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Hi, I'm John Green, This is Crash Course World History. And today we're going to talk about
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the life and astonishing death of Captain James Hook, whose death via crocodile cha—what?
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James Cook? There's no crocodiles? Stupid history, always disappointing me.
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Well, Captain Cook is pretty interesting too, and his death is a nice entrée into one of
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the great historian feuds of recent times. God, I love historian feuds.
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So Captain Cook was born in 1728. He was a sailor and eventually a British Naval officer
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who saw action in the Seven Years War, which you will no doubt remember from last week.
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But he's best known for his three voyages of exploration and scientific discovery that
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took place in the Pacific Ocean.
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The first was between 1768 and 1771, the second between 1772 and 1775, and the third between
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1776 and 1780. Although on the last one, Cook's journey ended in 1779, because he died.
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And as you can see from the map, Cook pretty much owned the Pacific.
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He mapped the coast of Australia, paving the way for British colonization, and also paving
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the way for the near destruction of aboriginal peoples and their culture.
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As with the Columbian exchange, Cook's voyages to Australia re-made the biological landscape.
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He introduced sheep, which paved the way for Australia's huge wool industry.
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Right, there was a penal colony established in Australia, but the real story of Australia
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is its success as a colony.
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Within 80 years, Australia went from 1,000 Anglo-Australians to 1.2 million.
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Equally important, Cook explored and mapped out New Zealand, again paving the way for
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colonization, and paving the way for Crash Course World History to make an announcement.
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WE DID IT! WE FINALLY TALKED ABOUT AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND. WE'RE A REAL WORLD HISTORY
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CLASS! HUZZAH!
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Now all you Australians have to shut up about how we've never mentioned you.
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Right, so in his voyages, Cook also determined that there was no such thing as the mythical
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continent of Terra Australis, said to exist here.
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And he helped to dispel the idea of a Northwest Passage, which Europeans had been obsessed
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with for centuries.
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He was the first European to describe Hawaii, and also the first to keep his ship's crews
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free of scurvy.
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Cook and his successors were part of the middle wave of European colonization, the one that
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took place after Europeans settled in the Americas, but before they set their sights
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on Africa.
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And in some ways, the colonization of Australia and New Zealand can be seen as an extension
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of the colonization of India, which happened about 30 years before.
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One more thing to mention about the context of these voyages, or rather, their impact.
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Besides huge territorial gains and increased wealth, exploration of the Pacific contributed
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to Europe's Romantic fascination with science.
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In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans became obsessed with mapping, and charting,
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and classifying the world, which maybe isn't, like, candlelight dinner romantic, but if
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you think about visiting never-before-seen lands and bringing back odd life forms...well,
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I mean, think about how we feel about space.
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And then, of course, as they colonized people, Europeans portrayed themselves as a civilizing
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force, bringing both science and religion.
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Oh, it's time for the open letter? An Open Letter to the White Man's Burden.
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But first, let's see what's in the secret compartment today. Oh, it's a mustache, so
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I can look like Kipling. Dear White Man's Burden.
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I'm gonna go ahead and take this off, Stan, I think Tumblr has had enough to get their
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gifs.
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So, White Man's Burden, you're a poem. And more then a century after Kipling wrote you,
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scholars still disagree over whether he was kidding.
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And this speaks to how weird and insane imperialism really was. Europeans seemed to genuinely
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believe that it was their unfortunate duty to extract massive wealth from the rest of
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the world.
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Seriously, were you kidding when you called natives "half-devil and half-child" because,
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in retrospect, that seems to describe, you know, you.
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Best Wishes, John Green.
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Right, so now having discussed the life of Captain Cook, we shall turn to the most controversial
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thing he ever did: Die. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
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So Cook landed in Hawaii, at Kealakekua Bay, in early 1779 and explored the islands.
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While he was ashore, he was greeted by an important person—either a chief or a god—and
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then in early February he left, but the ship had trouble and was forced to return to the
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Bay for repairs.
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During this second visit, he had difficulty with the Hawaiians, who'd previously been
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pretty hospitable, and there was a fracas in which Captain Cook was killed by at least
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one Hawaiian.
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We know this from journals kept by various crewmen, but the historical controversy arises
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from the details and interpretation of his death. Why, in short, was Cook killed?
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The traditional view is that Cook was killed for some religious reason, although what isn't
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always clear.
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One of the most fleshed out versions of this story comes from the anthropologist Marshall
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Sahlins in his book Islands of History.
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So in the Hawaiian religious system, Ku, the god of war and human sacrifice, rules for
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eight or nine months out of the year; the other months are reserved for the fertility
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god, Lono.
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The season-long festival for Lono is called Makahiki, and during this the Hawaiian king,
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who is associated with Ku, is ritually defeated.
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During the Makahiki, an image of Lono tours the island, gets worshipped, and collects
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taxes.
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And at the end of the Makahiki period, Lono is ritually defeated and returned to his native
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Tahiti.
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The thinking goes that because Cook arrived in the middle of the Makahiki, the Hawaiians
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perceived him as Lono.
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So Cook took part in the rituals and sacrifices that were made as part of the Makahiki.
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And in Sahlins' view, Cook was killed as a ritual murder to mark the end of Makahiki.
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For Ku to return, the festival to end, and the normal political order to be restored,
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Lono had to be defeated and, presumably, killed.
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For Sahlins' Cook's death fits perfectly with the ritual structure of Hawaiian culture.
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Thanks, Thought Bubble. So the big problem with this interpretation, which, admittedly
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sounds pretty cool, is that we don't have much evidence that Hawaiians would have actually
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seen Cook this way.
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We find a really interesting opposing view from Gananath Obeyesekere, and I will remind
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you that mispronunciation is my thing.
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Sorry, Gananath. Anyway, he criticized Sahlins' interpretation of Cook's death for looking
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a lot more like European myth than like a Hawaiian ritual.
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First off, Obeyesekere argues that Cook himself would not easily be confused with Lono.
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In fact, if he was taken for a God, it would probably be Ku, the war god, what with all
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the cannons and muskets.
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Also, there's the fact that the name Cook sounds more like Ku than Lono.
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Also, arguing that native Hawaiians would see a European and think him a God has all
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kinds of troubling implications, one of them being that native Hawaiians aren't terribly
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smart, when in fact we know that they are very smart, because unlike the rest of us,
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they live in Hawaii.
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And last, but definitely not least, Lono is associated with fertility, and the Hawaiians
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would have associated the Europeans with the exact opposite of fertility, because they
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introduced gonorrhea to Hawaii.
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And there's a further problem with the Cook = Lono equation, which is that nothing in
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Hawaiian religion has any of their gods being ritually killed.
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Part of their mythology can be seen as sanctioning a ritual killing of the king, but not of a
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god, and also it's a long way from ritual killing to actual killing.
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The truth is probably a lot less spectacular, which is that Cook was probably killed during
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a melee in which a bunch of Hawaiians were also killed.
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Before his death, Cook had attempted to take a Hawaiian king hostage in response to Hawaiians
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taking a bunch of stuff from Cook's boats.
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This was common practice for Cook; he had done the same thing in Tahiti and other Polynesian
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islands after islanders had taken European goods.
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Which, by the way, happened everywhere Cook went in the Pacific, so maybe he should have
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figured out that it was, like, a thing that you were allowed to take stuff off boats in
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exchange for the the right to hang out there.
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Great sailor, terrible anthropologist. Although, to be fair, anthropology hadn't been invented.
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Additionally, right before Cook was killed, there were rising tensions between the Hawaiians
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and the Europeans, even though, at first, their relationship had been quite cordial,
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as evidenced by all that gonorrhea.
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So why the tension? Probably because the Europeans dismantled a Hawaiian ritual space -- some
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sources call it a temple -- and used it for firewood.
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Cook attempted to pay for it, but his lowball offer of two hatchets—I'm not making that
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up—was refused.
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I'm sorry we destroyed your temple, but I'll give you two hatchets! One for each hand!
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I mean, what would you even do with a third hatchet?
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So, unfortunately the earliest Hawaiian account offering this explanation for why Cook was
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killed comes well after the accounts, but at least it's a Hawaiian explanation.
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Of course, it's also possible that the Hawaiians were just upset that Cook had attempted to
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kidnap their king.
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Most accounts from the time portray a chaotic scene in which Cook himself fired at least
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two shots, probably killing at least one islander.
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And one thing that seems pretty clear, even as described by European chroniclers, is that
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Cook's death does not look premeditated, and it sure doesn't look like a ritual.
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But even so, the idea that the Hawaiians saw Cook as a god has ended up in a good many
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accounts of his demise.
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Why? Well, one explanation is that it fits in with other stories of explorers.
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You've all probably heard that the Tainos thought Columbus was a god, and that the Aztecs
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supposedly thought Cortes was a God.
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And this just makes Captain Cook one in a long line of Europeans who were thought to
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be gods by people who Europeans felt were savages.
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And making Cook a god also sets up a stark contrast between the enlightened west and
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primitive Polynesia.
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Because Captain Cook often appears in history books as a model man of the enlightenment.
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Sure, he never had much formal schooling, but his voyages were all about increasing
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knowledge and scientific exploration.
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And having him die at the hands of a people who were so obviously mistaken in thinking
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him a god makes an argument for the superiority over the intellectualism of the enlightenment
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versus the so-called primitive religion of the colonies.
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But whenever a story seems to fit really well into such a framework, we need to ask ourselves,
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who's telling that story?
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One of the reasons we know so much about Captain Cook (and the reason he shows up in so many
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history textbooks) is because we have tons of records about him, but they're almost all
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European records.
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Even the Hawaiian records we have about Cook have been heavily influenced by later contact
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with Europeans.
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So, if we cast Cook's death as part of a native ritual, we're implying that Hawaiians were
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just performing a ritual script, which takes away all their agency as human beings.
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Are we making them recognizable, having them respond as we think Europeans would by flying
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off the handle?
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I don't have an answer, but the debate between these two historical anthropologists brings
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up something that we need to keep in mind.
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And we try to imagine that we're seeing the world as they have seen it, but the best we
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can really do is offer an approximation.
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So, is it really possible to present a "Hawaiian" version of Captain Cook's death?
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Or is the exercise inherently condescending and paternalistic?
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And most importantly, is our inability to escape our biases a good excuse for not even
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trying? As usual, those aren't rhetorical questions. Thanks
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for watching. I'll see you next week.