"No Ma Mamo: Traditional and Contemporary Hawaiian Beliefs and Practices," by Malcolm Naea Chun (Curriculum Research and Development Group/University of Hawai‘i Press, $40)
The astute reader doesn’t skip a book’s introductory material; these are, after all, notes the author thought important enough to present first.
In "No Na Mamo," Malcolm Naea Chun, a respected scholar, cultural specialist and educator, begins with, of all things, the illustrations, gathered from collections around the world.
So I began there, too, skipping ahead to examine the colored plates, some of the earliest Western art ever done in and about Hawaii. He was right: The details of clothing, housing, sacred objects, trading, craft, work and societal groups were, indeed, enlightening.
And often surprising.
Surprising, too, is Chun’s use of every form of knowledge, from chant to translated Hawaiian-language newspaper articles, to take us deeper into the layered meanings of words we thought we knew, most particularly "aloha."
The book — highly readable though of a scholarly nature — is not brand new; it is an ambitious bringing together of a series of short teaching booklets written for island students.
Throughout Chun’s detailed analysis of 12 Hawaiian values, one curious statement resonated: "There are no words in Hawaiian for values, morals or ethics."
These principles were lived, not prognosticated. "Pono" (the right, the honorable, the responsible, the selfless), for example, was differentiated from "hewa" (living wrongly without remorse or shame) not by do-this, don’t-do-that lectures. Instead, there was a well-understood but rigid hierarchy of teaching techniques, and there were treasured aphorisms and stories.
Two struck me strongly.
The first is a saying close to the well-known state motto, "Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono," usually rendered as "The life of the land is preserved in righteousness." Chun offers another thought: "E malama ia na pono o ka aina e na opio" — "The traditions of the land are preserved by the youth."
The other was the motto of Liholiho, King Kamehameha II: "Hookanaka." It means, Chun writes, not "be a man," but "be a person."
In these sayings, it seems, is everything Chun is trying to do: gather what we know (and it’s more than you’d think) and respectfully interpret what we know with the aid of respected elders, legends and life stories.
Less successful, perhaps, because much more daunting, are Chun’s attempts to conjecture about how these values can be translated to contemporary organizations or business environments.
"It is easier," he writes, "to slip into token measures such as using Hawaiian terms for noncultural policies and standards than it is to truly integrate the two."
But it is the challenge with which this worthy book leaves us.
