Wearing a dead man's jacket: State symbols in troubled places*

This paper was initially prepared for a panel entitled ‘Recreating Community: Ritual and Violence in Sri Lanka's shattered World’ and presented at the 1995 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Society, held in Washington D.C. I would like to thank my fellow panelists, Dennis McGilvray, Patricia Lawrence, and Mark Whitaker, and our discussants, Margaret Trawick and David little, as well as my colleague Sharon Carstens, for their helpful suggestions in revising this piece. Many of the insights herein are theirs; the flaws are my own. This research was made possible in part by National Science Foundation Dissertation Research Award grant.