Volume 42, Number 19 · November 30, 1995
Culture War
By Clifford Geertz
The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific
by Gananath Obeyesekere
Princeton University Press, 251 pp., $45.00; $13.95 (paper)
How 'Natives' Think, About Captain Cook, for Example
by Marshall Sahlins
University of Chicago Press, 318 pp., $24.95
Anthropology is a conflicted discipline, perpetually in search of ways to escape its condition, perpetually failing to find them. Committed, since its beginnings, to a global view of human life—social, cultural, biological, and historical at once—it keeps falling into its parts, complaining about the fact, and trying desperately, and unsuccessfully, to project some sort of new unity to replace the unity it imagines itself once to have had, but now, through the faithlessness of present practitioners, to have mindlessly cast away. The watchword is 'holism,' cried out at professional meetings and in general calls to arms (of which there are a very large number) in professional journals and monographs. The reality, in the research actually done and the works actually published, is enormous diversity.
Review, 3497 words
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