In the Wake of the Gulf War: Assessing Family Spending of Compensation Money in Sri Lanka

Between 1997 and 2000, the United Nations Compensation Commission delivered US$ 4000 apiece to roughly 87,000 Sri Lankan citizens who suffered displacement and loss of employment due to Iraq’s military actions in Kuwait during the Gulf War. Using qualitative ethnographic data, this essay examines eleven case studies of Kuwait returnees in the village of Naeaegama, in southern Sri Lanka. Like the majority of Sri Lankans caught in the Gulf War, these returnees are women from poor rural families who worked as domestic servants in Kuwait. The essay compares how the eleven households have spent compensation money and migrants’ remittances. Spending choices reveal a clear hierarchy of priorities: buying land and building a house, providing a dowry for unmarried women, and starting a viable business. These goals reflect family-based considerations, and use of the money illustrates the family’s role as an economic as well as a social unit. The essay also explores the role of family in facilitating migration and depressing women’s wages on the global market. Data reveal the local values, motives, and cultural contexts that shape individual and family decision-making on matters of finance and migration. Family choices are products of and adaptations to globalized contexts

Markoff Triples and Strong Approximation

We investigate the transitivity properties of the group of morphisms generated by Vieta involutions on the solutions in congruences to the Markoff equation as well as to other Markoff type affine cubic surfaces. These are dictated by the finite $\bar{\mathbb Q}$ orbits of these actions and these can be determined effectively. The results are applied to give forms of strong approximation for integer points, and to sieving, on these surface

Sri Lanka’s Post-Tsunami Recovery: Cultural Traditions, Social Structures and Power Struggles

The Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004 killed over 220,000 people and affected two million more in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and other Indian Ocean nations. As the world reels under the impact of more recent disasters in Haiti, Peru and Pakistan, we consider lessons learned about postdisaster relief and recovery from the aftermath of the tsunami in Sri Lanka. The tsunami waves caused by an undersea subduction earthquake off the coast of Sumatra devastated 70% of Sri Lanka’s coastline and killed 35,000 people. Days after the disaster, Dennis McGilvray joined forces with Michele Gamburd to organize an interdisciplinary team funded by NSF’s Human and Social Dynamics program to conduct research on the aftermath of the tsunami. The team included a political scientist, a demographer, and three cultural anthropologists; two disaster studies specialists later joined the group. All team members had prior experience working in Sri Lanka and South Asia, and collaborated on a project implemented in 2005-06 to compare the importance of cultural, regional and political factors in post-disaster governmental and NGO efforts. Results of the research appear in the volume Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions, edited by McGilvray and Gamburd (2010). Here we discuss what anthropology—in collaboration with related disciplines—has to offer discussions of post-disaster development and diplomacy

Expansion in perfect groups

Let Ga be a subgroup of GL_d(Q) generated by a finite symmetric set S. For an integer q, denote by Ga_q the subgroup of Ga consisting of the elements that project to the unit element mod q. We prove that the Cayley graphs of Ga/Ga_q with respect to the generating set S form a family of expanders when q ranges over square-free integers with large prime divisors if and only if the connected component of the Zariski-closure of Ga is perfect.Comment: 62 pages, no figures, revision based on referee's comments: new ideas are explained in more details in the introduction, typos corrected, results and proofs unchange

Book Review of, Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

Book Review: Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collective

Book Review of, Women in Post-Independence Sri Lanka

Reviews the book Women in Post-Independence Sri Lanka, by Swarna Jayaweer

On the averages of characteristic polynomials from classical groups

We provide an elementary and self-contained derivation of formulae for products and ratios of characteristic polynomials from classical groups using classical results due to Weyl and Littlewood

Money That Burns Like Oil: A Sri Lankan Cultural Logic of Morality and Agency

New labor opportunities have drawn Sri Lankan women to work as domestic servants in the Middle East. Many migrants complain that their remittances burn like oil, disappearing without a trace. The gendered discourse on burning remittances both draws on and contradicts an older cultural system that fetishizes money. The emerging logic provides symbolic resources for women to spend their remittances on advancements for the nuclear family, distancing themselves from other kin. (Migration, remittances, fetishism, Sri Lanka, Middle East