A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka

Bruce Kapferer's A Celebration of Demons is an anthropological monograph built on extended fieldwork among Sinhalese exorcism practitioners in Sri Lanka, and its authority rests on that direct ethnographic method rather than on textual or doctrinal sources. Kapferer's central argument, that exorcism rites are aesthetic performances that reorder a sufferer's experience of self and community as much as they expel a named demon, is an interpretive anthropological thesis, not an uncontested fact about what demons are or do. It is widely respected within medical and performance anthropology for its close attention to ritual structure and audience effect, and it should be read as one influential scholarly interpretation of Sinhalese healing practice among several, grounded in the particular villages and rites Kapferer observed, rather than a general theory of exorcism across traditions.