Mobility in marginalized spaces: Manoeuvring for survival among the Veddas in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In Sri Lanka the indigenous population, the Veddas, are rapidly losing their traditional habitats due to cash cropping and infrastructure development, and they are being forced to find new means of living. The purpose of the article is to show how mobility is an inherent characteristic of the new economy in the country and that mobility is gendered. The author documents how one group of Veddas has become immobilized (Dambane study village, which has turned into a tourist site) while another group has been forced to be more mobile (Henanigale study village, where emigration is increasingly practised) due to the same development policies. The study reveals that the market-led economy has caused spatial fixations that limit people more than they liberate them. These fixations take place in the domestic sphere as well as in the villages and they change gender relations, showing that mobility is intertwined with social processes that change local structures and relationships. In the case of the Veddas, living in marginalized places conditions their motility. Mobility is therefore a selective process and as much about the fact of moving as it is entangled with meaning and the power to produce (im)mobility at different scales.

Keywords:

• indigenous people
• mobility and immobility
• Sri Lanka

Acknowledgements

My great appreciation goes to the Vedda Chief and people in Dambane and Henanigale, Sri Lanka, for welcoming us into their communities and allowing me to conduct my research. Thanks are also due to Aloka Ekanayake and Radmil Popovic for preparing Figure 1, and to Catriona Turner for copy-editing the manuscript.

Notes

1 Names and identities of places and individuals are not anonymized in this article. Informed consent is given.

2 In the 1970s Sri Lanka embarked upon the Mahaweli Development Project, a process of industrialization and modernization of agriculture that involved the irrigation of 1659 km² of land, resettlement of 140,000 families to new towns and villages, the provision of power, infrastructure and services (schools, hospitals, and markets) to serve these areas, and three national parks. The project was implemented mainly between 1978 and 1983 (a five-year programme named the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Programme), and resulted in substantial social and economic changes in the country as well as reterritorialization of land.

3 I have not related the Vedda story to that of other marginalized groups in Sri Lanka because the marginalization processes are so diverse and impossible to compare due to being related to caste, rurality, ethnicity, or the Veddas being refugees or displaced.

4 All quotes in this article have been translated from the Vedda language to Singhalese and then into English by Chamila Attanapola.