HakaFracas? The Dialectics of Identity in Discussions of a Contemporary Maori Dance

Abstract

This paper analyses discussions of the haka (popularly translated as ‘the war dance of the Maori’) in three performative sites in Aotearoa/New Zealand: a national Maori dance competition, touristic ‘cultural experience’ programs in Rotorua, and a secondary school in Wellington. The discussions demonstrate that this dance has come to represent a variety of ‘identifications’ for the speakers. However, while the haka elicits multiple, related and sometimes conflicting identificatory possibilities for Maori-identified discussants (albeit within a limited range of positions), this is not the case for a group of non-Maori men reminiscing about their boyhood performances at school sporting events. Through the comparison of discussions of these three performance sites, this paper argues that haka conversations reveal dynamic creativity in discourses of identifications (intra-indigenous, collective indigenous, and nationalist) of some speakers but not of others.