‘We didn't want to do a dial-a-haka’: performing New Zealand nationhood in Turkey

Abstract

This paper analyses performances of nationhood by New Zealand sports tourists in Turkey. The Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey is significant in the imagined community of New Zealand, because it was where the Fifth Ottoman Army defeated the ‘Anzacs’, an acronym for the all-volunteer Australian and New Zealand Army Corps within the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, in the Battle of Gallipoli during WW1. Gallipoli was once a site for grieving pilgrims but has recently morphed into a ‘must-see’ tourist destination. This transformation has included sports tourism, like the annual Dardanelles strait swimming competition that is now an iconic global event. Using a perspective of nationalism and tourism ‘from below’ and qualitative methods, I show how New Zealanders' performances on a combined sport and military tour, especially performing haka, both intensified feelings of nationhood and engendered historical empathy with soldiers on both sides of the war at Gallipoli. I explain this serendipitous outcome by coexisting processes of everyday nationalism, communitas, deterritorialisation and reflexive embodiment.

Keywords:

• performance
• nationalism
• deterritorialisation
• haka
• embodiment

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Doug Booth, Karen Brooks, Mike Emmison, Mark Falcous, James Higham, Helen Johnson, Malcolm MacLean, Catherine Palmer, Brian Petrie, Brad West and my colleagues in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at The University of Queensland for their insightful comments on earlier drafts and seminar presentations of this paper. I also thank Mike Weed, an anonymous Associate Editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. A poi performance involves women dancing and singing while rhythmically swinging balls attached to flax strings with their hands.

2. A sweep has the vital responsibility of controlling the boat with one oar from a precariously standing position astern, while reading conditions and instructing the four rowers where and when to move swiftly.

3. The passage is:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours … You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace … After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.