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An examination of the nature of political change within a village, which the author calls Morapitiya, in the Kandyan highlands of Sri Lanka, during the transition from colony to independent nation. During the first years of Sri Lanka`s independence, the United National Party perpetuated the `indirect rule` policy of the British colonial government. In 1956, with the election of a coalition government led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, this form of rule was rejected. The new government was committed to reviving the traditional Sinhalese culture, language and Buddhist ideals, and to improving the living conditions of the poor. Soon after assuming power, the S.L.F.P. government began to implement political and economic policies designed to alter village structure in accordance with the new ideals. The new politics began to have noticeable effect in Morapitiya by mid-1963, towards the end of her first field trip there. When she returned in 1967, the political structure of Morapitiya had undergone fundamental change and incipient forms of a new political structure were discernible. The author considers the changes in cooperation and conflict and the effects of the new governments policies in Morapitiya. She focuses on the nature of this process of change, using the equilibrium model to analyse the pre-1963 village and showing that a model of competing political structures with different set of rules is necessary for analyszing the same village in 1967. ISBN - 9780521058964
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Pages : 400
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