An Integrated Approach to Caste in Sri Lanka

In this article I argue that Sri Lankan caste research has been inhibited by the widespread popular assumption that caste manifests in Sri Lanka in the form of parallel and incommensurate ethnoreligious caste systems. In other words, while scholars working elsewhere in South Asia approach caste per se as an important comparative topic, in Sri Lanka caste is usually enclosed and circumscribed within a framework of essentialised Tamil Hindu or Sinhala Buddhist identities that precludes similar comparative investigations. I begin with a review of Sri Lankan caste scholarship, demonstrating its post-Independence division into two ethnic streams with varying thematic foci and levels of attention to caste, before interrogating the three underlying principles of the ethnoreligious theory and their assumptions about the nature of caste, religion and ethnicity. After historicising the theory, I offer a critique that draws on empirical evidence and theoretical debates from Sri Lanka and elsewhere. In doing so, I set out the foundations of an integrated and comparative anthropology of caste in Sri Lanka, one which is not restricted by the assumption that caste is ultimately an epiphenomenon of ethnicity, but which is nevertheless attentive to the role that this popular perception plays in the relational dynamics of local identity formation and caste practice.