• A tribute to a scholar who bridged worlds, challenged myths, and redefined anthropology

On 25 March, the world lost one of its most original anthropological minds, Prof. Gananath Obeyesekere. Born in 1930 in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Obeyesekere was not just an academic but a provocateur, a poet of ethnography, and a relentless critic of colonial myths. His death marks the end of an era in which anthropology was not just about studying cultures but about engaging with them intellectually, emotionally, and sometimes, combatively.  

Obeyesekere’s work spanned psychoanalysis, history, religion, and literature, refusing to be confined by disciplinary boundaries. He wrote about Sri Lankan exorcisms with the same depth that he analysed Captain Cook’s apotheosis in Hawaii. He compared Buddhist meditators to Christian mystics, Freudian unconscious drives to Sinhala ritual symbolism, and colonial violence to nationalist mythmaking.

This is the story of why his work matters not just to anthropologists, but to anyone who cares about how cultures remember, how power distorts, and how humans make meaning in an uncertain world.

From colonial Ceylon to global anthropology 

Obeyesekere was born into a world in flux. British Ceylon was still under colonial rule, and the nationalist movements that would later shape Sri Lanka’s identity were gaining momentum. His early years in a rural village, followed by a move to Colombo, exposed him to both traditional Sinhala culture and the imposed structures of colonial education.

At the University of Ceylon (now the University of Peradeniya), he studied English literature, immersing himself in Shakespeare, satire, and the New Criticism movement. This literary foundation would later distinguish his anthropological writing as lyrical, ironic, and unafraid of ambiguity.

But it was anthropology that gave him a lens to examine his own society. After moving to the University of Washington for his PhD, he became part of a generation of non-Western scholars who began ‘studying back’, turning the anthropological gaze onto the colonisers rather than just the colonised.

The Freudian turn: Psychoanalysis meets culture

Obeyesekere’s early work was deeply influenced by Freud, but not uncritically. While many anthropologists dismissed psychoanalysis as ethnocentric, he saw its potential for understanding how personal anxieties become collective myths.  

His 1981 book, ‘Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience’, began with a chance encounter with a woman in a Sri Lankan temple, her hair matted and wild, swaying in ecstatic devotion. To Obeyesekere, she was not just a religious figure but a Freudian puzzle: What unconscious forces drove such extreme acts of faith?

The book explored how individual trauma, sexual repression, castration anxiety, and unresolved grief transform into public ritual. A man smashing coconuts on his head was not just performing a rite; he was externalising a psychic struggle. This was Obeyesekere’s great insight: Culture does not just reflect psychological works on it, reshaping private pain into shared meaning. 

The Goddess Pattini and the politics of memory

In ‘The Cult of the Goddess Pattini’ (1984), Obeyesekere documented a once-vibrant ritual tradition that was fading under modernity. Pattini, a deified heroine, was worshipped through dance, drama, and exorcism. But the book was more than ethnography; it was a meditation on cultural loss.

“Pattini is a history of a past that is no longer present,” he wrote. The rituals he recorded in the 1950s had nearly vanished by the 1980s, victims of urbanisation and shifting religious attitudes. Yet, he argued, these disappearing practices held keys to understanding Sri Lanka’s pre-colonial psyche, its gender norms, its anxieties about disease and fertility, and its resistance to Brahminical and European impositions.

Debating King Dutugamunu: When history becomes weapon

One of Obeyesekere’s most politically charged interventions was his analysis of Sri Lanka’s ancient chronicles, particularly the ‘Mahavamsa’. The text recounts how the Sinhala king Dutugamunu defeated the Tamil ruler Elāra in the Second Century BCE. In some versions, Dutugamunu is tormented by guilt over the slaughter; in others, he is a righteous hero, and Elāra a villain.

Obeyesekere saw these contradictions not as historical ‘errors’ but as ‘debates frozen in time’; contentious dialogues that reflected changing political needs. When Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism surged in the 20th Century, Elāra was demonised anew.  

This argument enraged some scholars. One, a monk, cut ties with Obeyesekere entirely, accusing him of undermining Sinhala pride. But for Obeyesekere, the lesson was clear: “History is never neutral. It is always contested, always alive.”

The Captain Cook controversy

In 1992, Obeyesekere dropped a bombshell: ‘The Apotheosis of Captain Cook’. European historians had long claimed that Hawaiians mistook Cook for the god Lono, a narrative that painted Indigenous people as naive and Europeans as rational. Obeyesekere flipped the script.  

The ‘apotheosis’, he argued, was a ‘European myth’, not a Hawaiian one. Cook’s death was likely a political execution, not a case of mistaken divinity. The idea of ‘natives’ worshipping white men said more about colonial arrogance than Polynesian beliefs.

Marshall Sahlins, a towering figure in anthropology, fiercely defended the traditional view. Their clash became one of the discipline’s most famous disputes. Sahlins, the structuralist, insisted on cultural difference; Obeyesekere, the humanist, insisted on Indigenous agency.

Critics accused Obeyesekere of being ‘too literary’ and of lacking fieldwork in Hawaii. But his point was broader. Anthropology had too often been complicit in colonial storytelling. The Cook debate was not just about 18th Century Hawaii, it was about who gets to write history, and why.

The late masterpieces

In his final major work, ‘The Awakened Ones’ (2012), Obeyesekere turned to mystics, Buddhist meditators, Christian saints, even the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He asked: “What happens when rational thought dissolves into ecstasy? Can anthropology comprehend visions that defy empiricism?” 

The book was controversial. Some colleagues wondered why an anthropologist was writing about Jacob Boehme’s pewter visions or Catherine of Siena’s trances. But Obeyesekere’s answer was simple: “If we ignore the irrational, we miss half of human experience.”

Obeyesekere knew his work was messy, contradictory, sometimes even wrong. But he embraced that. “One must be very humane to say, ‘I don’t know that’,” he once wrote, quoting Nietzsche.  

His legacy is not a set of fixed theories but a ‘way of thinking’, one that crosses borders, challenges dogma, and finds poetry in the ethnographic. In an age of academic hyper-specialisation, he remained a generalist, a comparativist, and a storyteller.

Epilogue: Why Obeyesekere still speaks to us

As Sri Lanka grapples with post-conflict reconciliation, as Hawaiians reclaim their history from colonial narratives, as anthropologists debate whether their discipline can ever be decolonised, Obeyesekere’s questions remain urgent. He showed us that, “Cultures are not static.” They argue, evolve, forget, and remember. The colonised talk back and scholars must listen. Anthropology is as much art as science, requiring irony, empathy, and sometimes, foolishness.  

Gananath Obeyesekere is gone, but his challenge endures: To see the world as it is complex, contested, and alive with meaning. 

(The writer is a researcher and coordinator at Law and Society Trust, Sri Lanka and an independent social documentary photographer)

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication