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How "NATIVES" THINK: About Captain Cook, for Example. By Marshall Sahlins. Chicago (Illinois): The University of Chicago Press. 1995. x, 328 pp. (Photographs.) US$24.95, cloth. ISBN-226-7336&8.
THIS BOOK provides a devastating rejoinder to Gananath Obeyesekere's The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton, 1992). Obeyesekere argues that the well-known story of Captain James Cook's reception as the god Lono in Hawai'i in 1778 is, in reality, a European "myth." He builds his argument from two perspectives. First, he observes that Europeans readily believed that one of their own could be taken for a god by ignorant "natives" and read deification into the events described by Cook's crew. Second, he argues that the surviving evidence itself suggests that the Hawai'ians received Cook as a chief; Cook was only deified after his murder. Obeyesekere claims that Hawai'ians operated from a common human endowment of "practical rationality" which makes it highly unlikely that they (or...