On January 17, 1779, Captain James Cook sailed into Kealakekua
Bay on the west coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. His ships, the
Resolution and the Discovery, anchored among hundreds of canoes filled with thousands of singing and rejoicing Hawaiians.
Cook was rowed to shore, where he was met by native priests
who wrapped him in fine red tapa cloth and led him to a temple,
passing among kneeling throngs of Hawaiians who called out
that Cook was the returning god Lono. Feted and honored as a
deity, Cook remained in Hawaii for a month as his expedition received gifts of fresh foods and the sexual attentions of local
women. After hoisting anchor, Cook set sail, but the foremast on
the Resolution broke and forced him to return to Kealakekua Bay
for repairs on February 11. Cook’s return was completely different from the initial arrival: the bay was empty, the locals stole and
pilfered from the British vessels, and relations between natives
and navigators deteriorated. When the Discovery’s cutter was
stolen during the night of February 13, Cook resolved to capture
the king and hold him hostage until the boat was returned. Accompanied by a small force of marines, Cook took the king,
Kalaniopu’u, hostage and returned to the shore amid an increasingly threatening mob. After firing at a chief brandishing an iron
dagger (which, ironically, was an earlier gift from the British),
Cook was stabbed to death, his body trampled and broken by the
mob. The surviving British seamen thrashed through the waves
to their boats and gained the safety of their ships. Two days later
parts of Cook’s body were returned to the Resolution by two
priests who asked the remaining mariners when Lono would return (for sources, see Beaglehole 1967, 1974; Sahlins 1981, 1985,
1995; cf. Obeyesekere 1997).
Sahlins analyzed the fate of Captain Cook as an example of
how a culture’s structures—in this specific case, the Hawaiian
notion of the return of Lono—set cultural limits on individuals’
actions. The apotheosis and death of Cook exemplifies how “culture may set conditions to the historical process, but it is dissolved and reformulated in material practice, so that history
becomes the realization, in the form of society, of the actual resources people put into play” (Sahlins 1981:7).
During the passage inland to find the king [Kalaniopu’u],
thence seaward with his royal hostage, Cook is metamorphosed from a being of veneration to an object of hostility.
When he came ashore, the common people as usual dispersed
before him and prostrated, face to the earth; but in the end he
was himself precipitated face down in the water by a chief’s
weapon, an iron trade dagger, to be rushed upon by a mob exulting over him. . . . In the final ritual inversion, . . . Cook’s
body would be offered in sacrifice to the Hawaiian king.
(Sahlins 1985:106)
Cook’s death was not just the unfortunate killing of a British
navigator; it was
Death of Cook: death of Lono. The event was absolutely
unique, and it was repeated every year. For the event (any
event) unfolds simultaneously on two levels: as individual action and as collective representation; or, better, as the relation
between certain life histories and a history that is, over and
above these, the existence of societies. . . . Hence on the one
hand, historical contingency and the particularities of individual action; and on the other hand, those recurrent dimensions
of the event in which we recognize some cultural order.
(Sahlins 1985:108)
To oversimplify, given the Hawaiian myth of the return of
Lono and the confrontation between Lono (Cook) and the king
(Kalaniopu’u) in which the king is triumphant, the divine appearance and inevitable death of Captain Cook make sense as a
historically contingent event (what if Cook had not returned?)
that is only comprehensible in terms of another culture’s sets of
meanings, “a situational set of relations, crystallized from the
operative cultural categories and actors’ interests” (Sahlins
1985:125).
But is Sahlins’s interpretation correct? In 1992 the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere (1992, 1997) published a critical response, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in
the Pacific. Obeyesekere’s criticism touched off one of the more
spirited debates in recent anthropology (for an overview of the
controversy, see Borofsky 1997). Obeyesekere’s central point is
that the Hawaiians never considered Cook to be divine; rather,
the British navigators who recorded the 1779 events imposed
their own Western European structures onto the encounter with
native peoples:
I question this “fact” which I show was created in the European
imagination of the eighteenth century and after and was based
on antecedent “myth models” pertaining to the redoubtable explorer cum civilizer who is a god to the “natives.” To put it
bluntly, I doubt that the natives created their European god; the
Europeans created him for them. (Obeyesekere 1997:3)
The debate between Sahlins, Obeyesekere, and their respective proponents flared across the pages of reviews and journals.
Sahlins’s How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example
(1995), is a book-length salvo that is by turns detailed and scholarly, witty and wicked. Obeyesekere responded with a countervolley in the second edition of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook,
which included a new essay, “On De-Sahlinization.” At times the
controversy descended to parody and personal attack, but a
nested set of central issues emerged from the acrimonious swirl.
First, did the Hawaiians think Cook was Lono or rather a highstatus chief? Second, is the idea that foreign “discoverers” were
gods a Hawaiian structure or a European myth-model? Third,
how can an anthropologist presume to speak for the individuals
of another culture; how can the cultural categories of another society be defined by any outsider?
The first issue is simultaneously empirical and theoretical.
Sahlins musters a commanding array of primary sources, principally but not exclusively European narratives, and deploys multiple accounts to arrive at a series of inferences. By his own
admission, Obeyesekere is not a specialist in Polynesian history
and ethnography (1997:xvii). Yet, Obeyesekere claims, simply
amassing more and more “evidence” does not prove Sahlins’s
interpretation, because the underlying motives of the accounts
are never exposed, analyzed, and deconstructed. It makes no difference how many British navigators said Cook was considered
divine because those accounts contain hidden agendas.
The not-so-hidden agenda in this case, according to Obeyesekere, was a justification of Western imperialism. Cook was the
fatal beneficiary of the myth-model that European conquerors
were viewed as divine beings by the peoples they subjugated,
natives who acquiesced to the natural superiority of their conquerors. The flaw in Sahlins’s argument, according to Obeyesekere, is that Sahlins uncritically accepted the British accounts:
“There is not a single instance of his questioning the agendas, motiva-
tions, or social contexts underlying the writing of these texts” (Obeyesekere 1997:201, emphasis in the original). Obeyesekere claims
that “Sahlins simply ignores the complicated nature of text writing by missionaries and navigators . . . as he holds imperturbably to the position that these texts accurately describe
Hawaiian culture and voices” (1997:200).
Obeyesekere is incorrect. For example, Sahlins writes,
Many of the main authorities are also significant actors in the
events they relate, in one way or another authorized to represent the structures in play. . . . But at least as important as the
supposed “biases” introduced by the particular interests of the
journalists [i.e., authors of the sources] is the fact that their interests and biases are constitutive of what they are talking
about. As much as the texts are “distortions” of “reality,” they
represent the organization of it. (1992:4)
This is a significant, subtle point. Obeyesekere argues that
the historical accounts are necessarily biased by Western mythmodels, biases that his non-Western upbringing in Sri Lanka
equipped him to discern (e.g., 1997:8–9, 21–22, 223–224).
Obeyesekere insists that the European sources tell us little
about the native point of view, and—to add another layer to the
controversy—that Sahlins’s use of those sources embodies his
own biases—personal, intellectual, and cultural—which result
from being a member of a dominating Western society (Obeyesekere 1997:220–225, 248–249).
In contrast, Sahlins argues that the “biases” of the accounts
are really reflections of the “values” of the encounter, mirroring
the worldviews and prejudices of the participants. If the account
of Cook being viewed as a god were merely the projection of
Western myth-models, then why did it only occur in Hawaii and
not in Tahiti or British Columbia or any other place where the expedition interacted with native peoples? As to the biased
sources, Sahlins’s position is that
the discussion of sources is not meant to be a testimony to the
persistent faith that by describing the class status or some evident reason for the “bias” we will be able to make the appropriate compensations and thus arrive at “the facts.” On the
other hand, neither is our criticism offered in the postmodernist hope of attaining an ineffable lightness of historiographic being, a liberating sensation of the impossibility of
knowing anything coherent and the futility of worrying about
it. For an ethnographic history, the so-called distortions of firsthand observers and participants are more usefully taken as values than as errors. They represent the cultural forces in play.
Insofar as the principal authorities are also significant actors,
the ways they constructed Hawaii were precisely the ways by
which Hawaii was constructed. (1992:14)
In such dynamic encounters, cultural structures and historical processes and contingencies are engaged through human actions. The death of Captain Cook exemplified this process, but so
too, ironically, does the debate between Sahlins and Obeyesekere. Writing of the fatal visit of Cook and its aftermath,
Sahlins concludes that
there is something more to this tempest in a South Pacific
teapot than a possible theory of history. There is a criticism of
basic Western distinctions by which culture is usually thought,
such as the supposed opposition between history and structure or stability or change. . . . Yet this brief Hawaiian example
suggests there is no phenomenal ground—let alone any
heuristic advantage—for considering history and structure as
exclusive alternatives. Hawaiian history is throughout
grounded in structure, the systematic ordering of contingent
circumstances, even as the Hawaiian structure proved itself
historical. (1985:143–144)
As to Obeyesekere’s other claim that Sahlins’s ethnographic
history is necessarily biased, inevitably a product of unequal
power relationships of (mostly) Western ethnographers who
presume to “speak for” their (mostly) non-Western subjects,
Sahlins’s response is two-pronged. First, this criticism rests on
the notion that “the unequal power relationships between anthropologists and their interlocutors” makes cross-cultural understanding impossible, which is itself a presumption of power:
To say that such a history cannot be done, that a priori we can
only succeed in constructing others in our own image, would,
however, be an ultimate assumption of power. It would take
divine omniscience thus to know in advance the limits of what
we can understand about humanity. (Sahlins 1997:276)
Second, this criticism ignores the possibility of exchange, of intersubjective discourse: “Anthropology is an attempt to transcend the customary parochial limits of such discourse” (Sahlins
1997:276), and “anthropology struggles to go beyond its membership in a particular society by virtue of its relationship to others” (Sahlins 1997:273).
All this is an argument for what postmodern anthropology has
made us allergic to: ethnographic authority, the so-called construction of the other. A better phrasing would be construing the
other. And whether ethnographic authority in this sense turns
into Orientalism or some such imperialist conceit depends on
how it is achieved rather than whether it is attempted. There is
no choice here. The attempt is a necessity: Either anthropology
or the Tower of Babel. (Sahlins 1997:273)