356
Book and Film Reviews
Intimations of Mortality: Dreams of a
Buddhist Anthropologist
Wendy Doniger
University of Chicago Divinity School, Swift Hall, 1025
East 58th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A.
(don8@uchicago.edu). 28 X 13
The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience.
By Gananath Obeyesekere. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2012.
The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience
is Gananath Obeyesekere’s magnum opus, his summa, his
valedictory volume, to use three Latinate terms that come
down to, it’s a great big book into which he’s put all the
wisdom of his long lifetime and is saying farewell. In it he
grapples with the tension between scientific method (the
“phenomenology” in the title) and dreams (the “visionary”
part of the title) and attempts to forge a methodology that
does justice to them both.
He does this by asking sharp, hard questions of a great
array of relatively hazy, soft texts. Chapter 1 begins with the
Buddha, flanked by William James, Nietzsche, and Freud; 2
consults Yogacara and Nagarjuna before concentrating on Ti-
betan Vision-Knowledge; 3 explores Plotinus (and the Bud-
dha) and Spinoza and Einstein; 4 compares the visionary
experiences of Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and Margery
Kemp; 5 is primarily about William Blake; 6 tells the story
of Madame Blavatsky, the Indian theosophist Damodar Ma-
valankar, and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott; 7 is about Freud
and Jung (Freud has always played a major role in Obeye-
sekere’s, work, but now, alas, there is a lot more about Jung);
and 8 is mostly about Stephen LaBerge’s Lucid Dreaming and
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, as well as Edwin Muir
and William Butler Yeats.
This wildly ambitious comparative agenda, as Obeyesekere
admits, goes against the trend of current ethnography. But,
he responds to his imagined critics, “I studied anthropology
at a time when comparative studies and large theoretical issues
were popular, if not normative” (10). Moreover, he maintains
his status as an ethnographer, in his view, by placing “con-
siderable emphasis on case studies of individual virtuosos,
however imperfect the historical record.” He chooses those
individuals, however, as he admits, “because they illustrate
my theoretical thinking” (12). And that thinking strives to
recover “modes of thought gone out of vogue with the advent
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
of Enlightenment rationality” (16). Obeyesekere argues that
most of our thought processes occur outside the domain of
rationality or reified reason, when conscious thinking has been
temporarily suspended. He terms these processes “passive cer-
ebration” or “aphoristic thinking” (17).
The “theoretical thinking” that drives the selection of ex-
emplary visions is Obeyesekere’s desire to stop the fight be-
tween rational and irrational ways of understanding human
life. This stupid squabble doesn’t seem to go away; it is still
raging, as of this writing, superficially reformulated into a
pigheaded quarrel in the pages of the New Republic, Steven
Pinker (in black tights) defending science as the only valid
source of knowledge, and Leon Wieseltier (white tights)
speaking for the humanities (Pinker 2013). The Pinkers of
this world assume somehow that you invalidate scientific
knowledge, a jealous god, if you allow the possibility of some
other kind of knowledge; thou shalt have no other form of
evidence but mine. For Obeyesekere, Francis Crick epitomizes
this camp; Obeyesekere finds Crick’s Astonishing Hypothesis
(1994) “astonishingly naı̈ve” when Crick argues, paraphrasing
Lewis Carroll’s Alice, that we are all “nothing but a pack of
neurons” (7). But Obeyesekere is equally disgusted with the
“equally obtuse stance of those who deny the neurobiological
roots of our being and their relevance for the phenomeno-
logical understanding of cultural forms or collective repre-
sentations” (15). Indeed, he has not merely intellectual but
ethical objections to both of these extremes: “I believe it is
ethically wrong for the scholar to denigrate the religious beliefs
of people by denying the existence of god or spiritual beings
or some other views of the afterlife such as rebirth and karma
on the basis of empirical or scientific evidence. Or: attempt
to prove the reality of metaphysical truths through science or
pseudo-science” (15).
The solution that Obeyesekere offers to this conflict is stun-
ningly simple and surprisingly effective. He proposes that we
accept the data of supernormal, supernatural sources (dreams,
visions, mysticism) as the phenomena they are: things that
happen in the minds of human beings. And then we impose
on these data the methods of science, which, in Obeyesekere’s
lab, are psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, and his own
versions of the phenomenological approach to religion. For
he takes phenomenology not in the rather complex sense in
which Husserl and Hegel (as well as Mircea Eliade) developed
it but in the much simpler sense of regarding dreams and
visions as phenomena: “While I believe that these special
thought processes occur outside the thinking-I or ego, I do
not have a verifiable or falsifiable theory of such thinking,
except for the phenomenological inferences I make based on
case studies and the intuitive understanding of my own
dreams” (9). He explores the reality of dream phenomena
not in a flat-footed way. He is not out to find out if Jesus
was really there when Margery Kemp thought she spoke to
him but to ferret out what was going on in her life to make

her think she saw him then and also, most of all, to find out
what she learned from that vision that’s real and important,
and that we can learn too, and take seriously.
But there is a conflict here that Obeyesekere does not ac-
knowledge; though he argues that visionary thinking is char-
acterized by “the absence of the active thinking ‘I’ or the ego
of the rational consciousness” (6), he immediately adds, “My
strategy is to relate the text to the cultural tradition and the
personal life of the experiencer”—that is, to the very “active
thinking ‘I’” that visionary thinking, in his definition, denies.
He wants to have his enlightenment and eat it too.
Indeed, Obeyesekere speaks of being a person steeped in
the two Enlightenments, “the European and the Buddhist”
(4). It has always struck me as strange that the English word
“enlightenment” means two opposite things (like cleave—
meaning both “adhere [to]” and “split [apart]”). For Euro-
peans, Enlightenment (the Age of Reason, as it is also called)
means excluding the world of dreams, and to Buddhists and
Hindus, it means inviting the dreams in; for Europeans, it
means sticking to empirical, verifiable (and, in Karl Popper’s
terms, falsifiable) reality and for Buddhists and Hindus, it
means breaking out of that sort of reality to another, beyond
the reach of verification. The English pun artificially links
what were originally two entirely different words: the German
Aufklärung (“clarification”) and the Sanskrit “Buddhi/Bud-
dha” (“awakening”).
Obeyesekere takes his title (The Awakened Ones) from this
second, Buddhist meaning, and argues that what is seen in
dreams has a significant reality, different from the reality of
waking life. Enlightenment Europeans did not officially trust
dreams, though European poets and mystics always did; in
India, however, the understanding was that you reached a
deeper reality when you dreamed, that you had to wake up
from what passed for reality. Obeyesekere explains how he
combines these two worlds:
One cannot live without Reason and one cannot live with
it either, at least in its exclusionary Enlightenment or Euro-
rational sense. Rationality for me still remains a powerful
means of knowing, but I criticize here the closure of our
minds to modes of knowledge, especially visionary knowl-
edge, that bypass the cogito. Hence the focus of this essay
is on those who brought their visions and intuitive under-
standings within the frame of rational thinking. Visions ap-
pear before the dimmed consciousness of the seeker of truth.
They are not thought out through the operation of Reason
and the work of the cogito or the thinking-I. (4)
Obeyesekere’s objective in this book is to get his readers
to take the insights reached in dreams and apply to them
Enlightenment tools of reason. (This double vision may have
been what Herodotus [History 1.133] had in mind when he
noted that the Persians debate every important point when
they were drunk—and then again when they were sober; or,
as the case may be, first sober, and then drunk. Plato, too
[Timaeus 71] remarked that the liver is the source of inspi-
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357
ration—which then must be then tested in the light of reason,
a faculty situated in other organs.) Beyond that, however,
Obeyesekere expresses the hope that European and American
readers might not only be receptive to the epistemological
thinking of Hindu and Buddhist philosophers but might also
be able to enrich their own philosophical and scientific
traditions by opening themselves to the varied forms of vi-
sionary and intuitive thinking that are celebrated by those
philosophers (5). Indeed, the Buddha is the hero of this nar-
rative, hands down, and the book is well worth reading for
its profound and original insights into Buddhism alone, apart
from the rich theoretical and comparative issues that Obey-
esekere raises.
At times the book waxes very theological, especially for a
confessional Buddhist. Obeyesekere speaks often of “spirit”
and remarks, “Whether these multiple manifestations of spirit
prove or disprove the existence of Spirit is simply outside the
purview of this essay.” Equally noncommittal is his remark that,
“For me, spirit, self, soul, and so forth—even ‘no-self’—are
human inventions designed to deal with problems of life, death
and existence in general” (12). But what interests him most
about spirit is its connection with ideas about the continuity
of life after death.
For this is really a book about death, indeed about the
author’s death. The final envoi is entitled, “Intimations of
Mortality.” The penultimate chapter ends with a poem by
William Blake in which Obeyesekere changes Blake’s “Love
in a golden bowl” to “Death in a golden bowl.” He admits
from the start that, “everywhere in this essay I explicitly or
implicitly share with the reader my personal existential pre-
occupation with problems of death, decay, and human fini-
tude” (11–12). He speaks of his “sense of urgency, as time
and the hour keep running inexorably toward my own short
day.” And at the end, he says, “As I began to gray and the
shadow of Thanatos fell across Eros, I used to dream of cul-
de-sacs leading to a nowhere” (475).
On the night of August 10, 1990, he learned he had “a
serious disease.” Fourteen years later, “in the late autumn of
my life, that intimation of mortality became a reality when I
was diagnosed with a death-threatening illness” (475). It needs
no ghost come from the grave, as Hamlet so nicely puts it,
to tell us why Obeyesekere is writing this book at this time.
He knew his days were numbered when he wrote it, and so
it is preoccupied with the meaning of death. It might have
been titled, like William Savage Landor’s poem, “The Dying
Speech of an Old Philosopher,” and indeed it shares Landor’s
central concern: “Nature I loved, and next to nature, art,” if
we read, in Obeyesekere, science (for nature) and dreams (for
art).
Yet he describes himself as “someone who has always lived
with uncertainty and questioned the self-assurance of those
who take for granted that death is followed by a life of eternal
bliss. Or, for that matter, those who comfortably think there
isn’t any such thing” (475). This book is Obeyesekere’s ar-
 358
gument with himself, an argument between a living anthro-
pologist who does not believe in an afterlife, and a dying
Buddhist who very much wants to believe, despite himself.
Both the anthropologist and the Buddhist are extraordinarily
brilliant, erudite, and candid, which makes the book thrilling
to read, no matter which one you find the more compatible
thinker. You are moved by them both.
References Cited
Crick, Francis. 1994. The astonishing hypothesis: the scientific search for the soul.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Pinker, Steven. 2013. Science is not your enemy: an impassioned plea to
neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians. New
Republic, August 6, with a rejoinder from Leon Wieseltier: “Science doesn’t
have all the answers.” Follow-ups in September 3 and September 26 issues.
One Damned Thing after Another
Matt Tomlinson
Department of Anthropology, School of Culture, History
and Language, Australian National University, Canberra
0200, Australia (matt.tomlinson@anu.edu.au). 26 XI 13
Militant Christianity: An Anthropological History. By Alice
Beck Kehoe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Alice Beck Kehoe’s argument in Militant Christianity: An An-
thropological History is easy to grasp. There is, Kehoe writes,
an ideological strand running through 4,000 years of “Indo-
European culture” in which conflict and violence are both
normalized and glorified. This ideology is embodied in the
figures of deities such as Indra, Thor, and American evan-
gelical Christians’ muscular Jesus; within American history,
it has been manifest in white racism and capitalist rapacity.
Militancy itself, rather than Christianity, emerges as the
main subject of the book. The pre-Christian source of Indo-
European militancy, Kehoe suggests, is to be found in the
situation of pastoralist traders in Asia Minor, whose liveli-
hoods were particularly risky and likely to foster both indi-
vidualism and cooperative households that “tolerate a high
level of violence” (11). She labels Indo-European militancy
“battle-ax culture,” a term originally applied to “a third-mil-
lennium BCE culture in southern Scandinavia . . . [named
for] the frequent inclusion of a stone battle-ax in male graves”
(7). Kehoe argues that the early Christian church was coopted
by this battle-ax culture. Indeed, she writes that this militant
strain of Indo-European culture exists in an “unbroken” (155)
line from those Scandinavian warriors of more than 4,000
years ago to the creationists, right-wing historical revisionists,
and religious bloggers of today.
The argument could be laid out more persuasively. Kehoe
presents her examples paratactically, lining them up as if their
rhetorical enchainment reflects a causality that is never fully
explained. This approach demands considerable effort from
the reader. One can make ongoing attempts, as Kehoe races
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Number 3, June 2014
from Constantine to the Crusades to the Black Death to Mar-
tin Luther to Thomas Jefferson to Jerry Falwell, to fill in the
gaps and figure out how, precisely, each connects to the next.
Or one can simply take on faith Kehoe’s claims that humanity
is inherently cooperative and that Indo-European militancy
persistently perverts our better natures.
One of my concerns with the book is the way in which
“culture” is invoked but not interrogated. Kehoe’s use of the
term is both rigid and hyperexpansive, both bounded (e.g.,
“The culture of the militant Christian Right in the United
States is integrated and bounded”; 152) and boundless (using
the term “culture” as a singular noun for the kaleidoscopically
diverse social practices of Indo-European peoples over
thousands of years). My main concern, however, is that Ke-
hoe—despite her evident passion for, and commitment to,
an anthropological engagement with history—falls into a trap
most anthropologists and historians carefully avoid: she gets
caught up in her own expectations of what she thinks people
ought to believe and do. In the second half of the book, she
observes several times that militant American Christians ig-
nore the teachings of Jesus in favor of a competitive, judg-
mental approach to business and politics. This is true, but
rather than use this observation to expand her readers’ un-
derstanding of how militant Christianity persists if it violates
our natural human tendency to cooperate, Kehoe boxes read-
ers in with moral judgment: militant Christians are hypocrites,
she suggests repeatedly. Opportunities for close-to-the-
ground analysis are missed, and the reader is asked to chalk
another example onto the board for a generalized Indo-Eu-
ropean battle-ax culture that keeps chopping its way through
history.
Her argument means that Christianity does not actually
change anything, does not make a real historical difference,
but simply provides a resource for militants to abuse. Dis-
missing Weber, Kehoe writes that the Protestant Reformation
did not need to have a religious aspect because it was fun-
damentally a political-economic transformation from feu-
dalism to bureaucracy (39). As Joel Robbins has observed,
there is something problematic about the arguments of an-
thropologists who claim to analyze Christianity-as-culture but
proceed on the assumption that, ultimately, Christianity is
culturally unimportant—something that is always subordi-
nated to other forces that are deeper, more enduring, more
consequential.
Because Kehoe often quotes extremists, the book has its
undeniably entertaining moments: in these pages you will
find, for example, Pat Robertson receiving divine revelation
over a plate of cottage cheese at Disneyland (114). But the
lunacy of extremists’ pronouncements sometimes provokes
Kehoe into her own overheated responses. Writing of Martin
Luther’s call to kill rebellious peasants, she comments, “Lu-
ther’s passionate cry for violence fits his Germanic heritage”
(40). This is neither anthropology nor history, but stereotype.
Elsewhere, she writes that John D. Rockefeller was a fascist
(85, 160), that in the nineteenth century Jesus “had no rel-