Translating ‘Sustainability’ in Hawai'i: The Utility of Semiotic Transformation in the Transmission of Culture

Abstract

This paper examines how businessmen and educators in Hawai'i have semiotically ‘translated’ sustainability to promote sustainability practices. Using data gathered from an educational institute that was co-founded by a corporation and a college, I analyse how the source discourse was, using Silverstein's term, ‘transformed’ so that the target discourse (or the signs used in the target discourse) invokes Hawaiian imageries rather than imageries of capitalism. Analyses reveal that changes to keywords of sustainability occur in a way that shifts possible local interpretations of them as cultural heritage, that is, as something ‘of Hawaiian’ and not ‘of white capitalists’. I argue that this translation effort assisted the concept's transmission by making ‘sustainability’ an inhabitable category of identity and by providing a model of a future in which locals can participate because it is now interpretable as having been modelled on the narrated past.

Keywords:

• Contextualisation
• Cultural Heritage
• Education
• Semiosis
• Sustainability
• Translation

Acknowledgements

Ideas in this paper have been presented at the 2009 ‘Understanding Sustainability’ Conference organised by the Portland Center for Public Humanities at Portland State University; the 2012 Biennial Convention of the Pacific and Asian Communication Association in Seoul; the 2012 International Conference organised by the Institute of Foreign Literature Studies at HUFS; the 2013 American Studies Association of Korea's International Conference; the 2014 International Conference of the Semiosis Research Center at HUFS; and the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

I am grateful to my informants at the ‘Sustainability Education Institute’ for granting me access to their workplace, allowing me to record their discussions and sharing their thoughts. Special thanks go to Janet and Claire. Many thanks to Philip Taylor and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful and encouraging comments.

Funding

This paper is a development of a small portion of one of my dissertation chapters (Koh 2010), which was funded by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research [2004, Grant No. 7224], University of Hawai‘i Foundation's SLIM Research Fellowship [2006, Document Number F058016] and University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts & Sciences Dissertation Fellowship [2007–2008]. This work, the writing of it, was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2014. All errors are my own.

Notes

[1] This work is based on twenty-four months of fieldwork during 2005 and 2006 in Hawai'i, USA. The data used here were gathered by means of research at what I call the ‘Sustainability Education Institute’ in 2005 and through interviews with individual local community members during 2005 and 2006.

[2] I thank Nicholas Harkness for directing my attention to Silverstein's (2003) and Handman's (2010) discussion of translation.

[3] Silverstein's (2003, 84) use of the term ‘transduction’ is based on an analogy to an energy transducer. In the transducer, ‘the two modes of mechanical energy are converted in a functionally regular way into another kind of energy altogether…with some slippage between the two systems of energy organization, due to “friction”, “inefficiencies”, “random contingent factors”’. He uses an example of a vocative form in the Worora language, and explains that when attempting to ‘translate’ it into Anglo-American, one is concerned with creating an equivalent ‘cultural system of value that endow the register forms with indexical meaningfulness—capturing this way how both source expression and target expression point to appropriate contexts and create effective contexts in systems of use as verbally mediated social action’ (Silverstein 2003, 85).

[4] In order to protect the identities of my informants, I do not specify the name of the island where I did fieldwork.

[5] I am grateful to Janet Six for sharing this insight and for generally helping me to think through the local interpretations of sustainability in the State of Hawai'i.

[6] This quote is taken from a website (http://sustainablemeasures.com/) that quotes Puanani Rogers, Team Leader for the Ho‘okipa Network, at a 1996 conference at Līhu‘e, Kaua‘i.

[7] Nygren (1999, 267) writes that local knowledge is often approached ‘as a scapegoat for underdevelopment or as a panacea for sustainability’. The empirical case presented here reveals that contemporary environmental-development knowledge production of sustainability at local sites builds on an internalisation of exactly what she has critiqued.

[8] A widely referenced definition of sustainability comes from the Brundtland Commission's (1987) definition of sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. This definition and other definitions that have been issued by major knowledge institutions encourage a kind of development that does not compromise any of the three so-called pillars of sustainability (that is, economy, environment and social equity).

[9] Mālama ‘āina is one of the most widely-used Hawaiian phrases in contemporary Hawai'i and is well understood by the predominantly native English speakers of the State as ‘care for the land’.

[10] I have chosen not to discuss the Hawaiian words used to translate ‘economy’ and ‘social equity’ as data in order to protect the identity of the Institute.