By Premakumara de Silva –

I. Introduction: The Library as a Contested Field

Honorable Minister, Chairman and Director General of the National Library of Sri Lanka, distinguished international delegates, esteemed colleagues, and fellow custodians of human knowledge—Good morning, Ayubowan, Vanakkam, Assalamu Alaikum! Throughout my career as a sociologist and anthropologist, I have argued that we cannot understand human institutions without unpacking the structural power dynamics, social hierarchies, and deep cultural matrixes that shape them. If we apply the critical theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu (1977; 1986), a library is never merely a neutral warehouse for dead trees or silent digital data servers. It is, in reality, a highly dynamic field of power. It is an institutional space where cultural capital is accumulated, legitimized, systematized, and distributed. It directly reflects, reinforces, and sometimes actively challenges the structural inequalities and class divides of the society that birthed it. The library decides what knowledge is worthy of preservation and what is pushed to the margins of historical oblivion.

For over two millennia, our island—shaped by the fluid, polyphonic intersection of diverse cultures, languages, and complex cosmologies—has recorded its historical existence on the fragile medium of the palm leaf. From the ancient rock temples of Aluvihare where the Buddhist Tripitaka was first committed to writing on puskola leaves, to the rich Islamic Arwi manuscripts of our coastal trading communities, and the vibrant Tamil literary traditions of the North, Sri Lanka’s history is fundamentally pluralistic. As we gather for ICNATLIB 2026 under the theme of ‘Libraries: Global Knowledge, Cultural Memory and Digital Futures,’ our central challenge is not merely technological or logistical. It is a deeply sociological and ethical dilemma: How do we ensure that our digital futures do not flatten this beautiful, complex, multi-cultural reality into a monolithic, algorithmically driven digital monoculture dominated by global Western paradigms?

II. Anthropological Custodianship: The Risk of Digital Majoritarian Reordering

Let us look critically at our first foundational pillar: Cultural Memory. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1990, p. 222) insightfully reminded us, “Cultural identity is not a fixed essence, belonging to the past. It is a production, which is never complete, always constituted within, not outside, representation.” If identity is an ongoing production, then the archives we build are the technical factories of that representation. In a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society like ours, memory is inherently plural and fragmented. It does not speak with a single, homogenized voice; it demands a chorus.

In my own ethnohistorical research on the reordering of sacred spaces in Sri Lanka—particularly my work tracking the transformation of Sri Pada (de Silva, 2013; 2016)—I have documented how historically inclusive, multi-religious, and pluralistic spaces can be structurally, politically, and physically reordered into exclusionary, majoritarian arenas under the intense pressures of modern nationalism and globalized forces. As I observe the contemporary transition from physical archives to digital repositories within the South Asian landscape, I must issue an urgent anthropological warning: Are we inadvertently repeating this majoritarian reordering within our cloud infrastructures and digital domains? If our national digital repositories fail to actively capture, tag, and preserve the pluralistic expressions of all our micro-communities with equal weight and visibility, our digital algorithms will perform an automated version of this exclusionary reordering.

When we digitize, we must guard fiercely against what the world-renowned postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) famously conceptualized in her seminal work, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, as “epistemic violence.” Spivak warned us of the systematic silencing, distortion, and marginalization of localized, indigenous knowledge systems by dominant colonial, Eurocentric, and elite discourses. If our modern digital metadata schemas, search algorithms, and library cataloging systems rely entirely on global Anglo-American classification models like the Dewey Decimal System, we commit a new act of digital epistemic violence. We render the subaltern mute all over again, this time within the digital archive.

In our own national history, we have experienced the most painful form of physical and cultural erasure: the tragic burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, which destroyed nearly 97,000 irreplaceable manuscripts, rare palm leaves, and historical records. However, the response to this trauma was not silence; it was an act of digital subaltern resistance. Look at the phenomenal work of the Noolaham Foundation (2024). By establishing decentralized scanning units—including collaborative digitization initiatives within the rebuilt Jaffna Public Library itself—this virtual, open-access library has digitized over 55,000 documents, rare local periodicals, oral histories, and rare Arwi or Tamil manuscripts. This is what I define as a true digital decolonial project. It proves that when local communities take control of their own technological infrastructure, they reverse epistemic violence and guarantee that no physical arson or political marginalization can ever erase their collective cultural memory again.

An ola leaf detailing our traditional medicine Vedakama, a Tamil Siddha medical text, or the rich oral ecologies observed in our indigenous Veddah communities (de Silva & Punchihewa, 2011) cannot be neatly categorized under generic Western terms without losing their entire internal epistemic logic. Furthermore, our pursuit of digital futures demands aggressive digital repatriation of records locked in Western metropoles. We must reclaim our digital twins from European museums to dismantle the imperial monopoly over our historical representations and allow the subaltern to speak through our own digital platforms.

III. Sociological Realities: Techno-Feudalism, Elite Capture, Digital Habitus, and Žižek’s Warning

This brings us to the concept of Global Knowledge and the sharp structural inequalities that govern its flow across borders. Recent postcolonial critiques on digitalization argue that the Internet has not democratized power; instead, it has given birth to what Slavoj Žižek (2010; 2023) and contemporary political economists term “Techno-Feudalism.” We are no longer living under classic industrial capitalism; we are living under digital feudal lords—massive corporate tech monopolies that own the digital “land,” cloud infrastructures, and LLM algorithms, charging us extractive rent to access our own shared human knowledge.

Žižek (2023) issues a critical psychological warning regarding our relationship with modern generative AI and automated search platforms. He describes it through the psychoanalytic structure of “fetishist disavowal”—the internal state of: “I know very well that I am interacting with a synthetic, corporate algorithm, but it feels so customized, so instant, that I act as if it is a neutral friend.” In a developing, multi-cultural nation like Sri Lanka, this is a dangerous psychological and intellectual trap. When our students and researchers rely on Western-trained, corporate-owned AI systems to summarize global knowledge, they receive what Žižek calls a “decaffeinated” version of reality—an outsourced, sanitized form of thought that completely strips away local nuance, structural class struggles, and anti-colonial resistance.

Here, we must radicalize our critique by deploying the insights of contemporary philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022) on the phenomenon of “Elite Capture.” Táíwò warns us that radical, emancipatory concepts—including “decolonization” and “identity politics”—are consistently hijacked and subverted by political and economic elites to serve their own narrow institutional interests. When we look at state-sponsored digitization projects, like the ICTA-NLDSB model digital libraries established in peripheral hubs like Badulla, Polonnaruwa, and Batticaloa, we must ask a painful sociological question: Are these infrastructures truly reaching the subaltern, or are they falling prey to elite capture?

If a digital room in a regional library is controlled by bureaucratic elites who dictate access metrics based on English proficiency or urban social capital, it reinforces what Táíwò terms “Epistemic Deference.” We default to a system where we defer to the room’s most privileged actors to interpret data. The library then ceases to be a site of social mobility and turns into a digital enclosure where the global tech architecture and our domestic elites form a collaborative structure of control. By prioritizing open-access infrastructure at the National Library, we convert these physical spaces into portals where a child from a rural farming family can bypass geographic penalization and access global knowledge, completely free from the extractive rents of techno-feudal lords.

If we map this divide through Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of the habitus—the deeply ingrained social dispositions, skills, and cultural familiarities shaped by an individual’s class background—we see that techno-feudalism reinforces existing domestic hierarchies. High-quality digital information and computational literacy remain elite resources, heavily concentrated in urban centers like Colombo and accessible primarily to those fluent in English. To counter this structural exclusion, we must analyze local, practical interventions. The Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA), in collaboration with the National Library and Documentation Services Board (NLDSB, 2024), launched model digital libraries across diverse socio-spatial hubs: Colombo, Kurunegala, Batticaloa, Polonnaruwa, and Badulla.

From a sociological standpoint, these centers are not merely computer labs; they are structural disrupters of the digital habitus. By deploying modern tablets, localized e-learning repositories, and high-speed internet to peripheral provincial towns like Badulla and Polonnaruwa, these projects democratize what Bourdieu calls cultural capital. They transform the local public library into an egalitarian site where a subaltern student can bypass geographic penalization and tap into the global grid of knowledge without paying the exorbitant “rents” demanded by techno-feudal monopolies. The public library becomes the ultimate equalizer.

IV. Digital Futures: Transforming Rituals for a Smart Nation

Looking toward the ambitious theme from our previous conference, “Building a Smart Nation through Smart Libraries,” we must analyze what a “Smart Nation” truly means from a humanistic, sociological perspective. A smart library is not just a room full of automated kiosks, RFID tags, and computer terminals. It must use technology to deepen social cohesion and expand human capability.

In my research tracking the globalization of local rituals (de Silva, 2000) and the digitalization of Buddhist ritual practices during modern crises like the COVID-19 pandemic (de Silva, 2021), I observed that local communities are highly adaptive. Our people are entirely capable of migrating traditional, deeply embodied rituals, sacred obligations, and social behaviors into digitized modes when existential crises demand it. We watched communities transform Zoom, YouTube, and local streaming setups into sites for Bodhi Poojas, community pirith chantings, and virtual funeral rites.

Our libraries must learn from this organic social resilience. Digital technologies should not be used to isolate us or to replace the physical, communal space of the library. Instead, they must be leveraged to enhance it—transforming libraries into vibrant digital public spheres where communities gather to co-create knowledge, share oral histories, and engage in civic dialogue. We must look at the scale achieved by our apex institutions: The National Digital Library of Sri Lanka (diglib.natlib.lk), which has compiled over 66,000 digital files, featuring critical historical foundations like the digitization of Government Gazettes spanning from 1974 to 1986 (National Library of Sri Lanka, 2025).

But as an anthropologist, I must push further: How do our users interact with these 66,000 files? Recent library user studies in Sri Lanka show a troubling trend: because our internal search engines and Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) often lack localized, deep semantic metadata, students frequently bypass our official platforms entirely, opting for generic corporate search engines. This is where Žižek’s warning of fetishist disavowal materializes. If we rely on generic algorithms to sort our digitized national gazettes or our UNESCO-supported digitization of 2,000 ancient Ola leaf manuscripts (UNESCO, 2024), the local cultural context is stripped away. Our future mandate is not just scanning paper into PDFs. It is the integration of advanced local-language Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and semantic tagging that forces global AI models to respect the internal linguistic logics of Sinhala and Tamil, rather than absorbing them into an Anglo-American digital matrix.

Furthermore, from a sociological perspective, surveillance capitalism disproportionately harms and monitors vulnerable populations (Zuboff, 2019). As our libraries adopt automated metrics, biometric checkouts, algorithmic cataloging, and digital user tracking, we must fiercely defend the absolute right to intellectual privacy. The library has historically been a safe, anonymous sanctuary where any citizen—regardless of their political leanings, ethnicity, caste, or social status—could read and explore radical ideas free from surveillance. Our digital platforms must be engineered around strict open-source, privacy-first architectures. We must ensure our citizens’ intellectual inquiries never become corporate commodities within the broader matrices of surveillance capital.

V. Call to Action: The Three Imperatives for an Equitable Future

To the policymakers, academics, and library professionals assembled here today: the digital future is not an inevitable, natural wave that we must passively ride. It is a social construct that we have the power, and the ethical obligation, to design.

I challenge this conference to commit to three structural imperatives:

1. Democratize Library Education through Critical Data Studies: To counteract the structures of algorithmic control, our first directive must move beyond passive “epistemic deference.” We must stop merely “centering marginalized voices” in speech while leaving the material infrastructure unchanged. Following Táíwò’s (2022) call for a “Constructive Politics” of radical solidarity and material worldmaking, we must completely overhaul our library science curricula to include digital anthropology, critical data ethics, and the sociology of knowledge—training a new generation to see technology through a deeply human lens. We must ensure that data literacies are not taught as elite technocratic skills, but as democratic tools available to the most geographically and socially penalized students of Sri Lanka.

2. Radical Archival Inclusion: To prevent the digital majoritarian reordering and the epistemic violence that postcolonial theory and my own work warn against, we must actively expand our collection policies to document the living histories, folk songs, and oral testimonies of all ethnic, religious, and marginalized sub-cultures within Sri Lanka.

3. National Open-Access Policies: We must strongly advocate for legislative frameworks mandating that any research funded by Sri Lankan taxpayers be made permanently open and free to the public via national institutional repositories.

Conclusion:  As I draw to a close, let us look beyond the flat glare of our computer screens and digital tablets. The crisis we face as librarians, archivists, and social scientists is not a technical crisis of digital formats; it is a profound ontological and political crisis. If we treat digital transformation merely as an automated process of scanning paper into pixels, we remain trapped in what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (2022) describes as a politics of pure symbolic compliance. We satisfy ourselves with the illusion of inclusion while leaving the global techno-feudal structures of exploitation entirely intact.

Centered within this digital transition is the fundamental question of worldmaking. When our ancestors sat under the shade of our historic monastic spaces, using a steel stylus to press ink into the organic fibers of a fresh palm leaf, they were not merely recording data. They were actively constructing a world. They were engaged in a material practice of resistance against time, decay, and existential erasure. They created an epistemic space where the polyphonic voices of this island—Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, and indigenous—could co-exist as a living repository of human consciousness.

Our modern turn to the digital must inherit that same radical spirit of worldmaking. We must refuse to allow our national libraries to become mere retail outlets for global data monopolies or sanitized archives that display a “decaffeinated” history. If the subaltern is to speak in the twenty-first century, they cannot speak through the template of an Anglo-American corporate algorithm. They must speak through structures that we build with our own hands, grounded in our own linguistic, cultural, and socio-spatial realities.

Let us build digital futures that do not homogenize our past, but structurally defend its pluralism. Let us ensure that our libraries remain what they have always been at their absolute best: not silent monuments to dead knowledge, but the democratic, multi-cultural, and living heart of our civilization’s collective survival.

References

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Noolaham Foundation. (2024). Digital Preservation of Subaltern Documentary Heritage: The Jaffna Public Library Partnership Project. Noolaham Wiki Archives.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak?. In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271-313). Macmillan.

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Žižek, S. (2023). The Post-Human Desert. Project Syndicate.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

*Keynote Address delivered at 5th International Research Conference of the National Library of Sri Lanka (ICNATLIB 2026) Premakumara de Silva, Professor of Sociology, University of Colombo, prema@soc.cmb.ac.lk