Religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka: Multi-religious Innovation, Paradoxical Interaction, and Shared Religious Spaces

This book presents a collection of original research about every day, innovative, interactive, and multiple religiosities among Sri Lankan Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and devotees of New Religious Movements in post-war Sri Lanka.

The contributors examine the unique and innovative religiosity that can be observed in Sri Lanka, which reveals a complex reality of mingled, and even simultaneous, cooperation and conflict. The book shows that innovative religious practices and institutions have achieved a new prominence in public life since the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009. Using the analytic framework of ‘innovative religiosity’ to allow researchers to look at this question between and across Sri Lanka’s plural religious landscape in order to escape both the epistemological and ethnographic isolation of studies that limit themselves to one form of religious practice, the chapters also investigate the extent to which inter-religious tolerance is still possible in the wake of Sri Lanka’s religion-involving civil war, and the continuing influence of populist Buddhist nationalism, globalization and geopolitics on Sri Lanka’s post-war governance. The book offers a novel approach to the study of post-conflict societies and furthers the understanding of the status of tolerance between religious practitioners in contexts where both ethnic conflict and multi-religious sites are prominent.

This book is an important resource for researchers studying Anthropology, Asian Religion, Religion in Context and South Asian Studies.

Mark P. Whitaker is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky.

Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake is a Senior Researcher at the International Center for Ethnic Studies.

Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the Open University of Sri Lanka.