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Abstract
In this essay I argue that Tamilnet.com, an Internet news agency put together by a group of Sri Lankan Tamils to address the Tamil diaspora and influence English-speaking elites, subverted international news coverage during Sri Lanka's civil war by making "ironic" use of the discursive styles of journalism and anthropology. I also claim that this constituted a particular form of autoethnographic popular anthropology that challenged professional anthropology, and in some ways sought to replace it. In the first two sections of this essay, I dismantle the concept of "the popular" by showing that when anthropologists and social theorists use the term they are often referring to connected but distinct aspects of popularity which should be distinguished: Baudrillardian market popularity on the one hand, and Habermasian identity-resistance popularity on the other. I then show how the Internet, given its technology and software, is best seen as market popular in form but identity-resistance popular in content. In the remaining four sections I illustrate, ethnographically, how the creators of Tamilnet.com, while deeply embedded in civil war and a world-wide diaspora, recognized this aspect of the Internet and used it-again, "ironically"-to construct a site that advances their own nationalist interests, [ethnography, Internet, autoethnography, popular anthropology, journalism, irony, nationalism, Sri Lanka, Tamil, diaspora, agency, Toronto]
Introduction
This is a story about a small group of Sri Lankan Tamil people who have devised a way to use the Internet to talk about their community to the world at large.1 They have done this by creating an Internet news agency, Tamilnet.com that subtly subverts international journalistic practices by, rather surprisingly, emulating them exactly. In so doing they have produced a kind of strategic communal self-description that I will argue is genuinely "autoethnographic," in Mary Louise Pratt's sense of that term (1992), in that it consists of a systematic attempt by members of a disempowered community to represent itself to a hegemonic other-in this case, the Western media-in terms the hegemon can accept.21 also believe that it provides a clear example of a particular form of "popular anthropology." Their case is an interesting one, I think, because it suggestively illustrates a kind of politically generative 'popular anthropology' that may ultimately transform anthropology as a whole, and that has certainly altered my...