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Paper short abstract:

When Munasinghe interviewed four traditional Sinhalese drummers, they reported significant differences between their practices in ritual and non-ritual performances. In this paper we explore the social, religious, political and historical lineages of this artform.

Paper long abstract:

Sinhalese low country drummers approach each performance with a complex array of personal, social, physical, and metaphysical postures: a rich empirical base from which to consider the relationship between people, ritual, art and social change. When Munasinghe interviewed and observed drummers for his PhD field research, he became keenly aware of the subtle elements of consciousness that they reported as relevant and appropriate to ritual (healing, exorcism) and non-ritual (entertainment, recording) performances, although their musical output was ostensibly the same. We define two Sinhala terms that refer to preparing the drum and the setting (Pè kireema) and preparing the drummer’s mental and physical state (Pè weema). These terms are key to the differentiation between ritual and non-ritual drumming. In a ritual setting, the drum, drummer/s, ritual practitioners, and audience enter a liminal zone where the sensible and the intelligible intertwine, and the ontological ground can be remade. As a vocation strongly linked to specific Sri Lankan castes and geographies, Sinhalese drumming, in some ways, documents an artistic mediation between the European colonial past and the current independence-era, which is dominated by Sinhala Buddhist nationalism (see Kapferer, 1983; Reed, 2002). Tangible changes to the technical and social conventions of the artform are reflected in the quality of life of the practitioners.