Cultural engineering

A picture I found on Google by
searching 'sri lankan folk rituals.'
Interesting side note: in the first
ten pictures listed in my search,
one of them was of ISLE

The other day, as I sat bored out of my mind and hot out of my clothes (Why isn't that an expression? It should be.) in a lecture about folk rituals of Sri Lanka, I began to wonder why people travel. The professor was talking about how every year he would get "locals" to come and perform folk rituals for the ISLE students. The rituals, in such a context, wouldn't mean anything. They would be performed purely for consumption by American students, who traveled to Sri Lanka for, presumably, exactly that. I wondered if that's why I came to Sri Lanka: to be a consumer of culture, to take and take and take, and give nothing; to watch, to "experience," and then leave.

Even if I can't quite articulate why I actually am here, I do know that the longer I'm here, the more I feel like I've been injected into this pristine cultural bubble. We take our classes with "Sri Lankan" professors--who teach in English, and have almost all been to and/or taught in the US at one point. We are given lectures on the ethnic conflict; on a post-ethnic state; on Buddhism; on the U.N. and human rights violations; and on art by upper-class, elite, rich, old--did I mention upper-class?--Sri Lankan men who are there to tell us what Sri Lanka is. They are also usually fairly prestigious, if not downright famous, Sri Lankans. Our Sinhala professor, whom we call "Amare," is an accomplished author of fiction and has received the Sri Lankan equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. My attamma was scandalized when she heard me call him Amare. "You mean Professor Amarekeerthi, right?" Our Colonial History class is taught by Kingsley de Silva, perhaps the preeminent Sri Lankan historian. Our material culture class was taught by Sudharshan Seneviratne, who would casually mention, as we blithely inspected some ancient ruins, that he lead the site excavation back in the 90s. We would repeat this whole scene at almost every site during our Northern Tour. During a visit to the house of yet another U-P.E.R.O.S.L.M, we listened to about six different authors do some readings from un/published books. My host mother was shocked when she found out that I didn't get a signed book from one of them, and I can't even remember his name.

We don't take classes with local students. In fact, by the time we began taking our regular classes [1], all of the university students had gone on break. Not like it would have mattered anyway, because it's not like we have any opportunities to interact with them anyway. All of our classes happen either in the specially designated "ISLE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE ROOM" or in the only room in the entire Arts Faculty [2] building with A/C. Cultural immersion, amirite?

Traditional Kandyan dancers,
epitomizing true Kandyan culture.

Supposedly, our classes are "open to all university students!" As if any one of them would, of their own volition, come and sit in a classroom full of rowdy American students who speak too quickly and have funny accents. And during their fall break no less. It's a joke, really, and it gets funnier. After we have class at the university, we pile into our van (with our driver who waits for us while we're in class) to go back to the ISLE Center [3] for our "traditional Kandyan dance" class, where we're taught by the prominent Master Surasena. On a trip to his house for an extra dance class, we were trying to extract directions from our half-crazy, half-deaf and fully awesome driver, Sumanasena. When we asked him where to go after getting off the bus, he told us to just ask anyone where Master Surasena's house was and they would show us. I'm sorry, did I mention we were surrounded by elite, upper-class men? Just to complete the bubble, the dance performance will be done inside the ISLE Center, and the people in attendance are our host families, there to humor our "cultural activities" one last time.

The stifling auditorium at Kingswood for the
inter-high school debate

I've been in Sri Lanka for a full two months now. I have only just begun to forge real relationships with people here. I quit the Kandyan dance class and occasionally ditch my lectures because I've actually found some interesting things to do with my time. During the aforementioned house visit, I talked to one of the younger authors in attendance. After happening to meet again at the university, he asked me to sit on a panel for an inter-school high school debate. The room was stifling, the chairs were hard, awkward social encounters abounded, and I was sweating in that profuse way that only Americans seem to, but I loved every minute of actually doing something that hadn't been specifically engineered for me. But if that's what I really wanted out of my visit to Sri Lanka, then remind me again why I'm paying Whittier College $25k to be here?


[NOTES]

[1] My time in the ISLE Program is broken up into three sessions. Session I consisted of: 1 week of intensive Sinhala class; 1 week of intensive Sinhala class plus the lecture portion of my Material Culture class; 1 week of a Northern Tour visiting all the ancient city sites of Sri Lanka; and 1 last week of Sinhala class and writing our final paper for our Material Culture class. Session II, which is beginning to come to a close, is the most similar to a normal class schedule. We're taking two "electives" (I'm taking Colonial History of Sri Lanka and Images of the Feminine and the Social Experiences of Women) in addition to Sinhala II. We also have the opportunity to take a Kandyan dance/drumming class (which I'm not) and a Batik class (which I am, sort of). Session III is our independent study, where we choose a project, go out in "the field" and then come back and write a paper. [BACK]

[2] Departments are called Faculties here. They have a Medical Faculty, Science Faculty, Arts Faculty, Agriculture Faculty, etc. The ISLE Program is a part of the Arts Faculty on campus. Interestingly, each faculty has pecking order; Arts is at the bottom, while Medical is at the top. There is a student led protest on campus telling the Administrators to "Set Up the Faculty of Management" because apparently the students entering as Management had been promised their own Faculty and building. Unfortunately for them, they got put into the Arts Faculty instead. [BACK]

[3] The ISLE Center is located in a residential area not far from the university. The Center is, in fact, the old house of a presidential candidate, Gamini Dessanayake, who was assassinated in 1994 by a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). From my casual walks around the neighborhood, it is far and away one of, if not the richest and grandest houses in the area. [BACK]