The Traditionalisation of the Maori Meeting House

Abstract

ABSTRACT By focusing on two successive phases in the traditionalisation of the Maori meeting house — exhibition and aestheticisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and standardisation and tribalisation during the 1930s and 1940s — I seek to illustrate how the diverse projects of national identity, tourist marketing, ethnology and state‐directed rural development converged to displace meeting houses out of time. I argue that while the short‐term effect of this displacement was to suppress developing traditions of oppositional Maori agency this was not the case in the longer term, nor was it always the intention of those engaged in the process.