EL CONTEXTO INSTITUCIONAL

Culture never stands alone but always participates in a conflictual economy acting out the tension between sameness and difference, comparison and differentiation, unity and diversity, cohesion and dispersion, containment and subversion (Young, 1995:53).

The focus of Part I of this thesis is what ‘makes up’ (Hacking, 1986) the identities of ‘Maori’ and ‘Pakeha’. In focussing on the ‘what’ of these identities, I am focussing on claims made about what constitutes Maori and Pakeha identities. Thus I am interested in the claims made for ‘Maori’ and ‘Pakeha’ as collective categories which unite and differentiate particular New Zealanders.10

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Richard Handler (1994:28) distinguishes between three aspects of human experience to which the concept of identity refers: to the individual, to the collective and to the relationship between the individual and collective. While my focus is the second of these, inevitably, given that it is individuals who bring collectivities into being and maintain them in their speech and action, the relationship between the individual and the collective appears here also.

Typically, given that these are cultural categories, these claims are made up of assertions of commonality and difference in terms of the significance of shared descent, common practices and values, specific relations to place (as indicated in the opening of Chapter One) and shared historical experience. However, I am not interested here in the anthropological particularities of culture, such as rituals, arts, belief systems and practices. Rather, I am interested in the claims made about the nature of the ‘substance’ of Maori and Pakeha. In other words, I am interested in the everyday theories and philosophies that underpin the identity claims

made by New Zealanders as they make sense of their own cultural location and those of their neighbours. Specifically I look at whether or not they conceive of ‘Maori’ and ‘Pakeha’ in essentialist or constructionist terms.

The debates over the place of essentialism and constructionism in the theorisation of identity seem to have reached a state of intellectual exhaustion. Constructionism was originally seen as a means to escape the problems of determinism associated with essentialism. Gradually, however, constructionism has also come to be seen to have its limits and the ‘strategic’ value of essentialism has been reasserted (see for example, Calhoun 1994; Hall, 1996a). Why retrace this now familiar ground? I do so here for a number of related reasons. Firstly, I want to bring these debates to bear on the identities of Maori and Pakeha. Secondly, in doing so, I am interested in the political effects of these modes of theorising in relation to the specific identities of indigene and settler. In this sense I am interested in the particularities of identity politics in the indigene-settler relation. Finally, I am interested in exposing the ongoing traces of colonial dynamics in these assertions of identity and in uncovering any potential offered within these modes of theorising to escape those dynamics. Relevant to this aim is Stuart Hall’s argument that identity, despite the problems of its oscillation between essentialism and constructionism, is still central to questions of ‘agency and politics’ (Hall, 1996a:2). In both these senses identity claims are crucial to the practices of resistance and assertions of autonomy of peoples who have been, and continue to be, oppressed by a range of categorical identities. As such, identity claims remain an important site to investigate the possibilities of moving ‘beyond’ colonial identities and modes of relating.

My discussion of constructionist accounts of identity centres on the concept of hybridity, as the other of essentialism. Robert Young, for example, argues that ‘[h]ybridity ... is a key term in that wherever it emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism’ (Young, 1995:27). For a number of reasons, discussions of constructionism in relation to cultural identities utilise this concept. To begin with, both terms arise in association with conceptions of nature and the organic. Raymond Williams (1983:87-93) has traced the early associations of ‘culture’ with the cultivation of crops and animals. Hybridity, similarly, arises originally in the natural sciences to refer to the cross-breeding of plants and animals. This scientific origin led easily to the

use of hybridity within scientific racism to refer to ‘racial mixtures’ and, from there, to its use in contemporary cultural theory (Young, 1995:5-6). Broadly, within this body of theory hybridity has come to signify movement and combination, against essentialism’s stasis and purity. While, in general, the focus of the following chapters, including the discussion of hybridity, is on claims regarding the ‘substance’ of identities as stated above, there is one exception. Hybridity, as developed in the work of Homi Bhabha, refers to identity as process, to movement itself, in an attempt to make a radical break with the idea of identities having ‘substance’ at all.

The structure of this part of the thesis traces the theoretical movement from essentialism, through versions of hybridity, and back to (strategic) essentialism again. In doing so, it parallels what Brian Stross (1999) has termed the ‘hybridity cycle’. This term refers to a diachronic process by which mixtures of ‘pure’ cultural forms create new ‘hybrid’ ones, which eventually themselves become new ‘pure’ forms, and the cycle begins again. Similarly here I follow the diachronic trajectory of identity theorising in academic debate from essentialism, through hybridity, and back to a new version of essentialism. While the discussion of strategic essentialism might suggest a return to the essentialism of Chapter Two, I argue that it is a significantly different, ‘new’ form. These chapters also represent a cycle in that they move from consideration of the substance of identities (essence or hybrid) to consideration of the process of identity construction (performative hybridity) and back to issues of substance again.