Cultural Authentication of Hawaiian Quilting in the Early 19th Century

Abstract

Hawaiian quilting is a form of material culture that developed through the interaction of Polynesian and American design traditions as westernization occurred in Hawaii in the early nineteenth century. Based on eight years of research, this paper presents the early design evolution of Hawaiian quilting and examines the usefulness of the cultural authentication model (Eicher and Erekosima, 1980) for an examination of the cultural diffusion of textiles. While this concept proposed that four stages (selection, characterization, incorporation and transition) would occur in a fixed order, in the Hawaiian case the stages occurred in a different order. This study provides support for the idea that the order of stages is not a critical part of the concept, as has been suggested in some earlier studies focused on assimilation in dress. When an indigenous culture adopts and incorporates a western item, it is culturally authentic by virtue of its cultural embeddedness.