Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii

This book is a study of Hawaiian sacrificial rituals in their social and cosmological context. But since sacrifices accompany every important social act and reproduce mental and social strucrurcs, it is also, by necessity, a study of Hawaiian culture and society in general. The book is divided into three parts. In the first I attempt to give a systematic account of Hawaiian religious notions, the most important of which is nlmn, "deity." A deity is the personified and naturalized concept of a human subject defined by his predicates, the most important of which is the aptitude to perform certain actions in certain social contexts. Thus a deity includes the interrelated concepts of a subject, his actions, and their social contexts. A concept is a general idea; bur this idea is personified, given a concrete (albeit imaginary) form; therefore it becomes a type. Indeed, the latter is defined as an "crre c01Jcret, recl ou imaginaire, qui CSt reprcsentatif d'une classc d'ctrcs" because it is "ee qui cn presente In forme la plus characteristique ou la plus parfaite" (Lalande 1960, 1155-56). Since as types the deities personify classes of moral, social beings, I consider them as moral, social species as well. In sum, "concept," "type," and "species" can all be used, depending on the context, to designate what the deities stand for.