An essay on Kiwi Culture

Pakeha Identity: Nature, Myth, and Nationalism

The Pakeha in New Zealand are plagued with cultural insecurity. While in many cultures an identity evolves organically from a past saturated with arts, language and custom, the Pakeha possess a relatively short history as a unified community in New Zealand, a nation just over 150 years old, and as a result cannot claim ownership to a distinct cultural identity. For the purposes of this paper, cultural identity will be used interchangeably with national identity and understood as the perceived commonalities shared within a group that is typically united by national borders. These shared commonalities amalgamate to form a harmonised image of self, one that strives to render as distinctive in the context of nations. Although the Pakeha share a common language and engage in the arts, these uniting characteristics are appropriated from Britain, rather than qualities unique to the Pakeha. Consequently, a distinctive cultural identity is substituted with the insecure use of another. The cultural nationalists, a literary movement of the 1930s and 40s including Allen Curnow and Fran Sargeson, embodied this insecurity and attempted to mitigate the threat by actively employing literature as a tool for identity creation. Likewise, Claudia Bell exemplifies this anxiety, recounting her experience growing up in New Zealand in the 1950s she explains, “We instinctively knew that anything English was superior to what we had here.” With the collapse of the economic partnership with Britain in 1973, the historical relationship that incited a Pakeha sense of allegiance to Britain deteriorated, and with it compromising an already unstable cultural identity. Thus, a void had to be filled. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes writes that myth assumes the task of giving historical intention a natural justification and making the contingent appear as the eternal. In lieu of any organically developed national identity, the Pakeha national identity was filled with a myth: the indigenous natural world of New Zealand, in its epic and sublime state, is the essence of the Kiwi identity.

Lacking a substantive history, the Pakeha identity embraces its ownership of the New Zealand landscape, carving out a sense of nationalism in the image of the land. The anti-nuclear stance taken by Parliament in 1984 functions as a defining moment of New Zealand identity-making. Acting in its own interest to protect the land from the corruption of nuclear materials, the nation decisively married the people to the land. Moreover, the event stressed the exceptional purity of the New Zealand environment, projecting an international image of New Zealand as a symbol of unadulterated nature. The anti-nuclear stance was not, however, the first instance of an integration of the land into the Pakeha identity. On the contrary, the New Zealand wilderness was acknowledged as early as the 19th Century as a rare distinguishing quality. In 1902, the New Zealand Parliament debated the allocation of funds for the purpose of printing “pictures of the native birds of New Zealand” for the use in schools. Harry Ell, the MP initiating the proposal, argued “something should be done to make the school-children more familiar with our beautiful flowers, and the more interesting specimens of the New Zealand native birds, instead of having only as an object-lesson the cards of English birds.” This debate illustrates an early appreciation of indigenous flora, fauna, and scenery as satisfying a psychological need. Because it possesses an extraordinary natural landscape, New Zealand can rise above its ordinariness and claim itself a unique nation. Subsequently, the ownership of the land acts as an extension of the individual, “a vehicle through which local, regional and national distinction is daily claimed and validated.” The dependency on nature as a source of Pakeha identity reaches conceptual maturity through the exploits of the tourism industry.

An increasingly vital component of the New Zealand identity, nature performs a key role in tourism advertising and image-making. Operating within a capitalist global market, New Zealand undergoes a public relations campaign, in which the image-makers repackage the nation in an effort to universally promulgate its appealing traits and invite its consumption. For New Zealand, this packaging reifies in the commoditisation of the land. The website NewZealand.com, “New Zealand’s first ever destination global marketing campaign was launched in 1999,” epitomises the commoditisation of nature and its integration with identity in its “100% Pure New Zealand” brand. The site proclaims, “our target market is seeking not just a destination to look at and drive through, but one to experience with heart and soul.” New Zealand is thus characterised as a nation superior to others in its organic beauty, a beauty so authentic it possesses “heart and soul.” This assumed superior beauty is endowed with what Karl Marx coined as exchange value, an abstract value measured in relation to other commodities. In other words, the land is privileged as a marketable commodity, promoted and sold. Furthermore, the site proceeds to fuse the prized nature with the individual, “We are a young nation, adventurous and passionate, with an invigorating outdoor life. Our Pacific location, our people and landscapes are key to our New Zealand identity.” By taking for granted the role of the landscape in the New Zealand identity, the company endows the New Zealander with a series of characteristics that logically follow: “adventurous,” “passionate,” and committed to an “outdoor life.” In the process of branding a New Zealand, this imaging campaign makes the jump from representation to myth-making, fabricating an identity for the greater New Zealand community.

Dean MacCannell, an American tourism analyst, postulates that while tourism functions primarily as a commercial scheme, it also proliferates an “ideological framing of history, nature and tradition, a framing that has the power to reshape culture and nature to its own ends.” NewZealand.com, an example of the greater New Zealand tourism industry, engages in a framing of “history” and “tradition,” through its underlying assumptions about nature and identity. Accordingly, this imaging affects its subject culture, in this case, constituting a self-manifesting identity. The international propagation of a New Zealand imagined in the interest of tourism exhibits a carefully constructed, positive image of the nation. In turn, these publicised and exciting constructed representations reshape the national identity. Pakeha national pride, Bell suggests, “is stimulated by the same beauty and uniqueness that is sold to tourists: a reinterpretation and revaluing of that which is familiar, glossier on the brochures than in everyday reality, and removed from any context that might detract from the splendour.” The belief in New Zealand as a pure and sublime nation positively reinforces the national psyche. It situates nature at the centre of national identity and celebrates it as distinguishing and superior in the international arena. Nevertheless, as Bell points out, “How many North Islanders actually see the South Island mountains, apart from on brochures and as backdrops on television ads? Yet they clearly inform [New Zealand’s] collective identity.” In spite of this, the material relationship the New Zealander shares with the cherished landscape is unimportant; the myths erected out of the tourism conventions substitute for the material experience in the process of building a national identity.

Myths succeed in the production of truth because they provide a system of communication in a society, performing meanings, concepts and signs. The myth perpetuates its own justification by presenting those interests and the institutions that serve them as inevitable. Nothing is more powerful than that which is authorised as beyond contingency as it inspires a sense of resignation to other possibilities. The manifestation of New Zealand’s identity in the image of the landscape is built on a myth, a myth that ultimately serves the capitalist spirit. The myth fashions a bond between the Pakeha and the land, the owner and the owned. It is the conduit through which capitalism creates a capitalistic identity that privileges ownership as intrinsic to individual self. A journalist from the New Zealand Herald wrote in 1910, demanded “Love me, love my land!” Commenting on this aggressive display of patriotism, Sinclair writes, “For love of country is, after all, only a nationalised sense of possession that has become part of every faculty and every thought.” Serving ideological purposes, the identity myth is an extension of a nationalised sense of possession. The Pakeha identity myth is the self-perpetuating promotion of the capitalist spirit in New Zealand.

(There are heaps of footnotes that didn't show up, so if you want bibliographic information I am happy to share it with you.)