Station Wives in New Zealand: Narrating Continuity in the High Country

Abstract

Processes of globalisation are considered to have led to the breakdown of traditional social formations, the dissolution of community and the fracturing and destabilisation of identity. However, these impacts have not occurred evenly across time and space. Farmers of the New Zealand high country have managed to reproduce a social formation that has shown remarkable continuity over a period of 150 years. They have achieved this through the reproduction of what Appadurai (1995:206) calls "reliably local subjects", local subjects that are produced through the reproduction of a traditional gender order. This thesis focuses on the life stories of high country farm women. Their stories are characterised by narratives of essence and emergence which posit a coherent self which is durable across time and context rather than the more common narratives of transformation which trace the change from one self to another. The life stories show striking homogeneity across three generations in terms of narrative structure, in the kinds of narratives that are told, and in the persona that is narrated. That persona is constituted through pioneering discourses, which, in linking contemporary farm women with the settler past, produce continuity. To account for the similarity of the life stories I draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that high country farmers are national subjects and are one of New Zealand's elites. The reproduction of a traditional community that can be imagined and experienced as continuous is the source of the economic and cultural capitals that enable high country farmers to compete in the field of New Zealand elites, and in order to continue to compete they must reproduce the structures that produce these capitals. This continuity is achieved through the reproduction of a stable community, a traditional gender order, a mode of agricultural production which has strong links with the past and the inculcation of pioneer subjectivity. Continuity, I suggest, is not the absence of change, but the outcome of constant social labour, a "labor of eternalization” (Bourdieu, 2001: viii). Keywords: life history; rural life; elites; gender; social reproduction.