Does Sri Lanka contribute to global intellectual expansion of Social Sciences and Humanities?

Let me begin with a confession.

- by Sasanka Perera

Even though I have been conventionally located within social sciences in terms of training and university location, I have never been a discipline or subject puritan throughout my career. As a result, I have transgressed broad disciplinary borders and specific subject domains in search of what interested me. This has taken me from sociology to history, philosophy and bodies of theory across disciplines and more recently to creative writing including poetry and translation of literature. Much of this is beyond my formal training in social anthropology, but one can - and I believe one actually should - venture beyond the ramparts of one's training.

This preface is to offer a simple explanation as a point of departure for the ideas I want to present here. From this eclectic - and what has been an adventurous academic background, I want to raise very briefly two broad, but fundamental questions today on the intellectual personality of both social sciences and humanities as they manifest in our country. These are questions I have raised both in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia for well over two decades:

A) Does the research we produced locally in these disciplines make an impact on the corresponding global or regional discourses? For example, does Sri Lankan sociology, political science, literature, cultural studies and so on make a difference in the ways in which these disciplines work and think elsewhere in the world?