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Grappling with the Past, Coping with the Present, Thinking of the Future: Culture, Tradition and Modernisation in Sri Lanka

Prof. K.M. de Silva is Executive Director, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Kandy, Sri Lanka. THIS BRIEF ARTICLE is a set of reflections on the complex links between culture, tradition and development in Sri Lanka. We need to begin with a definition of the terms which form the central themes in this article-culture, tradition and development, three of the most complex in the vocabulary of modern social scientists. Rather than be diverted into a long exercise in definition, the reflections in this article are based on short and common-sense definitions from a very accessible and acceptable source-standard dictionaries. On the definition of culture, we rely on the Concise Oxford Dictionary where the emphasis is on the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achieve-