Anthropologizing Sri Lanka

Book excerpt: For nearly two and a half millennia Sri Lanka has figured in the Western imagination. Anthropologizing Sri Lanka examines how recent anthropologists have constructed and misconstrued the culture of this complex country. Susantha Goonatilake contends that post-colonial anthropology relating to Sri Lanka is worse than anything that colonial anthropology wrought - worse, even, than the colonial writings on the south Asian nation of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That this has occurred after the period of questioning and decolonization that anthropology went through in the 1960s and 1970s is all the more puzzling.