[Reader-list] Buddhism, Political Violence and the Dilemmas of Democracy in Sri Lanka; CSDS, April 24, 5 PM

[Rajesh Ramakrishnan]

*24th April 2009, 5 PM *

*Seminar Hall, CSDS*

*29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054*


Rajni Kothari Annual Lecture



*Buddhism, Political Violence and the Dilemmas of Democracy in Sri Lanka*

by
Professor Gananath Obeyesekere



Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton
University, and has been Rajni Kothari Chair Professor at CSDS since October
2008.    He taught for twenty years in Princeton till he retired in
2000. Prior to that he was Professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, San Diego, and earlier Professor of Sociology at Peradeniya. His
research interests include: psychoanalysis and anthropology and the ways in
which personal symbolism is related to religious experience; European
voyages of discovery to Polynesia in the 18th century and after, and the
implications of these voyages for the development of ethnography. His
current research is on the phenomenology of the visionary experience, soon
to be published as a book, *The Awakened Ones*. He is also re-evaluating
notions of primitiveness and aboriginality through his work on the Veddas of
Sri Lanka. Apart from these, he is a keen observer of the political
situation in Sri Lanka.



He is the author of six books and over a hundred scholarly articles.  His
books are: *Land Tenure in Village Ceylon: A Sociological and Historical
Study;* *Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious
Experience;* *The Cult of the Goddess Pattini;* *Buddhism Transformed* (with
Richard Gombrich); *The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in
Psychoanalysis and Anthropology*; *The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European
Mythmaking in the Pacific*, and *Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in
Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth.*