Abstract

I start from a moment in the 1950s when a small group of Cambridge researchers – Edmund Leach, Ben Farmer and Nur Yalman, followed soon after by Stanley Tambiah and Gananath Obeyesekere – initiated a conversation, fuelled by bouts of intense fieldwork, about land, kinship and social order in rural Sri Lanka. In my second scene, from the early 1980s, a new generation of researchers returned to the same questions, but in a landscape increasingly shaped by nationalist imaginings of the rural. In my final scene, the rural has become synonymous with poverty and its pathological consequences – self-harm and suicide, alcohol abuse and violence. What links these scenes, and what will become the subject-matter for this lecture is, in Raymond Williams’ words, “a problem of perspective”.