Anthropology, Tourism and Protecting One’s Own: The Ethics of Representing Polynesian Cultural Identity by Marianne E. MacKinnon, B.A. Hons. A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Anthropology Department of Sociology and Anthropology Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario January, 2005 © 2005, Marianne E. MacKinnon Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 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The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these. While these forms may be includedBien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. i * i Canada Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract: Many Polynesian cultures have “persisted with few, or no, native-language speakers, as fervent Christians, and with ‘modern’ family structures, involvement in capitalist economies, and new social roles for women and men” (Clifford 2001:478). Can Polynesians protect themselves in power charged, unequal situations, created from the colonial carving up of the Polynesian cultural area into many individual nation-states? If so, how? And how do differently positioned authorities represent living cultures? The academic debates about cultural ‘inventions’ and ‘authenticity,’ ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’ and the organic analogies implying death requiring re-discovery, revival or salvage processes, are highly contested in the Pacific, simply because these are the very analytical categories that obscure substantive issues that bind and constrain processes of social and cultural change. It is these binding processes, designed at the local, regional, and international levels of the multinational tourism and economic development aid industries, that are the fundamental components of this thesis. ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents: 1. You can’t get there from here 1 2. The clash of worldviews 7 3. Through Euronesian eyes 25 4. Are tourists really guests? 35 5. Cultures on the move 50 6. Tonga and Samoa 68 a. The Kingdom of Tonga 73 b. The Independent State of Samoa 79 7. Redefining human rights 84 8. Towards sustainability 101 9. Protecting one’s own 109 10. Bibliography 116 iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. List of Illustrations: Illustration 1 — Ocean Routes map 51 Illustration 2 — Polynesian Triangle map 54 Illustration 3 — Settlement Timelines map 66 Illustration 4 — The Kingdom of Tonga map 74 Illustration 5 — The Independent State of Samoa map 80 iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 You can’t get there from here Emile Durkheim presented a fundamental question: How do we determine the degree of well-being, comfort or luxury that is appropriate for a human being? According to Durkheim, as a moral question, it is one that cannot be answered strictly from an economic point of view. It has to be addressed in terms of moral authority, or, as John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill call it, the emotional realm of the superiority “custom” (Mill and Mill 1970[1832, 1851:98, 1869]), in order to understand the processes and institutions that structure the relationships between “equal beings, or between a superior and an inferior, between a protector and a dependent” (Mill and Mill 1970[1832:73, 1851, 1869]). Durkheim asserts that social change is evolutionary and ordered so that as mechanical solidarity (group consciousness) decreases, organic solidarity (individual consciousness) increases, meaning that the “substance of social life must enter into entirely new combinations in order to organise itself upon completely different foundations. But the old structure, so far as it persists, is opposed to this. That is why it must disappear” (Durkheim reproduced in Abdo 1996:122; Urry 1995:8). The state apparatus required to manage and control individual behaviour ultimately replaces mechanical/collective forms of organizing society, and institutes the new form expressed as the institutionalization of personal life, leading him to conclude that governance involved conflict at its core, especially in terms of social inclusion and/or exclusionary practices, such as the granting of certain freedoms, access to resources, and rights of political representation that can be automatically translated into legitimacy, status and authority. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. It is clear that the form of governance as implemented during the colonial era throughout the Pacific is being replicated today, but on a much larger global scale. The previous process of “colonial exploitation... varied widely, according to the resources of each area and the interests of the colonizers.... to make profits from different peoples and their lands, whether through extracting wealth, using native labour, or decimating indigenous populations in order to establish settlements in their territories” (Etienne and Leacock 1980:16). Once dependence upon “goods [had] replaced goods they no longer produced or which had become new necessities... colonizers addressed their demands and their technical innovations to men, thus favoring men’s access to cash, the economic dependency of women and, as a result, the emergence of the patriarchal nuclear family” (Etienne and Leacock 1980:19; see also Leacock 1980:27; Bourgeault 1983). The imposition of the colonial state to manage all this followed shortly thereafter. Capitalism has ultimately become a global exploitation system, where multinational corporations move about the globe operating freely outside their home countries in order to avoid the limitations of trade union demands for living wages, social benefits or stringent health, safety and environmental standards. The question is whether the entire globe can sustain the same level of consumption of non-renewable resources as the industrially developed ‘North.’ Today, indigenous groups are up against corporate wealth and power and the state combined, highlighting the relevance of Durkheim’s work once again. Durkheim’s attention to conflict of social forces out of which “individual freedoms are born” (Durkheim reproduced in Abdo 1996:152) means that the state should not be viewed as merely a regulator and administrator but an entity that should be required to establish the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 conditions for conflict resolution in order to address the main question of determining the degree of well-being a society should experience. Herein lies the problem today: “public agents... social workers, health care practitioners and police... trained in ‘multicultural awareness’” (Vertovec 1997:58) provide a management and service delivery role, not a political one that would allow for the inclusion of previously silenced voices in the decision-making frameworks of society. The management function performed by individual governments cannot guarantee that the needs of all citizens in the world will be met or even take into account the needs of citizens outside their own borders, simply because the management function is significantly constrained by fiscal dimensions, compounded by both data collection and measurement problems as they relate to the institutional response systems and the organizational functions of policy implementation and conflict resolution procedures (see Keller 1996:18). This management function of government is quite different from the political function of determining