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Tea Talk: Violent Measures in the Discursive Practices of Sri Lanka's Estate Tamils

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

E. Valentine Daniel
E. Valentine Daniel
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan
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Extract

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.

Type
Labor Systems
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , July 1993 , pp. 568 - 600
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1993

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