Less than promoting a theoretical clash about the authors who will be mentioned in this text, our purpose here is merely to try to draw a line where their theories could cross in front of a punctual reference: the mythopraxis of Marshall Sahlins. Thus, what follows is an explanation of his theory applied to the famous case of the first contact of the Polynesians in Hawaii with an English fleet, with the addition of artificially critical developments - since without practical applicability, and to a certain extent counterproductive -, adduced here, in a manner of epilogues, of two contemporary works of his, those of Johannes Fabian and Roy Wagner.

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Myth and praxis in Sahlins

There is consensus among historians of anthropology that ethnographic studies of Pacific tribes, and perhaps maturity, were the laboratory where Marshall Sahlins experienced radical change in his own concepts. From a Marxist neo-evolutionism, the outstanding American anthropologist would move from the Columbia of his masters Steward and White to Chicago University, the diffusing center of cultural relativism and where he would assume a structural culturalism bordering on determinism. After two decades involved in heated debates on controversial theoretical issues of anthropology, Marshall Sahlins was willing to apply his conclusions to episodic examples that illustrate his hypotheses. One of the most famous of these events, with its novel analysis, consists of two of the five chapters of its fabulous Islands of History, where Sahlins proposes to reinterpret the curious, obscure and tragic episode that killed the successful English frigate commander James Cook. in Polynesia at the end of the century. XVIII.  

The case was emblematic and propitious. Here's a brief summary: the conventional narrative realized that when it docked in the Hawaiian archipelagos in December 1778, after a series of accidents [1]  That matched the descriptions molded in local myths, Cook was revered even to the worship of the natives as one of their gods (akua) who had finally returned to fulfill incarnate the rituals that were performed every year during the Makahiki festivities. Upon disembarking, Cook, led by a Hawaiian priest, accepted the hood. After the period in which the services were held, enough to supply the ships' holds, they celebrated the last rite: the symbolic death of the visiting god and the farewell ceremony prescribed in the ritual, with its promise of a cyclical return for the following year as soon as the Pleiades appeared in the sky to announce again the votive season to the god Lono. Twelve days after unberthing, however, an incident on board the high seas caused the British ships to return to the island for repairs. This unforeseen event reversed the natives' view of Cook, who had perhaps never been the Akua Lono, probably an imposter. A series of petty thefts and minor depredations followed. Until the theft of a longboat precipitated fatality. Armed, escorted, and with cannons aimed at the populace, Cook tried to take the Hawaiian king hostage to regain his property. There was a beginning of revolt and the situation got out of control. In the melee, a Hawaiian dagger stabbed the English captain. Cook's death throes suddenly soothed the tempers. Despite the violent retaliations of the sailors, with whom Hawaiian women had already broken the taboos of commensality and sex, their commander's body was celebrated by the natives as if it had regained its lost sacredness. A month later, the British left the island for Europe, embalmed with James Cook's bones.

Marshall Sahlins, after closely investigating other data and reports from the time of the event, gave his cultural version of the event. In it came terms such as the structure of the conjuncture or empirical reason, and what he called mythopraxis, where the myth assumed the dimension of a cultural complex. Malinowski had reasoned that myths were a kind of justification for the present, a way of legitimizing it; for Lévi-Strauss, a way of philosophizing, a vehicle for cosmological discourse. Sahlins would go further. As a condensed essence of the model of and for life that Geertz attributed to religion, according to Sahlins, the myth, for Polynesians, was a model of action and a roadmap for practical changes in the face of new situations that could reorder the cultural structure. “From the native point of view, every event is a concrete example of an ideological structure” (SAHLINS, 1984). Thus, Sahlins conceived the fateful event as the unfolding of a series of mytho-poetic prescriptions whose implementation gave rise to the cultural rearrangement that in the following years would take shape in Hawaiian society.

Sahlins' thesis, of course, would not pass unaffected by criticisms and challenges. The longest and most caustic of them came to the attention of the non-specialized press. The controversy with Princeton University anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, for whom the whole episode was just another case of conquest, imperialism and civilization, and whom Sahlins would offend by calling him a “vulgar utilitarian”, would allow for a more detailed extension of the exegesis of myth-praxis. Perhaps Obeyesekere refuted Sahlins with some partiality due to his insular origin in Sri-Lanka, but he disqualified his thesis far less than he counter-argued it analytically by opposing Sahlins' theory against himself when he claimed precisely the myths that so too, according to him , the English sailors in turn brought in their Enlightenment imagery representing the Polynesians as primitives who saw the Europeans as gods. Where Sahlins saw the involvement of an extensive network of cultural symbols that defined supreme action, his opponent saw only an obvious and rational reaction against the violent excesses of former English colonialism.

Sahlins and Obeyesekere under the light of Time in Fabian

About two years before the publication of Islands of History, the Dutchman Johannes Fabian had perhaps already provided, if not a method, a clue to greater efficiency in ethnographic interpretation, that is, to the essence of the issue between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. In O Tempo eo Outros: how anthropology establishes its object, Fabian weaves a kind of evolutionary path in the sense in which the notion of time has been apprehended throughout the history of culture. Time, there, is almost confused with the perception of space or history. These dimensions are as if reducible to a principle of temporality. From sacred medieval time to its secularization, and later to the use of time as something naturalized, a chronology is made that leads the Dutch anthropologist to his concept of distancing or allochrony, and makes him invoke a whole terminology to demonstrate what he should contain an anthropological interpretation: the coetaneity in their relationships.

Now, it seems to us that it was this allochrony, this lack of coherence in the relations, at least in Sahlins' version, between Captain Cook and the Polynesians of Hawaii in the 19th century. XVIII the key to elucidate not only what precipitated the facts in which the agents themselves were not clearly aware of their execution, but also to demystify the anthropological interpretation of this and so many other cases. Thus, if we can radically apply Fabian's theory, the British and the Hawaiians lived in the same era but within different notions of time. This disparity in time is also equivalent to that present between the scope of ethnographic analysis and the facts and data it compiles; between the world of the anthropologist and that of the ethnographic historical events on which he focuses. And it would not be an exaggeration to consider that, in Fabian's terms, Sahlins and Obeyesekere, to some extent, also place themselves on antagonistic planes of ideological time.  

The invention of Cook, the dying god

Dying God is the epithet that Sahlins foists on his hero in the fourth chapter of his Isles of History. This does not authorize us to say that Cook was already almost a character in Sahlinsian anthropology. It would never come to that, but it is inevitable that his narrative essays suggest to us the admonitions that Roy Wagner, some ten years ago, had enunciated in his The Invention of Culture.  

It was probably not Immanuel Kant that Wagner was inspired to compose his thesis, but the cognitive theories of the German philosopher [2]  they certainly serve to demonstrate it. What Wagner postulates, in essence, is that being irretrievably separated from the things and facts that surround us and with which we interact, our interpretation of events would be just one of countless others possible or even, why not, contradictory. Inserted this principle in the anthropological context, this finding becomes even more uncomfortable. Roy Wagner's tone is notoriously not that of a pessimist who wants to undermine our epistemological pretensions. In fact, like David Hume two centuries before him, he basically does nothing but reinforce them. But his warning, although it serves everyone, may not find other models to better address, because they are peremptory, than the deterministic anthropological speculations that then flooded the annals of this discipline, which perhaps is not the case with the theoretical analyzes that Marshall Sahlins he dared to undertake on the practical ramifications of the Polynesian myths. Everything would be a matter of degree, of level at which the proposition of a concept, a principle or a theory can venture.

Sahlins is said to have abandoned the determinism implied by Marxist materialism, or its understated version of cultural ecologism, from his first phase as an anthropologist to join his renown with the historical particularists descended from Franz Boas. But what happened was that he carried with him the already half-moribund germ of his determinism, I now revive in a more idealistic version of culture since he was disenchanted with the realization that the modes of production, the social infrastructure are defined by the chain of cultural symbols .  

Here we do not want the theory of mythopraxis to serve as a scapegoat for any possibility of postmodern critique. By the way, Sahlins was one of the few who rolled up his sleeves and made a point of demonstrating his assertions in clear and objective examples. So much so that Johannes Fabian and Roy Wagner's own doctrines would be self-contradictory or paradoxical if subjected to the scrutiny of their own questions, since the knowledge of reality or the time in which they conceived them could not be static, but as shifting as the sands from the beach he doesn't know that he saw James Cook agonize.  

Bibliographic references

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FABIAN, Johannes. Time and the Other. Petrópolis: Voices, 2013.

GEERTZ, Clifford. The interpretation of cultures. Rio de Janeiro: LTC, 2008.

KANT, Immanuel. Critique of practical reason. The thinkers. São Paulo: April: 1984

KUPER, Adam. Culture: the view of anthropologists. Bauru: Edusc, 2002.

LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude. The wild thought. Campinas: Papirus, 2004.

SAHLINS, Marshall. Culture and practical reason. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1984.

________. Islands of History. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1986.

WAGNER, Roy. The invention of culture. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2017.

Grades

[1]  The insignia of the English candles resembled the graphics that represented the image of the god Lono to the natives; the date Cook appeared coincided with the beginning of the season linked to the rulership of the god Lono; and the itinerary taken by the coastal navigation that the ships completed around the islands before anchoring had completed a journey similar to what Hawaiian mythology foretold as the ritualistic path of Lono's return (KUPER, Adam. 1999, pp. 207 – 258) .

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[two]  Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, states that we can only know phenomena, that is, what is presented to us through the senses. If Kant is right, since we cannot know anything about the things themselves, the noumenon, what we are left with is the construction of our own meanings.