On the Crest of the Tidal Wave: Adrift in Post-tsunami Sri Lanka

Drawing on the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this paper is an attempt to evaluate the possible incorporation of the concept of “translation” into the ethnography of post-tsunami humanitarian aid. By describing the saga of the Buffer Zone (BZ) regulation in Sri Lanka, I recount the ways that the pre-existing limits of coastal reconstruction have been revised and contextualized after the disaster. A field of action that brings together people, technologies, social structures, forms of knowledge and natural agents is what gives the BZ an identity. How does this “actor-network” (or reticular actor) form? What conditions hold it together? How does it set itself as an “obligatory passage point”? The BZ as a technological artifact would appear to have all the necessary requisites to become an example of a “black box”. As such it would assume a configuration that could, at least momentarily, be taken for granted – why has the BZ not been able to achieve this kind of stability in Sri Lanka? The paper argues that the BZ acted as a “multiple object” characterized by controversial interpretations, contestations, and political distortions according to the interests at play. The disaster thus took only the shape of a disarticulation of the local systems of meaning that make up social routines in Sri Lanka. In reality the local groups involved in the reconstruction enacted strategies to control and manipulate the aid without rupturing – at least drastically – the conventional relations of power in the island.