How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example
On its face, this appears to be a rebuttal of Gananath Obeyesekere's The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton Univ. Pr., 1992), which was in turn an attempt at refuting Sahlins's earlier explorations of the manner in which the native Hawaiians deified Capt. James Cook in 1779. In actuality, however, it is far more than that. This book is something of an apotheosis in its own right: a peroration on anthropology's responsibility to commit fully to appreciating other cultures' fundamentally different ways of organizing human experience. It provides a sustained theoretical exegesis that will be admired, if not necessarily subscribed to, by all who are engaged in the comparative study of societies, and it may in time prove to be the crowning achievement of one of contemporary anthropology's greatest thinkers and most perspicacious scholars. For academic collections.?Glenn Petersen, Baruch Coll. & Graduate Ctr., CUNYCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.