| Summary/Abstract |
This article analyses the ways in which a little-known Sinhala text called the Ravana Rajavaliya articulates a moral topography of late medieval Sri Lanka. Rather than expressing a kind of all-consuming xenophobia in response to social and cultural difference, the text indexes a set of local political responses to the surge in social mobility occasioned by changing patterns of trans-regional circulation in Sri Lanka’s southwest. We argue that ‘others’ are represented in terms of proximity to a generalised moral order, one which highlights desirable forms of selfhood as instruments for assimilation within an emerging state society.
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