Early in March 1996, the anthropologist Margaret Trawick, for the first time, pedaled an old bicycle across a bridge in Sri Lanka's eastern Batticaloa District to do fieldwork, as she puts it, beyond enemy lines. The enemy in question is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a ruthlessly efficient Tamil rebel army that, for thirty-two years, has been fighting the Sri Lankan national government—which is dominated by the country's majority Sinhala ethnic group—in order to establish a separate Tamil state, or Eelam, in the island nation's north and east. This conflict, as Trawick is aware, has been fought with little regard for “human rights” by all the various parties involved in it. But in a post-9/11 world, the LTTE's widespread use of suicide bombing, its recruiting of children—sometimes forcibly—and its use of all-female combat units has solidified its reputation among Western governments as a “terrorist” organization. Trawick, aware that she is treading on shifty ground, nevertheless expresses sympathy for the LTTE's cause (if not at all for its tactics or organization) because, as she outlines in useful introductory chapters, the repression and extreme violence that Sri Lankan Tamils have suffered (and continue to suffer) at the hands of various Sri Lankan governments have been well documented. In any case, Trawick's initial mission, as she recounts it, was twofold: to come to some understanding of the “worldviews” of people, especially children and young women, who have lived their entire lives in a war zone; and second, more controversially, to test and perhaps push beyond the simplistically demonizing portraits of male and female LTTE cadres put forward by their political and military opponents, who generally represent the Tigers—as LTTE cadres are called—as steely-eyed, cyanide-wearing terrorists fanatically devoted to their leader, the infamous Velupillai Prabhakaran. In this elegant if understandably wary book, Trawick, with great verve, successfully pulls off both these tasks. At the same time, she is wise enough to allow her account to force some theoretical and, frankly, moral questions about the nature of warfare and ethnography that, perhaps, ultimately have no answers—but are worth addressing nonetheless.

Given the tricky subject matter, some will fault Trawick for being too sympathetic to the Tigers, too “reflexive” (in that she does not exempt herself from the narrative), and too ethically compromised by her attempt to complicate previous discussions of the LTTE's female and child soldiers. But I think Trawick handles these issues well. First, although she is honest about her sympathy for the Tiger cause, Trawick does not seem to have been so influenced as to cover up painful details about Tiger practices in the Batticaloa District. Second, Trawick's reflexivity, as she points out, is not confessional and avoids fingernails-on-the-blackboard self-absorption; she simply uses herself, quite effectively, as a foil. Third, Trawick's discussions with female and young LTTE cadres are quite nuanced. Trawick's interviews with some of the “Birds of Freedom” (as the LTTE calls its female cadre) reveal women who are far more complicated than their representation by either the LTTE or their detractors would suggest. Trawick's discussion of child soldiers is also helpful. While not condoning the LTTE's use, sometimes, of children as young as thirteen, she correctly identifies this as part of a worldwide phenomenon related to global poverty, changes in small-arms technology, and the well-known malleability of the young—and points out that current international human rights law prohibits only nonstate groups, not states (e.g., Sri Lanka, the United States), from recruiting children younger than eighteen.

Finally, though, Trawick's conversations with both the LTTE cadres and Tamil civilians prove allusively complex. Batticaloa people tease Trawick, as they do each other, with a kind of play talk that Trawick calls “sūmma narratives.” Doing something sūmma, as Trawick points out, generally means doing something causally, without reason; speaking sūmma involves delivering, with deadpan believability, complete untruths about oneself and others. Trawick thus finds herself trying to peak around the edges of sūmma narratives and actions that call the very nature of ethnography into question, but also reveal, as child-like play, subtle alternatives to the various official narratives—of the LTTE and its opponents—that they, and we, are supposed to be using about them. Here Trawick's subtitle, “Warfare, Childhood, and Play in Batticaloa,” is relevant. Trawick claims that these seemingly distinct “mode[s] of being” (p. 8) are linked by Tamil literature and the Batticaloa people she interviewed. “Aren't you afraid when you go into battle?” she asks one young female cadre. “Chee—it is play . . . A game” (p. 157)—but, of course, it is also deadly. War, childhood, and play (including sūmma narratives), then, for Trawick, are transitory, liminal, ultimately “supernatural” forms of experience that lie outside habitual “natural” life and thus are free to pose alternatives to it. Here Trawick gestures at something subtle: wheels within wheels, or, rather, resistances within resistances—a way, in other words, in which Batticaloa Tamils, civilians, and LTTE alike, and perhaps anthropologists, too, may keep alive private complexity within the otherwise crushing circumstance of war.