"A tulip in lotus land" : the rise and decline of dutch burgher ethnicity in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This study on the Burghers of Sri Lanka addresses itself to the problem of social identity, the idea of race, and the concept of ethnicity. In particular the thesis focuses on the institutionalisation in 1908, of Dutch Burgher identity, as opposed to Portuguese or other 'non-Dutch' Burgher, in the form of the Dutch Burgher Union of Ceylon (DBU). Although the thesis is based mainly on a literature study, my argument does not depend on an exhaustive catalogue of texts dealing with Sri Lanka and the Burghers Rather, the focus is on one particular text - the Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union - in order to analyse how a group has semantically constructed a distinctive identity category for itself, as well as to delineate structural conditions that have led to that construction in the first place. This leads to considerations about the large body of literature on ethnicity published in recent years, especially the primordialist/ circumstantialist debate, and the reaction by some writers against this type of study due to the weak status of ethnicity as a social scientific concept. De Lepervanche (1980:25) for example has suggested that, as used in social scientific research and in government policy, ethnicity is an ideological concept which reproduces hegemony by denying the structural inequalities of class. Nagata (1981), in an excellent summary, broadly outlined two main approaches to ethnicity taken by various social scientists. The circumstantialist approach ’regards ethnicity as a dependent variable, created and controlled by a broad combination of external interests and strategies, which invest it with potential for action and mobilization1, and the primordialist approach ’sees ethnicity emanating out of a corpus of basic, elemental, and irreducible (’primordial1) loyalties, with a power and determinism uniquely of their own’ (Nagata, 1981:89). A number of writers(e.g. Epstein, 1978, Ballard, 1976, Keyes, 1981) and Nagata herself have taken the middle ground in the debate, arguing that the primordialist and circumstantialist approaches are not mutually exclusive, but that an adequate theory of ethnicity must include elements of both. I see the primordialist/circumstantialist debate in ethnic studies as merely a manifestation of a more general argument on the relative weight to be assigned to cultural and structural factors in the study of human social formations. However, I believe that this is only an argument in ethnic studies because most writers focus on the ethnic group as a real entity rather than as a symbolic construction. My argument in this thesis is based on the idea that ethnicity is a discourse which ’primordializes’ culture. However, as a discourse, it is part of the structure of social relations and operates within the context of social reality. Thus, I see Dutch Burgher ethnicity as a discourse which developed within the context of historical and socio-economic relations in Colonial Ceylon. Show more