The Cultural Power of Law? Conjunctive Readings

Sally Merry’s (1999) Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law provides a compelling account of the cultural transformation of the Kingdom of Hawaii in the nineteenth century. The focus is on the law, particularly on the manner in which Hawaiian alii (chiefs) and American lawyers and missionaries sought to make of Hawaii a modern, sovereign nation on the model of the ‘‘civilized world,’’ a process that demanded the dissolution of Hawaiian modes of governance and the concomitant contortions of the system of rank that they had entailed. It is also a narrative of the competing interests of American missionaries and American traders and merchants, who desired different ends but whose means sometimes had complementary effects. For example, missionary efforts to promote marital fidelity worked in tandem with the needs of emerging and transforming social hierarchies: Adulterers had the ‘‘choice’’ to work off their sentences by building roads for the chiefs. And people deemed (by missionaries) incapable of governing their sexual appetites could scarcely be trusted (by plantation owners) to govern their own nation (p. 250). Notions of the body, sexuality, gender, race, citizenship, and belonging are at the center of the transformations the book documents in a richly evocative account of the colonial disciplining of a Pacific people. At the same time, Merry shows how the disciplinary process was incomplete, fractured, and uncertain, and that colonized Hawaiians of both elite and commoner rank used the colonizing process at various times to further their own ends, as an arena for making claims to personhood. Women, for example, became objects of the law’s ‘‘surveillance and control’’ in the colonial policing of sexuality, but at the same time women were able to use the resources colonial law provided to challenge wife-battering (p. 265).