Nationalists everywhere call for the sacrifice of hearts, minds and bodies to apparently greater cause than the well-being of individuals and their local communities. What makes the Cook Islands so fascinating is the unusually close relationship between nationalists and the tourist industry. In this engaging work, Jeffrey Sissons draws on interviews with many prominent Cook Islanders and written records to describe the creation of a succession of different Cook Islands identities over the past thirty years. Workers in a young, progressive nation have, more recently, come to see themselves as hosts in a global, postmodern destination. Sissons argues that the conception of the Cook Islands nation as a ’cultural’ community is a relatively recent one, associated with tourism, therefore, the link is not natural between culture and nationhood in the Cook Islands or elsewhere.
