‘We didn't want to do a dial-a-haka’: performing New Zealand nationhood in Turkey

Abstract

This paper analyses performances of nationhood by New Zealand sports tourists in Turkey. The Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey is significant in the imagined community of New Zealand, because it was where the Fifth Ottoman Army defeated the ‘Anzacs’, an acronym for the all-volunteer Australian and New Zealand Army Corps within the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, in the Battle of Gallipoli during WW1. Gallipoli was once a site for grieving pilgrims but has recently morphed into a ‘must-see’ tourist destination. This transformation has included sports tourism, like the annual Dardanelles strait swimming competition that is now an iconic global event. Using a perspective of nationalism and tourism ‘from below’ and qualitative methods, I show how New Zealanders' performances on a combined sport and military tour, especially performing haka, both intensified feelings of nationhood and engendered historical empathy with soldiers on both sides of the war at Gallipoli. I explain this serendipitous outcome by coexisting processes of everyday nationalism, communitas, deterritorialisation and reflexive embodiment.