1st Edition
Exploring Confrontation Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History
Sri Lanka has been the meeting point of many ideologies and ways of being. This has spelt heterogeneity, syncretism and conflict. In drawing upon the practices of empirical research promoted by Western intellectual traditions, the author demonstrates the strengths of these practices through his contextualised engagement with the pogroms of 1915 and 1983, as well as other incidents, as at the same time he delineates some of the limits of empiricist rationality.
This book is replete with rich ethnographic detail and serves as an exercise in historical anthropology which illuminates Sri Lanka's political culture. It not only opens out the contrast between Western and Indian world views, but also explores the human condition by bringing out the immediacy surrounding acts of victimisation and human beings in conflict.
Introduction ONE A Pictorial Prelude: The Religious Circumstances of Political Action TWO Authors and their Situations Past and Present THREE The Asokan Persona as a Cultural Disposition FOUR "Caste Feudalism"? A Critique through the Asokan Persona and European Contrasts FIVE The Asokan Persona and its Reproduction in Modern Times SIX Four Twentieth Century Texts and the Asokan Persona The Particular and the General SEVEN The Imperialism of Silence under the British Raj: Arresting the Drum EIGHT Mentalities: Ideologues, Assailants, Historians and the Pogrom against the Moors in 1915, NINE 'I Shall have you Slippered': The General and the Particular in an Historical Conjuncture TEN Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka and Sinhala Perspectives: Barriers to Accommodation ELEVEN Ethnicity in Riposte at a Cricket Match: The Past for the Present TWELVE The 1956 Generations: After and Before Evocations: A Contrast THIRTEEN The Agony and the Ecstasy of a Pogrom: Southern Lanka, July 1983 FOURTEEN A Biographkal Epilogue
Biography
Michael Roberts
