Find a copy online
Links to this item
Find a copy in the library
Finding libraries that hold this item...
Details
| Named Person: | Gananath Obeyesekere; James Cook; Gananath Obeyesekere; James Cook; James Cook; Gananath (1930- ) @Obeyesekere; James Cook |
|---|---|
| Material Type: | Internet resource |
| Document Type: | Book, Internet Resource |
| All Authors / Contributors: |
Marshall David Sahlins |
| ISBN: | 0226733688 9780226733685 |
| OCLC Number: | 31077028 |
| Description: | x, 318 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm. |
| Responsibility: | Marshall Sahlins. |
| More information: |
Abstract:
In recent years, these questions have arisen in debates over the death and deification of Captain James Cook on Hawaii 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, ethnocentric 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 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 Hawaiian god. But this inverted ethnocentrism can only be supported, as Sahlins demonstrates, by 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 "natives," Obeyesekere, by substituting a homemade "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 also a brilliant demonstration of how to do anthropology by one of the discipline's most powerful minds.
Reviews
Tags
Similar Items
Related Subjects:(30)
- Obeyesekere, Gananath. -- Apotheosis of Captain Cook.
- Cook, James, -- 1728-1779.
- Ethnology -- Polynesia.
- Hawaii -- History -- To 1893 -- Historiography.
- Hawaiian mythology.
- Ethnology -- Hawaii -- Philosophy.
- Ethnologists -- Attitudes.
- Etnología -- Polinesia.
- Mitología hawaiiana.
- Etnología -- Hawai -- Filosofía.
- Etnólogos -- Actitudes.
- Antropologia cult social
- Ontdekkingsreizigers.
- Mythologie.
- Etnocentrisme.
- Obeyesekere, Gananath. -- The apotheosis of Captain Cook.
- Ethnologie -- Polynésie.
- Mythologie -- Hawaii.
- Ethnologie -- Hawaii -- Philosophie.
- Ethnologues -- Attitudes.
- Hawaii -- Histoire -- Jusqu'à 1893 -- Historiographie.
- Cook, James.
- Geschichtsschreibung.
- Hawaii.
- Polynesien.
- @Obeyesekere, Gananath (1930-....). -- The apotheosis of Captain Cook.
- Cook, James -- (1728-1779).
- Mythologie hawaiienne.
- Ethnologie -- Philosophie.
- Hawaii (États-Unis) -- Jusqu'à 1893 -- Historiographie.
User lists with this item (1)
- Sociology, Economics, Politics(151 items)
by debroy updated 2010-05-12
