The Apotheosis of Captain Cook European Mythmaking in the Pacific [Paperback]

Here 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. Using shipboard journals and logs kept by Captain James Cook and his officers, Obeyesekere reveals the captain as both the self-conscious civilizer and as the person who, his mission gone awry, becomes a savage himself.

In this new edition ofThe Apotheosis of Captain Cook, the author addresses, in a lengthy afterword, Marshall Sahlins's 1994 book,How Natives Think, which was a direct response to this work.

"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"Gananath Obeyesekereis Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His many books includeThe Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropologyand, with Richard Gombrich,Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka(Princeton). InThe 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 youlC{