Caste Among the Sinhalese in the Modern Era: The Significance of Name Changes – By Michael Roberts
Source : thuppahis
M. W. Amarasiri De Silva: “Do name changes to “acaste” names by the Sinhalese indicate a diminishing significance of caste?”
ABSTRACT of article pubd in in Cultural Dynamics, 2018, Vol. 30(4), pp. 303–325 ………………………………….. sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav httpDs:/O/dIo: i1.o0r.g1/1107.171/0779/201932173470410918982299660055
In modern Sri Lankan society, caste has become less significant as a marker of social identity and exclusion than was the case in the past. While acknowledging this trend across South Asian societies, the literature does not adequately explain why this is happening. Increasing urbanization, the growing number of inter-caste marriages, the expanding middle class, and the bulging youth population have all been suggested as contributory factors. In rural Sri Lanka, family names are used as identifiers of family and kinship groups within each caste. The people belonging to the “low castes” identified with derogatory village and family names are socially marginalized and stigmatized. Social segregation, marked with family names and traditional caste occupations, makes it difficult for the low-caste people to move up in the class ladder, and socialize in the public sphere. Political and economic development programs helped to improve the living conditions and facilities in low-caste villages, but the lowness of such castes continued to linger in the social fabric. Socially oppressed low-caste youth in rural villages moved to cities and the urban outskirts, found non-caste employment, and changed their names to acaste names. By analyzing newspaper notifications and selected ethnographic material, this article shows how name changes among the Sinhalese have facilitated individualization and socialization by people who change their names to acaste names and seek freedom to choose their own employment, residence, marriage partners, and involvement in activities of wider society—a form of assimilation, in the context of growing urbanization and modernization.
Keywords: acaste; individualization; low caste; name change; rural change; urbanization
THIS ARTICLE from the year 2018 will be presented in full within TPS in due course with illustrations added. Readers should also delve into the relevant sections of HAI Goonetilleke: A Bibliography of Ceylon, Zug, Switzerland, 1970 et seq.
ALSO NOTE
K. Tudor Silva: Caste, Class and Capital Transformation in Highland Sri Lanka. Ph.D. thesis, Melbourne: Monash University., 1982
Bryce Ryan: Caste in Modern Ceylon, Rutgers University Press, 1953
An useful list of items on caste can be found in ………….. https://thuppahis.com
