a comment

Berghahn Books

A COMMENTAuthor(s): Bernard SmithSource: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, No. 34(December 1993), pp. 61-65Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23163008 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 05:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Berghahn Books is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Analysis: TheInternational Journal of Social and Cultural Practice.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.104 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 05:54:58 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=berghahnbooks

http://www.jstor.org/stable/23163008?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


SOCIAL ANALYSIS

No. 34, December 1993

A COMMENT

Bernard Smith

On 19 January 1778 John Williamson, 3rd Lieutenant on Resolution on Cook's

third voyage, shot an Hawaiian dead after he had "made a stroke" at him while a

boat party of which Williamson was in command was attempting to land at Kauai.

When Cook stepped ashore thai same afternoon, not then aware of the killing, he

recorded in his journal the day following, that "the very instant I leapt ashore, they

fell flat on their faces, and remained in thai humble position till 1 made signs for them

to rise."

"It is clear", writes Gananath Obeyesekere, "that the native reaction was based on

the terror created by Williamson, who was now accompanying Cook". But is it that

clear? The next day Cook, conducted by an Hawaiian, walked up the Waimea Valley

leaving Williamson to take charge of the watering party on shore. "Our guide

proclaimed our approach and everyone whom we met fell flat on their faces and

remained in that position till we had passed," Cook wrote. Of this second prostration

it cannot be argued that it was the fear of the presence of Williamson because he was

not of the party. If we argue that terror of Williamson had now spread to the whole

of Cook's party, we must ask why Cook's Hawaiian guide was not terrified also. The

prostration on Kauai cannot be explained purely in terms of physical terror. Pure

terror surely would have induced a desire to run and hide. The immediacy of the

prostration before Cook suggests that abjection as well as terror was present. Cook

himself soon learned to his own sátisfaction a possible reason. "This, as I afterwards

learned, is done to their great chiefs". This is Obeyesekere's own thesis. In Hawaii

Cook was accepted as a chieftain not as the god Lono. Yet on this first crucial

occasion of contact on Kauai there is a slippage in the argument. On the first

occasion we are told that the prostration was due to tenor (based perhaps on

Williamson's presence). On the second occasion it is implied that the prostration is

due to the presence of an "Hawaiian?" chieftain. Does this mean that the prostrate

Hawaiians perceived Cook as an Hawaiian simply because they were terrified of

him? No one had yet instructed the populace to regard him as a chieftain. He would

certainly have not looked like one. There is an unresolved problem here.

On 17 January 1779 Cook landed ai Kcalakekua Bay, Hawaii, afier a long

journey into the arctic and two months of cruising off the Hawaiian islands. Lt. King

accompanied Cook when he went ashore for the first time on Hawaii, with two chiefs, Kanaina and Paiea, and Koa, an Hawaiian priest. Before they left the Resolution Koa

performed a rite upon Cook which King described. "He brought with him a small pig and piece of Red Cloth, which after clothing the Capn with, he held the pig in his

61



hand, & kept repeating a pretty long oration or prayer." Obeyesekere says that Koa

repeated a ritual formula in which the word Lono appeared.

I do not know where he obtains his evidence for Koa using the name Lono in the

ceremony aboard the ship, prior to going ashore. In his journal, King, who

Obeyesekere regards as our best informant for the installation ceremony that followed

Cook's disembarkation because he was an eyewitness, does not inform us that Koa

used the name of Lono in the ceremony on the ship. He tells us that after the party

landed on the shore it was "receiv'd by 3 or 4 men who held wands tipt with dogs'

hair, & who kept repeating a sentence wherein the word Erono (i.e. Lono) was always

used, this is the name by which the Capn has for some time been distinguished by the

Natives". As they came to a village at the end of the beach, "all the people, except

those of the Priesthood", wrote Bumey, "laying prostrate or rather on their hands

[and] Knees with their Heads bowed down to the Ground", and King added "as they

were at our first visit at Atoui (i.e. Kauai)".

My point is that on King's account it would appear that the ordinary Hawaiians

who visited the ship during its two month's sailing close to shore prior to the landing

were already calling Cook Lono. The practice of calling Cook Lono seems lo have

been taken on before he landed on shore. What wc do not know is who among the

Hawaiians first called him Lono; a chieftain or a commoner?

Cook was taken to the heiau at Hikiau and there induced to prostrate himself

before the image of Ku, thus acknowledging, as Obeyesekere notes, "the superiority

of the great Hawaiian god of war". Two days after this ceremony Cook was,

according to Samwell, formally invested with the "Title and Dignity" of Orono

(Lono)". But the question remains why was he called, informally, Lono in the first

place, apparently before he stepped shore and was officially named Lono? Was there

present here some tension between the way Hawaiian chiefs chose to perceive Cook

and the way the populace perceived him? There seems to have been, as Obeyesekere

argues, a strong desire on the part of the chiefs and priest to identify Cook and even

make him subject to Ku, the war god. Was, then, the formal installation by which he

was named Lono, after his obeisance before the icons of Ku, an endeavour on the part of the chieftains and priests to accept the popular identification with the Lono already

adopted by the populace? By naming him the priests and chiefs may have sought to

refract the potentially dangerous godliness Cook had already acquired, as the

returning god Lono, into a 'godliness' of their own that they could control, no less

and no more than a new powerful chieftain named Lono. A strange chieftain indeed

who did not look like and Hawaiian and who could kill men from a distance with

magic sticks!

Obeyesekere does not provide any answer to this question. But he does develop a

context that may be relevant. Kalani'opu'u, the 'king' of Hawaii, had been involved

with a war against the neighbouring island of Mauai for some time, though Cook and

his company say nothing of this in their journals. The evidence is obtained from

Fornander's Account of ihe Polynesian Races published a century'later. In order to

defeat the 'king' of Mauai, Obeyesekere suggests that Kalani'opu'u employed Kao to

recruit Cook to assist him against his Mauai enemies. Whilst this thesis is plausible

62



we have no firm evidence Lhat anything in faci like ihat happened. But even if it did

occur it does not explain why, on King's evidence, Hawaiian commoners were calling

Cook Lono before he disembarked from the Resolution and before Cook had met

Koa.

The central question here is whether, in calling Cook Lono and prostrating

themselves, the populace (not priests and chiefs) regarded him as a god or a chieftain.

Kalani'opu'u and other Hawaiian chieftains may have had political and military intendons in conferring upon Cook the status of an Hawaiian chieftain, but

commoners could have had no such purpose in mind. Obeyesekere provides some

sophisticated reasons why Hawaiians may have had difficulty in perceiving him as the god Lono. He does not consider the difficulty they must also have had on Kauai

at the outset in perceiving Cook as an Hawaiian chieftain. Did they perceive Cook's

men, so visibly different, as Hawaiians? It is taking the narrative about the war

between Hawaii and Mauai too far surely to suggest that it was the influence of Kao

and the politics of Kalani'opu'u that caused the prostrations before Cook in Kauai.

So far as we know Koa was not influential in Kauai.

At the heart ot this problem is the difficulty of knowing with any precision what

went on in the minds of Hawaiian commoners when they first prostrated themselves

before Cook. Obeyesekere, in my view, rightly stresses, that "real life natives. . . .

make a variety of discriminations about the nature of divinity." In South East Asia,

he says, in an impressive analogy, the king is considered an embodiment of Siva, but

this form of Siva is different from someone like Sai Baba, who claims he was an

avatar of Siva, or a possessed person who became a vehicle of that god, or from a

phallic representation of Siva in a temple, or from a friend who is named Siva (p.21). We may agree with Obeyesekere that nineteenth century Hawaiians could make

similar "refractions of the essence of one god". But this argument may be turned on

its head. If the Hawaiians were capable of such refractions why must we agree that

all Hawaiians had to decide whether Cook was the god Lono or merely an Hawaiian

chieftain given the name of Lono? Some of the populace may have believed one

thing, some the other, some both. How are we to know? We do know that when

Jesus proclaimed that he was the son of God some Jews believed him to be the

Messiah, some did not. At one point Obeyesekere observes that "it seems as if the

name Lono was used by the multitude, whereas chiefs generally called him Tuute

(Cook)". But he does not develop this telling insight. In calling him Lono did the 'multitude' invariably distinguish between the god Lono and the powerful stranger installed as Lono? Did they all revere their chieftains so much that they preferred to

think of the powerful stranger as yet another Hawaiian chieftain rather than their

returning god of the harvest? A stranger whose subordinates used magic sticks that

tilled at a distance. A strange and powerful chief indeed!

It is possible thai the populace had greater need than their chieftains and priests for a return of Lono as an old familiar god rather than as yet another chieftain. If the

Hawaiians could make discriminations between gods and their avatars, and I do

doubt it, surely they could also choose the kind of 'godliness' that suited their psycho

physical needs.

53



We are in the presence here of the superstitious mind; but minds well capable, as

Obeyesekere rightly stresses, of practising "practical rationality." It may well have

been practical rationality on the part of the 'multitude' prostrate in the path of Cook

to perceive him as a returning god than as a chieftain. He had revealed that he was

more powerful than any chieftain. Perhaps the chieftains viewed him as a friendly

chief for their survival; the multitude as a god for their survival.

This argument is relevant not only to non-European societies of the time. In

contemporary nineteenth-century France peasants held views about the nature of the

Christian god markedly distinct from those held by the high strata of society. In The

Superstitious Mind.: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth

Century (1987) Judith Delin notes that "the popular notion of God, seems to have led

to his becoming like a man, rather than to man's becoming like him" (p.21). "God

himself was more human than supernatural ... an old woman said 'that God was

nothing more than a "good sort'" (pp. 26-27). "God was addressed in much the same

way as an aged relative" (p.39). I do not believe therefore that Obeyesekere has made a convincing case that Cook

was never perceived by any Hawaiians as their returning god Lono. Whether or not

Cook's arrival coincided precisely with the Makahiki festival would not have

mattered much to those who wanted to believe. Belief makes short shrift with minor

logical and temporal inconsistencies. The evidence of the journals suggest that he

was called Lono before he was officially named Lono.

Although Obeyesekere fails, in my view, in his central thesis, this is

unquestionably a brilliant book. It is also frankly partisan as the author admits (p.8).

Gananath Obeyesekere, Sri Lankan professor of anthropology at Princeton University,

is one of a number of highly influential academics who are seeking to displace the universalist authority of European accounts of world history. They include, to

mention a few of the best known, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and

Rasheed Araeen. As a neo-colonial art historian working on the perimeter of the

European/US academic world and not, as they do, in its great centres, I have nothing

but admiration for their project. But partisan positions (and who in some degree is

not a partisan?) involve occlusions of vision as well as insights. Why does

Obeyesekere want to divest all nineteenth century Hawaiians of their returning god

Lono/Cook and prove him to be a European myth? Does he want to convince himself

that they were just as rational as French peasants and Princeton professors? He is

much more illuminating when he discusses the irrational aspects of Cook's

temperament and character on his last voyage. It is here that he deploys best his

enviable knowledge of ethnography, psychoanalysis and comparative religion. We

do need a less imperialist viewpoint on Cook. I began something along those lines

myself some years ago that Obeyesekere has the grace to notice. But he takes the

view that in the end I "reify Cook in the manner of earlier scholarship". When I

characterised Cook as a hero apt for the usages of nineteenth century commercial

imperialism, I was not reinforcing traditional views I was criticising them. A more

charitable view could be that my work began a process of critical revision of Cook's

humanism that Obeyesekere has further developed. I certainly refrained from

64



indicting Cook because it is not the business of the historian to mdict the dead. My central interest in Cook's voyages was not Cook, bul the representations his artists

made of the peoples of the Pacific, so that these basic documents could be more

readily available for the overarching global ethnographies of scholars of the calibre of

Obeyesekere. But even he would be wise to maintain a sense of balance. The

"terror" that Cook brought to Hawaii was mild enough compared to the ethnic

nationalism responsible for the murder of Professor Obeyesekere's beloved friend

Wijedasa, to whom is book is dedicated. The post few years should have taught us

that not all the evils of the world can be imputed to European imperialism —

especially by those scholars who are the vicarious heirs and beneficiaries of its

knowledge.

55



a comment

Documents