Author: Dr Vijitha Nanayakkara
Price: Rs. 1,400.00 | ISBN: 978-624-210-240-5

Sociology has never lacked textbooks in Sri Lanka. What it has lacked, more often, is a Sinhala-language introduction written by someone who has spent an entire career inside the discipline rather than merely passing through it. Vijitha Nanayakkara’s සමාජවිද්‍යාව සංකල්පාවබෝධය helps close that gap.

Nanayakkara brings to the book decades of experience in the University of Peradeniya’s Department of Sociology, where he also served as Head of Department, before becoming Vice-Chancellor of the Open University of Sri Lanka. He holds an honours degree and a master’s degree in sociology from Peradeniya and a PhD from Bangalore University. That academic trajectory is reflected in the structure of the book, which moves with unusual patience from first principles to contemporary social theory.

The book runs to ten chapters and just over 300 pages. It opens conventionally enough, tracing the origins of sociology and anthropology as disciplines, before moving into culture, socialisation, social institutions and the organisation of communities. The middle chapters — on inequality and stratification, and on deviance and social control — are where the book particularly earns its value as a teaching text. Class, caste and gender stratification, together with theories of crime, deviance and punishment, are introduced in a sequence clearly designed for the classroom rather than the casual browsing reader.

It is the closing chapter, on globalisation, that gives the book its strongest intellectual signature. Rather than treating globalisation as a single, settled concept, Nanayakkara presents it as a field of competing interpretations. Roland Robertson’s work on globalisation, Anthony Giddens on time-space distanciation, David Harvey on time-space compression and Ulrich Beck’s concept of the risk society appear in sequence, alongside discussions of the growth of the global economy, globalisation and democracy, and the formation of a global culture.

For a Sinhala-medium introductory text to engage this directly with Giddens, Harvey and Beck — rather than simply invoking “globalisation” as a fashionable term — is significant. It is here that the book begins to move beyond summary and encourages the reader to see sociology as an argument between different ways of understanding a rapidly changing world.

The foreword, by Professor Kalinga Tudor Silva of the University of Peradeniya, frames the book’s central task well. Sociology, in this view, is not simply about memorising ready-made facts about social problems. Its deeper purpose is to develop the disciplined imagination needed to ask the right questions about them. The book provides precisely that kind of groundwork for a new generation of Sinhala-reading students and scholars.

That is perhaps the book’s most important contribution. The teaching of sociology in Sri Lanka has often depended heavily on English-language texts in which European and Western theorists reach Sinhala-medium students at one remove. Nanayakkara writes as someone who has watched successive generations of students encounter these concepts for the first time, and it shows in the pacing. Ideas are built up rather than assumed, while the connections between them — how socialisation feeds into institutions, how institutions produce forms of stratification, and how stratification is reshaped by globalisation — are made explicit rather than left for the reader to infer.

. A scholar capable of explaining inherited sociological theory clearly is also well placed to ask a more difficult question: after several decades of observing Sri Lankan society, what can Sri Lanka itself teach us about the theories of inherited sociology?

That would make an interesting next book.