Introduction: Anthropology, Maori Tradition and Colonial Process

Abstract

The traditionalisation of Maori society has been a complex process that has displaced selected aspects of contemporary Maori society outside history, representing them as survivals from a pre-European Maori world. In contrast to the 'invention' or 'construction' of tradition, terms which imply agency at a particular point in time, 'traditionalisation' refers to a longer term process, beginning in the late nineteenth century and involving an interplay of forces especially commodification and state systematisation and a diverse range of agents: Maori leaders and tourist operators, state officials and artists, politicians and the odd anthropologist. An understanding of this process in New Zealand requires an analysis of the ways in which the projects of particular interested agents have converged and conflicted over time with respect to the reification and romanticisation of Maori cultural forms. This work has already begun. Over the past twenty years or so anthropologists and historians have been increasingly willing to look behind what Neich (1983) has termed 'the veil of orthodoxy' and examine transformations of Maori tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see, for example, Neich 1993; Simmons 1976; Sissons 1991; Sorrenson 1979; Thomas 1995). The structure of marae (ceremonial spaces) with their carved meeting houses and adjacent dining halls, marae protocols, 'tribal' organisations and 'canoe' confederations legitimised by migration narratives are among the more well-known examples of traditions that were radically transformed in the nineteenth century. This is not to suggest that these traditions were ever, in any way, inauthentic. It is simply to assert that they, like all traditions, have genealogies in both Foucauldian and Maori senses. Foucauldian because their emergence reflects new forms of power/knowledge associated with colonial state formation; Maori because they are products of a multitude of alliances and oppositions between kin working against and within these new regimes of power. To study genealogies of tradition is, therefore, to emphasise continuity over discontinuity particularly in relation to reifications of tradition within colonial and post-colonial society. Post-colonialism, 'a process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome' (Hall 1996:250), has meant quite different things for states and indigenous peoples. For states, international legitimacy and national sovereignty increasingly depend upon an ability to provide limited, affordable and bureaucratically controllable redress for legally defined colonial injustice (Sissons 1997). In New Zealand this has entailed the systematisation of Maori tradition in association with official 'bicultural' policies: the coining of Maori names for government departments; an increased use of Maori ceremonial traditions for official occasions; the