Books by Bruce Kapferer

The Sinhalese exorcism rituals are perhaps the most complex and the most magnificent in performance still extant. For this second edition, the author has written a preface and introduction in which he argues that the techniques and aesthetics of healing in Sri Lanka cannot be reduced to Western psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic terms.

In this book, the articles explore the different social practices that are typically understood as sorcery, magic and ritual, and address a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the America's.

The civil war in Sri Lanka and the part that nationalism seemed to play in it inspired the writing of this book some twenty-three years ago. The argument was developed through a comparative analysis of nationalism in Sri Lanka with the author's native Australia. At the time this constituted an innovative approach to comparison in anthropology, as well as to nationalism and its possibilities. It was not based on differences but on the way in which perspectives from within the two nationalisms, when seen side-by-side, could present an understanding of their implication in producing the violence of war, racism, and social exclusion. The book has lost none of its importance and urgency as proven by the chapters in the Appendix, written by top scholars working in Sri Lanka and in Australia. These contributions bring together new material and critically explore the book's themes and their continued relevance to the various trajectories in nationalist processes since the first publication of the book.