Early pacific encounters and masculinity war, sex, and christianity in Hawai‘i

Abstract

Anthropology explores gender as a social construct, performed in a variety of ways that are shaped by social and economic conditions and are part of a sex/gender system. Analyzing masculinities during a period of encounter between two very different sex/ gender systems provides a valuable way to see how the ideals of masculinity shape these interactions, how they change, and to what extent they remain stable despite dramatic political and economic change. In the first 50 years of encounter in Hawai‘i, from 1778 to about 1830, a prosperous set of chiefdoms encountered a wave of European and American explorers, merchants, whalers, and missionaries arriving on its shores. Tracing how the newcomers’ ideas of masculinity intersected with those of the Hawaiians shows how areas of convergence and divergence in the sex/gender systems shaped the nature of the interactions and, to some extent, the relative power of each side.