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Current anthropology is like a bourgeois bathroom because “everything is tidy, everything smells clean, and the shit is flushed into the dark, rat-infested sewers that line the belly of the city” (p. 288). But Obeyesekere' s book is more than a matter of exposing one discipline's fetid muck: nothing less, in fact, than the reworking of psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. The Work of Culture offers the most sophisticated demonstration yet of the relevance of Freudian psychoanalysis to cultural interpretation by a scholar whose sensitivity to cultural differences should reassure the reader that this will be no mere “reduction” of variable symbols and meanings to the invariant properties of the dynamic unconscious.
The four parts of the book are expanded versions of the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures, which Obeyesekere delivered at the University of Rochester. In the first part, “Representation and Symbol Formation in a Psychoanalytic Anthropology,” Obeyesekere pursues the topic of “personal symbols” first introduced in Medusa's Hair and follows up on several cases presented in the earlier work. In part 2, “Oedipus: The Paradigm and its Hindu Rebirth,” he relativizes the Oedipus complex and considers its South Asian transformations in the mythology of the elephant-headed god, Ganesh, and Buddha. In part 3, “The Parricide in Buddhist History,” the same theme continues, with reference to Sri Lanka. In part 4, “Freud and Anthropology,” Obeyesekere considers the utility of a culturally reshaped psychoanalysis as a nomological theory for looking beneath the surface of reality.
Throughout the book, Obeyesekere explores what he calls “symbolic re-move”—the process through which symbolic forms existing at the cultural level