Percepciones gerenciales y comportamiento estratégico

Such a dynamic traditionalism as suggested by Johnson and Pihama’s (1995) account may, however, still be difficult to achieve for some individuals of Maori descent. The

‘underlying essences’ of mana whenua and whakapapa, depending on how these are interpreted, may work to exclude individuals whose links to tribal origins and

t_rangawaewae have been lost, as suggested, for example, in Matahaere-Atariki’s references to landless southern Tahu women. While it is the position of, at least some, tribal authorities that all individuals of Maori descent can recover their whakapapa,94 in cases in which elders have died, or refuse to pass on the necessary knowledge, this may well be an impossible struggle (see for example, Stewart-Harawira, 1993:33). These difficulties of researching an uncertain or unknown whakapapa parallel those of occupying the hybrid Maori/Pakeha position discussed in Chapter Three. In both cases only strong and well-supported individuals will achieve their goal. For the rest, beyond the relational essences listed by Johnson and Pihama (1995), there is a case for a minimally essentialist definition of Maori in terms of descent itself.

A descent-based essentialism, as previously discussed in relation to Ihimaera (1998), is the minimum requirement to creating the distance from Pakeha which allows Maori autonomous development. Margery Fee (1989), in her discussion of Keri Hulme’s status as a Maori writer, argues that the demand for a biological basis to a Maori identity provides a minimal defence against assimilation. Fee writes in response to C.K. Stead’s (1985) attack on Keri Hulme’s achievement of an award for a Maori writer. Stead’s now familiar argument is that Hulme lacks both biological and cultural authenticity as a Maori:

Of Keri Hulme’s eight great-grandparents one only was Maori. Hulme was not brought up speaking Maori, though like many Pakeha New Zealanders she has acquired some in adult life. She claims to identify with the Maori part of her inheritance - not a disadvantageous identification at the present time - but it seems to me that some essential Maori elements in her novel are unconvincing. Her uses of Maori language and mythology strike me as willed, self-conscious, not inevitable, not entirely authentic (Stead, 1985:103-4).

94

This argument was made in resistance to the struggle of Urban Maori Authorities (UMAs) to gain a share of the fisheries settlement. The tribal position that everyone can whakapapa

undermines the basis of UMAs as representatives of Maori who identify with their urban base (whether or not they know their tribal origin).

Fee (1989:11-2) does not reject Stead’s critique outright as ‘anti-Maori’, because she argues that this is too easy and would mean failing to learn from his points. She agrees that the assertion of indigenous identity can be ‘dubious’ both racially and culturally, given the history of colonial appropriation and exploitation of the figure of the indigene (Fee, 1989:12) - to which I would add, given the history of assimilation also. Consequently, Fee (ibid) argues, ‘we must be highly suspicious of the motive behind texts that use indigenous themes and characters’. Unlike Stead however, Fee (1989:16) acknowledges that colonisation itself is responsible for this state of affairs and the partialised nature of Maori identity. Rather than Maori being blamed for their lack of ‘purity’, this historical causation must be remembered. And while indigenous ancestry is no guarantee of a Maori identity or cultural knowledge, descent can at least be ‘measured’ in a way that identification and socialisation cannot. Hence the requirement that an individual claiming to write as an indigene is at least of indigenous descent provides some safeguard against the ‘frequent facile exploitation of indigenous material by White writers’ (Fee, 1989:14-5).

In the context of a colonised minority people such as Maori, it seems that some form of ‘essence’ underpinning and safeguarding collective cultural identity is crucial to survival. The requirement of descent acts as a necessary, if not sufficient, basis for Maori identity claims. Beyond that, ‘tradition’, both pre-contact and colonial in origin, is a crucial source for forms of expression of that identity, an expression in which both contemporary and changing cultural forms are necessary to represent a ‘living’ culture and to guard against primitivist containment.

Conclusion

As a theoretical approach, strategic essentialism offers no more definitive solution to the problems of identity construction than do any of the other approaches discussed in earlier chapters. Further, I have argued that the equation of anti-essentialism with anti- substantivism is problematic in undercutting any possible ground for an autonomous politics of difference. As Modood (1998:380) argues, ‘surfing on the waves of deconstruction’ can be taken too far, resulting in a ‘post-self rather than [a] multi-self’.

Certainly, identity claims rely on the articulation of some ‘substance’, some positive content, and the conflation of all such claims as equally essentialist is of little political or analytic assistance. The historicised and constructionist approach to identity espoused by Hall (amongst others) and the Maori feminist academics discussed here, at least avoids the assertion of essence in terms of fixity and purity, allowing for the interweaving of elements of continuity and change. In the case of indigenous peoples, anything less than a dynamic construction of identity that accounts for indigenous ‘persistence’ (Lattas, 1993), or the longue durée of the indigene in Clifford’s (2001, p16 of 23) terms, fails to provide the basis for the agency Western peoples assume for themselves. It is clearly not a matter however of such historicised approaches offering any easy ‘truth’ to the substance of identity claims. This is precisely one of the gains of constructionism over assertions of purity and stasis. The narratives of history are always subject to revision and remain sites of contestation.

Finally, Modood (1998:381) also argues that the deconstructionist approach is based on the wrong kind of anti-essentialism, a sentiment echoed by Sayyid. Sayyid (2000:266-8) distinguishes between a universalist anti-essentialism which, as discussed above, critiques the essentialist claims of ‘others’ as purely derivative of the (universalist) West; and an anti-universalist anti-essentialism which, s/he argues, is necessary to undercut Western hegemony. Simply, only when attacks on one group’s essentialism are combined with a recognition of the ‘facticity’ of difference, or the plurality of epistemologies, can the universalising of the West be avoided. Western epistemologies and values must be seen as one set of particularities among many. This, Sayyid argues, requires taking the logic of multiculturalism seriously:

This logic should not be confused with recent debate regarding “clash of civilizations”. Multiculturalism does not mean simply the recognition that there are many cultures, nor that cultures are inherently locked in mortal combat with each other. Nor should “multicultural” be seen as a post-Holocaust euphemism for “race” or “nation”. The logic of multiculturalism is based on consequences arising out of the decentring of the West, in other words it is not an attempt to close the gap between the West and the centre; rather it is an attempt to explore the possibilities of widening the interval between the West and the idea of centre

... The cost of making a multicultural move is the abandonment of any investment in the uncontested universality of the western project (Sayyid, 2000:268).

Likewise, Clifford’s (1994:328) evocation of the possibility of ‘recovering non- Western, or not-only-Western, models for cosmopolitan life ... [as] resources for a fraught coexistence’ points in a similar direction.

In sum, the constructionist and historical approach to identity suggested here represents a return to the ‘substance’ of identity claims, with their problems of reductionism as noted in Chapter Two, but not to essentialism per se. I am convinced by the arguments canvassed in this thesis so far, that hold continuity and change, roots and routes, tradition and modernity in tension as the best means of asserting autonomy against domination from others. With this conclusion, my traverse of theories of identity comes to an end. I consider the assertion of a ‘persistent’ Maori identity to be a first step in moving ‘beyond’ colonialism. However, given the relational nature of colonialism, that first step requires a response from Pakeha that can affirm Maori autonomy. The issue of a non-colonial form of relation between Maori and Pakeha remains to be explored. With the aim of centring more directly on issues of relationality per se, in Part II of this thesis I explore theories of intersubjectivity.

Part II