A great, short piece by Erica Simmons and Nicholas Ruth Smith – “Comparison with an Ethnographic Sensibility” in the new issue of PS. They grapple with how to combine ethnography with systematic comparative research. Go check it out.
JR Doesn’t Hold Back
JR Jayewardene (“JR”) was one of the major figures of Sri Lanka’s history. Here he is, in a 1980 interview with James Manor, on future Prime Minister and Sinhala-only proponent SWRD Bandaranaike in cabinet meetings during the early post-independence UNP government (Manor, The Expedient Utopian, p. 188):
“We always waited for him to have his orgasm; then we could get on with things.”
Paul Staniland 