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South Asia is a rich and fascinating linguistic area, its many hundreds of languages from four major language families representing the distinctions of caste, class, profession, religion, and region. This comprehensive new volume presents an overview of the language situation in this vast subcontinent in a linguistic, historical and sociolinguistic context. An invaluable resource, it comprises authoritative contributions from leading international scholars within the fields of South Asian language and linguistics, historical linguistics, cultural studies and area studies. Topics covered include the ongoing linguistic processes, controversies, and implications of language modernization; the functions of South Asian languages within the legal system, media, cinema, and religion; language conflicts and politics, and Sanskrit and its long traditions of study and teaching. Language in South Asia is an accessible interdisciplinary book for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, language planning and South Asian studies.
Early history of photography in Sri Lanka.
This examination of Sri Lanka's ethnic and religious minorities links the past with the present through a treatment of Sinhala-Buddhist fundamentalist development in the late nineteenth century and its hegemony in the late twentieth.
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Advertising is a central part of the global system of commerce and culture. Every day it exposes consumers around the world to practices associated with the West, urban life, prosperity, and modernity. One consequence of this exposure is that it frees people's imaginations from time and place, and imposes a new and foreign reality. In this book Steven Kemper looks at a parallel trend, arguing that advertising firms in Nairobi, Caracas, and Colombo also domesticate the imagination, insinuating images into people's minds of the traditional as well as the modern, the local as much as the global. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted over thirty years, Kemper examines the Sri Lankan advertising industry to show how executives draw on their skills as folk ethnographers to "Sri Lankanize" commodities and practices to make them locally desirable, essentially producing new forms of Sri Lankan culture. Addressing many of the most pressing agendas of contemporary anthropology, Buying and Becoming breaks new ground in studies of culture and globalization.
This volume brings together contributions that explore the increasingly important roles that English plays in Asia, including its contribution to economic growth, national imaginaries and creative writing. These are issues that are political in a broad sense, but the diversity of Asian contexts also means that the social, political and cultural ramifications of the spread of English into Asia will have to be understood in relation to the challenges facing specific societies. The chapters in the book collectively illustrate this diversity by focusing on countries from South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. Each country has two contributions devoted to it: one paper provides an overview of the country s language policy and its positioning of English, and another provides a critical discussion of creative expressions involving the use of English. Taken together, the papers in the volume detail the most recent developments concerning the politics of English in Asia."
DIVExamines the caste, marriage patterns, ethnicity and religious institutions in the Tamil-speaking Hindu and Muslim communities situated along the eastern coastline of Sri Lanka, exploring the sources of their ethnic and political hostilities in the modern/div