Islands of History

En esta obra, Sahlins examina la muerte de James Cook como un evento simbólico ­—y no simplemente histórico— que revela cómo los indígenas de Hawai interpretaban su llegada e intervención. A través de una combinación de historia, antropología interpretativa y análisis simbólico, Sahlins muestra que la muerte de Cook se convirtió en “metáfora de historia” para los nativos, permitiendo repensar el encuentro entre culturas, la imposición colonial y los relatos de autoimagen cultural.

Obviously I love this book since I studied under its author. Sahlins's most ambitious and profound book, but also the one hardest to read and understand: repetitive, dense, and epigrammatic.

I would not recommend this book to people with a general interest in pacific history. The author writes about captain Cook's encounter with the natives, but his real agenda lies in social theory and you would have to be quite familiar with structuralist anthropology to understand his convoluted historical analysis. I appreciate the author's intentions and I thought the premises of this book were interesting, but I'll admit that I could not make much sense of the broader argument he tries to convey in this book.

This is a readable examination of Pacific island cultures.

Uno studio attento, frutto di accurate ricerche sul campo, sulle popolazioni delle isole del Pacifico, sulle culture indigene e sul loro incontro con i colonizzatori inglesi.