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Land, Personhood, and Sorcery in a Sinhalese Village1 A. J. SELVADURAI San Diego State University, San Diego, U.S.A. THIS PAPER is about people, land, and land disputes in a Sinhalese village in the Western Province of Sri Lanka. Specifically, the paper addresses the problem of what land disputes are about. I intend to demonstrate that land disputes are about social relationships, and that who owns what piece of land is only a way of talking about the social relationship. In order to demonstrate my hypothesis data on land tenure and land disputes will be presented and then subjected to a cultural analysis. What is at issue is the meaning, culturally defined, of land, of persons, and of the relationship between them. We shall look at the Sinhalese definition both of personhood and of land, and then data will be presented on two land disputes and examined in the light of the notion of personhood. Some recent developments in cultural anthropology (see Geertz 1966, Guemple 1974, and Schneider 1968, for example) have indicated that the concept of the person is a key explanatory variable in sociocultural analysis. In keeping with this orientation I shall treat "the person" as a
Journal of Asian and African Studies (in 2002 continued as African and Asian Studies) – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 1976
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