Abstract
The thesis is an ethnohistorical study of one major pilgrimage site in Sri Lanka,
known as Sri Pada (Adam's Peak), where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims annually
visit to worship the sacred footprint which is located in the mountain top temple. This
sacred footprint has different sacred connotations for Sri Lanka's major religious
groups (Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Catholic). However, this pilgrimage site,
which was considered a multi-religious site until the turn of the twentieth century, has
now been constructed or ordered into an ethnic majoritarian Buddhist space. My
thesis, therefore, concentrates in part on the historical process which has led to the
construction of the pilgrimage site as a Buddhist space, and then locates this process
within the wider context of the rise of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka. My
work highlights the powerful role pilgrimage can play in particular religious
discourses and the manner it legitimates certain ways of envisaging power and
relationships of domination at particular conjunctures, which is clearly apparent in the
contemporary Sinhala Buddhist cultural nationalism in Sri Lanka.
This thesis is divided into two interconnected parts. The first part explores the major
competing discourses that have been arisen during its political and religious history
and the second part is mainly focussed on the style of religiosity and the social
composition of pilgrims, and explores social factors in the practices of worship. One
chapter deals with the style of "official" Buddhist religiosity found at this centre and
two further chapters look at devotional and expressive forms of religiosity of pilgrims,
which is oriented to the Buddha rather than the gods and as such is markedly different
from that documented by anthropologists working in other parts of the island. The
final chapter investigates links between devotional styles and the shifting socio¬
political contexts. The documentation of the prevailing styles ofreligiosity at Sri Pada
enable me to show on one hand how such religiosity further undermines the broadly
Weberian antinomies that have dominated the anthropology of Buddhism in Sri
Lanka, and on other hand the intensity or scale of Buddhicization of the historically
viewed 'sacred site'.
