Legends of People, Myths of State

Bruce Kapferer is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has held academic positions in Zambia, Manchester, Adelaide, London, and Queensland and carried out extensive fieldwork in Zambia, Sri Lanka, India, Australia, and South Africa.

“…this brilliant book [draws] contrasts worthy of heavy thought and heavier debate.”  ·  American Anthropologist“This edition of the book adds insightful new essays by other scholars of nationalism, which cogently situate the legacy of the work… All of the appended essays update and fortify this original text, which is worth revisiting.”  ·  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute“This provocative study of the political culture of nationalism in Sri Lanka and Australia … is one of the few genuinely comparative studies in anthropology [and] in taking up such an important question as nationalism it reminds us that truly relevant anthropology questions deep-seated cultural beliefs, including our own.”  ·  Oceania“This is a book about equality and inequality, about the symbols and the ideologies of nation and state, and about violence committed in the name of religions of peace, Buddhism and Hinduism. Kapferer illuminates the modern world—and its horrors.”  ·  Peter Worsley, author of The Third World“By examining the ‘logic of ontology’ manifest in sorcery rites and in ethnic violence, Kapferer gives the book a dual character: it is at once a study of myth, evil, violence and an exercise in the comparative anthropology of nationalism. It is a provocatively ambitious work…”  ·  Times Literary Supplement“The problems addressed in this book are those of modern nationalism, a political development of European origin that now has a worldwide effect…Kapferer’s writing is fluid and powerful…[His work] is an excellent example of what comparative anthropology can be.”  ·  Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford

• Preface to the New and Revised EditionPreface to the Paperback ReissueIntroductionChapter 1. Cultures of Nationalism: Political Cosmology and the PassionsPart I: Evil and the State: Sinhalese Naitonalism, Violence, and the Power of HierarchyChapter 2. Ethnic Violence and the Force of History in LegendChapter 3. Evil, Power, and the StateChapter 4. Ideological Practice, Ethnic Nationalism, and the PassionsPart II: People Against the State: Australian Nationalism and Egalitarian IndividualismChapter 5. When the World Crumbles and the Heavens Fall In: War, Death, and the Creation of NationChapter 6. But the Band Played “Waltzing Maltilda”: National Ceremonial and the Anatomy of EgalitarianismChapter 7. Ethnicity and Intolerance: Egalitarian Nationalism and Its Political PracticeChapter 8. Nationalism, Tradition, and Political CultureNotesReferences