Tivaivai and the Managing of “Community” Funding in Auckland, New Zealand

Purpose – The chapter looks at the way a group of Cook Islands women in South Auckland used neoliberal-inspired community funding to fulfil the criteria of the funders as well as their own noncapitalist aims.Methodology/approach – The chapter draws upon a combination of original ethnographic fieldwork and literature pertaining to the production and use of tivaivai in South Auckland and neoliberal policy in New Zealand.Findings – The chapter analyzes the cultural context of value creation that the production and use of tivaivai constitutes for Cook Islanders in South Auckland. The production of tivaivai as a “commercial” derivative of these elite social textiles saw the group of Cook Islands women operating in a “human economy” (Graeber, 2012), despite the neoliberal agenda of the funding.Originality/value – As a group, Cook Islanders are marginalized in New Zealand, but the outcome of this funding in the details of how the women recipients managed the use of the money, and how and what they produced, tells a different story about how Cook Islanders engage with capitalism via the “human economy.” Such an analysis adds considerable complexity to the understandings of the way women make and use tivaivai in New Zealand, as well as the ways Cook Islanders do economics in an expanded notion of economy. This sheds light on the subaltern strategies that Cook Islanders create in response to the opportunities and hegemonic forces that exist in the global capitalist economy, and the way they engage with capitalism in the context of the New Zealand political economy.