Independant Study

My independent study is going really well! It’s just now beginning to open up for me, and it seems like a lot of things just sort of fall into my lap as far as research is concerned. At the beginning I didn’t think I could even find a teacher, and right at the beginning the librarian and my Sinhala teacher each found me one. I needed to do some interviews with my teacher as well as learning the art itself, and he spontaneously starts talking about the history of Angampora. I need a translator, and *poof*, there’s an English teacher in the room who just sort of steps in. My host family just happens to have relatives near where I have class. That family happens to have ancestors who did Angampora. My translator gets interested in Angampora and starts looking into it himself. Tons of happy coincidences that have really opened this topic up for me.

Its also really cool to gradually discover what the heck Angampora is. Right now, in Sri Lanka there seems to be a lot of different opinions about Angampora. Some say it’s very famous, others have never heard of it. Some say it was wiped out during the colonial rule, others say it continued in secret. Some say it’s 10,000 years old, others say it must be a more recent import. Is it an art practiced by soldiers? High caste people only? By monks (like kung fu in China)? There’s also a lot of argument between the teachers, about who knows the “real” Angampora, and which ones are merely pretenders. Some have even issued open challenges to deadly combat to prove that they are the REAL Angampora masters.

So, studying this has really been a blast.