Guest Lecture: Gananath Obeyesekere's "The Tower — The Long Night of Carl Jung’s Cosmic Vision"

March 23, 2011

Guest Lecture: Gananath Obeyesekere’s “The Tower — The Long Night of Carl Jung’s Cosmic Vision”

Gananath Obeyesekere is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Princeton University. Among his numerous academic awards is the Thomas Huxley medal, which is given by the Royal Anthropological Institute and is listed as “the highest honor at the disposal of the Institute”.  Obeyesekere has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Suntory-Toyota Fellow (STICERD) at the London School of Economics. His book on Captain Cook won the Louis Gottschalk Prize in 1993, awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. Presently, he is in California to receive a lifetime award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Obeyesekere has published over 100 scholarly articles and nine books: Land Tenure in Village Ceylon, Cambridge University Press, 1967 (reprinted 2008); Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, University of Chicago Press, 1981; The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, Chicago,  1984; Buddhism Transformed; Religious Change in Sri Lanka (with Richard Gombrich), Princeton University Press, 1988; The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformations in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, Chicago, 1990; The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, Princeton, 1992 (enlarged edition 1997); Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian Buddhist and Greek Rebirth, University of California Press, 2002; Cannibal Talk: The Man-eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas, California, 2005; The Awakened Ones: A Phenomenology of the Visionary Experience (completed manuscript is under review by Columbia University Press).

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology