Tab Article

Ratings: ★★★★☆ (4.4 / 5)
Genre: Anthropology, Sociology, History, Sri Lankan Studies, Visual Culture

Book Review:
Michael Roberts is one of Sri Lanka's most distinguished historians and anthropologists, and in Potency, Power & People in Groups, he turns his analytical eye to a subject that is both fascinating and urgently relevant: the power of images.

This book is both a display and a reflective exercise on the power of imagery—whether from camera, painting, or etching. Roberts shows us that images can be as captivating, as seductive, and as misleading as they are revealing. They can serve as raw data, providing glimpses of facets of life lost to modern generations. But they must be deployed with attention to context and in association with other forms of data.

The collection had its origins in material intended for Ismeth Raheem's Images of British Ceylon. That manuscript lay dormant for years, but Roberts has now extensively expanded and revised it, engaging events in Sri Lanka and abroad in recent years. Readers will find their contemporary experiences an aid when they critically interpret the more modern photographs in this collection.

Roberts is refreshingly honest about the limitations of his project. He writes: ''My explorative essay within these covers is incomplete. It does not explore the manner in which government agencies, media outlets and LTTE arms manipulated the placement of photographs [sometimes undated] to drive home some of their arguments. Fabrications and half-truths are an integral aspect of agit-prop activity in heightened conflicts. This is a netherworld, underworld, dirty world. Even moral crusaders resort to such selections or choose to see only what they wish to see.''

This honesty is characteristic of Roberts's scholarship. He does not pretend to offer final answers, but invites us to think critically about the images that surround us and the power they wield.

Roberts's own intellectual journey is impressive: educated at St. Aloysius College in Galle, he earned an Honours Degree in History at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya. He won the Rhodes Scholarship in 1962, completed his D.Phil at Oxford, and later held Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt Fellowships. He taught at Peradeniya before moving to the University of Adelaide in 1977.

Potency, Power & People in Groups is a valuable contribution to the study of visual culture, power, and Sri Lankan society. It will be of interest to anthropologists, historians, and anyone concerned with how images shape our understanding of the world.