The Väddas are famous tribal group of hunters and gatherers descended from the aboriginal people of Sri Lanka. Nowadays they are recognized so-called "indigenous people". This paper analyze the representation and the discourse on them searching out the origin myth in Mahāvaṃsa, the historical documents, and the ethnography written by anthropologists. As a savage race or the primitive people contrasted to the civilized Sinhala Buddhist society, their way of life excited ethnographic curiosity Robert Knox, a captured sailor in seventeenth century, had reported in his reliable records that the Väddas have been divided into a wilder and a tamer sort. In nineteenth century, it had become conventional to differentiate the wild Väddas, the hunter-gatherers, from the village Väddas, the cultivator. Seligman's famous ethnography adds the distinction between the pure and the degenerate. He has exclusive concern with pure wild Väddas who are the most primitive people in the world.
Such kind of discourse produced by anthropologists affects the Väddas image today. After the independence, their number of the statistical data has become few, and disappeared after 1963. They do not exist as the ethnic group now and change into a imaginary socio-cultural category. There is no great difference between the Sinhala and the Väddas based on the way of life such as language, kinship, and folk belief. On the analysis of the myth of God Saman and the indigenous people (yakkha) or the myth of God Kataragama and Valli Amma, we can conclude that the Sinhala and the Väddas share the common cultural base. Knox had already reported that the Väddas's language were speak Sinhalese. The Väddas have been always located on the periphery of Sinhala culture and society by the representation and the discourse. The distinction between the Väddas and the Sinhala is considered to be the range of continuous socio cultural variation.
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