Safe Enactments of Difference: An Ethnographic Study of Cricket and Social Change in Post-War Sri Lanka

Abstract

In the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983-2009), claims have been made that cricket can help with ongoing processes of reconciliation. In this thesis, I critically assess these claims through an ethnographic study of Sri Lankan cricket, detailing the potential and limits of the social relations that sport can produce. In doing so, I explore whether and how sport can indeed play a reconciliatory role in post-conflict states. Predominantly based in Colombo, my ethnographic research covers a diverse cross-section of the Sri Lankan ‘cricket community’, homing in on one amateur cricket club. By considering a wide range of cricketing activity, including playing, spectating, coaching, and development, I convey how my interlocutors come to understand themselves and others through cricket. I show how people deploy and negotiate social ideals derived from cricket, mapping out the various tensions that emerge when individual and collective interests come into conflict. I argue that in managing these tensions, my interlocutors learn also to manage differences between persons. As such, I argue that cricket involves engagement in ‘safe enactments of difference’. I suggest this is evidence that cricket has some merit as a tool for social good. However, I also contend that cricket promotes personal responsibility to the wider whole, placing excessive emphasis on individual change. Through cricket people are taught control, learning how to manage their circumstances. So, while cricket helps individuals make change in their own lives, it rarely leads them to question the social system they exist within. As such, I conclude that cricket seems unlikely to effect social change at a systemic, structural level, and the prospect of using cricket for reconciliation is limited. In this ethnographic study I therefore reflect on the wider issues around attempting to use sports in the hope of enacting positive social change.