Significant contribution to Lanka’s anthropology

Transnational Culture and Expert Knowledge: Responses from a Rural Community in Sri Lanka

Author: R.M. Ranaweera Banda
An author publication

Reviewed by Dr. Jayantha Perera

Prof. Ranaweera Banda’s Transnational Culture and Expert Knowledge: Responses from a Rural Community in Sri Lanka (2013) is an important contribution to Sri Lankan anthropology, in particular, and to development studies in ex-colonial countries, in general.

The focus of the book is on the type of development discourse that has taken place in the South Asian island of Sri Lanka with a 500 year-long experience of foreign rule.

Sri Lanka gained independence and became a new State about 60 years ago. Its incorporation into a transnational economic, political and cultural system began during the colonial rule and has been accelerated since Independence. Ranaweera Banda with painstaking research and acute contemplation of subtle changes that have taken place in a rural community presents a rich, vivid and compelling story of how the expanding transnational culture has spread its tentacles over the remote village community which still lives in its own traditional culture.

The ‘incorporation’ of a remote ‘undeveloped’ village community into the development stream has happened with State patronage. This process of incorporation is found in many postcolonial societies and is well examined by political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists.

This splendid book, as far as I know, is the first book in Sri Lanka which examines ‘processes and products of cultural interaction between transnational culture and local culture, and how such interactions influence and shape the social structure and organisation of the local community.’

Alien cultures

The book argues that ‘development’ is a vector that facilitates the penetration of alien cultures and powerful ideologies into remote communities which could still be labelled as ‘traditional’. The author does not reject the importance of the conventional definition of ‘development’ as a set of activities that are aimed at gaining growth and welfare for all who participate. But he points out that ‘development’ plays a critical role in catalysing individuals to think and act differently regardless of their current social disposition.

The catalytic role of ‘development’ is made possible in new States by the process which Faucault called ‘governmentalisation’. This generates legitimacy and avenues for State intervention. Enumeration and classification of populations by the State into hierarchically organised ‘array of grids’ provides the context to objectify and naturalise them. Categories such as ‘rural’ vs ‘urban’, and ‘poor’ vs ‘rich’, are taken as ‘given’ and act as windows through which alien cultures and development ideologies enter communities.

With odeologies come development interventions with State patronage to reduce poverty, manage natural resources, and enhance local capacity to capture benefits. In fact, such interventions, Ranaweera Banda argues, are the overt links between the Third World and the West.

Colonial period

Foreign experts play a mediatory role in linking the State with local communities, and the State with the global society. He examines how a State-sponsored coastal resource management project in Denagama – a remote fishing village in Southern Coastal Sri Lanka - has transformed its culture and economy, and how this transformation, in turn, has linked the community to the transnational culture through the State apparatus.

As Ranaweera Banda says, to understand the current changes in a small rural community, it is necessary to understand how it has evolved during the colonial period. For this, he reconstructed the past economy, society, polity and culture of Denagama – where he did extensive fieldwork – by showing how villagers continued to be guided by their traditional culture while gradually adopting to transnational cultural ethos and belief systems.

The village community’s exposure to outsiders limited by their caste, kinship and economic relationships was followed by its gradual absorption into the Buddhist-Sinhala identity which transcended village and regional identities engulfing the whole country.

Using rich anthropological data and historical information, he points out that what is seemingly a revert to tradition through long distant pilgrimages to national Buddhist temples and festivals is in fact a statement of the absorption of relatively isolated and parochial community into a larger politico-social entity called ‘nation’ which in this case is coterminous with the Sinhala-Buddhist State.

The key contribution of the book to development studies is its analysis of how shifting identities of individuals at the village level have facilitated and led to a national imagination. The fascinating aspect of the analysis is the author’s ability as a political anthropologist to flesh out the role of the ‘new category of experts comprising development consultants, development planners and advisors of the State in this exercise.’ He demonstrates with firsthand field data how the State itself through its own bureaucracy has surrendered to the transnational culture and global masters who are represented by such experts.

Development experts

Their hallmark is that they ‘function directly under the State legitimacy’ from where they draw ‘necessary powers to go beyond the authority of government officials’. He points out with apt sarcasm that those officials who held power in the colonial State now implement development policies and programs designed by experts who are not part of the bureaucracy. But without the State and its officials, development experts cannot catalyse communities or construct a national imagination which is fashioned after modernity models of the West. In Denagama, coral mining and environmental degradation in the lagoon system legitimised the State’s intervention in the affairs of the village community.

The book convincingly demonstrates that, to legitimise the coastal resource development project, the State invented ‘poverty’ in Denagama to ‘essentialise’ development. From the viewpoint of the CCD, the lack of development was the primary cause of natural resource degradation in the village and the region. The absence of development makes the rural communities poor.

By embracing development, or participating in a development project, they could also become non-poor. Ranaweera Banda concludes that Denagama is neither poor nor rich; it had its own system of survival which cannot be explained or understood by using the paradigm of ‘development’ imported from the West.

The fascinating story of development and change in a remote village in Sri Lanka demonstrates the risks associated with imposing development models on so-called traditional communities, and how such models generate development policies which adversely affect local communities and their environmental sustainability. This is an excellent resource book for politicians, policy makers, academics, and development practitioners in Sri Lanka who are engaged in improving the life chances of the rural poor.

The writer is a Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute.