Sri Lanka: politics, culture and history
Exploring Confrontation
This book brings together thirteen essays, six of which are reprints to which have been added
seven original pieces written for the book. These essays are organized in four sections:
Introduction; Past and Present; The Particular and the General; and Evocations.
Taken in sum, the book is an illustration of historical ethnography. The essays highlight the
place of agents in the construction of the world around them, by establishing linkages
between selected incidents and broader socio-political processes. They reveal the webs of
significance attached to provocative statements in moments of confrontation. As such, they
draw out the virtues of detailed empirical work. But such work is then extended into a debate
with Sri Lankan peers which seeks to demonstrate the blinkered limits of the British
empirical tradition.
The four essays in 'Past and Present' dwell on the cakravarti style of leadership
in Sri Lanka. Though this model (the 'Asokan Persona') is used to question the use of feudal
terminology for the ancient Sinhala kingdoms, the principal focus is on the modern period:
how this pattern has been reproduced in recent centuries and how it sustains a tendency
towards overcentralized forms of governance.
Several essays depict and analyze the ingredients, events and processes which have moulded
Sinhala ideology in recent centuries. One reveals the ideological barriers which were central
to the emergence of the present Sinhala-Tamil conflict, while two articles develop in intricate
detail the perspectives and processes which led Sinhalese from a wide occupational spectrum
to assault the Mohammedan Moors in British Ceylon in 1915. One of these, "The
Imperialism of Silence" provides an analysis of a 'perfect' example of Kultur
Kampf: where the British ruler's egalitarian code of respect for all religions premised
on the assumption that silence should be a mark of respect in fact disadvantaged -- and
disturbed -- Buddhists (and Hindus) for whom sabda puja (noise worship) was integral to
some acts of worship. Two other essays explore the significance of verbal altercations, one
at a cricket match in 1981 and another in 1929 between a labour politician and a police
officer during a trade union dispute.
All these essays are cast in an analytical mode. In the last section, however, a counterpoint
is made: the limitations of the 'standard' modalities of social science are revealed by a
literary essay written in a compulsive mood or -- an essay that is nevertheless not fictional
but empirical, one which evokes the immediacy of conflict and the horrors of victimization
during the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983.
The book is richly illustrated, runs to 333 pages of text and carries a detailed index and long
bibliography. It is available both in hardback and in paperback, and is published by Harwood
Academic Publishers.
Michael Roberts (ed.)
Exploring Confrontation. Sri Lanka: politics, culture and history
ISBN 3-7186-5506-3, hardback: £42,-
ISBN 3-7186-5992-3, paperback: £ 19,-
Harwood Academic Publishers
P.O. Box 90
Reading, RG1 8JL
England
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