Susantha Goonatilake. Anthropologizing Sri Lanka: A Eurocentric Misadventure. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Extract

In this “exercise in the sociology of anthropology” (p. xii), Susantha Goonatilake portrays contemporary anthropology of Sri Lanka as “worse than anything colonial anthropology wrought, and, in fact, worse than the colonial writings of the 19<+>th and early 20<+>th centuries” (xiii). Goonatilake focuses his attacks on selected works by Gananath Obeyesekere, Richard Gombrich, Bruce Kapferer, and Stanley Tambiah, and in the last chapter widens his critique to include almost every other scholar of Sri Lanka. While Goonatilake offers very good summaries of these texts and provides some pointed critiques, especially of Tambiah's more explicitly political writings, his analysis does not add up to an effective dismissal of post-colonial anthropological thought on Sri Lanka. While Goonatilake's book seems to try to be a Sri Lankan version of Ronald Inden's Imagining India, he undermines this ambitious project with his personal political animosities and his misreadings of anthropology.