General
Gananath Obeyesekere, 95, Dies; Anthropologist Bridged East and West
His wide-ranging work drew on field research in his native Sri Lanka as well as his extensive study of English literature and Christian mysticism.
Gananath Obeyesekere, an anthropologist whose long career and wide-ranging social insights — which drew on Hindu texts, Freudian psychoanalysis and Christian mysticism, among many other ideas — made him a leading intellectual figure in both his native Sri Lanka and the rarefied world of Western academia, died on Tuesday at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was 95.
His son Asita confirmed the death.
Dr. Obeyesekere was born in a small Sri Lankan village at a time when the country, then known as Ceylon, was still in the grip of the British Empire. He spent most of his career teaching in the United States, primarily at Princeton, where he established his reputation as a critical voice in debates about colonialism, pluralism and the possibility of finding commonalities across cultural divides.
Long prominent among academics, he broke into the broader public’s consciousness in 1992 with his book “The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific.”
Cap. James Cook was a British explorer who, after being received with great ceremony by Hawaiian islanders in 1779, unexpectedly returned and was murdered by the same people who had warmly welcomed him before.
Among historians and anthropologists, the common understanding was that the islanders had believed Captain Cook to be a god, and that his return, because of a broken mast on his ship, inadvertently fulfilled a belief in a banished god who would one day be defeated by their chief.
