“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 5^th 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.