How "Natives" Think

About Captain Cook, For Example

Marshall Sahlins

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9780226733692, 9780226733685
• eBook ISBN: 9780226733715
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

A.1

What the Sailors Knew

In the passage quoted on page 19, Obeyesekere says that none of Cook’s people could determine from Hawaiians that the captain was the god Lono, but elsewhere this statement is qualified in various forms and degrees. So, he also says that none of the major journal keepers supposed Cook was deified, thereby excepting Lieutenant Rickman and Heinrich Zimmermann, who did so (Ob. 75–76, 122–23). Again, he says, of the officers, only Lieutenant Rickman tied Cook to the god, thus excepting the ordinary seamen, who did so—on the basis of an a priori Haole tradition that “natives” take them for gods (Ob. 123). The officers did not come to this conclusion because “their empirical observations did not warrant it” (Ob. 124). Alternatively, Obeyesekere writes that the officers knew about the old tradition of European-as-native-god, “and were therefore cautious in accepting the popular shipboard equation that Cook was a god for Hawaiians” (Ob. 123). This must mean that the sophisticated officers refrained because they knew the seamen’s notions were folkloric. All the same, and despite the (hypothetical) empirical evidence to the contrary, Lieutenant King on his return to England wrote of the “religious adoration” of Cook and made other intimations of his divinity—enough to convince the poet William Cowper that God had struck down Cook for playing god (Ob. 125–26). Likewise, according to Obeyesekere, Midshipman Trevenan spoke of Cook as an “idolized man” in the marginal notes he made in his copy of King’s official account (Ob. 125). Mr. King, says Obeyesekere, was clearly influenced by London debates about Cook’s death and the earlier publications of Rickman and Zimmermann (as if the confused narratives of these two could persuade a person of King’s observational talents). In sum, if one assumes the hypothesis that the deification of Cook was a European myth, then makes the ad hoc assumption that any report of Cook’s divinity in Hawaii must be due to the influence of that myth, and for good measure throws in the assumption that if people did not say Cook was a god they must have evidence he was not a god, it can be reasonably concluded that the deification of Cook was a European myth.

On the other hand, Obeyesekere may have sensed that this one type of negative evidence—the failure of the British to report that Cook was received by Hawaiians as a god—would be evidence against his own thesis, which is that Haole are predisposed to say just that. Perhaps the sense of contradiction accounts for his curious speculation that, although the common seamen were inclined to this conceit, the officers were inhibited by their consciousness of the tradition. But this also suggests Obeyesekere’s sensitivity to the ambiguity of many British chroniclers about the respects Hawaiians paid to “the Orono”: their reports are marked by a distinct reticence in equating Cook and the god rather than by any eagerness to do so. Reviewing the Cook documents, John F. G. Stokes, a well-known scholar of things Hawaiian, spoke of the colossal ignorance of the British in not recognizing that Hawaiians were identifying Cook with Lono in so many words (1931:92–93). But was it ignorance—or delicacy?

European views about the propriety of such allegations of their divinity were hardly monolithic. Obeyesekere speaks of this conceit as a structure of the long run in Western ideology. But the sin of playing god is surely a structure of the longer and stronger run, it being in fact the Original—“ye shall be as God,” said the serpent, “knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). People such as Lieutenant King and David Samwell, who were very sympathetic to Hawaiians, especially to the priests, speak only obliquely of the islanders’ disposition to cross the great Western ontological divide between god and man; of course, they are even less direct in speaking of Captain Cook’s role in the affair, which they must have known would be a scandal to many of his compatriots. In an oft-quoted footnote to the official account, King puzzles over what precisely this designation of Cook as Lono meant. He says the Hawaiians sometimes applied it to an invisible being who lived in the heavens. Referring to Omeah, a high priest of Lono who analogously bore the god’s name, King writes that this personage “resembles pretty much the Delai Lama of the Tartars, and the ecclesiastical emperor of Japan” (Cook and King 1784, 3:5n). Yet, it had been well-known in Europe for at least a century that the Dalai Lama and the Japanese emperor were incarnate gods (see above, 135–36). This passage is pure circumspection all the way around. The kind of criticism of Cook’s divine career penned by Cowper—on the basis of Mr. King’s narrative—is testimony to the complexity of the ideological pressures surrounding the issue. Expressing these pressures as ambiguity, a text such as King’s is neither arrogant nor ignorant—just reticent.

Obeyesekere, however, thinks Mr. King exaggerated Cook’s supposed godliness in the published version of the voyage by comparison with his private journals. As was said, this presumes King was swayed by Rickman and Zimmermann (thus that he read German), and by debates in England over Cook’s death. The evidence of exaggeration is that, in the published account, King described the ceremony of the first day at Kealakekua in which Cook was formally offered a pig on board the Resolution as, “a sort of religious adoration,” and says it was “frequently repeated during our stay at Owhyhee”; whereas, the private journal, according to Obeyesekere, does not contain a reference to “religious adoration” (Ob. 125). Again, regarding such offerings to Cook, where the official account says they were made, “with a regularity, more like a discharge of religous duty than the effect of mere liberality,” the unofficial journal (merely) says: “All this seemed to be done as a duty . . . either as a peace offering or to a mortal much their superior” (ibid.). But here Obeyesekere’s literalness misrepresents Lieutenant King’s private journal, both with regard to its wording and its tenor.

By the second day of the British sojourn at Kealakekua, Mr. King in his private journal was describing the ritual respects the Lono priests paid to Cook as approaching “adoration.” In fact the ceremony of that day was the hānaipū, the formal greeting of Lono at the Makahiki (see above, 55–59). Writing of “the remarkable homage they pay to Capt” Cook & also to Captain Clerke,” King says:

This [homage] on the first visit of Capt” Cook to their [the Lono priests’] houses seemd to approach to Adoration, he was placed at the foot of a wooden image [of Lono] at the Entrance of a hut [a Hale o Lono or ‘House of Lono’ temple], to which [image] from the remnants of Cloth round the trunk, & the remains of Offerings on the Whatta [altar], they seem to pay more than ordinary devotion; I was here again made to support the Captains Arms. (Beaglehole 1967: 509–10)

The support of Cook’s outstretched arms would make him an image of the cross-piece Makahiki image, Lonomakua, the one received thus during the New Year festival. But Mr. King had been impressed with the unusual Hawaiian reactions to the British from the time of the first visit to Kaua’i, exactly a year earlier. He wrote of some Kaua’i people who had come aboard the Resolution:

In their behaviour they were very fearful of giving offense, asking if they should sit down, & spit on the decks, etc. & in all their conduct seemd to regard us as superior beings. (King Log, 20 Jan 1778)

Again, in summing up the British experience at Hawai’i, King wrote:

As they certainly regarded us as a Superior race of people to themselves, they would often say, that the great Eatooa [Akua, ‘god’] liv’d with us. The little Image which we have mention’d as being the center one in the Morai [Hikiau temple] they calld Koonooe aikai’a [Kūnuiakea, an encompassing form of the royal god, Kū] & said it was [King] Terreeoboos God, & that he also livd with us, which proves that they only regard these Images as types or resemblances of their Deitys. (Beaglehole 1967: 621)

We shall see that Obeyesekere misquotes the version of this passage in the published Voyage, which reads that the great god “dwelled in our country” and the king’s God “resided amongst us,” as saying that the latter “resided in us” (Cook and King 1784, 3: 159–60; Ob. 86, emphasis added). For the amusement of his readers (who have checked the originals), he then makes this Hawaiian (mis-)statement, that the Hawaiian god lived in Englishmen, part of his argument against the idea that Englishmen were received as Hawaiian gods, this being a purely European invention (see above, 62–63).

A.2

Literalism and Culture

Many of Obeyesekere’s criticisms are marked by a curiously flat literalism, as in this issue of the Makahiki god appearing in human form rather than the traditional wooden image:

Sahlins seems to assume that the arrival of Lono-Cook at Makahiki time was right on ritual schedule. But in fact this is a totally unprecedented event, for no Hawaiian god is supposed to arrive as a physical person during these ritual festivals. As in other societies, the gods are invoked in chants and prayers to be “present” in the ceremony; they may also appear in various forms, as for example, a wind. Thus, the arrival of the god Lono in person would have upset their ritual schedule, compelling them to make readjustments and alterations to deal with this unprecedented and unexpected event. (Ob. 64–65)

As Obeyesekere is well known for his imaginative symbolic interpretations of a psychoanalytic kind, it may be worthwhile to reflect (methodologically) on the repeated recourse to such banal realism in The Apotheosis of Captain Cook. The disputational strategy is fairly evident. By means of his own new-found literalism, Obeyesekere opens a space of commonsense incredulity that can be filled by Hawaiians’ hard-headed objectivity. It helps not to mention here that the god is represented at the Makahiki by a crosspiece image with an anthropomorphic figure or head at the top (Malo 1951: 143–44; Ii 1959:71), or that Cook was made to assume the form of this image the day he landed at Kealakekua (Sahlins 1989: 400). The rhetoric of an unprecedented arrival of Lono “in person” also fails to consider that a physical person, every bit as much as an image or a wind, would be a representation of the god. But, most important, the form of the literalist argument, by denying that Hawaiians were able to motivate a substantial relationship between Cook and Lono on logical and perceptual grounds, has the effect of confining them to a mindless repetition of their preexisting cultural forms. Of course, I am repeatedly accused by Obeyesekere of advancing just such ideas of “stereotypic reproduction”—a phrase and concept I have been explicitly criticizing since 1977 (see appendix 11). Indeed, my own argument is that Cook was creatively and flexibly assimilated by Hawaiians to their Makahiki tradition, since as Obeyesekere says that tradition did not prescribe the advent of Lono as a “physical person.” But in the realist theoretical practice adopted by Obeyesekere, in order for cultural schemata to function in practice, in order for people to successfully use their understandings of the world, the world will have to consistently and objectively correspond to the ideas by which they know it. If not, their minds turn into Lockean blank sheets of paper, and the biological capacity for realism takes over. Indeed, a utopian Lockean world of empirical truth would be the pan-human fate, since, sooner or later, usually sooner, reality proves a disappointment to all peoples’ categories.

. . . peace . . . how peaceful . . . how quiet. Now we have won. Much better. All those voices . . . stilled. What were those endless arguments about? We can hardly remember. Now everyone agrees; everyone knows the truth. Which is . . . we can hardly remember. It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing seems to matter much anymore. So quiet. Nobody talks—what is there to talk about? Nobody writes—who for? what for? We all agree, we see. We just live our lives and doze and die. And that at least, we all agree, is REAL. (Ashmore, Edwards, and Potter 1994: 11)

In the face of empirical discrepancies to received ideas, Hawaiians, like everyone else, will be reduced to their senses alone and a built-in capacity for “practical rationality.” They will forget everything. They will interpret experience for what it really is. If circumstances do not conform to their cultural order, they (or it) are so inflexible they have no other recourse except to give it up.

The reason this theoretical practice is unworkable is that every situation to which a people refer a given category is empirically unique, distinct from every other to which the same notion may be applied. One never steps into the same river twice—which never stopped anyone from calling it by the same name. To paraphrase John Barth, reality is a nice place to visit (philosophically), but no one ever lived there. Unless experiences were selectively perceived, classified, and valued by socially communicable criteria, there would be neither society nor intelligibility, let alone sanity. Not to say that the interpretive categories are culturally prescribed—as if there were no improvisation or innovation—only that events are culturally described. The great irony in all this is that the word that Polynesians most commonly use to designate unprecedented yet clearly significant phenomena, including persons, is akua or its equivalent (Fijian, kalou), indicating divine power and godly nature (see above, 178–79).

The passage from Obeyesekere cited at the head of this note has several errors. I have never assumed, or seemed to assume, that the arrival of Cook at the Makahiki “was right on ritual schedule” (see Sahlins 1989). Cook began the circuit of Hawai’i island two weeks in advance of the Makahiki god and arrived at Kealakekua nearly two weeks after its scheduled arrival (see ibid.). It is also incorrect that no Hawaiian god normally appears as a physical person during those ceremonies. Kahoali’i, a physical person who is the king’s ‘god’ (akua) and plays an important role in human sacrifices, has an analogous function in the dismantling of the Lono image at the Makahiki (Vancouver 1801, 5: 37; Sahlins 1985a: 119–20). Nor is it unknown for such gods to appear ceremonially “in other societies”—consider the Aztecs, among numerous others. Finally, that Cook’s arrival did create discrepancies in the Hawaiians’ ritual schedule to which they did adjust is a point I have made in detail: the suspension of the tabu on putting to sea during Lono’s procession, since Cook’s circuit was by ship; the improvised re-offering of an already sacrificed pig at Hikiau temple, reflecting a thirteen-day difference between Lono’s scheduled entrance to the temple and Cook’s; the performance of the hānaipū ceremony for welcoming Lono outside the 23-day period of the Lono procession; the transposition of sham fighting in the several districts of the island presided over by the “god of sport” forms of Lono to the boxing entertainments provided for Cook’s people, likewise marked by the appearance of Makahiki images: see Sahlins (1989) for these and other such improvisations.

A.3

On the Kāli’i Rite

In effort to deny the analogy between the historical death of Cook, killed on the shore of Kealakekua Bay by a crowd of armed men defending their king against him, and the kali’i ritual of the Makahiki that pits the king against the party of Lono, Obeyesekere asserts that it is “doubtful whether the ritual of Kali’i could be seen as a grand conflict between the king (as the god Kū) and those who ritually oppose him (Lono)” (Ob. 198). The assertion is partly contingent on a preceding argument—a reading based on his Sri Lankan concepts of divinity and a misreading of the Marquesan practice of designating foreigners as akua ‘gods’ (see appendix 17)—that the king does not represent the god Kū. But of course, the king is, in his warrior aspect, directly representative of Kū, especially the mobile war form, Kūkailimoku (’Ku-Snatcher-of-the-Island’); and the kāli’i marks the turning point in the year when the ceremonial presence of Lono is superseded by the temple rites centered on Kū (Valeri 1985). Obeyesekere apparently believes that if he obscures the affinity of the king and Kū, it will nullify the opposition between the king and Lono at the kali’i, and a fortiori the parallels to Cook’s death. So, in testimony to the above statement doubting that the kāli’i “could be seen as a grand conflict between the king (as the god Kū) and those who ritually oppose him (Lono),” Obeyesekere quotes the significant text of Kelou Kamakau—who nevertheless described the ritual of kāli’i in the explicit terms of the conflict of the king and the god (Lono):

The king came in from the sea, and when he was near the lower side of the temple towards the sea he saw a great number of people with the deity. A very large number of men ran in front of the image [of Lono], holding spears in their hands. One of them had several spears in his hands which he intended to throw at one of the men who landed with the king from the canoe. The king and his companion landed, and when the man who held the several spears saw them he ran forward quickly and threw a spear at the king’s companion. He parried it with something that he held in his hand, leaping upwards. The people then shouted at the man’s skill. The man then touched the king with a second spear thus freeing him from restrictions. Then there was a general sham fight among the people. (K. Kamakau 1919–20: 42–45)

In sum, the king and Lono came into conflict at the Makahiki, as did King Kalani’ōpu’u and “Lono” (as Hawaiians k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• One: Captain Cook at Hawaii
• Two: Cook after Death
• Three: Historical Fiction, Makeshift Ethnography
• Four: Rationalities: How "Natives" Think
• Epilogue: Historiography, or Symbolic Violence
• A.1. What the Sailors Knew
• A.2. Literalism and Culture
• A.3. On the Kāli'i Rite
• A.4. Historiography of the Makahiki
• A.5. Calendrical Politics
• A.6. Cook Wrapped
• A.7. Lono at Hikiau
• A.8. Clark Gable for Cook?
• A.9. Blurred Images
• A.10. Cookamamie
• A.11. Priests' Sorrows, Women's Joys, and Stereotypic Reproduction
• A.12. Divine Chiefs of Polynesia
• A.13. Priests and Genealogies
• A.14. On the Wrath of Cook
• A.15. The Language Problem
• A.16. Kamakau's Gods
• A.17. Atua in the Marquesas and Elsewhere
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index