Exploring Confrontation: Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History

Sri Lanka has been a meeting point for many ideologies and ways of being. This has resulted in heterogeneity, syncretism and conflict. In drawing upon the practices of empirical research promoted by Western intellectual traditions, Michael Roberts demonstrates the strengths of these practices through his contextualised engagement with the pogroms of 1915 and 1983, as well as other incidents. At the same time he delineates some of the limits of empiricist rationality.
This book is replete with rich ethnographic detail and serves as an exercise in historical anthropology which illuminates Sri Lanka's political culture. It not only opens out the contrast between Western and Indian world views, but also explores the human condition by highlighting the immediacy human beings in conflict.

Michael Roberts has taught at the Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide since 1977.