Mythri Jegathesan - Tea and Solidarity

Lekh

In the sixth episode, I speak to Mythri Jegathesan, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Santa Clara University on her new book - Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka published by University of Washington Press in July 2019. In her book, Jegathesan presents the stories of the women, men, and children who have built their lives on tea plantations in the SL hill country. Through feminist decolonial ethnographic methods, the book recenters the focus on Tamil women and their quest for dignity and respect through their labour. Jegathesan's vivid ethnography enables us to see a community that has been marginalised but whose labor and contributions are central to make sense of Sri Lanka’s global recognition as a leading tea exporting country. The conversation begins by asking how Jegathesan got interested in studying the Hill Country Tamils before covering how legacies of dispossession shaped the lives of women and men in this community over generations. The conversation moves to how Jegathesan went about studying this community focusing on the ethical and methodological choices she made and had to make through her research and their implications regarding how scholars approach fieldwork and the issues they study. The conversation ends by considering the future of the Hill country tamils as politics within Sri Lanka narrows and what that portends going ahead.

Resources

Mythri Jegathesan - Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Post War Sri Lanka

https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295745657/tea-and-solidarity/