How Chiefs Became Kings

How Chiefs Became Kings PDF Author: Patrick Vinton Kirch
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520303393
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In How Chiefs Became Kings, Patrick Vinton Kirch addresses a central problem in anthropological archaeology: the emergence of “archaic states” whose distinctive feature was divine kingship. Kirch takes as his focus the Hawaiian archipelago, commonly regarded as the archetype of a complex chiefdom. Integrating anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, traditional history, and theory, and drawing on significant contributions from his own four decades of research, Kirch argues that Hawaiian polities had become states before the time of Captain Cook’s voyage (1778-1779). The status of most archaic states is inferred from the archaeological record. But Kirch shows that because Hawai`i’s kingdoms were established relatively recently, they could be observed and recorded by Cook and other European voyagers. Substantive and provocative, this book makes a major contribution to the literature of precontact Hawai`i and illuminates Hawai`i’s importance in the global theory and literature about divine kingship, archaic states, and sociopolitical evolution.

How Chiefs Became Kings

How Chiefs Became Kings PDF Author: Patrick Vinton Kirch
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520303393
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
In How Chiefs Became Kings, Patrick Vinton Kirch addresses a central problem in anthropological archaeology: the emergence of “archaic states” whose distinctive feature was divine kingship. Kirch takes as his focus the Hawaiian archipelago, commonly regarded as the archetype of a complex chiefdom. Integrating anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, traditional history, and theory, and drawing on significant contributions from his own four decades of research, Kirch argues that Hawaiian polities had become states before the time of Captain Cook’s voyage (1778-1779). The status of most archaic states is inferred from the archaeological record. But Kirch shows that because Hawai`i’s kingdoms were established relatively recently, they could be observed and recorded by Cook and other European voyagers. Substantive and provocative, this book makes a major contribution to the literature of precontact Hawai`i and illuminates Hawai`i’s importance in the global theory and literature about divine kingship, archaic states, and sociopolitical evolution.

A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief

A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief PDF Author: Patrick Vinton Kirch
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520303415
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Tracing the origins of the Hawaiians and other Polynesians back to the shores of the South China Sea, archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch follows their voyages of discovery across the Pacific in this fascinating history of Hawaiian culture from about one thousand years ago. Combining more than four decades of his own research with Native Hawaiian oral traditions and the evidence of archaeology, Kirch puts a human face on the gradual rise to power of the Hawaiian god-kings, who by the late eighteenth century were locked in a series of wars for ultimate control of the entire archipelago. This lively, accessible chronicle works back from Captain James Cook’s encounter with the pristine kingdom in 1778, when the British explorers encountered an island civilization governed by rulers who could not be gazed upon by common people. Interweaving anecdotes from his own widespread travel and extensive archaeological investigations into the broader historical narrative, Kirch shows how the early Polynesian settlers of Hawai'i adapted to this new island landscape and created highly productive agricultural systems.

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Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 649

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Book Description


Transforming Hawai‘i

Transforming Hawai‘i PDF Author: Paul D’Arcy
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760461741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
This study examines the role of coercion in the unification of the Hawaiian Islands by Kamehameha I between 1782 and 1812 at a time of increasing European contact. Three interrelated themes in Hawaiian political evolution are examined: the balance between coercion and consent; the balance between general structural trends and specific individual styles of leadership and historical events; and the balance between indigenous and European factors. The resulting synthesis is a radical reinterpretation of Hawaiian warfare that treats it as an evolving process heavily imbued with cultural meaning. Hawaiian history is also shown to be characterised by fluid changing circumstances, including crucial turning points when options were adopted that took elements of Hawaiian society on paths of development that proved decisive for political unification. These watershed moments were neither inevitable nor predictable. Perhaps the greatest omission in the standard discourse on the political evolution of Hawaiian society is the almost total exclusion of modern indigenous Hawaiian scholarship on this topic. Modern historians from the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa argue that political leadership and socioeconomic organisation were much more concensus-based than is usually allowed for. Above all, this study finds modern indigenous Hawaiian studies a much better fit with the historical evidence than more conventional scholarship.

Braided Waters

Braided Waters PDF Author: Wade Graham
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520298594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Braided Waters sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii’s Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this study shows how the control of resources—especially water—in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. Wade Graham examines the ways environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras—a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history.

The Narrow Corridor

The Narrow Corridor PDF Author: Daron Acemoglu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224404
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
From the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics and the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail "Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." —Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise and fall based not on culture, geography, or chance, but on the power of their institutions. In their new book, they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history. Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats, or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society. There is a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, arrived at by a process of "enlightenment." This static view is a fantasy, the authors argue. In reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe’s early and recent history, the Zapotec civilization circa 500 BCE, and Lagos’s efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese imperial history, colonialism in the Pacific, India’s caste system, Saudi Arabia’s suffocating cage of norms, and the “Paper Leviathan” of many Latin American and African nations to show how countries can drift away from it, and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to achieve. Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more than ever, and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The danger on the horizon is not "just" the loss of our political freedom, however grim that is in itself; it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.

The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions

The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions PDF Author: Daniel Contreras
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317450620
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The impacts of climate change on human societies, and the roles those societies themselves play in altering their environments, appear in headlines more and more as concern over modern global climate change intensifies. Increasingly, archaeologists and paleoenvironmental scientists are looking to evidence from the human past to shed light on the processes which link environmental and cultural change. Establishing clear contemporaneity and correlation, and then moving beyond correlation to causation, remains as much a theoretical task as a methodological one. This book addresses this challenge by exploring new approaches to human-environment dynamics and confronting the key task of constructing arguments that can link the two in concrete and detailed ways. The contributors include researchers working in a wide variety of regions and time periods, including Mesoamerica, Mongolia, East Africa, the Amazon Basin, and the Island Pacific, among others. Using methodological vignettes from their own research, the contributors explore diverse approaches to human-environment dynamics, illustrating the manifold nature of the subject and suggesting a wide variety of strategies for approaching it. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in Archaeology, Paleoenvironmental Science, Ecology, and Geology.

International Institutions in World History

International Institutions in World History PDF Author: Laust Schouenborg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315409887
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
The discipline of IR has always suffered from a parochial occupation with the state and the Western system of states. This book presents a case for a basic reorientation of IR away from the state and towards the study of social institutions in the sense of patterned practices, ideas and norms/rules. The argument is that the state is an inherently modern phenomenon, a modern social institution, and that foundational concepts in IR should be based on a full appreciation of the wider record of human existence on earth, trans-historically and cross-culturally. This book will interest scholars and students within IR (particularly IR theory), anthropology, archaeology and sociology.

Leveraging Sovereignty

Leveraging Sovereignty PDF Author: J. Susan Corley
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824893743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Leveraging Sovereignty: Kauikeaouli’s Global Strategy for the Hawaiian Nation, 1825–1854 examines the leadership of Hawai‘i’s longest reigning monarch, King Kamehameha III. It highlights the early 1840s, when Kauikeaouli secured recognition from the United States, Britain, and France that he ruled over an independent and sovereign Hawaiian state. Britain and France, however, sought to limit his powers through forced extraterritorial treaties, and the king struggled to regain ruling control over key governance functions. At the same time, foreign merchants and traders increasingly dominated Hawai‘i’s economic activity, demanded institutional and social changes, and threatened to overwhelm the Hawaiian population already decimated by disease and out-migration. Kauikeaouli quickly responded to threats to the monarchy’s power with a comprehensive strategy to regain and maintain full functional control. In Leveraging Sovereignty, J. Susan Corley upends the popular narrative begun in Kauikeaouli’s own lifetime that his white ministers ruled in his stead. Adding a new layer of understanding, Corley’s meticulous research reveals insights into historical events and Kauikeaouli’s reign. She supports her findings of the king’s policies and tactical negotiations with an extensive use of Kamehameha III’s own commands as recorded in kingdom archives, letters and documents from government records, and contemporary Hawaiian- and English-language newspaper accounts. While this book includes an overview of the kingdom’s administrative structure in the 1840s, its analysis focuses on the origination, implementation, and effectiveness of key statecraft tactics. The king’s carefully planned strategy relied on the acquisition of western ministerial skills and of an English-language newspaper (the Polynesian) to publicly defend his sovereign rights and privileges at home and abroad. He ensured the enactment of legislation to defeat foreigners’ challenges by strengthening juridical processes and safeguarding land-title rights for Hawaiians, and he deftly managed the multistage renegotiation of unequal international treaties. By the end of his reign in 1854, Kamehameha III had succeeded: The king had reclaimed unrestricted power and authority over all governance areas of the independent, sovereign Hawaiian state. He delivered to his successor Kamehameha IV a restructured, constitutional state whose sovereign status was protected by the three maritime powers of that time.

Indigenous Textual Cultures

Indigenous Textual Cultures PDF Author: Tony Ballantyne
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 147801234X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
As modern European empires expanded, written language was critical to articulations of imperial authority and justifications of conquest. For imperial administrators and thinkers, the non-literacy of “native” societies demonstrated their primitiveness and inability to change. Yet as the contributors to Indigenous Textual Cultures make clear through cases from the Pacific Islands, Australasia, North America, and Africa, indigenous communities were highly adaptive and created novel, dynamic literary practices that preserved indigenous knowledge traditions. The contributors illustrate how modern literacy operated alongside orality rather than replacing it. Reconstructing multiple traditions of indigenous literacy and textual production, the contributors focus attention on the often hidden, forgotten, neglected, and marginalized cultural innovators who read, wrote, and used texts in endlessly creative ways. This volume demonstrates how the work of these innovators played pivotal roles in reimagining indigenous epistemologies, challenging colonial domination, and envisioning radical new futures. Contributors. Noelani Arista, Tony Ballantyne, Alban Bensa, Keith Thor Carlson, Evelyn Ellerman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Emma Hunter, Arini Loader, Adrian Muckle, Lachy Paterson, Laura Rademaker, Michael P. J. Reilly, Bruno Saura, Ivy T. Schweitzer, Angela Wanhalla