The First Lagoon The Lagoon at Uppuveli
With MetroMedia funding we were finally able to spend a month in Sri Lanka in 1979. We found lodging in Colombo, walked the streets, talked to many people, and listened to many stories. After our first week there, Upali Senanayake, Ranil’s father, took us under his wing. Upali was known as the Mahatma Gandhi of Sri Lanka. He took us to many villages and explained the tank and irrigation system which was 2 000 years old and still worked well. He had spent his adult years trying to preserve village life, holding that a step back to the past was really a step forward into the future. He was much loved, but younger people (particularly in the government) felt him impossibly old fashioned.
We were sitting at a bountiful breakfast one day at his home. Around the table were people from Madame Bandaranayake’s government. The Minister of Environment was talking about the Victoria Dam on the Mahaweli River and the whole list of good things that would come from it, including electricity. We asked if Sri Lanka, which had only about 15,000 000 people on the whole island, was really short of electricity, since we certainly hadn’t noticed it as a problem! He said that they did have enough electricity for Sri Lanka to survive in the modern world they needed to modernize, maybe even constructing a nuclear power plant. We, fresh from our studies of modernization and its destructive properties (particularly along the Colorado River), spoke about the harms of creating dams, wrecking the ecology of river systems, covering Tamil villages with water, and disrupting many lives. He said it was the cost of modernization, politely inferring that we were Luddites.
We were struck by how powerfully the sense of superiority of one group over another had embedded itself in the majority; they talked about the Tamils as second-class citizens. A newspaper reporter interviewed us the next day, asking our opinion of the proposed dam, among other things. We said they shouldn’t believe the words of the foreign experts who told them they would help the Sinhalese people modify themselves to become modern. The headline in the following day’s paper read “Foreign Experts Say ‘Don’t Believe Foreign Experts’”!
We traveled the country, meeting and talking with many. One of our journeys took us to the lagoon at Upouveli, where our crabs had come from. We met the fisherman. He wanted to know why we were interested in crabs mating, thinking us somewhat peculiar, until we explained that it was for scientific reasons.
Since we had mentioned in our first text that the Lagoon Cycle was a ten-year moment, it did not seem strange to us that Sea Grant and the Second and Third Lagoons happened five years before we visited the original lagoon. And it also did not seem strange to us that we had begun a story in the middle … and toward the end, we were creating the beginning.
We continued our wanderings through Sri Lanka with a guide, who was a dancer and friend of Ranil’s. Cedric took us to Kandy where we stayed in the Queen’s Hotel and were treated a little like the British Raj (although our accents were wrong). One rainy night, Cedric took me (Newton) to the Temple of the Tooth, which I misheard as the Temple of the Truth! This misunderstanding led to a very funny story in the First Lagoon which I refer to as “The Tooth and the Truth.” We wrote our stories in short form in the First Lagoon, giving voice to many people. The First Lagoon leaned heavily on our sociologist friend Aaron Cicourel’s approach to ethnomethodology. However, we also included, in some detail, the conversion story of Upali which was complex, being poetic, political, and spiritual. (Anthropologists later told us that the First Lagoon gave the best picture of Sri Lanka months before the civil war broke out, simply by speaking stories told to us by folk of a country only moments before war. We had come to believe that the Mahaweli Dam was one of the precipitators of the war in Sri Lanka.)
One day, after our return from Sri Lanka, Ranil visited us from Davis, where he was getting the very first PhD ever awarded in ecology. It was finally being acknowledged as a discipline, even though there was no overarching theory (which is how most disciplines knew that they were disciplines). We asked Ranil why he did not go back to Sri Lanka; did he not have responsibilities, given his family history? He said they might try to make him a minister, and he was not a good administrator—and, more importantly, he didn’t want to become the victim of the “rubber tire.” “What’s that?” we asked. He described how a person was tied up and immobilized, then put in the center of a gasolinefilled rubber tire lying on the ground. Then the gasoline was lit.
We were sitting at a bountiful breakfast one day at his home. Around the table were people from Madame Bandaranayake’s government. The Minister of Environment was talking about the Victoria Dam on the Mahaweli River and the whole list of good things that would come from it, including electricity. We asked if Sri Lanka, which had only about 15,000 000 people on the whole island, was really short of electricity, since we certainly hadn’t noticed it as a problem! He said that they did have enough electricity for Sri Lanka to survive in the modern world they needed to modernize, maybe even constructing a nuclear power plant. We, fresh from our studies of modernization and its destructive properties (particularly along the Colorado River), spoke about the harms of creating dams, wrecking the ecology of river systems, covering Tamil villages with water, and disrupting many lives. He said it was the cost of modernization, politely inferring that we were Luddites.
We were struck by how powerfully the sense of superiority of one group over another had embedded itself in the majority; they talked about the Tamils as second-class citizens. A newspaper reporter interviewed us the next day, asking our opinion of the proposed dam, among other things. We said they shouldn’t believe the words of the foreign experts who told them they would help the Sinhalese people modify themselves to become modern. The headline in the following day’s paper read “Foreign Experts Say ‘Don’t Believe Foreign Experts’”!
We traveled the country, meeting and talking with many. One of our journeys took us to the lagoon at Upouveli, where our crabs had come from. We met the fisherman. He wanted to know why we were interested in crabs mating, thinking us somewhat peculiar, until we explained that it was for scientific reasons.
Since we had mentioned in our first text that the Lagoon Cycle was a ten-year moment, it did not seem strange to us that Sea Grant and the Second and Third Lagoons happened five years before we visited the original lagoon. And it also did not seem strange to us that we had begun a story in the middle … and toward the end, we were creating the beginning.
We continued our wanderings through Sri Lanka with a guide, who was a dancer and friend of Ranil’s. Cedric took us to Kandy where we stayed in the Queen’s Hotel and were treated a little like the British Raj (although our accents were wrong). One rainy night, Cedric took me (Newton) to the Temple of the Tooth, which I misheard as the Temple of the Truth! This misunderstanding led to a very funny story in the First Lagoon which I refer to as “The Tooth and the Truth.” We wrote our stories in short form in the First Lagoon, giving voice to many people. The First Lagoon leaned heavily on our sociologist friend Aaron Cicourel’s approach to ethnomethodology. However, we also included, in some detail, the conversion story of Upali which was complex, being poetic, political, and spiritual. (Anthropologists later told us that the First Lagoon gave the best picture of Sri Lanka months before the civil war broke out, simply by speaking stories told to us by folk of a country only moments before war. We had come to believe that the Mahaweli Dam was one of the precipitators of the war in Sri Lanka.)
One day, after our return from Sri Lanka, Ranil visited us from Davis, where he was getting the very first PhD ever awarded in ecology. It was finally being acknowledged as a discipline, even though there was no overarching theory (which is how most disciplines knew that they were disciplines). We asked Ranil why he did not go back to Sri Lanka; did he not have responsibilities, given his family history? He said they might try to make him a minister, and he was not a good administrator—and, more importantly, he didn’t want to become the victim of the “rubber tire.” “What’s that?” we asked. He described how a person was tied up and immobilized, then put in the center of a gasolinefilled rubber tire lying on the ground. Then the gasoline was lit.
