The death of Koro Paka: "traditional" Maori patriarchy.(Report) (original) (raw)
2008, The Contemporary Pacific
Deconstruction does not say there is no subject, there is no truth, there is no history. It simply questions the privileging of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth. It is not the exposure of error. It is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced. (Spivak 1988, 28) This paper starts from the simple question of what knowledge is produced about Mäori men and why. In Nietzschean style, I am less concerned with the misrepresentation of truths than with how such truths have come to be privileged. I do not argue that tropes such as the Mäori sportsman, manual laborer, violent criminal, or especially the Mäori patriarch, are "false," for indeed there are many Mäori men who embody these categorizations. 1 To propose such tropes are false would suggest that other forms of Mäori masculinity are "truer," "more authentic" embodiments. Alternatively, I am stimulated to uncloak the processes that produce Mäori masculine subjectivities. Specifi cally, this article deconstructs the invention, authentication, and re-authentication of "traditional" Mäori patriarchy. Here, "invention" refers to the creation of a colonial hybrid. This is not to say, however, that colonization provided the environment for the genesis of Mäori patriarchy, for it is probable that modes of Mäori patriarchy existed prior to colonization (ie, patriarchy as constructed by Mäori tribal epistemologies, focused on notions such as whakapapa [genealogy] and mana [power/prestige/respect]).