Pu'u Kohola
spatial genealogy of a Hawaiian symbolic landscape
pp. 91-108
in: Gary Backhaus, John Murungi (eds), Symbolic landscapes, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
This chapter highlights our contention that symbolization is not merely an act of cognition, but rather a process of enactment. Historical events are lived on the basis of how they manifest in the shaping of the present. Experiences of contemporary Native Hawaiians reflect the presence of past layers that are a precognitive witnessing through their body schema, the behaviors that express the meaning of their existential situations. The Pu'u Kohola commemorative ceremony lends credence that an intellectualist notion of symbolization is anemic, an insufficient constitution of meaning. Hawaiians have taken care to enact a symbolic event that resonates with their experiences, expressive of a lived-history, the sedimentation of layers of existential meaning that needs to be symbolically gestured in the confirmation of identities. The ceremony translates this meaning of the "who—landscape intertwining" into a spatialized/spatializing symbolic incorporation/ek-stasis, intensified and heightened through an embodied participatory sociality.