Inventing politics

"Inventing Politics is a theoretical statement of a new kind of political anthropology. Through an extensive use of primary sources, including many contemporary Hawaiian-language newspapers and dictionaries, it argues that what informs our current understanding of politics was already present in the early nineteenth-century encounters between Hawaiians and foreigners - a reading that translates seemingly apolitical events into the language of politics and speaks to the fundamental question of whether politics is a functional aspect of every society or an invention based on specific cultural meanings and interests."--Jacket.