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‘The Anthropologist and the Native’ is a collection of twenty essays by internationally known scholars of different persuasions, honouring the distinguished anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere. The essays are arranged in six sections covering a range of topics that reflect Obeyesekere’s wide interests, making it a truly multidisciplinary volume. The areas covered include the Indian tradition and its representation, textual elucidation, renunciation, and the transformaion of Buddhism.
Editor’s Note; Section 1: The Indian Tradition and its Representation; 1. Paratha Mitter, Language and Race in Colonial Representations of Indian Society and Culture; 2. John Nemec, When the ‘Parampara’ Breaks: On Gurus and Students in the Mahabharata; 3. Patrick Olivelle, The Living and the Dead: Ideology and Social Dynamics of Ancestral Commemoration in India; 4. David Shulman, On Singularity: What Sanskrit Poeticians Believe to be Real; Section 2: Caste, Kinship, Land and Community; 5. Lawrence A. Babb, Recasting a Caste: The Case of the Dadhic Brahmans; 6. James Brow, Reconstituting Village Communities: Sir William Gregory’s Efforts to Renovate Village Agriculture in Ceylon’s North Central Province; 7. Dennis McGilvray, Dowry in Batticaloa: The Historical Transformation of a Matrilineal Property System; Section 3: Renunciation and Power; 8. Arjun Appadurai, The Morality of Refusal; 9. H. L. Seneviratne, Revolt in the Temple: Politics of a Paintings Project in Sri Lanka; 10. Peter Van der Veer, Pain and Power: Reflections on Ascetic Agency; Section 4: Buddhism Transformed; 11. Anne M. Blackburn, ‘Buddhist Revival’ and the ‘Work of Culture’ in 19th-century Lanka; 12. Steven Kemper, Dharmapala’s Buddhisms; 13. Donald K. Swearer, Religion and Globalization from the Historical Perspective of Thai Buddhism; Section 5: The Enigma of the Text; 14. Wendy Doniger, The Mythology of the ‘Kamasutra’; 15. Malalgoda Kitsiri Malalgoda, ‘Mandarampura Puvata’: An Apocryphal Buddhist Chronicle; 16. Romila Thapar, Variants as Historical Statements: The ‘Rama-Katha’ in Early India; Section 6: The Anthropologist and the Native; 17. Arjun Guneratne, Plain Tales from the Field: Reflections on Fieldwork in Three Cultures; 18. Abdelmajid Hannoum, The (Re)Turn of the Native: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Nativism; 19. R. L. Stirrat and Dinah Rajak, Romance of the Field; 20. Mark Whitaker, Human Rights and ‘Practical Rationality’ among Sri Lankan Tamils and Americans