Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. xiv, 234 pp. (B&W photos.) US$39.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3129-5.
Holmes’s text is an autoethnographic meditation on the politically charged relationship between Native Hawaiian and Western scholarly traditions of knowledge-making. It is as much a poignant, deeply personal quest for the author’s Hawaiian genealogy as it is an analytically sharp critique of the imposition of a foreign epistemic paradigm on an indigenous one. While yearning to anchor herself socially in relation to her Hawaiian birth mother, Holmes simultaneously strives to learn and privilege a distinctly Hawaiian mode of knowing in contrast to established epistemic discourses. Both these processes—her exhausting search for her birth mother and her educational pursuits—eventually converge as she examines the fundamental significance of lineage and land in Hawaiian conceptions of knowledge. Consequently, Holmes’s book juxtaposes intellectually stimulating scholarship with the suspenseful story of the serendipitous encounters that gradually usher her into the Hawaiian social network she once dreamed of.
Holmes’s academic endeavours are motivated by her own experience of being a child of Hawaiian descent adopted by American parents and raised on the US mainland. She introduces herself as the composite of “two voices” (xiii), glossed as “Hawaiian-style” and “University-style” (67), that manifest themselves in different forms throughout her book. This dichotomy is reflected most conspicuously in the visual presentation of her text in two columns; the left may be interpreted as symbolic of her Hawaiian consciousness and the right of her scholastic outlook. While Holmes does not specify any particular order in which the columns ought to be read, the reader might gravitate first towards the column on the left since it carries the experiential substance of her text: her life events, memories of her childhood, her dreams, excerpts from conversations and her interviews with Hawaiian elders (kūpuna). In parts of her book, the two columns address a common theme or topic from different perspectives; the right column often taking on an explanatory function that either contextualizes, analyzes or illuminates the subject presented in the left. But in other parts, the two columns do not neatly align with one another and stand apart as immiscible discourses; their dissonance iconic of the difficulty in integrating indigenous and Western epistemologies as well as Holmes’s conflicted personal identity.
Her chosen methodology, the unconventional presentation of her text, as well as her literary style, all have noteworthy political implications in keeping with Holmes’s aim to foreground Hawaiian epistemology. Adopting an ethnomethodological approach for data collection, Holmes is reflexive and critical of the structured interview format that strategically affords the interviewer an authoritative stance in leading the conversation. She is also mindful of the relational construction of knowledge, particularly relevant in the Hawaiian context, and therefore restructures the interview process by asking a socially embedded local Hawaiian friend to pose a few broad questions and engage in fairly open-ended discussions with Hawaiian elders. The discursive floor is yielded to the interviewee. Meanwhile, Holmes carefully positions herself as an attentive listener, a learner subordinate to the elderly Hawaiian knowledge-bearer. In doing so, she prioritizes her identity as a Hawaiian descendent over that of an academically trained researcher. Her stylistic choice to present dialogues and elders’ oral reflections as standalone narratives that are deliberately not framed within her own analyses or encumbered with theoretical flourish retains the original sequence and intactness of their speeches. It compels the reader to interpret Hawaiian expressions of Hawaiian cultural identity and epistemology independently of foreign theoretical frameworks such as political economy that Holmes finds inadequate for her task.
This is not to convey that Holmes’s text is devoid of theoretical rigour. Indeed she presents substantive summaries and critiques of the literatures on political economy and the invention of tradition debate referencing seminal texts in these discourses. One of her major discontents with such theories is that they reconfigure Hawaiians’ relation to nature in economic and ideological terms, and the “authorized languages [of such theories] leach out the presence of earth that often saturates the language of the texts and stories of those [Hawaiian] descendants” (171). The Hawaiian elders (kūpuna) Holmes interviews, “generate a grounded epistemology wherein knowledge emanates from the dictates of the land and passes through the generations connecting us with kūpuna of generations past” (171). The dispossession and commoditization of land brought up by colonization and capitalism effectively sever Hawaiians’ relation to it thereby eclipsing Hawaiian epistemology. By honouring and giving voice to kūpuna, Holmes intends to revitalize such a land-based, genealogically transmitted and practice-oriented Hawaiian epistemology.
As she straddles the Hawaiian and Western academic worlds she inhabits, Holmes recognizes her role in each as sometimes antithetical to the other. She questions whether embracing one identity, for instance, that of a scholar, might somehow betray her identification as a Hawaiian descendant. While her relentless struggle to be true to both identities is evident in her narrative, one wonders if, perhaps, these two identities are being reified to some extent and if they are necessarily mutually exclusive. It might be constructive to explore the ways in which each identity infuses the other. For instance, it is striking that Holmes is able to employ her educational activities, such as the interviews she conducts for her dissertation research, in service of her goal to integrate herself within the Hawaiian community.
In sum, Holmes’s book advances our understanding of indigenous epistemologies and will be of interest to scholars examining the nature and construction of knowledge, colonialism and postcolonial theory, self-determination and the struggle for sovereignty, cultural revitalization, biculturalism, hybridity, identity formation and Pacific studies. It will also be a thought-provoking read for those investigating the politics of research methods and the relationship between researchers and those who are researched.
Rachana Agarwal
Brandeis University, Waltham, USA
pp. 204-206