Māori indigeneity and commodity fetishism

Argues that Māori have survived at least three different sustained efforts to assimilate them since colonisation, that each time they have emerged as a substantially different culture as well as a different part of NZ society, and that new efforts to assimilate them have had to confront the unpredictable results. Focuses on the most recent form of assimilation which took shape in the 1980s but, facing what has come to be called indigeneity, became a kind of welcome (even a pōwhiri) into the new world of neoliberal opportunities. Reviews the research of Fiona McCormack in drawing together the critiques of this latest development and acknowledging its results as essentially unpredictable. Suggests that Marx’s image of the fetishism of commodities better captures the ambiguous contradictions and unpredictabilities of the situations she describes. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.