13

The Lost Ur

E. VALENTINE DANIEL

Whenever the disappeared is not replaceable, and as long as it has no replacement, it is a loss. Loss is a singular type of disappearance of some irreplaceable thing.

Adi Ophir

In the Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted almost three decades, many things were lost on both sides of the ethnic divide. I shall restrict my remarks mostly to the Tamil-speaking citizens of the island, particularly to the Tamils of the North-Central and the North-Eastern Provinces, who were in the thick of the conflict and suffered the most by being displaced by the war. Many o f the displaced are, as of this writing, still in internment camps. The most painful loss—apart from life, limb and home—that a displaced Tamil refugee experiences is the loss of one’s ur (commonly glossed as ‘village’). What is an ur? Why and how does an ur come to be so fraught with significance to Tamils? What makes its loss a cause for so much complaint, grief, melancholy, and somatoform disorders?

In an English-Tamil bilingual lexicon, the word ‘village’ has two glosses: kiramam and ur. Of the two, kiramam may be defined minimally, and far less ambiguously than ur. I define kiramam as:

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A patch of peopled territory that has a recognized boundary and a name, bequeathed upon it, within recent memory, by the authority and approval of some extension of state power, and is inhabited by a people who culti­vate its land, and live in houses built within the limits of its boundary.

To be sure, many of the characteristic features indicated in this working definition also apply to ur, thereby making the two terms, prima fade, interchangeable. This is also why the lexicon treats these two terms as synonyms and therefore, mutually substitutable.

There are, however, three reasons why ur is different from kiramam. The first concerns the fact that the sign ‘kiramam’ is uni-referential and tends towards monosemy, whereas ‘ur’ is multi-referential and tends towards polysemy, standing for many more objects beyond the ‘village’.1 The second difference pertains to the notion o f ‘boundary’. The third is about the ‘proper name’ of an ur or kiramam and its relationship to the territory in question.

PROBLEM 1: THE UR A N D ITS VICISSITUDES

‘Ur’ has many referents of which only one approaches identity with the referent o f ‘kiramam,’ and by extension, that o f ‘village’. ‘Ur’ refers also to territorial units such as towns, cities, regions, and even countries. For this reason alone, ‘k iram am , by virtue of its tending towards univocity, serves as a far more fitting gloss o f the word2 ‘village,’ even if an imperfect one, than the polysemic, multi- referential ‘ur’.

Sirukudi is an ur in the Tiruchirapalli district of Tamil Nadu, South India. Let us assume that a denizen of Sirukudi is walking away from the centre of his ur or from his house, away from the village-centre, when a fellow-villager whom he meets along the road asks him, ‘are you off to the ur?’ In uttering the word ‘ur,’ the questioner himself may have in mind, either the neighboring town, a more distant city or, on a rare occasion, even a foreign country; or he may not have any kind of territorial unit in particular in mind, but any one o f them regardless of which kind it is. In his response, our villager could specify which ur or what kind o f ur he is going to.

Let us assume that our outward bound peripatetic villager has crossed the outer limits of Sirukudi and is aware of having done so, when a stranger asks him, ‘what is your ur’, or, ‘where do you come from’ (which amounts to the same because in this phrasing too, a Tamil speaker assumes that the tacit reference is to ‘ur’). Our villager’s

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answer will be Sirukudi. That he would answer the question by naming his ur is, granted, obvious. But in so doing, he also mentally orients himself towards the place that is most central to his world. As long as he is outside the threshold of Sirukudi but still within the limits of Tiruchirapalli District within which Sirukudi is located, his answer to the same question will remain the same. If the question is posed to our uran3 of Sirukudi, after he crosses the limits o f the district, but is still within the state of Tamil Nadu—which is the very next encompassing named territory—his answer is likely to be Tiruchirapalli, not Sirukudi, because Sirukudi is now nested within Tiruchirapalli, though his orientation remains the same. One may assume by the same logic, that if faced with this question after he crosses the limits o f Tamil Nadu, he would respond by naming the territory that encompasses all the other named territories outside of which he happens to be. This would, o f course, be Tamil Nadu. This would be true, as long as the question is not asked in Tamil. If the question is phrased in Tamil, then the answer would be Tiruchirapalli, because, for a Tamil to tell another Tamil that he is from Tamil Nadu would be to offer redundant information. However, if the questioner also happens to be from the district o f Tiruchirapalli and both interlocutors knew this to be the case, the answer would be, ‘Sirukudi’.

If the question were to be posed to our Sirukudian by an apparently non-Indian individual in a non-Indian language in a conversation which occurs in a non-South Asian country, the answer to the question, ‘what is your ur?’, would be ‘India’; unless, of course, that non-Indian happens to be one who has a good knowledge o f India and had already figured out that his respondent was an Indian, and if the respondent also knew that this non-Indian stranger was acquainted with India. In such an event, the answer would have been more specific and the object would have been one o f the several inner nested and named territories o f the Indian sub-continent, depending on the depth o f the knowledge of India the questioner will have made evident to the uran from Sirukudi.

We may represent the meaning of the more semantico-referentially confined kiramam in a grammatical sentence as follows:

(1) 0(kiramam) = f(G),

where 9 stands for the meaning of message and G for a semantico- referential grammar o f the language of the sentence. That is, the

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meaning o f‘kiramam’ is mostly a function of the semantico-referential grammar o f the language in which it is expressed.4 The working definition of kiramam I put forth above would meet all the conditions of (G). With respect to ‘ur,’ even though we could pile on even more pragmatic variables, were we to choose to limit them only to the ones we have considered above, we may represent the meaning of ‘ur’ as:

(2) 0(ur)= f(G, x, y, z, t, 1 ...),

where x, y, z, t, and 1 stand for addresser, addressee, audience, time, and location, respectively; and the ellipses indicate its capacity to include even more potentially significant pragmatic factors that may arise. In other words, where G is solely constitutive of kiramam’s meaning (even in use), the meaning is mostly semantico-referential. In the case o f ur, to be sure, G remains an important factor in the meaning of the word or of the proposition containing the word ‘ur’, as indeed it would be the case in any linguistic construct, and yet, G is still only co-constitutive of the meaning in use o f ur; the other significant elements being: who speaks and who listens, who are the eavesdroppers or who is within earshot, where, when and under what conditions the propositional form that contains the word in question is deployed, and so on. These are pragmatic factors and hence the meaning of ‘ur’ may also be described as pragmatic. Recalibrating my claim a bit, we may say that kiramam is a linguistic sign that is more easily and more often than not defined by the semantico-referential grammar of Tamil and is more or less immune to other pragmatic factors; and therefore, the semantico-referential meaning of kiramam, represented by 0(kiramam) = f(G) is more the norm than the exception for it. By contrast, when ‘ur’ is used in a proposition, its purely semantico-referential meaning [0(ur)= f(G)] rarely survives uninflected. In other words, when in use, it is the pragmatic meaning o f ur [0(ur)= f(G, x, y, z, t, 1 ...)] that is communicated. What is worth noting here is that, we began by drawing the distinction between the univocity of kiramam and the polysemy of ur on the register of reference. But in working through the distinctions on this plane the subtler distinctions of these terms, especially of ur, began to emerge on the register of sense. This is the register where the answer to the three questions posed in the opening paragraph may be found, and this is the register which we shall continue to examine.

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I chose an example from Tamil Nadu to work through rather than one from Sri Lanka only because the former presents us with more such named, nested territories and a few more pragmatically significant factors that makes the exercise pedagogically more complex, interesting, and instructive. The same principle, however, holds true for the areas that Sri Lankan Tamils consider their ur, or their ‘homeland,’ as they have come to call it. In the example we considered, the semantico-referential meaning of ur seems to have transcended every available hierarchically nested threshold within India, and managed to expand its object after every limit-crossing, even though the sign, ur, was lodged in the same location amidst the same string of accompanying linguistic signs under the same, unchanging, semantico-referential rules o f grammar in the same question. I suppose, if one were to bump into a Tamil on the lunar surface and ask her what her ur was, she would respond, to this same question that had transported her across so many named territories, with yet another answer: ‘My ur is Mother Earth.’ For ur will have changed its object once again. In other words, an uran exceeds every threshold he crosses even as his ur expands with him. He continues to dwell in the world as Dasein.5 Kiramam by contrast, faithful and true to its semantico-referential constraints, abides in its assigned place, within its virtually unchanging and ‘indelibly’ mapped boundary. Strictly speaking, the meaning of any word used in a speech event will have a relatively fixed semantico-referential meaning and a greater range of pragmatic meanings. Though this is true of all words including ‘kiramam’, some meanings are far more context- sensitive even with respect to its referential function than are others. Ur is such a word and kiramam is not. What is unique to and most important about ur, however, is that the context for ur is always already the world.

PROBLEM 2: THE ELLA! OF KIRAMAM A N D UR

Ellai is the Tamil word for the outer limit o f an area. Its meaning, however, is modified by what it bounds. In general, the modern way of delimiting an area o f land, be it a village, a town, a city or a country is to ‘draw’, or imagine, a boundary around it and, if necessary, expect to find it and identify it in fact. A kiramam is unequivocally such a patch of territory. Theoretically, even if not in fact—due to, say the absence of an actual fence—there is, in the surveyor’s light, a virtual circumscribing line along an actual kiramam’s circumference that

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indicates where one kiramam ends and the adjacent kiramam begins. This is why a kiramam is easily translatable into and transposable onto a map. Indeed, every kiramam has at least one map in the safekeeping of a village elder’s or office holder’s home, one in the Tahsildar’s (rev­enue officer) office, and a third in the state archives. Theoretically and officially, the boundary of a kiramam in Tamil Nadu or of an English village, city or country is as definitive as it is determinate, dividing and distinguishing an inside from an out, with Cartesian certainty.6

When the outer limit of an ur is explicitly referred to as its ellai, what is imagined is not a circumscribing line or fence but certain locations along the periphery—a tree here, a shrine there, an image of a guardian deity, a place where two or more roads cross each other, where the river goes under a bridge, where a villager was slain, died of a heart attack or gave birth, and so on—all of which indicate either points of strong defenses or portals o f vulnerabilities to unspecified forces from the outside. Such loci are what constitute the ur-ellai. Representing this kind of territorial-limit-indicator or ellai on a map would be a virtually impossible task for the cartographer, because the actual outer limits of an ur are indefinite and perspectival. An ur ellai’s role is not to individuate the territory it encloses; but that is exactly what the ellai of a kiramam does.

In the little ur of Sirukudi, where I did some fieldwork in 1974-6, the outer limit of the ur was treated by Sirukudians as more of a threshold than as a mappable boundary; a zone or penumbra where one ur gradually dims and another makes its appearance; where one ur phases into semi-self-concealment and another begins its unconcealing, as in a Heideggerian Aletheia.7 The threshold that surrounds Sirukudi is a zone marked by loci and passageways fraught with non-human powers that are selectively harmful, neutral, or pro­tective of one or other category of human beings who come within their force-fields at one time or another. Each such space and portal of vulnerability or invincibility is often fortified with legends that are as ancient as the ur itself, and the stories these legends tell are of events, remembered and unremembered, that mark these loci as deeply affective interprétants.

THE OBJECTS OF UR A N D KIRAMAM

What are the objects of ‘kiramam’ and ‘ur’? Where exactly are these objects that are being discussed? Is the kiramam as defined something imagined, in the mind, a concept, an idea, or is it something that is

outside the mind, actually out there, so to speak, and hence perceivable through the senses? Or is it both? What about ur? I have forced these questions into this form because it throws into clear relief what is so fundamentally Cartesian about us moderns. Moreover, o f all the dichotomies Descartes bequeathed to us, the inside-the-mind and outside-the-mind divide is the most salient one. A loss is never an abstraction. Every loss is a loss for someone. It is relevant that I did not call what was lost, a thing or an entity, but an object. Is this a relationship between loser and lost, therefore, one of subject and object, in the Cartesian sense? Or is it a semiological signified (a concept and nothing more) a la de Saussure held together in a dyadic relationship with its signifier (an acoustic image and nothing else)? It is neither. It is a semeiosic object. Peirce’s way of both acknowledging and showing a way out of the absolutizing dichotomy of Descartes and the relative dichotomy proposed by de Saussure is to turn to semeiosis and to the triadic semeiosic sign, which is constituted of three correlates, one o f which is the object. We can begin to understand the power of the Peircean semeiosic object by beginning, for parity’s sake, in the domain of concepts, ideas and thoughts—where both Descartes and de Saussure began—however, with Peirce’s understanding that the universe is perfused with signs (1931, 5.n300), that thought too is a sign, or a ‘thought-sign,’ for short (1931, 5.538).

[Wjhat does the thought-sign stand for—what does it name—what is its suppositum? The outward thing, undoubtedly, when a real outward thing is thought of. But still, as the thought is determined by a previous thought of the same object, it only refers to the thing through denoting this previous thought. (...) The thought-sign stands for its object in the respect which is thought; that is to say, this respect is the immediate object (italics, mine) of consciousness in the thought, or, in other words, it is the thought itself, or at least what the thought is thought to be in the subsequent thought to which it is a sign. (1931, 2.285-86)

But where is thought lodged? Peirce says, even more radically, that thought:

(...) is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals and throughout the purely physical world. (...) Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought without Signs. (1931, 5.551)

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The Immediate Object (hereafter, IO) is the object as represented in the sign; it is the object as the sign represents it; it is the object cognized in the sign and therefore, an idea,8 it is what we would ordinarily call ‘the meaning’ of the sign (1931: 2.293), it is the immediately present object (1931: 8.343). ‘The Sign must indicate it by a hint; and this h in t... is the Immediate Object’ (Peirce cited in Susan Hack 1982: 200). There is a second form of the object that is not immediately present but ‘mediately present’ (Ibid.). This is ‘. .. the Dynamical Object (D O ),... the object outside of the Sign’ (Hardwick 1977: 83). Not only do trees one bumps into and the rocks one climbs qualify as DOs, but so do ghosts, dreams and even pain; anything that is forced upon the embodied mind and the mindful body is a DO.

If I were to meet my French friend, Bernard, in Tamil Nadu, and he tells me in Tamil that he lives and does research in a kiramam named Aravandikkudy, which is just 10 miles away, the sign ‘kiramam’ will cause its IO to manifest itself to me. The DO of kiramam will not appear, since it is not there to be seen. The IO could but need not be a graphic picture. It will most probably be in the form of a concept. And if I was familiar with the definition of the sign ‘kiramam’, that sign might serve as the basis o f the formation of the IO. If he invites me to come to his kiramam, and I know him well enough to know that he is generally a truthful person, that his invitation is genuine and that his kiramam is more likely to be there than not, then these collateral experiences will point me, train my expectations, and determine my travel plans, etc., toward a potential DO called a kiramam. But it is always possible that his kiramam may turn out to be a small town made up of strip-malls, and I should be left with an IO without its dynamic counterpart. Either the misuse of the word or Bernard’s intentions will have left me puzzled, if not surprised. Had the invitation been to his ur, and I ended up finding myself in the same small town full of strip-malls I may have been disappointed, but not surprised. My IO would have matched up, with the help of corollary experiences, with a true DO called ‘ur’. A kiramam has to have a rural feel to it with visible fields in order to fit both the definition and my expectations. An ur could have been any named place where a community of people lived and where they claimed a hoary past and where the place belonged to its residents as much as they belonged to the place. The ploughed fields were not necessary for it to be an ur. This manifestation will be in the form of an IO. Had my interlocutor been my Tamil friend, Murali, instead of my French

researcher friend, and had he invited me to visit his kiramam, the IO and the disappointment that followed in not finding a DO to match my IO would have not been different. However, had Murali invited me to visit his ur, the presencing of the DO would have had a slightly different trajectory. To begin with, its presence would have been almost simultaneous with the manifestation o f the IO. I would not have even had the possibility of doubting Murali’s claim that he has an ur of his own. For every Tamil, by definition, has an ur o f his own. To this day, even the Tamils o f Indian origin whose ancestors settled in the hills of Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century to work in British owned coffee, rubber, and tea plantations, claim to have an ur o f their own, back in India. As many as eight generations of these Tamils have lived and died on these plantations, but they do not consider these plantations as their own ur. So, its truth would have been one of those already always-confirmed truths. And I, as a fellow-uran9 would have been able to empathize with the sense and sentiment of being-in the ur. These two together, truth and sensible sentiment, would have been sufficient to draw me into or to comport myself towards experiencing a DO that is neither external nor available to the proverbial five senses at that moment, but it will be as real as the materially constituted ur, the eventual DO that I will encounter. In other words, the habit o f acting in a certain way towards a sign itself is dynamical, that is, it exists independent of my thoughts about it, it is an object o f petrified habits and hence a DO in its own right.

THE INALIENABLENESS OF UR

The ‘ur’, when invoked, does not throw before the mind a delim­ited space as an object, but beckons the person to experience self­comportment in relation to a potentially sequestered, but not a fenced- in place.10 A place is not a space that is transformed into a place, unless its transformation was sensed as deeply historical (rather than shal­lowly chronological), in which case it must have been always already a place to which a people belonged and which belonged to a people. This place called an ur cannot be spun out into or appropriated by a system of exchange, whereas a kiramam can be, since it is a space to which no one belongs, even though it may belong to somebody. In other words, since all places are ‘practiced places’, to call a place a ‘practiced place’, as de Certeau’s (1984: 91) does, is to be redundant. But since he allows for what he calls ‘practiced spaces’, we can also imagine a ‘de-practiced space’ or a ‘practice-free abandoned space’.

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Some of these practiced spaces may some day become (practiced) places, long after the originating practices are forgotten or enshrined in sublime forms in folklore or mythopoesis. Insofar as space, in any of its three forms, may belong to somebody, as property, it can also enter a cycle o f exchange. If lost, a kiramam has a value, and hence, is recoverable as a commodity in a capitalist market. Or, if whatever else o f value it may represent is lost, other things of equal value can replace it. This is why a kiramam, as a revenue unit, provides a mea­sure o f its own taxation. An ur, strictly speaking, cannot be taxed. The substitutes that the market offers are many. As Ophir writes:

The capitalist market is characterized by sophisticated mechanisms that introduce every loss into a cycle of exchange and do not allow it to be preserved as a problem for too long. Everything that represents a loss is exchanged as a commodity in the cultural market; even nostalgia is produced as a commodity. (2005:121)The loss o f an ur, a place, the practices of which constitute its iden­

tity as a place, cannot be worked into an exchange market because it is priceless, Edward Said’s sober warning notwithstanding. (1993: 14)UR AS EXCESS

An ur exceeds a kiramam in many ways, beyond being unbounded. Compared to a kiramam, which is a one-dimensional space, an ur is a multi-dimensional place. Unlike the visual or auditory effects of the word-sign ‘kiramam’ upon Tamils, which is affectively flat, ‘ur’ puts desire and reason on the same loop. The human being whose being is being-in-the-ur is not a being in a bounded space. Any being could be, in this way, in a kiramam, like a coin in a tin, but an ur is not a space for a human being to be-in like this but it is a place of being-in, like ‘being in’ a hurry, ‘being in’ good humour, or ‘being in’ love. Heidegger called these ways of being-in ‘dwelling’. Being-in is dwelling in and in-dwelling.

If ur is an IO, realized as such only in a definition—it would be too confining of its fecundity of meaning, o f its significant nexus of intra- worldly interrelatedness. That is to say, the things in an ur for an uran are not an assortment of physical entities and activities distributed in homogenous space and time that are to be counted, explained entity by entity and activity by activity. Many anthropologists are better at doing this than an uran. Granted, an ur realized as an IO in ethnographies is a great deal richer than what a lexicon entry has to offer, but the test of its adequation with its DO can be determined only

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when the latter is encountered and experienced. The understanding of what things, institutions, people, landscape, etc., share, by virtue of their intra-ur relatedness is what constitutes one’s being-in-the-ur.

For a displaced Tamil, at the moment of its beckoning in Tamil by a Tamil, by reference or allusion, ur reveals itself in the spatio-tem­poral vastness of its ‘IO’, unconcealing the plentitude of the caller’s world. This is not to say that the difference between a rural ur and the nearest metropolis is not made. As McKim Marriott so brilliantly ob­served as far back as 1955, the village (what I call ur)-city dichotomy is not a token o f the hicksville-culturedom type, found in the modern west. Rather, they form a symbiotic cultural pair held together and held apart by the dynamic processes o f universalization and parochi- alization that nourish a ‘great civilization’.11 This is what makes both Chennai (population 4.21 million) and Sathanur (population 3,000) a Sirukudian’s ur (Sirukudi, population 1,000).

Kiramam is at home in a discourse of dichotomies. For example, kiramam is referred to in juxtaposition to the city or pattinam. It is done so in order to emphasize the contrasting ways of life in the two places. Kiramam and pattinam parallel the western dichotomy alluded to in all the customary ways with their attendant prejudices. They are seen as two opposing moral orders, in both senses of the term ‘moral’, the Durkheimian and the Newmanian. It is not so in the case of ur. For even the city and the nation are urs. The only relationship of contrast the ur enters into is with kaadu, the wild, the wilderness, and the forest.12 But it also can join with kaadu to form urkaadu, which, among other things means the ur’s forest and thereby, from one perspective, it becomes a part of the ur rather than its other.

FINDING ONESELF IN THE UR

To whom is Sirukudi a kiramam, if ever? A Sirukudian or any Tamil who hears an ur referred to as a kiramam will know that by (mis)naming it as a kiramam, a place is being re-imagined as or re­made into a space, even if it happens to be a ‘practiced space’ in its own right. Foreigners are not the only outsiders who misname and misrecognize. So do another class of inside outsiders, which includes surveyors, cartographers, agronomists, revenue officers, absent land­lords, anthropologists, and all those who see the kiramam ontically;13 and then there are those who do not understand the difference be­tween ur and kiramam, in any way. For whoever insists on seeing the ur and thinking of it as a kiramam may be able to explain the place but

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will not understand it. On the other hand, those beings whose being is being-in-the-ur may not be able to explain it but understand it preon- tologically. The ontologist’s task is to understand the way-of-being o f an uran for whom the 10 and the DO become one and indistinguish­able. To be sure, the anthropologist-as-ontologist’s understanding will only be an interpretation; but the interpretation will be only as good as his or her understanding’s comportment towards the embodied practices, principles and possibilities that repose beneath the grasp of consciousness, which become manifest, unthematized and untouched by volition or intention, in responses, discriminations, motor skills, organization o f objects and persons in the environment, of those who dwell there in dasein, in the way o f being there. An interpretation as an interpretant in being does not have to be self referential, any more than a DO has to be outside o f thought. An ‘outsider’ re-makes the ur, as it pertains to an individual Dasein’s own existence, into a special world, a world in an ontical-existentielle14 sense, driven by the desire to know facts about entities in the world, and interested in questions that stand a chance of being answered by experimental science (Polt 1999: 34). Kiramam may be seen as one of those ‘special worlds’ and so is being an ur-less, displaced person, in a strange space.

The beings who enter the world of an ur as outsiders and find them­selves in it rather than of it, make a different world, a world o f their own, in which they may dwell. Those who make such a world into a world of their own are beings who are being-in their roles alongside a particular set of terms that describe the essential qualities o f all the entities that make up that set. For instance, if such a set is made up of surveyors, that set would also include ‘a constellation of equipment, practices and concerns in which [surveyors] dwell’ (Dreyfus 1991: 90). For example: kiramams, farms, orchards, tea estates, rice fields, acres, square feet, rods, leagues, perches, brush axes, compasses, cli­nometers, equipment batteries, battery chargers, magnetic locators, bipods, tripods, field books, levelers, surveying, drafting, sketching, measuring, and, of course, surveyors, form such a set. They cultivate a sense o f ‘our’ world, which is a world o f ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion.’ It is a world that one may come to share with others, but only as an individual in/of a community of surveyors or a community of anthropologists, or a community of foresters might, even if not in the face-to-face then in their own literary or cyber-communities. The ur for an uran, however, is not such a special or specialized world. When you are an uran, you dwell in your understanding of ur like a

fish understands its dwelling, the water. As a sentient being, an uran understands his own ur not intellectually or theoretically but in and through his bodily dispositions. These dispositions include posture, gesture, musculature, dexterity, proxemics, the five senses, peculiar but not inappropriate facilities with particular tools, habituated re­sponses to certain sounds, naturalized reactions to particular smells and tastes, comfort and discomfort brought about by differently organized living or working space, digital memory, cellular memory, and the availability o f an equipmental nexus provided by environ­ment, circumstances, and skill. The uran in his human being-in-the- world or Dasein15 is involved with tools (in the broadest sense) of his environment as entities that are available or ready-to-hand; they are entities of an ur, which is a human world, a world in which he dwells as Dasein. It is only when this world turns bad and when the said tools become unavailable, are merely present-at hand and not ready to hand, that entities fall out o f the ur and into the non-ur, out of this human world into the natural world.

THE IDEA OF UR AS A PRE-ONTOLOGICAL WORLD OF SIGNS

We have been speaking of ur and kiramam as signs. Peirce defined a sign or representamen as

(...) something, which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the m ind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its [dynamic]16 object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground [or the IO] of the representamen. (1931: 2.228)Then Peirce goes on to amplify what he means by idea:‘Idea’ is here to be understood in a sort of Platonic sense, very familiar in everyday talk; I mean in that sense in which we say that one man catches another m an’s idea, in which we say that when a man recalls what he was thinking of at some previous time, he recalls the same idea, and in which when a man continues to think anything, say for a tenth of a second, in so far as the thought continues to agree with itself during that time, that is to have a like content, it is the same idea, and is not at each instant of the interval a new idea, (ibid)Platonic ideas? Sri Lankan Tamil refugees and immigrants in

Toronto, if at all possible, like to reproduce a simulacrum of their

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ur by settling a Toronto neighborhood with people from their own ur. The making of such attempts is well known among Sri Lankan Tamils in Canada and elsewhere where Sri Lankan refugees or asylees tarry but don’t dwell. In Europe and North America, Tamils are identified by urs they come from and urs they have lost. One o f the first questions that two Sri Lankan Tamils who happen to be strangers would ask each other on encounter is: ‘what is your ur?’ Whatever ‘nested territory’ two men happen to share, the smaller the circle, the swifter will be the speed and ease with which ‘one man catches the idea of another,’ the drift of discourse and meanings. Ideas are caught, effortlessly, as in flight. So effortlessly in fact, that they are as good as real or are real, like the air one breaths. By ‘Platonic sense’, I take the allusion to be to the ontology of ‘ideas’ in Platonic realism, the Platonic Forms. Right or wrong, the reality o f Platonic Ideas is not at issue in the above quote. What is intended to be pertinent is the indubitability o f their reality (at least in theory). And the more real they are the easier it will be to ‘catch’ such ideas (which include ideas imprisoned in action: a gesture, a body posture, a wink, a grimace or an allusion), without effort, as a matter of course, and as a matter of habit. Thus being a Tamil who belongs to an ur and has an ur to which she belongs ‘naturally’, the ur is rarely an object of thought, rather, it is a habit of being-in; the being-in of being there, or Dasein.

LOSS

Today there are over a million Sri Lankan Tamils who have been dis­placed from their urs. Most of those I spoke with17 told me o f having lost their ur in locutions such as: ‘My house is “gone” (pottuthu , which also means “dead”) and so is my ur;’ ‘We no longer have a home or an ur’; ‘They reduced house and ur to sand’; ‘It was unnerving to see ur- dogs wandering the streets, lost, not knowing from where they came or where they were going, unable to locate and identify their own ur and home;’ ‘This country (the host-country) has lots of conveniences. But will it ever come to be like our ur?’; ‘My very soul/heart went/ died with our ur’. Several individuals described their experience of running into a fellow-‘villager’ in London or Bergen or Oslo as both joyous and uncanny. One who had such an encounter on London Bridge compared it to two ghosts meeting.

The unmistakable emphasis is on the possessive ‘our ur’, which parallels what we ascribed to the outsiders—for example, surveyors or anthropologists—who make their own ‘our [special] worlds’. But

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in the case o f anthropologists, perspective, critical reflection and compartmentalization help us to overcome our potential for forget­ting our own pre-ontological ‘the world’ which our own ‘our world’ presupposed. The Tamil refugees, asylum-seekers and the displaced, have lost ‘the world’ and only having lost it, now realize that ‘the world as lost’ is the only world that they can call ‘our world (that was)’. Lost is the ur that served as a centre to which they were connected in Dasein and that gave them the fortitude, the perspective, and the so- mato-psychic wherewithal to be able to dwell anywhere in the world, and to call ur whatever expanse of territory and people stood between them and their innermost ur toward which they were comported.

When a Tamil loses her ur—to an extent that is not the case in the loss of other things, including house and property—s/he loses her world, which was for her, the world, and is then forced into a quest for authenticity in a strange space out of place. One who loses one’s world is ontologically dismantled. There are a few who hold out the hope of getting back to their ur as well as getting back their ur. They believe that their ur is really there as the dynamic partner of the IO which itself they fear will soon disappear. But as long as it lasts it sustains its hold on meaning. There are those whose ur as IO has been drained of all meaning and they have given up all hope. Their response to their more hopeful compatriots is to remind them that they will never get back to the Same but find only an Other, and that they might as well get used to what has replaced their being-in-the-world by being an asylee or an alien, being in a structure o f inauthentic Dasein. To the extent that they experience their inauthenticity ontically, as dynamic objects in their own right dissonant with their immediate objects, it is not because they left the ur but because they have lost their ur. Some displaced Tamils believe that their ur still exists as a dynamic object even if not present to them, and hold that they could realize it, reincorporate it into semeiosis, rematch it with the ur’s IO which they have not yet completely alienated. Some know that their ur no longer exists to be a fact. Peirce put the concepts of ‘existence’/'existent’ to very different uses than Heidegger, the existentialist. Peirce plots existence and existent as over against the real and reality. An existent18 is an unconnected individual19 (person or thing), unassimilated into meaning, unrealized by and into semeiosis, a meaningless this, a nameless that, a pre-DO before it was ‘realized’ by the IO to be significant or reasonable, and thereby making it dynamic. Accordingly

‘existence’, describes the state of being an existent.

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It is in this sense that those who exist believing that their ur ‘exists’, exist even as their urs do, as individuated existents, irrational, unreasonable and unreal. Some know that their ur exists and believe that they could also recover its reality. Some o f their friends fear that these hopefuls may not only fail in what they believe is possible, but that when they find out that the government is executing its own plan o f settling Sinhalese citizens in the spaces and homes they left unoccupied, they themselves will become mere existents, unmoored, unconnected, un-belonging individuals and unrealized fugitives from the real, while the radical ‘Other’, the enemy, occupies their houses, and thereby has made the ur itself an ‘other.’

For many, as they wait in some space of displacement and uncer­tainty, for asylum or meaning far from their ur, the ur is not merely damaged and in a state of disrepair, nor has it disappeared and can be found, but is lost and cannot be experienced.20 What is present is only what has disappeared or only traces of the disappeared. In my conversation with asylees, I found that only the hollow, left behind by the disappearance of that which is no longer actually or even possibly present, is present. What is present is the presence of absence. Some (not all) among the displaced, have borne witness to the actual dis­appearance of their ur, like witnessing the disappearance of a loved one—either literally or analogically—as she breathes her last breath. In these persons, in addition to the presence of the absence o f the ur that was but no longer is, there are also present, traces o f their disappearance. Such traces may range from a salvaged article from the ruins of war as one fled in fear for her life, to images of the disap­pearance of their ur as they had known it to be, which they carried with them in their memories, even as they were fleeing the ur. Such traces include scars from being tortured the day of their kidnapping from the ur, torture that continued for months or even years, before being released from a detention center or prison; traces in the form of lingering nightmares’ frequent visitations even after having subse­quently lived in countries that have given them refuge for over five years. To adopt a passage from Adi Ophir and adapt it to the purpose at hand we may say: ‘The presence o f the trace of the disappeared and the presence of the traces o f disappearance dismantle presence as frezng-m-the-world and being-with other beings (persons and things)’ (Ophir, 2005: 57).

According to Peirce, iconic representamens hold some quality in common with the objects they represent. Furthermore, this ‘shared

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quality’ could range from similarity to identity with the objects they represent. This means that the similarity/identity need not be only a matter of form, but could also be, quite literally, substance. Therefore, the traces I speak of retain a measure o f iconicity or a shared quality with the ‘is-there-ness’ that was but no longer is. If some entity with a shape and form is removed from the place it occupied, it leaves behind its absence as an emptiness, a hole, so to speak, which is iconic of the presence that was, but is now disappeared, destroyed or lost.

THE UR THAT C AN NO T BE MOURNED

The picture was his son’s, taken when he left the island in 1989 for Glasgow. In 1994, when I met him in his ur, the picture was still in the plastic pocket of Mr Sathasivam’s wallet where he had slid it five years earlier. He looked at it often, showed it to friends and neighbours at every opportunity he got; and every time he looked at the photo, his heart stirred with pride. He treasured it there as long as he was in the ur. When his son left, he left behind a room with his books and athletic trophies in their assigned places, and he knew that he would always have a home and a room to return to. In 1994, he returned to the ur for a short visit. He changed out o f his trousers and into his veshti,21 which he took out of a mothball saturated almirah. He dusted his bicycle. Inflated the tires and sped ofF to see his friends. It was dark. But his body remembered the old pot-holes that were still there and he zigzagged around them as he always had; as he approached the big house that belonged to his school principal at the end o f the lane, he sped up as he had always done. The principal’s dog chased him, barking all the way as was her wont, and he propped his feet up on the bicycle bar, for he had acquired the momentum that would take him and his bicycle without peddling, until he reached the Palmyra tree just before the bend to the main road; then the dog stopped the chase, turned around and scurried back to the principal’s house, as she had always done. The principal’s house reminded him of the Kodak camera—the only camera in the ur then—with which the picture in his father’s wallet was taken. And he remembered where that camera was placed when it was not being used (and it was rarely used). It occupied a pride of place on a teak cabinet that was made in Burma by the principal’s great grandfather—at least that was what the people of the ur said—among other framed pictures that sat on it. As he approached the main road on his bicycle, he rang the cycle bell as always.

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The next day he noticed that a flowering tree plant named gloriosa superba that he had planted in the front yard had withered and died. He replaced it with a new plant o f the same species. His mother called him to come in out of the sun and finish drinking his coffee, which was cold by then. He left his ur for Glasgow for a second time, after a month’s vacation.

In 2000, his village was occupied by troops o f the Sri Lankan army. A policeman had come and relieved the father of his son’s photograph to pass it on to the captain of the Special Task Force, a dreaded arm of the army. The captain made copies of it and distributed them among the immigration officers at the Colombo airport so that he could be identified and arrested when and if he returned from abroad. Some jealous person (most probably the policeman, I was told) had fingered him as a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which he was not. He lives now in Holland. The original of the son’s picture was returned to the father. He had replaced it in the plastic pocket of his wallet.

In January o f 2006 instead o f joining his son in Holland, Mr Sathasivam and his wife and their two daughters chose to seek asylum and settle in India. ‘It is more like our ur’, they said. In 2008, Sathasivam heard that his ur in Sri Lanka had been overrun and destroyed by the Sri Lankan army, and that its residents were displaced to refugee camps. He stopped looking at the picture of his son that was in the plastic pocket o f his wallet, which he had safely carried around all those years. He could look at any other picture o f his son, but not that one. He said that it reminded him not o f his son, but of the day o f his son’s leaving the ur for Glasgow. On that day, he had a home and ur to return to. Now when the father looks at that picture it reminds him that there is neither home nor ur for him or his son to return to. After awhile, he took that picture out o f its plastic seal o f his wallet and put it away somewhere where he didn’t have to look at it every time he opened his wallet. But the missing photo had left its imprint in outline on the plastic cover o f the wallet sleeve, marking the presence o f its absence, which in turn took him to the thought of his lost ur. Finally, he had to get rid o f his old wallet to make life bearable.

The holy ash obtained from the priest o f an ur temple shares in the same qualities of the ash that was contained in the sanctified copper tray from which the priest had pinched some of it and placed it in the open right palm o f each devotee, one after another. Each devotee may

have saved some of that ash in banana leaf packets tied with the silky fibre extracted from the trunk of this tree-like giant herb. That holy ash is no longer there; no longer is it in that sanctified copper tray; it is no longer under the distributive authority o f that priest who served in that temple in that ur. The ash that was saved by the devotee who carried it with him in a banana leaf packet tied with a banana trunk fibre string is the only token of the ‘is-there-ness’ that has disappeared or is lost because of the civil war and its consequences. One may even say that the ‘is-there-ness’ of the holy ash split and scattered a multiplicity o f tokens o f itself, tokens that have become iconic traces of what they represent. These traces signify what has disappeared, and worse, what was lost in the dismantling o f the is-there-ness, not only through their iconicity but also, by their negative indexicality. In 1901, Peirce defined an index as:

A sign, or representation, which refers to its object not so much because of any similarity or analogy with it nor because it is associated with general characters which that object happens to possess, [but] because it is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or the memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other. (1931: 2.304)If an index is a sign that signifies its object on the grounds o f its

invariable or expected contiguity, be it as cause is to effect, or IO is to DO, then, by virtue of this contiguity to the object, its ‘is-there-ness’ is confirmed. Since the object was lost, positive indexicality was replaced with its negative counterpart. The signification was by virtue of their now absent contiguity, and the object it signifies is the was-there-ness. In the splitting and scattering o f such indexical signs, the displaced lost their ‘being-withs and being-alongsides’, people and things, and therein lost their equipmentality22 and equipmental contexture. Their bodily habits were lost to cultural deconstruction by the unfamiliar and unintegrated uses and exercises to which they were subjected. Their grace o f movement that had always accompanied confidence was also split apart by scorn; even smells and sounds were out o f place; and lost were their sensations, excitations and iterations that constituted their being-in-the-world. Iconic traces signified disappearance and loss by being present. Indexicality signified the same through absence. There was no there there. Each trace contains both the presence of iconicity and the absence of indexicality. This dismemberment and dismantling of presence has put into, play

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3 3 6 Village Matters

difference, multiplicity, and temporality where regularity and time­lessness once prevailed. Where the ur was, traces exist (in the Peircean sense), but nothing is.

Is-there-ness splits and scatters, expands and contracts in many ways at once, in time and space, witnesses multiply, and with them points of view and channels of sensation and excitation. (Ophir 2005: 57)The ur into which a Tamil is born is his understood world, an ur

that was already always there. The essence of a human being is his or her existence23 in such a world. Peirce helped us understand the ‘non­individuality’24 o f being human by his understanding o f the human being as a sign (1939: 5.314), or rather, a repository of signs, some quickened and some as signs o f habit. He helped us understand the universe as perfused with signs (1939: 5.n300), some o f which are signs that are also in states of petrified habits, some not. He opened up the hermetically sealed Cartesian subject so that s/he may dwell, as a sign, among, with and alongside signs, thereby transforming the absolute divide o f mind and body, inside and outside, self and other, mind and matter into continua.

The urans (the people of the ur who are as Dasein) as urans are more than subjects with minds and thoughts and ideas. The urans’ way of being in the ur is not a function o f their ability to think, nor of their ability to explain, but o f their being-in-the ur-world, which was not only always already there for them but it was the world that they, by virtue o f their involvement with it, made and remade, as they were made and re-made by it, with it and in it, not by thinking about it but by being involved with this world where they had found themselves in an equipmental contexture of things that surrounded them.25 They were intimately anchored to its centre with intricate ties that did not bind them but rather freed them to be there among other beings, among the beings o f other people and other worldly or unworldly things.

According to one reading of Heidegger on the subject, however, it may be said that to live in an ur as an uran is to live in an average, everyday mode o f Dasein, whose ‘mineness’ is to merely appropriate the form of ‘theyness’, and to live like that is to live inauthentically. True, it is more typical than not for Dasein to lose itself in the ‘they’ and forever defer the discovery o f its own individuality. This in fact is the gist of the advice that most social workers and psychologists impart to their Tost’ clients. It is time, they are told, implicitly and

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explicitly, by almost one and all, that it is best for Dasein to stop understanding its world in terms that the ‘they’ (of being-in-the-ur) provides it and respond to the new environment as the new ‘they’ ordains. Examples of people like them but who have rejected their old and inauthentic ontological categories are pointed out to these displaced refugees, asylees, and immigrants as exemplars of living as authentic individuals as authentic Dasein, authentically Being-itself, authenticity itself being experienced as existentielle. It is indeed true that for Dasein to find itself it must be able to lose itself. But the loss of ur poses a problem. Dasein, as Being in an ur and Being-with other beings or urans, has been lost with the loss of ur, leaving Dasein incapable of losing itself in order to find itself because it has nothing to lose, and no place left to leave behind.

This is why the loss o f one’s ur is so traumatic an event that is either seared in one’s memory or deflected into what the clinicians diagnose as psychosomatic disorders and even as psycho-social disorders and malaise. The loss that many displaced Tamils suffer in melancholia and anxiety, a loss, which they are unable to mourn and let go, is not the loss of ur as an IO. For that, for better or for worse, is part of them, thanks to the community of fellow-urans who still have within and among them the manifestations o f the presence of that IO called ur. As long as there is enough of a community that is willing to contribute to the making of a new DO with shared material and non-material fragments of the lost DO, the IO will be kept alive and accommodate itself to suit the evolving concrescence of the new DO into an ur, which, if nothing else, will provide them a centre that could hold, at least until the transition into a new Dasein is made. But the incompleteness o f the IO, the absence of its complement—literally, the absence of that which completes it has put them in a place where Dasein itself is what is painful. In other words, there is no real object left even to mourn; there is nothing to be able to forget.

NOTES1. The first OED (2009) definition of the term ‘village’ being: A collection

of dwelling-houses and other buildings, forming a centre of habitation in a country district; an inhabited place larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, or having a simpler organization and administration than the latter.

2. It is granted that no two words are absolutely identical in meaning. W hat is at issue here, however, is the degree of difference that makes a difference, a difference that unconceals.

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3. A person who belongs to an ur.4. Sem antico-referential m eaning refers to aspects of meaning which de­

scribe ‘objects’ independently o f the context of the utterance.5. Dasein, ‘existence’ in German, denotes for Heidegger the everyday­

ness relationship one has with the world: a fundamental, mostly infra- conscious, way of experiencing the ongoing unfolding of time, averaged for descriptive interpretation.

6. And it was ‘certainty,’ after all, that formed the corner-stone of the foun­dation of modern philosophy and science as seen from that perspective.

7. Aletheia means a state o f ‘unhiddenness’ brought about both by discov­ering and disclosing (Heidegger 1962: 56-57,262-269).

8. In the tradition of Descartes which holds that the mind is ‘a thinking substance,’ it is still commonly assumed that the mind is the repository ideas, and its home is the brain. A more radical view might entertain the possibility that the m ind need not be restricted to the brain but that it is still something internal and private, in the body but not of the body. Peirce’s concept of m ind was far more radical than either of these. That of Descartes may be appreciated by a couple of Peirce’s statements about mental phenomena.

A psychologist cuts out a lobe of my b ra in ... and then, when I find I cannot express myself, he says, ‘You see your faculty of language was localized in that lobe.’ No doubt it was; and so, if he had filched m y inkstand, I should not have been able to continue my discussion until I had got another. Yea, the very thoughts would not come to me. So my faculty of discussion is equally localized in my inkstand. It is localization in a sense in which a thing may be in two places at once. (...) It is plain enough that the inkstand and the brain-lobe have the same general relation to the functions of the mind. (1931: 7.366)

9. Being a being to whom being-in-the-ur is his way of being, a Dasein, as Heidegger might have put.

10. For an experimental demonstration of this fact, see Chapter 2 o f my book, Fluid Signs.

11. M arriott (1955); Gananath Obeyesekere makes the point even more forcefully in his 1966 essay in relation to Sri Lanka.

12. See Diane Mines’ (2005) superb ethnography on the kaadu and ur distinction and other refinements o f ‘ur.’

13. Ontic concerns beings; ontology concerns ways of being. ‘How old is the sun?’, is an ontical question; ‘What is the way of Being of stars?’ an ontological question.

14. Martin Heidegger (1962: 33).15. Dasein is not man as such, but a relationship to being-in-the-world of

ur that man acquires and may lose. An uran dwells in or inhabits his ur. ‘W hen we inhabit something, it is no longer an object for us but

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becomes part of us and pervades our relation to other objects in the world’ (Dreyfus 1991: 45).

16. The insertions within square brackets are my own, having been con­vinced of their synonymy with the terms in the original quote by Robert Chumbley (2000: 407-418).

17. There were several other categories of diasporic Tamils among my interlocutors, within and outside the United States. A majority of these individuals however, were asylum seekers or refugees living in the United States and Canada. Many of those with whom I spoke were undergoing treatment for ailments diagnosed as clinical depression, general anxiety, PTSD, an assortment of phobias, and various somatoform disorders.

18. In Peirce’s phenomenological tri-categorical order of phenomena, an existent is what he calls a ‘Second’; it is an actualization of a possibility where the possible is a First and the actual, or more precisely the accidentally actual (or the contingent) is a Second. A Second has the characteristic of the hie et nunc of being, a force without law, ‘brutally factual’ rather than ‘reasonably general’, which is a Third. A well-gleaned gathering of Peirce’s scattered remarks on the three phenomenological categories may be found in Goudge (1950: 85-95).

19. An absolute individual as infinitely determinate can only exist as a limiting concept (Peirce 1931: 3.216, 5.33).

20. I gratefully acknowledge the heavy influence of Adi Ophir’s The Order o f Evils on much o f what follows on the subject of loss.

21. The white, light cotton, 4 yards long, wrap-around lower garment worn by Tamil men.

22. ‘An item of equipment is what it is only in so far as it refers to other equipment and so fits in a certain way into an “equipmental whole’” (Dreyfus 1991: 62).

23. In the Heideggerian sense; that is existence as Dasein’s m ode of being.24. In this view dividuality or divisibility is what is characteristic of human

beings.25. ‘The nearest things that surround us we call equipment.... W hat is given

to us primarily is an equipmental whole, a unity that constantly varies in range, expanding and contracting. The view in which the equipmental contexture stands at first, completely unobtrusive and unthought, is the view of practical circumspection, of our practical everyday orientation. ‘Unthought’ means that it is not thematically apprehended for deliberate thinking about things; instead, in circumspection we find our bearings in regard to them ’ (Heidegger 1988:163).