The essays in this collection were presented in various national and international seminars. They cover a wide range of subjects in the field of literature, art and culture. They seek to explore the interface between technology and communication, culture and development, tradition and modernisation. They are marked by rare lucidity, sharp logic and a holistic perception of ground realities that shape personal psyche and social reality. Taken together they represent a multi-dimensional approach to understand today’s cultural patterns and social evolution. They emphasise the paramount need for the webs of intimacies that characterised earlier societies and cultures and the factors that have slowly eroded the sense of belonging and togetherness. At a time of rapid socio-economic change when everything tends to be looked upon as commodities in the market, they look at the roots of human happiness and the way art and culture can contribute to the human quest for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sitakant Mahapatra
Educated in Utkal, Allahabad and Cambridge Universities, Sitakant Mahapatra is a well-known anthropologist and a major voice in Indian poetry. He has been a fellow in the Universities of Cambridge and Harvard. Perhaps the best known interpreter of the oral poetry of the tribes of India he has earlier edited, with critical introductions, nine anthologies of such poetry. He has published numerous articles on the anthropology of development and oral literature in journals in India and abroad and chaired sessions in International Ethnological sciences. A doctorate in Development Anthropology, Oxford University Press ahs published his seminal works Modernisation and Ritual and The Realm of the Sacred: Verbal Symbolism and Ritual Structure. A Jnanpith Award winner for his poetry, he was earlier President of UNESCO’s Inter-governmental Committee of the World Decade for Cultural Development. Currently Chairman of the National Book Trust of India, he lives with his wife at Bhubaneswar, his home-town.
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