Gananath Obeyesekere, an anthropologist whose lengthy profession and wide-ranging social insights — which drew on Hindu texts, Freudian psychoanalysis and Christian mysticism, amongst many different concepts — made him a number one mental determine in each his native Sri Lanka and the rarefied world of Western academia, died on Tuesday at his dwelling in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was 95.
His son Asita confirmed the demise.
Dr. Obeyesekere was born in a small Sri Lankan village at a time when the nation, then often known as Ceylon, was nonetheless within the grip of the British Empire. He spent most of his profession instructing in the USA, primarily at Princeton, the place he established his status as a vital voice in debates about colonialism, pluralism and the potential for discovering commonalities throughout cultural divides.
Lengthy outstanding amongst lecturers, he broke into the broader public’s consciousness in 1992 together with his e-book “The Apotheosis of Captain Cook dinner: European Mythmaking within the Pacific.”
Cap. James Cook dinner was a British explorer who, after being obtained with nice ceremony by Hawaiian islanders in 1779, unexpectedly returned and was murdered by the identical individuals who had warmly welcomed him earlier than.
Amongst historians and anthropologists, the widespread understanding was that the islanders had believed Captain Cook dinner to be a god, and that his return, due to a damaged mast on his ship, inadvertently fulfilled a perception in a banished god who would in the future be defeated by their chief.
Dr. Obeyesekere noticed it in a different way. The Hawaiians, he believed, knew he was only a man; had honored him as an honorary chief, not a god; and had killed him over a extra secular dispute. Westerners, in saying in any other case, had then imposed their very own biases on the Hawaiians, in a way creating their very own myths a couple of mythmaking folks.
“This ‘European god,’” he wrote, “is a fantasy of conquest, imperialism and civilization.”
Amongst his targets was Marshall Sahlins, one other outstanding anthropologist, who had argued the god-making thesis in 1985 in his e-book “Islands of Historical past.”
Dr. Sahlins responded to Dr. Obeyesekere with a second e-book. In “How ‘Natives’ Assume: About Captain Cook dinner, for Instance” (1995), he stated that Dr. Obeyesekere was the true imperialist, as a result of he denied the likelihood that Hawaiians might have a means of seeing actuality that was basically totally different from the West’s.
The talk was coated broadly, in The New York Times and elsewhere. Dr. Obeyesekere denied being an imperialist, however Dr. Sahlins was not fully mistaken in saying that he sought commonalities between East and West. A lot of Dr. Obeyesekere’s work explored the methods by which totally different cultures shared sure common qualities, together with what he known as “sensible rationality,” a primary sense of seeing the world.
His willingness to take a vital eye to political views in Sri Lanka made him one thing of a controversial determine at dwelling, although he typically laughed that off with self-deprecating humor.
“For a few of my critics I need to appear a silly individual and likewise an ignorant one,” he stated in a 2015 handle on the College of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. “That certainly is true: In the midst of my lengthy mental life, I will need to have been generally a idiot.”
Although he constructed his status on ethnographic subject work in Sri Lanka, Dr. Obeyesekere’s later work moved away from standard anthropology to embody philosophy, sociology and literary criticism.
In one other of his main works, “The Woke up Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Expertise” (2012), he examined mysticism throughout quite a lot of cultures and time durations. Concerning Hinduism, Buddhism and the poetry of William Blake, he present in them the same embrace of a distinct form of considering.
“That which is nonrational,” he stated in 2015, “isn’t essentially irrational.”
Gananath Obeyesekere (pronounced GAH-na-nat “Obey-SAY-kara) was born on Feb. 2, 1930, in Meegama, within the Western Province of what’s now Sri Lanka, however his household moved to Colombo, the capital, when he was 5 so his father, Don Dharmadasa Obeyesekere, might educate conventional Indian, or Ayurvedic, medicine. His mom, Amara (Kannangara) Obeyesekere, died when he was very younger.
He attended personal faculties run on the British mannequin and steeped in British tradition, then studied English literature on the College of Ceylon (which later cut up into 4 establishments).
After graduating in 1955, he had the chance to attend Oxford to proceed learning literature. However he had additionally grown considering amassing tales and learning folklore within the countryside, and he opted to pursue anthropology as a substitute.
He married Ranjini Ellepola in 1958. Together with their son Asita, she survives him, as does one other son, Indrajit; their daughter, Nalinika Obeyesekere; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
Dr. Obeyesekere obtained his grasp’s and doctorate levels, each in anthropology, from the College of Washington, the place he additionally taught. He later taught on the College of California San Diego and at Princeton, the place he was chairman of the anthropology division from 1980 till his retirement in 2000.
Dr. Obeyesekere’s early work included “Land Tenure in Village Ceylon: A Sociological and Historic Research” (1967) and “The Cult of the Goddess Pattini” (1984), each of which delved into the tradition and politics of his native nation.
In a 2003 interview for the University of California, Berkeley, he stated that his grand mental mission was to review the way in which concepts from one tradition filtered via one other, whether or not or not it’s South Asian tradition via the West or vice versa.
“Even Buddhism was filtered via the West,” he stated. “I’m a product of that myself.”
