ABSTRACT
This chapter grew out of a series of what are tempted to call ‘discussions’ between Rosanna and the author over the course of about two years. Marilyn Strathern has described how the epistemological preoccupations of modernist anthropology have led to a ‘division of labour’ between social/cultural anthropologists and those concerned with material culture of the kind that finds its way to museums. Auckland in the late 1980s was a hotbed of Polynesian empowerment through the arts, music and fashion, a new wave of urban Polynesians were finding new avenues to create their own visual landscape, telling new stories and creating new histories. One of the strengths of fieldwork has always been the ‘total immersion’ experience of placing oneself bodily within (often) unfamiliar social situations. Drawing forced the author to analyse relationships between the different threads that formed the kaupapa or body of the cloak, and to hypothesize as to how they had been positioned.
