“Imagining Karma.”
-- Pradeep Jeganathan.
[Remarks read at the launch of Gananath
Obeyesekere’s Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian,
Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (California 2002), on the 5th Jan.
2003, BMICH, Colombo. Proceeds from the sales of the book, will
support the housing of bibliographer H.A.I Goonathileke's collection
of Modern Sri Lankan paintings and drawings, at the University
of Peradeniya.]
Today is indeed very special, I think
for all of us; I certainly will remember this day vividly, for
quite some time. Before us is Gananath Obeyesekere’s seventh book
– and as such, it is worth recalling and celebrating for a moment
the sustained intellectual labor that has forged his work over
the decades, while anticipating with pleasure, the volumes to
come.
In addressing Imagining Karma I would
like in some brief way, as this occasion allows, to reflect on
Obeyesekere as an intellectual practitioner. One might do this,
in any event, at the launch of any important work, but as I have
spent time with this volume I have felt my mind work back and
work through to the relationship between the scholar and his intellectual
concerns, not the interior self as such, which I can not address
-- but the orientation to the world, if you will, of the intellectual.
I warn you before I begin, that I
shall hardly do justice to this ambitious topic, doing no more
than tracing out a sketch, that might be worth considering – despite
its many gaps, and unthought paths.
I would start then, at what might be the middle, in as much
as chronology of publications goes, his 1984 classic, The Cult
of the Goddess Pattini. It is of course, not really a text of
the middle, for one knows from the preface, that it is the very
beginning of serious intellectual work. The work of Pattini began,
Obeyesekere has written, as an antidote to alienation. Alienation
from a lost world, lost perhaps, through reading English at Peradeniya.
Re-entering this world, re living its enchantments becomes for
Obeyesekere serious intellectual work, that then becomes the work
of professional, disciplinary anthropology. But it is not, at
the time, that is to say in practice, so disciplined as all that,
at that point of origin. For Obeyesekere’s method in that project
was not to delve deep into the life world of a small community,
as disciplinary anthropologists after Malinowski were supposed
to. His method was the opposite, to study a ritual over a broad
area. There is, in this methodological effort it seems to me,
a sympathetic orientation to the structure of things which is
original, remarkable and persistent. I shall return to it.
More central for me right now, is the disciplining of the problem
of alienation into and within anthropology, so that socio-cultural
anthropology becomes the site where the alienated self can be
cultivated. This is’nt only a starting point for Obeyesekere –
Sri Lanka has produced far more cultural anthropologists, it is
said, than her small size allows for, and from time to time, this
has been a matter for reflection in different quarters. Possibly,
many of us who have felt that in our everyday lives, manners and
tastes, we are removed from some thing else, some thing “other,”
some thing different, that we once possessed and then lost, have
inserted that feeling of loss, into the discipline of anthropology.
It is worth pausing here to frame what I take cultural anthropology,
in its classical philosophical form to be. The claim of anthropology
is to translate values and practices that are fundamentally different
from those that are normative in the project of the European enlightenment,
back to the very terrain of that project. And in so doing, understand
both in terms of that place of difference, and in terms of the
enlightenment, those values and practices, that were once strange.
Such is the conceit of anthropology.
As I have myself made my way through the discipline, I have
always, right from the very beginning felt uneasy with this project,
with this business of translating the exotic into the familiar,
the grotesque into the sanitary. And from the time I was discovering
anthropology, even as an undergraduate, and even though I felt
uncomfortable with it, I persisted, for I had read Obeyesekere,
and Obeyesekere was an anthropologist. There is some thing he
does, to the discipline -- to its most central and classical concerns,
that transforms it, some times with such care and passion that
it simply splits open, turning inside out with the force of his
intervention.
I have never quite captured fully, the analytic of that intervention,
but I have struggled to over the years, and more so, have renewed
my efforts, as I read Imagining Karma over the past few days.
On the one hand, it is arguable that one aspect of that orientation
I speak of is that Obeyesekere, at times, writes as a Buddhist
and a Sri Lankan. And perhaps this has some significance. I think
it does, but not because he complains, of how he has been wronged,
as a Buddhist or a Sri Lankan. The identitarian complaint, increasingly
fashionable in some quarters, has to do with the assumption that
some kind of modern right flows from ones identity, how ever fuzzily
or precisely delineated. This is not of course, simply, a preoccupation
of Buddhists, all manner of persons, positioning themselves as
Hindu, Malay or simply of Color, might claim such rights. This
is not Obeyesekere’s invocation; his is an orientation of insight,
of knowing. Most famously, I’d say in the opening pages of his
book on Captain Cook, he tells us of his thoughts as a Sri Lankan,
sitting in a faculty seminar at Princeton, listening to the Distinguished
Chicago anthropologist Marshal Sahlins’ misunderstanding the good
Captain’s reception in Hawaii. It is a seed of suspicion, that
becomes a detailed argument with Sahlins. That seed is, perhaps,
an intuitive epistemological orientation.
In other moments of his work being a Buddhist is a clear moral
orientation. Most vivid in my recollection is his not that well
known reflections on the riots of 1983, when he pauses as a Buddhist
to contemplate the grotesqueness that surrounds him. That is a
moral orientation to the world.
I want to step back for a moment, as I did to distill what I
take to be anthropology, returning to that outline to add to it.
In the kind of anthropology I spoke of, that is to say, in its
dominant form, the question of the moral orientation of the anthropologist
has a kind of thin, yet sickly sweet taste that does not still
well on my tongue. I do not mean by this that such anthropologists
are immoral or amoral and unconcerned with good and bad. In fact
they are so concerned, and often want to be committed too, to
some cause or value in some far away corner. But that place, even
though it might be ten miles from where the anthropologist lives,
is often, too often, but not always, in Arjun Appaduarai famous
phrase, “a moral elsewhere.” A moral elsewhere is a production
of the translations I spoke of before, of bringing home the exotic,
the different, the grotesque to a place where it must be encased
and labeled, allowing political commitments to become performative
sentiments, and for anger, pain and disgust to become mear verbal
exclamations. Such is not a product of failed disciplinary will
I suggest, rather it is an inevitable consequence of an anthropology
that has no serious stakes in its concerns.
Imagining Karma is a deeply moral book. It raises one of the
profoundest moral questions one can ask as a human being, “How
is a given rebirth eschatology ethicized?” Or in other words,
how does the human concern with the end of things, the end of
life, as it were, intersect with another, the problem of “the
good.” Obeyesekere’s exploration of this question is erudite and
absorbing; but it is extraordinary, in my view, for the orientation
he brings to the question. First are the insights that come to
him, as he thinks as a Buddhist. The problem of Greek rebirth
relegated to the margins by so many, is repositioned at the center
of a reflective comparison with other such thought that could
not take place before. The neat nineteenth century line around
Greece begins to dissolve, and then, suddenly, thoughts on the
subject from Amerindians of the Northwest coast of the United
States, to the Balinese in Indonesia can sit comfortably in the
same book. A new world is ordered.
And then again, there is the moral orientation of the whole project,
that seeks to ask of the ethics of our existence in a way that
is both under-stated and passionate, committed and calm, which
brings me what is the most remarkable, subtlest yet most clear
feature of the work.
The question of the ethics of a rebirth eschatology is not translated
outside its own terms. It never becomes some thing else, taken
out of its skin, so that people who think its odd can compare
it to their own eschatologies. It preserves its own coherence
and integrity and so never enters into the moral economy of the
sickly sweet sentiments of stake less anthropology. As such, it
seems to me, this work remakes and enlarges a space in anthropology
Obeyesekere has been clearing for some time – the concerns of
this text are by no means new, for those who know his 1968 paper,
“Theodicy, Sin and Salvation in a Sociology Buddhism,” will recognize
the concerns, rather than the terms, which were first presented
at Edmund Leach’s seminar at Cambridge in 1964. Those questions
now have flowered and blossemed, and have split anthropology open,
and turning it inside out, allowing for new claims upon the world.
And if I may return now, to the origins his intellectual project
in Pattini, to the problem of alienation that might have been
an orienting one for that work, I would conclude, that here we
see laid by its side a persistent and now fully developed orientation
that addresses that original problem of loss, disenchantment and
alienation that many of us have shared. And further, it returns,
magisterially to a distributed structure, that in Obeyesekere’s
terms, does not divide the world into little cultures, but seeks
resemblances and patterns, of and between forms of life that are
different yet commensurate.
Obeyesekere would not, I am quite sure advocate immitators.
He has cleared a space and stood his ground.
As I try, myself, to make a space for my thoughts as a Sri Lankan
intellectual, and hear on all sides, as I do so, what the donors
want and what the funders need, what is good for my tenure, and
good for another offer, and what we need to say to keep peace
alive, I feel strengthened that I may tread on a path that Obeyesekere
has, see a space that he has cleared, and hold this book close
to my heart.
---
Pradeep Jeganathan was trained as
anthropologist at the University of Chicago, and was McKnight
Professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis from 2000-2002.
He is now a Senior Fellow at the International Centre for Ethnic
Studies in Colombo.
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