Cultural Policies and Renaissance of Tradition in a Polynesian MIRAB Society : a case analysis from the Cook Islands(<Special Theme>Political Economy and Ethnography)

Abstract

The Cook Islands are called "a typical MIRAB society" by political economists. Since the 1910s a large number of Cook Islands Maori people have left their homeland in Polynesia for New Zealand as labor migrants. In 1996, while 18, 904 Maori resided in the homeland, almost 40,000 of them lived and worked in New Zealand. The economy of the Cook Islands has been kept alive only because of remittances from these labor migrants and of financial aid from the New Zealand government. The dispersal of the Maori population from their homeland and New Zealand's ever-increasing financial aid, which amounted to NZ$14 million in 1988, have worked against the Cook Islands, reducing the chances for domestic industries to develop and leading to chronic and sustained underdevelopment. As a result, the politico-economic and socio-cultural importance of the Maori homeland has been diminished drastically over the last three decades. However, while the politico-economic decentralization of the homeland has proceeded, the government and local communities in the Cook Islands have been attempting to recover Maori cultural identity and recentralize their homeland socio-culturally by way of a renaissance of "traditional culture." The characteristics and history of the cultural policies of the Cook Islands' government is discussed at the beginning of this essay. Then, as an example of recent local practices to revitalize Maori tradition, a vaka (canoe) building project is analyzed. Finally, the interaction, appropriation, and opposition between cultural strategies of the government and local practices are examined in detail. Through the discussions in this essay, I propose a new perspective to capture the present situation of Polynesian culture, which may help lead us to envision anew the discipline of cultural anthropology itself.