Steven Kemper

The Buddhist Monkhood, the Law, and the State in Colonial Sri Lanka

Neither the unremitting imposition of alien ways nor the faithful preservation of local ones, colonialism proceeds by the melding of imperial practices with indigenous social forms, creating new arrangements that look like old ones. Moreover, colonialism is an intersubjective, interpractical relationship; as a growing number of historical and anthropological studies have shown, the natives are unlikely to be passive receivers of imposed forms. However difficult their circumstances, the colonized busily construe and misconstrue the colonizers and their social practices, manipulating both to their own advantage. What follows is a “working misunderstanding.”

Reform and Segmentation in Monastic Fraternities in Low Country Sri Lanka

The Buddhist monkhood in each of the Theravāda countries of Southern Asia—Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka—is segmented into smaller fraternities (nikāyas) . In Sri Lanka these fraternities have proliferated since the early nineteenth century. This proliferation has been interpreted as evidence of a Buddhist reform or return to orthodoxy and portrayed against the background of Sinhalese society as a whole. In this essay I argue that the establishment of twenty-five such nikāyas in the Low Country of Sri Lanka can be better understood both as serving a variety of interests (of which reform is one) and in terms of regional groups of monks and lay people.

The peregrinations of pattini

Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. xvii + 629 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index.

Hierarchy and Its Discontents: Culture and the Politics of Consciousness in Caste Society

42.00 cloth.