Lono

Lono, called Rongo in the southern islands, is, in the Hawaiian tradition, the god of agriculture, of rain, of fertility and of peace, one of the four great gods of Hawaii. As with the other Polynesian deities, the Hawaiian Lono has cognate forms across the wider Polynesian world, but the traditions of the different island groups are distinct and are best not merged; what follows concerns the Hawaiian god. Lono governs the rain that makes the crops grow, the fertility of the land, and the peaceful arts of cultivation, and he stands in a natural complement to Ku, the god of war: where Ku presides over the season of war and demands its harsh rites, Lono presides over the season of peace, growth and plenty. His great festival is the Makahiki, a period of roughly four months beginning around November, marked by the rising of the star cluster the Hawaiians called Makalii (the Pleiades). The Makahiki was a time of peace, when war was set aside and the ordinary labour and the collection of tribute were suspended in favour of festival, feasting, games and athletic contests, and the god Lono was honoured as his image was carried in procession around the island to receive the offerings of the people. It was a season of renewal and thanksgiving for the fertility of the land.

There is a much-discussed episode in which the arrival of the British navigator James Cook in 1778-79 coincided with the Makahiki, and it has often been claimed that Hawaiians received him as a manifestation of Lono; the precise nature of that reception has been the subject of serious and unresolved scholarly debate, and it is more honest to note the controversy than to assert any single interpretation. Native Hawaiian culture is living and renewing, and Lono remains among the greatest of its gods, the god of the rain, the harvest, and the peaceful season of the Makahiki.

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.