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Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and is one of the world's leading anthropologists, who has done much work in his home country of Sri Lanka. He completed a B.A. in English (1955) at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, followed by an M.A. (1958) and Ph.D (1964) at the University of Washington. Before his appointment to Princeton, Obeyesekere held teaching positions at the University of Ceylon, the University of Washington, the University of California, San Diego.

In the 1990s he entered into intellectual debate with Marshall Sahlins over the rationality of indigenous peoples. Through the details of Captain James Cook's death in the Hawaiian Islands in 1779. At the heart of the debate was how to understand the rationality of indigenous people. Obeyesekere insisted that indigenous people thought in essentially the same way as Westerners and was concerned that any argument otherwise would paint them as 'irrational' and 'uncivilized'. Sahlins, on the other hand, was critical of Western thought and argued that indigenous cultures were distinct from those of the West.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Gananath Obeyesekere", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0