice, rights, and equality rested on the “appeal to government as an instrument of self-realization” (1961: 57). It is Australia as a society of individual self-discipline (Australia as a disciplinary society) that increases understanding of the ideological centrality or nationalist fetishism of practices such as sport and the expanding importance of national celebrations such as Anzac Day and its traditions, and even the ceremonialization of national disasters such as the recent Bali bombing. Here, too, is located some understanding of contemporary discourses in Australia concerning citizenship and the construction of projections of what kind of society Australia should become—and of who may not be appropriate for it.

Egalitarian Individualism and the Anzac Tradition A short account of the Anzac tradition brings our discussion into the center of Australian nationalist discourse and the way it may bring together social and political elements that on the surface can seem to be opposed. Australian nationalism and the consciousness of Australian identity now, and in the past, had little purpose other than to mark Australian distinctiveness in an era of nationalism that still bears force. Unlike elsewhere, it did not grow out of social and political struggle with colonial hegemony. Rather, what antagonisms there were, were reconstituted as a resolution in an idealism in which erstwhile opponents were united in agreement. In effect, the ideology of Australian national identity emerged as an imagined resolution of difference as sameness, or unity of project. In this sense it did, as its critics have complained, continue some of the logic inherent in the British ideology of Empire. The foregoing considerations are underscored in the phenomenon of Australian nationalism and the consciousness of Australian identity. These were constructions of the society of the state having little purpose other than the creation of a sense of distinction appropriate in an age of nationalism. Perhaps, too, Australian nationalism as it developed enshrined those values born of division in the largely British society of the state, re-creating them as principles of unity rather than of conflict. Australian nationalist ideology and discourses of Australian identity did not grow out of processes of social and political struggle. They developed after the fact of independence and were thoroughly representational, already first and

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foremost, media events concerned to produce a popular sense of distinctive personal and collective identity relevant to the creation in 1901 of the Federation of Australia, the union of hitherto separate colonies. The idea of Australian identity developed within discourses relevant to the dominant British population functioning to further embed its values as integral to the hegemony of the state. Australian political life was powerfully organized around issues of class and other related conflicts (e.g., Protestants versus Catholics), but these were suppressed or transmuted as part of Australian national presentation. An outstanding example is the legend of Ned Kelly, which expresses the mutual antipathy between Irish and English, between smallholder and large landowner, and between dominating urban capital and its authorities and laboring fractions (see McQuilton 1979). The legend, in effect, achieves in numerous representations an uneasy resolution and unity of the competing interests engaged in the production of Australia, generating a national value of resigned acceptance, the “Such Is Life,” despairing, almost defeated tone of so much that passes for Australian nationalist value.10 In a major way, the discourse of Australian identity engaged the language of class in drawing distinctions between Australian forms of life on the one hand and those of the “homeland” and its erstwhile ruling system—Britain—on the other. Thus, Australians were presented as egalitarian and classless, whereas the English were typified as class-ridden and hierarchical. Effectively, class conflicts internal to the colonial and postcolonial social orders were both denied in Australian nationalism and reconfigured as a cultural distinction between Australia and its erstwhile colonial ruler. Australian nationalism has its clearest (and most worshipped) representation in the Anzac tradition, constructed around the legendary exploits of Australian and New Zealand volunteer servicemen (non-conscripted citizens) at Gallipoli in 1915, where they were defeated by Turkey. This tradition, consciously developed to epitomize the heroism of egalitarian Australian individualism against all manner of hardship and suffering (frequently conceived as caused by the ineptitude of hierarchical management), was established as the “true” birthing event of the new nation, rather than the day of Federation. The egalitarian ideology of Anzac, one which has gone through numerous elaborations since, celebrated a community of individuals who expressed a fundamental unity in nature undifferentiated by the artifice of “culture” or the legacy of civilizations premised on unnatural hierarchical distinctions. The Anzacs—as described by their hagiographer, C. E. W. Bean, the inspiration behind the Anzac ceremonial center of the Australian War Memorial at Canberra—bore the heroic characteristics of men in the ancient cradles of civilization. In effect, they were constructed as manifestations of ancient ideals, “new men” who reinvented what later civilizations had debased (see Kapferer 1988). The society that they represented was a society of equals each of whom possessed as an innate quality

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the capacity to govern themselves, thus rendering hierarchical orders of power and control redundant. Anzac Day, the annual event honoring Australia’s servicemen and women that arguably remains the most important national event (even more than Australia Day, marking the arrival of the First Fleet, which is growing in popularity), takes the form of a symbolic suspension of state authority. An interpretation of the practices associated with the rites of Anzac Day is that ordinary citizens, the people, are given over to the formation of their social relations independently of the authority and mediation of the state. Constituted as a community of individuals without internal distinction, the people are bound by acts of mutual reciprocity and recognition of interpersonal equality (mateship). At the close of the rites, the state is reaffirmed and presented as emergent from the body of the people. The People/State opposition and tension that mark the dynamic of events on Anzac Day is, in many ways a ritual working out of the Hobbesian State/Society dilemma at the heart of the modernist state. The autonomy of the People, it may be interpreted, is recognized by the State. The agents of the state acknowledge the potency of this autonomy even as it is yielded to the state in War, as in Peace, in the interest of social and political continuity. Much of Anzac Day is, of course, centered upon the gift (sacrifice) of the autonomy of the People to the State. A clear Christian resonance obtains in this obdurately secular ceremony. Seen by many as largely Protestant in ethos, it nonetheless carries themes that are present in all denominations, enabling people of vastly different religious backgrounds to participate. The argument of sacrifice is potentially trans-religious, especially as it is clearly carried through in the contemporary discourse and rhetoric, in Australia and elsewhere, of citizenship and human rights. The Anzac tradition has frequently been interpreted as an artifact of days gone by, dismissed as a masculinist and militarist relic of Empire. Yet it has somehow survived such onslaughts, even gathering strength in the imagination of new generations who have not experienced war. There are now efforts to get Anzac Cove in Gallipoli listed as a World Heritage site. For numerous reasons, Anzac seems to go from strength to strength as the prime nationalist occasion, thanks not least to media attention and the organizers’ preparedness to adapt its practice to shifts in social attitude. However, the relevance of the egalitarian individualist logic of Anzac continues because of contemporary global processes and their particular local effects in Australia. In certain ways Anzac was already postmodern. Certain vital aspects of current realities—the structural shifts that have occurred because of globalization—discover import in Anzac and impel its reinvention or reissue. Not only was Anzac nationalism a thoroughly modernist idealism (in which real class conflicts and other social differences were suppressed) born, of course, in the first industrial war, but it also virtually denied its

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own historicity. The anti-historical feature of the Anzac ideology singles it out from other nationalisms (which often revel in the falsity of their histories) and aggressively underpins its essentialism and universalism. It is this fact that enables it to have continuing force in what is an immigrant society. In certain respects, Anzac ideology enables the erasure of different histories and their amalgamation to the expression of a foundational individuality. Moreover, it is paradoxically relevant to current globalizing realities that may be characterized as intensifying the biological and technological determinisms of modernist times. Anzac is preadapted, as it were, for a postmodern society with its strong emphasis on individual agency and self-discipline. The occasion of the event—after the parades are over, and frequently during them—manifests as loose and shifting gatherings (communities) of men (and now women) emblematic in many ways of the porous and shifting boundaries of postmodern society. The “communities” that spring up have no internal structures of authority but rather actively resist them, and they are expressly antagonistic to those forms of society that are coherent and ordered and that deny individual autonomy. The practice of Anzac seeks to achieve a resolution of any potential contradiction between individual and community interest (see Kapferer 1988). Although Anzac remains the most important practice of nationalist ideals, it is accompanied by a growing number of other festivals that ritualize individualist value. Many consider some of these to be more appropriate to modernity while communicating the same ideals. Thus, major occasions of celebration in Australia, e.g., Australia Day and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (now advertised as among Australia’s greatest tourist attractions) display similar egalitarian themes. Australia Day has recently received greater attention, in part in connection with recent patterns of immigration to Australia and the policy of multiculturalism. A state- and corporate-sponsored instrument of national ideological incorporation, its observation revolves around the eating of different ethnic cuisines, celebrating differences that can be ingested in a demonstration of essential oneness. The Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is, of course, presented as anti-masculinist and opposed to prejudices based on gender difference, which are conceived as being at the root of conventional social hierarchies (Nicoll 2001). In a sense it is also antisociety, though in a different way from Anzac. As is true for Anzac, it celebrates individuality and expresses powerful ideals of self-discipline and control (even as these are given a sexual value loading). In recent performances, the organizers have provided their own marshals who, in partnership with the police, maintain order among the spectators and participants. The further example of sport, the national obsession, provides countless arenas for the observation of natural capacities, selfdiscipline, and mutual camaraderie.

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Hansonism and Neoliberalism: An Anti-Postmodern Postmodern Turn within Egalitarianism The emergence of Hanson and One Nation gave expression to prejudices that, to many, contradicted progressive developments in thought and practice in Australia. It seemed to air attitudes that middle-class urban Australia had come to associate with the bush and often characterized as the narrow “redneck” ideas of its poorer communities.11 Hanson and her followers were seen as professing a racism (especially in views toward Aborigines and new immigrants, particularly from Asia) that many in Australia were attempting to distance themselves from. Yet the Australia of the past dramatically demonstrated that it was still very much alive. Hansonism achieved marked popularity in rural areas and towns but also, though muted, in the cities. Hanson and One Nation were an embarrassment to those who saw Australia as a cosmopolitan society that at last was rid of its colonial, Crocodile Dundee, backwater image. However, Hansonism was an expression of popular resistance to changes wrought within the country as a result of globalization. It was also an expression of possibilities of egalitarian individualist ideas and practices. This much was recognized by its opponents, who associated it with what they regarded as the worst imperialist and racist views of “old identity Australia.” These were the views of members of the Anglo-Celtic population who had not adapted to contemporary realities in which political and social power was shared with communities who had few, if any, ties to the Empire of the past. While there is much evidence to indicate that this was indeed the case, criticism of Hanson often came from within similar egalitarian individualist perspectives. The criticism of Hanson and the criticism she and her followers constantly espoused each centered around the claim that the other side was fostering inequality, if in different ways. Furthermore, as events were to demonstrate, those who opposed Hanson (even ridiculing her attitudes, as did a figure who, calling himself Pauline Pantsdown, dressed in drag and dogged her political progress; see Nicoll 2001) began to support programs that she had initiated regarding Aborigines, refugees, and certain immigrant groups. Many of Hanson’s opinions were reissued as neoliberal political, economic, and social policy, expressing similar lines of social and political exclusion and an apparent return to “old values.” While it may have been a return to past values, both Hansonism and the neoliberals (on both the left and the right) who overcame her were produced in the structural conditions of the present. These conditions were manifested as a postmodern and postcolonial crisis that achieved especial significance through egalitarian individualist value. In fact, what is most striking about the One Nation period (1996–1998) and after is the intensity of the nationalist egalitarian individualist discourse, which took various

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forms. Of particular dominance was the revitalization of the old egalitarian problematic, enshrined in Anzac, concerning the State/People relation. This expressed a consciousness of major change in the order of the state and its social context. Hanson took the position that the agents of the state, in coalition with old and new political and economic elites, were subjecting the ordinary population (the taxpayer) to illegitimate hardships that defied egalitarian ideals. In Hanson’s view, it was a world of “fat cats, bureaucrats and do-gooders” taking advantage of ordinary taxpayers, who effectively lost their money in support of “Aborigines, multiculturalists and a host of minority groups” and also to fund the increase in the “power and position” of already dominant groups (Hanson 1996). The state was, in other words, breaking its Hobbesian contract with the people. Hanson and One Nation engaged in class rhetoric, thinly veiled in Australian egalitarianism, to argue that the ideals of equality in Australia were being smashed by government policy. The paradox of Hanson’s pleas, in the eyes of many, was that the people she attacked were often clearly sites of disadvantage whose evident socioeconomic inequality had to be rectified. Hanson’s class and populist rhetoric were subject to ridicule (as was her self-presentation as the owner of a fish and chip shop, a person who was simply educated, and a single mother). This in itself ironically indicates the emergence of a language of class opposition and subjugation (not to mention sexism) that was now decentered from its location within a structure of class relations as a consequence of the atomization and fragmentation of class in a postFordist era. Paradoxically, however, the engagement of class rhetoric to the subversion of Hansonism indicates the persistence of the forces of class (though taking new shape) behind the moral progressivism and egalitarianism of those who rejected Hansonism If the language of class was engaged to subvert Hanson’s inegalitarian egalitarian (and cross-class) appeal, a further irony was the engagement of her nonconformism as a method of degradation. Hanson was represented as an inappropriate nonconformist egalitarian: an individualist who was not egalitarian—that is, did not subordinate herself to the collective moral will—and who manifested distinction from a communal uniformity. The ambiguities and contrary tensions that were germane within egalitarian thought and practice were exploited against her. Thus, the attack on One Nation often formed around the claim that Hanson (and many of her followers) were not individuals in common with the majority of Australia. She was depicted as a divorcee who was on bad terms with her children, in contravention of “ordinary” values. Moreover, she was an unconventional exception, separate from the crowd—a kind of inverted “tall poppy,” which in egalitarian Australia is a term disparaging those who stand out and effectively subvert its egalitarian ideals.12 We referred to Pauline Pantsdown, who shadowed Hanson, the one revealing the unconventional, bizarre, excessive, and transgressive in the other. They were bonded in identity

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by their exceptionalism as extremists—breakers of the norms, rather than purveyors of accepted convention (see Nicoll 2001). Irony built upon irony, for the debates surrounding Hanson were occasions, for Hanson and her opponents alike, of the emergence and invention of new values, even as they often seemed to repeat the old. The foregoing exemplifies the more general point that the values of egalitarianism can be pursued in a variety of often-contradictory directions. The continual development of new import in its terms ensures the vitality of an egalitarian ethos, new meanings or reevaluations being a potential of egalitarianism founded, as it is, on a dynamic of uneasy resolution and tension. Thus individuality is valued, even as it is potentially seen as subversive of the value of an undifferentiated essential sameness. Australian nationalist egalitarianism is relatively open and its course is far from certain. Routine political appeal to it is not without risk for it can turn in unexpected directions. . The historical context that gave rise to Hanson, and eventually to the incorporation of many of her ideas in contemporary mainstream politics, was an era of liberalization (from the late 1960s through to the present) spearheaded by the Australian Labor Party, which addressed a variety of internal social inequities. It instituted efforts to overcome social and economic disadvantage among Aborigines and, by advocating a policy of multiculturalism, aimed to ensure improved rights and recognition for ethnic minorities.13 During this era Australia opened its doors to immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, whose entry had hitherto been restricted in entry. Similarly, it was the federal government under Labor that instituted a program of economic deregulation consistent with the globalizing policies of the World Bank and the IMF.14 These changes in turn influenced an intensification of notions of individual agency and potency already explicit in egalitarianism, but they also subverted the collectivist anti-difference (difference as the source of inequality) that is a vital value in Australian nationalism. The momentary One Nation phenomenon, and the more enduring neo-nationalist developments that have followed in its wake, are in large measure both a reaction to and an effort to restore long-term hegemonies and to reposition the upwardly mobile in the changing hierarchies of power and society. Egalitarian nationalism has discovered new impetus in the largely state-mediated changes. Hansonism was one expression of critical shifts in the social order and the perceived threat to Anglo-Celtic dominance, in whose interests an egalitarian nationalism had largely worked, as it still does. But we stress that, more than a mere expression reflecting what in fact was at base, it was a construction motivated in egalitarian thought and practice that attached specific significance to ongoing processes. There is strong evidence that, increasingly since the 1980s, policies of deregulation have led to impoverishment in rural areas and small towns and growing migration from them to the cities.15 Small business (of which

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Hanson and her followers were often representative), a powerful site of values of individual autonomy, has been adversely affected, as have the communities with which small business was in mutual dependence. This is exacerbated by a decline of public services (transport, education, health) to rural areas and small towns.16 That small business interests should take up the cudgels of egalitarianism was in itself relatively original. To some extent, the One Nation populism replaced what was once the more vocal egalitarianism of the laboring and lower middle classes (in the cities and the country), whose power had been reduced by the decline of industry and privatization of government corporations.17 Many laid off from the manufacturing industry, as well as those in the white-collar sector, have themselves entered small business and been encouraged to become franchise owners and stakeholders in publicly floated companies.18 In a real sense, One Nation stood for struggling local small business against large, private, usually foreign conglomerates.19 These latter were frequently rocked by corruption scandals provoked by greed in the apparent opportunities opened by deregulation, the breakup of government monopolies, etc. Although the egalitarian rhetoric of One Nation appeared to be a throwback to the past, the meaning of its discourse was thoroughly contemporary. The values of Anzac nationalism were given a definitely new twist.

New Directions in Exclusionary Practice Some politicians, of the left and the right alike, realized that One Nation was speaking to a new fracture and the accompanying distress among large sections of the population. This seems to be reflected in the way politicians sometimes hedged their bets in elections, giving their voting preferences to One Nation. It is our opinion that the leader of the ruling Liberal Party, John Howard, felt the pulse correctly. He initially wavered in his condemnation of the outright racist aspects of Hanson’s appeal. Although he and his party eventually rounded on One Nation and participated in its destruction, it was destruction by incorporation more than anything else. Despite protests from some in his own party, Prime Minister Howard refused to officially support the Aboriginal Reconciliation movement, which was mainly promoted by indigenous groups and educated members of the urban middle class.20 This is, at the least, in tacit agreement with the Hanson message. Like Hanson, he refuses to acknowledge that his generation of white Australians bears any responsibility for the destructions and dispossessions suffered by Aborigines in the past. It was Howard’s government that brought in new controls over immigration, effectively closing Australia’s borders to refugees and establishing harsh camps for illegal immigrants that the United Nations has found to infringe on human rights.21 These policies are widely believed to have won him majorities in successive elections, despite public corporate scandals and what some see as the introduction of a complicated and punitive goods and

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services tax. This last point indicates that if economic concerns are causes of the final instance, they are not necessarily first causes. These, in the context of Australia at least, have much to do with the ideas through which the significance of reality is constructed, and onto which responsibility for difficulty and hardship is often too easily deflected. The One Nation phenomenon is of considerable interest because it triggered a revitalization of an Australian nationalist egalitarianism. We have argued that whereas it continued old ideas, it also gave them novel valence and direction. This persists and was elaborated in the neoliberalism of Howard and his government. Howard himself transformed from an earlier image of the careful accountant (during years of opposition to Labor) into a figure somewhere between the Australian sports fanatic and the swaggering, broadbrimmed hat–wearing hero of Australian folk caricature and bush legend. There is one feature of the new nationalist intensity that demands closer consideration. This relates to the singling out of Aborigines and new immigrants (usually of Asian and Middle Eastern background), as well as refugees, as objects against which to assert Australian egalitarian difference and value. Undoubtedly, it is an aspect of what Sartre (1962) recognized long ago, the assertion of identity through an act of constructing and then negating an Other. The ideo-logic of egalitarian thought and practice in the past and in the present is also relevant, as we have discussed. Thus, implicit in egalitarianism is that the ideals of egalitarian unity are more likely to be achieved where there are similarities in essence—for example, in cultural orientations and practice—than where there are marked differences. The well-known Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey used a similar egalitarian argument to vehemently criticize the multicultural policies of the 1980s that led to a large number of immigrants from Southeast Asia settling in Australia’s cities. Blainey claimed their cultural differences would inhibit the formation of a coherent and harmonious Australian nation founded in the moral ideals of egalitarianism (Kapferer 1988). His argument, which continued notions integral to the earlier White Australia Policy, has been reissued in the moral outrage of majority Australians against populations whose customs appear to flout egalitarian value. Certainly, policies of major government funding for Aboriginal organizations and land rights legislation, as well as for multiculturalism and encouragement of ethnic minority rights, created a sense among the “silent” majority that had hitherto not perceived itself to be ethnically marked that they were the victims of inegalitarian programs. Other factors that extend the earlier argument are worth consideration. Hansonism realized an inherent contradiction at the heart of Australian nationalism: its egalitarianism underpinned social and political domination by the majority population. As we have said, Australian egalitarian ideologies originated among an Anglo-Celtic population that assumed the superiority of its values. This assumption was problematized in the circumstances of the new Aboriginal policies (especially after the Mabo and Wik High Court decisions overruling the doctrine of terra nullius that had

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dispossessed Aborigines), multiculturalism, and increased immigration from Asia. The One Nation attack on these policies was a thoroughgoing reassertion of cultural orientations that were felt to be relatively and illegitimately reduced. In fact, we suggest, government policies were integral to the formation of a cultural self-awareness—a cultural identity—that had not been so clearly formulated before. In a sense, the Anzac ideology of the pre-Hanson years was not merely, as we have said, anti-society but was anti-cultural. Its cult of natural equality valued an essential unity in humanity that was in fact threatened by cultural and social difference, conceived to be unnatural. The events and developments surrounding One Nation constituted a shift in egalitarian thought and practice, recognizing it definitively as the cultural field possessed by the majority population, who now consciously defined themselves as Anglo-Celtic in relation to an Australian context explicitly presented as multicultural. This development was strengthened in the context of other changes we have outlined. The collapse of small rural populations, increased rural migration to the cities, fragmentation and dispersal of working populations centered on localized industry, and so on, created forms of social alienation that were counteracted through an intensified commitment to idealized values that buttressed a sense of community, albeit an imagined community of mutual interest and belonging. Benedict Anderson (in criticism of Ernest Gellner [1964]) makes the observation that it is not the fact that communities are imagined that is the critical feature of contemporary discourse on national identity, but rather the style of this imagination (1983: 15). Our agreement with this position underlies our concern with egalitarian individualist ideology in its Australian formations and redirections. But we also stress the imagination of community—especially among the dominant Anglo-Celtic population—in the sense of a community that perhaps only exists as an imaginary, an imaginary constituted at an abstract level above the more grounded contexts of social interaction. We consider the attempt to make a decontextualized abstract imaginary of Australian identity concrete at a lived everyday social level to be, in effect, a feature of contemporary practice. This sometimes takes on a strongly ritualistic character exemplified, as a superficial observation, by what some might see as a fetishism of mateship. Ordinary conversation, whether presented in the media or in activity on the street, is replete with assertions that the discourse is between mates (regardless of gender differences)—in other words, that the conversation is possible because the parties to it are already constituted in a community or society of mates. The relatively recent heightening of a fetishism of community and identity (among Anglo-Celts) was encouraged by changes to policies in immigration and developments in an ethos of multiculturalism (especially under Labor), particularly through the 1980s and 1990s. Immigrant populations, especially early in their experience, tend to be relatively coherent

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and mutually supportive. This is a well-recorded strategy of immigrant settlement worldwide. They often tend to closure, and not merely because of the prejudice and rejection of host populations. While such communities project an imagination of community coherence as culturally and socially conceived, this is by no means ungrounded. The formation of these communities, both through rejection and as a conscious settlement strategy (so much so that social communities were formed that also recognized a high degree of cultural boundedness), stimulated a recognition among Anglo-Celts of their own lack (an absence of experienced social and cultural coherence), and perhaps a consciousness of crisis—a crisis of community— further exacerbated by the retraction of state services, privatization, and economic liberalization. Government programs of support both exacerbated processes of increased cultural self-awareness among majority Australians and impelled further processes to cultural closure at a relatively socially alienated, imaginary level, which in turn impelled popular support for greater controls on immigration. We add that the popular support for tighter immigration controls (directed especially at peoples from Asia and the Middle East) was (and is) a rhetoric integral to a constitutive dynamics of cultural closure. And this so not only for Anglo-Celts: we suggest that it was also a process vital in the reshoring of communal boundaries among more recent post–Second World War immigrant groups who otherwise had little reason to share sentiments in common with Anglo-Celts. Indeed, one feature of anti-refugee discourse is that it is supported by Anglo-Celts and those from more recently established communities. We consider the cultural turn among majority Australians to have influenced the displacement of difficulties driven by global political and economic transformations onto populations whose existence was conceived to subvert or threaten the social, moral, and now consciously reaffirmed cultural hegemony of majority Australians.

Conclusion The recent directions in Australian nationalist and political expression have been couched in terms often referred to as a return to the right, or more accurately, practices that manifest essentialist and exclusionist ideas, frequently described as racist. The Hanson phenomenon appears to resemble movements in Europe marked by the populist successes of Haider in Austria, by Le Pen’s outrageous entry into the second round of the French presidential elections, and, until his assassination, by Pym Fortuyn in the Netherlands. In the Australian context, Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party, for a brief moment, seemed to crystallize similar forces. Hanson and her followers had limited electoral success with a rhetoric that stressed the “basic values” of lower- and middle-income urban and rural communities. The appeal was to those presumed to be white and of British

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background, or in more recent postcolonial conceptions, of Anglo-Celtic stock. The latter present-day ethnic conception asserts a homogeneity of interest that in the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods had been precluded by often-bitter enmities rooted in class, religion, and national/ political sensibilities. Hanson and her One Nation Party were antagonistic to Asian immigration, an open policy toward refugees, multiculturalism, government programs that aimed to positively discriminate in favor of Aborigines, and in particular, Aboriginal land rights. The broad similarities linking Australia with other nations undoubtedly relate to political and economic processes produced by globalization and the consequent crises it has generated in the political order of the state. What is evident to us, in the One Nation Party’s demands to return to protectionist policies of the past, is the appeal to those who have been the major casualties of rapid economic change. Indeed, an admixture of century-old protectionist policies characterizes both One Nation policies and the rising political tide of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that has overtaken Australia. Whether it be the response of “Fortress Australia,” the Howard government’s remedy to refugees coming to Australian shores, or One Nation’s demands to “wind the clock back” and protect the community from international competition, the demand to protect Australia from foreign threats, be they refugees or cheap imported goods, is a consistent one in Australian nationalism. Yet Hansonism says as much about the uneasy marriage between neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the Australian nationalist context. The crisis of the political order of the Australian state can be equated with the breakdown of preexisting political and economic arrangements, but in acknowledging this, we should not underestimate its contested and contradictory character. The deregulation advocated by the Howard government continued, more than ever, to force the government to intensify egalitarian appeals, expanding the sense of inner contradictions. The Prime Minister personally intervened, supporting attacks on multiculturalism and so-called “black armband” history, which sought to restore indigenous struggles against the processes of colonization as part of Australian history, as divisive examples of political correctness. Ironically, attempts to separate the more controversial racist policies of One Nation from the impact of neoliberal policies and economic deregulation ignore the deep historical roots of Hanson’s appeal for more protectionist policies and a more interventionist government. We contend that they are very much in keeping with the egalitarian ethos and logic that historically have been at the center of Australian nationalism and remain so. Yet it is perhaps the structural changes and the ideological revisions of Anglo-Celtic Australia—the decline and the discrediting of the AngloCeltic narratives of nation building—that best explain Hansonism’s contemporary relevance and the broader success of neoconservative policy. Indeed, much of the attack by Hanson and Blainey on immigration and

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multiculturalism is directed at the ascendancy of “white cosmopolites” (Hage 1998) to government, who implement policies accused of being unrepresentative of the people. For Howard and the neoliberal/conservative right, it is the progress and direction of social and historical research, performed by a new class of “intellectual elite” (Dixon 2000), that poses the direct threat to national identity that ideologically sustains the rejection and cutbacks of previous multicultural and indigenous policy. In addition, the new immigrant groups that came in under the conditions of state deregulation have been highly competitive and successful. The formation of relatively stable and well-integrated immigrant communities, real or imagined, based on ethnic or religious ties, stands against the fragmentation of the dominant population. This is no more dramatically represented than in the accelerated breakup of rural communities and the massive drift to the cities in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Hansonism’s appeal found resonance with those at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, that is, those most directly affected by restructuring processes, particularly those in the more socially and economically peripheral rural areas. It emerged as a reaction to the set of historical forces that threatened the ideological terms of Anglo-Celtic dominance. Hanson and One Nation were phenomena generated in large part during the crisis of the Australian society of the state. The public discourse they provoked revealed many of the contradictions at the center of Australian egalitarianism. It demonstrated both the continuing relevance of egalitarian thought and practice, and its redirection in the changing social and political complexities of contemporary postcolonial Australia. We have stressed some of the distinctive aspects of Australian egalitarianism but acknowledge its affinity with modernists-becoming-postmodern discourses elsewhere. Refractively, the Hanson event may throw some light on the paradoxes contained generally in postmodern discourses of egalitarianism and their capacity to be agents in the production of human distress as well as its overcoming.

Afterword On 20 August 2003, Pauline Hanson was sentenced to a three-year jail term for the fraudulent registration of the One Nation party in Queensland. Ironically, it initially appeared that she was convicted on grounds of the same kinds of dishonesty that she and her followers had pointed to in their criticism of the major parties. Many felt she received her just deserts when she was imprisoned in an institution whose inmates are often from the very communities (Asian and Aborigine) against whom Hanson and One Nation expressed egalitarian antagonism. However, other ironies were building. Just when the Hanson phenomenon appeared to have died out, her imprisonment rekindled and appeared

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to exemplify some of the very issues that she addressed. Hanson was presented more and more as a victim of the very forces she questioned, claiming that they silenced the popular interest of the typical Australian “battler” whom she symbolized and represented. For many, this manifested the excessive force of the state and the inequities of the justice system (i.e., the appropriateness of sentence to crimes committed). In the debate surrounding her imprisonment, Hanson was created as a symbolic type embodying the contradictions that lie at the heart of the Australian society of the state. As a symbolic type, she began to unify opinion in Australia, which, in her earlier manifestation, she had otherwise divided. Interestingly, the racism that always drew the opposition of major sections of the population took a back seat, and Hanson was reinvented as a symbolic catalyst for other ideologically driven concerns that fuel discourse in Australia. Hanson’s imprisonment appears as a disciplinary act consistent with our understanding of Australia as a society of the state. As we have argued, Hanson was a transgressive extreme, and the significance of her disciplining draws attention to this fact. The debate surrounding the event accentuated the authoritarian and disciplinary aspects of social institutional life in Australia, toward which there is considerable popular ambivalence. This ambivalence is vital in egalitarian discourse, as the folklore of the Anzac legend demonstrates. Many saw Hanson’s sentence as excessive and inappropriate to what appeared to be a breach of a bureaucratic electoral technicality, the infringement of a rule that had only recently been introduced to regulate a practice that previously was flexible and open to abuse. In popular commonsense terms, Hanson’s sentence did not fit the crime. Hanson’s conviction was presented as the result of behind-the-scenes manipulation of dominant and secretive political and economic forces. Her apparent victimization contradicted the moral legitimacy of a government that claimed to protect the egalitarian interests of the people. Allegedly, Hanson was criminally charged after a sustained covert action by key henchmen and wealthy supporters of John Howard’s ruling coalition to undermine One Nation. These supporters were said to have bankrolled a disaffected One Nation member in his personal legal vendetta against Hanson and One Nation, who had dismissed him from the party. The action was interpreted as cynical and naked political self-interest, born of no ethical or moral concern. Members of political and economic elites, it was implied, had engineered action behind the scenes in a scheme that took advantage of Hanson’s political naiveté—the force of hierarchical power over and against the egalitarian individual innocent. One argument for the severity of Hanson’s sentence (Howard, in populist mode, has also indicated that it was severe), which was expressed in the court judgment, was that Hanson’s fraudulent registration threatened the democratic process in that One Nation claimed to be a party when it did not have the appropriate registered members. Acting despite the electoral regulation, it had attracted a popular vote that severely threatened

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the major and registered parties. Thus the protection of ruling political and economic interests, even against the common will (One Nation received extraordinary electoral support), was put forward as the motivation behind the legal pursuit of Hanson and its cloak-and-dagger aspect. The suggestion was that by taking secret action against Hanson, Howard was able to avoid public disavowal of Hanson’s policies, enabling the coalition to quietly destroy One Nation while appropriating its political and populist orientation. Moreover, the covert action against One Nation was allegedly taken with Prime Minister Howard’s knowledge, which he initially denied. Commentators recognized Howard’s political genius as located in his adept capacity for denials that the public generally accepted. Howard routinely engaged this politics of denial (one that matched Hanson’s in its profession of innocence) to declare that he had always acted in moral good faith, and that he had not known that he was making policy decisions on the basis of what apparently was blatantly false information regarding major national issues, such as refugees (the Tampa incident and children overboard), the war in Iraq, or corporate behavior. The Hanson event played a part in the subversion of key aspects of Howard’s politics of denial, revealing his and key party members’ acts to have been of a morally dubious nature. Parallels were drawn between the covert actions of coalition parliamentarians and Watergate. Ironically, Hanson’s imprisonment rebounded, initially at least, to reflect the immorality of the state and its senior political agents. An egalitarian public consciousness was excited, fueling the opinion that Hanson was a victim of inegalitarian class power. Paradoxical as it may seem, the tragic irony of Hanson’s downward path repeated, albeit in a distinctive vein, the “Such Is Life” pathos that surrounds other Australian egalitarian heroes. Some elite and intellectual circles doubtless experienced a sense of relief that Hanson’s imprisonment might end a career that was a deep international embarrassment to Australians attempting to present a postmodern liberal and non-racist image. But, as this event demonstrated, future social trajectories are never certain. Hanson’s increased symbolic status may contribute to the sustenance of those populist orientations that many find abhorrent and reactionary—the paradox that lies at the heart of the egalitarian individual logic of practice.

Notes This article was originally published in Social Analysis in 2005. Since it was written The Liberal Government of John Howard was defeated to be replaced by a Labor Government. However many of the features of policy continue including perhaps harsher treatment of refugees trying to enter Australia and a severe effort by the government to place Aborigines in norther Australia under close surveillance by agents of the state, police and military otherwise referred toi as the Intervention. 1. In June 1998, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party reached the peak of its electoral power, winning 23 percent of the vote from the major parties

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and ten seats in the Queensland State election. At the next federal election in October that year, however, the party began its rapid electoral decline. Pauline Hanson lost her seat, and the party won only one senate seat in the Federal Parliament. The party’s electoral appeal was in irreversible decline. 2. The Whitlam (1972–1975) period ended twenty-five years of opposition for the Labor Party and ushered in a major policy reform program. In its short time in office, the Whitlam government ended Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam, introduced a major reduction in tariff protection policy, and presented a broad range of social welfare measures spanning universal health insurance, land rights legislation, multiculturalism, and introducing the family court. It should also be noted, as Beilarz has commented, that the Whitlam period marked a “significant ideological turn in the development of the Australian Labor Party—away from laborism” (1994: 87). Whitlam, from a privileged private school background himself, made the Labor Party more acceptable to middle-class voters and the younger generation weaned on the social protest and change of the 1960s. 3. The Queensland premier referred to the High Court as “a pack of historical dills” (cited in McKenna 1997: 8). The historian Geoffrey Blainey attacked the Keating government for implementing a “black armband ideology” by having the Native Title Bill “bulldozed through Federal Parliament” and characterized the High Court as the “black armband tribunal” (Bulletin 1997: 21–23; cited in McKenna 1997: 10). The “black armband” view of history is applied by conservative politicians, public commentators, and historians to a particular “strand of political correctness” that is seen to “belittle past (white) achievements” and encourage a “guilt industry” in relation to past injustices to indigenous Australians. 4. In August 2002, the Howard government announced that it would refuse to sign the protocol on the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women, refuse to appear at some of the UN human rights committee hearings, and ban most visits to Australia by UN human rights monitoring teams (Sydney Morning Herald, 30 August 2002). The reports of the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Human Rights Committee, in March and April respectively, had raised serious concerns about human rights breaches and was expecting similar adverse findings in the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights report to be presented in September (Sydney Morning Herald, 30 August 2002). 5. The term “the bush” did not describe a pristine wilderness but a semirural space carved out for pastoralism and, to a lesser extent, agriculture. 6. Words such as “station,” “muster,” and “superintendent” were part of the vocabulary of the convict system and were subsequently used throughout the pastoral industry (Fromkin, Blair, and Collins 1999: 405). 7. The transportation of convicts to Australia began and ended at different times in different colonies: New South Wales 1788–1850; Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) 1804–1853; Western Australia 1850–1868 No convicts were sent to South Australia. 8. Hage (1998) argues aspects of this point. But a serious failure in his analysis concerns his neglect of the historical factors engaged in the construction of the Australian situation, both its egalitarian ideas and the structure of

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instituted, often state-mediated practices (see Kapferer 2000). The argument concentrates on attitudes often considerably alienated from their social base. A major gap in his argument concerns serious reference to the White Australia Policy (which was vital in Labor Party policy until the Whitlam years of the late 1960s and early 1970s). 9. For Hancock, while this egalitarian ethos was not incompatible with the White Australia Policy, it was an “indispensable condition of every other Australian policy” (1961: 59). The functioning of the egalitarian state required the minimization of racial and cultural difference. Hancock cites Alfred Deakin, who became Australia’s second prime minister and was responsible for drafting the foundational legislation of the new Australian Commonwealth. As Deakin stated: “[T]he unity of Australia means nothing if it does not imply a united race . . . [where] its members can intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies . . . a people possessing the same general cast of character, tone of thought, the same constitutional training and traditions” (1961: 61). 10. Robert Hughes suggests that Kelly’s last three words, “Such is life,” capture the stoicism and fatality that is “the shrug that echoes through the nation’s history” (cited in Adams 1992). 11. The bitter rejection of these urban characterizations of regional Australia has been given eloquent expression in the poetry of Australia’s leading poet, Les Murray, in Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996) and the work of historian Miriam Dixon, The Imaginary Australian (2000). 12. The term “tall poppy” was originally used by Premier Lang of the state of New South Wales in the period between the two world wars to refer to the wealthy, who were instrumental in depriving ordinary people of their way of life. Hanson in fact engaged tall poppy rhetoric, but in the original sense of such rhetoric, by attacking the disadvantaged. Hanson was indeed herself a tall poppy. Interestingly, within a new cultural climate of individualism, the idea of the tall poppy is being revalued. Rather than being abused, the tall poppy is to be admired as an exemplar of individualist ambition. 13. Multiculturalism was officially adopted as policy by the federal Labor government in 1973. 14. Between 1983 and 1985, the federal government introduced the deregulation of Australia’s financial institutions, “floating the Australian dollar, removing capital controls, allowing entry to foreign banks” (Daly and Pritchard 2000: 174). The dramatic push for privatization and corporatization at the state and federal levels began in the late 1980s, gathering pace throughout the 1990s (see O’Connor, Stimson, and Daly 2001). 15. The 1980s was a major period of rural protest that spread to regional, state, and national protests, culminating in a major demonstration by an estimated forty thousand rural producers who assembled at Parliament House, Canberra, in 1985 (Lawrence 1987: 12). Farmer militancy also reached its high point in that year as farmers rallied in response to banks foreclosing on bankrupt farms (ibid.: 1). The Bureau of Agricultural Economics estimated that in the previous fifteen years, nineteen thousand farmers had left agriculture; the farm workforce had declined by thirty-two thousand and the total rural workforce by a hundred thousand (ibid.: 13).

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16. Thirty-three of the thirty-seven poorest electorates in Australia are now located in rural regions, and “the general health of rural people is, by urban standards, very poor . . . [with] above average rates of premature mortality and death through heart disease, cancer, suicide, and tuberculosis” (Lawrence 1996: 335). 17. Goot’s (1998) survey of One Nation Party support, based on the evidence of the demographic profiles of opinion polls, suggests there is both a rural and urban constituency based primarily in male, low-educated, blue-collar workers. 18. The fragmentation and realignments of labor deserve a more detailed discussion than we can give here. In metropolitan Sydney, for example, higher unemployment rates ensued from deindustrialization, particularly for lowskilled and unskilled workers. In a decade, manufacturing declined from 20 percent to 15 percent of GDP (Bureau of Industrial Economics 1994: 30). Onefourth of the entire manufacturing sector workforce—in real terms, 123,000 jobs—disappeared from the low-skilled and unskilled sector (ibid.). This work has been replaced by casual and temporary work in the retail and hospitality industries, and through the purchase of small businesses or franchises ranging from lawn-mowing services to the cut-price delicatessen. 19. The pressure on small rural communities and small business is evident in the research carried out in the two rural seats (Barwon and Dubbo) where One Nation gained the highest primary vote in New South Wales (Howard 2001). The research revealed major concerns with economic rationalization, that is, reductions to tariff protection and increased competition with imported rural produce, service cuts to rail, roads, banks, and health services, and the decline of small businesses as the population drifted to major regional centers (ibid.). 20. Howard has reiterated this point on many occasions since his tenure in government. His position has responded consistently to what has been termed the “black armband history” of the government-commissioned responses to the Stolen Generations and the debate over the High Court’s Wik decision on native title rights. Howard’s confrontation with delegates at the Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne in 1997 was symptomatic of his opposition. As delegates stood up and turned their backs on him as he spoke, he stated that he was unwilling to accept that Australian history was “little more than a disgraceful record of imperialism, exploitation and racism” and hence believed that contemporary Australians should not be held responsible for the sins of past generations (McKenna 1997: 10). 21. Although the Howard government made it a major political issue, the policy for creating detention centers came from the Keating government.

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Aborigines: 3; false comparison of, 238n16; as nationalist metaphor, 142–143, 214; policies for, 365, 369 Adam-Smith, Patsy, 127, 173 Ames, M., 108 Anderson, Benedict: 2, 4–5, 95, 140–141, 232n4, 270, 271, 272, 382; and print capitalism, 94 Anthropological comparison, 23–26 Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps): 29, 235n2; Christian symbolism in, 126–136; and indiscipline, 170, 171, 173; legend of, 121, 125–126; symbolic female and male symbolism of, 180–181; significance of Turks in, 129–131, 188; sectarianism, 350–352 Anzac Day: 129; genesis of, 345–50; and American Memorial Day, 238n13, 242n13; feminism and, 150, 181; legend of, 121, 122; as day of nation, 121, 151–153; as instrument of politic al control, 145–147; male symbolism in, 180; military symbolism of, 160, 168–169; rite, 137, 149–150, 151–153 Arendt, Hannah, 275 Asokan model, 297, 303 Australia Bicentennial, 242n16 Australia Day, as day of state, 121, 169 Australian Pioneer Tradition, 370–1

Australian War Memorial: 122; and new Parliament building, 242n16; “relics” in, 132–133; secular religious form of, 138–139 Autonomy: Australian ideas of, 124, 143, 154–155, 170–173, 178, 241n7; drink and, 157–161; state denial of, 186; national difference and loss of, 190–191 Bailey, F. G., 219 Barnett, S., 220n3 Barth, F., 98 Bean, C. E. W.: 126, 146, 236n3; ritualist empiricism of, 122, 236n4; and individualist ontology, 122–125, 343–4; secular attitude of, 136; and White Australia, 184–185 Bechert, H., 81 Beck, Brenda, 220n3 Berreman, G., 219 Bhalluka: relation to Dutugemunu, 63; killed by Phussadeva, 64, 116–117 Binns, C. A. P., 209, 238n13 Blainey, Geoffrey, 133, chapter 7 Bloch, Marc, 13 Bosworth, Richard, 206, 243n2 Bottomley, Gillian, 244n7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 47 Bryson, John, 143 Buddhism: in nationalist religion, 5–6, 98–99; as modem ideology of class

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Index

power, 108–111 Buddhist revival, fundamentalism, 5, 38, 97 Bullivant, B. M., 244n7 Burgmann, Verity, 207 Bush: romance of, 238n17, 370–2; as symbolic of egalitarian natural unity, 141, 143 Carrithers, M., 16 Christianity: in Anzac legend, 127– 136; and Australian secularism, 6, 128–129, 136, 137, 139 Clark, Manning, 133 Cassirer, Ernst, on myth 346 Class: Buddhist ideology and, 108–110; conflict and Anzac, 145; and ethnicity, 91, 92–93, 100–102, 193–195, 199, 223n8; hierarchy and, 105–108; interpretation of religious chronicles and, 42, 47; cultural transformation, 94, 95; and fear, 102; hegemony, 42–43, 179–180; and sorcery, 103–108; and violence, 93, 101–102 Class populism, 197–199 Clifford, J., 25 Cohen, B. S., 220 Collins, H., 140 Collman, J., 142 Communitas: concept of, 162; applicability to Anzac rite, 162–164; as egalitarian ideology, 163–164 Connell, R. W., 244n5 Conway, R., 207 Cook, K., 237n9 Cosmology, Sinhalese, 292–3 Crocodile Dundee, 16 Culture: ethnic nationalism and production of unified, 97–98, 113; identity in hierarchy, 114; invention of, 209–211; popular, 95–97; reification and transformation of, 2, 4, 93–99 Das, Veena, 220n3 Deleuze, Gilles, 322, 341–2, 364: apparatus of capture, 347–8 Demon, demonic: Buddhist monks and, 13, 16; and class, 105–106; in ethnic

rioting, 29; Sinhalese concept of, 11, 67–68; and trade, 106–107; in hierarchy, 12, 67, 68, 107; metaphors on political discourse, 88–90, 100; and labor migrants, 107–108 Devadatta (evil kinsman of Buddha), 67 Dhammaruchi, Sedawatte, 222n6 Difference, differentiation: as hierarchical principle of unity, 10, 109–110; as egalitarian principle of separation, 16–17, 109, 188, 190, 191 Dipavamsa, the: cosmological structure of, 49–50 Dirks, N., 10 Dissanayaka, T. D. S. A., 222n1 Douglas, Mary, 222n3 Dreamtime: use in Australian nationalism, 142 Drinking: egalitarianism and, 158–161; and individual autonomy and power, 155–161 Dumont, Louis: and comparative study of ideology, 8–11, 12, 14, 320–22; criticism of Levi-Strauss approach to myth, 78; and danger of movable wealth, 106–107, 203; on encompassment of political in modern nationalism, 136; evolutionism of, 219n1; and Indian hierarchy, 219–220n3, 320; and individualism, 340, 368–9; and moral economy, 202–204; on Nuer, 244n6 Dutugemunu: 49, 67, 78, 116–117, 122, 130, 212, 213; champions of, 59–60; demonic nature of, 60, 61, 62–63, 69–70, 95, 228n19; duel with Elara, 63, 81, 215; karmic process of, 50; myth of, 34, 57–65, 95; nationalist discourse and, 35, 36, 38–39, 40, 86, 91, 211, 304; popularity of, 300; rational power of, 86 Economism, 202–204 Edna Everage, Dame, 198–199 Egalitarianism: Australian ideology of, 14–17, 108, 122–125, 128–129, 139– 141, 165, 194–195, 372–6; in drinking, 158–161, 165; and education, 175–176;

Index

and gift, 109; inequality and, 187, 192– 196; hierarchy and, 8–10, 13–14, 109, 195–196, history in, 134–135; humor in, 128, 174, 198–199; and metaphors of space and time, 141–142; and moral economy, 201–204; rationalism of, 128, 139, 140, 171; and separation of difference, 16–17, 188–189; in sport, 174–175, 343–5 Elara: 34, 39, 40, 57, 58, 60, 61, 116, 130; changing symbolic meaning of, 81, 82 Emotions. See Passions Encel, S., 240n6 Epstein, A. L., 113, 233n6 Ethnicity: Australian-Sinhalese compared, 213–215; as categorical relations, 113–114, 196, 233n6; class and, 33, 42, 91, 92–93, 101–102, 223n8, 233n6; and cultural reification, 97–98, 99; and identity, 113–115; and individual-national essence, 187–190; and logic of hierarchical incorporation or embodiment, 109–112; and nationalism, 90–93, 223n10, 300–3; ontology of, 82; rationalism and, 46; violence and, 33, 39, 99–103, 221–222n1 Eureka Stockade, 23, 209 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 222n3 Evil: Buddhist and Christian conception of, 22, 221n; demon myths of, 65–72; as determining, paralysing, restrictive of person, 60, 74, 75; ethnic prejudice and, 82; generative power of, 58, 68–70; origin of, 66, 67; and transformation of Vijaya, 54, 56, 68; and migration, 107–108; as symbolic of opposition to state, of state fragmentation, 68–69, 100–103 Exchange. See Gift Exorcism: types of, 225n7; metaphors in political discourse, 88–90; and symbolism of violence, 101 Fabian, J., 124 Farmer, B. L., 227n7

397

Feyerabend, Paul, 45 Folk history, 93–95. See also Culture; Myth Foster, G., 234n11 Foucault, M., 140: biopolitics, governmentality, 273–7 Gajabahu 1., 39; Obeyesekere on, 44, 47 Galactic polity, 298 Gallipoli, 23, 121, 123, 126, 127–128 130, 132, 135, 146, 170, 171, 173, 188 Gambling: egalitarianism and, 203 Gammage, Bill, 126, 128 Geertz, C., 3, 19, 122, 217 Geiger, Wilhelm, 42, 49 Gellner, E., 3, 95, 232n4, 269–70, 271, 382 Gender: Australian representation of female, 180–182, 198–199; Australian representation of male, chapters 5 and 6; male idealizations, 161, 173. See Dutugemunu; Vijaya; Viharadevi; Kuveni on Sinhalese male-female idealizations Gift, reciprocity: logic of in hierarchy, 109; logic of in egalitarianism, 109, 159; of people to state, 167 Girard, R., 62 Giri, island of, 49, 224n2 Gluckman, M., 113, 162, 169, 196, 233n8, 238n16 Gombrich, Richard, 16 Gothaimbara, 60 Greenwald, Alice, 230n32 Gullett, H. S., 129, 130, 241n10 Gunasinghe, Newton, 38, 92–93, 223n8 Gunawardena, R. A. L. H., 81, 90–91 Hacking, Ian, 4 Handelman, D., 209 Hanson, Pauline, 363 et seq Hassan, Riaz, 206 Heesterman, J. C., 10 Hegel, Georg W. H., 2 Hero: in Anzac egalitarianism, 170–173 Hierarchy: and class, 105–111; and ethnic identity, 113–115, 214–215;

398

Index

demonic and, 12, 68–69; egalitarianism and, 8–10, 13–14, 109, 195–196; 213– 215; encompassment and, 10, 11–12, 13, 56, 62, 63–64; kingship and, 10, 13, 63–64; individual in, 13; and migrants, 106–107; power and, 10–12, 52, 68–70, 110–112; as principle of system coherence, 10, 109; in Sinhalese Buddhism, 10–12, 220n; transformational logic of, 11–12, 13, 55–57, 105–106 Hirst, John B., 140 Hobsbawm, E., 209, 210 Hughes, Billy: symbolic role as “Little Digger,” 153, 240n4 Hughes, Robert, 139, 239n17

Kapferer, B., 3, 25, 29, 38, 59, 68, 76, 220n3, 224n11, 230n31, 233n6, 244n5 Kapferer, Judith, 244n5 Karma: logic of chronicles, 50 Kedourie, E., 3 Kelly, Ned, 23 Khanjadeva, 60 King, kingship: and evil, 69–70; as embodiment of cosmic hierarchy, 10, 12, 13, 294–5, 297, 305, 309. See also Sihabahu; Vijaya; Dutugemunu myths Kitley, P., 155 Kuveni, 34, 41, 50, 56–57

Iconography, of Sydney Memorial, 180–182 Identity in egalitarianism, 114, 115, 194–195, 215; in hierarchy, 113–115, 214–215 Ideology: defined, 80, 84; of Buddhist power, 110–112; as constituting meaning of ontology, 80, 102–103; cultural homegeneity as, 97, 98; as embedded, 18–20; and hegemony, 144–147, 179–182; and historization of ontology, 81–84, 113, 116; passions of, 20, 99, 111, 115–116; as masking and generating contradiction, 92 Individual: as cultural value, 12–13; egalitarian concept of, 14, 15, 122–125, 159–161; as embodiment of national essence, 187–189; hierarchical conception of, 13, 14, 15 Inequality: and egalitarianism, 173– 182, 185, 188–189, 192–196 Inglis, K., 121, 142, 348

Laclau, Ernesto, 265, 276, 282 Lane, Christal, 238n13 Leach, E. R., 238n16 Lepervanche, Marie de, 206 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 20 Liyanagamage, A., 81 London, H. I., 243n2 LTTE , 282–3

Jayarajan, Paul, 41, 42, 44 Jayawardena, Kumari, 38, 92, 108 Jeans, D. N., 243n17 JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna), 259, 281–2 Kalu Kumara (Kalu Yaka, Kalu Devatava): 105; myth of, 65, 229n25

Macintyre, Stuart, 238n16 McKernan, Michael, 144 McQueen, Humphrey, 207, 244n5 Mahasammata (king): 49, 54, 72, 75; myth of, 66 Mahasona, 59, 60, 228n18 Mahavamsa: cosmological structure of, 49–50; in political discourse, 34–38, 39–41, 86; production of new meaning in, 81, 211, 213 Malinowski, B., 223n3 Manikpala (queen): 72, 74, 110; and first evil, 66 Marcus, Andrew, 243n2 Marcus, G. E., 25 Mardi Gras, Gay and Lesbian, 376 Marriott, McKim, 220n3 Mateship: 123, 240n6; and drinking practice, 159–160; as natural sociality, 157, 344–5 Mendis, G. C., 81 Migration: and evil, 107–108

Index

399

Mitchell, J. C., 113, 196, 233n6 Mosse, G. L., 2, 328 Multiculturalism, 184, 205–207 Munn, Nancy, 142 Myth: in political discourse, 34–39, 40; common sense and rationalist of, 40–48; and class rationalism, 42; Malinowski and, 43–47, 77; structuralist approach to, 77–78

Ontology: defined, 79–80, 220n5; agency and, 268; contingency in, 296; in ideology, 19, 20, 79–84, 99, 100–101, 102–103, 115–116, 211–213, 214, 215, 268–9, 281, 295; as logic of reasoning, 19–20; of political discourse, 83, 85–90, 265; of rationalism, 45, 46–47, 80, 122; virtuality and, 322, 340, 341 Oxley, H., 2411n6

Nairn, Tom, 95, 270–1, 272 Nandhimitta, 59–60, 227n16 Nation: and state in Sinhalese cosmology, 7–8; in Australian conception, 7–8, 17, 121, 167–170, 177–178; and Sinhalese person, 7, 100; and Australian person, 7, 165, 185–186 Nationalism: approaches to, 3–4, 19, 266, 269–73, 320–2; Asian and Western, 136, 177; class processes in, 92–93, 268; and communitas, 162–164; and cultural reification, 1–2, 4, 97–99, 209; and ethnicity, 90–91, 111–112, 194–195, 290–300; and historical reinterpretation, 90–91; religion of, 4–6, 136–139; Sinhala resurgence, 264, 291; spacetime metaphors of, 141–143, 163; and violence in hierarchy, 111–112, 116 Nature, natural: Australian male as regenerate of, 180–181; in Australian nationalism, 143, 170, 171, 177, 178; and egalitarian inequality, 174–176, 201 Neoliberalism, 367, 377–83 Niththyananthan, R., 221n1

Paine, R., 116 Palfreeman, A. C., 243n2 Parkin, David, 221n6 Parkin, F., 206 Passions: and fear and violence, 110, 111; ideology and, 83, 84, 115–116; and ontology, 46–47, 83, 84, 212; rationality of, 48; and sorcery, 106 Patronage: and embodiment in hierarchy, 110–111, 235n12 Pattini (Sinhalese deity): transformation of, 11; ritual of, 94, 232n3 Person: constituted in the state, 75–76, 78, 100–102, 110–112; embodiment of nation and, 187–189; ontology of, 83 Phussadeva: form of Vishnu, 64; and Dutugemunu, 64, 116 Ponnambalam, Satchi, 37 Power: and ethnic incorporation, 101, 103, 109–112; and hierarchy and class, 108–111; of individual in hierarchy, 70, 100; and kingship, 69–71; national difference and loss of, 191; of people in Anzac, 154–157; rational, 86 Premadasa, and Kandy throne, 325–7, 331 Primordial imaginary, 298 Pujavaliya, the, 81

Obeyesekere, Gananath: 11, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 81, 92, 94, 103, 108, 221n6, 232n3; on myth in historical reconstruction, 37, 43–47; on folk knowledge, 47, 93 Oddi Raja, Oddissa; 65, 89; myth of, 66–67, 229n27; transformation of, 67–69, 103–104, 107 O’Flaherty, Wendy D., 224n4

Rabinow, P., 4 Rajavaliya, the: writing of, 81, 231n33 Ranger, Terence, 209 Ricklefs, M. C., 206, 243n1 Ricoeur, Paul, 77, 221n6

400

Index

Rizvi, F., 244n7 Roberts, M., 108 Robinson, Marguerite, 95 Ross, J., 236n5 Russell, Bertrand, 116 Russell, Jane, 91

Suniyama exorcism: 54–55, 71; myth of, 65–66; ritual events Of, 72–75; ritual metaphors in political negotiation, 88; violence in, 76, 78–79 Suranimala: 60, 227n17

Sackett, L., 155 Sacrifice: 322; in Anzac, 135, 352; by Sihabahu, 224n3 Sahlins, Marshall, 34, 46, 113, 231n1 Salvation Army: in Anzac rite, 137 Seneviratne, H. L., 39 Shamgar-Handelman, Lea, 209 Sihabahu: 34, 55, 61, 224n3; myth of, 51–53; in nationalist discourse, 36 Silva de, K. M., 37 Siriweera, W. I., 34, 81 Smith, A., 95 Smith, Bardwell, 231n32 Sorcery: power and, 30, 109–112, 222n3; origin of, 66, 67; state and, 222n4 Sorcery shrines: clients of, 103; complaints at, 103; location of, 234n10; sacrifice of offerings at, 104 Southwold, M., 221n6 Sport, 174–175, 242n12 Stanner, W. E. H., 142 State: Australian autonomy of, 7, 154– 155, 167–170, 177–178; anti-state dynamic, 342–3; colonialism, 369–70; as constitutive of person, 75–76, 78–79, 100–102, 215–216; evil and, 22, 29–30, 68–69; hierarchical power of, 7, 100, 109, 112; kingship and, 13; Sinhalese Buddhist opposition to, 100–101; Sinhalese encompassment in, 7; modeled in exorcism, 54, 72–73, 75–76; violence of, 215–216 Stirrat, R. L., 222n5, 278 Summers, Anne, 243n18 Siniyam: 23, 30, 311, 67, 89; curse for, 31–32, 54; etymology of, 230n30; myths of, 65–69; personal prayer to, 104–105; transformational power of, 104–105, 107

Tambiah, S. J., 6, 8, 22, 213, 220n4, 222n2 Tamil policy, 304–5 Tan, G., 206 Taussig, M., 234n11 Thompson, E. P., 219 Thread: ritual and sacred, 55; symbolism of, 56, 225n9, 226n11 Thupavamsa, the, 228n19 Tönnies, F., 219 Toqueville, de, A., 219 Trevor-Roper, H., 211 Turner, I., 244n5 Turner, V. W., 162–164, 221n5, 225n8 Twinship: in chronicles, 224n4 Two-up, 129, 16l, 237n9 Unknown Soldier, 328–31; egalitarianism and, 352–6 Valeri, V., 228n22 Vasavarti Maraya: 221n6; evil desire of, 66; and Mara, 67; representation in exorcism, 75 Velusumana, 231n34 Violence: of Buddhist monks, 33, 86–87, 232n2; class, 93; ethnic rioting and, 29, 32–34, 101–102, 190, 221–222n1, 222n2, 222n5; and folk psychology, 93; in ideology, 99–100; national difference and, 190–191; and person, 100–103; at sorcery shrines, 31–32, 105, 106; state-nation opposition cause of, 186; as symbolic of power, 62, 69–71; as transformation 76, 78–79, 86 Viharadevi (Viharamahadevi): virtuous action of, 58; pregnancy longings of, 59

Index

Vijaya: 49, 61, 62, 67, 122, 216; evil of, 54, 68; myth of, 34, 50–51, 53–57; nationalist discourse and, 35–37, 40, 85, 90, 211, 213 Vishnu: 55, 66, 67; guardian of Buddhism, 39; Dutugemunu’s champions as manifestations of, 60, 227–228n18 War: and individual or national essence, 187, 190

Ward, R., 240n6 Warner, Lloyd, 242n13 Weber, Max: and concept of closure, 16–17 White Australia, 183–184, 193, 199, 201, 206, 243n2, 371 Wilton, Janis, 206, 243n2 Wirz, P., 229n25, 26, 230n31 Wright, P., 19 Yalman, N., 10

401