Who Is Marshall Sahlins A Metamorphosis Of Captain Cook

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The Eurocentric myth of preliterate natives venerating the awesome white man as a god has been central to the colonial discourse about Hawaiʻi since the late eighteenth century. Currently, the legacy rests on the premise that Hawaiians believed Captain Cook was their returning god Lono and venerated him as such. The pared down version: When Cook reached Hawaiʻi he was worshipped as a god; when Hawaiians finally realized that he was human they killed him. A central figure in the Cook/Lono construction is Marshall Sahlins, a structuralist anthropologist whose reputation rests in large part on his argument that preliterate Hawaiians revered Cook as the awesome embodiment of the long-awaited god Lono. Notably, Sahlins did not invent the Cook/Lono …show more content…

Moreover, this change in perspective reveals just how mythicizing his pacific expeditions through history, (or fiction) and biography. Valorized the science exploration and discovery through romanticizing Cook’s imperialist mission. Obeyesekere, states; “To put it bluntly, I doubt that the natives created their European god; the Europeans created him for them. This “European god” is a myth of conquest, imperialism, and civilization- a triad that cannot be easily separated. This book therefore, is not another biography of Cook; it subverts biography by blurring the distinction between biography, hagiography, and myth.” (Obeyesekere, 1992:3) Let us assume for a moment (from the perspective of Obeyesekere) that the Hawaiians considered, the prospect that indeed Cook was the God Lono, This would cause us to perhaps take up his argument, on the obvious incongruities between that of their cultural expectations for ‘Lono’s’ arrival - as well as the arrival of James Cook (and crew) that would mitigate a restless commitment to the identification of Cook as

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