Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience

by Gananath Obeyesekere

The great pilgrimage center of southeastern Sri Lanka, Kataragama, has become in recent years the spiritual home of a new class of Hindu-Buddhist religious devotees. These ecstatic priests and priestesses invariably display long locks of matted hair, and they express their devotion to the gods through fire walking, tongue-piercing, hanging on hooks, and trance-induced prophesying.

The increasing popularity of these ecstatics poses a challenge not only to orthodox Sinhala Buddhism (the official religion of Sri Lanka) but also, as Gananath Obeyesekere shows, to the traditional anthropological and psychoanalytic theories of symbolism. Focusing initially on one symbol, matted hair, Obeyesekere demonstrates that the conventional distinction between personal and cultural symbols is inadequate and naive. His detailed case studies of ecstatics show that there is always a reciprocity between the personal-psychological dimension of the symbol and its public, culturally sanctioned role. Medusa's Hair thus makes an important theoretical contribution both to the anthropology of individual experience and to the psychoanalytic understanding of culture. In its analyses of the symbolism of guilt, the adaptational and integrative significance of belief in spirits, and a host of related issues concerning possession states and religiosity, this book marks a provocative advance in psychological anthropology.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Religion, Ethnography, Spirituality, Philosophy, India

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

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

[s · Rating 4 out of 5]

Psychoanalytic study of ecstatic seers and penitents who undergo physical ordeals at a syncretic Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim shrine in Sri Lanka, spun into an extended meditation on how symbols function to integrate individual consciousness with broader culture. I don't know if I agree with some of the conclusions he leaps to but the gymnastics are fascinating. Purely on the level of case study, as a sober look at the complexities of religious practice in South Asia, it's worth reading. On another level, I loved it because (even though he doesn't mention Jung by name) it functions really well as a takedown of the idea of the collective unconscious and sketches a much more plausible and versatile way of understanding the functioning of symbols in culture.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating account of unusual (to me) religious practices amongst ascetics and ecstatics of Sri Lanka. While I have moral and ethical issues with the highly Freudian psychoanalytic techniques that Obeyesekere used to define and explain the matted locks of hair displayed by female ascetics, his in-depth analysis of the relationship between dreams and trance states (which he terms the “hypnomantic consciousness”), the development of myth and religion, and the interaction between public and personal symbols is extremely thought-provoking. There are two passages near the end of the book that I repeat here, both as a reminder of Obeyesekere’s main argument and as food for further personal consideration:

“Myth is often generated out of the hypnomantic consciousness. The ecstatics assembled at Kataragama are constantly inventing myths through hypnomantic means – dreams vision, trance, mediumship. Yet it is wrong to assume with Karl Abraham that the myth is the dream of the culture. The dream, and other hypnomantic visions, are the model for the myth.” [p. 181]

“Once a model for the myth has been created, it constitutes a genre. Thus it is not necessary for all myths to be fashioned out of the (unconscious) thought characteristic of hypnomantic states. One can consciously invent a myth based on the hypnomantic model and belonging to the accepted genre….The hypnomantic model for the myth has continuing relevance for the genre as a whole. This genre in turn feeds back into the hypnomantic state, influencing the thought structure of these states and the nature of our unconscious, including our dream life. The chicken and the egg are not isolatable things: they belong to a single interlocking, yet causally interdependent, mutually interacting system. In other words, it is possible for a person to dream a myth rather than a dream, thought the latter is the model for the former.” [p. 182]

[Kerri · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting essay on cultural meanings, and how they are articulated to personal experience more fully through incorporating the theories of Freud with those of Max Weber. Obeyesekere does not believe cultural symbols are simply unconscious results of society, but rather that through the society certain symbols come to have a certain meaning to the individual. Symbols are only viable, to Obeyesekere, when they effectively communicate between the individual and society. Overall, he does a remarkable job presenting his argument; it is backed up with multiple examples and presents a well thought-out essay that is often both convincing and clear.

My main problems with the book come from my own opinions of Freud. While I believe Freud gave a remarkable start to psychology, he had many holes in his theories and I feel his own fixations took control. And while Obeyesekere continually relates the importance of fluidity in the use and meanings of symbols within a culture, I feel that Freud's theories are an attempt to set rigid guidelines and dispose of that fluidity. It just seemed counter productive to me.

[Uditha Lakmal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good anthropological reading on ecstatics in Sri Lanka using (Freudian) psychoanalytic tools. Probably the only such study done to date in this level of detail. I really enjoyed the clarity of Gananaths writings. The way he compares and contrasts ecstatics in Sri Lanka to those in other parts of the world, shows his mastery over the field of anthropology.

[versarbre · Rating 4 out of 5]

what G.O would speak to the contemporary trauma culture?

[Michael Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great from an anthropological perspective. Most anthropologists do not take psychology into consideration when analyzing a culture while Obeyesekere rises to the challenge, providing extremely important insight involving the relationship between anthro and psychoanalysis.