How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example

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

How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example
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Book Summary Information

Author: Marshall Sahlins
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-10-01
ISBN: 0226733696
Number of pages: 328
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press

Book Reviews of How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example

Book Review: Modernity's best
Summary: 1 Stars

"How Natives Think" is a series of hypothetical inventions from the fertile imagination of its author, followed by forcing facts of history to fit them. In this case even though our author admits his proposed solutions to the 1779 Hawaiian killing of Cook fly in the face of fact, this trivial reality fails to change his solution, though it flies in the face of fact. Hence his theory is safe from accepting its failure by simply saying it didn't fail. Astounding. In an attempt to refute Obeyesekere's criticism, Sahlins only digs his own grave, which, naturally, won't damage his reputation among the faithful.

Aside from bickering with Obeyesekere, Sahlins exposes the larger issue and the worst of a reader's angst about modern scholarship. As a social theorist Sahlins pretends to be a historian without doing the work to become one. Sahlins reveals his field is as overtly biased by Western ignorance of human beings as those he claims to oppose. Merely saying a people think in some manner we find is enough for Sahlins. What passes for evidence is, as Sagan claimed and the reader fears, equivalent to what passes as evidence for 95% of a scientifically illiterate populous enamored with UFOs, crop circles and talking to dead people on television. Hence social theorists and literary critics can be historians too, perhaps even physicists one day soon. He shows in the text how politically confined he is to structuralist dogma, making it impossible for him to perform critical analysis. Ironic.

In the end "How Natives Think" is something like what we might expect from fundamentalist Creationist zealots telling us "the truth" about science with a Biblical critique of Einstein's Relativity and mutations of the fruit fly. Sahlins has his own religious cross to bear, his membership in a West he fashionably despises, while prospering from it. To imagine he holds a prestigious position at one of the Western world's most prominent institutions (U of Chicago) petrifies the reader with dread for America's educational system.

Summary of How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example

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.

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