Download or read book Aspects of Sinhala Folklore written by Jayaratna Banda Disanayaka and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book South Asian Folklore written by Peter Claus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-28 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With 600 signed, alphabetically organized articles covering the entirety of folklore in South Asia, this new resource includes countries and regions, ethnic groups, religious concepts and practices, artistic genres, holidays and traditions, and many other concepts. A preface introduces the material, while a comprehensive index, cross-references, and black and white illustrations round out the work. The focus on south Asia includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, with short survey articles on Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim, and various diaspora communities. This unique reference will be invaluable for collections serving students, scholars, and the general public.
Download or read book Sinhalese Folklore Notes written by Arthur A. Perera and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sinhalese Folklore Folk Religion and Folk Life written by Nandasēna Ratnapāla and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Folk Tales from the Serendib written by Sunil Munasinghe and published by Tamarind Tree Books Incorporated. This book was released on 2014-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A wonderful collection of tales about villagers and talking animals and their day-to-day problems in a pastoral Sri Lanka. Many stories are similar to the ones heard in other South Asian lands, a testimony to the foreign influences that blew across the island over the centuries through interaction with invaders, adventurers and peaceful travellers. These folktales do not, however, offer moral lessons. They are hilarious, with characters who find themselves in awkward situations and end up exhibiting the many tragic and comic aspects of our transient lives."--
Download or read book The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity written by Harshana Rambukwella and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-07-02 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that the passion for the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ has played a significant role in shaping nationalist thinking and argues for an empathetic yet critical engagement with the idea of authenticity. Through a series of fine-grained and historically grounded analyses of the writings of individual figures central to the making of Sinhala nationalist ideology the book demonstrates authenticity’s rich and varied presence in Sri Lankan public life and its key role in understanding postcolonial nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia and the world. It also explores how notions of authenticity shape certain strands of postcolonial criticism and offers a way of questioning the taken-for-granted nature of the nation as a unit of analysis but at the same time critically explore the deep imprint of nations and nationalisms on people's lives.
Download or read book The Legacy of Stylistic Theatre in the Creation of a Modern Sinhala Drama in Sri Lanka written by Lakshmi D. Bulathsinghala and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the development of Sinhala stylistic drama from its earliest manifestations to the post-independence era. Bulathsinghala examines the impact of indigenous and imported folk theatrical forms on the work of the most significant postcolonial stylistic dramatists and on key plays that they produced. In the process, the book explores a number of myths and misunderstandings regarding Sri Lanka’s folk heritage and seeks to establish more reliable information on the principal indigenous Sri Lankan folk dramatic forms and their characteristics. At the same time, by drawing connections between folk drama and the post-independence stylistic theatrical movement, the author demonstrates the essential role of the former in Sinhala culture prior to the advent of Western and other influences and shows how both continue to inflect Sri Lankan drama today. This book will help to open the field of South Asian drama studies to an audience consisting not only of scholars and students but also of general readers who are interested in the fields of drama and theatre and Asian studies.
Download or read book Folklore of Sri Lanka written by Nandasēna Ratnapāla and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dictionary of Proverbs of the Sinhalese Including Also Their Adages Aphorisms Apologues Apothegms Bywords Dictums Maxims Mottoes Precepts Saws and Sayings Together with the Connected Myths Legends and Folk tales written by and published by Asian Educational Services. This book was released on 2005 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cult of the Goddess Pattini written by Gananath Obeyesekere and published by Motilal Banarsidass. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pattini-goddess, virgin, wife and mother; folk deity of Sinhala Buddhists and Jains; and assimilated goddess of the Hindu pantheon-has been worshiped in Sri Lanks and South India for fifteen hundred years or more, as she still is today. This long-awaited book is the culmination of Gananath Obeyesekere's comprehensive study of the Pattini cult and its historical, sociological, and psychoanalytical role in the culture of South Asia. A well-known anthropologist and a native of Sri Lanka, Obeyesekere displays his impeccable scholarship and a stunning range of theoretical perspectives in this work, the most detailed analysis of a single religious complex in South Asian ethnography (and possibly in all of anthropology). Since 1955 Obeyesekere has observed and participated in modern performances of the rituals of worship, healing, and propitiation in the Pattini cult, particularly the postharvest ritual known as the gammaduva. He presents detailed texts of the gammaduva, placing them in their historical and mythic traditions. Using the texts, he formulates a cultural analysis of the Buddhist pantheon and a critique of empiricist notions of South Asian historiography. Obeyesekere shows that some seemingly historical figures of South India and Sri Lanka are mythic characters and that their historical significance can best be understood by an anthropological analysis of myth rather than through a reification of myth in history. The concurrent Hindu worship of Pattini with its myths and rituals is described in detail. Obeyesekere documents the Sanskritization of Pattini, the changing physical structures of the goddess's shrines from the 1930s to the present, the assumption by Brahman priests of ritual functions formerly carried out by folk priest, and the sociocultural causes of these changes. He traces, too, the origins and diffusion of the cult throughout its entire history, as well as its survival today. Of psychological interest is the problematic status of Pattini as virgin, wife, and mother and her relationship with her god-husband Palanga and his courtesan Madevi. Obeyesekere discusses the psychodynamics of this relationship in detail and explains its role in Hindu-Buddhist socialization and family structure. Further, he uses this analysis to account for local variations in the performance and structure of the ritual. The ritual of the killing and resurrection of Pattini's husband and her role as mater dolorosa will interest scholars of comparative religion.
Download or read book Legends of People Myths of State written by Bruce Kapferer and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Lorre described himself as merely a ‘face maker’. His own negative attitude also characterizes traditional perspectives which position Lorre as a tragic figure within film history: the promising European artist reduced to a Hollywood gimmick, unable to escape the murderous image of his role in Fritz Lang’sM.This book shows that the life of Peter Lorre cannot be reduced to a series of simplistic oppositions. It reveals that, despite the limitations of his macabre star image, Lorre’s screen performances were highly ambitious, and the terms of his employment were rarely restrictive. Lorre’s career was a complex negotiation between transnational identity, Hollywood filmmaking practices, the ownership of star images and the mechanics of screen performance.
Download or read book Sing Without Shame written by Kenneth David Jackson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of literary themes, linguistic practice and cultural traditions analyzes the oral traditions of Indo-Portugese creole verse, as a synthesis from European, African and Asian sources. This musical, dramatic and textual syncretism defines tradition within the group and maintains the identity of the creole community. References are primarily to Indian and Sri Lankan materials collected in the late nineteenth century and to data in the H. Nevill collection, an extensive manuscript of Sri Lankan Creole texts from the 1870s or 1880s, housed in the British Museum. The importance of these texts is linguistic, anthropological and sociological. They are persistent in their ability to give definition to creole culture, surviving in South Asia from the seventeenth century to the present.
Download or read book Sri Lanka written by Jonathan Spencer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decade, Sri Lanka has been engulfed by political tragedy as successive governments have failed to settle the grievances of the Tamil minority in a way acceptable to the majority Sinhala population. The new Premadasa presidency faces huge economic and political problems with large sections of the island under the control of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) and militant separatist Tamil groups operating in the north and south. This book is not a conventional political history of Sri Lanka. Instead, it attempts to shed fresh light on the historical roots of the ethnic crisis and uses a combination of historical and anthropologial evidence to challenge the widely-held belief that the conflict in Sri Lanka is simply the continuation of centuries of animosity between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The authors show how modern ethnic identities have been made and re-made since the colonial period with the war between Tamils and the Sinhala-dominant government accompanied by rhetorical wars over archeological sites and place-name etymologies, and the political use of the national past. The book is also one of the first attempts to focus on local perceptions of the crisis and draws on a broad range of sources, from village fieldwork to newspaper controversies. Its interest extends beyond contemporary politics to history, anthropology and development studies.
Download or read book Digging Up Stories written by James Thompson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Thompson explores the problems of theatre practice in communities affected by war and exclusion. Each chapter or "story" is written in a lively and accessible style and draws on a range of contemporary performance theories.
Download or read book The Buddhist Vi u written by John Clifford Holt and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publishe. This book was released on 2008 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Holt's groundbreaking study examines the assimilation, transformation, and subordination of the Hindu deity Visnu within the contexts of Sri Lankan history and Sinhala Buddhist religious culture. Holt argues that political agendas and social forces, as much as doctrinal concerns, have shaped the shifting patterns of the veneration of Visnu in Sri Lanka. Holt begins with a comparative look at the assimilation of the Buddha in Hinduism. He then explores the role and rationale of medieval Sinhala kings in assimilating Visnu into Sinhala Buddhism. Offering analyses of texts, many of which have never before been translated into English, Holt considers the development of Visnu in Buddhist literature and the changing practices of deity veneration. Shifting to the present, Holt describes the efforts of contemporary Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka to discourage the veneration of Visnu, suggesting that many are motivated by a reactionary fear that their culture and society will soon be overrun by the influences and practices of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.
Download or read book CultureShock Sri Lanka written by Robert Barlas and published by Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chock-full of useful tips and information, this book covers a wide range of practical issues, such as how to get your blue card, ways to get settled into your new home, and how to conduct business in the Sri Lankan environment. Find out how to communicate with the Sri Lankans and how to enjoy their delicious curries without needing a fire extinguisher! Discover what lies beneath the Sri Lankan profile and how religion, caste, and politics influence the lives of the locals. The book also guides you on the customs and cultural ways of the Sri Lankans and how you can integrate seamlessly into their society. Written in an easy-to-read style, CultureShock! Sri Lanka is the guide you must have to truly enjoy your stay in this country.
Download or read book Modernizing Composition written by Garrett Field and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-03-22 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The study of South Asian music falls under the purview of ethnomusicology, whereas that of South Asian literature falls under South Asian studies. As a consequence of this academic separation, scholars rarely take notice of connections between South Asian song and poetry. Modernizing Composition overcomes this disciplinary fragmentation by examining the history of Sinhala-language song and poetry in twentieth-century Sri Lanka. Garrett Field describes how songwriters and poets modernized song and poetry in response to colonial and postcolonial formations. The story of this modernization is significant in that it shifts focus from India’s relationship to the West to little-studied connections between Sri Lanka and North India.
