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Three years ago, Gananath Obeyesekere, an academic anthropologist originally from Sri Lanka, wrote a widely noted book challenging one of the accepted facts about the exploration of the Pacific, that Cook was taken by the Hawaiians to be an incarnation of a fertility god called Lono. Captain Cook's \"apotheosis,\" Mr. Obeyesekere argued (his book was entitled \"The Apotheosis of Captain Cook\"), was a Western invention, serving the vision of Europeans as civilizers who were gods to the natives. \"This 'European god,' \" Mr. Obeyesekere wrote, \"is a myth of conquest, imperialism and civilization.\" Beyond upholding the argument that mainstream anthropology has got it right about Cook and the Hawaiians, Mr. Sahlins has a broader objective. What Mr. Obeyesekere has done, in Mr. Sahlins's view, is use a \"pidgin anthropology\" whose effect is to make the Hawaiians over in our own image, reducing \"native\" thinking to categories that we Western rationalists can most easily understand. Mr. Sahlins wants to re-establish the idea that people, including modern Westerners and preliterate \"natives,\" do think differently, despite well-intentioned scholarly efforts to endow them \"with the highest Western bourgeois values.\" In a learned but demanding demonstration, the author describes how \"the so-called primitive mentality\" works. The modern West strives to eliminate \"spirit and subjectivity.\" The \"native\" world is one in which everything, objects and humans, are thoroughly invested with the spirit world. \"Relying on our own sense of 'reality,' let alone our neurosensory equipment, we could hardly believe that someone could seriously take a sweet potato, or even an Englishman, as the manifestation of a god,\" Mr. Sahlins writes. The Hawaiian sense of reality, informed by a \"total cultural cosmology,\" is different.

About $1 trillion of that total was for consumer debt - money spent on cars, college tuition, vacations, braces for the kids' teeth. In recent decades consumer debt has waxed and waned with the state of the economy, running at about 17 percent of the Gross National Product in slow years, climbing to 20 percent in good years. In our current five-year upswing, it has gone higher, peaking in 1986 at a record 23 percent of G.N.P. Since then it seems to have stabilized at around 22 percent, reflecting consumers' somewhat more cautious optimism about the economy. Americans have shown that they are prudent about borrowing, not only for consumer goods but also in their pursuit of the great dream, a house of their own. Thirty years ago home mortgage debt stood at $113 billion, equal to about 25 percent of G.N.P. Today it amounts to $1.8 trillion, equal to 41 percent of G.N.P. * FEDERAL DEBT. Ten years ago the Federal Government's debt to the public was about $600 billion; today it has soared to almost $2 trillion. But the national debt today is equal to only about 43 percent of G.N.P. - which is the same as it was in 1933 and smaller than it was at the end of World War II, when the debt was equal to 110 percent of G.N.P. After that the economy grew and the debt gradually fell in relation to our national income, reaching a low point of 24 percent of G.N.P. in 1974 - its lowest point since 1929. Today's national debt is no more scary than it has been at any other time in the past 50 years.

Donal Henahan's commentary on the Lyric Opera's ''Tannhauser'' production [ ''Clothes Don't Make the Opera,'' Oct. 23 ] was too kind.

''Gorbachev's Coup: Sign of Weakness'' by Prof. Marshall I. Goldman (Op-Ed, Oct. 5) must have turned many of his Sovietological colleagues green with envy. Who among us is so lucky as to be able to draw ''the only sure conclusion'' from the latest changes in the Kremlin? Who has the kind of ''better informed friends in Moscow'' capable of providing all the details of a ''plot'' hatched by Mikhail S. Gorbachev's opponents, which the Soviet leader barely (but only barely) nipped in the bud?

The money would have been used to support teaching and curricular development consistent with the spirit of the gift. However, Yale's administration had to refuse the donor's request to approve the specific faculty teaching in the program. Politics has nothing to do with the fact that no Yale faculty would allow even the most generous of donors to interfere with academic decisions that belong to the faculty and administration.

''Simply stated, Professor Stone was one of the greatest American mathematicians of this century,'' said Larry N. Mann, head of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts. ''And his death will be mourned by mathematics colleagues as well as scientists throughout the world.'' He ''was a really great mathematician who made a number of decisive contributions,'' said Saunders Mac Lane, a mathematician at the University of Chicago. 'Ambassador to Mathematicians' During his tenure, he ''completely renewed the department,'' Dr. Mac Lane said, ''making it best department in mathematics in the country in that period.''

''Study of the Soviet Union in the United States has always relied heavily on printed matter,'' said Marshall Goldman, Associate Director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard, which began offering the programs last month. ''I think scholars generally feel more comfortable with a newspaper. But more exciting things are going on in the Soviet Union than make their way to Pravda and Izvestia.'' Professor Goldman said that aside from illustrating nuances of spoken Russian, the programs also illustrate the interests and concerns of average Russian citizens, who are interviewed frequently on the nightly Russian news show, ''Vremya'' or ''time.'' Creighton has become one of the two major distributors of the special equipment necessary to track and receive transmissions from the orbiting Soviet television satellite ''Molnyia'' (''Lightning'') which is used to send programs originating in Moscow to the people of the Soviet Union's 11 time zones, especially those in Siberia.