Blog 1 – Cultural Death: The Apotheosis of Captain Cook

A cultural death necessarily indicates a significant subsuming of one culture at the hands of another entity. This entity was manifested in the person of James Cook whose presence at the Hawaiian Islands led to some form of cultural death for its inhabitants. Obseyekere’s account suggests that it was not a concerted effort or an elaborate scheme on the part of Cook to ‘kill’ the culture of the locals. For the author tells of a man whose behavior was increasingly erratic, whose shipmates could not entirely comprehend his actions. Yet he had such a profound impact on the inhabitants by way of attempting to, in his mind, lord over them.

It was the fundamental mindset that resistance was insolence that facilitated Cook and even Cortes in his time, in their attempts to dehumanize and exploit the native people. Cook heavily punished native individuals who threw stones at some of the white woodcutters. After administering each punishment, Cook would suggest in his journal that he had done so with a heavy heart. This indicates his justification of the punishments; that the natives deserved and were in need of strict admonishment. Cook imposed punishments usually employed on European voyaging ships, alien to the natives. This was a form of cultural imposition that damaged the Natives own conception of justice. This was exacerbated by the manner in which he punished the Chiefs of the islands, which was unthinkable to natives. Indirectly, their own justice system was upset, which is itself a key part of any cultural setup.

Traditional accounts that retell the supposed apotheosis of James Cook and journals written by others present the natives as mired inextricably in their mythological beliefs. Establishing a mythical belief as permanent labels the natives as non-pragmatic and their cultures as impractical, making it easier to treat it with contempt.  Changing the landscape and bringing foreign animals to the land was also a cultural imposition. This was a direct criticism of the way the natives operated their land which itself was a product of their culture. The apotheosis narrative also contradicted what we otherwise know of Hawaiian beliefs. But to impose a narrative upon a people erases their own narrative for centuries to come. There are few records of the natives own conceptions of their history because it has been replaced in global scholarly imagination by the narrative of the white explorers. For a history to be lost in obscurity is perhaps the epitome of cultural death.

The natives held sacredness about their cultural rites, but Cook desecrated those rites. To have them treated with such contempt by an individual whom they had been fraternizing with was shocking to the natives. Despite Cook being someone they had engaged with respectfully, he rarely reciprocated that respect. That impacts the sacrosanct image of their own culture in the eyes of the island inhabitants.

The narratives also drastically oversimplified the Hawaiians views about divinity. Divinity and religion, essential to the cultural norms of a people, were never seen as nuanced as they were in truth. A cultural death is brought about when the belief is seen as naïve. This is different from impractical, where even those scholars sympathetic to the natives sought to present their beliefs as uncomplicated and basic. To imagine that a people’s beliefs are basic and crude is to attach those same attributes to those people as a whole.