Response to Victor Li’s article “Marshall Sahlins and the Apotheosis of Culture”
Author(s)
Obeyesekere, Gananath
Abstract
Obeyesekere responds to critiques of his work that he suggests that Western culture has no space for improvisation whereas non-Western cultures do. He insists that one must be emancipated from the radical binary distinction between the West and its many Others. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook has as its subtitle “European Mythmaking in the Pacific,” and becomes clear that Obeyesekere limits himself to mythmaking with respect to the discourses associated with the voyages of discovery. Those of which are also discourses of colonialism and imperial conquest.
