Catherine M West

Kanchana and Catherine are currently developing a new research project entitled Urban Buddhism and the 'New Normal': Social Service and Politics in Sri Lanka.  The Sri Lankan response to the pandemic has been strongly conditioned by religious practices and beliefs concerning wellbeing and social service, as well as the medical, social, and political circumstances of the nation. The pandemic has brought potentially conflicting zones of belief into contact - Western and Ayurvedic medicine; secular and religious politics; physical and metaphysical sources of succor; indigenous and foreign knowledge; urban and rural life; individual and collective responsibilities; and psychological orientations to ‘how I was before’ compared to ‘how I am now’.  These factors describe the ‘new normal’. We will consider how the Buddhist community in inner-city Colombo have experienced stasis, schisms, collisions, sharing and co-options within these zones of belief in recent years, using our 2016-2018 field research as a temporal basepoint.

Urban anthropology has the critical tools to challenge the generally positivist bent of urban studies. To illustrate this, I tell the story of Harshini, who grew up in Narahenpita in the 1950s, on the peri-urban fringe of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She lives on the same street where she was born, which, when by the time I met her in 2016, had become a major inner-city thoroughfare. I extrapolate and integrate her lived experience with other forms of evidence that show the demographic, physical, and metaphysical changes that occurred in Narahenpita over five decades of urbanisation. While it is well documented that Colombo has been shaped by the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist agenda (and its shifting political and economic stances), I contend that there are also forces that remain unseen in the urbanist's rush to count the countable. Harshini's family background, religious practices, and economic fortunes provide additional layers of knowledge, rather than contradict the received wisdom of the city's urbanisation. Colombo was and is a multireligious city where the narrative of centralising state hegemony is
complicated by pluralist religious practice, and interwoven histories of migration, caste, and ethnic heritage. Although urbanisation is often discussed in terms of observable physical and demographic change (underpinned by political economy) I argue that our image of urban life is constructed more completely when we attend to less readily quantified phenomena.

Colombo is experiencing a period of rapid-fire remembering and forgetting: sometimes deliberate, sometimes incidental, often concerning life and death. What roles do modernity and religion play in the selection process? Long abstract In the post-conflict era Sri Lanka has increased its articulation with the global economy, while simultaneously looking inward for an identity that can support lasting peace. Colombo is the political and economic centre of the island, and a locus of religious and ethnic diversity. As such, it is embroiled in the conflicted national process of remembering and forgetting. Connerton (2009) argues that 'modernity' explains the paradox of simultaneous hypermnesia (the drive to remember) and the post-mnemonic (a tendency to forget). He defines modernity in relation to a specific geo-political moment, which elides or excises religion. To problematize this position, we consider the role of religion in memory-making and how Colombo's past is narrated, embodied and performed at different scalar levels. At the level of the individual body, Mrs G (an octogenarian widow) invites us in to her apartment to drink tea, observe her quotidian rituals and listen to her story. Just a few blocks away, we meet a government official who manages a local council facility. His mission is to do good and be remembered for doing good. To this end he has built a colourful shrine to the Buddha, so that passers-by will be delighted and think of peace. Finally, the city itself is defined by its monuments to religious and political heroes; the redevelopment of under-performing assets in to capitalist

This paper is my contribution to a group presentation titled ‘Religious innovation and social reform: three perspectives from the field’.  Samson Keam, Ben Vecchiet and I talked about our experiences, gathered from twelve months fieldwork in Sri Lanka, and looked ahead to the task of writing up our findings for our PhD theses.  I discuss my approach to the field: considering urban religion, social formation and the urban environment as three 'ecologies' which have their own inner coherence, yet interact with each other.  These interactions point to areas of cohesion and schism, perhaps suggesting starting points for an analysis of religion and social change.

Sinhala Buddhists in inner-city Colombo, Sri Lanka, turned to local-and national-level structures of trust in their quest to stay safe and mitigate suffering during the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore this through an ethnographic case study of the Sri Narada temple in Narahenpita and a textual analysis of the national government's response to the pandemic. Our research shows that both the temple and national government advocated similar pathways to immunity, including vaccination, Ayurveda, and Buddhism. We argue that in both instances, conceptions of health are plural and relational and embedded in the broader social context, as opposed to individualist notions of health. They also encompass moral issues around social service, merit, and what it means to be a "good" Buddhist. However, these common pathways led to dissimilar outcomes, mediated by qualitatively different relations of trust.

After months of curfews, lockdowns, and low infection rates, Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 case numbers spiked in October and November 2020. In early December, news emerged about a tonic called Dhammika Paniya that had the power to prevent and heal COVID-19. Though it was initially promoted as an Ayurvedic medicine, its inventor later attributed its strength to the goddess Kali. This appeal to the transcendent is not an alternative to biomedicine or Ayurveda but one that is imbricated in the everyday political and social response to the pandemic crisis in Sri Lanka. In the dramatic rise of Dhammika Paniya, we can observe a mosaic of perceptions, anxieties, and hopes that exist in tension with the nation’s well-developed public health system. This article follows the government’s involvement in the Dhammika Paniya story primarily by analyzing mass media coverage over four months, supplemented with interviews and personal observations.

Both the Sri Narada temple in Narahenpita, Colombo, and the Sri Lankan government actively promoted techniques to avoid COVID-19 including vaccination, Ayurvedic medicine and Buddhist ritual – employed singly and plurally as pathways to immunity. Chief Incumbent Ven. Samitha Thero instructed devotees to stay away and follow all the government’s COVID-19 public health directives. He says that he followed the guidelines to the letter of the law, although this meant tempering his usual hand-on approach at a time when his community were suffering from illness, isolation, and deprivation. Devotees at Sri Narada temple reported that where government messaging and assistance was confusing and inconsistent, the temple provided them with relief, comfort, and practical support. We utilise a case study of the Sri Narada temple and draw on interviews with urban Buddhist devotees and Ven. Samitha Thero, contemporary media reports, and academic literature to explore local and national structures of trust.

After months of curfews, lockdowns, and low infection rates, Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 case numbers spiked in October and November 2020. In early December, news emerged about a tonic called ‘Dhammika Paniya’ that had the power to prevent and heal the disease. Initially promoted as an Ayurvedic medicine, its inventor later attributed its strength to the goddess Kali.

This appeal to the transcendent is not an alternative to biomedicine or Ayurveda, but one that is imbricated in the everyday political and social response to the pandemic crisis in Sri Lanka. In the dramatic rise of Dhammika Paniya, we can observe a mosaic of perceptions, anxieties, and hopes that exist in tension with the nation’s well-developed public health system. This article follows the government’s involvement in the Dhammika Paniya story primarily by analysing mass media coverage over the past few months, supplemented with interviews and personal observations.

When we read and hear about Colombo, Sri Lanka, we don’t often read and hear about religion experience.  However, when we step outside on to the streets of Colombo religious experience is obvious and ubiquitous.  This project reviews the scholarly and anecdotal record and compares it to the social and spatial life of the contemporary inner-city.  As well as temples, churches and mosques, the spatiality of religion extends to the street, markets and homes of the city: religious experience is more than worship and sanctioned ritual.  It is felt through all the senses in Colombo.  For example, the cool shade of a bo tree allowed to grow through the hot pavement; the colours and styles of dress; the aromas and flavours of the richly syncretic cuisine; small acts of kindness; and the sounds of observance: voices and instruments connecting the humans, their material realm and the cosmological world.  When religious experience and innovation determine the spatial and the social to such a high degree, why is it that history does not acknowledge their presence?  This blindness to ‘urban religion’ is evident in the literature on Colombo, but also in urban studies more generally.  Situational analysis of the social formation, the urban environment and religious experience represents a way to move past axiomatic views of religion, cities and their relationship. This study also reflects on how a more anthropological understanding of the capital, Colombo, might offer alternative perspectives of the nation and its complex social identity in the post-conflict era.