nationalizing the local past in Sri Lanka: histories of nation and development in a Sinhalese village

Abstract

Focusing on a frontier settlement in southeastern Sri Lanka, this article examines how ideologies of the Sinhala Buddhist national past and local settlement history become articulated in the struggle over development. Employing an approach to cultural hegemony which departs from that generally used in social science, it shows how villagers adopt the dominant ideological frame of reference in order to enhance their claims to development resources. On the basis of this ethnographic analysis, it concludes that the villagers themselves help reproduce the general contours of a cultural hegemony inflected by the dominant ideologies of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. [hegemony, development, nationalism, national past, dominant ideology, Sri Lanka]

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 67 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.