Nation and Destination Creating Cook Islands Identity - Softcover

Sissons, Jeffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 982020142X ISBN 13: 9789820201422

Publisher: Institute of Pacific Studies and the University of the South Pacific Centre in the Cook Islands, 1999

Synopsis

Nationalists everywhere call for the sacrifice of hearts, minds and bodies to apparently greater cause than the well-being of individuals and their local communities. What makes the Cook Islands so fascinating is the unusually close relationship between nationalists and the tourist industry. In this engaging work, Jeffrey Sissons draws on interviews with many prominent Cook Islanders and written records to describe the creation of a succession of different Cook Islands identities over the past thirty years. Workers in a young, progressive nation have, more recently, come to see themselves as hosts in a global, postmodern destination. Sissons argues that the conception of the Cook Islands nation as a 'cultural' community is a relatively recent one, associated with tourism, therefore, the link is not natural between culture and nationhood in the Cook Islands or elsewhere.

About this title

About the Author

Jeff Sissons is Professor of Social Anthropology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. He is author of The Turiri Trees are Laughing: A Political History of Nga Puhi in the Inland Bay of Islands (with Wiremu Wihongi and Pat Hohepa, Polynesian Society) and Te Waimana: Tuhoe History and the Colonial Encounter (University of Otago Press), along with numerous articles on ethnic politics, Maori tradition and Cook Islands society.

Edition details

• Publisher: Institute of Pacific Studies and the University of the South Pacific Centre in the Cook Islands
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 982020142X
• ISBN 13: 9789820201422
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 139