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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226733715 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 314 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Captain Cook at Hawaii
Heinrich Zimmermann heard it directly from Hawaiians: Cook was Lono. J. C. Beaglehole, the great historian of Cook's voyages, characterized Zimmermann as "the jack of all trades from the Palatine who liked to wander and wrote a little book about the voyage and the great captain" (1967: lxxxix). An ordinary seaman aboard the Discovery, Zimmermann kept some abbreviated notes in German on his experiences, which he managed to hold on to despite the Admiralty's attempt to sequester all shipboard records of the expedition. The Admiralty's intention was to prevent other accounts from reaching print before the officially sponsored version (Cook and King 1784). Zimmermann, however, was able to forestall the official publication with his own Reise um die Welt mit Capitaine Cook. This appeared in 1781, the year after the return of the expedition (there was no English edition until 1926). Undistinguished for its accuracy or knowledge, Zimmermann's slim volume is of little value according to Beaglehole, except for its lower-deck impressions of Cook. Yet it also sets down some Hawaiian impressions of Lono-Cook — in a decipherable transcription of the Hawaiian language.
The first vernacular quotation appears in Zimmermann's discussion of the gods. The Hawaiians, he says, "have a great many ... which they name after their king and chiefs" (Zimmermann 1988: 95). The seaman thus reverses Hawaiian naming relations between gods and chiefs (cf. Valeri 1985: 145), a mistake he repeats when speaking of the connection between Cook and an image of Lono:
They made a god of Captain Cook on the Island of O-waihi and erected an idol in his honor. They called this "O-runa no te tuti," "O-runa" meaning god and "tuti" Cook. This god was made after the pattern of the others but was adorned with white feathers instead of red, presumably because Cook being a European had a fair complexion. (Zimmermann 1988: 95–96 [1781: 77])
The phrase "O-runa no te tuti" is reasonably glossed as 'Cook is indeed Lono.' It occurs again in Zimmermann's second citation of Hawaiian speech. Here Zimmermann refers to the occasion when Lieutenant King led a large party towards the shore of Kealakekua Bay for the purpose of negotiating the return of Cook's body. King was kept waiting nearly an hour for a response, during which time the other boats approached the shore and entered into conversations with Hawaiians there. Zimmermann's text indicates he was present — "We held the five boats at a short distance from the land" — and reports one of the interviews. The Hawaiians, he wrote,
showed us a piece of white cloth as a countersign of peace but mocked at ours and answered as follows: "O-runa no te tuti Heri te moi a popo Here mai" which means: "The god Cook is not dead but sleeps in the woods and will come tomorrow." (1988: 103 [1781: 88])
The Hawaiian here is again decipherable, but it is more straightforward than Zimmermann's translation: "Cook is indeed Lono; he is going to sleep; tomorrow he will come" — no death, no woods. The apparently curious statement fits into the range of European accounts of the incident, all of which cite Hawaiians to the effect that Cook would be returned the next day, while describing his existing condition as anywhere from dead and cut to pieces, to alive and sleeping with a young girl (Anonymous of Mitchell 1781). Mr. King speaks only of the dismemberment and the message from the Hawaiian king, Kalani'opu'u, "that the body was carried up the country; but that it should be brought to us the next morning" (Cook and King 1784, 3: 64; cf. Beaglehole 1967: 554). David Samwell attributes the statement that Cook was not dead to the royal emissary Hiapo, and describes it as part of an attempt to lure Lieutenant King to shore (Beaglehole 1967: 1206). An analogous report by an unknown party, apparently also a participant, confirms that Zimmermann's version is not aberrant:
after waiting some time Mr. King began to doubt the sincerity of there [sic] promise of bringing the Body and again put the question to this he was answered that Capt Cook was not Dead and desired Mr. King to come on shore and see, but being again told that we knew he was they gave for answer that we would not have it before Morning being a great distance up the Country. (Anonymous of NLA Account, 11)
Obeyesekere writes: "If Cook was the god Lono arrived in person, it [A.1 What the Sailors Knew] is strange that the ship's journalists, in spite of constant probing, could not find this out; or that Hawaiians, in response to constant probing, could not state this as a fact" (Ob. 95). Something is indeed "strange," since Obeyesekere cites Zimmermann's text on idols, and even "Oruna no te tuti," although he does not translate the sentence or refer to its second mention. He also allows that this text — as well as a passage in Rickman's journal about Cook as "their Ea-tu ah-nu-ah" (akua nui, 'great god') — would give the captain the status of Lono. So did they or didn't they say it? No, they did not. According to Obeyesekere, this kind of talk was just shipboard gossip. "O-runa no te tuti" was Haole scuttlebutt: "It is virtually certain that Zimmermann's idea that Hawaiians thought of Europeans as immortal, or that Cook was a god, comes from their own shipboard traditions" (Ob. 123). This means the fo'c'sle hands are gossiping about Cook in Hawaiian — which is at least a greater show of respect for their linguistic capacities than Obeyesekere usually accords them. On the other hand, the Hawaiians' words have been taken from them.
It will be useful to keep an on-going catalogue déraisonné of Obeyesekere's arguments, as he comes up with some original additions to the known fauna of historiographic fallacies. The example in the previous paragraph might be christened "double-bind question begging." It consists of two propositions. First, the absence of a European mention that Cook = Lono means that for Hawaiians Cook was not Lono. And second, the presence of a Hawaiian mention of Cook = Lono is an indication of the European myth to that effect. In other words, the European non-assertion is evidence of Hawaiian realities, while the Hawaiian assertion is evidence of European beliefs. Obeyesekere's thesis is thus confirmed when the Haole do not say what they are supposed to say, or else when the Hawaiians say what they are not supposed to. More species in due course.
The remainder of this chapter reviews the events of Cook's visits to Hawaii in 1778 and 1779, with an emphasis on the documentary evidence that he was greeted in Hawai'i island as a personification of the New Year god Lono. It will be impossible to rehearse all the details; the reader may wish to consult earlier works I have offered on the subject as well as the major historical sources cited therein: Sahlins 1981, 1985a, 1985b, 1988, and 1989. But first, to situate the reports penned by Zimmermann and many others of Cook's company, I present a general outline of the Hawaiian New Year ritual, the Makahiki festival. It will also be necessary to discuss the correlation between the Hawaiian lunar calendar, by which the Makahiki was ordered, and the Gregorian calendrical coordinates of the Cook visit.
Captain Cook and the Makahiki Festival, 1778–79
The issues presented by Captain Cook's appearance off Maui and Hawai'i island late in the year of 1778 were cosmological. It was the time of the Makahiki, the annual rebirth of nature configured as an elemental cosmic drama. From early December to mid-January, the Resolution and Discovery circumnavigated practically the whole of Hawai'i in a clockwise direction, reproducing the procession made on land, along the coast, by the image of Lono during this season. Writing to the Admiralty Secretary about Cook's death at Hawaiian hands some weeks later, Captain Clerke observed that even on that fatal day the famous navigator "was received with the accustomed respect they [the Hawaiians] upon all occasions paid him, which more resembled that due to a Deity than a human being" (Beaglehole 1967: 1536). The British were well aware that "the title of Orono (Lono], with all its honours, was given to Captain Cook" (Cook and King 1784, 3: 159). They understood "Orono" to be some sort of abstract status — not just a personal name as Obeyesekere contends — for they frequently allude to Cook as "the Orono" (with the article) in their journals, as if the Hawaiians were speaking thus. The seamen were given to referring to Hikiau temple, where Cook had undergone certain rituals on first landing, as "Cook's altar." Indeed from many circumstances it was clear to Mr. King that the islanders held the British as a lot in extraordinary estimation: "they regard us a Set of beings infinitely their superiors" (Beaglehole 1967: 525). But for all that, the Haole had not fathomed what "the Orono" meant to the Hawaiians; nor did they know that their visit had fallen within the special months of the Makahiki (see appendix 1).
This makes the detailed correspondence between the incidents they naively recorded and particular observances of the New Year festival all the more remarkable. On the other hand, probably because it was so extraordinary, the coincidence of Cook and the Makahiki was not unknown to the old folks around Lahaina and elsewhere whose recollections of the events were recorded in the 1830s by Hawaiian students of the American mission high school. Arranged and piously embellished by Rev. Sheldon Dibble, these accounts were published in 1838 under the title of Ka Mooolelo Hawaii (Hawaiian History). They say Hawaiians had considered Cook — or "Lono" as they still knew him — the returning god of the Makahiki time (Kahananui 1984: 17–23, 171–75).
A festival of four lunar months in all, the Makahiki was marked at [A.2 Literalism and Culture] a certain point by the reappearance of the exiled god cum deposed king Lono. The god was embodied in a wooden image and a manifestation called Lono-makua, 'Father Lono' or 'Lono the Parent.' The name is a metaphor of the god's seasonal existence. Circuiting Hawai'i for the better part of the lunar month Welehu, the last month of the Hawai'i island year, Lono effected the regeneration of nature together with the renewal of the kingship and human society. As in cognate ceremonies in other Polynesian islands, the beneficial passage of the returned god is associated with the reappearance of the Pleiades on the horizon after sunset in late November — an event that in 1778 occurred a few days before Captain Cook appeared off Maui. This was also the period of winter rains in Hawaii, rains which mediate a double transition of nature resonant with cosmological significance: from "the dying time of the year" to the time when "bearing things become fruitful," and from the season of long nights (po) to the season of long days (ao) (Beckwith 1932).
Initiated each year by the winter solstice, the turn from night to day, po to ao, replicates the succession in the famous cosmogonic chant, Kumulipo, from the long night of the world's self-generation (po) to the ages of day or the world of mankind (ao). Midway through the creation, at the eighth of fifteen periods, the gods and men appear. Born together, as siblings, they are destined to be locked in fraternal strife. The first god, Kane, and the first man, Ki'i, are rivals over the means of their reproduction: their own elder sister, La'ila'i. The struggle is presented as the condition of the possibility of human existence in a world in which the life-giving powers are divine. Man wins a victory of a certain kind, although it needs to be constantly renewed. The end of the eighth chant thus announces the human era, day (ao): "Man spread abroad, man was here now, / It was day" (Beckwith 1972: 98). This indeed was the triumph annually repeated over Lono, the fertilizing god, at the New Year: representing humanity, the king retook the bearing earth.
In the Kumulipo creation chant, the same drama is played out between the triad of Kane, Ki'i, and the one who mediates the transfer of powers between them, La'ila'i. The older sister of god and man, La'ila'i is the firstborn and heiress of all the earlier eras of divine creation. She personifies the pivotal role of woman; she is uniquely able to transform divine into human life. In Hawaiian descent ideology, women function analogously: they transfer sacred tabus from one descent line to another — hence the critical role of strategic marriages in contests of rule. So, in the Kumulipo, the issue in the struggle of the brothers (god and man) to possess La'ila'i was cosmological in scope and content, and political in form. Yet, since the man's name, Ki'i, means 'image' while Kane means 'man,' everything has already been said. The first god is 'man' and the first man is 'god' (the image). Hence, in the sequel the statuses of human and divine are interchanged by La'ila'i's actions. To the rage of Kane, who has prior claim on her, La'ila'i illicitly takes Ki'i as a second husband, and her children by the upstart man are born first. The children of man become senior to the god's progeny:
Kane was angry and jealous because he slept last with her, His descendants would hence belong to the younger line, The children of the elder would be lord, First through La'ila'i, first through Ki'i, Children of the two born in the heavens there Came forth. (Beckwith 1972: 106)
All the same, man remains dependent on the god for life. Without the generative intercession of the god, people can accomplish neither their own reproduction nor the production of the natural means of their existence. Everything happens as if these Polynesians were condemned to suffer their own version of Zeus's vengeance (for the famous deception practiced by Prometheus). As Vernant describes it, Zeus's fury was likewise the consequence of human hubris: the duplicitous sacrifice prepared by Prometheus (in Gordon 1981: 43–79). Having offered the god the inedible portions of the ox, while reserving the delicious food for themselves, men were thenceforth and forever destined to exhaust themselves filling their bellies. In Polynesia the theft of the bearing earth (woman) made men forever dependent on the ancient, transcendent and divine powers of procreation. Polynesians were ever and again engaged with the divine in a curious combination of submission and opposition whose object was to transfer to themselves the life that the gods originally possess, continue to detain, and alone can bestow. By successive rituals of supplication and expropriation, the god is invited into the human domain, to give it life, and then banished that mankind may take possession of the divine benefits. "Man, then, lives by a kind of periodic deicide" (Sahlins 1985a: 113). Hence the annual rehearsal in the Makahiki of the victory described in the Kumulipo. Respectively represented by Lono and the king, the original struggle of god and man was repeated with the sovereignty and possession of the earth at stake. Hawaiian traditions make the same connections with the foreigner they called Lono: on first landing at Kealakekua during the Makahiki period (of 1778–79), Captain Cook was escorted to the great temple of Hikiau where, it is said, the Kumulipo was chanted before him, in his honor (Beckwith 1972: 9).
The Kumulipo had been composed for the tabu chief Ka'l'imamao, a previous ruler of Hawai'i island, whose son Kalani'opu'u was the king known to Cook. In the chant, the royal child is called "Lono of the Makahiki" (Lonoikamakahiki), which is also the name of a famous kingly predecessor of Ka'l'imamao in the capacity of Lono. Hawaiians relate very similar traditions of the god Lono, the original King Lonoikamakahiki, and of Ka'l'imamao: traditions that have structural analogies both with the cosmogonic rivalry of god and man and with the historic fate of Captain Cook. Telling of the usurpation and banishment of the god by a more humanized warrior figure, these several stories are linked by interchangeable personages and episodes — notably the seduction of the sacred woman by the god-king's human rival. They are in turn linked to Cook not only by the analogies of myth and history, but by the fact that, taken in chronological (or genealogical) series, they convey just this sense of transformation from the one to the other. The effect is something like the observation Dumézil (1948) made about the contrasts between Indian mythology and Roman dynastic legends. Traditions of the early Latin kings repeat the mythical feats of the Indic gods, but precisely in a humanized form and a quasi-historical register. It is interesting that Martha Beckwith (1919: 301–4) had already come to a similar conclusion about the progression from divine to human, the miraculous to the historical, within the body of Hawaiian traditions. Here the royal heroes prove to be the true successors of the gods by duplicating the divine exploits on the plane of earth: that is, in the compass of the Hawaiian islands and as deeds of political and intellectual prowess. Politics appears as the continuation of cosmogonic war by other means. Beckwith writes (1919: 304):
Gods and men are, in fact, to the Polynesian mind, one family under different forms, the gods having superior control over certain phenomena, a control which they may impart to their offspring on earth.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface
Introduction
1. Captain Cook at Hawaii
2. Cook after Death
3. Historical Fiction, Makeshift Ethnography
4. Rationalities: How "Natives" Think
Epilogue: Historiography, or Symbolic Violence
Appendixes
Bibliography
Index