Introduction

Transforming Worlds: Kinship as Practical Ontology

Authors

  • Billie Lythberg University of Auckland
  • Conal McCarthy Victoria University of Wellington
  • Amiria J.M. Salmond Independent Researcher

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15286/jps.128.1.7–18

Keywords:

Māori, whakapapa (relatedness, kin networks), ontology, indigenous anthropology, tikanga (Māori practices), Apirana Ngata, Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck)

Abstract

The papers in this issue trace a particular set of Māori interventions in anthropology, arts, museums and heritage in the early twentieth century and consider their implications for iwi ‘tribal communities’, development and environmental management today. They follow Apirana Ngata, Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck) and some of their Māori and Pākehā (European New Zealander) allies at the Polynesian Society through the Dominion Museum expeditions, on Te Poari Whakapapa (the Board of Maori Ethnological Research) and in a variety of community research initiatives. Authors explore how engagement with ancestral tikanga ‘practices’ and with western technologies and institutions allowed these scholars and leaders to imagine te ao hou ‘a new world’ in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through the analysis of surviving photographs, films, artefacts, collections and displays, as well as the extensive written archives that were produced through their efforts, the articles explore how relational concepts and practices including whakapapa ‘kin networks’ and tuku ‘exchange of treasures (taonga)’ were mobilised as practical ontologies, that is, as methods for bringing new things (artefacts, systems, concepts) into being. The lasting effects of these collaborative projects on museums, scholarship, government administration and tribal cultural heritage are investigated, showing the enduring relevance of this work in the present.

Author Biographies

Billie Lythberg, University of Auckland

Billie Lythberg is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland Business School, New Zealand, working at the junction of economics, anthropology and history. Her research explores Oceanic sciences, arts and oral histories; cross-cultural theories of value, valuables and valuation; intellectual and cultural property; sustainability and environmental management; digital repatriation and social innovation. Billie is co-editor of Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories (University of Otago Press, 2016) and Collecting in the South Sea: The Voyage of Bruni d’Entrecasteaux 1791–1794 (Sidestone Press, 2018). She is currently working across four projects funded by the Marsden Fund, Royal Society of New Zealand, including Te Ao Hou.

Conal McCarthy, Victoria University of Wellington

Conal McCarthy is a Professor and Director of the Museum and Heritage Studies programme at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington. He has published widely on museum history, theory and practice, including the books Exhibiting Māori (2007), Museums and Māori (2011) and Museum Practice (2015). In 2017 Conal was one of the authors of Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government (Duke University Press), and co-editor of a volume of essays in memory of Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Victoria University Press). His next book is a comparative analysis of indigenous museology in Australia and Aotearoa for Routledge.

Amiria J.M. Salmond, Independent Researcher

Amiria Salmond is an independent researcher whose interests include Māori weaving (whatu and raranga), artefact-oriented ethnography, cultural and intellectual property, digital taonga and the “ontological turn” in social anthropology. Her book Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange (2005), based on her doctoral thesis, was published by Cambridge University Press. She co-edited Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (Routledge 2007) and Pasifika Styles: Artists inside the Museum (University of Otago Press 2008), the latter based on a ground-breaking exhibition curated with artist Rosanna Raymond; and Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories (University of Otago Press, 2016). A former senior curator and lecturer at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), University of Cambridge, she has also curated and designed exhibitions at the Tairāwhiti Museum in New Zealand.

jps march 2019 cover

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Published

2019-03-31

Issue

Vol. 128 No. 1 (2019): March 2019

Section

Articles

License

Copyright © 2022 by the Polynesian Society (Inc.)

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

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Dr Marcia Leenen-Young, Editor
The Polynesian Society
c/o School of Māori and Pacific Studies
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019, Auckland
New Zealand

email: m.leenen@auckland.ac.nz