Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture, 2015-16: Three scenes from rural life: Cambridge to Colombo and back again, 1954 to 2016

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• Professor Jonathan Spencer, University of Edinburgh
• Wednesday 27 April 2016, 17:00-18:00
• The Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College, Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Barbara Roe.

With a reception to follow in the Blue Board Common Room, Trinity College

I start from a moment in the 1950s when a small group of Cambridge researchers – Edmund Leach, Ben Farmer and Nur Yalman, followed soon after by Stanley Tambiah and Gananath Obeyesekere – initiated a conversation, fuelled by bouts of intense fieldwork, about land, kinship and social order in rural Sri Lanka. In my second scene, from the early 1980s, a new generation of researchers returned to the same questions, but in a landscape increasingly shaped by nationalist imaginings of the rural. In my final scene, the rural has become synonymous with poverty and its pathological consequences – self-harm and suicide, alcohol abuse and violence. What links these scenes, and what will become the subject-matter for this lecture is, in Raymond Williams’ words, “a problem of perspective”.

This talk is part of the Centre of South Asian Studies occasional events series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Centre of South Asian Studies occasional events
• The Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College, Cambridge

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