Imagining Karma : Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth

Exploring the beliefs of small-scale societies of West Africa, Melanesia, traditional Siberia, Canada, and the northwest coast of North America, this text compares their ideas with those of ancient and modern Indic civilizations and with the Greek rebirth theories of Pythagoras, Empedocles, Pindar, and Plato.

The discussion decentres the popular notion that India was the origin and locus of ideas of rebirth.

As Obeyesekere compares responses to the most fundamental questions of human existence, he challenges readers to re-examine accepted ideas about death, cosmology, morality, and eschatology.The text shows that diverse societies have come through independent invention or borrowing to believe in reincarnation as an integral part of their larger cosmological systems.

In a contemporary intellectual context that celebrates difference and cultural relativism, this book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical undersanding of "family resemblances" and differences across great cultural divides.