Cultural Categories and Sovereignty: Futures and Pasts of Hawaii (1988)

By Sohail Inayatullah

Cultures are often cannibalized when they adopt the categories of the foreign dominating culture. While colonialism is often seen as the capturing of lands and political power, far more intrusive is the imposition of epistemological categories–what is considered rational or real, for example.

The historical stages of colonialism are well known: economic exploitation (gaining monopoly rights of raw materials), imperialistic exploitation (using political and economic power to transform the local economy), political oppression (transforming
ethnic relations), and finally fascist exploitation (transforming traditional collectivities into nation states where then the foreign is constructed as the advanced and developed and the local the backward underdeveloped). It is the last phase that creates the context for cultural exploitation, creating the conditions for a cultural inferiority complex–the long term result is the shattering of the spine of the local culture.

Western colonialism has become universal through a three part process: (1) transforming traditional accounts of time (into linear developmentalist time), commodifying everything (transforming traditional social relations into exchange relations) and imposing a foreign language or culture.

To counter these forms of exploitation there are a range of appropriate strategies. First, economic democracy, where ownership is vested in those who provide labor, ideas and capital in the form of cooperatives for example (not just to those who provide capital). Second, revitalization of language. Third, the recovery of epistemological categories in which the local culture has historically known itself. Fourth, the creation of links with other oppressed movements and peoples, so as to create a local/global link. Fifth, a neo-humanistic ecological approach that is not based on geo-politics, race politics, or species politics but includes all that is.

While all these might be preferred strategies, most often cultural interaction between foreign and local are based on the categories of the dominant culture. Clearly, the historical and present interaction between Hawaiians and Westerners is based on the cultural and historical categories of the West. Interaction has come on their terms.

In the present sovereignty debate, for example, the contours of the debate are based on Western political theory. The idea of a constitutional convention (while perhaps appropriately participatory) forgets that it is a particular American invention divorced from Hawaiian history or from the unique blend of “local” culture. This form of representation based on election might not be the best way for Hawaiians to design their (constitutional) future. The idea as well that Hawaiian should collectively sit down and rationally develop policy statements as to what they want to do or be again forgets that many peoples do not choose (in the Western sense of the term) their epistemology or their constructions of the other–they live in a given historical relationship to the land or the transcendental. While Westerners may rationally choose their relations, it is not the same with other cultures. Who choose might indeed include the land and the transcendental, for instance. The idea of choice in this case itself becomes an imperialistic concept used to impose one’s own view of rationality, or knowledge.

What then are some Hawaiian, local or more appropriate ways to structure the debate, to create the future. If ho’oponopono, for example, is in fact a way to reach consensual agreement, to heal personal and social illness, to discern where the relationship has gone wrong, and who needs to be forgiven and what needs to be made right, then perhaps this model can be used to structure interaction with the various parties linked to sovereignty or independence. Or ho’oponopono could be revised to meet present social and political needs.

Even while cognizant of the dominance of neo-realist politics (self-interest at the individual and nation-state levels), we can still ask what traditional categories of governance can be reinvented to create an Hawaiian future. Besides ho’oponopono what other categories exist that can be used to attain freedom? What local forms of social and economic organization can revitalize Hawaii as the US core culture looses its legitimacy?

While sovereignty and independence are both laudable ideas, is sovereignty even possible in a world dominated by a Core, the West in present history? Moreover, is the idea of a sovereign nation-state in itself an imposition, useful only from a Westernized view. Should Hawaii and Hawaiians be seeking support from non-American institutions and agencies instead of debating with American institutions, that is attempting to find ways to link with the global community, even a world governance structure in the very long run. This is especially important for sovereignty, when achieved, will still be in the context of an unequal global division of labor where the opportunities for the recently sovereign (Africa and Asia) are far less then those that have been sovereign for hundreds of years. Thus, even if, or when, Hawaii does secede it will still exist in an international system that sees only states as real, denying the visions of social movements, of women, of the aina. Again as the experience of sovereignty for African and Asian nations has shown, gaining sovereignty is only the beginning of the battle, especially if the terms of sovereignty are framed in the language and categories of the dominant.

Finally, after centuries of subjugation, the periphery often has internalized the brutality of the oppressor. Once sovereign these same categories are used on one’s own people. Local culture colludes with the dominant Center power (the West or Japan) long after the colonialists have left we continue using their visions of the future, their ideas of history. Colonialism after all is a state of mind, that remains long after the colonialists have left.

To survive–epistemologically, culturally, economically–we have to use our own categories of thought. Western culture must struggle through these categories just as the Non-West has had to struggle through the categories of the West. We have to create our own forms of interaction recognizing that we have been made Other. We have to make links with others who have been colonized. We must also be careful that this duality not become internally oppressive.

In creating a future based on authentic ways of knowing, which categories should be used? Which are truly authentic? From which period of history can these be derived from? No culture is static (accept again in the context of imperialism when culture becomes custom, museumised or airportized), cultures are living, even reinventing themselves by resisting the dominant culture. Indeed,  instead of defining culture in the traditional Western sense of values and habits, perhaps culture is resistance. Resistance creates culture.

However, this collusion with the dominant cultures makes one multi-cultural since every moment is an encounter with a foreign culture and a remembrance of one own’s culture. Rethinking the relationship between local and global, these moments can eventually become the creation of a new planetary culture–one based on local understandings but planetary in the sense of an expanded we: living in Our home, for you and I and everybody else.