Knowing Otherwise: Vulnerability, Mourning, and Tamil Religious Practice in Post-Conflict Sri Lanka

Abstract (English)

The researcher's inner pain, emotional upheaval, or spiritual experiences—through which they might come to ‘know’ both the other and themselves—have long been marginalized in anthropological inquiry as subjective and methodologically unsound. For instance, Rosaldo’s (1993) paper “Grief and Headhunter’s Rage” faced harsh criticism, with some arguing that understanding others through the researcher’s embodied and emotional experiences risks falling into sentimental "universal humanist thinking" (Behar 1996: 169). By disregarding affective and introspective modes of knowing, conventional approaches often overlook the relational, intersubjective, and transformative dimensions of ethnographic encounters, thus limiting the potential for a deeper understanding of interlocutors and our true selves—an understanding that might emerge, along with personal realization, through physical, emotional, and spiritual engagement with the other.

It can be argued that our vulnerability—our openness to others’ pain and suffering in ethnographic moments and spaces—enables us to recognize who we are or who I am when we find ourselves emotionally and spiritually affected/shaken by an interlocutor “who is not wholly other, who could be me” (Das 2015:108). This paper first examines how a researcher’s vulnerability to their interlocutor shapes both their ethnographic understanding of the other and their own introspective awareness. Focusing on mourning practices within Sri Lankan Tamil religious traditions in the post-conflict context, it explores how ethnographic moments and spaces can create alternative pathways for understanding both the religious life of the other and who we are and who we may become. Such vulnerability to the other fosters deeper ethnographic insight while cultivating self-awareness, encouraging researchers to engage more attentively with their own inner selves. This process reveals the transformative potential of ethnographic engagement, wherein vulnerability and resonance serve as pathways to alternative ways of knowing.

Moreover, this paper examines how, within the relationship between the Hindu goddess and the Tamil villagers, her compassionate and empathetic gaze, imbued with vulnerability, played a healing role in the grief of the bereaved. The villagers frequently visited the local temple, seeking her benevolent gaze—one that acknowledged their pain and the suffering of loss. Carrying losses deemed unworthy of recognition under the gaze of the Sri Lankan state—their wounds rendered invisible and unheard within the Sinhalese majority’s (ethno-) national narratives—, they turned to the goddess in desperation. Longing for ‘witness’ of violence and her divine oracles, they sought traces of their loved ones’ fate, hoping to learn whether they were still alive. Through deep emotional resonance, the villagers came to recognize their grief as worthy of care, allowing them to express their suffering and sorrow and share it within the community. This case study highlights the transformative power of the goddess’s openness and empathetic acknowledgment, which enables the bereaved to embrace their healing journey.