Medicine as a Lens to Examine Cross-Cultural Encounters: A Study of Medical Missionary Samuel Hayward Ford’s Writings in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

Author(s):  
Kate Tilson

Summary Medical missionary Samuel Hayward Ford arrived in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands in the late 1830s, a few years before the formal colonisation of the country. His letters and medical reports to the Committee of the Church Missionary Society revealed the complicated and malleable nature of medicine in the cross-cultural encounter. Through close study of Ford’s writings, this article argues that medicine worked to transform and interweave Māori and missionary worlds in precolonial New Zealand. Experiencing the spread of disease in the Bay of Islands, Ford practised and was influenced by evangelical humanitarianism, and he was also entangled in the politics of empire. More than this, his medicine exposed the missionary objective to transform Māori society, and it showcased not just cultural differences regarding medical knowledge but also the exchange of ideas and treatments between Māori and the missionaries.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma McNeill

<p>The landscape of cultural relations in Aotearoa is complex and entangled. While academics and policy makers imagine Aotearoa as a multicultural society, there is a lack of understanding of how cultural diversity is lived every day in Aotearoa.  There is an emerging literature on the geographies of encounter. This encourages us to address the historical predicament of how we are to live together in increasingly super diverse communities by considering the existing everyday negotiations of difference. This thesis contributes to that literature by undertaking a case study of Newtown, Wellington, in order to: 1) understand where Newtown residents and employees experience cross-cultural social interactions; and 2) what type of places help encourage positive cross-cultural interactions. Through this I explore how cross-cultural encounters and exchanges might be encouraged.  Q-methodology was used to investigate locations of cross-cultural social interactions, I conducted and analysed 23 Q-sorts with Newtown, Wellington residents and local employees. I argue that places of cross-cultural encounter take many forms. The identification of these places is closely linked to participants’ characteristics, such as socioeconomic position, and age. The participants in this study represent diverse Newtown. They have diverse socialising practices and identify a wide range of positive places for cross-cultural interactions. In conjunction with this people understand and experience encounters with cultural diversity differently. I argue that an encounter across cultural difference is not limited to an explicit interaction but can also be through the sharing of space and engagement in similar activities. I also argue for the importance of space in cross-cultural encounters; certain spatial and material qualities of spaces appear to animate cross-cultural social interaction.  This research argues that: engagement in cross-cultural interactions is often mediated by other identifiers, that everyday multiculturalism is demographically complex, and that the materiality and spatially of spaces is effectual in animating these interactions.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
John O'Connor

In this paper the author suggests that, when standing at the waharoa (gate) waiting for the karanga which calls us on to the marae, many of us, and particularly those whose ancestral histories originate in countries other than Aotearoa New Zealand, feel the apprehensive anticipation, if not disturbing terror, that comes with stepping into a cultural context so imbued with the painful colonial histories of this country. The paper explores how this history impacts upon us in cross-cultural encounters in Aotearoa New Zealand, and in particular in encounters between Māori and non-Māori, and the challenges and opportunities such encounters offer for the psychotherapeutic clinical encounter.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma McNeill

<p>The landscape of cultural relations in Aotearoa is complex and entangled. While academics and policy makers imagine Aotearoa as a multicultural society, there is a lack of understanding of how cultural diversity is lived every day in Aotearoa.  There is an emerging literature on the geographies of encounter. This encourages us to address the historical predicament of how we are to live together in increasingly super diverse communities by considering the existing everyday negotiations of difference. This thesis contributes to that literature by undertaking a case study of Newtown, Wellington, in order to: 1) understand where Newtown residents and employees experience cross-cultural social interactions; and 2) what type of places help encourage positive cross-cultural interactions. Through this I explore how cross-cultural encounters and exchanges might be encouraged.  Q-methodology was used to investigate locations of cross-cultural social interactions, I conducted and analysed 23 Q-sorts with Newtown, Wellington residents and local employees. I argue that places of cross-cultural encounter take many forms. The identification of these places is closely linked to participants’ characteristics, such as socioeconomic position, and age. The participants in this study represent diverse Newtown. They have diverse socialising practices and identify a wide range of positive places for cross-cultural interactions. In conjunction with this people understand and experience encounters with cultural diversity differently. I argue that an encounter across cultural difference is not limited to an explicit interaction but can also be through the sharing of space and engagement in similar activities. I also argue for the importance of space in cross-cultural encounters; certain spatial and material qualities of spaces appear to animate cross-cultural social interaction.  This research argues that: engagement in cross-cultural interactions is often mediated by other identifiers, that everyday multiculturalism is demographically complex, and that the materiality and spatially of spaces is effectual in animating these interactions.</p>


From the seventeenth century to the current day, more than 2.5 million Scots have sought new lives elsewhere. This book of essays examines the impact since 1600 of out-migration from Scotland upon the homeland, on the migrants themselves, on the destinations in which they settled, and upon their descendants and ‘affinity’ Scots. It does so through a focus on themes of slavery, cross-cultural encounters, economics, war, tourism, and the modern diaspora since 1945 in diverse destinations encompassing Europe, the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Hong Kong, Guyana and the British World more broadly.


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