Reading Ruatoria and its Rastafarians: the construction of contesting identities through architecture and landscape in Children of Zion

Abstract

This essay presents an analysis of how images of the built environment and landscape are used to construct identity in the documentary Children of Zion, which tells the story of the Mt Zion Hikurangi Rastafarians as part of the arson attacks that plagued Ruatoria in the mid to late 1980s. In doing so, the analysis draws on a range of disciplines including geography, critical theory, media studies and cultural studies, as well as architectural theory. Loss is an important theme, developed through Peter Schwenger's theories on corpse images and Neil Leach's writings on attacks on architecture serving to form identity. One reading of the documentary narrative can have the identities of 'society' and the Rastafarians as being tied to distinct, separate, spaces - as though the two groups occupy geographically discrete areas in support of a division between 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. However, a key tracking shot following the title segment introduces ambiguity around the collective identities, initially that the collective identity of society is a contested one, but also a more complex reading where the two identities occupy the same space, more akin to Edward Said's theory of entanglement.