This qualitative research used the Long Interview method to study cultural and gender influences on mental health, health beliefs, health behaviour, help-seeking and treatment expectations for mental health problems in newcomers to Canada who are members of an ethnocultural, visible minority population - the Sri Lankan Tamils. The study employed a comparative design and analyzed data from interviews with Tamil men (N=8) and Tamil women (N=8) who self-identified as having been diagnosed with depression, and service providers (N=8) who provide frontline mental health and related services to the Sri Lankan Tamil community. The objectives were to a) understand cultural and gender factors inherent in the Sri Lankan Tamil community; b) investigate how these cultural and gender factors impact mental health and influence the trajectory of help-seeking and treatment for depression in the Sri Lankan Tamil community; c) explore the intersection of culture and gender as it relates to health behaviour; and d) explore service providers’ perceptions of the influence of culture and gender in relation to help-seeking for mental health problems and the application of this understanding to service delivery. The study found that the respondents equated social function with health and that this concept informed help-seeking and treatment expectations. Socially appropriate functioning was seen as an indicator of health, and this differed by gender. Gender-differentiated social stressors contributed to depression. Women played a role as enablers of care, both for family members and acquaintances. Men were more resistant to help-seeking and tended to disengage from care. There was a distinct preference for service providers who understood the culture and spoke Tamil. Religious groups served a social support function. Family physicians and Tamil service providers in the social service sectors were identified as key players in the pathways to care. Service providers did not appear to understand the community’s holistic view of health; however, they did use their knowledge of the community to make adaptations to practice. Recommendations that result from these findings include health promotion and prevention strategies beyond the traditional health care system, targeted culture and gender-informed interventions, and the need for multisectoral collaborations.

Dans cette étude, l’auteure décrit les relations entre des catholiques et des hindous chez les Tamouls originaires du Sri Lanka qui ont immigré à Montréal. Ce faisant, elle accentuera son étude sur les perspectives des catholiques tamouls, et ce particulièrement au cours de pèlerinages et à travers la dévotion mariale. Les relations entre catholiques et hindous sont ainsi codifiées par des normes sociales et culturelles. De plus, l’auteure démontre que la migration, de même que la société d’accueil, influence les interactions entre ces deux groupes. Dans ce contexte, la notion de syncrétisme devient un concept secondaire qui est principalement étudié en lien avec les normes sociales tamoules. Finalement, l’auteure démontre, à travers les pèlerinages et la dévotion mariale, que les catholiques entretiennent des rapports contradictoires avec les hindous. / In this study, the author discusses relations between Catholics and Hindus among Sri Lankan Tamils living in Montreal. By doing this, the author puts forward the prospects of Tamil Catholics through Catholic pilgrimages and Marian devotion. Thus, relations between Catholics and Hindus appear to be codified by social and cultural standards. Also, religious interactions seem to be transformed partly by migration and by the host society. In this context, « syncretism » becomes a secondary concept that is primarily studied in relations with Tamil social standards. Finally, through pilgrimages and Marian devotion, the author argues that Tamil Catholics maintain contradictory relations with Hindus.

Bibliography: leaves 318-325 / iv, 325 leaves : maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Discipline of Anthropology, 1991

The purpose of this study is to investigate how local and foreign newspapers used the war journalism and peace journalism frames when covering the Sri Lankan civil war, and to uncover subframes specific to the conflict. The first part of the thesis provides an in- depth literature review that addresses the history of the conflict and media freedom in Sri Lanka. The newspaper articles for the textual analysis were selected from mainstream Sri Lankan and U.S newspapers: the Daily News (a state sponsored newspaper) and Daily Mirror from Sri Lanka, and the New York Times and Washington Post from the U.S. A total of 185 articles were analyzed and categorized into war journalism and peace journalism. Next, subframes specific to the Sri Lankan conflict were identified. The overall coverage is dominated by the peace journalism frame, and the strongest war journalism frame is visible in local newspaper articles. Furthermore, two subframes specific to the Sri Lanka conflict were identified: war justification subframe and humanitarian crisis subframe. In conclusion, the study reveals that in the selected newspapers, the peace journalism frame dominated the coverage of the Sri Lankan civil war. All in all, while adding to the growing scholarship of media framing in international conflicts, the study will benefit newspaper editors and decision-makers by providing textual analysis of content produced from the coverage of war and conflict during a dangerous time period for both journalists and the victims of war.

THESIS submitted by Wannisinghe Mudiyanselage Jayantha to Hong Kong Baptist University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and entitled "Emerging Femininities in Selected Sri Lankan English Fiction" May 2019. The study documents the rise of emerging Sri Lankan feminine subjectivities as portrayed in post-independence novels in English by Punyakante Wijenaike, Nihal de Silva, and Chandani Lokuge. It attempts to interpret the rise of socially constructed traits of new womanhood and shifting gender norms responding to significant transformations in post-independence Sri Lanka economy and society during which the nation has rapidly shifted from a traditional rural economy to an industrialized since the 1978 free market reforms embraced with policies of globalization and neoliberalism. The selected novels are historicized by means of specific data indicating that any compensations traditionally afforded to Sri Lankan women through the collusion of colonialism with patriarchy are being challenged by the current globalization of opportunity and risk, even as Sri Lankan women continue to engage in the far older struggles for respect in traditional contexts and spaces (Wijenaike), take up arms in service in the name of nation-building projects (De Silva), or search for greater life opportunities by means of out- migration and eventual return (Lokuge). Challenges to conventional colonial-patriarchal ideology, with attention to specific objects symbolizing alternative (or even "deviant") femininity long preceding modernity, are the central focus of Punyakante Wijenaike's Giraya and Amulet. The use of a Marxist-feminist approach, localized in the setting of the walauwe, allows for the examination of potentials and limits for women's subjectivities as they emerged in the earliest 1970s-era post-independence novels. Nihal de Silva's The Road from Elephant Pass explores the fictionalized portrayal of women soldiers, conscripted to the LTTE in the early 1980s, and the effects of a revolutionary posture upon traditional gender roles. The tension in de Silva's novel between the political liberation project as national/romantic allegory uniting Sinhala and Tamil causes as ultimately endorsing patriarchal claims of Anderson's "imagined communities" thesis in the dramatic context of women's participation in the civil war. Using a "Fourth World" sovereignty frame, the final chapter of the project analyzes the potential rewards and risks of diasporic experience, for women protagonists in Chandani Lokuge's If the Moon Smiled and Turtle Nest. Collectively, the analyses indicate how Sri Lankan novels in English have documented the struggles, potentials, and continuing vulnerabilities around the emergence of new feminine subjectivities for post-independence Sri Lankan women.

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