Sam Hammer’s Fulbright Journey Goes to Unexpected Places
When Sam Hammer went to Sri Lanka to do research for his Fulbright scholarship, his work took a surprising turn.
Hammer and CGS professor Meg Tyler were one of 800 faculty nationwide to receive the coveted Fulbright award, which sponsors U.S. and foreign participants for international educational exchanges across disciplines. A cultural landscape ecologist and associate professor of natural sciences and mathematics, Hammer went to Sri Lanka in September 2015 to study the country’s irrigation systems, known as “tanks.”
These ancient systems look like lakes, can be as old as 2500 years old, and act as “sustainable human-built ecosystems,” Hammer says. About 30,000 tanks are scattered across the Sri Lankan landscape and many are still in use. They’ve become wildlife refuges, places for people to wash clothes, and a source of drinking water. Hammer intended to find out how the lakes were shaped, study their soil and effects on the ecosystem, and learn how the people have been able to use them for so long. Along the way, he also found that the tanks are significant in the culture because they are a way that communities mark the landscape as theirs. “It’s a claim to the land,” Hammer says.
In the course of his study, he began to look at more contemporary tanks. Some were built as recently as the 1980s in areas that were once rainforests. He discovered that the government chopped down rainforests, built tanks meant to look like the ancient ones, and then displaced one ethnic group and claimed the land for another.
When Hammer looked at Dehiattakandiya, he found a town “hewn out of virgin jungle in the mid-1980s” and “a manufactured landscape that makes a political statement about place and power.” The 70,000 settlers brought in to settle the town were brought in to act as a bulwark against nearby Tamil and Muslim minorities, Hammer says—“pawns in a dangerous, incendiary demographic game.”
During his nine-month stay, Hammer found when he spoke to people, “There was so much trauma beneath the surface.” People had survived displacement, a 26-year civil war, and the 2004 tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people. “When you travel there as a tourist it’s a beautiful country,” he said, but the reality is sadder and more brutal. “I went as a scientist and I really thought this was an apolitical type of project to work on,” Hammer said. “And then I uncovered these aspects that were so heinous.”
Hammer wrote extensively about his travels while he was in Sri Lanka and reflected on them afterward in his blog. As his writing changed in response to what he encountered, he began writing poetry to capture what he was seeing and experiencing. In May, he wrote, “Sri Lanka has taken on a new character I couldn’t have understood before, a complex and multifaceted character that can’t be explained away by a single viewpoint or framework. There is just too much of everything.”
Photos courtesy of Sam Hammer