rituals of development: the accelerated Mahaväli development program of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Modern political rituals—and within that genre, rituals of development—highlight vividly the engagement between culture and politics. This article analyzes a development ritual from Sri Lanka from the multiple perspectives of its planner‐participants as well as its audiences. The levels of complicity and conflict that emerge corroborate as well as complicate the notion of the cultural‐political dialectic, thereby also expanding the reflexive/comparative task of anthropology.