Ageing between the global and the local : exchange and personhood amongst elderly pacific islanders in New Zealand

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MSc Social and Cultural Anthropology

Master’s Thesis

Ageing Between the Global and the Local: Exchange and

Personhood Amongst Elderly Pacific Islanders in New

Zealand

by

Vanessa Maloney

11126523

Submitted: 01/08/2016, Amsterdam

Supervisor/ Examiner:

Second & Third readers:

Prof. Niko Besnier

Dr. Kristine Krause

Dr. Daniel Guinness

University of Amsterdam Department of Anthropology

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Abstract/ Summary

Prescriptions for how to ‘age well’ reflect culturally constructed ideologies defining how to live meaningfully throughout one’s life. My research field, a state-funded community elder care programme for Pacific Islanders in New Zealand, provided an opportunity to analyse such prescriptions for ‘ageing well’. I situate the organisation’s ‘successful ageing’ rhetoric at the intersection of local and global discourses surrounding ageing, culture, exchange and personhood. My elderly interlocutors are doubly othered on the basis of both age and culture and this manifests itself in the staff’s conceptualisation of older Pacific Islanders as incompetent at managing their liminal position between cultures and exchange systems. According to the staff, the participants’ propensity towards lavish giving and their inability to ‘say no’ leave them vulnerable to ‘elder abuse’ and are therefore taught by the staff to protect their interests as individuals embedded in a market economy. The staff appropriate the rhetorical device of ‘prolonged independence’, superficially representing a neo-liberal ideal of the self-governing ageing subject, as a strategy for disentangling these older people from the networks of reciprocal obligation in which they are embedded.

The staff’s endeavours create a field full of paradox, disjuncture and political manoeuvres. I argue that recent global gerontological movements shape old age as a site of otherness, providing fertile ground for local ideologies and politics to play out. I show how the staff and participants’ navigation of the ageing process runs parallel to their attempts to understand their liminal position between cultures. The organisation’s practices shed light on the types of agency liminal subjects employ when they engage with ideologies of exchange, culture and personhood that have become reified through post-colonial identity politics. I argue that people caught in between imagined ways of being learn to engage with these models strategically and reflexively. The staff’s rhetoric of ‘independence’ is not simply an attempt to impose individualism onto dividual persons, rather it advocates a capacity to oscillate between models of personhood and exchange, allowing one to successfully participate in gift and market economies simultaneously. The localisation of ‘successful ageing’ through this specific model of economic behaviour has implications for how we view emergent gerontological movements and how we conceptualise actors’ engagement with models of exchange and personhood.

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Introduction

Ageing is far from a purely biological process. Efforts to organise, understand and evaluate ageing turn it into a largely social process. Infinitely varied cultural interpretations of ageing give rise to the construction of unique notions of not only what it means to age but also, and more importantly, what it means to age well. A rapidly ageing global population and an increasingly connected political climate have led to the widespread dissemination of certain gerontological movements. These movements, commonly dubbed ‘successful-’, ‘active-’, productive-’ or ‘positive ageing’, have come to define top-down approaches to handling elderly populations the world over. Critical approaches to these gerontological movements have tended to either situate them within their cultures of origin (Biggs, 2001; Biggs & Powell, 2001; Higgs & Gilleard, 2015; Kaufman,1994; Leibing, 2005), or

challenged them using cultural relativism (Lamb, 2014; Lamb & Myers, 1999; van der Geest, 2012; von Faber et al., 2010). My research field, a state-funded community care programme for elderly Pacific Islanders living in New Zealand, provides an opportunity to observe political attempts to directly apply the principles of ‘successful ageing’ to groups deemed cultural others. Through participation in the day programmes that this organisation runs, I was able to observe the articulation of discourses produced by neoliberal interventions into the ageing self with local cultural understandings of personhood and exchange. This

intersection of different notions of how to age well produced moments of tension, dissonance and paradox. These tensions were displayed in differences between the practices of the organisation staff and the elderly participants, sometimes even surfacing in the form of open conflict.

I seek to understand these conflicts by connecting them to various paradigms of the self and exchange and by placing them within global and local contexts. I will engage with anthropological work on ageing, exchange and personhood, raising key questions about how the paradigms surrounding these concepts come together to produce notions of what it is to age well. My field is unique in the sense that my elderly interlocutors were doubly othered and subject to interventions, both on the basis of age and culture. I ask what my elderly interlocutors’ position as doubly liminal means for the localisation of global gerontological movements. This ethnographic niche provides an opportunity to observe what happens when different notions of ageing well clash, and how they are reconciled within local contexts.

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These observations are revealing of how people construct a ‘successful’ old age and in turn how they reflexively shape themselves and their social world more generally. I use my ethnography to shed light on the ideological structures that shape people’s construction of a ‘successful’ old age, and ask what types of agency are produced by these structures. Because of the significant role that exchange plays in my field, both as a practical reality and as a discursive construct for Pacific Islanders in New Zealand, I focus on how certain

prescriptions for economic behaviour define ideas of how to age well.

Chapter 1 provides a first impression of my field by outlining both the staff’s and the participants’ representations of the work the organisation does. This involves describing the staff’s community interventions to tackle ‘elder abuse’ and conceptualising the day

programmes as a delineated social space. In this chapter I also introduce the key contexts to my field, namely the history of Pacific Islanders in New Zealand and the framework of identity politics that shapes the limits and possibilities for who Pacific Islanders can be in relation to ‘culture’. These contexts are key to the cultural othering that both legitimises the organisation and shapes the self-understandings of my interlocutors.

Chapter 2 places the work of the organisation in the wider historical and political context of policies and discourses surrounding aged populations. I situate the rhetoric of the organisation in the global ‘successful ageing’ movement and show how the organisation mimics certain rhetorical structures. I show how the staff’s understandings of a ‘successful’ old age and the concepts they employ such as ‘prolonged independence’ are by no means neutral or a-cultural but loaded with normative assumptions.

Chapter 3 hones in on exchange as a concept through which we can understand the disparities between what the staff wanted for the elderly participants and the reality of the participants’ behaviour and self-understandings. In the first part of this chapter I outline my theoretical approach to exchange and the practical reality of gift exchange principles as they function in Pacific diaspora. I go on to describe the importance of exchange practices in the participants’ experience of the day programmes, using examples to show how exchange gains added potency as it is essentialised through a ‘culture’ discourse.

Chapter 4 outlines the organisation’s stance in opposition to excessive gift exchange that characterises their efforts to tackle ‘elder abuse’ and help the elderly people to achieve ‘prolonged independence’. I also ask if the staff’s approach to ‘independence’ and ‘abuse’ can be understood within local contexts, rather than simply seen as an external imposition from neo-liberal policies. These local contexts include generational differences in ideas of how to inhabit a ‘Pacific Islander’ identity and the strategic politics of giving that form a part

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of this. I draw this chapter together by offering a definition of the organisation’s concept of ‘prolonged independence’ that recognises the complexity and multi-dimensionality of this discursive construct as it operates at different scales.

Chapter 5 asks what the organisation’s practices can tell us about the ways in which people engage with different models of personhood. I argue that the staff’s prescription for how to behave economically requires one to inhabit a dividual and individual personhood simultaneously and conceptualise the staff’s attempts to disembed the older people from their reciprocal obligations as processes of individuating. These processes force us to reimagine the relationship between different models of personhood and find more nuanced ways of conceptualising actors’ engagement with them. I conclude by suggesting some ways forward in this task, using my fieldwork to illustrate that when it comes to models of personhood and exchange, our interlocutors are perhaps far more savvy than we tend to give them credit for. I ask not only what my field tells us about the localisation of gerontological movements but also what it reveals about the ways in which liminal subjects engage with modalities that have been reified through post-colonial identity politics.

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Chapter 1 Contexts: “Coming here is like coming back to my home country”

The Field

Every Wednesday and Thursday from 10:00am to 2:00pm, a pedestrian passing by a decrepit ex-council office on a busy junction in South Auckland will hear the sound of rasping Tongan and Samoan voices singing the songs of their island homes wafting through the open windows. They may also overhear a bellow of laughter, a passionate speech or simply the quiet hum of gossip. The social world that this building encompasses was my research field.

The site is home to a community organisation, partly funded by the New Zealand government, that runs respite care programmes for elderly Pacific Islanders. The organisation is small but well-established, with seven staff members, all of whom are of Pacific Island origin and three of whom are trained social workers. The main duties of the staff are the running of these ‘day programmes’ for older people and conducting home visits to families that have been referred to them for potential ‘elder abuse’. The aims are to tackle, in a ‘culturally appropriate’ manner, some of the problems for the Pacific elderly population that accompany belonging to a cultural minority with certain customary practices and occupying a low position on New Zealand’s socio-economic ladder. The organisation was founded almost two decades ago, with one staff member (the current manager) as part of a Tongan Methodist church. The idea was born out of her observations that the well-being of each older person was “highly dependent upon the carers that look after them”.

I was partly drawn to research elder care amongst Pacific Islander groups because I was aware that they had extraordinarily high rates of family caregiving. This was confirmed in my first conversations with the staff members, who explained to me that “the element of difference between a non-Pacific family and a Pacific family is such that a very high

percentage chooses to care for their loved ones at home”. Pacific Islanders often explain this difference in care arrangements by invoking cultural values, hence their use of the concept of ‘choice’. However, throughout my fieldwork I also listening people’s frustrations at the lack of state support for the elderly population. There are therefore political and economic forces at play in addition to ‘culture’. There is no doubt that Pacific Islanders’ preference for family

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care is convenient to a neo-liberal centre-right government that saves around NZ$10.8 billion a year (around 5% of the GDP) from family caregivers who receive limited economic support (Carers NZ). The organisation is based on an insistence that even when elderly people are materially supported at home as opposed to in a nursing home, they still require certain forms of support beyond the family, even if only for one or two days a week. The staff

conceptualise this work as ‘community care’, and focus on monitoring and assisting families in order to keep their elders “happy, healthy and safe”. This takes on a slightly more critical tone when they define their work as fighting “elder abuse and neglect” in Pacific Islander communities. Elder abuse can in rare cases consist of outright physical abuse or failure to provide for the basic needs of an elderly family member. More often than not, however, this ‘abuse’ is more subtle and relates to family members taking financial advantage of older people or standing in the way of their ‘independence’. As this thesis will explore, the deciphering of ‘abuse’ is neither a neutral nor straightforward task, as it involves the negotiation of various categories of personhood and economic behaviour.

The day programmes

Although community intervention against elder abuse formed the basis for parts of my analysis, most of my primary research data came from participant observation in the day programmes that the organisation ran. On my first day in the field, after an access negotiation meeting with the manager, I was taken into a small hall where one of these mixed group ‘time-out’ programmes was running. I sat down next to the manager and watched the

participants doing their group exercise, as she introduced some of the older people to me and explained more about the programme. The hall was around ten by twenty metres, with tables and chairs lining the outside of the room. There were between thirty to forty elderly people, all wearing colourful patterned shirts and dresses, some with flowers around their neck. The atmosphere was filled with energy and joy. The participants were in the midst of an aerobics class where they were mimicking the movements of the staff member at the front. Some were sitting and some were standing in the open space in the centre of the room. Remixed disco-beat versions of island music pumped relentlessly on the sound system. As each song finished there was clapping, chattering and people shouting “Malo!” (a Tongan gesture of

appreciation). The hall was cramped and the air was thick with the smell of sweet tea and flowers. Most of the participants were in their eighties and they varied greatly in their

mobility. Some were dancing energetically, some remained seated or required walking sticks as some were recovering from strokes. About two thirds of the group were Tongan and the

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rest were mostly Samoan, bar one Cook Islander and one Niuean. On this first day there were also two caregivers who had come along to accompany the person they were looking after. One of them was a family caregiver, who was looking after her uncle who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and the other one was an employed nurse accompanying somebody from a rest home. When the aerobics session came to an end, the floor was opened up for speeches, the first of which was the Manager’s welcome speech where she introduced me and new members. As she recited the organisation’s aims and motto, the participants slowly and deliberately chanted along with her; “happy… healthy… and safe”.

People were referred to the day programmes by the police, social services, hospitals or by word of mouth. The day programmes were designed to include exercise, education and social components in order to fulfil the aims of keeping the older people “happy, healthy and safe”. The day programmes also functioned as ‘respite care’, giving the family caregivers some time out from their care duties for half a day. One of the groups had just been set up at the beginning of my research period and took place in a different suburb. This new group gave me a chance to observe the process of the participants getting to know each other and establishing a routine. Conversely, the other day programmes ran like clockwork as they had a well-established routine with a clear group dynamic. The number of participants each day ranged from around twenty to fifty. One of the days was ‘Tongan only’, whereas the other two were ‘mixed group’ programmes, meaning in reality mostly Tongans attended, with the next largest group being Samoan.

My position as a participant within the programmes was ambiguous and I took on a variety of roles throughout. I bounced between the roles of volunteer, expert and outsider. I assisted the staff with the running of the programmes, occasionally led the aerobics exercises and often acted like one of the programme participants by dancing and gossiping with my interlocutors. Particularly after a short trip to Tonga with the manager, I was able to

participate in some of the more educated conversations of the participates. I found that formal interviews damaged my research relationships by creating a distance between me and my interlocutors. I therefore gained most of my data from participant observation, casual conversations and listening to speeches.

My first experience of the day programmes gave me an accurate impression of how the days predictably tended to pan out, as the format of the days was relatively standard. Each programme ran for three to four hours, beginning with speeches and a prayer. This was followed by an aerobics session and less structured dancing and singing with a tea break in the middle. The day began to round off with more speeches and a prayer. There were also

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usually speeches from the staff in which they encouraged a sense of togetherness and gave an educational component stressing the aims of bringing happiness and ‘independence’. In the mixed groups, the speeches and songs alternated between the Tongan and Samoan groups and much of the talking was done in English for everybody’s benefit. On the Tongan-only day, much of the speech making was done in Tongan, with the occasional English translation for my benefit. The content and manner of the speeches varied greatly, ranging from

summaries of news from the islands to Biblical orations and poetry recitals. Even when I was unable to understand the content of the speeches, they were still full of interesting data to observe. It was not uncommon for speechmakers to cry, laugh, shout and pray (sometimes all within one speech).

From the beginning it became clear to me that the most important element of the day programmes was that they provided a social space for people who might otherwise be isolated from the wider community beyond their primary caregivers. This was reinforced by numerous statements and speeches made by the programme participants showing their

appreciation for the chance to socialise. One participant addressed me in a speech, explaining to me: “Some of us are lonely. We stay home. Nobody to talk. All we have to do is turn on the radio. But we just count the days that we can come here and see our friends. And it is a good place”. Mele, a Tongan woman I got to know well over the weeks, was a good example of the importance of the programme as a place to socialise. She caught my eye from the beginning because of her bubbly character and energetic dancing. When an upbeat song came on she would jump up from her seat yelping and waving her skirt from side to side. As I got to know her, I realised that her enthusiasm came from the fact that the programmes were her only chance to enjoy being around other people. She told me that after her husband passed away she stayed at home crying for four months until a friend invited her to the day

programmes and she was able to find happiness again. She explained to me the importance of the day programmes by saying that people “need somewhere to dance, even to cry,

somewhere to laugh… you can’t laugh by yourself”.

It also became clear that cultural specificity was an important factor in the provision of this social space. One man told me “coming here is like coming back to my home

country”. Speaking their native tongues and singing songs of their childhoods on the islands brought the participants a level of familiarity that could arguably not have been achieved in a non-culturally specific organisation. The idea behind the programmes was to create a

‘community’. There was often talk from both the staff and the participants of the problems of living in New Zealand (in comparison to a positive depiction of the islands) in houses where

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you may not know your neighbour and therefore have to work harder to find a community. The manager explained to me, “Living here, you have to go out and find your community. The community is out there”. Of course by this logic, as someone gets older and less

physically able, it becomes more difficult to find this ‘community’. A family carer explained to me that in New Zealand “all [the older people] can do is stay home and read the Bible, go to bed and watch TV, whereas on the islands they’re walking around all over the place talking to people”. Therefore, by providing transport, social workers, a routine and a physical space, the organisation has provided the means for constructing a social space that the older people have access to and have the social knowledge to participate in.

Pacific migration to New Zealand

Although the basic description of the services the organisation provides may seem straightforward, its very existence and the categories it is founded upon are the result of a complex intermingling of political and historical contexts. Particularly the fact that the organisation receives government funding on the basis of its ‘culturally appropriate’ services for groups that are seen as needing social improvement, requires some historical

contextualisation.

The ethnic group described in New Zealand’s dominant vocabulary as ‘Pacific Islanders’, is a term that mainly refers to all Polynesians excluding New Zealand’s indigenous Maori. The Pacific Diaspora is impressive in scope, with New Zealand (along with Australia and parts of the USA) being a major destination for Pacific Island migrations. Pacific Island populations in New Zealand have maintained strong links with their homelands through remittances and travel and the economies of the island nations are largely sustained through these remittances and, in some cases, tourism (Evans, 2001; Gershon, 2007; Gibson et al., 2006; Rynkiewich, 2012; Spoonley, 2001). The largest Pacific Island ethnic groups living in New Zealand trace their roots to Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tonga, Niue, Fiji and Tokelau. This pattern is due to the historical links created between certain islands and New Zealand owing to the devolution of British colonial rule to New Zealand. These groups have come in different waves of migration, mainly during the latter half of the twentieth century and primarily in search of employment, as well as other opportunities such as education. Most have settled in New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, and most islands have a higher, or at least comparable, population living in New Zealand compared with on the home

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Islands1. For this reason, Auckland is commonly described as the ‘Polynesian capital of the world’ (Misa, 2010).

This status was achieved, in historical terms, relatively suddenly. The modern wave of Pacific Islander migration slowly began in the 1900s but there were still only 3,600 Pacific Islanders living in New Zealand in 1951 (Fairburn-Dunlop, 2003:20). However, the

economic boom of the 1960s and the demand for manual labour to support New Zealand’s growing industries saw a relatively open immigration policy that encouraged a wave of migration from the Pacific. As a result, New Zealand’s Pacific Islander population had reached 66,000 (2.1% of NZ population) by 1976 (Fairburn-Dunlop, 2003:20). Although immigration policies have been continually changing since this time, this number increased four-fold to 6.5% of the population by 2001 (Fairburn-Dunlop, 2003:20) and in 2013 was estimated at 7.8% of the New Zealand population (Statistics New Zealand, 2015). Estimates that factor in undocumented and/or temporary migrants place the numbers much higher. Cook Islanders, Niueans and Tokelauans hold New Zealand citizenship so have had

uninhibited access to the country. Samoans, Tongans and Fijians have been more constrained by fluctuating quotas and immigration policies but have nevertheless settled in New Zealand in significant numbers. Samoans in particular have settled in large numbers and often

dominate Pacific Islander political and cultural affairs owing to their numerical superiority and assertive practices.

The wave of labour migration of young adults in the 1960s and 1970s kick-started the growth of New Zealand’s Pacific Islander communities but most of this growth stemmed from an increase in New Zealand-born Pacific Islanders. Many of today’s self-identifying ‘Islanders’ may be classed as a particular ethnicity but inhabit that ethnic identity in a very different way than their first-generation migrant grandparents may have done (Macpherson et al., 2001). Almost all of the participants I met at the elder-care programmes arrived as young adults in the wave of labour migration beginning in the 1960s, whereas most of the staff were either born in New Zealand or moved from the Islands as small children. This generational difference is crucial context to the disparities in ideas of how to inhabit a Pacific Islander identity that emerged between the staff and the participants, as this thesis will explore.

1_{In 2006, New Zealand’s 4 million population included; 57,000 Cook Islanders (compared to 13,000}

in the Cook Islands); 22,500 Niueans (compared to 1,200 in Niue); 7,000 Tokelauans (compared to 800 in Tokelau); 131,000 Samoans (compared to 176,000 in Samoa); 50,000 Tongans (compared to 99,000 in Tonga). (Fraenkel, 2012)

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Pacific Islander groups have a strong and visible presence in modern-day New Zealand’s towns and cities, particularly in the southern suburbs of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Today, a thirty-minute train journey will take you from Auckland’s Central Business District (CBD) to Manukau City, where the yuppie coffee shops and flashy boutiques of the CBD make way for Samoan takeaways and odds-and-ends stores selling taro, flower leis and lavalavas. Pacific Islander communities have also managed to gain a presence in New Zealand’s political landscape and have a government ministry dedicated to them in the Ministry for Pacific Peoples (formally Ministry for Pacific Island Affairs)

This political standing is ambiguous and the fight for recognition has been an uphill battle against institutional (and now more insidious) forms of racism and hostility. In 1974 the New Zealand Government implemented the infamous ‘dawn raids’, during which the police raided Pacific Islander homes in search of overstayers. This was met with protest from groups such as the ‘Polynesian Panthers’ (Anae, 2006). Because of the conditions in which the initial wave of migration occurred, cycles of intergenerational poverty as well as social barriers mean that Pacific Island populations are still seen as a struggling group on the

country’s socio-economic ladder. Because the waves of migration in the 1960s and 1970s put the majority of Pacific Islanders in unskilled manual labour, the collapse of New Zealand’s manufacturing industry in the 1980s left them in a particularly desperate condition. Pacific peoples’ labour force participation rate fell from 70% to 59% between 1987 and 1996. It has recovered slightly since then, but is still below the national average (Statistics New Zealand, 2002: 58).

These unemployment numbers go along with a range of other troubling statistics. In 2011 a report found that across all ages Pacific peoples’ health was worse than other New Zealanders’ and their life expectancy is about four years less than the overall population (Health and Pacific Peoples, 2011: 10). Pacific people are over-represented in convictions for violent offences (Statistics New Zealand, 2002: 37). Pacific students tend to leave school with lower qualifications than others and have lower than average rates of participation in tertiary education (Statistics New Zealand, 2002: 41). Combined with all of these statistics, perhaps the most significant fact for my research is that ‘a greater proportion of Pacific adults spent time looking after an ill or disabled member of their household, with 12 percent doing so in 2001 compared with 7 percent of adults among the national population’ (Statistics New Zealand, 2002: 58).

Historical patterns of disadvantage have led to the perpetuation of negative cultural stereotypes. The overlaying of cultural category and socio-economic class has had

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ramifications for the ways in which Pacific people self-identify and for the ways that they are seen by others. During my time living in New Zealand I found that prejudice from white New Zealanders towards Pacific Islanders was not rampant, but certainly not uncommon either. I would hear remarks such as ‘Islander guys are good at rugby but kind of stupid’ or ‘At least Chinese migrants are good for the economy, Islanders are just lazy’. I encountered versions of this prejudice in the responses of (White New Zealander) acquaintances when I explained my research to them. Even when the responses were rooted in sympathetic liberalism as opposed to prejudice, they still othered Pacific Islanders on the basis of a homogenous culture, for example, one acquaintance told me, “Good luck… Islanders tend to be very private people”.

Identity Politics

This cultural othering leads me to a second crucial historical context to my research: the history of New Zealand in terms of politics, culture and indigenous rights. Particularly in New Zealand, it is important to ask the question ‘How do Pacific Islanders negotiate their identity in spaces filled with more recognisable ethnicities?’ (Rynkiewich, 2012: 294). This political context is crucial as it forms the landscape of identity politics within which migrant groups must place themselves. In the latter part of the 20th century, indigenous New Zealand Maori experienced a cultural renaissance inspired by civil rights movements that emerged globally. This movement sought to reverse the marginalised position of Maori and the cultural assimilation policies that the New Zealand state had pursued since colonisation. This involved a reassertion of distinct cultural practices, a revival the Maori language (te reo), increased political representation and the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975. The Waitangi tribunal researches claims to Maori land and various taonga (treasured possessions) that were lost through the colonial project and seeks to redress past injustices. The Waitangi Tribunal was set up following a Maori rights protest in 1975 to allow for investigations of Crown breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty of Waitangi itself was a political agreement made between the British Crown and five hundred Maori chiefs in 1840 before New Zealand became a British Colony. The content of the treaty is a source of controversy and ongoing historical analysis, mainly due to debates surrounding

mistranslations and contradictions between the English and Maori versions (King, 2003: 151-167). Non-material valuables, such as language, are included in the category of taonga and are the subject of tribunal claims. Therefore, a rhetoric of the ‘reclamation of culture’ has emerged.

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New Zealand is now officially recognised as a ‘bicultural’ nation; where two peoples, with two distinct cultures, coexist as partners through the Treaty of Waitangi, often attributed with a nearly sacred quality as the founding document of the nation. In 1982, the race

relations councillor stated that “New Zealand is a bicultural country. The primary task of the Maori is to convert the Pakeha (New Zealanders of European descent) to recognise that reality and to modify the country's institutions to incorporate compatible Maori values” (Walker, 1982, cited in Sissons, 1995: 61). This biculturalism places the Pacific Island migrants in an awkward position as they are neither indigenous nor Pakeha (European). Something that is important to recognise in my analysis of Pacific Islanders in New Zealand is that ‘all societies and identities are constructed within specific discursive formations and they are results of articulatory practices’ (Božić-Vrbančić, 2003: 301). In other words, people inhabit a Pacific Islander identity within the dominant discourse of biculturalism and identity politics in New Zealand and these discourses determine the various limitations on and

possibilities for who people can be in relation to ‘culture’. The use of ‘culture’ as a framing mechanism is not without contestation. For instance, right-wing politicians have opposed affirmative action schemes by reconceptualising ‘cultural rights’ as ‘racial privileges’

(Barber, 2008; Gershon, 2008). However, New Zealand remains a society in which “‘culture’ is talked about incessantly” (Goldsmith, 2003: 281) and ‘culture’ remains a term that people frequently employ without scrutiny.

The position of Pacific Islanders in relation to biculturalism and Maori rights is ambiguous and complex. Although biculturalism gives Pacific Islanders less legitimacy than indigenous Maori, these groups have also been able to ride the wave of indigenous rights, arguably more than any other cultural groups, in order to make certain claims based on ‘culture’. The shared Polynesian ancestry of Pacific Islanders and New Zealand Maori plays a role in narratives that associate these groups with each other. It was only around 800 years ago that the Maori ancestors first settled in New Zealand from what is now the Cook Islands and French Polynesia. This deep historical context may seem irrelevant to modern politics but these ‘origin stories’ are part of the cultural repertoire in modern New Zealand and play an important role in shaping identity politics. This history complicates the ways in which Pacific Islanders fit in to the political landscape, as although Maori people hold a unique position in regard to indigenous rights and biculturalism, Pacific Islanders are sometimes lumped together with Maori. I have often heard the phrase “our Maori and Pacific peoples” in the context of political conversations. This also relates to a shared socio-economic status, the inherited trauma of colonialism and struggles with similar prejudices and disadvantages. This

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is an important context as other migrant groups (such as Chinese migrant communities), unlike Pacific Islanders, do not hold this place in identity politics and do not have their own government ministries set up or have policies adapted to their ‘cultural precepts’. This position that Pacific Island communities hold is shaped by the deep rooted historical relationship between New Zealand and the Pacific Islands both through Polynesian movements and the experience of colonialism.

In some senses, this situation has been advantageous to Pacific Islanders as the Maori rights discourse has opened the way for ‘culture’ to become a legitimate determining factor in government policy and has led the way for ethnic minority activism. Government policies are adapted to suit cultural needs and affirmative action redirects resources along ethnic lines. This is evident in the fact that the government has set up a special Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. Whether the government succeeds in accommodating difference is another question, but it remains that difference on the basis of a particular interpretation of ‘culture’ has

become a legitimate frame through which Pacific Islanders can lobby for resources and claim a socio-political niche in New Zealand society. The treaty of Waitangi is written into virtually all legislation and social policy research but this is also often supplemented by attempts to accommodate other cultural groups, particularly Pacific Islanders. This has enabled the organisation I worked with to become established and to receive some support from the state. The manager is often called upon by government ministries for conferences, research and policy writing to give ‘the Pacific perspective’ on issues pertaining to older people. Figures in her position are asked to contribute to the drafting of documents such as New Zealand’s “Positive Ageing Strategy”, which has sections dedicated to accommodating cultural difference (Ministry of Social Development, 2001). ‘Culture’ not only serves a function in these top down dynamics but, as I will explore, is also used as an emic concept by my interlocutors. Interpretations of the culture concept were woven through my ethnographic data and the term often takes on a legitimising force in disputes and negotiations.

The historical and political contexts I have outlined have come together to produce my field and set my research participants within particular limits and discursive frameworks. Particularly important to my arguments are the settings of (a) Pacific Islanders being

conceptualised as a problem group that are in need of uplifting and (b) the dominance of ‘culture’ in understanding and handling difference. In the following chapter, I will discuss how the elderly population is generally ‘othered’ in discourses surrounding ageing and in policy, creating space for attempts to monitor, control and shape ageing selves. However, as my contextualisation shows, the elderly people I worked with were actually doubly othered

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as their ‘culture’ alone already creates this space for intervention. This double othering, based on both culture and age, means that ideas of how best to inhabit a Pacific Islander identity in New Zealand are determining factors in the organisation’s ideas of how to age successfully.

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Chapter 2 “Happy, Healthy and Safe”; the organisation’s recipe for ageing

successfully

“Our ideas about what it is to be a successful human being over the life course arise out of and are shaped by profound cultural–political visions of who we are as human beings and how best to live.”

- Lamb, 2014:51

The first time I walked onto the scene of one of the day programmes, I was greeted with a speech from the manager in which she reminded the elderly participants of the aims of the organisation: “You know what [the organisation] wants to do for you… to make sure you are happy, healthy and safe”. The participants chanted along with her slowly and deliberately as she recited the organisation’s motto, “Happy… healthy… safe”. This oddly dogmatic tone and repetitive rhetoric of the staff as they made encouraging speeches to the participants was a defining characteristic of the programmes. The manager and staff were skilled orators who regularly espoused, in poetic yet broken English, idealised advice on how to relate to oneself and one another in a positive way. This rhetoric was not merely benign but it was also loaded with implications for what it means to age well and, more broadly, how to live meaningfully. This chapter will unpack some of this organisational rhetoric by placing it within wider influences. I argue that the discursive forms that the organisation staff draw upon and the values they prescribe are not isolated phenomena but are situated within the socio-political milieu of neo-liberal welfare policies. The approach to ageing that has arisen from this political and cultural climate can be summed up in what has been dubbed the ‘successful’, ‘productive’ or ‘active’ ageing discourse. These top-down approaches have been

disseminated globally and provide a model for interventions that is highly specific to today’s socio-political climate.

Ageing and the neo-liberal restructuring of the welfare state

Although the organisation’s status as supported by the government on the basis of its ability to accommodate for cultural otherness is particular to New Zealand’s socio-political

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landscape, there are also global dimensions to the work that the organisation does. The manager has attended conferences around the world and has tried to ground the

organisation’s aims in doctrines such as Universal Human Rights for Older Persons (United Nations OHCHR, 2011) and New Zealand’s Positive Ageing Strategy (Ministry of Social development, 2001a). She also regularly universalised the problems the older people faced and the solutions to these problems. With this global outlook in mind, it is necessary to situate the organisation within today’s globally disseminated dominant discourses of ageing and their relation to public policy. Wider historical developments and political trends mean that ‘ageing ideologies are much more widespread than one might think’ (Leibing, 2005: 18).

One only has to look back a few decades to observe how global trends in politics and social welfare have shaped popular ideas about ageing and how best to deal with the aged population. Ageing paradigms have tended to correspond to political attitudes towards welfare. Certain themes can be traced through time, from post-war welfare paternalism, to Thatcherist/Reaganist turns towards marketisation and more recently to the Clinton/ Blair ‘third way’ (Biggs & Powell, 2001: 2). Important to this thesis is the way in which these changes perpetuated particular notions of personhood in old age. The post war ‘structured dependency’ narrative supported an understanding of older people as an inevitably dependent group that, unlike children, cannot be invested in or educated, and are therefore

‘unproductive and a burden to society as a whole’ (Biggs, 2001: 307). The marketisation of welfare during the 1980s turned older people into consumers with certain consumer rights as well as opening up space for a ‘grey market’ (Katz, 2000 in Biggs, 2001: 307). The more recent ‘third way’, initiatives championed by Blair and mimicked the world over, focuses on fighting ageism and reinventing old age, ‘from being a problem of burden to an age of opportunity’ (Biggs, 2001: 309). This shift in policy narrative, coupled with a demographic shift of an increasingly ageing population, has led to ‘the discovery of elderly persons not only as a population but also as both consumers and voters’ (Leibing, 2005: 17). It is within these political and social developments that the organisation’s localised brand of successful ageing is situated.

New Zealand and Australia have followed a path similar to the UK, whereby the ‘welfare state’ has given way to a post-welfare or neo-liberal politico state (Biggs and Powell, 2001: 4). These changes in welfare policy and shifts to a narrative of opportunity have meant that in the field of elder care, institutional dependency has been replaced by decentralised, market model-inspired programmes focusing on the ‘politics of participation’ and ‘social inclusion’ (Biggs and Powell, 2001: 4). I observed these structural trends in my

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research in the ways in which the staff discussed the work of the organisation. The manager spoke of their work as ‘community care’, describing it as filling a role somewhere between the state and the family. When I referred to the social inclusion that the organisation provides as a type of ‘social care’, the manager corrected me: “community care. ‘Community’ is a much more Pacific word”. The reification of Pacific families and familial obligation is convenient to the state, saving large amounts of money and resources. In a similar vein, the fact that the concept of ‘community’ appeals to the manager on the basis of cultural

difference is no doubt convenient to the decentralising efforts of the state. By funding ‘grassroots’ ‘community’ initiatives such as this, the government helps reify ‘communities’, thereby legitimising the localisation of responsibility2. In this way, New Zealand’s state-sanctioned identity politics have paved the way for neo-liberal reforms. The desire to make services ‘culturally appropriate’ allows the state to step back whilst retaining a supervisory role.

Successful ageing and the ‘third age’

The idea of active, healthy, positive or successful ageing implies that there is such a thing as inactive, un-healthy, negative, and unsuccessful ageing (Higgs & Gilleard, 2015: vii). These antonyms serve an ‘othering’ function, and this othering creates space for

intervention and monitoring. As Higgs & Gilleard argue, these binaries are what separates the ‘third age’ and ‘the fourth age’, ‘the distinction between a fit, healthy and productive later life and an old age dogged by ill health, incapacity and neediness’ (Higgs & Gilleard, 2015: 10). Sometimes referred to as ‘the oldest old’ or ‘deep old age’, the ‘fourth age’ is a social

imaginary that functions as a negative backdrop against which its remedies can be articulated, namely the values of ‘choice, autonomy, self-expression and pleasure’ (Higgs & Gilleard, 2015: 14). Whereas old age used to be a chronological category, it is now defined by an exaggerated distinction between fitness and frailty. The medicalised concept of ‘frailty’ is a social construction shaped by the predominance of the ‘autonomy paradigm’ in bio-medical discourse (Kaufman, 1994: 46). The fashioning of a ‘fourth age’ has given rise to remedial ‘third age’ cultures that advocate the rejection of old age as a category and a destination. The third and fourth ages are interdependent and have malleable boundaries (Leibing, 2005: 18).

2_{At a practical level, this decentralisation relates to the government’s attempts to reconfigure the}

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It is this perceived malleability, this hope of stretching the third age to its limits, that have given rise to ‘successful ageing’ movements and programmes such as the one I worked with.

These orchestrated attempts to manipulate and extend the ‘third age’ are multifarious and have been given many different names by both scholars and policy makers. For the purpose of simplicity, I have chosen to use the term ‘successful ageing’ to describe the gerontological movement the organisation is situated in. Although overlapping notions of ‘active’, ‘healthy’ or ‘positive’ ageing would also have been appropriate, ‘successful ageing’ encompasses most completely the aims of the organisation. It also emphasises the skill and work that goes into achieving a certain status. In the field of gerontology, the Rowe-Kahn model (1998) popularised the notion of ‘success’ in ageing and defined it as the ‘avoidance of disease and disability, maintenance of high physical and cognitive function, and sustained engagement in social and productive activities’ (Rowe & Kahn, 1997: 439). This model was seen by gerontologists as grounded in scientific parameters and provided a framework for interventions throughout the world (Crowther et. al., 2002: 613).

However, from an anthropological perspective, the most interesting aspects of this type of model are the metaphors and discursive elements that it opens up beyond the domain of medicine. ‘Successful ageing’ is not a purely medical intervention but a discursive trend that has exploded predominantly from North America (but has also taken hold in Europe and Australasia) in the domains of public health, medicine, psychology and gerontology (Lamb, 2014: 42). Typically, this type of discourse emphasises individual agency and espouses ‘permanent personhood’ as the key to ageing well and the remedy for physical and mental decline. Policies, programmes and self-help literature on the topic tend to show common themes, namely: ‘an emphasis on individual agency and control (you can be the crafter of your own successful aging); the value of independence and the importance of avoiding dependence; the value of activity and productivity; and a vision of not aging at all, while pursuing the goals of agelessness and what could be termed a permanent personhood.’ (Lamb, 2014: 44). Although taken from fieldwork in North America, this definition gives an eerily accurate summary of the organisational rhetoric I encountered during my fieldwork.

The organisation’s brand of successful ageing

The organisation mimicked these models in a variety of ways. Particularly relevant to my research is the idea of successful ageing as perpetuating a particular model of

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countering physical decline, but through a parallel process of fostering ‘a cultural–political model of personhood emphasising individual control and self-determination’ (Lamb, 2014: 50). This orientation was made explicit in the staff’s references to the universal code of human rights, describing their motto as a summary of these rights.

“We tell them they are to be happy, healthy and safe. Because if they are happy healthy and safe, that means there can't be abuse if they're happy, and if they're healthy their money must be spent on the right thing and they must be eating right, and so on… and if they're safe, it ticks a couple of boxes. And you know you're familiar with the international code of rights for older persons? There are five things. And when we do our elder abuse information, we promote it as rights-based. We have a half-full glass approach… so we promote ‘you have a right to receive care, a right for your dignity to be upheld, you have a right to participate in anything you want, you have a right to independence and… self-fulfilment’”.

- Member of staff at the organisation

Because the health and care elements are practical and the medical aims are subtly interwoven with cultural values, the organisation’s rhetoric (along with other successful ageing movements) is prone to be viewed as ‘culture-free’. However, these aims exemplify ‘certain foundational cultural principles and visions of personhood—for instance, that decline in old age is bad and that independence is ideal’ (Lamb, 2014: 42). Most of the ideological basis for ‘success’ works through metaphors of personhood. Words that the manager used like ‘dignity’, ‘independence’ and ‘self-fulfilment’ are loaded with normative assumptions of what a successfully crafted old age entails. The manager used the term ‘prolonged

independence’ to describe the ability of ageing people to fulfil these rights and maintain oneself in old age. In Chapter 4, I will dissect more precisely what this notion of ‘prolonged independence’ means within localised notions of exchange but in a general sense I heard it being used to refer to a continuous ‘self’ that is not impinged upon by physical, financial and social dependencies.

The staff demonstrated their understanding of ‘success’ when it came to personhood and independence by referring to participants. One participant whom the staff often showed off as a success story was Viliami, a Tongan participant I was able to grow close to over the

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research period. At the age of 89, Viliami was one of the oldest participants and was highly respected by both the staff and his peers. Although he required a walking stick, he was able to get up for a dance occasionally and, although hard-of-hearing, he seemed to have good cognitive functioning. Every week he would be dropped off by his niece (as opposed to using the mini bus service as the majority did). He would sit in the same spot at the end of the room, calmly overseeing the activities, often leaving his trilby hat and sunglasses on. A teacher in his younger days, he was considered well educated and enjoyed discussing

political and social issues. Sometimes I saw him scanning over a Tongan newspaper, though the cloudy blue-grey film over his eyes made me wonder how much he could actually read. Nevertheless, he seemed to pride himself on his educated position and maintaining an engagement with current affairs. Jane, one of the administrative staff, pointed Viliami out as an example of success in ‘prolonged independence’: “In terms of the Universal code of rights… He seems to be living them. He can go back to the islands. Because he can make choices… he is able to do what he wants to do. He’s not tied here because his income is not required by his family”. Jane also cited other aspects of Viliami’s as indicative of his positive ageing, explaining that “He’s always well dressed and well articulated”. There are many different contexts and strands of thought that feed into this assessment of Viliami. Some of them are highly localised, as they relate to class differences and support certain types of economic activity, as I will expand upon in the following chapters. However there are also assumptions about his success that are more reflective of cultures of ‘successful ageing’ than any local cultural context. There is clearly an emphasis on ‘individual control and self-determination’ (Lamb, 2014: 50) as a key symbol of success. The fact that Viliami had a distinctive ‘personality’ and continued to express it in various ways, be it through giving speeches, ‘reading' the newspaper or dressing stylishly, seemed to lend weight to the staff’s perception of him as a success story. ‘Prolonged independence’ in this case referred to a capacity to maintain some of the behaviours of one’s youth and retain a sense of control over one’s own affairs in spite of physical frailty.

Another way in which the programmes aligned with gerontological paradigms such as successful or active ageing was in the focus on biomedical definitions of personal success. The organisation, partly because of the conditions under which they received funding from the Ministry of Health, engaged in various bio-political practices. The participants were weighed weekly and the numbers were recorded on a database. Just before I finished my fieldwork, the organisation had received funding to bring a nurse in for blood pressure tests. The staff were also working on creating a database of all of the ailments and eating

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requirements of the participants. The staff combined these practices with speeches in which they encouraged the participants to think of themselves as biological entities and put health on their radar. One staff member explained that when participants are referred from the hospital, it is often too late to change their habits before they pass away, so the organisation “tries and finds people before they end up in referrals”.

To some extent, the staff succeeded in bringing physical health to the front of the participants’ minds. When I asked the participants directly what they took from the

programmes, they often turned to notions of physical wellbeing. The exercise components of the programmes, which in reality only took up a small amount of time each day, were often given a disproportionate importance in the participant’s explanations of what the organisation was about. For example, I heard many statements such as “we don’t stay home and look to die, look to the floor and do nothing at home. We have to do more exercise”. Lopeti, a slightly younger Tongan participant at the newly formed group, used the programmes to work on improving his mobility following two strokes. He sometimes used speeches to discuss his progress and relate his physical disabilities to others’ in the group. The participants clearly, even if only at a discursive level, aligned with the more medically orientated elements of the successful ageing discourse such as the ‘value of activity’ (Lamb, 2014: 44) and the ‘maintenance of high physical and cognitive function’ (Rowe & Kahn, 1997: 439).

By situating the work of the organisation in globally popularised gerontological paradigms such as the successful ageing discourse, I have shown how certain political forces shape understandings of what it means to age well and in turn shape attempts to intervene into ageing selves. These understandings of ‘success’ are not benign, rather they are founded upon certain values and assumptions about the self. The focus on ‘independence’ perpetuates the notion of an ideal neo-liberal subject who can avoid physical and social dependency, thereby prolonging the time until they become a burden to the state and society. It is this aim of extending the ‘third age’ (Higgs & Gilleard, 2015) that guides the aims of the organisation. In some ways, these discourses were internalised by the participants, as evidenced by their referral to physical well-being in their explanations of how the organisation benefits them. However, for the most part, I observed a significant disjuncture between the understandings of the staff and participants. This rift is explored in the following chapter.

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Chapter 3 Culture and Exchange

‘… The individual must work. He should be forced to rely upon himself rather than upon others. On the other hand, he must defend his interests, both personally and as a member of a group. Over-generosity, or communism, would be as harmful to himself and to society as the egoism of our contemporaries and the individualism of our laws.’

- Mauss, 1925: 88.

“I go on the radio and I say to the older people, ‘do you know how to say no?’. Don’t say something to please, say something to please you. And I talk like that to them. If you give your card to pay one bill, make sure you ask for it back and if not, you can ring us to ask for it. Because we’ll do it in a nice way, it’s not gonna make you an enemy. And if they get you to babysit when you want to go to a group with other older persons, just say: ‘no. I love you, but you can have your child’. And you know you'll get a yell from them, but it’s ok; just feel good. You’re allowed to. And hey, you don’t have the time to hang around to wait for things to go well because you’re old. You don’t have the time to muck around.”

- Manager of the organisation

These strikingly similar quotations from Mauss and the manager of the organisation I worked with, encapsulate the key tensions and points of interest in my fieldwork, namely the notion of exchange as potentially dangerous to a particular formation of the self. The

following chapters explain how local culturally defined economic structures complicate, expand and localise the successful ageing discourse. As I have outlined in the previous chapter, the organisation’s rhetoric in many senses falls neatly in line with globally

disseminated top down ‘successful ageing’ discourses. With its focus on individual agency, ‘prolonged independence’ and bio-medical definitions of personhood, at a discursive level the organisation mirrors recently developed frameworks used to deal with ageing populations in North America and Europe. If ‘successful ageing’ is viewed through a Foucauldian lens as

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a set of ‘technologies of the self’ (Biggs & Powell, 2001), on the surface this rhetoric may seem effective in its transformation of the older people into individual selves as projects, particularly with respect to bio-medical definitions of personhood.

However, I found that there is a significant disjuncture between the rhetoric of the organisation and the older people’s self-understandings and this rift is most apparent in attitudes towards exchange. Exchange activity acted as the dominant catalyst for almost all staff interventions and disputes in which the elderly participants deviated from the vision of what the staff wanted for them. I observed that reciprocal obligation repeatedly threw a spanner in the works of the successful ageing project. There was an implication that cultural structures of exchange and the pressure to give stood in the way of achieving self-fulfilment and independence in old age. After all, according to an individual-focused model of ageing, how can one truly achieve ‘prolonged independence’ if obligations to others are served before those to oneself?

These tensions manifested themselves in the organisation’s work against elder abuse (particularly financial abuse) and in its attempts to regulate and suppress exchange activity at the day programmes. The contrast was sharpened by the fact that narratives shaped by cultural identity politics tend to draw on cultural systems of reciprocal exchange as key to defining a Pacific Islander identity as opposed to a Palangi (white person) one. When these very systems are seen not as something to celebrate but as a threat to individual wellbeing, this raises interesting questions about the contrasting notions of personhood underlying discourses of identity politics and successful ageing.

The fact that the organisation sees part of its mission in helping older people to ‘age well’ as loosening their ties of obligation and dependence and that these very obligations are conversely often celebrated as ‘cultural’ raises some key questions. How are the older people bound into these dependencies in the first place? Why do the organisation staff view these dependencies as potentially detrimental to the older people’s well-being? How does this relate to both the successful ageing discourse and identity politics? Are the conflicting narratives really illustrative of global/local distinction or can the organisation’s stance on exchange be understood within a local context?

In Chapter 4, I will dissect the staff’s opposition to gift exchange practices in more detail but it is first important to contextualise this stance within a social world in which ‘giving’ is celebrated, perhaps above all else. I will begin by contextualising my approach to exchange as well as the practical reality of gift-economies operating amongst Pacific

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programmes to show how powerful exchange is, not only as a means for the older people to remain socially embedded but also as a means to define a ‘Pacific Islander’ cultural identity. The potency of exchange as a practical reality and a social imaginary provides a stark backdrop for the staff’s practices against abuse.

The obligation to give, receive and reciprocate

In order to unpack why the staff found it so difficult to tear the older people away from their obligations to others, be it babysitting for a family member or helping someone pay their bills, it is important to identify how these ties work and why they are particularly difficult to break in this context. Any study of ‘obligation’ must reference Mauss’s classic comparative study of the gift. In The Gift (1925/1990), Mauss theorises the webs of exchange and obligation that are involved in the act of giving. He elaborates on various examples to show how the mechanism of reciprocal obligation binds people together in relations of indebtedness. Mauss’ analysis reveals the nature of total services as ‘apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested’ (Mauss, 1925/1990: 4). This theoretical backdrop is crucial to my investigation of familial obligations as it denaturalises emic terms such as ‘voluntary’ and ‘sacrifice’, replacing these with more analytically sharp etic terms such as ‘obligation’, ‘reciprocity’ and ‘contract’. Through this theoretical lens we can begin to see how the gifting of time, money, goods and services are what bind people into webs of dependency. My analysis of the relationship between ageing, exchange and

‘independence’ at the organisation is founded upon the principle that exchange is not merely expressive of a relationship, it is constitutive of that relationship.

In the context of Pacific Islanders in New Zealand, the power of gift economies in forging relationships and shaping everyday life is expressed in various ways. For instance, one financial burden that is generally placed upon Pacific Islanders is the obligation to one’s church. There are significant denominational differences that define the extent of this

obligation but in many cases churches ‘place considerable financial and other responsibilities on members’ (Macpherson, 2002: 74). Many of my interlocutors were Tongan Mormons, who are involved to an even greater extent than other Tongans in having to contribute financially to the church (Gibson, 1990: 214). It is common for all Pacific Islander congregations to call upon members to ‘support their ministers through regular and

significant financial donations and take on various projects’ (Macpherson, 2002: : 74). I often heard people discuss this responsibility to one’s church as a defining factor of being a Pacific

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Islander. A similar mechanism of money collection is used in kinship networks, as people expect to be called upon at any time to contribute large amounts of money to family events such as funerals or the birth of a child. Traditionally, material valuables were gifted on these occasions but particularly in the diaspora these have been mostly replaced by monetary gifts (Addo, 2013: 148). The obligation to give, receive and reciprocate is not only a moral principle that shapes the practical reality of Pacific Islanders’ familial and social lives in specific ways but also works to sustain the Pacific diaspora though remittances. The Pacific Islands have some of the most remittance-dependent economies in the world. For example, remittances were equal to 37 per cent of Tongan GDP in 2001, one of the highest rates in the world (Ratha 2003, in Gibson et. al. 2006). Tongan transnational relations work through individual economic decisions supported by cultural frames such as the principles of gift exchange, which “function effectively and in articulation with the capitalist world market” (Evans, 2001: 2). These various obligations that are placed upon people, such as those to church, family and homeland, enmesh Pacific islanders in webs of reciprocal obligation. In a generalised sense, participation in gift economies is a concrete practical reality for my interlocutors. This practical reality has increasingly become the focus of conscious reflection amongst Pacific Islanders living within a dominant market economy, who are forced to confront some of these differences in exchange practices.

Identity politics and exchange

Mauss focused on Polynesian societies as some of the most explicit cases of gift economies. He claimed that when it comes to mechanisms for reciprocal obligation, “The moral and religious reason for this constraint is nowhere more apparent than in Polynesia” (Mauss, 1990 [1925]: 9). Partly through Western scholarship such as this, Polynesian

societies have, in the academic, political and popular imagination, become strongly identified with notions of gift exchange networks. Particularly relevant to my field is the part that this historical vision of the Pacific has played in the ‘othering’ of Pacific Islander migrants in New Zealand and its defining role in the context of identity politics. This has even made its way into government policy. For instance, The Family Group Conference policy allows Maori and Pacific Islanders to intervene alongside state social workers in child welfare through extended family meetings (Cohen & Gershon, 2015). This case is one of many examples of the New Zealand government actually basing policies on an idea of the other as more embedded in familial obligations and networks than their perception of the average

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‘European’ citizen. In a similar vein, it is clear that services are adapted in a ‘culturally appropriate’ way when it comes to elder care and that this is embedded not only in reciprocal obligation itself but in an orientalised vision of Pacific Islanders as particularly bound to these networks. At this level, the government funding that the organisation receives is dependent upon the state’s perception of the cultural ‘other’ as requiring specially adapted services for different culturally defined modes of circulating care and services. The New Zealand government’s Positive Ageing Strategy (Ministry of Social Development, 2001a) - a document I was referred to by the manager of the organisation - includes a section on cultural diversity and stresses the importance of making services ‘culturally appropriate’. It includes a special mention only to Maori and Pacific Islanders and aims to “identify issues of specific concern to older people from ethnic communities and develop options for addressing these” (Ministry of Social Development, 2001b).

At a deeper level, and more relevant to my research, is the self-orientalisation that explicitly associates ‘culture’ with exchange and in turn links ‘culture’ with certain ways of circulating care and handling the elderly population. During my fieldwork, with the exception of kinship hierarchies and taboos, almost all of the occasions when ‘culture’ was brought up unprompted were directly related to exchange. One staff member often used universalising language whenever I hinted at cultural difference being a factor in the way certain issues were dealt with. However when a dispute arose about money (I had insisted on paying her back for some food), she became angry at me for embarrassing her and passionately exclaimed “you see this is where all the culture stuff comes in!”. By offering money I had displayed my ignorance as a Palangi and disrupted the balance of reciprocal obligation. The fact that she chose ‘culture’ to explain this misunderstanding is significant. On another occasion, I made a comment to one of the staff members about the sharing of food between the older people at the day programmes, to which she responded “that’s in our culture, it’s all about the sharing and giving. That’s what makes it different to the Palangi” (white people). The same staff member found out that I was interested in how family members care for one another throughout their lives and explained to me: “In Tongan culture it’s like a circle… it comes back round”. Conversely, the association of market exchange with the Palangi way is exemplified in disparaging comments about nursing homes. In my first meeting I was told “we Pacific people prefer to care for our loved ones at home” and this was followed throughout my fieldwork by various horror stories about paid care services and their

unsuitability for Pacific people. This is in spite of the fact that the organisation in reality dealt with many more cases of family care ‘gone wrong’.

Ageing between the global and the local : exchange and personhood amongst elderly pacific islanders in New Zealand

MSc Social and Cultural Anthropology

Master’s Thesis