Tamilnet.com: Some Reflections on Popular Anthropology, Nationalism, and the Internet.
In this essay I argue that Tamilnet.com, an Internet news agency put together by a group of Sri Lankan Tamils to address the Tamil diaspora and influence English-speaking elites, subverted international news coverage during Sri Lanka's civil war by making “ironic” use of the discursive styles of jou...
| Published in: | Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 77; no. 3; pp. 469 - 499 |
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| Format: | Article |
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George Washington Institute for Ethnographic Research
Summer 2004
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=510374111&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 510374111 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00035491 ANQ jtl: Anthropological Quarterly issn: 00035491 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Summer 2004 vid: 77 iid: 3 pid: 12361 pub: George Washington Institute for Ethnographic Research artinfo: ui: 510374111 10.1353/anq.2004.0034 ppf: 469 ppct: 30 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 1.5MB tig: atl: Tamilnet.com: Some Reflections on Popular Anthropology, Nationalism, and the Internet. aug: au: Whitaker, Mark P. su: Sri Lanka Civil War, 1983-2009 Internet & politics Anthropology -- Computer network resources sug: subj: Sri Lanka Civil War, 1983-2009 Internet & politics Anthropology -- Computer network resources keyword: Tamils -- Sri Lanka -- Ethnic identity ab: In this essay I argue that Tamilnet.com, an Internet news agency put together by a group of Sri Lankan Tamils to address the Tamil diaspora and influence English-speaking elites, subverted international news coverage during Sri Lanka's civil war by making “ironic” use of the discursive styles of journalism and anthropology. I also claim that this constituted a particular form of autoethnographic popular anthropology that challenged professional anthropology, and in some ways sought to replace it. In the first two sections of this essay, I dismantle the concept of “the popular” by showing that when anthropologists and social theorists use the term they are often referring to connected but distinct aspects of popularity which should be distinguished: Baudrillardian market popularity on the one hand, and Habermasian identity-resistance popularity on the other. I then show how the Internet, given its technology and software, is best seen as market popular in form but identity-resistance popular in content. In the remaining four sections I illustrate, ethnographically, how the creators of Tamilnet.com, while deeply embedded in civil war and a world-wide diaspora, recognized this aspect of the Internet and used it—again, “ironically”—to construct a site that advances their own nationalist interests. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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