This work, based on three years of fieldwork in a central region of Sri Lanka, approaches Sinhalese Buddhism from the viewpoint of regional-systems analysis. It attempts to integrate two diverse strands of scholarship on Sinhalese Buddhism: the many recent studies of the way central-level Buddhism is used to support political power in Sri Lanka; and the more traditional anthropological works focusing on village religion.The dissertation begins by exploring the role of Buddhism in Sri Lanka's national history. It then moves to a consideration of a single village community of pottery-makers in the Kurunagala District of the up-country culture area. The community's involvement in various regional social systems is described, with particular attention given to a spatial analysis of some 1400 extant marriages. Next, the village's Buddhist beliefs and activities are detailed, with special concern for delineating the territorial systems they reveal. The dissertation then moves away from describing the village to a regional-systems analysis of deity worship throughout the island. The origin of the pantheon's contemporary territorial structure is traced to eighteenth-century Kandyan politics. The local village is then placed against this carefully constructed background of Sinhalese Buddhism seen as a territorially-specific, national whole. The dissertation ends with a consideration of the degree of fit between the different regional systems described, and a summary account of how Sinhalese Buddhism is used at central, regional, and local levels to achieve political integration and legitimacy.The dissertation's major contribution to anthropology lies in the ethnography it presents of a hitherto unstudied Sri Lankan caste group; and in the application of a regional-systems methodology to central issues in Sri Lankan studies.
