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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

25. Fale Samoa’s Extended Boundaries: Performing Place and Identity

Authors : A.-Chr. (Tina) Engels-Schwarzpaul, Albert L. Refiti

Published in: The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

Originating half a century ago in Europe, the critique authenticity and identity were quickly taken up in the USA, and subsequently in countries like New Zealand. Towards the end of the twentieth century, someone using the word ‘authentic’ in New Zealand was immediately under suspicion of essentialism. Māori who did not want to relinquish notions of authenticity and identity often became targets of such criticism. The notion of identity is, of course, further complicated in diasporic situations, where its articulation at the intersection of dwelling and travelling claims continuity within discontinuity. This paper explores notions of identity and authenticity as performance, in the force field of past and present imperialisms and globalisation, through the histories of several ‘travelling houses’ from Samoa and Aotearoa New Zealand. For more than a century, Pacific houses have been displayed in fairs, parks or museums: three Māori wharenui (meeting houses) and a Sāmoan fale tele (council house) were instrumental in performing European and Pasifika identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Three fale and Te Aroha o Te Iwi Māori, the central and largest whare at the Māori village, were built at the Polynesian Cultural Center (Hawai’i) in 1961–63. In 2004, a fale arrived at the Tropical Islands Resort in Brand, Germany, which had been built on commission by tufuga fau fale and was reassembled at the resort. These houses not only signify but per/form identities, according to inconsistent, even conflicting values. Our paper investigates exchanges between three regions, worlds apart yet with shared histories. We first explore notions of place and identity at exhibitions featuring Māori whare and fale Samoa in the USA, Europe and Aotearoa New Zealand. Then, we address aspects of critical regionalism relevant to (post)colonial contexts and, finally, we discuss exhibitions as performative practices. We deliberately see-saw between diverse geographical, theoretical and political positions, to generate relational spaces that transcend geo-political boundaries, yet remain local and specific.

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previous chapter Contemporary Change in Sāmoan Indigenous VillageVillage Architecture: Sociocultural Dynamics and Implications
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Footnotes
1
Arguments rejecting Māori essentialism effectively deny Māori the right to self-determination and were (are?) often employed as an “imperialist tactic of preserving intellectual distance and intellectual superiority” (Jahnke 1996: 14–15).
 
2
‘Pasifika’ is a term in the Samoan language describing non-Samoans, especially European westerners. It is a cognate in other Polynesian languages and used by New Zealand Ministries “when referring to Pacific peoples in New Zealand. The term refers to those peoples who have migrated from Pacific [island] nations and territories. It also refers to the New Zealand-based (and born) population, who identify as Pasifika via ancestry or descent” (Anae & Mila-Schaaf 2010).
 
3
And, just as ironically, authenticity in Europe nationalist ideologies was entangled with an anxiety over the credibility of the nation’s existence as a bounded and distinctive entity. Such anxiety, in Handler’s observation, is “particularly apparent where national or ethnic groups find themselves in a struggle for recognition, seeking either national sovereignty or equal rights within a larger polity” (Handler 1986: 3).
 
4
Tūrangawaewae is defined as “domicile, standing, place where one has the right to stand—place where one has rights of residence and belonging through kinship and whakapapa” (Moorfield 2017).
 
5
Kenneth Frampton rejected the eclectic appropriation of “alien, exotic forms” for the revitalisation of “an enervated society” (1989: 37).
 
6
See also Meleisea and Schoeffel (1994: 89–124).
 
7
“To visit the Exhibition is to visit every Continent of the earth” (Lawrence quoted in Cohen 2004: 89).
 
8
For a Samoan response to these stereotypes, see Le Tagaloa (1998). For further details of Tropical Islands Resort, see Engels-Schwarzpaul (2006, 2007a, b, c, 2009).
 
9
The genealogy of this configuration is unmistakeable: Dürbeck (2006: 93) argues that tourism anywhere still profits from the same dualistic stereotypes of the Pacific highlighted in the Völkerschauen. Tropical Islands Resort’s Tropical Village includes “authentic houses from six tropical regions of the world”, “constructed on site at Tropical Islands by craftsmen from their respective home countries” (Tropical Island Management GMBH 2005).
 
10
Since the 1960s, most traditional fale tele and faleafolau are being built for tourism resorts. While some fale have been commissioned by schools, other education institutions and government agencies like the Samoan Tourism Authority, the tourism sector remains the main source of work for the tufuga-faufale regarding the construction of traditional houses.
 
11
‘Critical regionalism’ refers to Frampton’s ideas as developed in Western architectural discourses. A focus on European concepts tends to diminish their relevance to extra-European contexts (see Colquhoun 1997).
 
12
The full quote reads: “The fight against colonial powers and the struggles for liberation were, to be sure, only to be carried through by laying claim to a separate personality: for these struggles were not only incited by economic exploitation but more fundamentally by the substitution of personality that the colonial era had given rise to. Hence it was first necessary to unearth a country’s profound personality and to replant it in its past in order to nurture national revendication” (Ricœur 1992: 277).
 
13
Provincializing Europe has affinity with Stevenson’s notion of interparochial differences which imply, despite their limiting self-interest, plural ways of understanding. See Chakrabarty (2008: 96).
 
14
Regere fines mean the tracing of “limits by straight line”, the “delimitation of the interior and the exterior” by an authority “invested with the highest powers” (Benveniste 1969: 311).
 
15
German Protectorate from 1900; annexed by New Zealand in 1914; mandated to New Zealand by the League of Nations from 1920 to 1962.
 
16
A “certain version of ‘Europe,’ … continues to dominate the discourse of history … In other words, the global condition for the production of history had this element of inequality about it” (Chakrabarty 2008: 86–87).
 
17
This would interrupt the sequence “first in the West, and then elsewhere” (Chakrabarty 2008: 6). The inequality in the production of history has an equivalent in the production of regions: what “lies beyond the center is by definition peripheral. No matter how vital, the peripheral is other than, deviant from, and lesser than the center” (Eggener 2002: 232).
 
18
Jacobs (1996), who attempts also to present the views of ‘those marked as Other’, expands colonised peoples’ repertoire of available attitudes—yet this repertoire still appears strangely bound to Chakrabarty’s ‘silent referents’.
 
19
Gayatri Spivak’s use of critical regionalism (Butler and Spivak 2007: 8, 94, 118) points at the political implications of regionalism’s going “under and over nationalisms” to reinvent the state beyond the nation state.
 
20
The hangar connotes technology and progress—the fale imaginary islands’ balmy breezes, and a utopian way of life. Both are double-apse buildings, and their structural frameworks share similarities. See Buck (1949) and Lehner (u.d.).
 
21
‘Flimsy’ is a relative term. In Samoa, “space is indissolubly linked to time” (Tcherkézoff 2008: 136, 201).
 
22
See Tisdall (2012).
 
23
Pollock et al. register a need to ground a “sense of mutuality in conditions of mutability”, “to learn to live tenaciously in terrains of historic and cultural transition” (2000: 580).
 
24
Sala Pio Tagiilima stated in an interview that the work for the Tropical Islands Resort fale was done on a palagi (non-Samoan) contract, as the builders had to leave the country and could not act within a Samoan framework. Vitale Feaunati, a tufuga involved in the construction and re-assemblage at Tropical Islands Resort, commented that Samoan building techniques were disregarded. “What they actually wanted was just the look … It’s meaningless to the Fa’a-Samoa”.
 
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Metadata
Title
Fale Samoa’s Extended Boundaries: Performing Place and Identity
Authors
A.-Chr. (Tina) Engels-Schwarzpaul
Albert L. Refiti
Copyright Year
2018
Publisher
Springer Singapore
Book
The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture

Print ISBN: 978-981-10-6903-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-6904-8

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6904-8_25