Response

Fashion Accessory or Cultural Statement?

I am already aware of the fact that I am making a statement based on a media report and to make conclusive judgements on these two traditional Moko artists based solely on it would be unfair. However, I am not making judgements on the entirety of the written report; just the above statements regarding reasons behind people's interest in traditional Maori Moko-whether its therefore perceived as a 'fashion accessory' as opposed to a 'cultural statement'.

Firstly, fashion accessory for me is still a cultural statement; and I think we should be sensitive to the complexities of popular cultures rather than the widely spread criticism based on preconceptions suggesting as well as assuming the elements (especially visual) of such a mechanism as having no attachment to a particular history or cultural paradigm.

Sure popular culture can be criticised as holding little attachment, respect and therefore obligations to elements of morality and ethics based or emerging from a certain and overarching historical and cultural dimension; yet, do we also take into considerations the idea that at some point of the genealogical thread of our own cultural history, our ancestors also engaged with elements initially outside their own systematic understandings? That at some point or level of what has been handed down to us as a people giving force (and vice versa) to a certain cultural dimension, were things accepted by our ancestors based predominantly on their aesthetic and visual qualities?

I am not supposing a certain standpoint which disregards Maori values (as I do hold a great deal of respect to this culture and their mana); rather, I think it’s not enough for us to just say that the ways in which our own cultural elements (fundamental to our own existence as a culture) has been accepted and re-utilized out there in a paradigm other than our own should remain within the same scope of value we ourselves assign to it. Is it enough to just say that moko that has been inked on people other than our own is merely fashion? Or, has our moko become something other than we have historically utilized it within our very own system of values? Has it transformed into an embodiment of another system of value? This, I think is the case!!

Popular cultures (and I am speaking here about those which has been consistently consumed by people in close relations to the media as a kind of aesthetic as well as identity source) shouldn’t be firstly perceived through a binary-glass; where we tend to (perhaps unconsciously) bestow our own systematic values upon it and therefore in cases where what we are engaging with don’t seem to fit in accordance to our own sense of values, we look upon it as lacking the same principles with which we are gazing.

I will talk about this idea of fashion accessory as an essential element of cultural statement—as two sides of the same coin in the next post…Perhaps justify what I had just claimed since it really does seems as if it is expressed in a quite disrespectful tone with regards to Maori culture and heritage--something which I greatly admire and respect fully