Abstract
Gananath Obeyesekere is unusual among contemporary anthropologists in the way that he uses the comparative method, cutting through a host of disciplines, such as, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, indology, philosophy, etc. In this work on the phenomenology of visionary experience, he continues with themes that are present in his earlier works such as Medusa’s Hair (1984), where he dwells on the relationship between personal symbols and culture.
In a series of fascinating case studies that range from prophets such as Gautama Buddha, medieval European mystics like Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila, modern visionaries such as the poet William Blake, theosophists like Madame Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott and Damodar Mavalankar to psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung, Obeyesekere sets out to explore transformative, visionary experiences known as ‘the dark night of the soul’ (p. 11) that challenge the certitude of knowledge derived from Reason. Of course, critiques of the Enlightenment valourisation of the cogito and of the reflexive self, the ‘I’, are already minor traditions in South Asian anthropology. Scholars such as Ashish Nandy and J.P.S. Uberoi have both contributed to the study of alternate knowledge traditions using the case study method—the former through his insightful psycho-biographies of Indian thinkers and latter through his study of pre-Enlightenment knowledge traditions in Europe. But for this book, however, a vantage point from which we may make sense of the range of different kinds of visionary experiences is Weber’s correlation between worldly disenchantment and the progressive development of rationalism. For Obeyesekere, the domination of reason may itself be accompanied by an enrichment of our private fantasy lives—a growth of what he somewhat whimsically calls ‘inner worldly enchantment’ (p. 368)—modifying Weber’s famous phrase. The closure of our minds to the validity of visionary knowledge that follows from the overwhelming domination of reason and knowledge based on empirical experience may however have led to new kinds of knowledge and disciplines that gave them validity—one such being psychoanalysis with its interest in dreams. In fact, a tentative hypothesis that Obeyesekere suggests is that as these alternate modes of knowing and experiencing come under the sway of Enlightenment reason, visions decrease giving way to dreams. What is the kind of knowledge acquired through meditation—through the emptying of the mind of discursive reason and of the active consciousness? The term ‘It consciousness’ (p. 202) adapted from Nietzsche is used to characterise the modes of knowledge that are part of the experience of meditation—thoughts that come to the mind as they wish, divinely revealed or heard (shruti) rather than through the reflexive ‘I’. To what extent is it possible to read experiences that range across such a vast expanse of time and space? Obeyesekere presents his argument as an encounter between psychoanalysis and anthropology, and explores the interface between personal symbols and cultural symbols. In my view, we need a more anthropological reading of psychoanalysis but that perhaps is beyond the scope of the argument in this volume. Obeyesekere’s ability to enter into the intellectual worlds of the visionaries that he writes about and to discuss their ideas from their own perspectives is admirable as is the sensitivity with which he weaves the autobiographical voice into the text describing some of his own dream experiences, leaving us, the readers, to make of them what we will.