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

In this beautifully written analysis of Captain Cook’s colonial apotheosis in Hawaii, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins attempts to theorize the cultural epistemology of the indigenous mythology that led to his sacrifice. Additionally, Sahlins stages an ongoing critique of the anthropologist, Obeyeskeare, who criticizes Sahlin’s work on the matter. While this back and forth grows tiresome (and I cannot really weigh in on the truth of the matter), Sahlin’s magisterial command of the mediation of practice on thinking leaves you with an extraordinary work of historical theory.

This book originates from a decade of careful data readings and re-collectings on hawaiian contact with European sailors headed by James Cook, whose untimely death is explained.It is a must-read for anyone committed to view our thinking about self, others and the world as being collectively crafted and transmitted as our material-technological surroundings are. Sahlins shows how culture so taken, and further defined as a way of living framed on grand-narrative, works in informing the way we/they feel things, in turning perceptions into thinking and action. In so doing, he fosters the cultural, boassian anthropology's best and most profound insight on human nature to a wider public.For anyone who holds that nature speaks by itself and to itself through a universal psychological calculus (or mechanism called practical reasoning), who holds that culture is a distorting lense, a source of error and illusion, this book will be irritating, not conforting. But by the same token, it is an opportunity to learn anew.

Whether the Hawaiians deified Captain Cook or not has been for a long time hotly contested, which is a good reason to read Sahlins's books with at least some doubt. Sahlins relies heavily on accounts from the sailors who traveled with Cook to get a picture of the festivities and the attitude of the Hawaiians toward the Europeans. However he often interprets the Europeans' view in their journals as the correct view, without giving reference to other events in Hawaiian history that would help the interpretation on the occurrences in the journals. A few of my concerns that were not adequately addressed: According to mythology, Cook was not the first outsider to come to Hawaii, so why should the appearance of Cook awe the Hawaiians so? Furthermore, because Sahlins is trying to defend anthropology's legitimacy, he ignores the fact that early anthropological work was often ethnocentric. Also, from Obeyesekere's book, why would a Hawaiian god come back not looking Hawaiian, not able to speak Hawaiian, and ignorant of Hawaiian customs? Yet, Obeyesekere's book should be taken with some doubt, too, as he bases some of his arguments off of his Sri Lankan background, along with other flaws. My judgment on How "Natives" Think would be better informed if I had read other works by Sahlins, but he makes a strong case here for Cook's apotheosis, especially in his section arguing against Obeyesekere's interpretation of the ceremonies as Cook's initiation as a chief. Both books are good to see both sides of the argument.

This book is not everyone's cup of tea, but it is a serious and important work enlivened with a humorous edge. It effectively offers one side of a debate on crucial issues in the human sciences. Its author is a leading figure in anthropology and a major thinker more broadly. Even Sahlin's intellectual opponents would acknowledge this as an important work, one that does not deserve the negative review posted here.