13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

WILLIAMS, Paul

Inventing Maori: the cultural politics of indigenous tradition in New Zealand

A decade ago three major New Zealand newspapers carried the provocative headline “US Expert Says Maori Culture Invented”. A flurry of controversy ensued; many Maori were angered that unsympathetic Pakeha had been handed apparently spurious information with which to discredit the fledgling Maori cultural renaissance. The US expert was anthropologist Alan Hanson, and the media story was based on an article written one year previously for the American Anthropologist journal. Engaging with the premise that tradition serves to validate the interests of its time by appealing to an inviolable or sacred past, Hanson adduces evidence to demonstrate how, in the late nineteenth century, anthropologically constructed Maori migration myths served an ideologically assimilationist purpose by emphasizing Maori similarities to European colonialist culture.

My paper focuses on the contemporary cultural politics that occurred when the expert definition of the Maori migration myths was challenged by a cultural outsider. I will argue that this case study demonstrates the limits of an objectivist tradition invention anthropology. Hanson identifies Maori engagement with migration myths in the very different environment of the contemporary Maori cultural renaissance as only an example of the re-invention of tradition. By contrast, I will argue that since Maori now attach radically different political meaning to migration myths and assert cultural ownership over them, this reclamation is much more significant: it is the historical basis for a contemporary Maori political ideology. It is the nature, legitimacy and structure of the state that is being reinterpreted through debate about Maori tradition. Further, I posit that in postcolonial nations there can only be tension between ideas of culture and identity that privilege heritage and origin, and those that privilege new combinations and relocations. The contemporary rearticulation of migration myths forms part of an ideology that should be recognized not as inauthentic or helplessly dislocated, but as an integral part of the re-association of Maori with their own history, from which they have long been alienated.