NAMING AS NORMING - RACE, GENDER, AND THE IDENTITY POLITICS OF NAMINGPLACES IN AOTEAROA NEW-ZEALAND

The process of naming places involves a contested identity politics of people and place. Place-names are part of the social construction of space and the symbolic construction of meanings about place. According ly, we argue that the names applied to places in Aotearoa assist in th e construction of the symbolic and material orders that legitimate the dominance of a hegemonic Pakeha masculinism. Attempts to rename (and in doing so, reclaim) places are implicated in the discursive politics of people and place. The contestation of place-names in Otago/Murihik u, one of the southernmost regions of New Zealand, is examined. We pre sent a discursive analysis of submissions made to the New Zealand Geog raphic Board in 1989-90 concerning a proposed reinstatement of Maori n ames in the area. In interpreting objections to renaming we suggest th ese objections articulated with and through a number of 'commonsense' notions about gender, 'race', culture, and nation which discursively ( re)produced a hegemonic Pakeha masculinism in New Zealand.