ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to address how people negotiate with innovative multi-religious spaces, a new religious pluralism, and geo-religious power in post-war Sri Lanka. Ethnographically, then, our project urged us to explore whether such religious innovations were deviations from conventional orders of religion or from within a wider cultural grammar of religion; and whether shared sacred spaces or multi-religious spaces were being amicably constructed as in classic notions of religious syncretism or were revitalizing each religion against the others through conflict, violence, and competition. Meta-narratives of multi-religious places such as Sri Pada, Kataragama, and Madu Church produce religious spaces shaped by multiple discourses, histories, ideologies, and cultural interpretations. Understanding religious pluralism in Sri Lanka requires moving beyond classical anthropological theories that seek singular answers towards a more complex engagement with the contemporary field’s postmodern and ontological turns. For all of them multi-religious places are spaces of redefinition, reshaping, and reimagining.
