ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to describe a community dominated by the karava caste and take it as an example of general social and political processes which have shaped the class structure of many urban communities within Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka's remarkable recorded history covers a period of over two thousand years, more than four hundred years of which were under Western colonial domination. Demon exorcisms are a regular part of everyday life in the villages and towns of the western and southern coastal areas of Sri Lanka. Middle-class attitudes to exorcism and the fact that exorcism is mainly a working-class and peasant practice are recent phenomena. The class structure of modern Sri Lanka began to take shape in the context of a developing capitalist economy which was established in Sri Lanka under the conditions of colonial rule. The change in Sinhalese Buddhism to which Obeyesekere points, contra Ames, is expressed by the middle class with its increasing emphasis on the deities.
