Customer Reviews

How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example

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This book is not everyone's cup of tea, but it is a serious and important work enlivened with a humorous edge. It effectively offers one side of a debate on crucial issues in the human sciences. Its author is a leading figure in anthropology and a major thinker more broadly. Even Sahlin's intellectual opponents would acknowledge this as an important work, one that does not deserve the negative review posted here.

"How Natives Think" is a series of hypothetical inventions from the fertile imagination of its author, followed by forcing facts of history to fit them. In this case even though our author admits his proposed solutions to the 1779 Hawaiian killing of Cook fly in the face of fact, this trivial reality fails to change his solution, though it flies in the face of fact. Hence his theory is safe from accepting its failure by simply saying it didn't fail. Astounding. In an attempt to refute Obeyesekere's criticism, Sahlins only digs his own grave, which, naturally, won't damage his reputation among the faithful.

Aside from bickering with Obeyesekere, Sahlins exposes the larger issue and the worst of a reader's angst about modern scholarship. As a social theorist Sahlins pretends to be a historian without doing the work to become one. Sahlins reveals his field is as overtly biased by Western ignorance of human beings as those he claims to oppose. Merely saying a people think in some manner we find is enough for Sahlins. What passes for evidence is, as Sagan claimed and the reader fears, equivalent to what passes as evidence for 95% of a scientifically illiterate populous enamored with UFOs, crop circles and talking to dead people on television. Hence social theorists and literary critics can be historians too, perhaps even physicists one day soon. He shows in the text how politically confined he is to structuralist dogma, making it impossible for him to perform critical analysis. Ironic.

In the end "How Natives Think" is something like what we might expect from fundamentalist Creationist zealots telling us "the truth" about science with a Biblical critique of Einstein's Relativity and mutations of the fruit fly. Sahlins has his own religious cross to bear, his membership in a West he fashionably despises, while prospering from it. To imagine he holds a prestigious position at one of the Western world's most prominent institutions (U of Chicago) petrifies the reader with dread for America's educational system.