Abstract:
The sociology of knowledge posits social networks and frameworks that filter the
production, acceptance and dissemination of legitimized knowledge. Sri Lankan
anthropology, over 50 years after independence is still largely written by foreigners or
foreign based Sri Lankan academics for foreign audiences and have given rise to a body
of knowledge largely tangential to the truth. These flights of fancy have been allowed to
occur because there is a disjuncture between the academic discourse within Sri Lanka
say in the universities, and that occurring outside the country in this anthropology
literature. The obvious question is: what are the institutions within Sri Lanka, outside of
the university and public sphere that maintain this production of spurious knowledge.
The paper identifies a cluster of basically foreign funded institutions that interact with and
help in the production of this spurious anthropology. The organizations identified include
ICES (Colombo), Marga, SSA, CPA. The list of spurious publications and their authors
either channel through, work with, or find discussion room in these institutions. During
the period of attempted decolonisation of anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s a call
was made for a new anthropology where power structures in knowledge were to be
reversed. The paper posits that the same logic should be applied to this network of
organisations and that they should be subjected to anthropological inquiry in the same
manner that innocent villages in Sri Lanka are subject to.
