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Conversion and Demonism: Colonial Christian Discourse and Religion in Sri Lanka

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

David Scott
David Scott
Affiliation:
Bates College
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Extract

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, it has been difficult for anthropology to avoid the fact that its own discourse is ever entangled in a whole Western archive. What became clear, of course, was that the categories through which anthropology constructs descriptions and analyses of the social discourses and practices of non-Western peoples are themselves participants in a network of relations of knowledge and power. Interestingly enough, however, whereas the general import of this Foucauldian thesis has now been quickly assimilated, its challenge has hardly been taken up in terms of tracing out the lines of formation of specific anthropological, or, let us say, anthropologized, concepts.

Type
Colonial Conversions
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , April 1992 , pp. 331 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1992

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