“PŪʻALI KALO I KA WAI ʻOLE”: HARM, CARE, AND THE UNEVEN GROWTH OF A HOUSELESS COMMUNITY

Abstract

This work is a longitudinal ethnographic study of Kīpuka ʻAineamalu, a self-organized houseless community in Waiʻanae, Oʻahu. It explores how people living at the margins of state support construct systems of care, governance, and moral order through everyday acts of pilina (relational connection), kuleana (responsibility), kōkua (aid) and pono (ethical balance). Drawing on 2+ years of immersive, participatory fieldwork from 2020-2022, the study traces how village residents navigate overlapping experiences and histories of abandonment, interpersonal harm, and institutional betrayal – and how they build fragile but meaningful forms of collective relational life. Rather than framing care and harm as opposites, this study traces their entanglement. The very systems that offer refuge can also wound; practices of care can become coercive; and structures of support can reproduce the logics of control. Similarly, autonomy and control are not framed as static opposites but dynamically linked: residents sought freedom from surveillance, paternalism, and harm even as collective life in the village required some level of mutual accountability and shared obligation which shifted in their intensity. The village’s moral order emerged through this tension – between freedom and kuleana, care and enforcement – and was continually reshaped by internal strain and external scrutiny. This paper engages and extends three theoretical frameworks: relational sociology, dissipative structures theory, and charismatic authority. It argues that authority in such communities emerges not just from formal roles, but from relational presence and ethical action; that governance unfolds not through institutional stability but through adaptive reconfiguration, particularly to external pressures and scrutiny; and that care, though vital, can become strained under pressure to perform legitimacy and compliance. Leadership, pilina, and moral authority were not fixed assets but relational effects – grown, tested, and sometimes lost in the rhythms of everyday life. Through close analysis of daily life, leadership dynamics, and moments of strain, this study contributes to the sociology of homelessness, care, governance, and grassroots movements. It challenges dominant policy logics that equate success with compliance or exit, and instead calls for frameworks that recognize dignity, presence, and participation as vital metrics of social life. The ʻōlelo noʻeau that titles this work – Pūʻali Kalo i ka Wai ʻOle ("Taro grows misshapen when it lacks water") – names a core insight: communities can endure even when those who populate them have coped with a dearth of foundational care and when the community itself is under duress, but what grows in such conditions is inevitably strained. Still, even misshapen kalo strives toward the light. It does not always thrive, but most of the time, it survives.Sociolog