traditionalisation of the Maori meeting house, The

Oceania, Sep 1998 by Sissons, Jeffrey

ABSTRACT

By focusing on two successive phases in the traditionalisation of the Maori meeting house - exhibition and aestheticisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and standardisation and tribalisation during the 1930s and 1940s - I seek to illustrate how the diverse projects of national identity, tourist marketing, ethnology and state-directed rural development converged to displace meeting houses out of time. I argue that while the shortterm effect of this displacement was to suppress developing traditions of oppositional Maori agency this was not the case in the longer term, nor was it always the intention of those engaged in the process.

INTRODUCTION

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'Traditional' Maori culture is widely understood by New Zealanders to be most at home in small, relatively isolated, farming communities where it is talked into local landscapes and nurtured through daily interaction between kin. It is often considered to be most authentically and formally expressed during rituals of encounter (Salmond 1975) which begin when guests are called onto rural marae (ceremonial spaces) by women standing on the porches of elaborately carved meeting houses. Meeting houses, termed whare nui (large houses) or whare whakairo (carved houses), typically represent the ancestors of iwi (tribes) and local hapu (sub-tribes), and are said to embody their mana. Hence, stories about the construction, ownership, location and relocation of these buildings feature frequently in the oral histories of Maori communities. In Te Waimana, a Bay of Plenty community in which I did fieldwork in the late 1970s and early 1980s, for example, successive periods of social integration and social division were represented through narratives describing the construction and relocation of the oldest meeting house, Rahiri (Sissons 1991). Indeed, meeting houses like Rahiri are understood to have biographies, sometimes as eventful as those whom they represent.

While each of the twelve Te Waimana meeting houses was built in its own peculiar circumstances, often involving local factionalisms, I have recently come to realise that their construction also reflects much wider processes of invention and traditionalisation occurring within Maori communities throughout New Zealand. The two oldest houses in Te Waimana are representatives of a period when these large painted and carved buildings served as alternatives to churches and as venues for large intertribal gatherings held throughout the central and eastern North Island to discuss responses to colonialism. Rahiri, initially erected in the centre of the valley in about 1885, was built, like many others at the time, partly as a symbol of allegiance to Te Kooti Arikirangi, founder of the Ringatu movement, later to become the Ringatu Church. The second house, built in 1905, hosted large gatherings for followers of the prophetic leader, Rua Kenana, believed by some to have been Te Kooti's successor. The remaining ten meeting houses were built in Te Waimana after 1925, most between 1925 and 1940. Their construction, subsidised by the government through the Department of Native Affairs, was intended to advance much less radical political agendas. Foremost among these was an increase in Maori cultural pride and social integration, both locally and nationally, in order that Maori might better adapt to European and capitalist society.

In Te Waimana today, however, no clear distinction is made between the earlier prophetic meeting houses and those built subsequently; all now symbolise kin-group identity, and differences between them are thought to reflect the changing historical relations between hapu and whanau (extended families) in the valley. Furthermore, all are considered to be equally 'traditional'; all are whare tipuna, ancestral houses of ancient design, despite the fact that such structures were probably not built until the third decade of the nineteenth century and were virtually unknown in the eastern Bay of Plenty before the late 1860s. Even in the mid 1880s, when Rahiri was constructed, carved meeting houses would have been considered contemporary structures, innovative in design and decoration, and of highly-charged political significance.

But to say that 'traditional' Maori meeting houses were nineteenth-century innovations is not to say that they were invented as traditional. On the contrary, my thesis here is that meeting houses were invented forms that became traditional - nineteenth- century structures that underwent distinctive processes of traditionalisation. By traditionalisation I mean a process or set of processes through which aspects of contemporary culture come to be regarded as valued survivals from an earlier time. This assumes that there was a time when they were not so regarded - when they were either innovations or taken-for-granted features of daily life. In contrast to earlier `invention of tradition' approaches which sought to demystify tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Linnekin 1983; Hanson 1989) and which therefore raised spectres of inauthenticity (Jolly 1992), traditionalisation approaches emphasise a whole history of becoming traditional that is not reducible to acts of misrepresentation. The emphasis is on processes that result in the displacement of contemporary agency `out of time' rather than on the deliberate concealment or rationalisation of political agency in the present (e.g. Lawson 1996). Tradition becomes, then, less 'a contemporary interpretation of the past' (Linnekin 1990:152) than an historical accomplishment.

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traditionalisation of the Maori meeting house, The

Oceania, Sep 1998 by Sissons, Jeffrey

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