Breaking Boundaries 2019

Angeline Greensill is a prominent Māori political rights campaigner, academic, leader and the daughter of Eva Rickard.

 

Marama Muru-Lanning is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the James Henare Māori Research Centre at the University of Auckland. Her research is concerned with debates and critical challenges in social anthropology where she focuses on the heterogeneity of Māori and their unique sense of place and belonging in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Marama’s environmental research incorporates mātauranga and Māori methods. She co-leads a number of interdisciplinary research projects in robotics, infrastructure and health. Her book Tūpuna Awa: People and Politics of the Waikato River, was published by Auckland University Press in 2016.  Marama is from Tūrangawaewae Marae and is of Waikato Tainui and Ngāti Maniapoto descent.

Whakarongo ki te tangi ō ngā Whaanga: Listening to the Voices of Our Harbours

My talk investigates kaitiakitanga over Aotearoa’s harbours, emphasising the work of Māori activists at multiple levels, from the shores and waters of their harbours to the steps of Parliament. The word ‘kaitiaki’ has entered our legal system, but in practice it is often used as a convenient Māori shorthand for ‘stakeholder,’ without recognition that the term is deeply embedded in the culture from which it comes. The voices of kaitiaki are seldom heard in academic literature. How do kaitiaki understand harbours and how we best care for them?

Māori activists mobilised the word kaitiakitanga in the 1980s, particularly in the Manukau harbour claim led by Dame Nganeko Minhinnick. My latest interdisciplinary research will look at how kaitiakitanga has evolved since then, in the context of increasing neoliberalisation in environmental management. The aim of the work is to develop new ways of envisaging harbours, promoting mātauranga Māori as instrumental in the past, present, and future wellbeing of our harbours.

Toon van Meijl is professor of cultural anthropology in the Dept. of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. With a doctorate from the Australian National University (1991), he has been engaged in long-term anthropological research among the Tainui Māori. His research concentrates on issues of cultural identity, and on socio-political questions emerging from the debate about property rights, especially of indigenous peoples. At present, he also coordinates the research programme of the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies that focuses on the relationship between cultural diversity and socio-economic inequality in postcolonial Europe, with special attention for issues of citizenship, democracy and dialogue.

Shifting boundaries of sovereignty in the post-settlement era of Māori claims?

A long-term process of negotiating full and final settlements of the dispossession of Māori in the nineteenth century might be finalized in the not too distant future. Although great strides have been made in settling colonial grievances, it could also be argued that the settlement process is deepening the dispossession of many Māori who for a variety of reasons do not share in the settlements. In this paper, I will explore this argument, which is based on the assumption that the sovereignty that is being reclaimed by Māori tribes is compromised by the disenfranchisement of those Māori who do not benefit from the settlements, partly because tribal corporations who have signed a settlement hardly invest in social and economic welfare, but partly also because they may not be affiliated formally to tribal corporations or because they are reluctant to be represented by tribal corporations that have received government recognition.

Alex Golub is an Associate Professor (senior lecturer) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa where he has a speciality in political anthropology with a focus on mining in Papua New Guinea. He is the editor of A Practice of Anthropology: The Thought and Influence of Marshall Sahlins and of a special issue of Anthropological Forum entitled The Politics of Order in Contemporary Papua New Guinea.  He is also the co-editor of a forthcoming special issue in the Journal of Pacific History on the life and thought of Bernard Narokobi. Professor Golub also has an interest in public and open access anthropology, blogging for seventeen years, including twelve years at savageminds.org (now anthrodendum.org). He is currently a podcast host at the New Books in Anthropology channel of the New Books Network of podcasts. His ethnography Leviathans at the Gold Mine won the 2014 book award of the Political and Legal Anthropology section of the American Anthropological Association. He is currently the chair of the Association for the Social Anthropology of Oceania and hopes you will attend their annual meetings in Hilo, Hawai‘i in January.

Breaking Boundaries in the History of Anthropology: Construing New Pasts for a Decolonised Future

Contemporary anthropology is in a decolonising moment, seeking to remake our discipline in a way that are responsive to more than just the traditional voices of the academy. As anthropologists have long known, political struggles gain legitimacy by constructing 'usable pasts' to ground themselves and this case is no exception. In this lecture I argue that we need to construe new pasts to ground the futures which we are currently imagining. Doing so requires us to break the boundaries of some of our simpler narratives about our past: That anthropology was always entirely a vicious tool of the coloniser, or always unproblematically aligned with the colonised. Our current moment is not an epochal breakthrough for social justice, nor is it just just another periodic upwelling of youthful dissatisfaction. In this lecture I try to see the trees for the forest in order to discern some historical common dynamics which could provide a nuanced, useful past for our discipline.