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Sacred Modernity - Nature, Environment and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R1,019
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Sacred Modernity - Nature, Environment and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Hardcover, New)
Series: Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines, 12
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Sacred Modernity argues how everyday non-secular experiences of the
natural world in Sri Lanka perpetuate ethno-religious identitarian
narratives. It demonstrates the relationships between spaces of
nature and environment and an ongoing aesthetic and spatial
constitution of power and the political in which Theravada Buddhism
is centrally implicated. To do this, the book works consecutively
through two in-depth case studies, both of which are prominent
sites through which Sri Lankan nature and environment are
commodified: first, the country's most famous national park, Ruhuna
(Yala), and second, its post-1950s modernist environmental
architecture, 'tropical modernism'. By engaging these sites, the
book reveals how commonplace historical understandings as well as
commonplace material negotiations of the seductions of Sri Lankan
nature are never far from the continued production of a
post-independent national identity marked ethnically as Sinhalese
and religiously as Buddhist. In the Sri Lankan context this
minoritizes Tamil, Muslim and Christian non-Sinhala difference in
the nation-state's natural, environmental and historical order of
things. To make this argument, the book writes against the grain of
Eurocentric social scientific understandings of the concepts
'nature' and 'religion'. It argues that these concepts and their
implicit binary mobilizations of nature/culture and the
sacred/secular respectively, struggle to make visible the pervasive
ways that Buddhism - thought instead as a 'structure of feeling' or
aesthetics - simultaneously naturalizes and ethnicizes the fabric
of the national in contemporary Sri Lanka. Sacred Modernity shows
the care and postcolonial methodological sensitivity required to
understand how 'nature' and 'religion' might be thought through
non-EuroAmerican field contexts, especially those in South Asia.
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