ABSTRACT
The study of modes of knowledge constitution is especially important in Pacific anthropology today due to the changed conditions of production of anthropological knowledge itself. Anthropologists have been having trouble establishing their knowledge of the Pacific in the turbulent times. The change in the conditions of anthropological knowing has serious consequences. For a certain predominant discourse in the Pacific it has led to the importation of the ‘invention of tradition’ to characterize kastom movements and other similar cultural movements’ construction of their identities. A crucial problem in assessing different modes of knowledge, as with all cultural corpuses, is that our starting-point has tended to be a notion of culture as enumerable items, practices, beliefs, symbolic constructs, etc. The apotheosis of Captain Cook can be seen as a Western phenomenon that identifies Cook as the product of the godlike characteristics invoked in the apotheosis story.
