scholarly journals Constructing the Identities of Place: An Exploration of Māori and Archaeological Heritage Practices in Aotearoa New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Elizabeth Dale Pishief

<p>This thesis examines a problem in current heritage practice, namely, the statutory management of archaeological sites separately from other heritage places with the consequent loss of many sites of importance to Māori. It explores places and the different meanings and practices of heritage constructed around them by archaeologists and Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand where such questions have not been critically examined in great depth. The study responds to this gap in the literature by setting out to develop a theory of heritage practice that enables the effective translation of peoples' heritage aspirations into a workable model of heritage management in place of the current framework. The research has used an interdisciplinary theoretical framework developed from the literature of heritage studies and related fields, which builds on Laurajane Smith's work on archaeology and the authorised heritage discourse, but also includes writing on governmentality, phenomenology, kinaesthesia, agency, and material culture. The research design employed a qualitative, interpretivist methodology. Discourse analysis of the evidence gathered from secondary sources, including legislation and policy; and an ethnography of current professional practice in the form of interviews and participant observation, all produced rich findings about heritage, place and practice that are fundamental to understanding the complex issues examined in this study. The main finding that emerges from the research is a refined theory of heritage. I argue that heritage is comprised of three tangible elements: person, performance and place, which create what Māori respondents refer to as the 'Connect', a contemporary Māori heritage practice related to customary concepts. Heritage is the Connect. The research has led to the formulation of a more appropriate trans-cultural, bi-national governance model of heritage. As one of the first sustained pieces of critical analysis of heritage management in New Zealand, this thesis thereby makes a significant academic contribution to critical heritage studies and the history, theory and practice of heritage management in this, and other post-settler nations.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Elizabeth Dale Pishief

<p>This thesis examines a problem in current heritage practice, namely, the statutory management of archaeological sites separately from other heritage places with the consequent loss of many sites of importance to Māori. It explores places and the different meanings and practices of heritage constructed around them by archaeologists and Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand where such questions have not been critically examined in great depth. The study responds to this gap in the literature by setting out to develop a theory of heritage practice that enables the effective translation of peoples' heritage aspirations into a workable model of heritage management in place of the current framework. The research has used an interdisciplinary theoretical framework developed from the literature of heritage studies and related fields, which builds on Laurajane Smith's work on archaeology and the authorised heritage discourse, but also includes writing on governmentality, phenomenology, kinaesthesia, agency, and material culture. The research design employed a qualitative, interpretivist methodology. Discourse analysis of the evidence gathered from secondary sources, including legislation and policy; and an ethnography of current professional practice in the form of interviews and participant observation, all produced rich findings about heritage, place and practice that are fundamental to understanding the complex issues examined in this study. The main finding that emerges from the research is a refined theory of heritage. I argue that heritage is comprised of three tangible elements: person, performance and place, which create what Māori respondents refer to as the 'Connect', a contemporary Māori heritage practice related to customary concepts. Heritage is the Connect. The research has led to the formulation of a more appropriate trans-cultural, bi-national governance model of heritage. As one of the first sustained pieces of critical analysis of heritage management in New Zealand, this thesis thereby makes a significant academic contribution to critical heritage studies and the history, theory and practice of heritage management in this, and other post-settler nations.</p>


Author(s):  
Meg Parsons ◽  
Karen Fisher ◽  
Roa Petra Crease

AbstractIn Aotearoa New Zealand, co-management initiatives are increasingly commonplace and are intended to improve sustainable management of environments as well as foster more equitable sharing of power between the settler-state and Indigenous Māori iwi (tribes). In this chapter we examine one such co-management arrangement that recognises and includes Ngāti Maniapoto iwi in decision-making about their ancestral river (the upper section of the Waipā River Catchment) and whether the implementation of initiative translated into tangible benefits for the iwi. Our research findings highlight how co-management agreement is perceived as overwhelming positive by both government and Ngāti Maniapoto representatives. However iwi note that they still face substantive barriers to achieving environmental justice (including the lack of formal recognition of their authority and power, and limited resourcing).


Author(s):  
Meg Parsons ◽  
Karen Fisher ◽  
Roa Petra Crease

AbstractIn this concluding chapter, we bring together our earlier analyses of the historical and contemporary waterscapes of the Waipā River (Aotearoa New Zealand) to consider the theory and practice of Indigenous environmental justice. In this chapter, we return to review three key dimensions of environmental justice: distributive, procedural, and recognition. We summarise the efforts of one Māori tribal group (Ngāti Maniapoto) to challenge the knowledge and authority claims of the settler-colonial-state and draw attention to the pluralistic dimensions of Indigenous environmental (in)justice. Furthermore, we highlight that since settler colonialism is not a historic moment but still a ongoing reality for Indigneous peoples living settler societies it is critically important to critically evaluate theorising about and environmental justice movements through a decolonising praxis.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Martyn Reynolds

<p>Pasifika education, the education of students with connections to the Pacific in Aotearoa New Zealand, is intercultural; Pasifika students are generally taught by Palangi (European-origin) teachers in a system originally designed to meet the perceived needs of European settlers. The field has a history of inequity, consigning many Pasifika students to mediocrity in formal education. A cultural reading of the situation connects a need for emancipatory self-description with the achievement of social justice within the kind of participatory democracy imagined by Dewey. Recent government initiatives such as the Pasifika Education Plan have sought ‘Pasifika success’ through targets and initiatives, the most visible focusing on success as achievement understood by comparison to other ethnic groups. This has been critiqued as not seeking success as, but of Pasifika, in effect another assimilative practice. This thesis interrogates how success in formal education is understood, described, and explained by male Pasifika students as they enter the secondary sector. This is complemented by: paying attention to experiences of success in primary education; extending discussion to families; and the catalytic use of Pasifika community-sourced data to create opportunities for teachers to re-vision their practice. The inquiry is a bounded case study in the atypical context of a high-decile single-sex state school. A framework which combines a critical theory, critical race theory, and a Pacific Indigenous research paradigm provides a nuanced strengths-based approach. A dialogical-relational methodology argues for a mediated dialogue to teu le va (care for the relational spaces) between participants. The thesis demonstrates how catalytic attention to relationality can help teachers positively re-vision their practice. Attention to relationality also supports a complex positionality where a Palangi researcher seeks to edgewalk between Pasifika and Palangi concepts and communities, teachers and students, and Pacific-orientated research and the academy. Findings suggest that male Pasifika students hold a wide basket of forms of success which both contrast with and complement success as achievement: ideas about a ‘good education’, acceptance, participation, comfort, resilience, and the contextual extension of competence. These can be understood through Pacific origin concepts such as va (relationality), malaga (journey) and poto (wisdom), disturbing existing thinking about Pasifika education. As a result, the thesis has potential to assist a re-framing of theory and practice in the field as well as providing a model of relational inquiry for further social justice research into intercultural fields such as Pasifika education.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Miranda Williamson

<p>Carman and Sørensen’s book Heritage Studies: Methods and Approaches challenges us to reconsider and extend methodologies in heritage studies. This thesis takes inspiration from their book to ask how and why heritage practitioners and academics researching built heritage should use oral history as a useful qualitative tool in their research process. In the New Zealand context, researchers find it difficult to find information for the period that spans the Second World War to the present, due to the common practice of restricting access to recent official records and government documents, in most cases due to sensitivities about privacy, and the cessation of the Papers Past newspaper resource. This thesis asks if researchers could fill this gap by drawing on tools from the fields of public history and oral history and by doing this extend and refine the theory and practice of heritage studies and heritage management.  To test this approach, I have undertaken a case study of the historic building, Ngaroma, in Wellington’s Lyall Bay. The methodology I have followed involved first delving into the building’s history through library and archival sources; I then conducted nine interviews with people who have had a connection to the building. The data I have gathered about both the physical and social fabric of Ngaroma and its history has built up a picture of life in the building. Memory, senses and emotion have emerged as important aspects of my findings.  In analysing the results, I have extended the established binary understanding of the physical and social fabrics of the building and developed the concept of ‘numinous fabric’. In doing so I argue that we can identify the overlap between physical fabric and social fabric which can guide and inspire the way we can go about interviewing people by linking extant fabric with intangible things such as memories. This thesis finds that oral history can be used to tap into a rich source of material that adds depth and dimension to our understanding of the built heritage around us. It encourages all academics and heritage professionals researching historic buildings to undertake oral interviews as a central qualitative methodology and in doing so to bring together heritage theory and heritage management practice.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jonathon Avery

<p>Māori performing arts provides a valuable contribution to Aotearoa New Zealand society. Māori performing arts has an intrinsic link to Māori culture and is used to connect 1) Māori who are disengaged from iwi/hapu/whanau, as well as 2) non-Māori, in New Zealand and around the world with Māori culture. Performance genres such as waiata-a-ringa, haka and mōteatea contain a body of knowledge that communicate Māori ways of being and doing and provide participants with an opportunity to become connected to a culturally literate and informed community. Using ethnographic techniques of participant observation, interviews and performance, this thesis examines the experiences of individuals who engage with Māori performing arts and the meaning they attribute to their engagement with the art form. Drawing on contemporary ideas of community and meaning, this thesis also investigates how Māori performing arts builds and strengthens relationships and whanaungatanga by connecting participants to local, national and international Aotearoa New Zealand communities. This thesis draws on two contexts in Wellington where people engage with Māori performing arts - The Ngāti Pōneke Young Māori Club at Pipitea marae and Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music. Along with exploring two Māori performance context in detail, this these explores how Māori performing arts is used as a platform to educate participants about Māori knowledge, language and culture while also discussing how Māori performing arts is used to symbolise and represent Aotearoa New Zealand nationally and internationally.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sophia Edwards

<p>Existing studies suggest that Asian panethnicity is the political mobilisation of diverse groups of people under a new name, to oppose racism and discrimination. Asian panethnicity is shaped by social forces, including those that exclude. As such, it is inherently political. However, it is limiting to think of it only as a kind of intentional, collective action bent towards achieving a predetermined group goal. This thesis expands this understanding of panethnicity, by considering how “Asiannness” is experienced on an intersubjective level and asks what “Asian” means to and for the Asian individual.  Lingering Orientalism perpetuates a sense of Asian people as not quite belonging in the West. Though by now cliché, this narrative of non-belonging continues to determine ideas of Asianness and set the parameters of appropriate Asian behaviour. But, this non-belonging is also the site in and from which Asian actors make their own meanings and seek their own kind of situated belonging. This thesis takes an autoethnographic and ethnographic approach to field sites in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to observe some of the ways Asian identity is formed. It is inevitable that transnational processes contribute to this identity work, but these global processes are also subsumed by localised structures and contexts.  Drawing from participant observation with social and community groups, and interviews with creative artists, writers, administrators, community workers and activists addressing the question of what it means to be Asian, I argue that Asian panethnicity is constituted by “doing”. It is made up of different acts, repeated over time, and in different settings. As a product of relationships between externally imposed, in group enforced, and self-made conceptions of “Asianness”, Asian panethnicity is both performative and performed. This thesis presents scenarios in which these performances and presentations of the Asian self take place. In considering some of the possible contexts and conventions that give rise to the performative act/s of being Asian, I argue that being Asian is a creative, collaborative, ongoing endeavour. It is a means by which to accomplish belonging in the world.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bronwyn Jewell McGovern

<p>This thesis explores the everyday life of Brother, a well-known street dweller and local identity, who lives everyday life on a busy street corner in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Brother’s way of doing ‘being ordinary’ attracts strong public curiosity, media interest, and monitoring by informal and formal social control mechanisms, including medical intervention. This research provides a comprehensive account of what can happen to those at the margins who dare, or are impelled, to do things differently. My research is inspired by the longstanding tradition of street corner sociology, and grounded within the sociology of everyday life orientation. My street ethnography involved participant observation over a three-and-a-half year period. In that time, I observed Brother and other street people, capturing the depth and nuanced complexities of a life lived in the open. Central to this thesis is an examination of the ways in which wider social structures and institutions bear upon the local micro-setting, in particular how classification processes act to ‘make, remake, and unmake’ people. Three core concepts of space, body, and social interaction are explored to examine, through the situatedness of everyday talk and social action, how social meanings are locally produced and understood. I argue that by developing spatial, bodily, and interactional methods, Brother has established organisational and social capacities, and lines of conduct, that are firmly founded in autonomous actions. Through his rejection of ascribed ‘homeless’ membership and his clear embracement of a street lifestyle, Brother’s street life is shown to subvert and trouble normative understandings, while engendering and maintaining a lived sense of home in the city he calls his whare [house]. My research contributes an Aotearoa New Zealand perspective to the international sociological street corner landscape, and provides a Wellington perspective to the emerging domestic literature on street life. More broadly, my study aims to stimulate critical sociological reflection regarding different modes of being and belonging in the world and how we, as a society, respond to this.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-273
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Balcerzak

Abstract The article explores the mechanisms of memory culture and the commercialization of the socialist heritage from the period of the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) (from 1945 to 1989) as a tourist destination, societal practice and cultural resource in today’s Warsaw. At the intersection of heritage studies, historical tourism and material culture, the ethnographic analysis focuses on three empirical case studies as examples of the commercial popularization of the history of the PRL. These are the communist heritage tours offered by WPT 1313 and the documentation of the socialist heritage at the Museum of Life in the PRL and the Neon Museum. These commodified products of Warsaw’s tourism and entertainment culture fill a gap in the tourist market, based on the prototypical, nostalgic longing of tourists for a sensual and emotional experience of the “authentic past”. This predominantly participant observation-based ethnographic study on the practices, spaces, images and agents filling this touristic niche, illustrates how they create sensual-emotive, aesthetic and performative fields of reifying, discovering and experiencing the socialist past. Finally, the paper focuses on how these polyvalent mechanisms shape the tourist infrastructure of Warsaw oscillating between critical distancing and entertaining appropriation of the socialist heritage.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Francesca Benocci

<p>This thesis is a case study in literary translation. It consists of a creative component (60%) — an anthology of contemporary New Zealand women poetry translated into Italian — and a critical component (40%) — an interdisciplinary commentary outlining the historical, linguistic, cultural, literary and translational aspects underpinning my work as editor, literary translator and scholar. My interest in New Zealand literature began with my Master’s thesis, when reading Keri Hulme’s 1985 Booker Prize winning novel the bone people exposed me to the linguistic and cultural specificities of literary works produced in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This interest was further ignited by reading Marinella Rocca Longo’s pioneering study of New Zealand poetry, La poesia neozelandese dalle origini inglesi ai contemporanei, published in 1977. To this day, Hulme’s novel remains untranslated in Italian and Rocca Longo’s monograph is the only comprehensive study about New Zealand poetry for an Italian-speaking readership, one with which I have engaged constructively and critically in the course of my studies. This doctoral thesis thus combines translation and poetry. More specifically, it asks itself what it means to translate contemporary New Zealand women poets into Italian. This choice is motivated by three aims, which complement the wider ambition to make New Zealand writing better known to Italian readers: to better reflect the ethnic richness of New Zealand literature; to highlight the major role played by women in developing and expanding New Zealand poetry; to discuss translation theory from a post-colonial and feminist viewpoint. These factors are reflected in the structure and contents of this thesis. A historical overview of New Zealand literature in general and of New Zealand poetry in particular as an example of post-colonial literature is followed by a discussion on which theories and practices of translation are ethically as well as aesthetically the most appropriate for the translation of post-colonial poetry written by women. The comprehensive anthology I have compiled and the commentary that accompanies it bring this discussion to life, celebrating not only the creative and scholarly contribution of the translator as an intercultural negotiator, but also the ethical responsibility underscoring this task. The opportunity to undertake this research in Aotearoa/New Zealand has made this study particularly intense as well as personal, as I negotiated and renegotiated the space between theory and practice, pushing myself to expand and deepen the choices a translator is called to make as a reader, as an interpreter, as a critic, and as a writer. I hope that this goal has been achieved in the negotiation between the theoretical, scholarly and creative parts of this project that are embodied in the outcome of this thesis.</p>


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