Paper short abstract:

This PhD project sets out to document the interactions of religious experience, social formation and the urban environment in an inner suburb of Colombo, Sri Lanka, by creating a dense ethnographic map of contemporary life and its historical antecedents.

Paper long abstract:

What is the relationship between religious experience, social formation and the urban environment? These three ecologies are mutually constitutive in many ways: inseparable in theory as well as practice. Through extended immersive field research, a dense ethnographic map of contemporary life and its historical antecedents in an inner-city suburb of Colombo, Sri Lanka, emerges. Focussed on a two kilometer diameter circle, the research observes and interrogates the institutions and people whose daily activities create the dynamic hum of the city's life. Stories, maps, drawings, photographs, relationships, experiences, news media and demographic data develop a sense of what exists within the circumference. Geography, history, ritual and belief motivate everything from the simplest meal to the most elaborate festival: Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic and their multivalent combinations. As well as peering in from the perimeter of the circle, this perspective also digs down, through time, attempting to see the inner workings of the sphere. Political, personal and physical histories created the space, inform the present and project the future. Familial connections, spirits, technology, opportunity and desperation repel and attract people and things beyond the circle, to and from the greater city area, the nation and the globe. Where are the fractures and structures, the discontinuities and cohesion, in this multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-class community? This spot-lit view of Colombo illuminates how religious experience, physical space and the historico-material reality of our lives conspire to effect social change.