THE COOLIE DANIEL, E. VALENTINE
Cultural anthropology,
05/2008, Volume:
23, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
ABSTRACT
“The Coolie” is a selection from a larger “epic poem” about Tamil labor on the plantations of Sri Lanka. It is written in three tercets of iambic hexametrical, 12‐syllabic lines in the terza ...rima structure, so as to preserve truths present in oral history and ethnography that would be made distant or secondary in prose. The influence of Derek Walcott is acknowledged with admiration. An analogue of this pairing of poetry and prose and prose in poetry is found in the way ancient Tamil grammar conceptualizes vowels and consonants, as goddess is to god; as power is to form; as oral history is to documented history. By narrating the ethnohistory of the Tamil coolie in this form of verse, the certainties of prose are neither absent nor neutralized but are given a supportive and constraining role. The narration concerns how 19th‐century colonialism transformed over 30‐million human beings into coolies, and the violence this plantation economy—one of colonial capitalism's most productive enterprises of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries—wreaked on the land.
How does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can he ...remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel "walked into the ashes and mortal residue" of the violence that had occurred in his homeland. His planned project--the study of women's folk songs as ethnohistory--was immediately displaced by the responsibility that he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior, what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author's term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence? In avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he avoid flattening it with theory? The ways in which Daniel grapples with these questions, and their answers, instill this groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and intellect.
The Coolie Daniel, E. Valentine
Cultural anthropology,
05/2008, Volume:
23, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
"The Coolie" is a selection from a larger "epic poem" about Tamil labor on the plantations of Sri Lanka. It is written in three tercets of iambic hexametrical, 12-syllabic lines in the terza rima ...structure, so as to preserve truths present in oral history and ethnography that would be made distant or secondary in prose. The influence of Derek Walcott is acknowledged with admiration. An analogue of this pairing of poetry and prose and prose in poetry is found in the way ancient Tamil grammar conceptualizes vowels and consonants, as goddess is to god; as power is to form; as oral history is to documented history. By narrating the ethnohistory of the Tamil coòlie in this form of verse, the certainties of prose are neither absent nor neutralized but are given a supportive and constraining role. The narration concerns how 19th-century colonialism transformed over 30-million human beings into coolies, and the violence this plantation economy--one of colonial capitalism's most productive enterprises of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries--wreaked on the land.
The role of the sociocultural in constituting fear & the political use of that derived fear is examined in the case of torture victims in Sri Lanka since 1983, using field research. The ontological ...feeling of aloneness (tanikam dosa) with its components of being alone, disequalibrated, & frightened at the same time is discussed & contrasted with that of santa danta, a calm & controlled aloneness in Sri Lankan culture. Tamil militant separatists have been trained to resort to the latter ascetic path when captured & put into solitary confinement, but members of the Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna (People's Liberation Front), a leftist extreme Sinhala nationalist party, seem to succumb to tanikam dosa & hyper-individuation under the same conditions. Interview transcripts with Sri Lankan torture victims illustrate the semeiosic effects of torture, how pain affects speech & metaphor usage, & how healing can proceed in this cultural milieu. 11 References. M. Pflum
To evaluate the prognostic value of surrogate markers (HIV RNA copy number, CD4 counts and CDC clinical and immunologic categories) in HIV-infected children through a 2-year period.
Eighty-six ...HIV-infected children followed by the Duke Pediatric HIV Clinic in the fall of 1994 were evaluated for plasma HIV RNA concentration (viral load), CD4 lymphocyte percentage, age, antiretroviral treatment status and CDC clinical and immunologic categories. Follow-up evaluations were performed for approximately 2 years, and the time to progression to a new CDC category C diagnosis or death was noted.
Of 86 children 22 had progression to new Category C diagnosis or death. Seven children died, 17 had a new Category C diagnosis and 2 had both. Among children who progressed, the median CD4 percentage at entry was 3% (absolute count, 75 cells/mm3), whereas children who had no disease progression entered with a median of 29% (868 cells/mm3). The overall median viral load at study entry was 4.58 log10 copies/ml (38,019 copies/ml, with a range of 1.7 to 6.78 logs). Children who had no disease progression had a median log copy number of 4.43, whereas 5.18 was the median for children whose disease progressed. Log copy number declined over time in children < 3 years of age, whereas it remained fairly consistent for children 3 years or older. Progression rates were determined by entry plasma HIV RNA concentration quartiles quartile boundaries < 4.18, 4.58, > 5.08 log RNA copy/ml (< 15,136, 38,019 and > 120,226 copies/ml, respectively). Progression rates by quartile were 0 of 21, 4 of 22, 5 of 21 and 13 of 22. Kaplan-Meier survival curves defined by CD4% less than or greater than 15 and log RNA less than or greater than 5.0 (100,000) revealed that patients with CD4% less than 15 and plasma HIV RNA concentration > 5 log10 copies/ml did least well: 11 of 12 (92%) had a progression event at a median of 179 days. Patients with a high CD4 percentage and high viral load, or a low CD4 percentage and low viral load did similarly; 5 of 14 (36%) and 4 of 12 (33%) had progression events, respectively. Patients with high CD4 percentage and low viral load did best: only 2 of 48 (4%) had a progression event.
The two most significant prognostic indicators of disease progression were the initial CD4 percentage and the plasma HIV RNA concentration, and a combination of CD4 percentage and virus load best predicted which children had progression events. Progression was less common in children who had < 100,000 HIV RNA copies/ml initially (6 of 60 vs. 16 of 26; P < 0.001; relative risk 0.16). Therefore it seems reasonable that in a child for whom complete suppression is not possible, a threshold of 100,000 (5 log10 copies/ml) can be used to mandate a change in therapy.
At the most manifest level, this paper is about agricultural and agronomic terminology as found in the discourse of Tamil-speaking workers on Sri Lanka's tea plantations or tea estates, as they are ...called there. My use of the terms agricultural and agronomic in this context is admittedly idiosyncratic. In the tea estates of Sri Lanka, two kinds of agricultural (in the unmarked sense) terminology are in use, one belonging to managerial agriculture and the other to folk agriculture. But by and large, the tea estate is the regime of managerial agriculture. Whereas in village India, folk agriculture prevails. I call the class of terms belonging to managerial agriculture, agronomic terminology, and reserve the term “agricultural terminology” for the domain of folk agriculture. By analyzing four communicative events that I observed and recorded on tea estates in Sri Lanka, I attempt to show how these two terminological worlds interact. The nature of that interaction is such that the dominant terminology of agronomy may be seen to be deconstructed by the subdominant terminology of village agriculture.
