Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2008
Volume
6
Journal
Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change
Issue
3
First Page
161
Last Page
184
URL with Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14766820802553152
Abstract
This study analyses how Maori operators in the tourist industry portray indigenous culture in their brochures. For close to 150 years, Maori people have been involved as entrepreneurs in New Zealand’s tourist industry. Although now integrated into the modern New Zealand nation-state, the representation of their culture in tourism gives an image of a traditional people radically different and set apart from modern New Zealand (Kiwi) culture. Utilising Fabian’s ideas regarding the organisation of otherness through cultural constructions of time and space, this article demonstrates how certain spatial arrangements are necessary to sustain the imaginary temporary division between a modern Kiwi culture and the representation of a traditional Maori culture, the latter is a tourist attraction in itself. Auto-ethnography in the dis- course of tourism inevitably becomes ‘self-Orientalism’, even if some spaces makes co-presence possible.
