Mobilizing Māori identity: cultural capital and expatriate “portable personhood”

Abstract

Elliott and Urry suggest that the paradigm of mobilities is "becoming increasingly central to contemporary identity formation and re-formation" (7). I match this claim against a focus group study I undertook with expatriate New Zealanders in London. The participants were questioned about their experiences of watching Aotearoa New Zealand films while living overseas to understand their perspectives regarding "mobilized" national identity. While my findings regarding the responses of the majority of the participants have been published, I remained convinced additional work was needed to adequately represent the unique perspectives of the final group: four women who self-identified as being involved with Ngāti Rānana (a London-based Māori culture club). Utilizing Elliott and Urry's term, "portable personhood", these four women mobilized specific aspects of Māori affiliation through Ngāti Rānana and joint film viewings (3). The concept of portable personhood, as developed and employed by these women, both recognizes and expands their traditional indigenous relationships and responsibilities. These changes include, but are not limited to: (i) how the act of relocation allows for portable personhood (specifically, in this case study, mobile indigenous-orientated identities), not only physically but also culturally, "racially" and even in terms of kaitiakitanga (guardianship); and (ii) what it means-on the ground-to build a cultural network around an identity dislocated from the land that makes it.

Leaving Politics Behind? Diasporic Nationalism in London

“…Both examples could be read as a form of cultural appropriation by Pākehā but this was not how the participants interpreted these Māori-Pākehā interactions. Thornley's (2015) research with New Zealand expatriates also found the same Māori cultural organisation provided a sense of belonging, history and community to Pākehā who expected to find a sense of kinship in the UK but felt more at home in the Māori cultural group. One of my Māori participants talked about the explicit way in which belonging is facilitated through the formal welcome given to newcomers (known as the pōwhiri), which communicates: 'you're not just someone in London, you're part of us if you want to be' and will be included in a family-like network of friends where everyone looks out for each other.…”

How do beliefs and institutional context influence the portability of political and civil society behaviours among New Zealand return migrants?

“…Traditionally, the OE was funded by short-term, unskilled work interspersed with periods of travel but New Zealanders are increasingly staying away longer and settling in one place to continue and develop their careers (Kea/Colmar Brunton, 2015). Australian and United Kingdom immigration processes, in particular, make long-termeven permanent -migration relatively easy and have encouraged the development of significant expatriate communities in these locations (Humpage, 2017;Thornley, 2015). Record numbers of returnees (Statistics New Zealand, 2016) and Kea/Colmar Brunton (2015) data on expatriate intentions suggest that most New Zealanders do return eventually but these recent changes make New Zealand expatriates more similar to the expatriate communities examined by previous research on political and civil society remittances.…”

Responsiveness In Crisis: Measuring New Zealand’s State-Diaspora Relationship During The Covid-19 Pandemic

“…Kea, 2015) , future aspirations (Kea, 2021;Walker, 2021), Māori identity (e.g. Thornley, 2015;N. E. Henderson, 2021), external integration (e.g McMillan, 2017) and the experiences of New Zealanders returning home (Watkins, 2012;Kea, 2020) but these have not touched on political expectations and experiences as a central concept.…”

“…As this group covers almost the entire adult New Zealand diaspora of at least 500,000 people, research was conducted via an online survey in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. While previous academic research into the diaspora has used subject interviews (e..g Thornley, 2015;McMillan, 2017), these are more useful when the diaspora is divided into smaller subsets. This research benefited from a significantly larger sample size.…”