The question of how Hawaiians actually understood Cook's arrival became, in the 1990s, the subject of one of the most closely watched controversies in modern anthropology. The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued at length, drawing on structuralist analysis of Hawaiian ritual calendar and myth, that Hawaiian priests and commoners plausibly did understand Cook's arrival during the Makahiki season, and his own subsequent actions and death, through the specific ritual logic of Lono's yearly return and departure, treating the episode as a genuine case of a historical event being interpreted, on both sides, through a culturally specific conceptual structure.
The Sri Lankan-American anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere responded with a sustained and pointed challenge, arguing that the claim Hawaiians took Cook for a literal god reflected a Western, colonial-era fantasy about supposedly credulous non-European peoples rather than genuine Hawaiian belief, and that Sahlins's account uncritically repeated older European travel narratives without sufficiently questioning their reliability or bias. The resulting exchange, conducted across books and journal articles through the 1990s, drew in numerous other scholars and became a widely cited case study in debates over how anthropologists should handle indigenous belief systems, colonial-era sources, and the risk of either over-mystifying or overly rationalizing another culture's response to first contact. The dispute was never resolved to the satisfaction of the whole field, and it remains a standard teaching example precisely because it exposes how much interpretation, on both the historical and the scholarly side, is required to make sense of a single, sparsely documented encounter.