ABSTRACT
This essay introduces a collection of chapters about religious innovation and shared multi-religious spaces in post-conflict Sri Lanka. Although Sri Lanka has displayed much inter-religious conflict between a regnant Sinhalese Buddhist majority and Hindu, Christian, and Muslim minorities since its inter-ethnic civil war ended in 2009, this was concurrent with long-standing, often unrecognized, background sets of shared practices and ritual spaces, especially at Sri Lanka’s famously multi-religious pilgrimage sites such as Kataragama and Sri Pada/Adam’s Peak. At these and similar places, Sri Lankan religiosities continue to rub up against each other, as they also do at interfaces of ethnicity and gender, and both inviting and fissiparous inter-religious (and inter-communal) activities occur. This essay argues, therefore, that understanding innovations and the multi-religious spaces they occur within, if leavened with a thorough accounting of national and geopolitical contexts, is a prerequisite to understanding how both tolerance and intolerance are produced.
