A relatively well-known academic debate in anthropology in the 1990s concerned whether Hawaiian priests and chiefs perceived captain James Cook as their god Lono; if so, then his subsequent killing by them could be seen as the unfolding of a ritualistic script to which Cook—as its central character—had first conformed but then disrupted. In Islands of History, Sahlins argues that Cook's violation of his role in coming back to Hawaii when Lono wasn’t expected to was what raised the local chiefs' ire, and importantly, the mere terrestrial explanation—that the return was due to a problem with the ship's mast—would not placate them, since this reason was not even intelligible within their “cosmological” framework. Uday Chandra makes an argument similar to the one that Gannath Obeyesekere made in his The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, against Sahlins's interpretation, namely that practical reason should not be presumptively dismissed as a hypothesis for actions when it comes to non-Western bourgeois societies. Practical reason directed towards very worldly ends is a faculty of humans in general and not just a product of modernity. Chandra (82–84), whose discussion also features the appearance of a white man as a deity to “tribals” (albeit in a dream th