Exploring Confrontation: Sri Lanka
Subtitle: Politics, Culture and History (Studies in Anthropology and History, V. 14)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Routledge
Published: June 1, 1995
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 377
ISBN-13: 9783718655069
Subjects: Anthropology; Asian / Middle Eastern history; Human rights; Political science & theory; Sri Lanka; Ethnology; History - General History; Social life and customs; India; Anthropology - General; Asia - India & South Asia; Social Science / Anthropology / General; Ethnicity; Ethnic relations
First sentence: Our first picture was a shocking revelation to contemporaries.
Description: Sri Lanka has been a meeting point for many ideologies and ways of being. This has resulted in heterogeneity, syncretism and conflict. In drawing upon the practices of empirical research promoted by Western intellectual traditions, Michael Roberts demonstrates the strengths of these practices through his contextualised engagement with the pogroms of 1915 and 1983, as well as other incidents. 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 highlighting the immediacy human beings in conflict.