Obeyesekere: The Relentless Iconoclast

Editorial

Gananath Obeyesekere, a man larger than life, passed away today. His death marks the end of an intellectual force that reshaped the very foundations of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and the critique of colonial epistemologies. He was a scholar who never cowered before the grand narratives of the West, who questioned with ferocity, and who refused to let history remain the property of its victors. With his passing, the world loses not just an academic but a provocateur, a relentless interrogator of myths, and a man who, in his own words, sought to expose “the unconscious work of culture” in shaping our realities. His intellectual battles were never polite; they were rigorous, uncompromising, and often iconoclastic, revealing the fault lines of anthropology itself.

Obeyesekere’s scholarship was profoundly shaped by his Sri Lankan heritage, his deep engagement with Buddhism, and his insatiable curiosity about human consciousness. Unlike those who romanticised indigenous cultures or those who dismissed them as primitive, he occupied a rare middle ground, arguing that all human beings—whether in Polynesia, Sri Lanka, or Greece—possessed the capacity for rational thought and symbolic reasoning. His claim that “primitives” were not irrational, but rather operated with the same cognitive tools as Europeans, was a direct affront to the latent colonialism that still pervaded the discipline. It was this argument that led him into one of the most ferocious debates in anthropology’s history—his clash with Marshall Sahlins over the apotheosis of Captain Cook. Sahlins, rooted in structuralist traditions, argued that Hawaiians mistook Cook for the god Lono. Obeyesekere countered with devastating clarity: “The idea that Polynesians could not distinguish a god from a man is a Western fiction.” His thesis in The Apotheosis of Captain Cook was not merely an academic exercise; it was a declaration of war against the idea that indigenous people were naïve, childlike, and forever trapped in an enchanted worldview.

The controversy was not just about Cook. It was about power, authority, and who has the right to interpret history. Edward Said, in Orientalism, warned of how the West constructs the East as an object of its own fantasies. Obeyesekere extended this critique to anthropology itself, challenging the ways in which Western scholars imposed meaning on non-Western experiences. In a world still haunted by colonial ghosts, he forced his readers to confront uncomfortable truths. His words had the force of an incantation: “Myths are not just stories. They are weapons, wielded by those who seek to control how the past is remembered.”

His work on religious experience remains unparalleled in its depth and complexity. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience dissected the ecstatic practices of Sri Lankan ascetics, showing how deeply personal symbols intertwined with broader cultural and psychological structures. He did not approach religion as a dogma to be explained away but as a lived, intimate reality, shaped by trauma, memory, and the longing for transcendence. His interpretation of symbolic forms drew on Freud, Jung, and the anthropological giants before him, but he always resisted simplistic psychoanalytic reductions. “The gods one sees,” he wrote, “are often the ones we have created to make sense of our suffering.”

Buddhism, for Obeyesekere, was never a static doctrine but a shifting, adaptive force. His co-authored work Buddhism Transformed examined how Theravāda Buddhism evolved in response to modernity, capitalist transformations, and political upheaval. He exposed the ways in which colonialism had reshaped Buddhist practice, how reformist movements had selectively reconstructed tradition, and how mythologies of purity were often modern inventions. His ability to dissect the entanglement of history, power, and belief made him a formidable historian of religious thought.

His exploration of karma and rebirth across cultures was another of his landmark contributions. In Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth, he took on a near-impossible comparative task, linking the cosmologies of vastly different traditions. He argued that the moral calculus of karma was not unique to South Asia but resonated across multiple civilisations, from the Pythagoreans to the shamans of the Americas. This was not mere comparative analysis; it was a philosophical provocation, forcing scholars to rethink the universality of moral causality and human attempts to impose order on the chaos of existence.

Obeyesekere’s intellectual audacity extended beyond texts and theories; it seeped into the very way he engaged with the world. His critique of colonial historiography was not limited to abstract scholarship—it was a political stance. He argued that Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, the last king of Kandy, had been unjustly vilified in British accounts. In The Doomed King: A Requiem for Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, he dismantled the colonial caricature of the king as a depraved despot and instead presented a nuanced, historically grounded portrayal. His scathing critique of nationalist mythmaking, however, ensured that he was never entirely embraced by Sri Lanka’s own political and academic establishments. He was, as the best intellectuals always are, a man without a single home, always disrupting the comforts of certainty.

His willingness to defy conventional wisdom made him enemies. His detractors accused him of arrogance, of overstepping disciplinary boundaries, of reading too much into historical texts. Some saw his work as an attack on Western scholarship; others in Sri Lanka accused him of betraying nationalist ideals. Yet, as Nietzsche warned, “Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.” Obeyesekere was never shackled by convictions. He was relentless in his pursuit of truth, wherever it led, and he was unafraid to dismantle even the most sacred of intellectual edifices.

His legacy is one of disruption. He leaves behind not just books and essays but a way of thinking that refuses to accept received wisdom. His insistence that all people, across time and culture, share a fundamental cognitive and symbolic repertoire remains one of his most powerful contributions. In a field too often caught between exoticisation and condescension, he carved out a space for a truly humanistic anthropology—one that recognised the full depth of indigenous thought without either mystifying or diminishing it.

With his passing, the discipline loses a scholar who refused to be comfortable, who refused to let others be comfortable, and who demanded that the past be wrestled with, not simply recited. His words, sharp as obsidian, will continue to cut through complacency. As long as myths continue to be wielded as instruments of power, as long as history remains contested ground, the spectre of Gananath Obeyesekere will linger, unsettling, provoking, refusing to be laid to rest.