I am Professor
of Anthropology, Emeritus at Princeton University
from where I retired in 2000 after teaching there
for twenty years. I passed my BA in English literature
with first class honors in 1955 from the University
of Ceylon; my MA and PhD was from the University
of Washington, Seattle, in 1958 and 1964 respectively.
I have taught at the University of Sri Lanka,
the University of Washington and the University
of California, San Diego. Since my retirement
I have taught at Harvard as Numata Professor of
Buddhist Studies (Fall 2005); this coming Fall
I will be New York City Professor at Columbia
University. I have given major endowed lectures
all over the world, most recently the William
James lecture at Harvard, the Foerster Lecture
in Comparative Religion at Berkeley, the Thomas
Huxley lecture in London; and next year I will
deliver the Alice Thorner lecture in Paris. I
have had many academic honors and awards, among
them the Huxley Medal given by the Royal Anthropological
Institute and which is listed as “the highest
honor at the disposal of the Institute.”
I have been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Suntory-Toyota
Fellow (STICERD) at the London School of Economics
and many more. My book on Captain Cook won the
Louis Gottschalk Prize in 1993 awarded by the
American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.
I have published over one hundred scholarly articles
and the following books: Land Tenure in Village
Ceylon: A Sociological and Historical Study, Cambridge,
1967; Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal
Symbols and Religious Experience, Chicago, 1981
(Translated into Japanese by Shibuya Toshio, Tokyo,
1988); The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, Chicago,
1984; Buddhism Transformed (with Richard Gombrich),
Princeton, 1988; The Work of Culture: Symbolic
Transformation 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 Maneating Myth and Human
Sacrifice in the South Seas, University of California
Press, 2005. In preparation, The Awakened Ones:
A Phenomenology of the Visionary Experience.
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