Inventing Politics: A New Political Anthropology of the Hawaiian

Juri Mykkanen Hardcover, 320 pp.How did early nineteenth-century foreigners understand Hawaiian chiefly politics? What ideas and concepts were used to represent Hawai'i as a polity? What kind of cultural resources did Hawaiians themselves have to make sense of their own structures of domination and those of the West? What was the outcome in political terms of the encounter between Hawaiians and foreigners? To answer these questions, this volume takes readers on an ethnographic journey through Hawai'i's early contact period. It begins by exploring the translation work done by American Protestant missionaries, who played a central role in bridging cultural differences between Hawaiians and Westerners. Evangelicalism and liberal capitalism set the stage for constructing political images of a "pagan" society, and the present work follows the subsequent evolution and transformation of these images--aspects of which were invariably appropriated by Hawaiians themselves to build their own inte