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Book Cover
Book
Author Obeyesekere, Gananath.

Title Medusa's hair : an essay on personal symbols and religious experience / Gananath Obeyesekere
Published Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [1981]
©1981

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  306.6 Obe  AVAILABLE
Description xiii, 217 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Contents Includes index
Summary The great pilgrimage center of southeastern Sri Lanka, Kataragama, has become in recent years the spiritual home of a new class of Hindu-Buddhist religious devotees. These ecstatic priests and priestesses invariably display long locks of matted hair, and they express their devotion to the gods through fire walking, tongue-piercing, hanging on hooks, and trance-induced prophesying. The increasing popularity of these ecstatics poses a challenge not only to orthodox Sinhala Buddhism (the official religion of Sri Lanka) but also, as the author shows, to the traditional anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of symbolism. Focusing initially on one symbol, matted hair, the author demonstrates that the conventional distinction between personal and cultural symbols is inadequate and naive. His detailed case studies of ecstatics show that there is always a reciprocity between the personal-psychological dimension of the symbol and its public, culturally sanctioned role. Medusa's Hair thus makes an important theoretical contribution both to the anthropology of individual experience and to the psychoanalytic understanding of culture. In its analyses of the symbolism of guilt, the adaptational and integrative significance of belief in spirits, and a host of related issues concerning possession states and religiosity, this book marks a provocative advance in psychological anthropology. [publisher]
Analysis Sri Lanka Kataragama Rituals
Notes Includes index
Bibliography Bibliography: pages 207-211
Includes index
Subject Hair (in religion, folk-lore, etc.)
Hair -- Folklore.
Hair -- Religious aspects.
Symbolism.
SUBJECT Kataragama (Sri Lanka) http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n82062445 -- Religious life and customs. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh00007603
LC no. 80027372
ISBN 0226616002