364: The Apotheosis of Captain Cook by Gananath Obeyesekere & How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example by Marshall Sahlins

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific by Gananath Obeyesekere.

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How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example by Marshall Sahlins.

Today's post is actually a recommendation of two books. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook by Gananath Obeyesekere and How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example by Marshall Sahlins.

These two books are in conversation with each other. The debate between Obeyesekere and Sahlins is an example of what substantive debate between two notable scholars looks like.

Princeton University Press's description of Obeyesekere's book:

"Here Gananath Obeyesekere debunks one of the most enduring myths of imperialism, civilization, and conquest: the notion that the Western civilizer is a god to savages. Using shipboard journals and logs kept by Captain James Cook and his officers, Obeyesekere reveals the captain as both the self-conscious civilizer and as the person who, his mission gone awry, becomes a "savage" himself.

"In this new edition of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, the author addresses, in a lengthy afterword, Marshall Sahlins's 1994 book, How "Natives" Think, which was a direct response to this work."

Sahlins' response is essentially: How do you know what natives think? From the University of Chicago Press:

"When Western scholars write about non-Western societies, do they inevitably perpetuate the myths of European imperialism? Can they ever articulate the meanings and logics of non-Western peoples? Who has the right to speak for whom? Questions such as these are among the most hotly debated in contemporary intellectual life. In How "Natives" Think, Marshall Sahlins addresses these issues head on, while building a powerful case for the ability of anthropologists working in the Western tradition to understand other cultures.

"In recent years, these questions have arisen in debates over the death and deification of Captain James Cook on Hawai'i Island in 1779. Did the Hawaiians truly receive Cook as a manifestation of their own god Lono? Or were they too pragmatic, too worldly-wise to accept the foreigner as a god? Moreover, can a "non-native" scholar give voice to a "native" point of view? In his 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, Gananath Obeyesekere used this very issue to attack Sahlins's decades of scholarship on Hawaii. Accusing Sahlins of elementary mistakes of fact and logic, even of intentional distortion, Obeyesekere portrayed Sahlins as accepting a naive, enthnocentric idea of superiority of the white man over "natives"—Hawaiian and otherwise. Claiming that his own Sri Lankan heritage gave him privileged access to the Polynesian native perspective, Obeyesekere contended that Hawaiians were actually pragmatists too rational and sensible to mistake Cook for a god.

"Curiously then, as Sahlins shows, Obeyesekere turns eighteenth-century Hawaiians into twentieth-century modern Europeans, living up to the highest Western standards of "practical rationality." By contrast, Western scholars are turned into classic custom-bound "natives", endlessly repeating their ancestral traditions of the White man's superiority by insisting Cook was taken for a god. But this inverted ethnocentrism can only be supported, as Sahlins demonstrates, through wholesale fabrications of Hawaiian ethnography and history—not to mention Obeyesekere's sustained misrepresentations of Sahlins's own work. And in the end, although he claims to be speaking on behalf of the "natives," Obeyesekere, by substituting a home-made "rationality" for Hawaiian culture, systematically eliminates the voices of Hawaiian people from their own history.

"How "Natives" Think goes far beyond specialized debates about the alleged superiority of Western traditions. The culmination of Sahlins's ethnohistorical research on Hawaii, it is a reaffirmation for understanding difference."

Why this is liberal/progressive: This is an awesome debate and by the end you probably won't know which side is more right. And this is why it's on the list. Liberals and progressives are more comfortable with uncertainty. And science is riddled with uncertainty. If you think it's always easy to tell who's right and who's wrong do yourself a favor and read these two books back to back. (Or rather, read Obeyesekere, then Sahlins, then Obeyesekere's new afterward responding to Sahlins's argument.)

BUY OBEYESEKERE

BUY SAHLINS