The cultural poetics of eyesight in Sri Lanka: Composure, vulnerability, and the Sinhala concept of distiya

Conclusion

This essay has constituted something of a detour. My argument, however, is a quite simple one, namely, that unless we are prepared to accept anthropological analyses in terms of demonological assumptions and presuppositions about the Intrinsic efficacy of specific, historically constituted cultural forms, we cannot understand the Sinhala yaktovil until we try to understand the local poetics of eyesight that informs the Sinhala discourse of yakku, and particularly the minor practices of gurukama.

But my effort in this essay has also been of a more general character. It has been to highlight a point that I think is far too often obscured in accounts, descriptions, and analyses of the cultural practices of the West's Others. And this point might be posed in the following way: If anthropology, as is now so often claimed, is supposed to be about the interpretation of the signs of Others, and in virtue of this a semiotic practice (and there are at least some of us who would wonder about this assumption), what is far less problematized, and regrettably, is the fact this practive is itself always a discursively and institutionally constituted one. And as such the fundamental categories and metaphors that organize its authoritative readings, its problematic, are always part of a determinate history and a determinate economy of power. In other words, the semiotic practice which has inscribed Sinhala local knowledge and practice within a thematics of demonism and possession, and which in so doing has only sought images of itself elsewhere, remains part of the less than fully interrogated legacy of the discursive relation between anthropology, Christianity, and colonialism.