Abstract—At the end of the three decade old (ethnic) war, Sri
Lankans are slowly but progressively moving towards
reconciliation and, perhaps, to finding political solutions to
many issues. This progress raises the question of how people
from different ethnic and religious backgrounds collaborate
when the political and social environment is still vulnerable to
tensions and clashes. In order to explore this situation further, I
carried out seventeen months of phenomenological research in
Sri Lanka, observing many examples of inter-ethnic
collaborations. In this article, I describe such everyday
collaborations through which I call “commongrounds”, a
concept I employ to illustrate the ways and means in which the
multi-ethnic middle-class community create harmonious social
space for everyone to share in ethno-politically volatile Sri
Lankan society. I will draw upon insights from Barth, Harrison,
Bourdieu and Neofotistos to discuss my research findings on
how members of Sri Lanka’s middle-class community create
everyday relationships based upon their own classifications of
“good” and “bad”, which cross rigid ethnic boundaries.
Index Terms—Ethnicity, nationalism, commongrounds,
middle-class, ethnic conflict, Sri Lanka.
Anton Piyarathne is with the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie
University, NSW 2109, Australia and Department of Social Studies, The
Open University of Sri Lanka, Nawala, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka (e-mail:
anton.piyarathne@mq.edu.au, antonpiyarathne@gmail.com,
apiya@ou.ac.lk).
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Cite: Anton Piyarathne, " Construction of Social Lives in Ethno-Politically Ruptured
Sri Lanka," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 443-450, 2014.