Actor-Network Theory and Traditional Cultural Properties: Exploring Irrigation as a Hybrid Network in 19TH CENTURY Hawai'i

Abstract

During the late 19th century, customary Hawaiian systems of mutual sharing and obligations between chiefs and commoners were reconstructed into questions of property ownership and rights. Water was integral to this situation. Hawaiian spiritual worldviews concerning water and a political economy that supported traditional irrigation practices were undermined as immigrants imported their own approaches to agriculture and water governance. This paper examines changing irrigation practices during the latter decades of the Kingdom of Hawai'i through the Latourian lens of hybrid networks, with the goal of promoting more nuanced and active articulations of Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs). Exploring hybrid networks – partially social, partially natural amalgamations bound up within their own historic and geographic conditioning – provides a means to connect with struggles over modernity and move beyond static notions of traditional culture or nature. If society is recognized as being carved into projects of modernity through networks associated with hybrids, then looking at the dynamic nature of water, culture, and the connections between them makes sense in identifying TCPs. This paper argues that TCP analyses should recognize change over time and spatial dynamics; explicitly acknowledge the significance of water as well as land; and assess relationships between nature and society through untangling hybrids.