This is a book about the politics of competing cultures and myths in a colonized nation. Elizabeth Buck considers the transformation of Hawaiian culture focusing on the indigenous population rather than on the colonizers. She describes how Hawaii's established religious, social, political, and economic relationships have changed in the past 200 years as a result of Western imperialism. Her account is particularly timely in light of the current Hawaiian demands for sovereignty 100 years after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893. Buck examines the social transformation Hawaii from a complex hierarchical, oral society to an American state dominated by corporate tourism and its myths of paradise. She pays particular attention to the ways contemporary Hawaiians are challenging the use of their traditions as the basis for exoticized entertainment. Buck demonstrates that sacred chants and hula were an integral part of Hawaiian social life; as the repository of the people's historical memory, chants and hula practices played a vital role in maintaining the links between religious, political, and economic relationships. Tracing the ways in which Hawaiian culture has been variously suppressed and constructed by Western explorers, New England missionaries, the tourist industry, ethnomusicologists, and contemporary Hawaiians, Buck offers a fascinating "rereading" of Hawaiian history.

A rereading of Hawaiian history

About the Author
Elizabeth Buck is a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai'i.

Reviews
"[A] thought provoking account of the history of Hawai'i's indigenous people.... [Buck] examines the transformations of successive social structures and the various relationships of power and domination in Hawaiian history before and after contact with the West. Buck uses the changing contexts of the production, practice and meaning of the chant and hula, and the later emergence of Hawaiian music, to inform our understanding of the cultural and social implication of political and economic change.... Well worth reading."
-Journal of American History

"Buck has written an exemplary theoretical meditation on the politics of cutlure and of history, embedded in a richly nuanced and evocative study of Hawai'i's past."
-American Studies

"Betty Buck has a rare gift. She reads, understands, and processes a wide array of political, philosophical, and literary theory well enough to apply the ideas to specific cases, phenomena, or processes and to ask questions of that material that less theoretically informed researchers are far less likely to find interesting, or to even ask."
-Virginia R. Dominguez, University of California, Santa-Cruz



Book Information
ISBN 9781566392006
Author Elizabeth Buck
Format Paperback
Page Count 252
Imprint Temple University Press,U.S.
Publisher Temple University Press,U.S.
Dimensions(mm) 210mm * 140mm * 18mm