Gananath Obeyesekere
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Gananath Obeyesekere Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Washington in 1964 and later taught at the University of California, San Diego before accepting a position at Princeton University. He is best known for psychoanalytic studies of possession and the "work of culture" in South Asia.
He has done much work in his home country of Sri Lanka. In the 1990s he entered into intellectual debate with Marshall Sahlins over the rationality of indigenous peoples. Obeyesekere has engaged in fieldwork in Sri Lanka and India.
He is most interested in psychoanalysis and anthropology and the ways in which personal symbolism is related to religious experience. He has recently become interested in European voyages of discovery to Polynesia in the 18th century and after, and the implications of these voyages for the development of ethnography.
Professor Obeyesekere teaches classes in psychoanalysis and anthropology, hermeneutics, social anthropology, and Buddhism.
[edit] Books
- Land Tenure In Village Ceylon : A Sociological And Historical Study, 1967
- Medusa's Hair : An Essay On Personal Symbols And Religious Experience, 1981
- The Cult Of The Goddess Pattini, 1984
- Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (with Richard Gombrich), 1988
- The Work Of Culture : Symbolic Transformation In Psychoanalysis And Anthropology, 1990
- The Apotheosis Of Captain Cook : European Mythmaking In The Pacific, 1992
- Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth, 2002
- Cannibal Talk : The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas, 2005
- Karma and Rebirth, 2005
