Daniel, the acting Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University this year, has spent years collecting material about people affected by the conflict who are now in Sri Lanka, India and the West. He is originally from Sri Lanka the son of an Up-country Tamil family. An earlier book of his is titled "Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way". "Charred Lullabies" is a collection of articles on disparate subjects only loosely held together around the common subject of violence. The book is dedicated to Rajini Rajasingam Thiranagama, a lecturer at the Jaffna University, who died at the hands of an unknown assassin during the Indian occupation of the Tamil homelands.

Most accessible is a chapter titled 'Suffering Nation and Alienation' , which is about differing perceptions of the nation-state and nationality amongst the several waves of Tamil immigrants to England. Another chapter, 'Violent Measures, Measured Violence', is about how Estate Tamils' imprecise views of all measurement interact with the rigid rules of a market-based, Victorian British operation in a situation of heavy oppression.

The technique you need to use in reading the book is to skim the anthropological verbiage to extract what you can and to see how the very vivid examples he gives fit together.

(from pg. 210) "'In this darkness and this silence' [of the horrors of the war] there is neither ontology nor epistemology, hermeneutics nor semeiotic, materialism nor idealism, and most important, neither culture nor Culture. Herein lies (C/c)ulture's counterpoint, a slippery word in its own right. The counterpoint of which Wertheim wrote almost twenty years ago was a counterpoint of hope and human emancipation. He described it as a 'tiny and apparently futile beginning' that had the capacity to 'evolve into a powerful stream leading humanity, or part of it, toward evolution and, in extreme cases, revolution'. The counterpoint of which I have written today is one that resists all evolutionary streams, be they of action or thought. It will and should remain outside of all (C/c)ulture, if for no other reason than to remind us that (a) as scholars, intellectuals and interpreters we need to be humble in the face of its magnitude; and (b) as human beings (italicized) we need to summon all the vigilance at our command so as never to stray toward it and be swallowed by its vortex into its unaccountable abyss. The first is a sobering point that concerns observation, the second a cautionary one that concerns participation: twin terms that, hyphenated, constitute the sine qua non of the anthropological method. It is time for cultural anthropology to lose both its Hegelian conceit and its Malinowskian innocence."