Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne is Lecturer in Law at Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) and completed his doctorate at the University of Kent (U.K). He teaches courses in Native Title, Law and Culture, the Legal History of Asia and the Middle East, and Property Law.
摘要
Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka offers a new perspective on contemporary debates about Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka. In this book de Silva Wijeyeratne argues forcefully that Sinhalese Buddhism in the period prior to its engagement with the British colonial State signified a relatively unbounded (although at times boundary forming) set of practices that facilitated both the inclusion and exclusion of non-Buddhist concepts and people within a particular cosmological frame. Juxtaposing the premodern against the backdrop of colonial modernity, de Silva Wijeyeratne tells us that in contrast modern 'Sinhalese Buddhism/nationalism' is a much more reified and bounded concept, one imagined through a 19th century epistemology whose purpose was not so much inclusion, but a much more radical exclusion of non-Buddhist ideas and people.
In this insightful analysis modern Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, then, emerges through the conjunction of discourse, power and knowledge at a distinct moment in the trajectory of the colonial State. An intrinsic feature of this modernist moment is that premodern categories (such as the cosmic order) were subject to a bureaucratic re-valuation that generated profound consequences for State-society relations and the wider constitutional/legal imaginary. This book goes onto explore how key constitutional and nation-building moments were framed within the cultural milieu of modern Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism a nationalism that reveals the power of a re-valued Buddhist cosmic order to still inform the present.
Given the intensification of the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist project following the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, this book is of interest to scholars of nationalism, South Asian studies, the anthropology of ritual, and comparative legal history.
目次
Acknowledgements xiii Introduction: Sri Lankan nationalism and the presence of the past: towards a hermeneutic perspective 1 1 The Mahāvamsa as history and the pre-history of state formation 13 2 The cosmology of Buddhism, the Pāli chronicles and the ontology of evil 24 3 Textual practices, Sinhalese Buddhist consciousness and dissonance 46 4 Galactic polities, cosmography and Buddhist sovereignty 59 5 The transformation of Sinhalese Buddhist consciousness in its colonial and postcolonial relation 78 6 Independence, land, citizenship and the cosmic order 101 7 Sinhalese revolutionaries, linguistic nationalism and Buddhism reimagined 117 8 Cosmology, constitutionalism and the Tamil other 135 9 Centralization, decentralization and the cosmology of Buddhism 155 10 Conclusion: rethinking community in Sri Lanka 193 xii Contents Notes 197 Bibliography 225 Index 242
