HALE 129M
By Appointment
My ethnographic interests are in South Asia, with a research focus on the Tamils and Muslims of south India and Sri Lanka.ÌýMy book, Crucible of Conflict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka (Duke 2008), analyzes matrilineal Hindu and Muslim kinship, caste structure, religious ritual, and ethnic identities in the Tamil-speaking region of eastern Sri Lanka, an area that was deeply affected by the island’s civil war. I also co-edited a collection of essays resulting from a multidisciplinary NSF project entitled Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions (McGilvray and Gamburd, eds., Routledge 2010). The fieldwork that I am currently engaged in explores transnational Sufism and Muslim saints’ shrines, as well as matrilocal household patterns and dowry marriage among Tamils and Muslims (Moors) in Sri Lanka and South India.Ìý A published photographer (Symbolic Heat, Mapin 1998), I am also interested in visual anthropology and alternative modes of cultural representation. Before retiring from the classroom in 2014, I taught a lower division course on Tamil culture; upper division courses on Symbolic Anthropology, Foundations of Theory, and South Asian ethnography; and a graduate seminar on Ethnography and Cultural Theory.Ìý I am the recent past president of the .
Recent Publications:
2022. Sufis in Sri Lanka: a Fieldwork Story, in Mark P. Whitaker, et al., eds.,ÌýMulti-religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka: Innovation, Shared Spaces, Contestation. Routledge. 207-219.
2016: Rethinking Muslim Identity in Sri Lanka.Ìý In John C. Holt, ed. Buddhist Extremists and Muslim Minorities: Religious Conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka. Oxford University Press. 54-77.
2014: A Matrilineal Sufi Shaykh in Sri Lanka.Ìý South Asia History and Culture 5(2):246-261.