Developing a Nation of Villages Rural community as state formation in Sri Lanka

district in which the settlement is situated (Moneragala District) is very sparsely populated. Furthermore, its inhabitants are people who only recently migrated from land-scarce regions of the island to encroach on state-owned land, known as Crown Land. They are, in effect, people who had left their home villages in search of land and a new life, one hopefully better than the one they left. They are, nevertheless, poor and have struggled for several years to gain government recognition of their ’landholdings ’ so that they might begin to receive resources for the ’development ’ of their community. They finally gained this recognition in 1985. Suduwatura Ara Gama is thus like many other ’villages ’ on the frontier of development. It is a settlement whose inhabitants are struggling for subsistence and for a life that will bring them and their children greater security (see, for instance, Vitebsky, 1984). While settlers believe they have legitimate and valid reasons for moving into the frontier, from the perspective of the government, movement into the frontier is by nature suspect. The frontier, in the official view, is an area with a reputation for lawlessness and is thus a region that requires careful surveillance. This is especially the case in the southeast. Whether true or not, it is a region that is popularly believed to be inhabited by people who harbor anti-government sentiments. Adding weight to these beliefs is the fact that in the late 1980s the area became an important base of a Sinhalese supported insurgency against the Sinhalese controlled government (the Sinhalese are the majority ethnic community in Sri Lanka). This insur-gency, led by a right-wing nationalist party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), was, in simplest terms, primarily fueled by dissatisfac-tion with the way the government was handling the Tamil separatist struggle in the north and east and for its lack of concern for the plight of Sr