How "Natives" Think

Curiously then, as Sahlins shows, Obeyesekere turns eighteenth-century Hawaiians into modern Europeans, living up to the highest Western standards of "practical rationality." By contrast, Western scholars are turned into classic, custom-bound "natives," endlessly repeating their ancestral traditions of the white man's superiority by insisting Cook was taken for a Hawaiian god. But this inverted ethnocentrism can only be supported, as Sahlins demonstrates, by wholesale fabrications of Hawaiian ethnography and history - not to mention Obeyesekere's sustained misrepresentations of Sahlins's own work. And in the end, although he claims to be speaking on behalf of "natives," Obeyesekere, by substituting a homemade "rationality" for Hawaiian culture, systematically eliminates the voices of Hawaiian people from their own history