Economic Globalization and Cultural Heritage in Sri Lanka Today

In 1977, Sri Lanka abandoned a protected economy and welfare state in favor of integration into the world market. This process of globalization has been embraced by traditionally-defined lower class women, and is raising tensions in the way Sri Lanka's Buddhist heritage is being passed down to the current generation. In particular, female garment workers have come under attack, ostensibly because their growing economic and social status is incompatible with traditional notions of a woman's proper place in society. Can chronically unemployed or at least underemployed men, displaced from their traditional occupations by the spread of technologies in the newly globalized Sri Lankan economy, thwart the aspirations of women for greater economic and social status by insisting that what women want is immoral? Or is there a middle way, with heritage enacted elastically, capable of adapting to changes in technologies and social status within traditional definitions of social integrity? This is a pressing social and cultural question facing Sri Lanka today, just as it is for other nations undergoing the process of globalization.