Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth

Comparative Studies in Religion and Society

by Gananath Obeyesekere

With Imagining Karma, Gananath Obeyesekere embarks on the very first comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures. Exploring in rich detail the beliefs of small-scale societies of West Africa, Melanesia, traditional Siberia, Canada, and the northwest coast of North America, Obeyesekere compares their ideas with those of the ancient and modern Indic civilizations and with the Greek rebirth theories of Pythagoras, Empedocles, Pindar, and Plato. His groundbreaking and authoritative discussion decenters the popular notion that India was the origin and locus of ideas of rebirth. As Obeyesekere compares responses to the most fundamental questions of human existence, he challenges readers to reexamine accepted ideas about death, cosmology, morality, and eschatology.

Obeyesekere's comprehensive inquiry shows that diverse societies have come through independent invention or borrowing to believe in reincarnation as an integral part of their larger cosmological systems. The author brings together into a coherent methodological framework the thought of such diverse thinkers as Weber, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche. In a contemporary intellectual context that celebrates difference and cultural relativism, this book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical understanding of "family resemblances" and differences across great cultural divides.

Genres: Anthropology, Philosophy

520 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Gananath Obeyesekere was a Sri Lankan anthropologist who was emeritus professor of anthropology at Princeton University and had done much work in his home country of Sri Lanka. His research focused on psychoanalysis and anthropology and the ways in which personal symbolism is related to religious experience, in addition to the European exploration of Polynesia in the 18th century and after, and the implications of these voyages for the development of ethnography. His books include Land Tenure in Village Ceylon, Medusa's Hair, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, Buddhism Transformed (coauthor), The Work of Culture, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, and Making Karma.

Reviews

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to skip most details and leave them for expert reading. But in terms of the project formulation, OB's book is one of the rare products that we may call "post-Orientalist" world-historical comparisons. The development of Buddhist ideas from its pre-Buddhist sources obviously informed OB's formulation of the "ethicization" turn of the rebirth eschatologies. And putting Plato, Plotinus in the picture along with the Inuits and the Igbos is a necessary step to overcome many classicist-Orientalist biases. It's a very formidable task and most scholars would not want to take it up for it would take a lifelong time (and most likely one life isn't enough!). OB did it and the very serious attempt must be remembered. The elementary forms in the style of Levi-Strauss on kinship may be too much buried in the details. For me OB's discussion about rebirth is most effectively mind-changing for how I think about "Rites of Passages." The birth is the return of a dead ancestor! And the birth rite is facilitating that transition! Why couldn't we make this reformulated picture of "Rite of Passage" an ideal-typical "elementary form" of social lives in which eschatologies are irreducible parts (but not everything).