Sociology/Anthropology Literature: An Excursion into the Sociology of Sociology

Abstract

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 list of spurious publications and their authors either channel through, work with, or find discussion room in these institutions. During the period of attempted decolonisation of anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s a call was made for a new anthropology where power structures in knowledge were to be reversed. The paper posits that the same logic should be applied to this network of organisations and that they should be subjected to anthropological inquiry in the same manner that innocent villages in Sri Lanka are subject to.