The Cult of the Goddess Pattini

Gananath Obeyesekere

University of Chicago Press, 1984 - Body, Mind & Spirit - 629 pages

Pattini—goddess, virgin, wife, and mother; folk deity of Sinhala Buddhists and Jains; and assimilated goddess of the Hindu pantheon—has been worshiped in Sri Lanka and South India for fifteen hundred years or more, as she still is today. This long-awaited book is the culmination of Gananath Obeyesekere's comprehensive study of the Pattini cult and its historical, sociological, and psychoanalytical role in the culture of South Asia. A well-known anthropologist and a native of Sri Lanka, Obeyesekere displays his impeccable scholarship and a stunning range of theoretical perspectives in this work, the most detailed analysis of a single religious complex in South Asian ethnography (and possibly in all of anthropology).

About the author

Gananath Obeyesekere is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is the author of "Imagining Karma: Ethical" "Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth "(California, 2002), "The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the" "Pacific "(1997), "The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in" "Psychoanalysis and Anthropology "(1990), "The Cult of the Goddess Pattini" (1984), and "Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious" "Experience "(1984).

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Cult of the Goddess Pattini
• Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1984
• ISBN: 0226616029, 9780226616025
• Length: 629 pages
• Subjects: Body, Mind & Spirit / General; Religion / General; Religion / Hinduism / General