Sri Lanka’s Simmering Eastern CrucibleCrucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka. By Dennis B. McGilvray. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Abstract

Sri Lanka has garnered international headlines over the past 25 years for its protracted ethnic conflict and more recently for the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and its devastating aftermath. However, long before these phenomena punctuated social memories, Dennis McGilvray had been engaged in research in the Batticaloa region in eastern Sri Lanka. Crucible of Conflict is a sprawling ethnography that attends to Sri Lanka’s “remarkable sociological complexity.” While too numerous to encapsulate in this review, the details are carefully chosen and are dedicated to providing a historical backdrop of the region’s major social structures and relations that is especially relevant to scholars of Sri Lanka and of South Asia in general. Recognizing that history is a “highly charged field of political rhetoric” (p. 56) and that the deep past can be utilized as a political resource to legitimize social hierarchy, McGilvray nevertheless advocates that some baseline historical inferences can be made from available sources. To him, this is particularly important when studying eastern Sri Lanka because there is a “scholarly vacuum” (p. 56). In Crucible of Conflict, he endeavors to expand the body of research and develop a reliable historiographic foundation while also stimulating further research and debate. McGilvray weaves together old colonial records, diaries, Tamil texts, legends, and myth to advance his thesis regarding the social structures that permeate the matrilineal belt of eastern Sri Lanka. He asserts that the Mukkuvars, a maritime Hindu caste tracing its origins to the matrilineal Malabar Coast of Kerala, India, became politically and economically dominant in the eastern Batticaloa region in the wake of the thirteenth-century invasion of Sri Lanka by Kalinga Magha and in turn molded the social structures of the other Tamil castes to conform to their model of matrilineal descent and political office. From 1969 on, McGilvray has situated himself in Akkaraipattu, a multiethnic agricultural settlement in the Batticaloa region and an ideal setting in which to study village-level