The Cult of the Goddess Pattini

By Gananath Obeyesekere

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).

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226616029
• ISBN13: 9780226616025
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 648 Pages
• Weight: 2.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 7.1" x 9.8"