The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific - Couverture rigide

Obeyesekere, Gananath

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0691056803 ISBN 13 : 9780691056807

Editeur : Princeton University Press, 1992

Synopsis

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 voyage, 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 gruelling final voyage, his increasingly erratic behaviour, 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 betwen history, hagiography, and myth, Obeyesekere maintains, requires us to examine the presuppositions that go into the writing of history and anthropology.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

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).

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Date d'édition: 1992
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0691056803
• ISBN 13: 9780691056807
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 276
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible