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The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific
In January 1778 Captain James Cook "discovered" the Hawaiian islands and was hailed by the native peoples as their returning god Lono. On a return trip, after a futile attempt to discover the Northwest Passage, Cook was killed in what modern anthropologists and historians interpret as a ritual sacrifice of the fertility god. Questioning the circumstances surrounding Cook's so-called divinity - or apotheosis - and his death, Gananath Obeyesekere debunks one of the most enduring myths of imperialism, civilization, and conquest: the notion that the Western civilizer is a god to savages. Through a close reexamination of Cook's grueling final voyage, his increasingly erratic behavior, his strained relations with the Hawaiians, and the violent death he met at their hands, Obeyesekere rewrites an important segment of British and Hawaiian history in a way that challenges Eurocentric views of non-Western cultures. The discrepancies between Cook the legend and the person come alive in a narrative based on shipboard journals and logs kept by the captain and his officers. In these accounts Obeyesekere sees Cook as both the self-conscious civilizer and as the person who, his mission gone awry, becomes a "savage" himself - during the last voyage it was Cook's destructive side that dominated. After examining various versions of the "Cook myth, " the author argues that the Hawaiians did not apotheosize the captain but revered him as a chief on par with their own. The blurring of conventional distinctions between history, hagiography, and myth, Obeyesekere maintains, requires us to examine the presuppositions that go into the writing of history and anthropology.
Book Details
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publish Date: Dec 14th, 1997
- Pages: 336
- Language: English
- Edition: Revised - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.17in - 6.13in - 0.83in - 1.04lb
- EAN: 9780691057521
- Categories: • Historical• Folklore & Mythology• General
About the Author
Gananath Obeyesekere is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His many books include The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology and, with Richard Gombrich, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton).
Praise for this book
"Winner of the 1992 Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies"
"Winner of the 1993 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in History, Association of American Publishers"
"In The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, a fascinating and important book, Gananath Obeyesekere ... examines the murder and the events leading up to it in a fresh way. He enlarges the debate about how we think not only about our own diminishing collection of heroes, but also about the outsiders of European history, in this case the eighteenth-century Hawaiians."---Robert I. Levy, The New York Times Book Review
"Without question the most provocative reassessment of the famed explorer's demise.... Obeyesekere has made a persuasive case for his counternarrative of Captain Cook, strongly supporting it with a fine-grained analysis of an impressive array of cultural material, some of it long submerged."---Amy Burce, The Sciences
"There are so many ways of patronizing the past, [Obeyesekere] as good as says, and one of them is to accept your own culture's version of it. For this reason alone, his book would be stimulating. But there is more, much of it centering around the personality of James Cook himself. That familiar, Queegish figure of a ship's master obsessed with theft, increasingly unhinged by whatever private ghosts ... is surely worth examining."---James Hamilton-Paterson, The New Republic
"A fascinating and important book . . . Obeyesekere examines [Cook's] murder and the events leading up to it in a fresh way."---Robert L. Levy, The New York Times Book Review
"The whole book is admirable, impeccable, even at times brilliant."---Simon Schama, The Washington Times
"A remarkably rich and persuasive argument."---Nicholas Thomas, Current Anthropology