The Kingsley Martin memorial lecture

Wed 27 April 2016

The Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College

Professor Jonathan Spencer (University of Edinburgh) will deliver the Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture entitled 'Three scenes from rural life: Cambridge to Colombo and back again, 1954-2016' on Wednesday, 27 April 2016, 5 pm in the Winstanley Lecture Hall, Trinity College with a reception afterwards.

Abstract: I start from a moment in the 1950s when a small group of Cambridge researchers – Edmund Leach, Ben Farmer and Nur Yalman, followed soon after by Stanley Tambiah and Gananath Obeyesekere - initiated a conversation, fuelled by bouts of intense fieldwork, about land, kinship and social order in rural Sri Lanka. In my second scene, from the early 1980s, a new generation of researchers returned to the same questions, but in a landscape increasingly shaped by nationalist imaginings of the rural. In my final scene, the rural has become synonymous with poverty and its pathological consequences – self-harm and suicide, alcohol abuse and violence. What links these scenes, and what will become the subject-matter for this lecture is, in Raymond Williams’ words, “a problem of perspective”.

Cost: Free