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Revisiting Newton Gunasinghe-By Uditha Devapriya Source:Island udakdev1@gmail.com Newton Gunasinghe, easily one of the most brilliant minds of 20th century Sri Lanka, was the country’s first Marxist anthropologist. Gunasinghe’s contributions to the fields of social science and anthropology have not gone unacknowledged. Yet it took some time for his essays and scholarly works to be published: his doctoral thesis on Kandyan social relations came out in 1990, two years after his death, while a collection of his articles followed six years later. The Social Scientists’ Association, of which he had been a leading light and face, undertook the publication of both works. Together with Kumari Jayawardena and a handful of other scholars, he remains an authoritative name for social science students. In his obituary for Gunasinghe, Jayadeva Uyangoda attempted to sum up his contributions to these fields. Uyangoda essentially argues that serious scholarship did not become a high point of local ...