Marshall Sahlins · 1985 · PDF · Calibre ID 8405
Resurfaced in The Log Breaks Off at the Morai (2026-10-07).
Role in the triad
Thesis: structure fills the silence; Cook as image of Lono, death as ritual transformation
Why this book
Ch. 4, ‘Captain James Cook; or, The Dying God’ (Frazer Lecture 1982), is the structuralist reading Obeyesekere’s Apotheosis attacked; it opens with Home’s epigraph on the impossibility of certainty, then finds ‘the one recurrent certainty’. Lono-heavy, cannibal-light: the mirror image of Cannibal Talk.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- ‘But indeed they were so Exceedingly perplexed in their Accounts that it was a hard matter to Colect Certainty, in particular cases, or indeed to write any Account at all.’ (Home’s log, epigraph to ch. 4, p. 104)
- ‘They were singing!’ (p. 105)
- ‘Cook indeed became the image of Lono, a duplicate of the crosspiece icon’ (p. 105)
- ‘Permit me thus an anthropological reading of the historical texts.’ / ‘the one recurrent certainty is a dramatic structure with the properties of a ritual transformation.’ (p. 106)
- ‘a set of historical relationships that at once reproduce the traditional cultural categories and give them new values out of the pragmatic context’ (p. 125)
- ‘Captain Cook fell victim to the play of Hawaiian categories, or more precisely to their interplay with his own’ (Intro, p. xiii)
- ‘Every actual use of cultural ideas is some reproduction of them, but every such reference is also a difference.’ (ch. 5, p. 153)
Themes
dying god · Frazer · kino lau · Lono · Makahiki · risks of reference · stranger-king · structure and event · structure of the conjuncture