Spiritual Discourses in Hawaiian Indigenous Movement : Anti-Modernism Based on Modern Conditions

The indigenous people\u27s movement in contemporary Hawaii displays skepticism toward some aspects of modern culture, despite the fact that it is a civil rights movement that relies on such modern principles as democracy and human rights. Individuals involved in the movement retell Hawaiian religious tradition in their own words and reconstruct and interpret Hawaiian spirituality in diverse ways. Four typologies frequently appear in the spiritual discourses employed by this religio-cultural and political movement : 1) a compression of historicity through the narration of individual spiritual experiences, 2) outlining Hawaiian religiosity through comparisons to other religious traditions, 3) analogically discussing the spiritual relationship between Hawaiian cosmology and the body, and 4) affirmation of alliances with alternative cultural movements in the first world. These discourses, which express skepticism toward modernity, have nonetheless been realized through distinctively modern conditions. They have also been enabled by the availability of fragments of texts that have been preserved in the form of anthropological research and the use of comparative methodology that draws on anthropological resources, as well as the modern western notion of "anti-modernism.