In the 1950s a small group of researchers initiated a conversation, fuelled by bouts of intense fieldwork, about land, kinship and social order in rural Sri Lanka. The research was revisited in the 1980s. The third scene in the lecture is contemporary, looking at how the rural has become synonymous with poverty and its pathological consequences – self-harm and suicide, alcohol abuse and violence. What links these scenes, and what will become the subject-matter for this lecture is, in Raymond Williams’ words, “a problem of perspective”.