Captain cook, culture and the world system

Abstract

MARSHALL SAHLINS MUST SURELY BE QUALIFIED TODAY AS AN HISTORICAL ANTHROpologist, although he would further insist that his approach was 'structural historical anthropology'. This amounts to putting practice and time back into the cultural determinism that characterized Culture and Practical Reason. The result is a dialectic, the 'reciprocal movement between the practice of the structure and the structure of the practice', whereby, in the abstract, at least, cultural categories are transformed by their very implementation, i.e. where their practice contains properties differing from the categories themselves, and leading thus to their transformation. Now this scheme has only been applied to a situation best described as a culture confrontation between Europeans and Hawaiians, so it is not clear how the model might work within society itself. In both Historical Metaphors and 'Other times, other places', Sahlins sets out to demonstrate the existence of a 'heroic' and/or 'mythical' history whose dynamic consists in the translation of historical events into the recapitulation of cosmology, and even, as in the Maori case, an actual 'mythopraxis', or acting out of the origin myth in a new historical context. Thus, for heroic history it might be said that ontogeny recapitulates cosmogony. This, of course, is a variant on Levi-Strauss's concept of the 'cold society' in so far as linear time is reorganized into a timeless representation of myth. Structural change only occurs, according to Sahlins's model, because the imposition of structure on practice is incomplete, i.e. there is a significant portion of reality that remains beyond the bounds of structure. In all of Sahlins's recent work the latter corresponds to that which is part of European structure and practice. One drawback of Sahlins's approach is that in the case that he has analyzed we have a confrontation of two systems of different orders which he necessarily reduces to a relation between Hawaiian structure and a stream of events that are treated simply as externalities, instead of a well structured process in its own right. Thus, the fact that Captain Cook is identified as a god (if that is in fact the case) need not bear any relation to the subsequent military alliance between Chief Kamehameha and the British forces that resulted in the unification of Hawaii, nor to the trade that ultimately led to the bankruptcy of the aristocracy. That part of Hawaiian history which is also European history is reduced to external event in Sahlins's discussion even though a wider perspec-

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