‘Āina under the influence
| Author | Marilyn Brown |
| Published date | 01 February 2003 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480603007001201 |
| Date | 01 February 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Theoretical Criminology
© 2003 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
1362–4806(200302)7:1
Vol. 7(1): 89–110; 030201
‘¯
Aina1 under the influence:
The criminalization of alcohol in
19th-century Hawai‘i
M A R I LY N B R O W N
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, USA
Abstract
The imposition of Western law in Hawai‘i extended novel sets of
regulation and control on the colonized Native Hawaiians. A
primary focus of the law was the control of drinking and the native
intoxicant ‘awa. Using perspectives that emphasize the governing
of populations through drinking and drug use, this case study
shows how overlapping programs of regulation and prohibition
grew out of a racialized discourse about the identity of the
colonized and the colonizer. This article contributes to the
governmentality literature through a sociological analysis of the
complexities of regulation and criminalization.
Key Words
alcohol prohibition • colonialism • governmentality • Native
Hawaiians • law
The regulation and prohibition of drink and other intoxicating compounds
share a common significance and origin in the governance of populations.
Both moves spring from impulses to indirectly govern populations rather
than targeting individuals who are having problems controlling their
consumption (see Valverde, 1998: 143). However, choices to regulate or
prohibit and thereby criminalize the use of intoxicants are not straightfor-
ward results of the perceived dangerousness of these chemical substances—
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they are products of political conflict, moral debate and processes of social
distinction. Historical examinations of law and law enforcement show that
moves to regulate substance use are generally hard-fought efforts to
demarcate the moral boundaries of groups in conflict, where the interests of
social elites trump those of non-elites.
This process can be theorized more clearly by looking at colonial
situations where multiple interest groups and cultures come into conflict. In
the colonial encounter, moves to regulate and criminalize behaviors are
shaped largely by discourses of race. This article will explore how various
modes of regulation were used in 19th-century colonial Hawai‘i2 to govern
populations. I will argue that both the move to criminalize drink and that
of regulating it arose from discourses that essentialized both whites and
Native Hawaiians. While the law declared whites were capable of adhering
to regulations controlling their alcohol use, it criminalized aboriginal
drinking and furthered the erosion of Native Hawaiian autonomy in their
Kingdom.
Regulation creates a limited temporal or social space for the consump-
tion or use of sumptuary products like alcohol or drugs, whereas criminal-
izing intoxicating compounds makes use or mere possession of them
unlawful. Criminalization may also pertain to states of body and mind,
such as drunkenness or being intoxicated. While discourses of health and
science inform the regulation of drink and drugs in contemporary societies,
this is a very recent rationale. During the 19th century and well into the
next, authorities explicitly drew upon knowledges about race, class and
gender to govern populations through consumption of intoxicating prod-
ucts.
Intoxicants: power, colonialism and race
Alcoholic beverages, psychoactive substances and even milder stimulants
have played important supporting roles in both class formation and
capitalist expansion across the globe. Engels famously recognized the role
that drink played in the subordination of the English working class (Singer,
1986). Similarly, Mintz (1985) illustrated the importance of gin, along with
stimulants like tea and sugar, in motivating reluctant workers during the
industrialization of Britain. A number of writers have pointed to the
prominent role that alcohol and drug regulation played in the subordina-
tion of indigenous groups under colonial and post-colonial rule (Dumett,
1974; Van Onselen, 1976; Sargent, 1979). Other authors offer accounts of
alcohol and drug trafficking as central features of alternative economies
(Crump, 1987; Bourgois, 1995). These dynamics of social control, class
formation and colonial relations in modernity have sometimes relied on the
promotion of alcohol or drugs, but more often have been deployed by
regulation of consumers through the products they consume.
Power is manifested in the discourse that accompanies the formation of
Brown—‘¯
Aina under the influence
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rules and regulations governing products with psychoactive properties.
Recent analysts of American drug policy have pointed to the racist origins
of the legal regulation and prohibition of certain intoxicants. The criminal-
ization of opium, marijuana and cocaine is rooted in a broader discourse of
racial and cultural conflicts. Becker (1963: 135–46) notes the connection
between racial fears about Mexicans and the eventual criminalization of
marijuana. Similarly, Hickman (2000) shows how anti-Chinese sentiment
dominated the discourse about addiction in late 19th-century USA, paving
the way for the eventual criminalization of opium. Up to the present day, it
is clear that the regulation of intoxicants commonly operates to extend
political, economic and legal control over social groups whether racializing
discourses are explicit or not.
Perspectives on regulation and prohibition
Whereas many methods of controlling the use of alcohol or drugs directly
target the person, this is only one mode of governance, as Valverde (1998)
notes. Governance also takes place in less direct ways through licensing
whereby drinkers (or consumers of drugs) are controlled through con-
straints on where consumption takes place, times of consumption, what
types of beverages might be consumed, and which categories of people may
consume them. Prohibition policies are particularly associated with the
expansion of the American West and incursions into Native American
territories. In 1802, Congress passed the first federal laws prohibiting the
sale or distribution of alcohol to Indians. Colonial authorities implemented
similar policies but little note was taken of their lack of success (Unrau,
1994: 524).
These racial prohibition policies were inherently steeped in contra-
dictions (Unrau, 1996). This became far more problematic as growing
numbers of whites moved west and more Native people were moved into
the regions known as Indian Country. Both state and federal laws set up
programs that prohibited selling liquor to Indians, but definitional prob-
lems mounted, confusing the prohibition project. These issues varied from
what constitutes ‘Indian Country’ and, later in the 19th century, how
Indians were to be defined (see also Valverde, 1998 for the Canadian
case).
These policies were often motivated by concerns over the alarming dying
off of native populations as well as fears of liquor-inspired disorder. In
common with other colonized aboriginal peoples, Native Americans suf-
fered from a host of problems related to the continual erosion of their
culture and subsistence resources, their numbers further devastated by
epidemics of diseases. But whites tended to reify the problems of Native
Americans to issues of drink and drunkenness, essentializing them as
childlike and incapable of self-control when it came to consuming liquor.
This knowledge of the nature of the native came to constitute a series of
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legal interventions into the situation of alcohol use by these aboriginal
peoples. Federal authorities developed policies intended to segregate
whites, who supplied the liquor and modeled poor drinking comportment,
from Native American groups. Colonists, explorers, traders and settlers
linked the natives’ serious troubles to a supposed vulnerability to the effects
of alcohol. The United States government adopted a paternalistic approach
to this problem by prohibition laws enacted early in the 19th century. The
Indian removals of the 19th century attempted to push them into spaces
where their drinking could be governed both by prohibition of alcohol and
by the exclusion of whites who supplied liquor (Unrau, 1996).
Colonial strategies to control native drink varied, depending on the
national origin of the imperialists, their own ideologies about alcohol and
the types of intoxicating products and related beliefs of the colonized. In
regions where alcohol was unknown, like most Pacific islands, the image of
the aboriginal as an innocent could be sustained in a way that was not
possible in regions like Africa where the colonized were viewed less
paternalistically (Valverde, 1998: 163). Across North America and the
islands of the Pacific, selling alcohol to native peoples was prohibited—in
some cases well into the late 20th century. Colonial authorities enacted
race-specific liquor prohibitions and disciplined those whites who sold or
distributed liquor to aboriginals. The reach of law was often limited,
however, with the enforcement of prohibitions being notoriously un-
successful. In some regions, enforcement did not penetrate areas that were
primarily under aboriginal control. Prohibiting the distribution and sales of
alcoholic beverages by whites could be marginally more effective than
attempts to enforce prohibition in these often sparsely populated aboriginal
territories.
In regions where dual legal systems arose, criminalization of native or
introduced intoxicants could be somewhat muted by lack of direct mecha-
nisms of enforcement. In other regions, a unitary legal system developed
which, while...
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