Cultural death in 'The Apotheosis of Captain Cook'

In Gananath Obeyesekere’s The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, cultural death of the natives can be seen as operating on two levels, one immediate and the other long term. Firstly, it is in the act of domesticating and civilizing the ‘savage’ natives on behalf of the empire, where a new culture of domination and control is seen as being established. Secondly, it is in the way in which the natives are represented and framed in academic and non-academic discourses which provides evidence of epistemic violence being perpetuated against the natives to this day. Importance of either should not be underestimated.

Accompanying the European ‘discovery’ of Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia was an act of making familiar the unfamiliar. What lay outside the conception and cognition of the ‘discoverers’ and ‘explorers’ was brought into it; unfamiliar territories were given familiar names, alien fields were domesticated through the placing of familiar animals and plants on it, and law was brought to the lawless savages. The natives were being brought under the realm of an authority which had the monopoly of violence over its subjects. Whether the natives perceived the authority to be legitimate and theirs was completely out of question (disclaimer: they probably didn’t) since they were driven by myths and superstitions and not by logic, and hence couldn’t decide what was best for them. Yet through establishing judicial and political norms of hierarchy and punishment and reward (Cook’s ‘native informants’ usually had an edge over the other natives), a structure of power and domination was enforced which negated all the native cultural or customary outlets of existence as irrelevant. The only real and legitimate concerns in this liberal enlightened age could be what Cook and his associates represented. Since monopoly of violence lay with the British, they were creating a whole new culture through it, a culture of fear and domination. Resistance was to be expected but neutralized, since those rebelling didn’t really know what was good for them. Lashing of the natives went well past the prescribed limits, both in number and in frequency, and yet it was framed as being done not out of anger or dominance, but out of the ‘saddening’ burden of civilizing the savage, as presented by Cook and others in their diaries. This was the immediate cultural death of the natives, where external structures were forcefully and suddenly imposed onto them without any respect and understanding of their own will and conception of community and culture.

Yet nowhere in the episode of Captain Cook, or in fact the whole colonial venture, can one see and situate the voice of the natives, of what their idea of culture, divinity and identity was. They were simply not deemed important. This is the second level on which cultural death may be observed, in the academic and non-academic discourses around the subject. The apotheosis of Captain Cook was perceived as a given thing, a sure fact, when in fact it was based on an assumption, namely that the myth dominated world view of the natives would lead them in perceiving Cook to be the God Lono. Not surprisingly, nowhere in the scholarly discourse was this assumption challenged and dealt with. What this ultimately means is that the native conception of their own culture and religion was painted and understood through the white male gaze. Obeyesekere’s argument is to be understood here, on how framing native cultures as driven by myth is a myth (model) of itself, albeit of the Europeans. This European myth is making an assertion regarding the nature of the ‘other’ culture and positing it as driven by mythos rather than logos, and since the latter (logos) was (and is) understood as the correct and rational mode of reasoning in the liberal post enlightenment world, it regarded the myth driven natives to be not suitable for the new age. Moreover, mythos can be easily manipulated by others, as in the case of Cortes using the ‘signs’ of the natives to establish dominance, and even Cook himself who played by their myths and got himself framed by the natives as their God Lono. Going back to the logic mentioned above, the natives needed to be guided by the Europeans.

Inherent in both these arguments is the idea of a hierarchy, be it cultural, racial or cognitive. In the more immediate context of the eighteenth century, cultural death is substantially inflicted and can be visibly observed. There, power and authority enforces Eurocentric conception of power and domination leading to erasure of indigenous and native conceptions. On the other hand, long term cultural death is inflicted upon the natives through their representation as emotional and superstitious beings governed not by logic and rationality but by myths. This is more epistemic and less visible in nature, but one which permeates the hollow racial, cognitive and epistemic hierarchy established in the colonial era to this day.