Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps and figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map 1 Sri Lanka
- Map 2 The west coast of Sri Lanka
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The colonial Church
- 3 The Church in crisis
- 4 The rise of Kudagama
- 5 Demonic possession and the battle against evil
- 6 Suffering and sacrifice
- 7 Holy men and power
- 8 Patronage and religion
- 9 On the borders
- 10 Conclusion
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
9 - On the borders
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps and figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map 1 Sri Lanka
- Map 2 The west coast of Sri Lanka
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The colonial Church
- 3 The Church in crisis
- 4 The rise of Kudagama
- 5 Demonic possession and the battle against evil
- 6 Suffering and sacrifice
- 7 Holy men and power
- 8 Patronage and religion
- 9 On the borders
- 10 Conclusion
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Summary
Introduction
Looking back at the shrines discussed in previous chapters, a distinction has to be made between short-term cyclical processes and long-term trajectories. If we take Kudagama for instance, as the shrine grew in popularity so pressures were generated which increasingly undermined its existence. As the crowd of devotees grew, so did the amount of money given at the shrine. Suspicions grew that Father Jayamanne's assistants were misappropriating these funds thus tarnishing the shrine's sacred image. Similarly, as the number of pilgrims grew, it became increasingly difficult to control behaviour at the shrine, and the criticisms levelled against older places of pilgrimage such as Madhu and Talawila were increasingly directed against Kudagama. Such pressures were in part responsible for the growth of Suvagama and Katunayake, but as they grew in popularity so they too became the object of such criticisms. And in the case of Kudagama there was a further problem: the dangers of being co-opted into the mainstream of diocesan life.
Yet at the same time, another process was at work in the 1970s and increasingly in the 1980s which began to undermine not just particular shrines but also Catholic shrines in general. Clearly the sort of world hankered after by the faithful at Kudagama, Suvagama and Katunayake is a mirage. There can never be a return to the imagined golden age of the Catholic community in Sri Lanka. Today, Catholics form a small minority in a country dominated by tensions in which to be Catholic is increasingly irrelevant and ethnicity or political persuasion more and more important.
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- Information
- Power and Religiosity in a Post-Colonial SettingSinhala Catholics in Contemporary Sri Lanka, pp. 176 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992