Papers by Susantha Goonatilake
South Asia Research, Sep 1, 1993
Over the last forty years, Sri Lanka has become one of the most violent places on earth. In the l... more Over the last forty years, Sri Lanka has become one of the most violent places on earth. In the last ten years, between 65,000 and 80,000 people have been killed, from a population of seventeen to eighteen million. Although Tambiah states that his book ’is not written for Sri Lankan specialists, but for general readers, both inside and outside academia’ (p. 3), it attempts to relate the violence in Sri Lanka to a sociological/anthropological explanation. The book’s flier rhetorically asks, ’how can committed Buddhist monks and lay persons in Sri Lanka today actively take part in the political violence against the Tamils’? Tambiah also asks ’whether the framework of current Buddhist nationalism can in the future stretch and incorporate a greater amount of pluralist tolerance in the name of Buddhist conceptions of righteous rule’. The book has a foreword by Lal Jayawardene, then Sri Lankan Director of the World Institute of Development Economic Research (WIDER) in Helsinki. In
Technology and Cultural Values
The sociology of knowledge posits social networks and frameworks that filter the production, acce... more The sociology of knowledge posits social networks and frameworks that filter the production, acceptance and dissemination of legitimized knowledge. Sri Lankan anthropology, over 50 years after independence is still largely written by foreigners or foreign based Sri Lankan academics for foreign audiences and have given rise to a body of knowledge largely tangential to the truth. These flights of fancy have been allowed to occur because there is a disjuncture between the academic discourse within Sri Lanka say in the universities, and that occurring outside the country in this anthropology literature. The obvious question is: what are the institutions within Sri Lanka, outside of the university and public sphere that maintain this production of spurious knowledge. The paper identifies a cluster of basically foreign funded institutions that interact with and help in the production of this spurious anthropology. The organizations identified include ICES (Colombo), Marga, SSA, CPA. The l...
In her book, Science and Colonial Expansion, 1 Lucille Brockway has explored some of the relation... more In her book, Science and Colonial Expansion, 1 Lucille Brockway has explored some of the relationships between colonial expansion and the scientific apparatus. However, in her sympathetic treatment and implicit definition of the subject, there are assumptions about both the scientific and the colonial world which rest on a perhaps unavoidable Western ethnocentric view of the world, even though Brockway and her book are explicitly anticolonial and procolonized. The present writer has also examined the relationship of ...
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 1994
The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, 2011
World Futures, 1997
The three lineages of information,—the genetic, the cultural and artifactual—will increasingly me... more The three lineages of information,—the genetic, the cultural and artifactual—will increasingly merge their constituent information contents through advances in biotechnology and information technology. This will redefine what constitutes “social” and what constitutes “community.” A community's members communicate with their “significant others” and change their internal information states (and their internal and external behaviors). Under conditions of merging, information exchanges occur across all the three lineages. In this ...
Theory, Culture & Society, 2006
... Prana. Knowledge as an Ecology Susantha Goonatilake Keywords ... ended. In theBuddhist analys... more ... Prana. Knowledge as an Ecology Susantha Goonatilake Keywords ... ended. In theBuddhist analysis, unsatisfactoriness and anxiety become essential to the 'I' because these are the I's response to its own groundlessness. This ...
Foresight, 2008
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to outline the contours of futures studies that override the ... more PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to outline the contours of futures studies that override the ethnocentric epistemological limitations of present studies, which are mono‐civilizational and extrapolations from Western experience.Design/methodology/approachThe paper shows by empirical and conceptual means the inadequacy of present futures studies – based partly on alleged American exceptionalism – which limit the imagination of futurists. The paper then uses a different philosophical base, namely Buddhist process philosophy, which puts change at its inner core to develop a new perspective.FindingsThe paper finds that the alleged American exceptionalism is based on founding myths and ground realities not necessarily present in other countries. Huntington and others evoked the role of civilizations before the rise of Asia was being fully noticed. Current US dominance is illustrated to some extent by “everywhere is America”, but in a reverse direction “everywhere is in America” as the...
Current Anthropology, 1986
Cultural selectionism is a Darwinian approach to the understanding of human culture which, in con... more Cultural selectionism is a Darwinian approach to the understanding of human culture which, in constrast to sociobiology, holds that cultural evolution proceeds solely on the phenotypic level. Unlike structuralism, cultural selectionism predicts that the form taken by any culture will reflect historical processes rather than underlying, genetically induced biases of the human mind. Genetic selection, however, must be invoked to explain both the origin of the human capacity for culture and the maintenance of this genetic capacity in modern ...
prepared for Interface
Biotechnology and information technology are the two generic technologies which are poised to hav... more Biotechnology and information technology are the two generic technologies which are poised to have a major impact in the coming decades. Students of generic technologies have pointed out that their impact would be much greater than the earlier generic technologies associated with the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, including such technologies as those asssociated with steam, electricity, chemicals and oil1. But the two technologies replace and/or intimately affect respectively life processes and cultural ...
American Anthropologist, 2002
Anthropologizing Sri Lanka:. Eurocentric Misadventure. Susantha Goonatilake. Bloomington: Indiana... more Anthropologizing Sri Lanka:. Eurocentric Misadventure. Susantha Goonatilake. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 306 pp.
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Papers by Susantha Goonatilake