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This thesis examines the sources for generating financial and social capital for ethnic small business owners, particularly for Sri Lankan ethnic small businesses in Australia. The results further our understanding of raising capital by introducing a model by generating capital for ethnic small businesses. This model identifies the informal and formal sources of financial capital, factors influencing those sources and networking activities for generating social capital. We found that competition and rising costs are the major business problem for Sri Lankan ethnic small business owners, not raising capital. The reasons for using personal savings as the major surce of capital include difficulties associated with approaching financial institutions and government agencies. The role of networking with ethnic associations was also explored. Finally, recommendations are made to business owners on how to overcome various business problems and to promote better networking activities through ethnic associations. Recommendations are also made to government agency officials to provide information about government progammes, and to financial institutions about satisfying banking needs of ethnic small business owners. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The aim of this thesis is to examine the employment situation of recent Sri Lankan skilled immigrants in Victoria and whether they need further education and re-training in order to face emerging technological changes or to update their skills. The underemployment and unemployment problem faced by the Sri Lankan skilled immigrants is an issue for both the Australian economy and the migrants. The following set of premises has been used for the study; a) the migrants' educational qualifications, training and skills are recognised by the Department of Immigration Multicultural & Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) of Australia, b) they are having difficulties in finding and keeping suitable jobs, although some have found employment commensurate with their qualifications, and c) the reason for their difficulties are many and complex. The essential format of the research is to identify and explain the many and complex reasons for such unemployment or underemployment. This study is based upon a survey of three contrasting Sri Lankan immigrant groups: a) trade persons and related workers with certificates or no qualifications b) technical or associate professionals with diploma or associate diploma level qualifications and c) professionals (engineers) with university degrees or their equivalent. Subjects for the surveys were through three relevant alumni organisations based in Melbourne, and through personal contact. The survey was supplemented with some applying qualitative methods that involved unstructured interviews, and small case studies. Recommendations have been proposed to assist in solving the issues that were identified through the study. Although the recommendations mentioned in the study provide a starting point, it is stressed that further research is needed to be undertaken before implementing such suggested solutions. Therefore, this thesis serves as a foundation in highlighting the loss of services of skilled immigrants within the labour market in Australia, particularly among the Sri Lankan community, and proposing recommendations to address this issue.

The fieldwork on which this dissertation is based was done in Sri Lanka from 1984 to 1986 when the critique of the of the anthropologist as 'Knower of the Other' was surfacing in the literature (Fabian, 1983, Clifford and Marcus, 1986, Marcus and Fisher 1986). When I returned from the field most works of this genre were generally unknown in Adelaide. However, I began by writing with the insights of Bakhtin who himself had inspired central dimensions of the burgeoning critique of anthropological practice. Like Bakhtin's work, the debates about ethnographic authority continue to invite us to reflect upon the methods employed in the production of any text which claims to define the world of others. It therefore seems appropriate for me to preface this dissertation by highlighting relevant features of the processes which have culminated in this work, Cosmic Horizons and Social Voices. The nature of my fieldwork was distinctive. I did not work in a spatially constrained community. Rather my work was anchored by the work of specialist ritual practitioners, both deity priests and performers. Because the practitioners themselves not only live in dispersed locations but are also highly mobile in relation to the work that they do, my work entailed extensive travel in and between urban centres and rural areas across several provincial divisions. In the course of eighteen months of this kind of fieldwork, I attended in excess of fifty rituals of different types and scale. Over time, I developed personalized networks with more than fifty ritual practitioners privileging me to a broad span of rituals. I worked regularly, and often intimately, with a core of five priests and ten performers to give depth to my understandings. Many of these practitioners appropriated me to themselves at rituals where they publicly announced the purpose of my presence to ritual audiences as being to document Sinhala culture. I was claimed by them as 'our madam' ('ape noona') and as a university lecturer, which they knew very well I was not. This public acknowledgement legitimated my documentation of performances which were, after all, paid for by others. It also had the effect that the sponsors largely treated me as a member of the performing troupe. My growing familiarity with ritual practitioners had the further ramification that some of them insisted that I discuss the meanings of the rituals I documented with those people whom they considered specialists in their field. Soon, therefore, in addition to attending rituals, I spent a great deal of my time entertaining, and being entertained by, ritual specialists with whom I discussed deeper levels of their knowledge and work. In this way, and through my own unique constellation of relationships, I accumulated ritual knowledge, albeit at the theoretical, not practical, level. Some people shared esoteric and valued information with me that they would not disseminate to others with whom they were in competition. This field exercise provided a singular vantage point from which I have interpreted Sinhalese Buddhist ritual practices. While the final selection of rituals interpreted in the dissertation is mine, and represents only aspects of the larger body of knowledge carried collectively by Sri Lanka's ritual practitioners, the interpretations are based not simply on my observations, but on this body of knowledge which was shared with me even as it was constantly discussed, disputed, disseminated and transformed by ritual practitioners. My understandings of the meanings of ritual were consolidated in both quasi-formal and informal social settings, at my home and theirs, with people renowned as ritual experts by their peers. I collected ritual knowledge like ritual practitioners, in bits and pieces from different people. And, like practitioners who publicly acknowledge only one gurunnanse, I acknowledge mine formally, in the public arena of my own world, in the Introduction. There is another dimension of my field experience that I want to mention before discussing how it was metamorphosed by writing. My three children, Grant, Vanessa and Mark accompanied me to Sri Lanka at the ages of 9, 11 and 12 respectively. Their beautiful, inquisitive and effervescent youth attracted many people to us as a family which meant that they became wonderful sources of new friends and colloquial information. Both of the boys were fascinated with the unique rhythms of Sri Lanka's ritual music and dance and before long, they were keen to learn these for themselves. Grant was deeply disappointed that he could not because, like Vanessa, he was committed to his schooling and, even at 12, he was taller than many of the ritual practitioners. Mark was younger and, in any case, of a much smaller build so he became a pupil of Elaris Weerasingha, a ritual practitioner with international fame, who became my husband. Mark left school to work with Elaris and his sons, often at rituals other than those I attended. With Elaris as his gurunnanse, Mark made his ritual debut just as novice Sinhala performers do. The Sri Lankan press discovered this unique cross-cultural relationship in late December 1986 just as we were preparing to return to Australia. Memorable photographs appeared in both English language and Sinhala papers accompanied by full-page stories praising Elaris for his teaching and acclaiming Mark for proficiency in dance and fluency in Sinhala language and verse. We were delighted. Mark and Elaris continued to perform together in Adelaide at the Festival of Arts, on television and at multicultural art shows before Elaris returned to Sri Lanka to live for family reasons early in 1988. I remember Elaris for both the joy of our union and the pain of our parting. I want to thank him here for sharing his culture with us and especially for the way he supported me to believe in my understandings of the rituals he knew so well. I transcribed my field experience with the help of Bakhtinian insights. The rituals I studied are analysed for their performative value under the heading Cosmic Horizons with faithful reference to what their producers, including Elaris, consider to be one of their most important dimensions if they are to be efficacious; where and when they should occur. I call these facets of ritual their time-space co-ordinates and I employ Bakhtin's conception of the chronotype, in conjunction with practitioner's naming practices, to give them the analytical emphasis they deserve. Using elaborations of ritual meanings articulated to me by ritual specialists and colloquial understandings of words rather than their linguistic etymologies, I variously explore the chronotopic dimensions of the names of supernatural. beings, myths, ritual boundaries and segments to render explicit those unifying symbolic dimensions of a ritual corpus which would otherwise remain implicit to all except ritual practitioners. In particular, the Bakhtinian conceptions I use to analyse ritual serve to reveal and crystallize an integral relationship between the time-space co-ordinates inherent in ritual performance and the oscillations of the sun, moon and earth. Part 1 is my synthesis but it is based on the time-space co-ordinates of ritual; it is deliberately constructionist but it elaborates what I learned from ritual practitioners in the ways I have described. Part 2 is deconstructionist, it is an attempt to represent rituals as events with complex and indirect discursive reference to the elegant symbolic dimensions of the ritual performances themselves. As its title, Social Voices, suggests, Part 2 of the thesis privileges discourse about ritual - by ritual practitioners, ritual sponsors, Buddhist monks, the media and scholars - above the structural symmetry or chronotopic logic of the ritual corpus. It is in this domain, just to offer one example, that religion (agama) is distinguished from culture (sanskruthaiya) and exploited to make value judgements about people's participation in orthodox or unorthodox ritual practices, a judgement which is a possibility of the comic horizons constituted in ritual but which is not, as I argue, determined by them. This dissertation is ultimately an attempt to represent, in written form, fragments of an-Other world through a prosaic Bakhtinian focus on the way particular people named and talked about that world to me. Although I chose not to identify individuals in the text for personal reasons, my methodology is purposeful, giving value to Sinhalese performative ritual as the product of specialist knowledge. And, in keeping with the new imperatives for writing ethnography, this preface describing my field experience is intended to make explicit the way the dissertation explores its foundation in relationships between Self and Other, Observer and Observed, without abrogating the responsibility of authorship. Not pretending to be the voice of the Other, Cosmic Horizons and Social Voices is my voice, echoing the voice of Sri Lanka as it spoke to me. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Social Sciences, 1990.

Thesis--Göttingen. / Includes selected texts from Tripiṭaka in Pali (romanized) and German. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-240) and index.

The fieldwork on which this dissertation is based was done in Sri Lanka from 1984 to 1986 when the critique of the of the anthropologist as 'Knower of the Other' was surfacing in the literature (Fabian, 1983, Clifford and Marcus, 1986, Marcus and Fisher 1986). When I returned from the field most works of this genre were generally unknown in Adelaide. However, I began by writing with the insights of Bakhtin who himself had inspired central dimensions of the burgeoning critique of anthropological practice. Like Bakhtin's work, the debates about ethnographic authority continue to invite us to reflect upon the methods employed in the production of any text which claims to define the world of others. It therefore seems appropriate for me to preface this dissertation by highlighting relevant features of the processes which have culminated in this work, Cosmic Horizons and Social Voices. The nature of my fieldwork was distinctive. I did not work in a spatially constrained community. Rather my work was anchored by the work of specialist ritual practitioners, both deity priests and performers. Because the practitioners themselves not only live in dispersed locations but are also highly mobile in relation to the work that they do, my work entailed extensive travel in and between urban centres and rural areas across several provincial divisions. In the course of eighteen months of this kind of fieldwork, I attended in excess of fifty rituals of different types and scale. Over time, I developed personalized networks with more than fifty ritual practitioners privileging me to a broad span of rituals. I worked regularly, and often intimately, with a core of five priests and ten performers to give depth to my understandings. Many of these practitioners appropriated me to themselves at rituals where they publicly announced the purpose of my presence to ritual audiences as being to document Sinhala culture. I was claimed by them as 'our madam' ('ape noona') and as a university lecturer, which they knew very well I was not. This public acknowledgement legitimated my documentation of performances which were, after all, paid for by others. It also had the effect that the sponsors largely treated me as a member of the performing troupe. My growing familiarity with ritual practitioners had the further ramification that some of them insisted that I discuss the meanings of the rituals I documented with those people whom they considered specialists in their field. Soon, therefore, in addition to attending rituals, I spent a great deal of my time entertaining, and being entertained by, ritual specialists with whom I discussed deeper levels of their knowledge and work. In this way, and through my own unique constellation of relationships, I accumulated ritual knowledge, albeit at the theoretical, not practical, level. Some people shared esoteric and valued information with me that they would not disseminate to others with whom they were in competition. This field exercise provided a singular vantage point from which I have interpreted Sinhalese Buddhist ritual practices. While the final selection of rituals interpreted in the dissertation is mine, and represents only aspects of the larger body of knowledge carried collectively by Sri Lanka's ritual practitioners, the interpretations are based not simply on my observations, but on this body of knowledge which was shared with me even as it was constantly discussed, disputed, disseminated and transformed by ritual practitioners. My understandings of the meanings of ritual were consolidated in both quasi-formal and informal social settings, at my home and theirs, with people renowned as ritual experts by their peers. I collected ritual knowledge like ritual practitioners, in bits and pieces from different people. And, like practitioners who publicly acknowledge only one gurunnanse, I acknowledge mine formally, in the public arena of my own world, in the Introduction. There is another dimension of my field experience that I want to mention before discussing how it was metamorphosed by writing. My three children, Grant, Vanessa and Mark accompanied me to Sri Lanka at the ages of 9, 11 and 12 respectively. Their beautiful, inquisitive and effervescent youth attracted many people to us as a family which meant that they became wonderful sources of new friends and colloquial information. Both of the boys were fascinated with the unique rhythms of Sri Lanka's ritual music and dance and before long, they were keen to learn these for themselves. Grant was deeply disappointed that he could not because, like Vanessa, he was committed to his schooling and, even at 12, he was taller than many of the ritual practitioners. Mark was younger and, in any case, of a much smaller build so he became a pupil of Elaris Weerasingha, a ritual practitioner with international fame, who became my husband. Mark left school to work with Elaris and his sons, often at rituals other than those I attended. With Elaris as his gurunnanse, Mark made his ritual debut just as novice Sinhala performers do. The Sri Lankan press discovered this unique cross-cultural relationship in late December 1986 just as we were preparing to return to Australia. Memorable photographs appeared in both English language and Sinhala papers accompanied by full-page stories praising Elaris for his teaching and acclaiming Mark for proficiency in dance and fluency in Sinhala language and verse. We were delighted. Mark and Elaris continued to perform together in Adelaide at the Festival of Arts, on television and at multicultural art shows before Elaris returned to Sri Lanka to live for family reasons early in 1988. I remember Elaris for both the joy of our union and the pain of our parting. I want to thank him here for sharing his culture with us and especially for the way he supported me to believe in my understandings of the rituals he knew so well. I transcribed my field experience with the help of Bakhtinian insights. The rituals I studied are analysed for their performative value under the heading Cosmic Horizons with faithful reference to what their producers, including Elaris, consider to be one of their most important dimensions if they are to be efficacious; where and when they should occur. I call these facets of ritual their time-space co-ordinates and I employ Bakhtin's conception of the chronotype, in conjunction with practitioner's naming practices, to give them the analytical emphasis they deserve. Using elaborations of ritual meanings articulated to me by ritual specialists and colloquial understandings of words rather than their linguistic etymologies, I variously explore the chronotopic dimensions of the names of supernatural. beings, myths, ritual boundaries and segments to render explicit those unifying symbolic dimensions of a ritual corpus which would otherwise remain implicit to all except ritual practitioners. In particular, the Bakhtinian conceptions I use to analyse ritual serve to reveal and crystallize an integral relationship between the time-space co-ordinates inherent in ritual performance and the oscillations of the sun, moon and earth. Part 1 is my synthesis but it is based on the time-space co-ordinates of ritual; it is deliberately constructionist but it elaborates what I learned from ritual practitioners in the ways I have described. Part 2 is deconstructionist, it is an attempt to represent rituals as events with complex and indirect discursive reference to the elegant symbolic dimensions of the ritual performances themselves. As its title, Social Voices, suggests, Part 2 of the thesis privileges discourse about ritual - by ritual practitioners, ritual sponsors, Buddhist monks, the media and scholars - above the structural symmetry or chronotopic logic of the ritual corpus. It is in this domain, just to offer one example, that religion (agama) is distinguished from culture (sanskruthaiya) and exploited to make value judgements about people's participation in orthodox or unorthodox ritual practices, a judgement which is a possibility of the comic horizons constituted in ritual but which is not, as I argue, determined by them. This dissertation is ultimately an attempt to represent, in written form, fragments of an-Other world through a prosaic Bakhtinian focus on the way particular people named and talked about that world to me. Although I chose not to identify individuals in the text for personal reasons, my methodology is purposeful, giving value to Sinhalese performative ritual as the product of specialist knowledge. And, in keeping with the new imperatives for writing ethnography, this preface describing my field experience is intended to make explicit the way the dissertation explores its foundation in relationships between Self and Other, Observer and Observed, without abrogating the responsibility of authorship. Not pretending to be the voice of the Other, Cosmic Horizons and Social Voices is my voice, echoing the voice of Sri Lanka as it spoke to me. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Social Sciences, 1990.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, Discipline of Anthropology, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-325).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-246) Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Women's Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 336-370). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR51698

published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy