Matriz de análisis: significaciones imaginarias instituyentes

The concept of hybridity is commonly used in New Zealand as a way of thinking about the processes of identity negotiation and identity construction for people who identify with more than one ethnic group. Many authors have used hybridity to describe people of Māori and Pākehā heritage, for example Bell (2004a, 2004b), Meredith (1999b), Moeke-Maxwell (2005), and Webber (2008). Hybridity can be defined as the “forms of mixture and combination that result from culture contact” (Bell, 2004a, p. 125). It refers to the process through which new identities are created and how identities change over time. As hybridity focuses on mixture, plurality and change, it is used to challenge and disrupt essentialist ideas about culture and ethnicity (Meredith, 1999b). The acknowledgement of hybrid identities, such as Asian-American, Fijian Indian, or Black British, helps to foster the idea that ethnic or cultural identities are not static, singular, bounded entities that are set in stone. Rather, people who identify with a mixed or hybrid identity help to demonstrate that identities can be inclusive of people from different backgrounds and heritages (Bell, 2004a). The notion of ‘hybridity’ to describe multiple ethnic identities comes from biology, where two species combine to create a new, hybrid variety. Such hybrid pairings could result in a more robust and resilient offspring, or a weaker, even a sterile, combination of the two parent specimens. During the nineteenth century, the same thinking was applied to people who were coming into contact with different groups through the process of colonialism (Bell, 2004a).

Nineteenth-century race theory held that white, European people were naturally superior to people from other parts of the world—people who looked different, who lived in different ways, and who constituted different ‘races’. The process of colonialism was an attempt to ‘civilise’ the ‘natives’ in colonial territories, to assimilate them into European ways of living and thinking. Bell (2004a) points out that this contact between peoples was only intended

to move in one direction, with the natives becoming more like the Europeans. Any movement in the other direction “was considered a form of ‘taint’ or degradation of European racial essence and superiority” (p. 124). The trap inherent in this logic is that the ‘natives’ could never assimilate fully, could never change their biological makeup, and therefore would always retain elements of their own culture. The term ‘hybrid’ was employed to describe people caught in this trap—who adopted parts of colonial culture, but could never completely assimilate (Bell, 2004a).

More recently, the notion of hybridity has been reclaimed and applied to constructionist understandings of ethnicity (Bell, 2004a). Bell (2004b) argues that there are two types of hybridity discussed in the literature, ontological hybridity and performative hybridity. The first, she terms ‘ontological hybridity’ because it focuses on different types of reality, on different mixtures of cultures or ancestral heritage. Ontological hybridity arises out of contact between different groups of people—through migration or through mixed parentage. The mixing that is occurring in this type of hybridity is the mixing of culture or ethnicity, or what Bell (2004b) calls the “‘substance’ of identity claims” (p. 76). The focus is on the product of the mixture, or on the person and how they identify themselves and negotiate their multiple identities.

Performative hybridity, on the other hand, focuses more on the process of mixing. This type of hybridity draws on the work of Homi Bhabha (1994). For Bhabha, hybridity refers to something new that emerges from the encounter between coloniser and colonised. It refers to the space between these two identities, a space Bhabha calls the ‘third space’ (Meredith, 1999b). In the third space, identities are played out, performed, practiced and enunciated, and assimilation is resisted (Bell, 2004b). In the third space, “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; […] even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 37). Bhabha’s performative hybridity is utterly anti-essentialist. For him, “no identity has an originary essence. Rather, all are derivative, constituted in and through difference” (Bell, 2004b, p. 106). For Bhabha, all identities are hybrid.

For the purposes of this thesis, ontological hybridity is a far more useful way of conceptualising multiple ethnic identities than performative hybridity. Ontological hybridity is a step beyond essentialism, where ethnic identity is seen as fixed and unchanging, but it does not take hybridity into the realms of the abstract in the same manner as performative hybridity. People of mixed descent or those who have experience of different cultures have the choice to assert a hybrid identity, but this choice is constrained

by the ethnicities of their parents or by the cultures in which they live—the ‘substance’ of their lives, in Bell’s (2004b) terms. An ontologically hybrid identity is grounded in these ethnic or cultural elements, elements that still have essentialist undertones of what a ‘proper’ member of an ethnic or cultural group acts like and looks like.

Bell (2004b) discusses two different types of ontological hybridity: doubled and syncretic. A doubled identity is one where the distinctiveness of the two original identities is maintained and combined into a hyphenated identity. Examples include African-American or Asian-British identities. A syncretic identity is a fused or blended identity, where the constituent identities have been subsumed into a new, singular identity. In the New Zealand context, both Māori and Pākehā identities are syncretic identities—blended identities that arose out of the experience of colonial contact. Prior to the arrival of European settlers, Māori identified themselves in terms of their whānau (family), hapū (sub-tribe) or iwi (tribe). The term ‘Māori’ came into use as a way of distinguishing the original people of New Zealand from the new settlers (Webber, 2008). Likewise, Pākehā is a relational identity, only having meaning in contrast with Māori identity (Bell, 1996, 2004b). People from many different white European backgrounds came to be known as Pākehā (or New Zealand European; see Chapter Four), as a means of defining themselves as one group of New Zealanders who were not Māori (Bell, 2004b).

Syncretic hybridities demonstrate that ethnic identities can be ‘opened up’ to include diversity and help to challenge essentialism by showing that identities are not fixed and absolute but can change and evolve over time (Bell, 2004a, 2004b). Doubled hybridities help to show that binary, ‘either or’ distinctions between ethnic groups or cultures are artificial (Bell, 2004b). People can and do cross the boundaries between ethnic groups, through processes such as self-identification and social ascription (how you identify yourself and how others identify you), and forces such as immigration, marriage, political power and representation, and the government policies that regulate these forces (Barth, 1969; Nagel, 1994). In addition, doubled hybridities often reflect the lived experience of individuals who identify with more than one ethnic group, as they negotiate their multiple ancestries and cultural experiences (Bell, 2004b).

The value of using theories of hybridity in New Zealand is that they help to make sense of the experiences of people with mixed backgrounds. Meredith (1999b) conceptualises the person of the Māori-Pākehā hybrid as a ‘cultural lubricant’ who can help to translate and negotiate between the two groups. Likewise, Moeke-Maxwell (2005) sees Māori-Pākehā

women as able to cross boundaries and translate between cultures, thus helping to disrupt and resist essentialising notions of what it is to ‘be Māori’.