The paper explores the nexus between democracy, power and violence through an ethnographic study of an extraordinary event, which occurred in Sri Lanka towards the end of Nominations week of the local elections of March 1997. It involves the public daylight assassination of a 29-year-old Member of Parliament (MP) and a police security guard by an electoral opponent and his supporters, acted out before a watching crowd of over a hundred people in the Ratnapura district. Eight years on, the perpetrators still remain at large.

This paper will approach violence as performance rather than transgression (Butler 1990: 1993). This does not of course preclude an awareness of the transgressive implications of violent event. It does not imply waiving over the guilt, liability or innocence of perpetrators and victims, even though the work of anthropologists such as Feldman (1991) confronts us with the painful truth that victims of violence often become perpetrators.

Still, the simple, sometimes transgressive desire to hurt/destroy an opponent does not always translate into visceral, bodily violence. As Rosaldo (1986) argues, such internal rages manifest themselves through culturally sanctioned idioms, roles or codes. Thus in his study of ‘internment’ in the late-1970s, Feldman (1991) argues that for teenaged Irish boys, the ‘interrogation’ which entails the torture of their bodies, in fact spurs the desire to resist their interrogators. It spawns political agency through angry resistance. Against this, Daniel’s (1996) work on young Tamil men in detention displays that in their case, the relentless pain of the ‘interrogation’ often shatters their very sense of self. As their initial outrage fades, they succumb to inertia. Here bodily pain removes agency. It would seem then, that the capacity of Irish teenagers to survive such violence also has much to with the Irish cultural endorsement of certain kinds of bodily violence as heroic – as exemplified in the pugilistic idiom of the ‘hardman.’ Such idioms become cultural resources in the formation of subject-identity in the young. In this instance, their resistance involves the performative acting out of the hardman’s heroic stoicism in the face of pain. Alternately, young Tamil men facing torture seemed to have no such cultural resources to draw from.

Still, the code of the hardman is not confined to the impassive endurance of pain. It also involves risking the body in the attempt to attack/disable the opponent. It is this aspect of the hardman’s code which young Irish activists – both Catholic and Protestant – act out when they subsequently take to engaging in acts of terror. It is this performative dimension of the practice of such agents, which the author wishes to focus on in this essay.

Returning to electoral violence, while electoral contests may fuel local enmities in the constituency, such angers do not always erupt in the idiom of spectacular political assassination. Yet if the act of violence outlined above was not – at least at some level - culturally-sanctioned, would it be possible for its perpetrators to still remain at large? It is this seemingly culturally sanctioned performative dimension of this act, which the author wishes to unpack in this essay.

This paper will do this by tracing the notions of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ violence, which pervade discourses on democracy. Here ‘irrational’ violence often takes the form of symbolic acts, which cannot be accommodated within the discourse of democracy/rationality, focussing as it does on instrumentalist notions of cause and effect. Symbolic acts may be defined as acts, which carry a larger cultural message which resonates beneath its surface meaning, and which may be deciphered by the local spectator who is attuned to its cultural nuances. Such acts are effected through cultural idioms which are ascendant at given moments.

This paper will go on to present an alternate to the electoral contest idiom, such as the village feud. The feud holds powerful symbolic dimensions. Here I approach the village feud as an important cultural idiom, which is by definition, performatively acted out. The paper will describe the event, and go on to explore the political and social relationships between the main protagonists - who are members of powerful political families in the Ratnapura district - and construct this relationship in terms of a classic ‘village feud.’

Unlike the electoral contest though, the feud is not an egalitarianizing device, but is in fact premised on social inequality. It therefore reinforces hierarchy. The feud revolves around two pivotal cultural codes which – as much as in other agrarian cultures of South Asia -- mark Sinhala discourse: lajja (‘shame’) and tatvaya (‘status’). Lajja occurs when one is subjected to public ridicule, which in turn undermines one’s status (tatvaya). Tatvaya is contingent upon receiving the deference of the community. But a withdrawal of deference (by perceived inferiors) becomes ‘insolence.’ It provokes a sense of outrage, which - in some contexts - is culturally sanctioned. This creates a space for the physical acting out of such angers. Such performances unfold as sequences in the feud.

Thus between 1978-94 the regime-in-power consciously disabled the operation of democratic structures within the Sri Lankan State. It also consciously encouraged its Party activists to revert to alternative political idioms such as the village feud. But, in the process, they transformed the nature of the feud, infusing it with a new and visceral violence. As much as the Irish teenagers in Feldman’s study respond to State violence by engaging in acts of terror, acted out, as it were, in accordance with Irish pugilistic codes, some Sri Lankan politicians now engaged in terrorizing acts of violence aimed at extracting political compliance from the electorate, played out in the code of the village feud. Consequently, even after the fall of the regime in 1994, the culture of terror continued to persist across many localities. This enabled extraordinary acts of violence against members of the new regime, which the – now democratically diminished - Sri Lankan State was impotent to take punitive measures against. The destruction of democratic spaces, painfully built over the decades then, cannot be retrieved simply with the fall of an anti-democratic regime.

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