‘This coconut was the one that finally worked’: cursing for peace and justice in Sri Lanka

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses how Sandya Ekneligoda re-purposes cultural and religious cursing rituals to challenge disappearances, impunity, and illiberal peacebuilding in post-war Sri Lanka. Drawing on several cosmologies (principally Buddhist and Hindu), she invokes archetypal female deities/demons for healing and revenge. She uses performances of ritual cursing not only to keep her husband’s disappearance in the public eye and to critique domestic justice processes, but also to connect with other families of the disappeared across Sri Lanka’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic divides. In January 2022, she performed a cursing ritual against the ruling Rajapaksa clan, which ended with smashing a coconut. Six months later, a popular uprising had ejected the Rajapaksas from power. The article makes an original empirical contribution to the peacebuilding and transitional justice literature, which highlights the need to pay greater attention to (female) cosmological power, negative emotions, and non-liberal forms of resistance to illiberal peacebuilding.