Moral economy reconfigured: philanthropic engagement in post-tsunami Sri Lanka

Abstract

This article focuses on the ‘gift of aid’ and its impact upon the local moral economy in a Sri Lankan village affected by the tsunami disaster in 2004. The importance of giving, receiving, and reciprocating for the shaping and consolidation of social relations has long been recognized. The act of giving reflects one of the most basic principles of morality and has constituted a classical anthropological field of inquiry. The impact that humanitarian aid had on the local moral economy of a community struck by disaster and the various ways the ‘gift of aid’ was understood and valued by donors, brokers, and recipients is explored. Also examined is how processes of change were set in motion, benefiting some people and relationships but marginalizing others. Local lifeworlds were shattered in multiple ways and became caught in tensions between competing moral discourses concerning modernity, the collective, and the global. Promoting material recovery disaster aid also generated disorder and fragmentation of local social and moral configurations.

Keywords:

• anthropology
• disaster aid
• morality
• reciprocity
• social organization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Carolina Holgersson Ivarsson completed her Ph.D. in social anthropology at School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg in Sweden with the dissertation, The Give and Take of Disaster Aid: Social and Moral Transformation in the Wake of the Tsunami in Sri Lanka (2013). The thesis focuses on post-disaster recovery and how disaster aid influenced local, social, and moral configurations. She currently holds a postdoctoral position at Gothenburg University and works on a research project studying contemporary political transitions and religious dynamics in Sri Lanka and Burma.

Notes

1. The article builds upon the authors' doctoral dissertation from 2013, The Give and Take of Disaster Aid: Social and Moral Transformation in the Wake of the Tsunami in Sri Lanka.

2. The article is based on two months of ethnographic data collection in 2005 and 10 months in 2008. Tharugama is a pseudonym. Likewise the names of all persons have been changed. Sinhalese Buddhists dominate the village (and the area) and Sinhala is the spoken language.

3. A 100-metre buffer zone was established in the South, which is popular for tourism and densely populated with a Sinhalese majority. The Tamil- and Muslim-dominated East was the area most heavily affected by the tsunami and there a 200-metre buffer zone was declared. A 400-metre limit was announced by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for Northeast areas under their control. The high density of population and the shortage of land coupled with the restrictions made reconstruction highly contentious (Hyndman 2007, 364–365). The initial buffer zone policy in Sri Lanka was maintained for almost a year before exemptions were issued.

4. Demand for skilled workers often exceeded the available supply, and prices of construction material escalated. International organizations offered more attractive salaries and thus drained some local organizations of skilled staff. The competition between aid agencies was primarily about spending their resources and about finding people and projects to allocate them to (see e.g. Khasalamwa 2009; Silva 2009; Stirrat 2006).

5. For details on the theory of dukkha, see Rahula, What the Buddha Taught ([1959] 1996, 29).

6. Personal communication with Sri Lankan writer Hasini Haputhantri, April 17, 2013 (see also Gombrich 1996).