The Veddas

Driven to unravel the mystery surrounding the tribe of the Veddas, the tropical island's aboriginal people, traveler, Alexis Debary, hops on a local bus while on holiday on Sri Lanka. Serendipity makes her stumble on, collecting impressions, but she is also Driven to unravel the mystery surrounding the tribe, who still live in the depth of the jungle, and what she ultimately encounters surpasses her expectations and is too precious not to share.

Excerpt from The Veddas Not only was the work urgently needed on account of its scientific importance, but it was known that the Veddas were a numerically small people verging on extinction, and so affected by contact with Tamils and Sinhalese that if they were not studied promptly there was every possibility that it would soon be too late to study them at all; indeed, with all my efforts I was able to meet only four families, and hear of two more, who I believe had never practised cultivation. Pure-blooded Veddas are not quite so rare as this statement implies. The Danigala community, the best known wild Veddas of Ceylon, are still reasonably pure-blooded, though they have adopted many Sinhalese habits, including cultivation, and have assumed the role of professional primitive man. They are commonly fetched to be interviewed by travellers at the nearest rest house, where they appear clad only in the traditional scanty Vedda garment, whereas, when not on show, they dress very much as the neigh. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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In contemporary Sri Lanka, long-established modes of rural life are being disrupted in the name of progress. As this occurs, instances of "demonic possession" have been known to take placeÑincidents that may both express the conflicts that result and attempt to resolve them. When residents of the village of Kukulewa were promised sixty new houses, a factional rift arose between those who benefited from the project and those who did not. The breach between what became in effect two separate villages resulted in both divisive accusations of sorcery and spirit-inspired appeals for cooperation. James Brow witnessed these possession trances and sorcery accusations as they occurred, enabling him to convey this richly textured story interweaving political factionalism and troubled spirits. Official projects of development have proceeded apace in Sri Lanka, but until now there have been few accounts of their tendency to tear apart the fabric of rural society. Demons and Development combines an engaging narrative of how development was experienced in one particular village with an original contribution to theories of hegemony, the social anthropology of South Asia, the ethnography of nationalism, and the sociology of development.