Demonic Violence and Moral Panic in Postwar Sri Lanka: Explaining the Grease Devil Crisis
Demonic Violence and Moral Panic in Postwar Sri Lanka: Explaining the Grease Devil Crisis
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战后斯里兰卡的恶魔暴力和道德恐慌：解释油魔危机
DOI：
10.1017/s0021911815000522
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发表时间：
2015
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
R. Venugopal
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
R. Venugopal
社会科学如何解释危机、崩溃、暴力和崩溃事件？本文通过研究战后斯里兰卡由一种被称为“油脂魔鬼”的神秘雄性捕食者引起的群众紧张和焦虑的非凡事件来解决这个广泛的问题。2011年年中，关于这个神秘、无处不在和强大的存在广泛袭击妇女的报道导致斯里兰卡农村和城郊大部分地区的警惕和恐惧程度提高。它对该岛以前饱受战争蹂躏的东北部产生了特别强烈的影响，导致受影响社区与警察和军队之间发生暴力冲突，而警察和军队被广泛认为是同谋。本文试图重建和理解油脂魔鬼危机的主要材料，包括实地考察，并通过参与一系列的概念和分析车辆在历史和社会科学文献，包括社会学的道德恐慌，人类学的魔术，斯里兰卡恶魔，霸权控制。在这样做的时候，它确定了三种不同的方式来理解危机：（一）因果关系;（二）工具/功能和;（三）事件作为隐喻;并从事在何种程度上，这些涉及到现有的证据，以产生分析相关的见解的批判性评价。
How can episodes of crisis, breakdown, violence and collapse be explained in the social sciences? This paper addresses this broad question by studying an extraordinary episode of mass tension and anxiety in post-war Sri Lanka caused by a mystery male predator known as the ‘grease devil’. Reports over widespread attacks on women by this shadowy, ubiquitous, and powerful being led to heightened levels of vigilance and fear across large parts of rural and peri-urban Sri Lanka in mid-2011. It had a particularly strong impact on the formerly war-torn north-east of the island where it led to violent confrontations between affected communities and the police and military, who were widely held to be complicit. This paper attempts to reconstruct and understand the grease devil crisis by drawing on primary materials, including fieldwork, and by engaging with a range of concepts and analytical vehicles across the historical and social science literature including the sociology of moral panics, the anthropology of magic, Sri Lankan demonology,and hegemonic control. In doing so, it identifies three different ways to understand the crisis: (i) causal; (ii) instrumental/functional and; (iii) event as metaphor; and engages in a critical evaluation of the extent to which each of these relate to the available evidence to produce analytically relevant insights.