TOURISM, RACE AND THE STATE OF NATURE

Abstract

The ethno-historical study of tourism can lend a new focus to the theorization of governmentality, demonstrating the ways in which it rests on the systemic, performative, and affective interpenetration of human and environmental bios (‘nature’), built form, economy, and the technologies of the state. This paper examines Rotorua, a tourism centre in New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, suggesting that it operated as a laboratory for the forms of political rationality associated with the emerging liberal state, in particular those concerned with race. It analyzes town planning and environmental engineering initiatives, the medical discourses relating to the spa complex constructed by the government, and tourists’ accounts of the geo-thermal attractions of the area. In each of these cases, tourism was oriented towards the production of white subjects, and the ‘liberalization’ of Māori populations, through reflexive work on what Foucault called the ‘conduct of conduct.’ In each of these cases, bio-political imperatives relied on a repertoire of bio-poetical performances, investing the subject imaginatively in forms of conduct that are viscerally embodied, expressive, creative, improvisatory, and even eroticized. Where the literature of governmentality focuses predominantly on the rationalities, technologies, and generalized institutional loci of bio-politics, attending ethno-historically to tourism attunes us to its affective registers, performative repertoires, its intimate relationship with locality and spatiality, and the symbolic (a)logics through which it achieves its purchase on the immanently political territory of natural life.

Keywords:

• governmentality
• Māori
• tourism
• performance
• race
• liberalism

Notes

1. Notably absent is the perspective of local Māori, whose contestations and accommodations of governmental procedures I deal with elsewhere (Werry 2001).

2. A.S. Wohlmann to T.E. Donne, 11 December 1902, TO1/1901/5/10, NZ Archives. Such state benevolence was unevenly distributed across ethnic lines: institutionalized racism and cultural insensitivity (especially around issues of bodily tapu), policy discriminations, and geographical marginalization meant that Māori had little real access to these services (Lange 1999).

3. Elsewhere, I trace the emergence of this discourse in detail, through a reading of health education, urban reform, national census, Young Māori Party literature, and parliamentary debates (Werry 2001).

4. ‘By forming the roads, introducing proper drainage systems and reasonable sanitary conveniences, and by insisting on a reasonable form of Māori architecture in the villages … the attraction of these villages to the tourists can be enormously increased.’ Engineer in charge to superintendent, 19 September 1908, TO01-0044, NZ Archives. Sir Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hīroa) and Frederick Bennett (both Māori reformers) drafted plans for the ‘ideal whare’ (or Māori house) combining Māori architectural aesthetics with European prerogatives of structure and hygiene, and submitted them to the Young Māori Party conference (Te Aute College Students Association 1906, Young Māori Party 1909).

5. A.S. Wohlmann to Hon. J.G. Ward, Minister DTHR, 5 February 1903, TO1/1901/5/10, NZ Archives; A.S. Wohlmann, enclosure with T.E. Donne to Hon. R.J. Seddon, Premier, 14 February 1903, TO1/1901/5/10, NZ Archives.

6. ‘Hydropathy’ by Dr W.B. Hunter reproduced in Muir (1900, n.p.).

7. One of the early spa directors, Camille Malfroy, in fact manufactured thermal attractions, including three geysers that he, tellingly, named ‘Victoria’ ‘Nelly’ and ‘May,’ and put into action on the Queen's birthday (AJHR 1891, C. 1, vol. I, p. 6., Malfroy 1892).

8. Anxieties also revolved around a perceived lack of spatial discipline, adhering even more closely to a racial analogy, and bespeaking alarm at the barely controlled violence of the natural. Where tourists personified thermal features as ‘raging like all-possessed … their centres in a wild tumult, and their hoarse mutterings suggestive only of a scrummage of demons,’ their descriptions corresponded uncannily in structure, language and imagery to representations of Māori performances of the haka, or war chant (Elkington 1906 , p. 91).

9. For discussion of the nature of the hermeneutic circle created by tour guides, their quality of being both prescriptive and descriptive of actual touristic performance, see Rojek (1994) and Werry (2001).

10. C.S. Phillips (née Brayton), ‘Journal 1896–25,’ MS Papers 961, ATL.