Gananath Obeyesekere Research Articles

Whence karma?

How did the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution come into existence? W. D. Whitney called it ‘one of the most difficult questions in the religious history of India’, and Richard Salomon described it, a century later, as ‘the single greatest problem of Indological studies’. Scholars have proposed textual continuities leading up to texts that give expression to this belief, but questions can be and have been raised about such continuities. Worse, these studies do not deal with the observation made by A. B. Keith almost a century ago, viz., that ‘while the ideas thus recorded are of some value … the importance of transmigration lies precisely in the fact that the doctrine is an ethical system’. The one scholar who fully recognises the importance of ethicisation is Gananath Obeyesekere. Unfortunately, his theory is based on some disputable assumptions, which weaken it, as they weaken Richard Seaford’s theory, which builds on Obeyesekere’s ideas. This article offers an altogether different approach that puts this belief in line with beliefs that accompanied the appearance of social complexity elsewhere in the world.

Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509–1670

Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509–1670

Intimations of Mortality: Dreams of a Buddhist AnthropologistThe Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. By Gananath Obeyesekere. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook and Film ReviewsIntimations of Mortality: Dreams of a Buddhist Anthropologist The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. By Gananath Obeyesekere. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.Wendy DonigerWendy DonigerUniversity of Chicago Divinity School, Swift Hall, 1025 East 58th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A. ([email protected]). Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3June 2014 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/676528 Views: 43Total views on this site HistoryAccepted October 28, 2013 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Book Review: Gananath Obeyesekere, The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience

Book Review: Gananath Obeyesekere, <i>The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience</i>

Reincarnation and Ethics

Studies of reincarnation beliefs often assume that these beliefs are logically and historically prior to certain ethical values and practices, and hence that the values and practices are based on, and explained by, the beliefs (or theory). This assumption has been challenged by Catherine Osborne, who argues with reference to certain ancient Greek philosophers that the order of priority is the other way round. Through critical engagement with Osborne and also Gananath Obeyesekere, this article seeks to question the deeper presupposition that there must be an order of priority here at all. Along the way, objections are raised to Obeyesekere's model of how South Asian karmic eschatologies evolved from nonethicized rebirth eschatologies, and it is argued that Obeyesekere's notion of ethicization runs the risk of obscuring the pervasiveness of ethics within supposedly nonethicized forms of reincarnation belief in small-scale societies. This pervasiveness is illustrated by some examples from anthropological literature.

Vancouver the Cannibal: Cuisine, Encounter, and the Dilemma of Difference on the Northwest Coast, 1774–1808

Food is fundamental. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto has written, food “has a good claim to be considered the world's most important subject. It is what matters most to most people for most of the time” (Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food [New York, 2002], ix). We are what we eat, both materially and discursively, both in terms of the ecological networks that provide us with sustenance and the identities that define who we are as social, cultural, and historical beings. This article examines early contacts on the Northwest coast, using food as a lens on cultural and environmental encounter. Drawing on oral tradition and on accounts of explorers such as George Vancouver, this article treats the newcomers ethnographically, setting their behavior within the context of European cultural practices, and treats aboriginal societies historically, showing them as active participants in processes of change. Across tables and hearths, aboriginal people and the newcomers created a space in which static notions of race played a surprisingly small role. Instead, differences were seen as having to do with subtler concepts like generosity, cultivation, and taste. As with the belief, shared by Europeans and aboriginal people alike, that the strangers they encountered might be cannibals, these early encounters created what Gananath Obeyesekere calls a “dialogical misunderstanding” upon which would be laid the shaky foundations of empire (Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas [Berkeley, CA, 2005]). By using food to ground the face-to-face encounters between native and newcomer and by placing indigenous understandings of encounter at the center of the story, this article seeks to describe some of the specific mechanisms, material and rhetorical, by which colonialism dispossessed.

Cannibal Talk: The Man‐Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. Gananath Obeyesekere Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2005. Xx + 320 pp.

Cannibal Talk: The Man‐Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. Gananath Obeyesekere Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2005. Xx + 320 pp.

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S AXIAL AGE: ORIGINS AND ETHICS

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S AXIAL AGE: ORIGINS AND ETHICS

“Maui and Orphic blood”: Cook’s Death in Contemporary Maori Poetry

The interpretation of Captain James Cook's death at Kealakekua Bay in 1779 was subject to contention in the eighteenth century; admiring publicists of the navigator's imperial benevolence such as Anna Seward differed from those like William Cowper, who denounced his irreligious participation in heathen rites. (1) Assessments as to the cultural and religious implications of his end are as diverse today, with anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere arguing extendedly over whether Hawaiians really believed Cook to be the god Lono. To Obeyesekere, the idea that Hawaiians greeted Cook as a deity is an absurd imperialist illusion, while for Sahlins, the identification is necessary to understand the ritual implications of his death. (2) Nicolas Thomas and Anne Salmond have recently joined the fray, with Thomas emphasizing the extent to which societies habitually blurred the line between the divine and human, while Salmond argues that Cook was recognized either as a contemporary representative of Lonoka-Mahakihi or as the grandson of Lono-ma-I-Kanaka, in either case being saluted not as a deity but as the scion of a chiefly family. (3) Whatever their differences, all these contemporary commentators bring an anti-imperial skepticism to their judgments about Cook but none writes from a specifically perspective. In recent years, however, the Maori poet Robert Sullivan, of Nga Puhi descent resident in Hawai'i, has published two volumes dedicated to assessing Cook's career and legacy from a markedly Pacific perspective. In writing about Cook as one of the skin of the ocean (people of the Pacific) through Polynesian eyes, Sullivan's work reshapes the extant metropolitan debate. (4) As Seward's name-making Elegy on the Death of Captain Cook (1780) and Cowper's Charity (1780) bear witness, eighteenth-century poetry was a crucial aspect in developing and contesting Cook's emergence as a cultural hero. An important testimony to the salience of Sullivan's contemporary poetic contribution to the continuing historiographic and anthropological argument over his status is signaled by J. G. A. Pocock's admiring tribute to his contemporary, Allen Curnow, Aotearoa/New Zealand's leading modernist poet. In the first chapter of a recently published collection of essays, The Discovery of Islands, Pocock remarks that Curnow's verse articulated the problematic of unsettled and mobile oceanic identities and histories that would shape his own perspective as a historian: It was through the poetry of Allen Curnow that this conjunction of images and problems became in my mind a way of looking at history and living in it, when both had to be done a long sea voyage from anywhere He presented an imagination which could never be fully at home where it was, could never return to where it might have come from, and had traveled too far to fly off and live anywhere else. (5) In saluting the literary insight that enabled his own paradigm-shifting understanding of British history as archipelagic and oceanic, Pocock--who also cites Sullivan's work in his account of Maori self-representation--reminds us that poetry is not simply an object but a form of knowledge. POETRY, POSTCOLONIALISM, AND COOK Sullivan is relatively unusual in choosing poetry rather than the novel to challenge Anglo-American interpretations of Cook and the colonial histories that followed in his wake. Benedict Anderson's influential account of the way that print culture helped generate the imagined community of postcolonial nations grants the novel a privileged role in this process. (6) One of the most interesting aspects of Sullivan's work is his ability to use a wide range of poetic genres to address and constitute a pan-Pacific community, which cuts across postcontact national boundaries, while also issuing uncomfortable challenges to other groups, such as New Zealand Pakeha (settlers). (7) Equally interesting is his use of Cook's narratives in this project, for like Richard Hakluyt's collections of voyages, these texts can be read in the terms Richard Helgerson has proposed, as prose epics of the English nation. …

Transforming Possession: Josephine and the Work of Culture

Abstract This article presents the case of a Sri Lankan woman who tells of an early life fraught with suffering and problematic dissociation. After a 30‐year career as a priestess during which she became renowned for deep possession trances, firewalking, and blood sacrifices, she no longer participates in these activities. The analysis of this case argues that problematic dissociation outside a ritual context can be used in and transformed by involvement in culturally available possession rituals to promote healing. This counters Melford Spiro and others who have viewed possession experiences as necessarily abnormal, psychotic, and symptomatic of mental disorder. It supports Gananath Obeyesekere's assertion that engagement with these symbolic systems can lead to “progressive transformations.” Parallels between this priestess' lifestory and Western psychotherapy extend Obeyesekere's conception of “the work of culture” beyond the domain of meaning and symbol to include roles for embodied practice and interpersonal relationships. [spirit possession, Sri Lanka, dissociation, healing, mental health]

Good Jews Don’t: Historical and Philosophical Constructions of Idolatry

Naomi Janowitz G O OD J E WS D ON ’ T : H I S TO R I C A L A N D PH I LOS OPH IC A L C O N S T RUC T I O N S O F I D O L AT RY The first question British sailors asked the indigenous people they encoun- tered in Polynesia was, “Are you cannibals?” While the question would seem to be about the natives, it also reveals quite a bit about British interests. Gananath Obeyesekere has masterfully analyzed for us why the British were obsessed with “other people’s” cannibalistic tendencies. A small but famous set of stories circulated about British sailors who resorted to cannibalism in dire straits. Thus the question of whether or not the British behavior was morally acceptable was explored via an investiga- tion of “primitive” behavior. A universal human fear and fascination with the possibility that somewhere in the world human monsters consume human flesh also contributed to the British obsession. Obeyesekere con- cludes, “Polynesian cannibalism is constructed out of an extremely com- plex dialogue between Europeans and Polynesians, a dialogue that makes sense in relation to the history of contact and unequal power relations and the cultural values, fantasies and the common dark humanity they both share.” 1 The natives’ answers were part of this delicately constructed dialogue. Adopting the outsider’s view of themselves accrued a perverse power to Gananath Obeyesekere, “ ‘British Cannibals’: Contemplation of an Event in the Death and Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 650. c 2007 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

Eating People in the South Sea: Fact or Fantasy?

Gananath Obeyesekere. Cannibal Talk: The Man‐Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 320 pp.

From Cannibalism to Genocide: The Work of Denial

In Cannibal Talk, Gananath Obeyesekere sets out to expose cannibalism as racist slander and anthropologists' perpetuation of a mistaken sense of “identity.” In the very act of denying its existence, however, he employs it as sheep's clothing for the beast of genocide and other atrocities, implying that they, too, can be classified as slander or treated as aberrations outside the bounds of social rules or analysis. In claiming to deconstruct centuries of falsehood and defamation, Obeyesekere paradoxically opens the door to revising real crimes-the global horrors that he compares with cannibalism-lending them the same aura of unreality.

Culture, subject, psyche: dialogues in psychoanalysis and anthropology

The 20th century was marked by two profoundly different insights into the nature of humanity: one views each person as the product of unconscious desires, while the other sees the individual as the product of language and culture. While many still believe these two insights to be irreconcilable, there are a growing number of scholars attempting to integrate the psychoanalytic subject into their culturally-bound research. In this groundbreaking new work, Anthony Molino has collected in-depth interviews with seven renowned anthropologists and social theorists: MARC AUGE, VINCENT CRAPANZANO, KATHERINE EWING, GANANATH OBEYESEKERE, MICHAEL RUSTIN, KATHLEEN STEWART, and PAUL WILLIAMS. These dialogues, alongside essays by Molino, anthropologists WESLEY SHUMAR and WAUD KRACKE, and psychoanalyst LUCIA VILLELA, update the prevailing conceptions of psychoanalysis within anthropology. They explore possible psychoanalytic contributions to ethnographic theory and practice on matters concerning the self, narrative, identity, the unconscious, and fieldwork and power relations.

The untested Dharma is not worth living

Like Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles Moore (1957), Bina Gupta and J. N. Mohanty (2000), Jonardon Ganeri (2001), Bina Gupta (2002), Bimal K. Matilal (2002), and Gananath Obeyesekere (2002), Thomas McEvilley's The Shape of Ancient Thought (2002) shows us how rewarding the study of comparative Greek and Indian philosophy can be. They argue that comparative study is not just a matter of recording interesting parallels but that such study is indeed necessary to understand either Indian or Greek philosophy. Comparative studies may help us not only understand the historical influences that shaped each tradition, but comparisons themselves may be a crucial tool in helping us under stand the subtleties of each tradition. To illustrate this, this paper will review McEvilley's contribution to the comparative project and then work through an extended comparison of one aspect of Greek and Hindu philosophy.

Slash and Burn: A Swidden Critique of Sri Lankan AnthropologyAnthropologizing Sri Lanka: A Eurocentric Misadventure. By Susantha Goonatilake. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 306 pp.

Anthropologists are one of Sri Lanka’s minor export industries. In this polemic, the Sri Lankan social scientist Susantha Goonatilake, who disapproves of both anthropology and the Sri Lankans who practice it, takes aim at the two most prominent among them, Gananath Obeyesekere and Stanley Tambiah. For good measure he also throws in two non–Sri Lankans, Richard Gombrich and Bruce Kapferer. All four write about the religion of the Sinhalese, and it is their representations and interpretations of Sinhala religion that stir Goonatilake’s ire. This is a relentlessly angry and intemperate book whose slash-and-burn approach undermines its own argument. Goonatilake’s thesis is essentially that “the anthropology of the four authors is seriously flawed with respect to basic facts on the ground, the methodology used, and the conclusions arrived at” (p. xiii). His central theme is that these four authors engage in a colonial anthropology that fails to do justice to the complexity of Sri Lankan (read Sinhala Buddhist) civilization. These writings, he asserts, “‘are worse than anything colonial anthropology wrought, and in fact, worse than the colonial writings of the 19th and early 20th centuries on Sri Lanka” (p. xiii). He adds a strongly worded attack on Sri Lankan “institutions and individuals . . . [who act] as a social cognitive matrix that filters the local reality for the visiting anthropologists” (p. xiv). These critiques are liberally laced with strong doses of attacks ad hominem. Goonatilake deals with these writers book by book, giving no quarter to any argument, minor point, assertion, and statement that comes his way. He devotes four chapters to Obeyesekere and Gombrich, three to Kapferer, two to Tambiah, and three to what he calls the sociology of Sri Lankan anthropology. He raises some issues worthy of discussion, such as the pitfalls in gen-

Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. Gananath Obeyesekere

<i>Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth</i>. Gananath Obeyesekere

Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (review)

Reviewed by: Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba by J.D.Y. Peel Jeffrey Cox Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. By J.D.Y. Peel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Imperial history sometimes appears to be dominated by binary distinctions: British and foreign, European and “native”, east and west, black and white, civilized and savage, tradition and modernity, resistance and collaboration, etc. These distinctions are rooted in historical experience and thus unavoidable when discussing the past. As every imperial historian knows, however, they have also been elevated into categories of analysis that threaten to obliterate the complexity of the past. Perhaps the most fundamental binary of all is the distinction between colonizer and colonized. Tied to the imperial archive created by colonizers, most imperial historians approach their topics from one side of this binary, but not without endless frustration. If only we could tell both sides of the story, looking at a problem from the point of view of both colonizer and the colonized, and weaving the two into a unified story based on a thorough knowledge of the history and culture of both sides of the binary. There are a few admirable models of how this might be done, and J. D. Y. Peel’s book is one of them. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba belongs alongside the works of other anthropologists who have written some of the best works in imperial history: Jean and John Comaroff, Laura Stoler, Thomas Beidelmann, Marshall Sahlins, and Gananath Obeyesekere. Peel has done many years of anthropological field work among the Yoruba of southern Nigeria, but in this work he sets out to write as a historian, basing his research on the archives of the evangelical Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS). His goal is to explain why the overwhelming majority of the Yoruba people voluntarily abandoned their religion and adopted Christianity. Peel’s choice of an archive would appear to place him among the imperial historians who begin their analyses from the point of view of the colonizers, but he makes claims about his sources that ultimately destabilize the binary distinction between colonizer and colonized. The Victorian CMS was controlled by obsessive bureaucrats who required all CMS agents to document their daily activities and report them to headquarters in London. Most CMS agents among the Yoruba were not white Europeans but black Yoruba Christians, working for white European missionaries, but agents in their own right with a considerable degree of autonomy. They wrote detailed diaries of their daily activities, which are now deposited in the vast CMS archive at Birmingham University. On which side of the binary do these black agents of the CMS belong? Are they collaborators in the destruction of their own indigenous culture, as secular Nigerian nationalists such as Wole Soyinka assert, and therefore on the colonizing side? Are they early practitioners of a genuine, indigenous African Christianity, independent of its western roots, as church historians such as Lamin Sanneh assert? Peel resolutely refuses to put his documents, or the agents who wrote them, on either side of the binary. The most important thing about these Yoruba Christians, he argues, was not their status as carriers of western culture, or their status as shapers of an indigenous African Christianity. It was instead the fact that they were Christians, self-conscious participants in a trans-national world religion. Peel does not attempt to ignore the categories of European and African, which were important to the people he is studying. He does attempt to prevent these categories from obliterating the complexity of the past. His primary interest is in the way in which educated Yoruba Christians shaped a new historical narrative that integrated Christianity into the history of the Yoruba, and the Yoruba into the history of Christianity. CMS agents and clergy not only wrote diaries, but published sophisticated histories rooted in a Christian cultural nationalism with broad rhetorical appeal. The most influential of these texts was the Rev. Samuel Johnson’s 684 page History of the Yoruba, completed in 1901 and published in 1921. According to Peel, Johnson created with his narrative a modern sense of Yoruba nationhood. Johnson was only one of...

Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma. Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth

Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma. Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth

Imagining Karma. Ethical Transformation In Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. By Gananath Obeyesekere. pp. xxix, 448. (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society 14) Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 2002.

Imagining Karma. Ethical Transformation In Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. By Gananath Obeyesekere. pp. xxix, 448. (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society 14) Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 2002.