Gananath Obeyesekere

Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and has done much work in his home country of Sri Lanka.

Anthropology

Career

Professor Obeyesekere completed a B.A. in English (1955) at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, followed by an M.A. (1958) and Ph.D (1964) at the University of Washington. Before his appointment to Princeton, Obeyesekere held teaching positions at the University of Ceylon, the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego.

Debate with Sahlins

In the 1990s he entered into a well-known intellectual debate with Marshall Sahlins over the rationality of indigenous peoples. The debate was carried out through an examination of the details of Captain James Cook's death in the Hawaiian Islands in 1779. At the heart of the debate was how to understand the rationality of indigenous people. Obeyesekere insisted that indigenous people thought in essentially the same way as Westerners and was concerned that any argument otherwise would paint them as "irrational" and "uncivilized". In contrast Sahlins argued that each culture may have different types of rationality that make sense of the world by focusing on different patterns and explain them within specific cultural narratives, and that assuming that all cultures lead to a single rational view is a form of eurocentrism.[1]

Books
  • Land Tenure In Village Ceylon : A Sociological And Historical Study, 1967
  • Medusa's Hair : An Essay On Personal Symbols And Religious Experience, 1981
  • The Cult Of The Goddess Pattini, 1984
  • Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (with Richard Gombrich), 1988
  • The Work Of Culture : Symbolic Transformation In Psychoanalysis And Anthropology, 1990
  • The Apotheosis Of Captain Cook : European Mythmaking In The Pacific, 1992
  • Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth, 2002
  • Cannibal Talk : The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas, 2005
  • Karma and Rebirth, 2005
  • The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience, 2012
  • The Doomed King: A Requiem For Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, 2017

Videos
  • Kataragama: A God For All Seasons, 1973

Distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute

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References
  1. Moore, Jerry D. 2009. "Marshall Sahlins: Culture Matters" in Visions of Culture: an Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists, Walnut Creek, California: Altamira. pp. 365-385


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