Acknowledgments; On Transliteration and Usage; Introduction; Part I. Ethnographic Topoi; Part II. Colonial Discourses; Part III. Reconstructing Anthropological Objects; Conclusion; Appendix; Notes; Glossary; Bibliography; Index
Summary
Yaktovil is an elaborate healing ceremony employed by Sinhalas in Sri Lanka to dispel the effects of the eyesight of a pantheon of malevolent supernatural figures known as yakku. Scott's investigation of yaktovil and yakku within the Sinhala cosmology is also an inquiry into the ways in which anthropology, by ignoring the discursive history of the rituals, religions, and relationships it seeks to describe, tends to reproduce ideological-often, specifically colonial-objects
