ABSTRACT
Who is a host? What makes one group of people ‘guests’ or ‘immigrants’ and another ‘hosts’ or ‘locals’? On the surface, this appears straightforward: migrants come from elsewhere and hosts are already there. But this simple guest/host distinction is not always so clear in practice. Drawing on ethnography with hippies and younger drop outs who have moved from the mainland United States of America to the Big Island of Hawai‘i, I explore some of the implications of who guests choose to recognise as hosts. I focus in particular on one hippie, Dominic, who ‘dropped out’ of the University of Hawai‘i and, as he saw it, mainstream American society in 1968 when he moved to the Puna district of the Big Island ‘to grow ’erb’ (cannabis), which he has been doing ever since. Through Dominic and his interactions with his Hawaiian neighbours, I highlight the importance of expectation in processes of host-making. Dominic and fellow drop out immigrants arrived in Hawai‘i carrying particular (often New Age) assumptions and expectations about indigenous people, expectations left largely unmet in social life. Those Dominic expected to be idealised hosts turned out not to be, and so became for him just another set of colonisers in the islands. Dominic creatively reframed the concept of ‘host’ to take into account these unfulfilled expectations. It is these unmet expectations which lie at the heart of this chapter.
