The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand

2. The Class Act of Guide Maggie: Cosmopolitesse, Publics, and Participatory Anthropology

At the turn of the twentieth century, the small Māori village of Whakarewarewa , at the heart of New Zealand’s isolated inland thermal district, played host to tourists by the thousands. They came to soak and socialize at the spa built by the government in the nearby town of Rotorua and to sightsee, taking in the widely touted geological wonders of the region, at their most spectacular on the government reserve that adjoined the Māori village. And they came to encounter “the Maori at Home,” as promised in the guidebooks and pamphlets published by the government and tour companies. An afternoon at “Whaka” might be spent gawking at the bizarre spectacle of the villagers living amid fumaroles and boiling pools of mud, chatting to the women cooking and laundering in the hot pools, or watching the children diving from Puarenga Bridge to retrieve the coins that tourists tossed into the stream below. Wait at the bridge for a moment, and a Māori woman would approach, offering (for a fee of one shilling) to guide tourists around the village and reserve. In her care, they would learn something of the traditional ways of the region’s people and the stories that attached to each geological feature—this pool, the place where a famous war chief met a grisly end, or that spring, valued for its curative properties.Truly discovering Māori manners, customs, and “quaint thermal lore,” tourists opined, required “dealing with everything first hand,” and a Māori informant was considered indispensable to such self-appointed ethnographers.1 44 c h a p t e r 2 The Class Act of Guide Maggie: Cosmopolitesse, Publics, and Participatory Anthropology To round off the day, a tourist might spend an evening at Charles Nelson’s nearby Geyser Hotel, enjoying a short concert of haka, poi dances, Māori song, and English glees, quartets, and parlor tunes, by a dozen Māori from Whakarewarewa, followed perhaps by a flutter on the dance floor with one of the pretty young performers. A gentleman might then adjourn to Nelson’s drawing room to discourse with fellow tourists and experts, such as Nelson himself, about questions of ethnological interest or perhaps inspect the proprietor’s collection of Māori curios and carvings. Discussion might turn—as it so often did in the accounts tourists wrote for friends, family, and publication on their return home—to the process of transition to colonial modernity that Māori were undergoing: what had the tourist’s inspection of the village during the day revealed about “the Maori . . . as Nature and civilization have combined to make him?”2 Colonial politics, colonial society, and not least, the conduct of other tourists—who had also been very much on display during the days’ peregrinations—were all fodder for drawing-room discourse. For a generation of postcolonial critics, ethnic tourism has epitomized the colonial apparatus of representation that enlists the colonized as performing fetishes of authenticity—“signs of themselves”—to secure racial doxa.3 Tourism, they argue, lays bare the fundamental, shared structure of anthropological objectivism, scientific racism, and (neo)colonial domination : metropolitan subjects scrutinize mute, commodified colonial objects across a temporal gulf produced by a distancing tourist gaze. The resulting spectacle romanticizes, mystifying the economic and social violence of the state and enabling tourists to project racially determinist judgments that subtly, or not so subtly, legitimate that violence.4 This account of tourism as a representational practice, however, is inadequate to the complexity of tourist sites such as Whakarewarewa. To be sure, tourism’s fripperies took place there amid patent evidence of colonial devastation, which some tourist commentators attributed to the racial limitations of Māori and others blithely ignored. But in its privileging of interaction with its ethnic objects and fostering of debate between its metropolitan subjects, Liberal-era ethnic tourism in New Zealand was less a representational expression of colonial dominion than a performative “contact zone” (in Mary Louise Pratt’s famous formulation).5 Its encounters did not repress the particulars of interethnic relations in the young state but instead relentlessly produced, organized , contested, endorsed, ironized, debated, and disseminated knowledge the class act of guide maggie 45 about them, generating a fund of popular opinion bearing on questions of colonial policy. In this sense, the scene of ethnic tourism operated as a public sphere of sorts complexly entwined with both state and market: a network...