Scholasticism is not dead; it is the texts considered canonical that are in dispute. University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, in this densely argued, frank, and at times humorous response to Princeton University anthropologist Gananath Obeye- sekere’s Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (1992), defends his view that when James Cook arrived in Hawaii in 1779, the “Hawaiians” incorporated him into their way of understanding the world and their place in it; accorded him some type of status, explained in English as that of a “god”; and killed him when he returned after a brief exit. (For a clear presentation of Sahlins’ argument, see his “Captain James Cook; or, the Dying God,” in Islands of History, 1985).
Both Sahlins and Obeyesekere relate this 1779 episode explicitly to reports and understandings of the relations between Hernando Cortés and various Mesoamericans in the early sixteenth century. The two authors debate the question, Did early modern non-Europeans sometimes see Europeans as “gods”?
Obeyesekere questions Sahlins’ structured understanding of what Sahlins posits as the belief system of the early modern Hawaiians. Clearly connecting with Tzvetan Todorov’s work La conquête de l’Amérique: la question de l’autre (1982), Obeyesekere challenges his readers to remember the emotional aspects of early modern contacts by dedicating his work to his Sri Lankan driver, Wijedasa, a victim of the terror that defines much of contemporary Sri Lankan society. In this, he echoes Todorov’s dedication of his work to the memory of a Mayan woman killed and dismembered by the Europeans’ dogs. Obeyesekere suggests that his readers reverse the roles used to explain the Cook episode; how do things look if it is the “Hawaiians” who acted rationally, practically, innovatively, and the Europeans who were tied by myths such as the famous “non-Europeans see Europeans as gods”?
Sahlins’ response in this book is clear and thorough. He presents 4 well-argued chapters, 17 appendixes, a table, 3 maps, and 8 figures. He successfully argues that Obeyesekere did not convincingly prove his case concerning the Hawaiians’ “practical rationality.” Sahlins is less successful in countering Obeyesekere’s critique of systematic anthropological knowledge of early modern non-European societies.
It is Sahlins’ system-making understanding that Obeyesekere calls into question. Sahlins repeatedly criticizes Obeyesekere for producing a “pidgin anthropology” (p. 62 and elsewhere), emphasizing instead a knowledge of the early modern Hawaiians as fundamentally “strange.” “ ‘Strange’ should be the beginning of anthropological wisdom” (p. 62).
With this dispute over the nature of anthropological knowledge concerning long- dead non-Europeans, the “Europeans as gods” controversy returns to Todorov and the supposed symbol manipulator, Cortés. Obeyesekere and Todorov seem to fear the structures of universal understanding that enable the comprehension — and realization—of the contact between early modern “Mesoamericans” or “Polynesians” and “Europeans” within the framework of late twentieth-century Scholasticism.
