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Cohn, Norman. Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt. 1975. New York: Meridian-New American Library, 1977.
Obeyeskere, Gananath. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
The felicity with which these two books complement each other is entirely serendipitous. The Cohn was the last unread book on witch-hunts, European or American, in the house; the Obeyeskere was chosen as the result of my trawling our bookcases restlessly, searching, with increasing despair, for something that looked interesting when what I really wanted was to chase down some of Norton's bibliography. And yet, they turned out to be books with projects that were in some ways remarkably similar.
Both Cohn and Obeyeskere spend a great deal of time in deconstructing the arguments of other scholars--not in a game of oneupmanship, but because in fact their arguments are largely about the ways in which those arguments got constructed. Cohn is taking apart the myths modern scholars have invented and perpetuated about the origins of the European witch-hunts; Obeyeskere's absolutely fascinating book is about how the death of Captain Cook got reimagined by Europeans, from the journal-writers of his expedition, through the missionaries, to twentieth-century anthropologists, and how those reimaginings strayed further and further from the truth of eighteenth-century Hawaiian culture--and obscured both that and the truth of Cook himself. In both cases, what Cohn and Obeyeskere are principally talking about is the way that European commentators, scholarly and otherwise, chose stories--myths, in Obeyeskere's phrasing--that they wished to be true, and folded, spindled, and mutilated their source material until it seemed to be telling that story (they both indict their principal scholarly antagonists for the cunning and misleading use of ellipses--leaving out the bits that you don't want makes everything so much clearer). Both Cohn and Obeyeskere emphasize the necessity of going back to the primary sources and paying attention to what they actually say, rather than our preconceived notions of what they should say.
Obeyeskere, as a Sri Lankan trained in Western academic anthropology, also brings a tremendously valuable perspective to the practice of ethnography, because he refuses, again and again, explicitly and sometimes with withering sarcasm, the idea that non-Western peoples are naive or childlike or incapable of rational thought or unable to understand metaphors. He shows how the myth of Captain Cook's apotheosis--that the Hawaiians believed him to be their god Lono--is founded not on the behavior or beliefs of the Hawaiians themselves, but on European beliefs--European wish-fulfillment, even--about how white men were regarded by the indigenous peoples of Australia and Polynesia and South America.
It was interesting, reading these books back to back, to see how scholarly discourse changed in the twenty years between them. The narrative voice of Cohn's work is a general voice--a default voice. Cohn isn't trying to hide his individual agency and opinions, but the voice is very calm, detached. "Disinterested kindness" is the Victorian phrase, but it applies very well to the stance taken by Cohn's work. Obeyeskere, on the other hand, is very present in his work, not merely in that he talks about himself--using his own experiences as examples, explaining how he, a Sri Lankan with no expertise in Polynesian ethnography, came to be writing this particular book--but in that his passion shows. The academic defaults have changed: Obeyeskere's prose isn't as graceful as Cohn; it's more thickly bejargoned and sometimes hard to follow--and those aren't individual traits. They scream "mid-90s academia!" just as loudly as Cohn's gracious, distanced, balanced sentences scream "mid-70s academia!" But it's also become more acceptable to admit that you care about your topic. We're letting go of the myth of objectivity. The fact that Obeyeskere is actually angry about the ways in which the truth has been obfuscated and deflected and denied doesn't invalidate his work. He is present in his writing, and I think the admission of a subject-position, the admission of an inherent bias (because objectivity is a myth), is a serious advance in the Western scholarly tradition. The observer is just as much the subject of the work as the people observed.
Obeyeskere, Gananath. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
The felicity with which these two books complement each other is entirely serendipitous. The Cohn was the last unread book on witch-hunts, European or American, in the house; the Obeyeskere was chosen as the result of my trawling our bookcases restlessly, searching, with increasing despair, for something that looked interesting when what I really wanted was to chase down some of Norton's bibliography. And yet, they turned out to be books with projects that were in some ways remarkably similar.
Both Cohn and Obeyeskere spend a great deal of time in deconstructing the arguments of other scholars--not in a game of oneupmanship, but because in fact their arguments are largely about the ways in which those arguments got constructed. Cohn is taking apart the myths modern scholars have invented and perpetuated about the origins of the European witch-hunts; Obeyeskere's absolutely fascinating book is about how the death of Captain Cook got reimagined by Europeans, from the journal-writers of his expedition, through the missionaries, to twentieth-century anthropologists, and how those reimaginings strayed further and further from the truth of eighteenth-century Hawaiian culture--and obscured both that and the truth of Cook himself. In both cases, what Cohn and Obeyeskere are principally talking about is the way that European commentators, scholarly and otherwise, chose stories--myths, in Obeyeskere's phrasing--that they wished to be true, and folded, spindled, and mutilated their source material until it seemed to be telling that story (they both indict their principal scholarly antagonists for the cunning and misleading use of ellipses--leaving out the bits that you don't want makes everything so much clearer). Both Cohn and Obeyeskere emphasize the necessity of going back to the primary sources and paying attention to what they actually say, rather than our preconceived notions of what they should say.
Obeyeskere, as a Sri Lankan trained in Western academic anthropology, also brings a tremendously valuable perspective to the practice of ethnography, because he refuses, again and again, explicitly and sometimes with withering sarcasm, the idea that non-Western peoples are naive or childlike or incapable of rational thought or unable to understand metaphors. He shows how the myth of Captain Cook's apotheosis--that the Hawaiians believed him to be their god Lono--is founded not on the behavior or beliefs of the Hawaiians themselves, but on European beliefs--European wish-fulfillment, even--about how white men were regarded by the indigenous peoples of Australia and Polynesia and South America.
It was interesting, reading these books back to back, to see how scholarly discourse changed in the twenty years between them. The narrative voice of Cohn's work is a general voice--a default voice. Cohn isn't trying to hide his individual agency and opinions, but the voice is very calm, detached. "Disinterested kindness" is the Victorian phrase, but it applies very well to the stance taken by Cohn's work. Obeyeskere, on the other hand, is very present in his work, not merely in that he talks about himself--using his own experiences as examples, explaining how he, a Sri Lankan with no expertise in Polynesian ethnography, came to be writing this particular book--but in that his passion shows. The academic defaults have changed: Obeyeskere's prose isn't as graceful as Cohn; it's more thickly bejargoned and sometimes hard to follow--and those aren't individual traits. They scream "mid-90s academia!" just as loudly as Cohn's gracious, distanced, balanced sentences scream "mid-70s academia!" But it's also become more acceptable to admit that you care about your topic. We're letting go of the myth of objectivity. The fact that Obeyeskere is actually angry about the ways in which the truth has been obfuscated and deflected and denied doesn't invalidate his work. He is present in his writing, and I think the admission of a subject-position, the admission of an inherent bias (because objectivity is a myth), is a serious advance in the Western scholarly tradition. The observer is just as much the subject of the work as the people observed.
