Sri Lanka today is a postnational location, the uncomfortable home of a nation that never was, and never will be. If anthropology has been concerned with the particularity of "other" cultures defined as a "moral elsewhere" beyond the comprehension of universal reason, then anti-colonial nationalism has sought to claim a universality for the particularities of national culture. This essay sketches a preliminary description of the double loss imposed by the impossibility of the nationalist project, a loss that cannot be mourned in an ordinary way.
