sociology and Maori visitors in New Zealand museums

Bourdieu wrote that the sacralisation of art serves to consecrate the social order by ‘enabling educated people to believe in barbarism ’ and persuading ‘the barbarians of their own barbarity’. But what about the ‘primitive ’ art now accepted within the canon of western art? Do the ‘rules of art ’ apply to the recent success of Maori art or do Maori artists play by their own rules? This article draws on field theory to examine indigenous culture in New Zealand museums, which occupies an ambiguous position in a post-settler nation. It explores the production of ‘Maori art ’ in its various forms through its display in museums: from the ‘discovery ’ of traditional Maori carving in the 1980s to the ‘triumph ’ of contemporary Maori art in the 1990s, before considering the reception of this art by both majority Pakeha (European) and indigenous Maori visitors. The results of research at Te Papa (the national museum) simultaneously echo and depart from the prevailing patterns of social stratification seen in Bourdieu-inspired visitor studies worldwide. On the one hand we see the emergence of a new Maor