L. R. McBride (1926–1993)

In ancient Hawai'i the kahuna were for more than the priests of a religious order. They were experts, trained in a variety of skills and occupations, the learned and porfessional men and women of their time. On them rested the responsibility of preserving and advancing knowledge within their specific discipline. They arrived at their positions only after more than two decades of training.

L. R. McBride collected information about the kanuna for many years through extensive research in 19th century writings and interviews with Hawaiian people. In this fascinating account he gives an accurate and unsensational account of what the kahuna meant in the Hawaiian culture of long ago. McBride includes fascinating legends and stories concerning individual kahuna. Illustrated with reproductions of historic prints, photographs and drawings by the author and others, The Kahuna presents a readable introduction to a fascinating aspect of ancient Hawaiian culture.

Contents

Foreword
Who were the Kahuna?
The origins of the kahuna
The versatile kahuna
Astronomers and navigators
Botanists and agriculturists
The geologists
The meteorologists
Artists and poets
Healers
Other professions
Sorcrers
The power of words
In conclusion
Additions and corrections 1983
Bibliography
Additions and corrections 2000
Bibliography 2000
Glossary
About the author… (mehr)

If you've ever read a collection of "true" ghost stories, this is similar, only about the kāhuna. It is a collection of (mostly unsourced) statements purporting to demonstrate that the Hawaiians, like all non-industrialized societies colonized by Europeans, knew more about the world and the universe than Europeans did prior to the 20th century. True? Some of it. Possibly. Good luck identifying which parts, though. It is folklore presented uncritically as anthropology or history, and as long as you take it as such, it's tolerable.

What's intolerable is the writing . . . style, shall we say? The chapter organization is fair, but below that it's crap. Within each chapter the train of thought meanders. Sometimes one paragraph accommodates several ideas, sometimes one idea is discussed in the course of several paragraphs (and the meandering can make that hard to follow). Many, many Hawaiian words are provided, to no purpose that I can tell. If this were a technical work and McBride wanted to be clear what Hawaiian concept he was glossing in English, that would be fine; but it's not a technical work. The writing is what I would expect from a middle-school term paper.

Evidently it was originally intended as a (possibly souvenir?) corrective to an implied popular American conception of the kāhuna as 'witch doctors.' From that perspective it's interesting as an artifact of cultural politics, for which the veracity of specifics isn't the goal: driving out the notion that the Hawaiians were benighted heathens is.… (mehr)