Cultural Death- The Apotheosis of Captain Cook

Obeyesekere writes how he doubts “that the natives created their European god; the Europeans created him for them” (3). When he says this, he questions the essential and one of the most basic aspects on which Cook is predicated; the truth. Obeyesekere questions, making us question, the validity of Cook’s godliness. He wonders about the very basis which surrounds this voyager, and in doing so he sheds light on the gravity of the situation at hand. We realise that we have never known what the natives thought because it has never been made available to us. There is no place where we are confirmed through a native that they truly believed Cook to be a god. The truths of the natives have never been recorded and so they can never be told. Does this mean the same for all narratives we have been fed? 

The favouring of Cook’s version over the complete absence of the natives’ story is one instance in the larger picture of ways in which the native has been erased. They are erased in the stories they tell and the truths they embody. Their stories have not been given the light of day, and we believe what we have been told. The stories told to us are those that have been fed to us for years on end and ones that perpetuate a dominant narrative-one of conquering and plundering. One of superiority. If this is the case, then is it not just as easy to erase entire cultures and beliefs and project them as something else? Is it not easy to take something when in power and turn it into that which pleases you? Maybe. We are all too familiar with this concept, and there have certainly been grave violences against many particularly because of this domination of one over the other.

It is not easy defining “cultural death”. Not because there is a lack of words, but because maybe it isn’t as easy as this. It isn’t as easy to declare something dead, and then discuss the ways in which it can be characterized as so. Behind the notion of cultural death, there is the assumption that culture can die. The assumption that it ceases to exist. How so? Does the death of a people belonging to a culture relegate itself to cultural death? The extinction of a language? Of a ritual? How can we label something as dead merely because it has been out of reach or out of sight. Not knowing what the natives really thought of Cook may not be death, but a vanishing. A vanishing of that which we need, and which is most important.

Interestingly enough, however, centuries later we have encountered a man who questions this absence. He brings it out into the open, and asks where the truth went, if there ever was one. Obeseyekere brings back the question of the natives. He brings back the question of why there were no questions at the time. In doing so, he transforms the culture from one of silence to that of curiosity. The need to know is what drives this culture, and this need is one that compels all of us to ask the questions we do everyday, the very same need that makes us ask as to what "cultural death" is.

These are abstract notions and ones that may be wrong in their entirety. These notions, however, may be even the littlest bit significant because they attest to the strength of culture as something is not so easily erased. Maybe just this once, there does not need to be death.