Prof. Greg Johnson, former Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, studies repatriation and reburial disputes in American Indian and Hawaiian contexts, as a means to understand the ways religious claims are announced, enlivened, and contested in the contemporary moment. He was a guest lecturer at UA last year and has written the following unsolicited response to a recent post on our grad blog.

In your face resistance is a hallmark of Hawaiian culture. Colin McElvenny gets that right, and I find his thoughts interesting and provocative. I simply want to round out the picture a bit by way of adding a few observations pointing to the historical depth and political contexts of this phenomenon. Continue reading →