Gananath Obeyesekere, an anthropologist whose long career and wide-ranging social insights — which drew on Hindu texts, Freudian psychoanalysis and Christian mysticism, among many other ideas — made him a leading intellectual figure in both his native Sri Lanka and the rarefied world of Western academia, died on Tuesday at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He was 95.
His son Asita confirmed the death.
Dr. Obeyesekere was born in a small Sri Lankan village at a time when the country, then known as Ceylon, was still in the grip of the British Empire. He spent most of his career teaching in the United States, primarily at Princeton, where he established his reputation as a critical voice in debates about colonialism, pluralism and the possibility of finding commonalities across cultural divides.
Long prominent among academics, he broke into the broader public’s consciousness in 1992 with his book “The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific.”
Cap. James Cook was a British explorer who, after being received with great ceremony by Hawaiian islanders in 1779, unexpectedly returned and was murdered by the same people who had warmly welcomed him before.
Among historians and anthropologists, the common understanding was that the islanders had believed Captain Cook to be a god, and that his return, because of a broken mast on his ship, inadvertently fulfilled a belief in a banished god who would one day be defeated by their chief.
Dr. Obeyesekere saw it differently. The Hawaiians, he believed, knew he was just a man; had honored him as an honorary chief, not a god; and had killed him over a more secular dispute. Westerners, in saying otherwise, had then imposed their own biases on the Hawaiians, in a sense creating their own myths about a mythmaking people.
“This ‘European god,’” he wrote, “is a myth of conquest, imperialism and civilization.”
Among his targets was Marshall Sahlins, another prominent anthropologist, who had argued the god-making thesis in 1985 in his book “Islands of History.”
Dr. Sahlins responded to Dr. Obeyesekere with a second book. In “How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, for Example” (1995), he said that Dr. Obeyesekere was the real imperialist, because he denied the possibility that Hawaiians could have a way of seeing reality that was fundamentally different from the West’s.
The debate was covered widely, in The New York Times and elsewhere. Dr. Obeyesekere denied being an imperialist, but Dr. Sahlins was not entirely wrong in saying that he sought commonalities between East and West. Much of Dr. Obeyesekere’s work explored the ways in which different cultures shared certain universal qualities, including what he called “practical rationality,” a basic sense of seeing the world.
His willingness to take a critical eye to political beliefs in Sri Lanka made him something of a controversial figure at home, though he often laughed that off with self-deprecating humor.
“For some of my critics I must seem a foolish person and also an ignorant one,” he said in a 2015 address at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. “That indeed is true: In the course of my long intellectual life, I must have been sometimes a fool.”
Though he built his reputation on ethnographic field work in Sri Lanka, Dr. Obeyesekere’s later work moved away from conventional anthropology to encompass philosophy, sociology and literary criticism.
In another of his major works, “The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience” (2012), he examined mysticism across a variety of cultures and time periods. Touching on Hinduism, Buddhism and the poetry of William Blake, he found in them a similar embrace of a different kind of thinking.
“That which is nonrational,” he said in 2015, “is not necessarily irrational.”
Gananath Obeyesekere (pronounced GAH-na-nat “Obey-SAY-kara) was born on Feb. 2, 1930, in Meegama, in the Western Province of what is now Sri Lanka, but his family moved to Colombo, the capital, when he was 5 so his father, Don Dharmadasa Obeyesekere, could teach traditional Indian, or Ayurvedic, medicine. His mother, Amara (Kannangara) Obeyesekere, died when he was very young.
He attended private schools run on the British model and steeped in British culture, then studied English literature at the University of Ceylon (which later split into four institutions).
After graduating in 1955, he had the opportunity to attend Oxford to continue studying literature. But he had also grown interested in collecting stories and studying folklore in the countryside, and he opted to pursue anthropology instead.
He married Ranjini Ellepola in 1958. Along with their son Asita, she survives him, as does another son, Indrajit; their daughter, Nalinika Obeyesekere; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
Dr. Obeyesekere received his master’s and doctorate degrees, both in anthropology, from the University of Washington, where he also taught. He later taught at the University of California San Diego and at Princeton, where he was chairman of the anthropology department from 1980 until his retirement in 2000.
Dr. Obeyesekere’s early work included “Land Tenure in Village Ceylon: A Sociological and Historical Study” (1967) and “The Cult of the Goddess Pattini” (1984), both of which delved into the culture and politics of his native country.
In a 2003 interview for the University of California, Berkeley, he said that his grand intellectual mission was to study the way ideas from one culture filtered through another, whether it be South Asian culture through the West or vice versa.
“Even Buddhism was filtered through the West,” he said. “I am a product of that myself.”