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This article was first published on Open Inquiry 

http://openinquiry.nz 

February 2025 

  

  

The 2007 New Zealand Curriculum allows teachers and schools to decide what to teach. In this localised curriculum there is no prescribed content, no nationwide standardisation nor effective quality control. The result is increased inequality. Students in schools committed to high quality academic subjects continue to achieve. Students in schools that offer little more than socio-cultural beliefs and practices are denied the education needed for full inclusion in modern society.   

  

The Minister of Education, Erica Stanford is determined to introduce a knowledge rich curriculum for all New Zealand students. What does this mean? First, it is a standardised curriculum which ensures that students across the country receive the same high-quality knowledge. That knowledge consists of academic subjects with content selected for its value and justified for its veracity. Furthermore, the content must be designed so that it is coherently organised and built progressively from the most basic to the more complex.  

Second, it is about planning for teaching. It is here that teachers take the designed national curriculum and turn it into effective teaching plans suitable for their school and their students. The latest ideas from cognitive science about secondary mental abilities, time perception, memory load, and feedback are needed at this stage. They help connect the content to students’ thinking processes.  

Third, both good curriculum design and planning for teaching set the foundation for the actual teaching. Many teachers know their subjects well and use teaching methods that best connect students to rich content. They will welcome a knowledge-rich curriculum because it is what they have taught for years. We know and respect those teachers. The real benefits will be for those teachers and students who have been disadvantaged by eighteen years of a localised curriculum.  

This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generationⁱ. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s. However, its success is not yet assurred. The professional class which benefitted most from that post-war subject-based curriculum, has worked tirelessly to dismantle the source of its privilege in a strange alliance of decolonisation and socialism. 

  

We can thank the recent secondary school incident for revealing what this alliance looks like in practice – a junior English class, a video playing, a teacher instructing how to analyse the video’s tone and mood. In the video, How colonisers went from learning to reo Māori to trying to exterminate it, students hear the authoritative voice of sociolinguist, Dr Vini Olsen-Reeder declaiming, Once the pakeha government was established here, from there the desire grew to exterminate the Māori peopleⁱⁱ.  

  

The video’s content is either wrong or seriously distorted. Such propaganda will be difficult to teach in a knowledge-rich subject that requires the selection of content to be justified. That’s the sticking point – who justifies the content? What criteria are used? 

In the coming months, the public will be consulted on the draft English curriculum. This is right and proper – it is not a curriculum for teachers alone, but for the nation.  It is here, in the national discussion about the subject of English that I predict a simmering conflict will surface. Some, like me, regard school English as the study of language and literature in the English language. For others, English is the tool of the capitalist coloniser, intent on locking the colonised into a permanent state of subjugation. Their demands are for the decolonisation, then indigenisation, of the entire education system. 

It is unsurprising that English is at the centre of the gathering storm, although History and Science are not far behind. English has a very particular role – that of creating society’s cultural repertoire. When we study English at school we are taught, or should be taught, the content and conventions of our nation’s most widely spoken language. New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English. It is the language of the 19th century colonial era and of 20th century nation building. According to one secondary school principalⁱⁱⁱ, the most effective way to decolonise the nation is by removing English, that dangerous language of the Eurocentric coloniser from the school curriculum.  

If we agree that the subject is the study of English language and literature, then the content selected must be justified. A straightforward process, one might think. But no, at the very source of the creation and justification of academic knowledge, is the wellspring of the conflict. It is in the nation’s universities that decolonisation and indigenisation are being promoted^iv. School subjects which are drawn from university disciplines and accountable to their rules and methods, will be hostages to the unaccountable ideologies of our decolonising universities.  

English as a school subject draws in the main from the disciplines of literary criticism (including Shakespearean studies), linguistics, sociolinguistics, and history. Decolonising those disciplines removes all means of accountability – those methods of empirical evidence, logical argument and ongoing criticism which ensure that disciplinary knowledge is always on trial and always subject to rejection, revision, or provisional confirmation. These methods are what gives the disciplines, and by extension those who practise them, authority and status.  

Although Dr Olsen-Reeder does not identify himself in the video as a university lecturer, his title and sociolinguist label convey authority. Teachers and high school students are likely to take him at his word. If anything, the English lesson incident is to be thanked for providing us with a glimpse of a decolonised education system. It should alert us to the difficulties faced by those tasked with introducing a knowledge rich curriculum.  

If you contribute to the consultation of the draft English curriculum, I ask that you justify what you want taught. The content must have value not only for its literary beauty, its grammatical precision, its vocabulary richness, but it must challenge students. When teachers introduce young people to abstract content beyond their immediate experience, the students develop the secondary cognitive abilities necessary for the complexities of modern life.  

A decolonised curriculum does not provide quality content. Instead it locks young people into emotional responses. But emoting is not thinking. Abstract thinking develops only when students are confronted by complex content. A knowledge-rich English curriculum offers both that content and the development of the mental skills needed for the modern world. 

See Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Turn. Springer.   

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74661-1.

The book is free to download 

  

Democracy’s Pillars 

The pillars are:  

1. The citizen^ix – the individual who bears political and legal rights – not the racialised group member.  

2. The state  –– the governing infrastructure of parliament,  systems of law, education, health and so on, regulator of public resources such as water, foreshore and seabed, flora and fauna, radio waves . . ..   

3. The nation – at once a geographic entity and a symbol of a unified though historically diverse people who muddle along together in liberal civil society. 

Each of these pillars is riven by a necessary tension – a tension arising from their inherent contradictions  – contradictions which make democracy future-oriented, progressive  –  and vulnerable. 

The contradictions are: 

• As citizens, we have a duty to society but, at the same time, we have personal interests arising from kin, cultural, and other social loyalties.   

• The state is simultaneously the capitalist state – generating economic wealth and inequality – and the secular democratic state – guaranteeing political equality and regulating wealth distribution. 

• The nation is unified in facing the future, yet diverse in its past.  

Democracy is peaceful battle within and between each of these three pillars. This bloodless conflict is only possible when individuals are partially loyal.  

So what is ‘partial loyalty’? 

Partial loyalty 

I first came across the term in anthropologist, Alan Macfarlane’s The Making of the Modern World. It intrigued me and I have developed the idea further in the following way.  

‘Partial loyalty’ can explain what it is about the modern individual who has contradictory loyalties simultaneously – identifying as a family member, a member of an ancestral group, a cultural group, a tribe, a religion, an identity group defined by leisure interests, sexuality, and so on.  

This is civil society. From different, even conflicting interests how do we decide where our loyalty lies – is it to New Zealand? To an identity group? An ancestral group? To those ‘who look like us’? 

The idea of ‘partial loyalty’ is a way into thinking about this question.  

It is a question that someone in a tribal society, an autocratic society, a religious society would not have to ask, or be permitted to ask, because the answer is already provided.  

Most societies demand total loyalty. 

• Traditional tribal societies allowed one identity – fixed by birth status and and kinship ties – not open to individual choice.  Loyalty was non-negotiable because total loyalty ensured the group’s survival.  

• Autocratic regimes, both past and present, impose total loyalty – not for the survival of all, but for the elite – imposed by might and by ideological indoctrination. 

Democracies are different in a fundamental way. They not only allow partial loyalty but require it. 

In a democracy we hold many loyalties simultaneously – family and social groups where the loyalty is personal – creating a deeply held sense of identity and belonging  – perhaps to a tribe, culture, religion, sport or other type of association.  

And at the same time we are loyal to a diverse society and to its governing system that is not personal. Indeed loyalty to the democratic nation is loyalty to a vision – the idea of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.  

These two different loyalties – one a deeply personal identity – the other a rational commitment to an idea – is why democracy is so difficult. It is much easier to fall back into loyalties of emotion, not reason.  

The ease and attraction of total loyalty favours ethno-nationalism – it is profoundly anti-modern and anti-democratic – yet profoundly seductive.  

(This is an extract from the speech I gave to the New Zealand ACT Party Annual Conference, in Wellington and Auckland, July 2022.)

This extract about partial loyalty from Chapter 6 ‘Social Relations of Trust‘ in my 2012 book ‘The Politics of Knowledge in Education’.

The objective knowledge developed in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences is important to liberal democracies for political as well as for educational reasons. This chapter is about the link between the objectivity of epistemic knowledge and the rational thinking required for democracy. It draws on Alan Macfarlane’s (2002) ideas about ‘partial loyalty’ (p. 271), a concept developed in the literature about the role of contractual associations in making the modern world (the title of Macfarlane’s book). According to this approach, the partial loyalty of social relations of trust enables the simultaneous attachment and separation towards knowledge that is required for objectivity and criticism. Macfarlane (2002) refers to the development of a world of trust and openness as ‘the basis not only for capitalism but also for modern science’ (p. 106), a view of science’s role in modern society shared by Sharplin and discussed in chapter 3. Along with their importance in establishing and maintaining relations of trust between people in societies based on contract not status, objectivity, criticism, and judgement are also features of democratic citizenship.

The student who ‘knows only what has been told him, (whose) judgements are only those which he has received from his teachers (and) has formed his mind on another’s. His knowledge has not been drawn from reason. He is merely the plaster-cast of a man’ (Kant, 1781/1993, p. 535). Such imbibed understanding is the doxic or embodied knowledge of subjective experience, where ‘we accept many things without knowing them’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992, p. 113). It is the commonsense reality of experience that is the source of ideology and the reason for ideology’s power. But it is a reality in which our “senses may fail us”. Only the provisional truth claims of objective knowledge can reveal the ideological or cultural nature of experience.

This means that the reasoning required for disciplinary knowledge is that which is critical both of itself and of the society which that knowledge serves. It employs the sociological imagination which makes the familiar unfamiliar and enables us to conceptualise that which is unknown to us. Forms of social organisation that have been developed in the academic disciplines over time, forms that arise from the ‘cognitive interests’ (Young, 2008, p. 31) of intellectualised individuals and that are produced in disciplinary institutions, are intimately connected to the partial loyalty of contractual social organisation. That partial loyalty enables agency—whether the agency of the intellectual individual in knowledge creation or the rational citizen in democratic politics.

Social knowledge and academic knowledge have much in common. Both types of knowledge are produced by people within a social context and in the service of the society. Both have their origin in the sacred of the traditional world where ‘in general no distinction is drawn between the natural, the supernatural, and the human; the gods do not transcend the universe but are rooted in it and subject to its principles’ (Lindberg, 1992, p. 8). But as David Lindberg (1992) observes, the early ‘conceptions of space and time are not (like those of modern physics) abstract and mathematical, but are invested with meaning and value drawn from the experience of the community’ (p. 8). With reference to the origin myths of several early societies, Lindberg points to the ‘strong tendency in oral traditions to identify causes with beginnings, so that to explain something is to identify its historical origins’ (p. 8).

This is a significant observation and helps with the task of delineating one of the major differences between social realism and social constructivism—that of abstract conceptual knowledge. Whereas scientific knowledge is characterised by advanced theoretical and conceptual understanding, social knowledge too conceptualises the world in the beliefs found in religious and cultural explanations for the unknown. However with social knowledge, the meaning and value of knowledge remain tied to the experience of the social group. The beliefs do not become abstract concepts capable of being applied to other times and other situations. They remain experience-based beliefs even if the experience referred to occurred in mythological times. In this way, commonsense knowledge, although located in the reality of experience, is ideological. It is not a “false consciousness”, because it is deeply embedded in the reality of everyday life and is a “way of knowing” that arises from that experience. For this reason the cultural beliefs that make up ideology are extremely difficult to change (Shalem and Bensusan, 1999). But although such social knowledge  is the “truth” of our lives it is one limited in what and how it can explain the world given that it is always tied to the the world of the “knower”.

Like Durkheim, Lindberg (1992) traces the emergence of science from the early understandings of the sacred, describing how the contemplation of natural phenomena led to new sets of questions and new sets of answers with ‘personification of nature gradually becoming a less-prominent feature of their (the early philosophers) discourse, and the gods disappearing from their explanations of natural phenomena’ (p. 26) as a ‘distinction between the natural and the supernatural was emerging’ (p. 27). The distinction between the natural and the supernatural, which has enabled the growth of science as objective knowledge, was developed within the canons of the various disciplines. These were communities of scholars across time and space that produced the ‘coalitions of minds’ described by Collins (2000, p. 7)—a claim accepted by social realists to support the argument that knowledge is produced within social and historical circumstances but not limited to those circumstances. It is in the sociality of the canon that the collective representations of the discipline are generated. According to Durkheim (1995):

Collective representations are the product of immense cooperation that extends not only in space but also through time; to make them, a multitude of different minds have associated, intermixed, and combined their ideas and feelings; long generations have accumulated their experience and knowledge. A very special intellectuality that is infinitely richer and more complex than that of the individual is distilled in them. (p. 15)

Despite the sociality of the production of knowledge, the “product” is able to be separated from those conditions of production—for reasons that I described in the previous chapter. That is one of the crucial differences between social realist and constructivist arguments. Another distinction concerns the role of the individual in generating knowledge and contributing to the disciplinary canon. Not only must the knowledge be separated from the knower, but that “knower” must have a degree of agency within the social relations of symbolic production. In order to be a critic within disciplinary systems and procedures researchers must be capable of objectifying their own conditions of existence, including the symbolic relations of production within which they are located. In doing so researchers are intellectual agents contributing to producing the collective canon, not to merely reproducing it.

Social knowledge is characterised by its role as the means to reproduce a socio-cultural group. It preserves the “culture” in order to maintain continuity and cohesion. In contrast, modern societies are characterised by internal mechanisms of change, what Alan Macfarlane (2002) describes as ‘the unusual properties of the new kind of grouping’ to emerge in societies based on contract not status (p. 259). This is the partial loyalty made possible by the fact that individuals can enter and leave social groups according to the person’s volition—something not possible with groups organised according to kin and ethnicity. The idea of partial loyalty can also be usefully applied to academic communities. They, like members of socio-political organisations, have an “entry and escape clause”. Neither the researchers nor their ideas are required to be totally loyal to the wider group, as is the case with religio-cultural groups. The latter require such total loyalty to maintain social and political cohesion. But it is a condition of the academic system that its members are not “loyal”, that they remain critical and judgmental.

For this reason, although ideas are created within the social relations of symbolic production of any particular discipline, those relations are not necessarily determining of the intellectual thinker who produced them. They do determine the systems, methods, and codes that are used, that is true, but the scientist is not restricted to reproducing the theories and concepts of the discipline. He or she is able to change them. While the disciplinary systems and procedures allow for the development of innovative theories, it is the individual scientist either alone or with colleagues whose creativity is “distilled” in the complex intellectuality of the canon.

Michael Young (2008) refers to one of the two goals he identifies for social realism as ‘to explore how the forms of social organization that arise from “cognitive” interests may themselves shape the organization of society itself’ (p. 31). That exploration is my purpose here to link the type of institutions made possible in contractual societies to those institutions and procedures of science. The link is to be found in the partial loyalty that characterise the social relations of trust required for criticism and judgement. The rise of objective knowledge that contains criticism as a key part of its logic is intimately associated with the shift from status-based to contractual societies and the resulting individualisation of personal identity that followed from the breakdown of the kinship structuring principle. Trust emerged as the unifying device for this new social order.

My interest in this chapter is in examining the relationship between contractual society and objective knowledge to explore the nature of the link. I find it in a politics of knowledge that contains two features; one is the processes of objectivity, criticism, and judgement that allows for the partial loyalty of attachment and distance exercised in the disciplinary canons and in democratic politics. The second feature is the social relations of trust that provide the context for that partial loyalty to operate. The organising principle of liberal democratic societies in the modern world is that of contract, and it is in the making of the contractual relationships and the public sphere as the site for those relationships that objective knowledge plays a major role. It is for this reason that I devote the first section of the chapter to explaining the shift from status to contract—what Henry Maine describe as the ‘the greatest of all changes’ (Maine, cited in Macfarlane, 2002, p. 16)—before turning to examining how objectivity creates the partial loyalty that is a necessary condition for the exercise of critical reasoning in contractual societies.

How do societies with populations that do not share a common past cohere and hold themselves together? The status to contract issue is an old question for modernity—one asked by thinkers from Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Tocqueville to Marx, J. S. Mill, and Durkheim. According to Alan Macfarlane a question at the heart of sociology is: What is the ‘way in which the individual is embedded in wider groupings’? (p. 5). In The Making of the Modern World (2002), Macfarlane traces what it was about the change in the individual-group relationship that enabled the shift to modern liberal democratic societies. Convinced by the nineteenth-century historian, F. W. Maitland’s argument that the answer is found in the non-kinship corporations and trusts that characterise English common law and equity from the Anglo-Saxon period, Macfarlane asks the rhetorical question: ‘How could civilisations avoid the Scylla of status and also the Charybdis of contract?’ His answer is that ‘the way lay through some combination of the best of both; the affective, emotional ties of status, the flexibility and efficiency of contract’ (p. 259).

In tracing the development of contractual associations as ‘a new kind of grouping’, Macfarlane brings back into the literature Maitland’s ideas about how a new form of cooperation emerging from the early English ‘proto-trusts’ ‘could balance the allegiances of group and individual’ and replace societies based on status bonds’ (p. 259). According to Macfarlane (2002), Maitland ‘finally solved the problem of combining individualism and associations in a new way’ (p. 3) in explaining the ‘origins and nature of the modern world’ (p. 4). This is indeed a powerful statement. If it is the case, then Maitland’s insights will also assist those like myself who wrestle with how to explain the relationship between a determinism in the relations of symbolic production and the agency of individuals in creating Durkheim’s ‘collective representations’ (1995, p. 15).

While the canon ‘enables a particular type of activity and its principles are generative’ given that it is the ‘knowledge not the knower that counts’ (Moore, 2007b, p. 68), the individual is consciously involved in the creation of knowledge. In this way, I would argue, the knower does count (although not tied forever to the knowledge as the constructivists would argue). Along with creating ideas that become distilled in the canon’s complex intellectuality, the scientist issimultaneously a member of the disciplinary community and its critic. It is this “knower” who enacts the systems and procedures of objectification and criticism authorised by the discipline as well as doing the actual thinking. As Durkheim (cited in Culliver, 1983) maintained, ‘truth is only ever achieved by individuals’ (p. xx). However, Durkheim traced the condition for individualism in the social division of labour.

My argument that the form individuality takes with its “partial loyalty” under certain political conditions—conditions enabled by the objectivity of knowledge—does not deny the location of individualism in economic relations. However I do argue that the contractual nature of liberal democratic political relations acts as a counterbalance to the determinism of capitalist relations of production. This is the case because the partial loyalty of contractual social relations encourages objectification, and with it, criticism and judgement. It is for this reason that the uneasy but workable settlement between liberalism and capitalism of the expansive industrial period was the condition for the extension of epistemic knowledge to the wider population. The stronger the forces of liberal democracy, the greater the spread of epistemic knowledge with its objectivity and criticism.

However, since the 1970s, the democracy-capitalism settlement of the industrial era has weakened. Reactionary and conservative political forces with their accompanying strategies of localisation have found that accumulation in the era of financial capitalism appears to operate effectively alongside non-democratic polities. The success of capitalist accumulation in countries governed by oligarchies and autocracies as well as the emergence of localised forms of capitalism, such as neotribal capitalism in New Zealand (Rata, 2000; 2011b) would support this view. It would appear that democracy is no longer the price that capitalist elites need to pay by placating the working class in return for expanding profits. This realisation that democracy may not be the only polity suited to capitalist accumulation supports the rise of conservative elites, increasing inequalities, and liberal-democratic nations that govern increasingly on behalf of global capitalism rather than on behalf of the people.

It is a pyrrhic victory for capitalism however. As democracy declines, so too does epistemic knowledge, given one is a condition for the other. Capitalism, by weakening the conditions for objective knowledge through various localisation strategies, weakens its own foundations. The source of creativity required for capitalist expansion is located in epistemic knowledge. The “long twentieth century” settlement between capitalism and democracy was not only a settlement with the working class, it was a settlement with science. While financial capitalism may believe it can dismiss the claims of working people for greater equality, it cannot do without objective knowledge. However, such knowledge also serves democratic aspirations. This means that contemporary capitalism is mistaken to think that its rejection of the settlement with democracy is in its best interests. Creative capitalism still needs the “turbulent individual” who can think objectively. Democracy is the price to be paid for science.

But before continuing with the idea that the objectivity and critical reasoning developed in the disciplines is made possible by the social relations of trust in liberal democracies—I indulge in an intriguing tangent—one that also fascinated Macfarlane. Given the importance of Maitland’s contribution to explaining the modern world, what accounts for the amnesia surrounding his work? Macfarlane attributes that amnesia to ‘the way in which earlier knowledge of a high quality is quietly forgotten’ (p. 7). I include these comments here as a further reason for the importance of the structuration of disciplinary knowledge with its procedures of building on the work of earlier thinkers through processes of scrutiny and criticism. The collective representations developed over time that become the disciplinary canon are undermined by the constructivist conflation of knowledge and the knower. It means if one does not approve of the politics of the philosopher or the politics of the age in which the philosopher worked, then one also rejects his or her ideas. This has enabled the dismissal of earlier thinkers as “dead, white men” and of their ideas as well. It means the generation of students raised within postmodernism miss out on the philosophical heritage that underpins today’s social sciences.

I recall one of my postgraduate students justifying her refusal to read anything from the “dead white male camp” by saying that not only did those writers contribute to Western patriarchy but so did their writings. For her, the knower and the knowledge were inseparable. Because she refused to read the work of Enlightenment thinkers, she missed out not only on understanding the historical context of today’s sociological theories but also on those works with which she would have a degree of sympathy. These would, I have no doubt, include Kant’s essay On Enlightenment (1784/1990) and Mills’s The Subjugation of Women (1869/1999). She also missed out on acquiring the historical way of thinking required for the sociological imagination. Most unfortunate of all is that she will never know what she has missed. Although that student was at the extreme end of the postmodern generation of graduates, her dismissal of the knowledge of the last three hundred years on the grounds of the sex of its producers captures the intransigence and irrationality of the postmodern fundamentalist that I referred to in chapter 4. It is also a real problem for emerging researchers in indigenous studies, where a hostility to “Western” ideas can mean that the young researcher is confined to an ahistorical intellectual context.

To return to the amnesia surrounding Maitland—a silence that cannot be blamed on postmodernism since Macfarlane identified it in the 1960s. The silence suggests a larger problem; how to maintain disciplinary knowledge down through the generations without important ideas becoming lost, or alternately, other ideas taking over as an authoritative “creed” in the manner of moribund degenerative science. When the latter happens, disciplinary knowledge is reduced to stultified and stultifying “truths”. Indeed that is a charge levelled at the traditional school curriculum by social constructivists—one not without some foundation—although the answer lies in re-vitalising the knowledge that is taught and in teaching it well, not in rejecting it. In the case of the former, when ideas are simply lost, as exemplified by the amnesia concerning F. W. Maitland, it was not that Maitland’s ideas were abandoned because they had been tried and found wanting. That would suggest a vibrant discipline doing what it should do—testing and discarding as warranted. In this case it appears that the ideas had simply been overlooked and then forgotten. Yet, like Macfarlane, I also consider Maitland’s ideas insightful, finding in his explanation of a new form of social organisation based on trust and its institutional expression in legal trusts a powerful explanation for the emergence and resilience of contractual societies. This includes the “contractual” society of the scientific community. Their “discovery” by Macfarlane and my own use of the ideas may well exemplify the cooperation over time that may be seen not only as a continual process, but as one that has its stops, starts, and disjunctures.

Maitland drew on earlier ideas about the role of trusts in the modern world and contributed to taking the ideas further. Voltaire (1647/1994) had, as early in the modern period as the seventeenth century, identified the emerging new forms of association based on trust (in his case a trust engendered by common business interests) that overrode race and religion. Accordingly, ‘the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all profess the same religion and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts’ (p. 30). Over three centuries later the two great unanswered questions that Macfarlane returned to remain central to sociological inquiry.

The first concerns the exceptional case of modernity, where civilisation favours the individual rather than the group as the political subject. The second is ‘what could possibly hold such a system together? If kinship is restrained, God was kept out of the market, the state inhibited, how and why should people work effectively together?’ (2002, p. 257). Given social realism’s preoccupation with the sociality of knowledge, these are questions as relevant for that discipline as for political science. For society generally, the institutions of the political sphere—the state—and the institutions of the broader public sphere—civil society—provide the sites and systems for the individual to exercise partial loyalty to the group and, in doing so, enable individualisation and, at the same time, group commitment. For academia more specifically, the institutions of each discipline offer the site and systems for that partially loyal engagement.

The intellectual conversations across time by those in the same or inter-related disciplines are part of the procedures of academic knowledge that guarantee its truthfulness. It is a point made by the social realists in their use of Collins’s metaphor “coalitions of the mind” as the sub-title in the edited volume by Karl Maton and Rob Moore (2010) that brings together some of the major articles in the emerging social realist canon. The idea emphasises the importance of scholarship that builds disciplinary knowledge over the centuries. As a relative newcomer to this coalition, my interest in applying the ideas of Maitland and Macfarlane to social realism is because both writers provide insights into the socialising character of contractual associations and it is the very sociality of knowledge that is the central issue for social realists. Such associations, which include academic communities, must remain connected to their social contexts if they are to survive, and yet they must also be able to exercise critical judgement within that very context; a criticism that has the potential to destabilise the discipline’s existence. What accounts for the stability of that vulnerable state? It is a contradiction that exists in contractual societies as in disciplinary institutions. According to Maitland and Macfarlane, it is the social relations of trust that stabilise the society while at the same time allowing the contradiction to serve as the vehicle for innovation and change. Contractual forms of social cohesion have something very human at the core—trust—a trust that becomes institutionalised as legal trusts, associations, incorporations, institutions, and in the case of knowledge, in disciplinary institutions, systems, and procedures.

Disciplinary knowledge remains connected to its social context yet able to transcend that context in a number of ways: by the sociality of the academic community—that is its “coalition of minds” I previously referred to, and by the partial loyalty of those working in that coalition. The third way in which knowledge both maintains and transcends its social character is in the materiality of the knowledge “product”. Moore (2007a, p. 38) draws a distinction between ‘constructivism’ and ‘emergence’ to explain the materiality of scientific knowledge. He describes constructivism as reductionist in that ‘knowledge relations are reduced to power relations between social groups and their specific standpoints and interests and any autonomy of knowledge is denied’. In contrast, the disciplines are ‘concerned with the emergent properties of knowledge producing practices and their capacities to transcend their immediate contexts of production (allowing for autonomy)’. Accordingly, ‘whereas one is concerned with the social construction of knowledge (and is a form of idealism) the other is concerned with the social production of knowledge (and is a form of materialism)’ (p. 38). I understand that ‘autonomy’ to be  the partial loyalty of social relations of trust found in institutions that have mechanisms enabling change (in contrast to the stasis that characterises the institutions of traditional societies). In the knowledge disciplines, the mechanisms of change are the thinker’s objective reasoning and critical judgement. These are faculties enabled, rather than determined, by the procedures of the disciplines.

It is the structuring relations of trust that enable the otherwise de-stabilising forces of change to operate in disciplinary institutions and in the wider contractual society itself without destroying institutions from within. Scientific knowledge serves that society through processes of objectification that enable change to occur within institutions that guarantee continuity. Social knowledge also serves society. It is important primarily for its role in providing the cement that holds the society together and maintaining stability and continuity. This role of disciplinary knowledge, on the other hand, is as the agent of change. But to understand the changes made possible by science in Heideggerian terms as ‘a machine-like “total mobilization” of technological enframing’ (Irwin, 2008, p. 73) is to confuse knowledge with how it is used. That application is to be found in the motives and interests of real people.

Knowledge is, as Moore (2007a) suggests, a symbolic production that is ‘organized through distinctive modes of production parallel to those of material production in the economic sphere’ (p. 30). If its use is corrupted, then it is to those who control knowledge to whom we look, not to the knowledge itself. In chapter 10, I take up Moore’s identification of the issue for the sociology of education—‘to investigate the historical and sociological conditions under which the possibilities (of modes of symbolic production) are realised and distributed’ in an account of the production of indigenous knowledge. It is in the specificity of those conditions that one finds the ideological strategies of knowledge production and application.

Where the science “product” is controlled by a political group acting in its own interests, knowledge production and reproduction, like any economic resource, serves that elite. In such cases, erudite knowledge loses its partial loyalty character and becomes social knowledge—a total loyalty. This is the case because the authority over the knowledge has passed from the disinterested systems and procedures of the discipline reliant on trust to maintain their stability to the interested strategies of an economic elite or an ideological driven group. We see this with religious and cultural “knowledges”, where the criteria for who can produce the knowledge is based on the knower’s status as a group member rather than developed through procedures integral to the discipline. These are the procedures that scrutinise and test the knowledge.

Objective knowledge contains moral and aesthetic as well as economic dimensions. The arts and humanities are as important in their potential application to society as are the sciences from which technologies are developed. Objective knowledge with its inherent reasoning and critical features has the potential to ensure that science is directed towards sustaining the natural world and improving the lives of human beings. This is in marked contrast to societies that value knowledge for its economic worth only. With only an instrumental rationality as the guiding principle for existence, a society becomes lost in the reactionary modernism that Jeffrey Herf (1984) identified as Germany’s fate in the 1930s. It is the other side of modernity; soulless, sterile, and ultimately self-destructing. It is the price to be paid for rejecting the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge as capable of containing the moral and aesthetic means by which we become fully human, means that are intrinsic to the judgement function of criticism.

Contract societies need all three dimensions of knowledge to provide the material for “trust” that integrates individuals into the social contract. The individual is the social and political subject of the modern world, and it is for the individual that the concept of human rights was developed. It is the individual who holds those rights in liberal democratic nations. This fact makes nonsense of the belief that the modern individual is ‘a fiction’ (Irwin, 2008, p. 73). The social contract between individuals that arises from the individual’s political subjectivity is the condition for social and political agency. Whether the explanation for individualisation is a Marxist or liberal one, the process of becoming individualised means separating from the status-based social group in order to re-connect through contract (the liberal explanation) or class social relations (the Marxist understanding). Ulrich Beck (1994, p. 13) uses the terms ‘disembedding and re-embedding’ to describe that process of individualisation. It contains the same idea of attaching, separating, and re-attaching—the process by which partial loyalty is created.

The struggle to be free from cultural tyranny, to cast off the prescriptive template laid out for people in status-based societies is not only about what is to be rejected. It also involves ways of re-connecting. For Marxists the individual is re-connected through capitalist social relations of production that are considered to be alienating in their exploitative character. For liberals, the re-connection is the partial loyalty enabled by the contractual social relations of trust. It is when the re-connections fail and the individual is left isolated and atomised that we see the rise of traditionalist ideologies, of re-racialisation movements, and of romantic dreams of Arcadia. Although these are all part of modernity—in the logic of its negation—they are understood as a return to the more humanised world of an idealised tradition. Yet it is a world that lacks the means of progressive change. That is found in the partial loyalty of individuals within institutions, including disciplinary institutions, and operating according to social relations of trust.

Individualisation enables people who are not from the same racial and religio-cultural heritage to unite within the modern imaginary of the liberal democratic nation. How this happens is, as Macfarlane (2002) points out, the task of sociology—to understand ‘what it is that unites people in the modern, industrial, world’ (p. 109). While Marx argued that the new form of social relations are to be found in the exploitative relations of production, Macfarlane, drawing on Maitland’s insights, looks to trust-based forms of association for the explanation of reconnection. The key feature of the associations that sustain individualisation while simultaneously relating the individual to others within a social entity is the partial loyalty of the individual. That person, while belonging to the group through relations based upon trust—a relationship institutionalised in various ways and all with their codes, systems, and practices as with the institutions of academic practice—is also free to join and leave.

The processes involved in developing objective knowledge provide the mechanisms that connect people into the non-status associations of the disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences. The same procedures also provide the wider society with the mechanism for the unifying trust that enables the simultaneous stabilising continuity and the destabilising but transformative change of contractual social organisations. That mechanism is objective critical reasoning. It is a process developed within the scientific disciplines but of huge importance to modern societies based on the delicately balanced social contract. The trust between individuals that creates the society, a trust institutionalised within the systems, procedures, and practices of social organisations, ensures the existence of the society as well as the existence of the individual. It is a trust that is only as sound as the institutions that provide its structures and systems. The processes of objectification, scrutiny, and criticism, processes developed as mechanisms in disciplinary knowledge production, are as important for all forms of contractual social organisations as they are for the disciplinary communities. They play a crucial part in maintaining trust because they are procedures that enable the connection to—yet, at the same time, the separation from—the social context.

It is in these ways that scientific knowledge contributes to uniting people so that non kin-based associations are possible. Epistemic knowledge, while located in the social context, is directed to its criticism and transformation. The type of knowledge that can unite the non-kin, non-ethnic associations of the modern world must be knowledge that enables ‘communities not based on blood and place, but communities of sentiment as well as purely instrumental and practical goals’ (Macfarlane, 2002, p. 269) to cohere. Any society with groups placed on the margins and not fully integrated into the national imaginary struggles with that unity. And yet what is the ‘trick’ of unity? Macfarlane speaks of the concept of ‘trusts’ as ‘islands of fellowship in a sea of atomistic, contractual, market society’ providing the possibility and the resolution of the logical contradiction of self-love and social’—a ‘trick’ he calls the ‘mysterious essence of modernity’ (p. 272). These ‘new flexible institutions’, whose ‘prototype is the trust’, enable a ‘civilisation to emerge which “has separated off different parts of life”—power, economics, religion, and kinship’ (p. 272). I would add that the ‘trick’ he identifies is one made up of objectification, doubt, and criticism—strategies first developed within and protected by the institutions of science.

The new ways of uniting people that don’t come from one’s status in the kin group, in the religious order, or in other traditional hierarchies of power and wealth brings people together in the sports clubs, the music and arts fraternities, the political groups, the endless number and type of community organisations based on anything from gardening to sexuality to child care, and central to all—the school. The public school in the national education system—one with a common curriculum that teaches academic knowledge—is at the heart of the “trick” of unity. Public schools have the potential to create the social links that are vital to unifying each new generation in the act (and art) of association—one that ultimately depends on trust. Trust only develops where there are shared values, behaviours, and aspirations, but it is a sharing that is not mandated by kinship and the need for total loyalty to ensure the group’s survival.

To have a “heart”, these associations must have internal links but be able to link to the wider contractual society in ways that command both loyalty and criticism—in other words “partial loyalty”. Public schooling and public universities are not only institutions where the contract is developed and strengthened, their importance lies in their role as contractual institutions based on the “raw material” of association—the methods of producing and reproducing abstract objective knowledge. That knowledge is, or should be, produced and reproduced in public education, thereby providing the instrumental means for social coherence but also providing the affective and moral ties that make the civilisation worth having. In a world where people without a shared heritage form new bonds, those bonds must have ongoing value from a source other than tradition. It is not enough that epistemic knowledge be instrumental. It must also provide the raw material for social integration, but for an integration that is constantly fluid as new individuals and groups join the society. To do this, knowledge must draw on disciplines from the three dimensions of human life—the instrumental or economic, the moral or spiritual, and the aesthetic. These are found in the symbolic codes of the arts, humanities, and sciences. They form the basis of education in modern democratic nations—all directed towards the universal humanity captured in Kant’s (1781/1993) dictum referred to in chapter 1 of this volume.

What can I know?

What ought I to do?

What may I hope? (p. 518)

‘What can I know’ is the promise offered by objective knowledge. It frees us from the way of thinking that is tied to experience; to a world where “I know because I was there”, “I know because I feel”, “I know because I am a member of a gender, a race, a religion”, a membership that provides certain experiences to be understood only by those in the group. ‘What can I know’ is the implicit acknowledgement of the key idea of the Enlightenment, the idea of the universal human being who is the author of his or her own destiny, whose self-authority comes from the ability to reason and to criticise—but who exercises the authority within the collective representations of “coalitions of minds”. ‘What can I know’ also evokes an instrumental use of knowledge. It suggests what can I know for what purpose. It is the utility of knowledge; the way knowledge can make our lives better. We don’t need to live the brutish and short lives lived by all our ancestors. The science that brings economic benefits is to be welcomed. As David Landes (1998) points out in describing the great technical advances of the nineteenth century, the bringing together of ‘instruction in abstract and theoretical matters’ with technical application ‘opened the way to new branches of knowledge of great economic potential’ (p. 283).

But that instrumental use of knowledge is only one dimension. It needs the humanising control of the moral and aesthetic dimensions if we are to be more than alienated, mindless machines. It is these dimensions that are expressed in the everyday lives of people as they associate with those to whom they are not bound by ties other than their universal humanity. The contractual society cannot do away with the human need for emotional warmth and for a life with meaning and value. Indeed it needs these values more than status-based societies do because they cannot be assumed but must be constantly created.

‘What ought I to do’ is the promise of that meaningful future. Disciplinary knowledge is by its nature future oriented. It is about what is not yet known. The very idea of a future is the source of hope. We can think about what is to be valued and why and what we should do to maintain that value and carry it forward into the future. It is for this reason that a national curriculum should be the ‘knowledge that each country agrees is important for all students to have access to’ (Young, 2011). The universality and future orientation of epistemic knowledge means that all individuals are seen as contributors to this future. It has a moral message: That we have an obligation to contribute to making a better world, and that what we do, however small, does matter. Indeed, it is the idea behind the growing contemporary commitment to a sustainable world, a commitment to redress the excesses of industrial capitalism and the narcissistic greed of financial capitalism. The final line of Kant’s dictum, coming after the first two suggesting that knowledge is behind action, is a political message. Hope implies a purpose; hope for a better society. Politics is about making that society. In this way, Kant’s dictum links knowledge and politics.

The mechanisms for the link between knowledge and politics are the partial loyalty based on trust and produced by objectivity and critical reasoning. The objectivity and critical reasoning needed for scientific inquiry is also needed for democracy. Young people are prepared for citizenship, not merely by learning about being a citizen and what democracy is, but by being trained in the practices of objectivity and critical reasoning. Their understanding of the world cannot be tested against experience because “experience fails us”. It requires “testing” using the abstract concepts of political and civic engagement. In this way, the objectification required for scientific knowledge is a source for the institutions and systems of political citizenship. It is also a source for the systems and institutions of social citizenship. It provides the material for the partial loyalty that links people across the enormous range of interests and activities in modern societies.

Although loyalty to the contractual group is only partial, this does not mean that societies are simply collections of individuals. The structures of the institutions and systems of association exist independent of the individuals who belong to them. Liberal societies are constituted by social relations of trust. This is not an idealised mechanism but has its own materiality in those social relations of trust. Like knowledge, “trust” is a “product”. There is a difference, though, in terms of the type of “product”. Unlike academic knowledge, which has a specific product in terms of ideas, the component of the trust product is affective and social—it is the emotional ties and the belief in the efficacy of those ties. It is also the practices of social interaction that occur in contractual organisations. Where abstract knowledge and trust have a similar materiality is that both are produced in systems that operate according to the mechanisms of objectification, doubt, and criticism.

By producing the intellectual means for the individual to be at once separated from yet partially loyal to the group, disciplinary knowledge is intimately tied to democratic politics. This means that the attack on objective knowledge by relativists and constructivists has implications for society far wider than the “dumbing down” of the curriculum. The dominance of constructivism in educational circles contributes to what Durkheim described as ‘one of the great obstacles which constrict the development of sociology’ (1983, p. 91). Durkheim’s insight that ‘for a long time to come, there will be two tendencies in any society: a tendency towards objective scientific truth and a tendency towards subjectively perceived truth, towards mythological truth’, captures the impasse that the sociology of education found itself in at the end of the century. By denying the objectivity of knowledge, the discipline lost its own object of study.

This article was published in The Democracy Project, 3rd October 2023 

Elizabeth Rata: Two Treaties of Waitangi: The Articles Treaty and the Principles Treaty

October 2023 

Commentary 

There are two versions of the Treaty of Waitangi.  The first is the 1840 Treaty – the ‘Articles Treaty’. The second is what I call the ‘Principles Treaty’. It dates from 1986 when the principles were first included in legislation. Astonishingly the parliamentary representatives who inserted the word ‘principles’ did not know what they meant. To include a word estranged from its meaning into legislation is an egregious political failure. At the very least, a democracy requires words to have an agreed meaning otherwise rational communication is impossible.  Autocracies that use ideologies to control how people think can dispense with accurate meaning. Democracies cannot. 

The result of parliament’s failure is two versions, one of Articles – the ‘Articles Treaty’, the other of Principles – the ‘Principles Treaty’ – and the consequences – a racially divided country and a group asserting co-governance rights.  How did it happen?  

The 1840 Articles Treaty has a Preamble and 3 Articles that reflect the ideas, motives, and actions of the time. Similarly the Principles Treaty is of its time and place – the 1980s. The cause of enormous confusion and conflict is because the treaty today has the words of 1840 (whether in Māori or in English) but the meaning is late 20th century ideology.  

The meaning of the 1840 Treaty exists in the Articles. Article I recognised British sovereignty. Article II recognised the rights of Māori to hold or dispose of property. Article III recognised Māori as British subjects. In start contrast, the inventors of the Principles Treaty have, after decades of uncertainty, finally settled on the so-called core principles of partnership, active protection, and redress, despite these words not appearing in the Articles. 

The word ‘principles’ first appeared in the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act. In that legislation, ‘principles’ referred directly to the meaning, value, and purpose of the Articles. The word ‘principles’ was tied to the Articles. It had no referent outside those Articles. It did not state the word ‘partnership’, nor was active protection and redress mentioned or implied.  

Three events detached the word ‘principles’ from the Treaty Articles, leading to decades of meaning creation. They are the 1985 Treaty of Amendment Act, the 1987 Court of Appeal’s ‘akin to partnership’ statement, and the insertion of undefined ‘principles’ into legislation from 1986.  

The Articles-Principles detachment occurring in these three events was crucial to today’s invented treaty. It enabled the principles to acquire a different meaning, value and purpose – a new referent. To reflect the word’s new power, it was given a capital ‘P’. From that time treaty revisionists of all ethnicities talked excitedly about the ‘Principles’ as though they had always existed. Like sacred text, the meaning was lying in wait in the Treaty runes. It would be revealed by those who now interpret the Word to the World – the lawyers who are the modern secular priesthood.  

As the practice of legislative insertion and legal interpretation gained momentum so too did an acceptance of the erroneous belief that the Principles had authority. An authority conundrum was created. It is reasonable to believe that insertion into legislation is the act of authorisation.  

After all, members of parliament authorised the insertion. However they failed to define the Principles despite numerous and ongoing insertion. It was left to activist judges, officials and retribalists to take on the monumental task of deciding what the Principles were to mean.  

In a democracy, parliamentarians represent us, the people. Yet does this authority have legitimacy when our representatives did not know what the Principles meant when they were inserted into law?  

A vacancy of meaning, especially when concealed by righteous language, opens up opportunities for those with vested interests to insert their own meaning.  In inventing and consolidating the Principles, advocates for a kinship-based political structure have used traditional ideology to provide a timeless, spiritually authorised quality to their very time-bound interests. The erroneous partnership Principle is given the greatest weight, opening up a wide backdoor to power. Tribal corporations can now move beyond their economic interests to demand political power – to be entrenched first as co-governance, then as tribal sovereignty.  

How do you get people to believe in an invention and then to agree to its consolidation in legislation? Retribalists simply used age-old strategies.  

The first strategy laid the groundwork by creating alliances with those in government and the professions, particularly in the judiciary. It didn’t matter if the alignment proved to be incompatible – such as that between a racialised retribalising movement and emancipatory feminism. As a temporary alliance it served its purpose with many feminists proving to be ardent retribalists. Some later retreating in silence, unable to resolve a dilemma created by mistakenly defining equal rights and justice in identity terms. In this way, feminism was ousted by gender identity politics and women’s rights were side-lined. 

The second strategy is to ride on the back of current intellectual movements. Using postmodernism’ mystifying and irrational idea that reality only exists in language means that if one say something is the case then it is – especially if it is said in the loud and certain tone of the righteous with prayers adding the gravitas of sacred authority. If it is stated that the Treaty has Principles, then it is for the secular priests to reveal that truth.  

This emperor’s new clothes strategy was supported by the righteousness of Cultural Marxism, a thriving ideology in university social science and education faculties and in government departments staffed by those with postmodern degrees. Although the nonsensical conflation of culture and materialism would have Marx turning in his grave, it gives social justice intellectuals a site on the moral highground from where they can do well by doing good.  

The third strategy, the language game, rests on this irrational intellectual bedrock.  Controlling the language that can be used when talking about the Treaty ensures that thought itself is restricted in both its expression and, more seriously its very development.  How can alternative ideas be developed if they cannot be spoken?  Even more seriously, once language is couched in moral terms then criticism is excluded.  

The rapid inclusion of the word indigenous into New Zealanders’ everyday language from the 1980s shows how effective this method is.  Belief in a treaty partnership requires partners who are to live in a permanent relationship.  Differences are emphasised, sometimes even created, and commonality rejected. 

Embedding one of those partners in the status of indigeneity with the other partner an intruder into Arcadia expands the moral distinction into a timeless mythical realm.  Romantic evocations of the evil coloniser and the indigenous colonised provide a more seductive narrative for the nation’s collective memory than the more prosaic fact that, from the thirteen century to the present, all New Zealanders are settlers.  

Our history is one of waves of settlers. It is a shared experience that trumps an arbitrary division into the indigenous on the one hand and all other settlers on the other. But language control is most successful when it evokes the sacred. The word indigenous does this with its suggestion of a mythological connection to the land and its creators. Those who resist the language game are accused of refusing not only the word, but the Word as revealed truth. Those who insist that truth lies in reality – that the 1840 Treaty didn’t have Principles and that we are all settlers, no matter the time of arrival, are silenced by accusations of racism. Far better to be silent than to bear the racist taint suggestive of a profoundly immoral character.  

It is in the revelation of sacred meaning that the fourth strategy has proved to be most effective. Today’s secular priests – the activist judges, tribalist law professors, and lawyer-politicians – have claimed the authority to interpret the truth from the Treaty runes. They have won the age-old battle between the World and the Word in securing doctrinal supremacy. Made vulnerable by their commitment to the Word and their role as its interpreters to the World, lawyers tend to believe that if it is said, and especially if it is said in legislation, then it must be true. That revealed Word is now the authority. 

But tribalist intellectuals, activists and lawyers aside, the group most to blame for the invention of the Principles Treaty are our Members of Parliament. The inclusion into legislation of a statute without legislators knowing what it meant is an unprecedented failure of political representation. Compounding the failure by continuing to insert the Principles does not make up for that failure. Repeating an error does not diminish or remove it, rather the error is consolidated. 

The initial authority for inclusion was not given by the people. Until this occurs, or if the people refuse to authorise the inclusion, the Principles do not have the authority claimed for them. They should be removed. In the end, legitimacy is decided by the people if democracy is to work. 

Those who have done well out of the invention of Treaty Principles will object to their removal. They will use the loud voices and threatening tactics that have proved so effective and led to widespread entitlement. They will be shameless in calling on the democratic ideals of universal human rights to justify a racialised future.  

But an unsettled and messy time is democracy in action. Indeed a degree of conflict is to be expected given the current mess.  But the message for legislators is clear. They act on behalf of the people. They must know what their legislation means before laws are passed. Officials and lawyers then interpret the law. They do not create its meaning in undertaking that interpretation.  

It is in discussion with the people that our parliamentary representatives assure themselves and us that they know what they are talking about. The discussion about whether we want Treaty Principles may be four decades late, but it must happen for the sake of New Zealand democracy.  

I identify three possible choices. The first is continue with the 1980s’ invented Principles Treaty knowing it justifies co-governance and will lead to the irresolvable conflict between a kinship-based polity and a universal democratic one, one justified in a racial division of people into indigenous and non-indigenous.  

The second choice is to value the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi as one of the country’s most significant historical documents, but one with no practical relevance to a modern democracy.  

The third choice is similar to the second but treasures the symbolic value of the historical document within the nation’s collective memory. It is to regard the principles (lower case ‘p’) mentioned in the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act as referring directly to the Articles but with no meaning or application beyond those Articles.  

Democracy is not just arriving at a decision. It is the act of rational communication that enables the decision to be made. For this to happen, language must be pulled apart so that meaning is exposed, and with it, the intentions of the user. There can be no language priesthood, no sacred words, no moral highground.  Those who have controlled treaty language have controlled meaning for too long. It is now time to talk critically about the Treaty.  

When Alice told the Mad Hatter that she didn’t think, his reply was – then you shouldn’t talk. But we must talk, the alternative is silence – and anger. So let us follow the March Hare’s advice – say what we mean. Language has three components – words, meaning, and the explicit connection of the word to its meaning.  Ideology intrudes in the vacant space when words are detached from their meaning. That has been the case with Treaty talk since the 1980s.  

Let us insist on democracy’s rational communication in all its complexity and disturbing power so that we know what we mean when we speak and we can justify the meaning in explicit argumentative logic. Let us insist that our parliamentary representatives do the same. 

(Note: The ideas in this commentary are based on my article: Rata, E. (2004) ‘Marching through the Institutions’: The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi. Published in Sites, New Series, Winter, Volume 1, No. 2 https://sites.otago.ac.nz/Sites) 

PUBLISHED: UNIVERSITY WORLD NEWS, 3 June 2023

When a university no longer commits to the principle of universalism it can neither claim, nor does it deserve, the title of university.

New Zealand universities are rapidly indigenising and in so doing may undermine the very universal foundations that give the name university its purpose and meaning. We need to ask why New Zealand’s universities, among the best in the world throughout the 20th century, have embraced anti-universal decolonisation and indigenisation.

The answer has deep historical roots. Decolonisation and indigenisation are today’s expression of the Counter-Enlightenment communitarianism ethos that has resisted the Enlightenment’s liberal democratic ideals since the 18th century.

At its heart is whether the group or the individual is the primary social and political category. Although an old battle in 21st century clothes, the type of re-emergent communitarianism depends on a country’s particular history. New Zealand’s version is retribalisation, with demands that ancestral kinship serves as the political category.

Decolonising and indigenising all government institutions, including the education system and the universities, are retribalism’s strategies.

Reactionary modernity

The reactionary modernity that rejects universalism and its accompanying individual rights for communitarianism is justified by a virulent mixture of revisionist history, performative culture, corrupted leftism and postmodern relativism.

Universal human rights are claimed to be identity group rights, whether of kinship, race, sexuality or culture. The rights that first served Enlightenment universalism now serve the Counter-Enlightenment division. Modern science, developed to serve universal humanity, is wrongly labelled just one of the many cultural ways of knowing by identity groups.

In this anti-democratic modernity, the authority that individuals seized from the aristocracy and the priesthood, that right to think for themselves and make public those ideas, now stands accused as the enemy. Better, say the reactionaries, to embrace the authority of race, kin or cultural identity, than allow the rational individual to be the author of his or her own destiny.

Science

It is the universities that are the target of this prolonged attack on individual thought. We should not be surprised. Modern science admits no authority but that of justifiable reason. However, a direct attack on individual reason is not easily achieved, despite postmodernism’s best attempts.

The problem is science itself. Its truth-seeking mission cannot operate without reason, and reason cannot exist without the individual. It is the individual who thinks and it is science’s abstractions that train thought into rational logic.

Science allows individuals to develop and justify naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. Its concepts refer to the theorised structures and properties of the physical world, its methods are those of hypothesis, testing and refutation, its procedures those of criticism and judgement.

It is humans daring to provide naturalistic explanations without reference to the priestly interpreters of supernatural beliefs that give science its authority. It is the authority of the scientific method, long exercised in the university. Traditional knowledge can be included, but only by submitting to scientific criticism.

Who holds authority over knowledge?

And this is the nub of the matter – who holds authority over knowledge – today’s communitarian priesthood or the scientific method? Because New Zealand universities are proceeding apace to indigenise, what is happening in my country is instructive.

Justified by retribalisation politics with the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi used as the mandate, the aim is to insert traditional ways of being, thinking and doing into all areas of the university. The commitment to a revisionist historical treaty can be found in universities’ strategic plans.

Curriculum initiatives along with research ethics and funding are also required to demonstrate a treaty commitment. There is some dissent, but accusations of racism and the response to those who have spoken publicly have silenced opposition.

Social justice

Ironically, decolonisation and indigenisation are justified using the universal human rights argument for equity. But this will not be the outcome. The anti-universalism of this dawning reactionary age will indeed divide society into two groups – but not those of coloniser and colonised locked into the permanent oppressor-victim binary used to justify communitarianism.

Instead one group will comprise those who receive a sound understanding of science, mathematics and the humanities. Their intelligence will be developed in the demanding engagement with this complex knowledge. It is to be hoped that they will serve as the guardians of the Enlightenment’s democratic modernity.

The second group will comprise those who remain restricted to the type of knowledge acquired from experience and justified in identity ideologies. Discrediting science as ‘Western’, identity-based cultural beliefs and practices will exclude these young people from the benefits of a scientific education.

It will be a tragedy for New Zealand if indigenising the nation’s universities continues to advance unchallenged. However, given our universities’ history of excellence, one dating back to the University of Otago’s foundation in 1869, a recommitment to the principle of universalism is not impossible. But that will depend upon university leaders with the courage to speak in defence of science.

Elizabeth Rata is a professor in the School of Critical Studies in Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Free Kiwis Podcast Series: Conversation with Michael Johnston and James Kierstead

I gave this address ‘In Defence of Democracy’ to the New Zealand ACT Party Annual Conference, in Wellington and Auckland, July 2022. I want to thank David Seymour, Leader of the ACT Party, and like myself committed to liberal democracy, for inviting me to speak.  Although the address was given at a political party event, I was a guest speaker so the ideas I present are my own.

IN DEFENCE OF DEMOCRACY[1]

Professor Elizabeth Rata

University of Auckland

Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. My talk ‘In Defence of Democracy’ is for those of all political persuasions who are deeply worried about New Zealand’s descent from democracy into a tribal form of ethno-nationalism[2].

I want to talk about democracy[3] – about what it is we are in danger of losing and what we need to do to retain our nation’s remarkable 170 year legacy of democratic governance.

Nearly forty years ago the 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act set in motion a radical constitutional agenda. The aim –  to shift the country from democracy to tribalism. In that time a corporate tribal elite has privatised public resources, acquired political power, and attained governance entitlements. Activist judges have created treatyism – a new interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi as a ‘governance partnership’[4]. Intellectuals have supplied the supporting racialised ‘two world views’ ideology.

The question we must ask is this: How has a small group of individuals, both Maori and non-Maori, managed to install a racialised ideology into our democracy?[5]

In his book The Open Society[6], philosopher Karl Popper identifies those who would take us back to the past, to that closed tribal society from which we are all descended. He describes how throughout history those who ‘could only make themselves leaders of the perennial revolt against freedom’, those ‘incapable of leading a new way’ will return us to what he called ‘cultivated tribalism’.

It is this colossal failure of vision for a democratic future that has taken New Zealand to the crossroads.  Democracy is one path ahead; ethno-nationalism is the other.

Treatyism’ success can be seen in how comprehensively ‘partnership’, ‘decolonisation’, ‘co-governance’  – whatever term is used – is inserted into all our government institutions, into the universities, and into the law. It is an ideology that tells how we are to understand our country’s history and how we are to envisage its future.

The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was, like all human products, of its time and place. One aim – shared by British and Maori signatories alike – was to establish the rule of law by imposing British sovereignty through British governance. Sovereignty and governance go together as two sides of the same coin – with intertwined meaning. In the decades which followed, the treaty lost relevance in the new colonial society. This is the case with all historical treaties.

Revived in the 1970s as the symbol of a cultural renaissance, the treaty was captured by retribalists in the 1980s to serve as the ideological manifesto for the envisaged order – a reconstituted New Zealand. It was given a ‘spirit’ to take it above and beyond its historical location so that it could mean whatever retribalists say it means.

This treatyist ideology successfully promotes the false claim of partnership between the government and the tribes. However there is a deeper more insidious strategy propelling us to tribal ethno-nationalism. It is the collapse of the separation between the economic and political spheres.

The separation of the economic from the political is absolutely essential for democracy. When economic interests and political ambitions are merged there is no accountability to the people – consider all those totalitarian leaders whose power gives wealth and whose wealth gives power – a merger broken only when (and if) the people revolt.

When the combination of reactionary politics and wealth accumulation is justified by ‘myths of past perfection’[7], we have what I call the neotribal capitalist version of the wealth-power merger[8].

The corporate tribes have already acquired considerable governance entitlements – the next and final step is tribal sovereignty.  It’s a coup d’etat in all but name, accomplished not by force but by ideology – enabled by a compliant media.

Given the enormous success of retribalism is it too late to reclaim New Zealand from the relentless march to blood and soil ethno-nationalism?

That depends upon our willingness to understand, value, and restore democracy.

To do this we need to be clear what democracy is.

First, it is the remarkable and still uncommon form of government described in Abraham Lincoln’s famous words as ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

Second, democracy has three pillars. Remove or even tweak these pillars and it collapses.

Third, democracy requires the ‘partially loyal’ universal individual. 

I want to talk about these three pillars and that partially loyal individual. If we are to understand democracy this is where we start.

Democracy’s Pillars

The pillars are:

1. The citizen[9] – the individual who bears political and legal rights – not the racialised group member.
2. The state  –– the governing infrastructure of parliament,  systems of law, education, health and so on, regulator of public resources such as water, foreshore and seabed, flora and fauna, radio waves . . .. 
3. The nation – at once a geographic entity and a symbol of a unified though historically diverse people who muddle along together in liberal civil society.

Each of these pillars is riven by a necessary tension – a tension arising from their inherent contradictions  – contradictions which make democracy future-oriented, progressive  –  and vulnerable.

The contradictions are:

• As citizens, we have a duty to society but, at the same time, we have personal interests arising from kin, cultural, and other social loyalties. 

• The state is simultaneously the capitalist state – generating economic wealth and inequality – and the secular democratic state – guaranteeing political equality and regulating wealth distribution.

• The nation is unified in facing the future, yet diverse in its past.

Democracy is peaceful battle within and between each of these three pillars. This bloodless conflict is only possible when individuals are partially loyal.

So what is ‘partial loyalty’?

Partial loyalty

I first came across the term in anthropologist, Alan Macfarlane’s The Making of the Modern World. It intrigued me and I have developed the idea further in the following way.

‘Partial loyalty’ can explain what it is about the modern individual who has contradictory loyalties simultaneously – identifying as a family member, a member of an ancestral group, a cultural group, a tribe, a religion, an identity group defined by leisure interests, sexuality, and so on.

This is civil society. From different, even conflicting interests how do we decide where our loyalty lies – is it to New Zealand? To an identity group? An ancestral group? To those ‘who look like us’?

The idea of ‘partial loyalty’ is a way into thinking about this question.

It is a question that someone in a tribal society, an autocratic society, a religious society would not have to ask, or be permitted to ask, because the answer is already provided.

Most societies demand total loyalty.

• Traditional tribal societies allowed one identity – fixed by birth status and and kinship ties – not open to individual choice.  Loyalty was non-negotiable because total loyalty ensured the group’s survival.

• Autocratic regimes, both past and present, impose total loyalty – not for the survival of all, but for the elite – imposed by might and by ideological indoctrination.

Democracies are different in a fundamental way. They not only allow partial loyalty but require it.

In a democracy we hold many loyalties simultaneously – family and social groups where the loyalty is personal – creating a deeply held sense of identity and belonging  – perhaps to a tribe, culture, religion, sport or other type of association.

And at the same time we are loyal to a diverse society and to its governing system that is not personal. Indeed loyalty to the democratic nation is loyalty to a vision – the idea of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

These two different loyalties – one a deeply personal identity – the other a rational commitment to an idea – is why democracy is so difficult. It is much easier to fall back into loyalties of emotion, not reason.

The ease and attraction of total loyalty favours ethno-nationalism – it is profoundly anti-modern and anti-democratic – yet profoundly seductive.

I want to turn now to how we have been seduced. This means talking about ideology.

Ideology

Retribalism has attackedthe three pillars of democracy through the covert use of ideology. I want to talk specifically about how this is occurring in language, education, and the media.

Retribalist ideology and language

Ideologies control not just speech but thought itself. The most successful have a manifesto, a ‘sacred text’ or covenant[10]. Mao’s Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, the sacred texts of religions, the US Constitution’s Second Amendment – these are used to symbolise a spiritual, ‘beyond this world’ authority,  disguising the real-life ambitions of those controlling the ideology. 

Since the 1980s the Treaty of Waitangi has been developed as such a manifesto – using two highly effective tactics.

I call the first the transubstantiation tactic.

Here the treaty is transformed from an historical document to a sacred text. This mystical transubstantiation takes the treaty into the realm of the spiritual from where it acquires a doctrinal authority – one to be interpreted for we common folk by a new priesthood – treatyist intellectuals.

Once the treaty’s unchallengable spiritual authority is established the second tactic comes into play. It is the diversion tactic. This ‘how many angels on a pinhead’ tactic operates by diverting us into echo-chamber squabbles – about the 1840 meaning of this word, that word, this intention, that intention. This is all interesting and important material for historians but our concern should be, not what the treaty said in 1840 – those days are gone – it served the purpose of the time – but what it is being used to say today – and for what purpose.

What about retribalist ideology and education?

Our  education system is indoctrinating children into retribalism. The so-called ‘decolonisation’ and ‘indigenisation’ of the curriculum is the method. This is a disaster. Decolonisation will destroy the very means by which each generation acquires reasoned knowledge, and in so doing, the ability to reason. 

I have described how this ability creates the disposition of partial loyalty that is required to be a citizen. Reasoning provides the rationalism to counter the irrationalism of total loyalty.  By undermining the secular academic curriculum – that which creates the reasoning mind – we are destroying the partially loyal individual. Our fate – to be left with those capable only of mindless total loyalty.

And retribalist ideology and the media?

An ideology becomes omnipotent when it is not challenged. In a democracy the media should inform us of all competing interests and in all their complexity. We, the people, need to know everything, because it is us who will decide what should happen. Mainstream media has failed to do this – indeed is culpable in embedding treatyism.

The Future

Is it too late to save New Zealand’s democracy? Have we already passed the crossroads? A pessimist, realist perhaps, might say ‘yes’. As a reluctant optimist I would say there is still time if we do the following:

1. Remove the treaty and its principles from all legislation. People (not a sacred deity)  put these into legislation. People can remove them.
2. Remove retribalism’s ideology from all public institutions, including the universities.
3. Encourage those in civil society who value and desire Maori culture to participate in – for example – Maori media, Maori language, kaupapa Maori schools[11], Maori literature, arts, music, fashion, film, festivities . . . all the activities of a vibrant culture.
4. Teach a complete and unvarnished NZ history developed according to sound scientific methods.
5. Allow New Zealand English to evolve organically through incorporating Maori words, not by government decree[12].
6. Re-build the education system to teach academic subjects – the source of the partially loyal individual – not ideological dogma [13]. 

And finally, hold a national discussion – possibly over several decades – about a symbol for New Zealand’s foundation.  I have four suggestions:

1. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi – for its historical value only – not as a legal and constitutional document. Recent attempts to trace democracy to the treaty are nonsensical and will further embed treatyism.

• The 1852 Constitution Act. This Act, with all its limitations, did establish New Zealand democracy. It set up Parliament and the beginnings of the workable state that continues today. It recognised the citizen to whom Parliament is accountable – even though only certain Maori and settler men were able to vote – it is that crucial principle of accountability to the people that was put in place.

• The 1893 Electoral Act – women’s suffrage.

• Don’t have a founding document. Do we need one?

On a personal note  –  I confess an emotional pull to the 1893 Electoral Act – for kinship reasons – one of my great-grandmothers was a signatory to the Suffrage Petition. However as a ‘partially loyal’ citizen I must give full and rational consideration to the other contenders – even to argue against my own various loyalties in coming to a decision. There is no doubt that the 1852 Constitution Act is the strongest contender because we can trace our liberal democracy to this legislation. Surely it worth celebrating?

But we may never decide on an official founding document – and that’s fine. It is the continuous peaceful battle of democracy in action that matters. But that ongoing battle is democracy’s inherent source of instability – an unsettleness that is both its strength and its vulnerability.

When citizens abdicate their democratic duty, when the media abandons its responsibilities, when judges become political activists, when academics are intolerant of open inquiry, and when governments are subverted by an ideology – that is when a corporate tribal elite emerges to encircle the commons, that is to privatise what belongs to the public, to us the people, and to govern not in our interests but for themselves. In this way wealth and power are merged.

Before moving to my conclusion I want to make one thing absolutely clear – especially to those who will seek to distort my words – I support the activities of those in civil society who value and engage in Maori language and culture. A liberal civil society is where we meet in all our differences – indeed society is at its most creative when diversity is practised and enjoyed by all. 

To conclude

Politics arises from civil society – from the various conflicting interests of people. That political-civil interaction is what democracy looks like.  But, and this is the crux of my argument,  no interest group  has the right of governance unless the people agree. Elections are that act of agreement – always temporary with the winner always on trial. 

New Zealanders, both Maori and non-Maori, have not been asked to agree to tribalist governance.  If we had been asked would we have agreed?

Tribalism and democracy are incompatible. We can’t have both.  If we wish to keep New Zealand as a liberal democratic nation then, as we derive our citizen rights from the nation-state, so we have a duty to ensure that the nation-state which awards those rights, remains democratic and able to do so.

For our country to remain a liberal democracy, we need to know what democracy is, its true value, and what we must do to restore it.

---

[1] The ideas in my speech are been developed in academic articles and books since the early 1990s. Some are available on these websites – www.elizabethrata.com

https://profiles.auckland.ac.nz/search?by=text&type=user&v=Elizabeth%20Rata

and https://openinquiry.nz. My choice of the title ‘In Defence of Democracy’ is a nod to the Listener letter ‘In Defence of Science (NZ Listener, 31 July 2021). I was one of the seven signatories to that letter.

[2] Rata, E. (2021) Ethno-nationalism or Democratic Nationalism: which way ahead for New Zealand?

Elizabeth Rata: Ethno-Nationalism or Democratic-Nationalism: Which way ahead for New Zealand?

[3] Amartya Sen (1999).  Democracy as a Universal Value. Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999) 3-17.

[4] Rata, E. (2021) The road to He Puapua – Is there really a treaty partnership? The Democracy Project, 5 July.

Elizabeth Rata: The Road to He Puapua – Is there really a Treaty partnership?

[5] My first article, published in 1996 was entitled ‘Goodness and Power’: The Sociology of Liberal Guilt, New Zealand Sociology, 11(2), 231-274.

[6] Karl Popper. The Open Society, Vol. 1.

[7] Acknowledgement to Professor Brian Boyd for this beautifully apt phrase ‘the myth of past perfection’.

[8] ‘Neotribal capitalism’. Available at www.elizabethrata.com

[9] The term ‘global citizen’ is nonsensical. A citizen is someone who bears rights. Those rights must be from an entity that has the power both to award the rights and to enforce them.  Currently it is the nation-state that does this as there is no global institution that has the authority to award and enforces rights and responsibilities.

In the absence of such an authority the term ‘global citizen’ is hollow in substance, and only useful as a metaphor for the aspiration of equality for all people.

[10] Margaret Wilson,  cited in Rata, E. (2005). Marching through the Institutions, The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi, Sites New Series, 1 (2) 56 – 81. Article available https://openinquiry.com and www.elizabethrata.com

[11] My recent book, written with Tauwehe Tamati, is about a teaching method to use in kura kaupapa Māori in order to develop students’ academic achievement in both Maori and English.

Rata, E. and Tamati, T. S. (2022) Academic Achievement in Bilingual and Immersion Education: TransAcquisition Pedagogy and Curriculum Design. Routledge.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003156444/academic-achievement-bilingual-immersion-education-elizabeth-rata-tauwehe-sophie-tamati

[12] Public Service Act 2020 Te Whakapakari I te hononga I waenga I te Maori me te Karauna Strengthening the Maori Crown relationship. Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission. Fact Sheet 3.

[13] The cultural knowledge of traditional societies is not science. However the science-culture distinction doesn’t exclude traditional knowledge from the secular curriculum. It does however put limits on how it is included. Students can be taught in social studies, history, and Māori Studies about the traditional knowledge. But this must not be induction into belief and ideological systems. The home and community (e.g. marae and churches) are for induction into cultural beliefs and practices.

The following extract is taken from Rata, E. (2022) The Decolonisation of New Zealand Education. The Democracy Project.

Elizabeth Rata: The Decolonisation of Education in New Zealand

“Proto-science (pre-science) is found in all traditional knowledge and includes traditional navigation, medicinal remedies, and food preservation This knowledge, acquired through observation and trial and error, as well as through supernatural explanation, along with the ways it may have helped to advance scientific or technological knowledge, is better placed in history of science lessons rather than in the science curriculum.

Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. Its concepts refer to the theorised structures and properties of the physical world, its methods are those of hypothesis, testing and refutation, its procedures those of criticism and judgement.  The inclusion of cultural knowledge into the science curriculum will subvert the fundamental distinction, one acknowledged by mātauranga Māori scholars, between naturalistic science and supernaturalistic culture”.

This paper was published as An Overview of Neotribal Capitalism in Ethnologies Comparees. Oceanie, debut de siecle. No 6, Spring, 2003.

Author: Elizabeth Rata

I have updated the article slightly and re-named it ‘Neotribal Capitalism’ (June 2022). As I read it again for the first time in at least a decade I realised that not much needed updating although there are several passages that I want to comment on.

This italicised extract (below) is taken from page 17. Despite the long-term resistance by many New Zealanders to treatyist constitutional change, the neotribes have successfully advanced their non-democratic agenda in the two decades since 2003. The legislative inclusion mentioned in the extract did indeed lay the foundation for a new ethno-nationalist constitution. He Puapua (2019) is intended to be its implementation.

Extract 1

Attempts by the government to award constitutional recognition to the neotribe in terms of political partnership have been thwarted only by the absence of a national consensus. The Minister of Treaty Negotiations, Margaret Wilson, acknowledges that the more limited ambition of recognition through legislative inclusion ‘may be the best that can be achieved in the current political climate’ (1996: 15).

I copied this italicised extract from page 12. As a co-signatory to the ‘In Defence of Science’ NZ Listener letter (July 2021) I find my words from 2003 disturbingly prescient.

Extract 2

The inherent conflict between research that is ‘independent’, ‘open to scrutiny’ and ‘driven by hypotheses or intellectual positions capable of rigorous assessment’ (Ministry of Education, 2003: 17) on the one hand, and ‘closed’ (ie. not available for independent critical scrutiny) neotraditionalist research on the other is not addressed by the new Tertiary Education Commission in its policy formulation document. . . . The institutionalisation of kaupapa Maori research into the tertiary sector with the establishment of the Maori Development and Knowledge Panel and a Maori Centre for Research Excellence is just the most recent example of this reactive process of ‘principles of the treaty’ inclusion.

Extract 3

The third extract is from p. 22. I’ve chosen in order to highlight how retribalisation is in fact the privatisation of public resources for the neotribal elite.  

The process by which communal ownership was acquired, resources capitalised, commodities produced, and access to and control of the resources showed in fact a process of privatisation.

Abstract

In New Zealand the identity movements of the 1970s enabled the commonality between Maori and pakeha members of the new professional class to serve as the means for the recognition and politicisation of ethnic difference. The subsequent institutionalisation of ethnic boundaries established the conditions for neotribal capitalism. This paper discusses this process of ethnic boundary construction and summarises the research studies that lead to the theory of neotribal capitalism.

Introduction

One of the most complex dilemmas faced by constitutional democracies today concerns the regulation of universal democratic rights and the recognition of cultural difference. New Zealand has an enviable reputation as a nation that has achieved a satisfactory balance between these two often conflicting demands. In this paper I provide an outline of the theory of neotribal capitalism as a counter-argument to the ideas that support this reputation. I argue that, despite the democratising ideals of the cultural recognition movements, the Maori cultural revival of the 1970s established the context for a Maori elite to acquire political and economic capital from the political regulation of culture and the creation of ethnic boundaries.

The orthodox view is that Maori, who consist of approximately fifteen percent of New Zealand’s increasingly multicultural (though still mainly Anglo-based) population, are reviving a traditional culture and modernising it to fit into today’s world. This movement for indigenous self-determination is understood to be a rejection of the pakeha (Anglo settler descendant) dominance established during colonisation. Its symbol is the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, a document signed between the British government and the majority of tribal chiefs and recently revived to serve as the nation’s ‘founding document’[1] and the basis for a bicultural constitutional ‘partnership’ between the revived tribes and the government. 

In this paper I propose a contrasting view of the processes and outcomes of the past four decades of ethnic recognition in New Zealand. I argue that a broad peoples-based movement for cultural recognition and social justice has become derailed by a combination of global and local forces and by the responses of various interest groups to these forces and to each other. Not only has the derailment of a democratic movement for social justice become a vehicle for the creation of ethnic boundaries, it has become the means by which a Maori elite have acquired considerable economic and political capital at the expense of all Maori in whose name the cultural recognition movement first received widespread support. More seriously for New Zealand’s long-term future the derailment has created the conditions for destabilising New Zealand’s constitutional democracy.

I begin by examining the two main groups, Maori revivalists and pakeha biculturalists, who led the movement for cultural recognition to show that it was, ironically, the politics of recognition that established the brokerage sites and mechanisms for the creation of ethnic boundaries and the emergence of neotribal capitalism. This is followed by a brief outline of my research into the Maori revival and the bicultural movement to show the emergence of fundamental tensions and contradictions between the intentions and the outcomes of the various projects that comprise these movements of major social change. The tensions and contradictions are theorised as neotribal capitalism.

Part One      The Context

The reasons for the derailment of the New Zealand’s post-war democratic movements for social justice are multi-layered. They are to be found at a global level in the economic contraction and the decline of Western hegemony from the 1970s (Friedman, 1994), in the political experiences of New Zealand’s well-educated protest generation, and in the ways in which two distinct groups in the radicalised new professional class responded to changing global conditions. The combination of these global forces (the apparent disintegration of modernity’s universalising politics) and local circumstances (the contraction of the local economy and the squeeze on the new professional class) led to local versions of the identity ideologies that were replacing modernist universalism throughout the postcolonial world.

Identity politics enabled the most vulnerable of the new professional class (its most recent entrants, such as women and ethnic minorities), to respond actively to global economic contraction and its accompanying ideological shifts. Local movements were built around identity politics to ensure that the gains women and minority groups had made in the prosperous fifties and sixties were maintained in sites for identity recognition. These sites include women’s studies and cultural studies in academia and government policies that target marginalised groups.

In the 1970s a small group of tertiary educated Maori became the leaders of the cultural revival that signalled the first stage of ‘glocal’ identity politics in New Zealand. By the end of the 1980s this group had successfully defined indigenous recognition in terms of the new identity politics and achieved important political gains, particularly the government’s willingness to revive and honour the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. The consequences of unjust colonial practices were to be addressed through historical grievance settlements. The powers of the Waitangi Tribunal (established in 1975) were extended to hear reparation claims dating back to 1840. These inroads into political recognition and institutionalisation were extended in the 1990s to include the concept of political ‘partnership’ between the tribes and the government. This was to be achieved by legislating adherence to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in a range of Acts of Parliament.

Tribal institutions, revived by the Treaty reparation settlements, provided the structures for the materialisation of this indigenous identity. Those Maori who had led the cultural and indigenous movements become tribal brokers[2], a comprador bourgeoisie, on behalf of the newly established tribal economies. They negotiated for political and economic resources across the newly created sites of Treaty partnership discourse: the revived tribes on the one hand, and, on the other, the state institutions committed to recognising the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

It is worthwhile noting the ad hoc way (on the government’s side at least) that the brokerage of Maori revivalism into the institutions of government occurred. A government minister in the early 1990s National Government is able (with the hindsight of 2003), to describe the way in which the requirement to adhere to the principles of the Treaty were first incorporated into legislation through the highly influential 1991 Resource Management Act. ‘I am quite sure that none of us knew what we meant when we signed up to that formula’. By ‘formula’ the former Minister, Simon Upton, means the requirement that local government, through the Resource Management Act, ‘take account of the “principles” of the treaty’. Revealing further the extent of a government driven by tribal interests rather than its own policies, Upton adds that ‘when it framed the Resource Management Act, the National Government was aware of treaty “principles” developed by the Court of Appeal in 1987 and by the Waitangi Tribunal in dealing with Maori land Claims. “But given the extraordinary wide reach of the act, handing over its implementation to local councils with no clear guidance on how those principles might intersect with the claimed rangatiratanga[3] of any particular group amounted to a legislative evasion”.’ (Simon Upton quoted in the New Zealand Herald, 22 – 23 Feb. 2003)

The ad hoc nature of governments’ reaction to tribal demands continued throughout the 1990s. In 2000, the Labour Prime Minister, Helen Clark, acknowledged that ‘there is no one in Cabinet actually co-ordinating the insertion of Treaty clauses into new legislation’ (Listener, 2000: 22). Yet in response to a survey (New Zealand Herald, 28. 11. 2000, p. A3) that found that ‘two out of every three people believe references to the Treaty of Waitangi should not be included in legislation, Helen Clark indicated that the government was providing effective leadership in matters of Treaty and government legislation. Arguing that “strong leadership will reverse New Zealanders’ views on this contentious issue”, the Prime Minister located the problem in the “not very great public understanding”. However, she did ‘admit that the ‘Government had not been properly prepared for the debate over the treaty clause originally inserted in the health reform bill’.

Andrew Sharp (1997: 452) has drawn attention to this reactive ad hoc response in his reference to the unprecedented way in which ‘governments were losing control of policy formulation and execution’ in relation to the Treaty.

The left-wing activists who increasingly identified as ethnic pakeha in the new ‘glocal’ identity movements of the 1980s that replaced earlier left-wing universal movements took up the challenge of biculturalism with considerable vigour. ‘Being Pakeha’[4] meant acquiring a geographically based ethnic identity with Maori as the referent. The use of the word to describe oneself was a self-conscious symbol of ethnic identification that other groups of settler-descendants refused to accept. Its popularity among the left until the late 1980s and its subsequent decline is indicative of the shifting fortunes of bicultural adherents.

Biculturalism was the movement that linked the two ethnically distinguished groups of the new professional class, the Maori radicals (I also use the terms revivalists and neotraditionalists for this group) and the pakeha biculturalists. In doing so, biculturalism strengthened and institutionalised the boundaries between the two. By creating a space between ‘two worlds’ the strengthened boundaries denied the real material commonality between Maori revivalists and pakeha biculturalists, a commonality based not only upon shared class interests but also upon a considerable degree of actual shared ethnicity. This mixed ethnicity from the high incidence of historical intermarriage is continued in the intermarriage practices of the new professional class. In a recent and important study on ethnicity measurement and reporting Paul Callister (2003) has drawn attention to the association between education and having a Maori partner. The trend in New Zealand for more highly educated Maori to marry ‘out’ is (also a trend in inter-ethnic marriage in the United States), is ‘more pronounced amongst those with university qualifications’ (2003: 36).

The institutionalisation of ethnic division occurred through legislation and policies that required government agencies to adhere to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. This construction of an institutionalised division on ethnic lines by two groups of the new professional class replaced their earlier shared leftwing universalist politics and denied their shared lived commonality. Both groups continued to share the same privileged material conditions of all new professional class members: university education for their children, overseas travel, the health and material comforts of middle-class life. Both groups continued to intermarry (Callister, 2003).

However, ethnic division enabled Maori revivalists to assert themselves as a distinctive political force, a political position strengthened by the social and cultural identity that creates a niche repertoire for these (increasingly) ‘global representatives of the local’ (Friedman, 2001: 67-8). Such cultural repertoires are particularly apt in a post-fordist world where niche identities fit well with niche consumption. The distinctive political identity is reinforced by the cultural niche positioning in the development of a privileged elite. Friedman (2001: 67) has referred to ‘the conversion of status for indigenous representatives’ as they take indigenous politics onto the world stage, noting that ‘such a shift implies a contradiction in identity, a contradiction between the rootedness of indigeneity and the cosmopolitan life of the higher circulatory elites of the world arena’.

With the shift of egalitarian idealism from leftist progressive universalism to group identity politics the explanations of the left biculturalists for the outcome of biculturalism were rephrased in a new discourse. This was a confused and confusing mixture of Habermasian communicative action, rightist communitarianism and postmodernism’s championing of the local. The stalemate provided by the left’s inability to address the fundamental issues of the conflict between public good and private autonomy, and between universalism and local primordialisms, enabled the tribes to control Treaty discourse. Margaret Wilson, the Minister of Treaty negotiations and a leading biculturalist, demonstrates the left-right confusion of cultural politics.

With clear Habermasian overtones, Wilson rejects a fundamental plank of democratic philosophy – that the individual is the political monad – by arguing that ‘I do not see why individual and group rights need to be constructed in oppositional terms. This is not to say that there may not be instances where there is conflict. It is more important however to find the points of consistency between the two sets of rights.’ And in a move into relativism which leaves behind any notion of the Habermasian standard of rationality in communicative action, she argues that ‘(b)oth are valid within their own terms’ (2000: 20).

By the 1980s the strong influence of postmodern ideas in New Zealand social sciences had provided the intellectual justification for the left’s shift to identity politics and away from modernity’s democratising universalism. A leading leftist commentator in New Zealand has referred to the destructive effect on the left caused by the identity politics of the new social movements’ identity politics. ‘Communists and socialists alike found themselves assailed by those late arrivals on the left-wing block – the new social movements’ (Trotter, 2003: 37).

Despite Foucault’s[5] disclaimer against the reduction of knowledge to relative experiences, the result of postmodernism’s capture of New Zealand social science was to reduce ideas and judgement to mere opinion, with all opinions of equal value. The nihilistic vacuum left has become fertile ground for a strange but mutually benefiting axis of neoliberal self-interest, neoconservative rigidity and neotraditional fundamentalism.

Neotraditionalists used postmodernism’s celebration of the local to acquire support from those of the left who moved to postmodernism in the 1980s. The resultant culturalism is both an anthropological ideology and an intellectual brokerage mechanism for the institutionalisation of neotraditionalism. As an anthropological ideology it is ‘increasingly used as a privileged tool to legitimise political domination’ (Babadzan, 2001: 150) with its ‘sacralisation of cultures and identities’. In this approach ‘culture’ is ‘transformed and essentialised’ (Babadzan, 2001: 149) with ‘anthropologists appropriating the ethnic-culturalist discourse that actors themselves hold about the meaning of their practices’. Peter Munz’s (1994) critique of the New Zealand culturalist anthropologist, Anne Salmond, identifies this practice. He refers to the ‘reliance on the finality of uncritical self-representation (that) has become American anthropological orthodoxy’. (Munz, 1994: 61). I would add ‘New Zealand social science orthodoxy’ as well.

Neotraditionalism is the belief that a traditional social structure has been revived. However, it is the process identified by Habermas as a ‘self-conscious traditionalism’ which ‘is itself a thoroughly modern movement of renewal’ (cited in Barry, 2001: 259). Maori retribalisation is explained as the restoration of the social relations of a traditional redistributive society consisting of kinship-based groups. In claiming that genealogy, rather than ethnicity, is the primary determinant of tribal membership and tribal definition, Apirana Mahuika (1998: 219) argues that ‘cultural identity . . . on ethnic non-blood lines rather than tribal blood lines . . . would be suicidal for iwi[6] and culture, because whakapapa is the heart and core of all Maori institutions, from Creation to what is now iwi. Whakapapa is the determinant of all mana rights to land, to marae, to membership of a whanau, hapu, and, collectively, the iwi whakapapa determines kinship roles and responsibilities to other kin, as well as one’s place and status within society.’

The uncritical acceptance by biculturalists of Maori as tribal kin-groups of a particular ethnicity rather than according to a broader non-kin referenced ethnic identity enabled the tribes, rather than pan-Maori, to be recognised as the legitimate inheritors of the traditional resources. This meant that the tribes were defined as the rightful claimants for the historical reparation settlements. The return of these resources, either in kind or in monetary form, enabled several of the larger tribes to establish successful tribal economies. In the neotraditionalist interpretation of this economic development the tribes were now able to develop a group-based form of capitalism that maintained traditional social relations alongside contemporary technologies, management and organisation. The group-rights pakeha biculturalists accept this ideological version of the ‘restored’ tribes as models of a new and more democratic form of capitalism, a ‘communal capitalism’ (Spoonley et al., 1996: 75).

 

Part Two    Neotribal Capitalism

Rejecting the concept of ‘communal capitalism’ as a contradiction in terms, my theory of neotribal capitalism provides an alternative explanation for Maori revivalism and the interdependent biculturalist movement. The theory interprets the new social structure (the neotribe) that organises and operates the economic enterprises (resourced primarily by the Treaty settlements) as fundamentally different from the traditional social structure (the tribe) of a pre-capitalist redistributive economy. However, neotraditionalism provides the ideological justification to interpret the contemporary tribe as the legitimate inheritor of the past, and, as such, the legitimate inheritor of the Treaty of Waitangi settlements.

A series of research studies into Maori revivalism led to my conclusion that the capitalisation of resources and their control by one group to the exclusion of others alters social relations in ways so fundamental that a new social structure (the neotribe) is created. This is explained in terms of a new relationship between the economic dimension and ‘the mode of regulation or social environment of production’ which, according to Esser and Hirsch (1994: 74) enables the elements of (the) complex relationship between production and reproduction (to be) related to each other socially.

David Harvey (1989: 121) also acknowledges the ‘strength of regulation theory in its grasp of the dialectical complexity between the production and reproduction environment’. This relationship is not dissimilar to Marx’s ‘modes of co-operation’ ([1846] 1965) as the social regulation of accumulation. The operation of the neotribal economic dimension (the determinant ‘in the final instance’) occurs in regulating the social environment in ways that enable the capitalisation and commodification of traditional resources under the political control of the tribal elite. This control is achieved through neotraditionalist ideologies of revived kinship structures and revived forms of traditional leadership.

I began my own research into the Maori revival and pakeha biculturalism in the late 1980s. Like many other researchers, both Maori and pakeha, who were involved in the exciting and hopeful period of minority group and women’s identity movements, I was able to benefit from the expansion of postgraduate research that also occurred at this time. New academic courses in cultural and women’s studies provided the academic discourse and theories for the social movements that had, in their turn, contributed to tertiary expansion.

My master of education thesis (Rata, 1991) and other publications (Rata, 1988, 1989) documented the Auckland kura kaupapa Maori[7] education organisation, Te Runanga o Nga Kura Kaupapa Maori o Tamaki Makaurau. I was the runanga or committee’s inaugural secretary and administrator of its teacher education programme. Colleagues who were within the kura kaupapa Maori movement and also university academics established a master of education (Maori) degree in the Department of Education at the University of Auckland. Many kaupapa Maori researchers were to complete master and later doctoral studies in this department. It became the centre for the development of kaupapa Maori theory as a codified body of thinking promoting a distinctive kaupapa Maori epistemology. Kaupapa Maori theory is regarded by its adherents as ‘a uniquely Maori way of looking at the world’ (L. T. Smith, 1999: 175). It rejects the ‘academic Western tradition’ with ‘its inherent right to knowledge and truth’ accorded to the ‘inquiring individual researcher’ (Walker, 1997: 2).

Increasingly throughout the 1990s, research undertaken in education, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and Maori Studies was explicitly intended to record and support Maori self-determination. By the end of the decade the eclectic mix of leftist and postmodernist theorists whose ideas had underpinned the development of Maori education studies was replaced by indigenous theorists. ‘Kaupapa Maori research (is) research over which Maori maintain conceptual, design, methodological and interpretative control . . . “research by Maori, for Maori with Maori”’ (Jahnke and Taiapa, 1999: 45). My doctorate thesis was to be no exemption to this political requirement. Studies into the relationship between the intentions, actions and outcomes of a range of revivalist initiatives, including Maori schools, Maori fisheries and Maori kinship groups, began, like most Maori research of the period, as a way of supporting Maori political aspirations.

Almost a decade later, the notion of kaupapa Maori research is so entrenched that even at the level of the government’s new tertiary research funding policy (a policy designed to develop New Zealand’s scientific community within the competitive global market), an ethnic version of knowledge is accepted without question. ‘Maori research was seen to encompass research into things Maori, and research conducted according to Maori methods of research and subscribing to Maori ways of knowing.’ This ethnic ‘way of knowing’ is to be developed through a Maori Knowledge and Development panel which will consist of experts on Maori research. ‘The panel would directly evaluate Maori researchers, and (where appropriate) provide advice to other panels where the research being evaluated had a Maori focus.’ (Ministry of Education, 2003: 36).

The inherent conflict between research that is ‘independent’, ‘open to scrutiny’ and ‘driven by hypotheses or intellectual positions capable of rigorous assessment’ (Ministry of Education, 2003: 17) on the one hand, and ‘closed’ (ie. not available for independent critical scrutiny) neotraditionalist research on the other is not addressed by the new Tertiary Education Commission in its policy formulation document. The tendency to ignore the hard issues of the meaning of ethnic recognition in the contemporary world is characteristic of the government’s ad hoc treaty-based approach. The institutionalisation of kaupapa Maori research into the tertiary sector with the establishment of the Maori Development and Knowledge Panel and a Maori Centre for Research Excellence is just the most recent example of this reactive process of ‘principles of the treaty’ inclusion.

As my own research progressed during the early 1990s it became impossible to ignore the tensions and contradictions that began appearing in the research findings. These pointed to a different interpretation of ethnic and indigenous identity politics. Finally I had no choice but to abandon the political intentions of my research and address the issues revealed in the studies. I theorised the unacknowledged contradictions and the disparities between the Maori revivalist claims and the actual outcomes in terms of an emergent neotribal capitalist regime (Rata, 1999, 2000). This theoretical position has led to further research into the neotraditionalist ideology which is neotribal capitalism’s self-representation.

The research analyses the brokerage mechanisms that enabled the tribal elites to acquire tribal, rather than pan-Maori ownership, of the historical reparation settlements, and that continue to provide political access. It includes an examination of the ways in which the neotraditionalist ideology has been so comprehensively taken into the institutions and processes of the democratic state. Other research critiques the culturalist discourse in academia and government. The purpose of these studies is to demonstrate the cumulative effects of neotraditionalism upon the universalist egalitarian principles that inform and support New Zealand democracy (Rata, 2002b, 2003a, 2003b).

 

Part Three  The Research Studies

The initial studies that led to theorising neotribal capitalism are: the bicultural project of the 1980s, the revival of a Maori whanau or extended family, the family’s return to tribal lands and establishment of a marine farm, the tribe’s own revival, the establishment of the national Maori fishing industry and the establishment of kura kaupapa Maori. The first study, of the 1980s’ bicultural project (Rata 1996b, 2000), was an examination of the ‘goodness and power’ (Gouldner, 1979: 36) paradox experienced by an expanding group of self-conscious ethnic pakeha who were committed to establishing biculturalism on a national scale in order to support the Maori cultural revival.

This complemented the study of a Maori family (Rata 1996c, 2000) who had undertaken a revival of genealogical ties in order to return to traditional tribal lands and establish a marine farm. In turn, that study led to an account of the process by which the Ngati Kuri tribe of New Zealand’s far north emerged from two centuries of ‘historical invisibility’ to become a major player in Maori politics from 1988 (Rata 2000). The study of the family’s marine farm led to an investigation of the newly established national Maori fisheries (Rata 2000).

My own background in kura kaupapa Maori education meant that studies of the establishment of the schools and the accompanying teacher education programme were also undertaken (Rata 1996a, 2001). Post-doctoral studies of family revival practices (Rata 2002a), kaupapa Maori influence on teacher education (2002b), neotraditionalist ideology (Rata 2003a) and the Maori elite of neotribal capitalism (Rata 2003b) followed. It is my intention here to give a very brief account of several of the studies, primarily to show the path taken from the studies to theorising neotribal capitalism, and latterly, to extending the theoretical ideas to the broader implications for New Zealand democracy (Rata 2003b). This progression of my scholarship, from uncritical participant-observer ethnographer to critical theorist, did, not surprisingly, require that I reconsider the relationship between research and political engagement at a very fundamental level (Rata 2002c).

The study of the bicultural project of the 1980s focussed upon the actions and motives of an increasingly influential group of settler descendants who, born in the prosperous post-war period, received free secondary and university education in large numbers. Many of these people entered the humanities-based professions of teaching, health, the church, social services and the media, with a smaller number moving into government and politics. (The biographies of many senior politicians in the current Labour Government fit this profile). Their left-wing political instincts were honed in the heady days of radical student activism, from the ‘Ban the Bomb’ and anti-Vietnam war protests of the 1960s to the conservation and anti-apartheid movements of the 1970s.

Culminating in the 1981 nation-wide demonstrations against the visiting South African Springbok rugby team, this activism channelled its focus and energy into a home-grown issue – Maori cultural revival. In the post-1981 period, culture identity became its focus. Biculturalism emerged as the means by which Maori and settler descendants could recognise each other as distinct ethnic identities, identities that justified claims to geographical place. Anglo settler-descendants adopted the older Maori term ‘pakeha’ as the self-referent in increasingly large numbers.

Cultural recognition moved quickly into political recognition. By 1985, the Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act gave significant power to the earlier, and more symbolic 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act. The 1985 Amendment ensured that the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and its enforcer and interpreter, the Waitangi Tribunal, had significant political and moral authority. The research study examined the enthusiasm of pakeha biculturalists in exploring both their own identity as pakeha in a particular relation to Maori, and in supporting Maori revivalism. Specific attention was drawn to the extent of pakeha feminist support for Maori self-determination and then to a further shift, in the early 1990s to a largely silent retreat from Maori issues. The heyday of pakeha biculturalism, characterised by large numbers of self-identifying pakeha learning the Maori language, attending marae visits and advocating bicultural practices in the workplace gave way to a confused but silent withdrawal by many of the earlier biculturalist as retribalisation replaced the earlier pan-Maori social justice ideals that had characterised the bicultural movement.

Despite several decades spent in recognising and emphasising the differences between Maori and pakeha, both pakeha biculturalists and Maori revival leaders, as members of the prosperous and well-educated new middle class, have a similar educational background and shared middle-class political and economic aspirations. City-raised and university educated in the main, Maori who have become the brokers of neotribal capitalism, emerged as an elite during the revivalist movement’s shifts from cultural renaissance in the 1970s to retribalisation and tribal economic development in the 1980s and 1990s. Recently their concern is to institutionalise various forms of tribal political partnership with the government, moves that will consolidate their position as a neotribal capitalist aristocracy. As the elite of neotribal capitalism they retain the links forged with their pakeha counterparts during the rise of the well-educated new professional class from the 1960s. They shared the radical politicisation of the new middle class in the protest culture. Just as importantly they shared the shift to middle class prosperity in the following decades.

It is unsurprising that the networks with their pakeha counterparts from the days of shared protests were maintained. Many continued to work together as lecturers and teachers in schools, polytechnics and universities, or as trade union officials, or in welfare, the media and the church. As the radicals became successful and influential in politics, the bureaucracy and the professions, the Maori professionals were able to insist that their pakeha bicultural associates actually enact the rhetoric of cultural recognition that both had created. Indeed the confidence of Maori professionals as the political ‘drivers’ is revealed in the ‘scary radical’ role ‘defiantly embrace(d)’ (Simpson, 2003: 51)  by a Maori educationalist who asserts ‘So a lot of people see us coming and they run – but, you know we’re Maori people and you can’t run far’ (Pihama quoted in Simpson, 2003: 51).

This commonality of real material conditions and radicalism (increasingly nostalgic as the radicals aged) explains the continued and effective support of left-leaning pakeha for the Maori revival through all its forms, from the earlier cultural renaissance to the more recent construction of ethnic boundaries within the nation’s political structure.

Commitment to retribalisation and biculturalism of an increasingly political kind was not disrupted by the movement of some members of this group into new right politics during the 1980s. (Several members of the 1984 – 1990 Labour Government founded a new right-wing political party after failing to retain control of the Labour Government that they had pushed to the right). Indeed the tribe was regarded as the perfect regulatory mode for the new right policy of devolved state activities. Those pakeha biculturalists who remained on the left regarded the tribes as organisations governed by communal mechanisms more deeply democratic than the supposedly ‘limited’ democratic forms of representative government.

The commonality between tribal leaders and influential pakeha of the right and the left in government[8] goes some way towards explaining the extraordinary success of the tribes in acquiring and maintaining political recognition. Not only has a non-democratic organisation (the neotribe with its hierarchical social relations and kinship-based membership) been successful in arguing that it, rather than all Maori, be the inheritors of the grievance settlements, but this very organisation is acquiring legal recognition as a Treaty-based political ‘partner’. Attempts by the government to award constitutional recognition to the neotribe in terms of political partnership have been thwarted only by the absence of a national consensus. The Minister of Treaty Negotiations, Margaret Wilson, acknowledges that the more limited ambition of recognition through legislative inclusion ‘may be the best that can be achieved in the current political climate’ (1996: 15).

The second study of the establishment of kura kaupapa Maori, traced the campaign of an Auckland-based Maori group, Te Runanga o Nga Kura Kaupapa Maori o Tamaki Makaurau, to establish Maori language and philosophy schools and to acquire recognition and funding from the state for these schools. The schools were an extension of the early childhood centres, kohanga reo, set up in the early 1980s in order to reverse the declining use of the Maori language. The study showed the brokerage process of the bicultural project in action as biculturalists committed themselves to supporting the establishment of separate Maori schools in legislation and policies.

The success of the Runanga’s campaign for state funding of kura kaupapa Maori was acquired on the basis of the claim that the kura would produce bilingual and bicultural citizens. The appeals to inclusive national sentiment in the submissions to the government during the pre-legislation period may be contrasted with the neotribalist discourse of the movement itself. These show the contrasting interpretations by pakeha biculturalists and Maori neotribalists with respect to the purpose of kaupapa Maori education. The biculturalists supported kaupapa Maori education as part of the commitment to the group rights idea used to justify identity politics despite the fact that the notion of group rights subverts the basic democratic principle that it is the individual, not the group, who is the bearer of legal and political rights.  For the neotraditionalists on the other hand, kaupapa Maori education was concerned with restoring the primordial kinship relations of the traditional tribe.

My other studies of a Maori family’s cultural and economic reconstitution in the late 1980s and its establishment of a marine farm on tribal lands showed how the economic processes of capitalisation and commodification changed the family’s relations in fundamental ways. The family or whanau achieved a great deal in a few years, testament to the deep beliefs that a return to traditional values and practices would replace the unemployment and problems of modern urban living. Like many other Maori families of the time (all with varying numbers of pakeha among the whanau – the result of ongoing and frequent intermarriage) this whanau researched its genealogy, traced family members, held reunions, funerals, unveilings and birth practices according to traditional custom. Naming children after their Maori ancestors and insisting that others use the Maori name with the correct pronunciation replaced the English names that had become common from the 1950s. By the later 1980s, the researched whanau had established its genealogy, placed its younger children in the kohanga and kura, held the mandatory whanau reunion and acquired land in its tribal homelands.

The establishment of a marine farm by those of the whanau who returned permanently to the tribal lands (others visited intermittently, some for a while before the visits trailed off) ended this period of communal involvement. In the early stages everyone, including the pakeha members of the whanau, were involved in the retribalisation process and planning for the marine farm. However, problems emerged even before the marine farm was established. There were conflict over ownership definition, kin belonging, the place of pakeha and Maori from other tribes in relation to direct descendant whanau members and to the tribal resources, the way in which capital contribution (as its form in either actual money, physical labour or mental labour) related to work done on the farm and anticipated profits.

It was not long before the farm was divided in two for each of the nuclear families who had agreed to settle permanently. The ideal of a large communal holding worked by a permanent group and augmented by the occasional visits of the city-based family members was soon rejected in favour of small enterprises owned and operated by couples and their children who worked on the farm and who would receive the profits of their labours. It was no different from any other small agricultural holding throughout the country except that in this case the families did not have freehold land but claimed the right to the land and shoreline on the basis of tribal descent.

Researching a small family based economic enterprise led into researching the establishment of Maori economic venture, the national tribal fisheries to see if the same issues of access, ownership, control and benefit, were similar to those issues at the marine farm level. The fisheries study examined the contribution made to neotribal capitalism by the reshaping of pan-Maori revivalism into retribalisation in processes of property rights, capitalisation and brokerage. The 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act and the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission were pivotal in the reshaping of Maori revivalism into neotribal capitalism. In a series of treaty and fisheries legislation and policies tribal legal identity became defined in terms of property ownership rather than as social and cultural entity only.

The 1989 Maori Fisheries Act built upon the recognition of the tribes as modern legal corporate entities established in the 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act. It became the mechanism for defining the nature and extent of tribal property rights. ‘It follows’ (that is, from the 1989 Maori Fisheries Act, which recognised in law that “article Two of the Treaty of Waitangi guaranteed Maori continued possession of their fisheries, Signatories to the Treaty were the chiefs – the representatives of the tribes’) ‘that the rights being dealt with in the Maori Fisheries Act should be tribal rights, and that ownership of those rights, to the extent that they continue in existence today through the provisions of the Maori Fisheries Act, should rest with tribes’ (Habib, 1991: 30).

The 1992 Settlement Act was the historical ‘moment’ when the newly recognised tribal property became capital. Property rights invested in the private person or the corporation (the neotribe) are not yet capital although the legal recognition of ownership is a necessary step in the path to capitalism. That step occurred with the mechanism created by the Settlement Act for the use of tribal property in the production and circulation of commodities based upon the utilisation of the fisheries property. Commodification is the accumulative mechanism of capitalism.

The study of the re-emergence of the Ngati Kuri tribe from several centuries of obscurity showed how the process of identity recognition was essential to claiming property rights. Once the traditional resources were recognised legally as tribal resources, it was imperative for specific groups who had material interests to assert those interests through the median of the tribe. The Waitangi Tribunal was the institution that conferred tribal recognition upon claimant groups. For tribes such as Ngati Kuri or the Chatham Islands Moriori who had been included in the definition of another collectivity, the Tribunal provided a place for the juridification of a contemporary definition.

This definition merged the revived historical tribal definition with the new capital-owning corporate identity. Without a clear tribal definition, descendant groups could not access the tribal property rights that were acquiring legal recognition from the late 1980s. Tribes, such as the Moriori Tchakat Henu (indigenous Moriori) sought judicial recognition of their self-defining status as a historically distinguishable tribal group in order to challenge the allocation of fishing property rights already made as part of a claim by another tribal group. Ngati Kuri, on the other hand, undertook the process of tribal definition re-establishment in order to make a claim for fishing property rights on the basis of its historical existence and the need for the people of the area to maintain their access to the fishing grounds.

The whanau’s revival, the fisheries study and the marine farm study opened up another important piece in the retribalisation process, that is, the revival of the tribal structure itself. The retribalising whanau needed a tribe to return to, the fisheries claimants needed strong tribal identities in whose name claims could be connected to the tribal signatures on the Treaty of Waitangi. This historical link provided the justification for the contemporary claim as a tribal, not a pan-Maori, claim. The decision to allocate fisheries resources under the treaty grievance process led to a wave of tribal definition and consolidation. Some of the larger tribes maintained a strong core of adherents within the tribal lands. Others, such as the tribe to which the researched whanau belonged, were severely depopulated. The study of this particular tribe, the Ngati Kuri of New Zealand’s far north became an account of historical invisibility and visibility, interwoven with the fortunes of the Rimu whanau itself.

Part Four  Theorising Neotribal Capitalism

Taken on their own, each of the research studies suggested unacknowledged discrepancies between intentions and outcomes. These discrepancies could be explained as a project gone wrong, a specific problem due to an unexpected event or rogue occurrence. However, all the studies suggested the same problem. The way in which a particular project was explained fitted best with the intentions, rather than the outcomes, of that project. For example, the intention of the kura kaupapa Maori movement was to produce bicultural and bilingual citizens of New Zealand. This was the way the movement was explained to its own members and to its biculturalist supporters in influential educational positions and in government. However, my research showed that the shift away from biculturalism towards an insular tribalism had begun even before the legislation was achieved.

By 1990, the kura kaupapa Maori legislation had instituted the kura into the state education system. Political support had been achieved on the basis of its stated committed to bicultural citizenship. Yet, the founding document of kura kaupapa Maori, Te Aho Matua (which was later included in legislation), was based upon the notion that the purpose of the kura was to construct each child as a member of its tribe. Kin belonging was placed before concepts of individual autonomy and universalism that underpinned the mainstream state education system. The incorporation of Te Aho Matua into the kura kaupapa Maori legislation exemplifies the institutionalisation of neotraditionalism.

Discrepancies both between Maori revivalist intentions and outcomes, and between the actual outcomes and the explanation of the outcomes, were also revealed in the marine farm and fisheries studies. The process by which communal ownership was acquired, resources capitalised, commodities produced, and access to and control of the resources showed in fact a process of privatisation. The group who acquired the resources in the communal name went on to acquire effective control over the resources. Detribalised Maori were excluded completely, despite the fact that pakeha biculturalists’ support for the Maori revival was achieved on the basis of the movement’s pan-Maori social justice intentions. Those Maori who identified with the tribe but who were not in the controlling elite have received little benefit either from the treaty settlements.

Tribal control rests with the elite who justify their leadership positions according to neotraditionalist notions of revived tribal leadership, a hierarchical structure based upon birth ascription and aristocratic lineage. The concept of traditional aristocratic ascription has supported the general acceptance by the non-elite tribal Maori of the legitimacy of the tribal elite, despite its new classed character. An influential Maori academic and tribal leader, Sydney Mead, justifies contemporary tribal leadership in terms of its continuity with the past. ‘The social system of traditional times is still in place. Though greatly changed. Waka, iwi, hapu and whanau still exist despite years of government efforts to undermine them. There is still a Maori leadership system.’ (1997: 203).

The discrepancies between intentions and outcomes in all the studies mirrored the greatest discrepancy of all, one that was increasingly hard to ignore. Widespread pakeha (and Maori too in many cases) support for the Maori revival and cultural, then political, biculturalism was based on the belief that this was to be the path to greater social justice. The concept of a decent and just society has deep roots in New Zealand history and is an ideal still advanced in contemporary political parties. Despite the experiment with new right policies in the late eighties and early 1990s, New Zealanders remain attached to a history of democratic egalitarianism and take pride in the social justice legislation of the 1890s and 1930s. Yet several decades of biculturalism intended to bring Maori in from the margins and improve Maori social and economic conditions had resulted in the disenfranchisement of those very Maori, whose poor status is the result of earlier detribilisation and whose guarantee of continued impoverishment was caused by their present inability to become retribalised. Detribalised Maori, in whose name the historical reparation settlements had initially been promoted, were excluded from those settlements.

There was a further problem. The tribes had acquired access to the settlements because they claimed to be the traditional tribe in a contemporary context. If it’s tribal then it’s traditional. And yet the studies all pointed to the emergence of new social relations within a new social structure. My research task was to locate the discrepancies in a theoretical framework that had sufficient explanatory power. The frequent use of post-colonial approaches, such as post-colonial trauma, to explain continuing Maori disadvantage had become less plausible given the visible evidence of considerable advantage to some Maori and ongoing disadvantage to Maori poor.

All the studies pointed to the type of relationship between the social environment and the economic environment as the source of the discrepancies and conflicts. According to neotribal capitalist theory the changed social relationship between people was a consequence of the new relationships of people to material resources. Despite the fact that the lands, waters and other resources were the same material things as in the past, indeed the same as in 1840 when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, the meaning and use of these resources had changed in fundamental ways. However, in returning the resources to the tribes, the resources were juridified into legal ownership within a legal system based upon the concept of private ownership. They were capitalised as resources available for the production of commodities and the creation of profit under the control of a particular group.

The relationships between people, although still based upon notions of shared ancestry were different in fundamental ways from the communal relationships of the traditional tribe. Exploitative class relations, based upon differential access to and control of the traditional resources, replaced the traditional relationships located in the tribal hierarchical structures of a redistributive economy.

The tribe as the structuring principle of the social relations of the kin-group, was a legally defined economic unit within a democratic nation-state, a corporate neotribe. Despite the fact that the neotribe continues to practice certain cultural customs of the traditional tribe and is comprised of the descendants of its historical members, it is a new social structure, defined primarily by its economic functions. It is an economic corporation in a capitalist economic system, the same as all capitalist organisations in that it is accumulative not redistributive, class not communally structured.

It is not the modernised productive forces that determined the character of the tribe but the underlying relations between the people. Despite claims that these relations were still communal as in the traditional tribe, the logic of capitalism is that of an accumulatory regime which privileges those who own or control the capital resources. Accumulation follows resource ownership or control of the commodification process. Class division results from that control. The elite of the neotribe has a privileging relationship to the resources under its control. This fact separates them from those who, as a result of their detribalised status, are not even nominal owners of the tribes’ resources, and from those, who, as tribal members, are nominal shareholders in the tribal corporation, but whose influence is limited by the leadership ideology of neotribal capitalism.

Conclusion

The retribalisation movement itself did not automatically lead to neotribal capitalism. The emergence of this mode of production required the combination of a range of factors, not least the global context of new post-fordist forms of worker organisation and control that favoured localised production and communal or team worker organisation. Neotribal capitalism is a form of capitalism suited to late capitalism in that its modes of regulation provide new and undemocratic form of worker organisation and control.

Legal tribal status, legal recognition of traditional resources as tribal property, the capitalisation of the property and the production of commodities, the brokerage of the capitalised resources into the national and international economy, the control of the property (both capital and commodities) by one group at the expense of another group – all these factors needed to combine in order for neotribal capitalism to emerge as the structuring principle of the ‘revived’ tribe. And, in turn, none of these forces were possible without the bicultural context that was created from the relationship between two groups of the new professional class, whose historical position led them to identity themselves and others in terms of ethnic identity rather than according to the univeralist ethos that underpins New Zealand’s democracy.

In 2022 I would conclude with this phrase “and that is under grave threat from the neotribal elite and its agenda to transform New Zealand from democracy into ethno-nationalism.

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Rata, E. (2002c). Re-interpreting the Maori Revival, An Ethnographer’s BiographyPaper presented at the ASAO Conference University of Auckland, February

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Rata, E. (2003b) Leadership Ideology in Neotribal Capitalism, Political Power and Social Theory. Vol 16

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[1] The 2002 Speech from the Throne at the Opening of the 47^th Parliament by the Governor-General, Dame Silvia Cartwright  (Cartwright, 2002) shows how thoroughly Treaty rhetoric is established in government circles. ‘The basis of constitutional government in this country is to be found in its founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi. My government values and remains committed to strengthening its relationship with tangata whenua (indigenous people). That means fulfilling its obligations as a Treaty partner’. Despite the insistence upon constitutional recognition, the Treaty has no constitutional status in law apart from the requirement in many acts of legislation that the principles of the Treaty are recognised or adhered to. Recent media comments by a  former politician indicate the extent of the lack of consensus concerning the Treaty of Waitangi. ‘(M)ost New Zealanders do not support a treaty-based nationhood (whose rules are) so arcane that only an elite can understand them’ (Upton, 2003: 6). This view is supported by the results of a 1999 national survey of attitudes and values (Perry and Webster, 1999) which found that ‘’this is clearly not a picture of a nation with a substantial and growing proportion of support for the Treaty and the Waitangi Tribunal. Our results seem to indicate that this is issue is a major point of division within the country.’ (1999:74).

[2] A discussion of the brokers, the brokerage mechanisms, and the privileging outcomes of brokerage is available in Rata, 2003b

[3] rangatiratanga – this word has a range of meanings concerning authority. They range from some form of limited governance, to self-determination, to the concept of full sovereignty.

[4] Being Pakeha was the title of an influential book by Michael King. Published in 1981 at the beginning of the bicultural movement this book was avidly read by those of the new professional class who were identifying in increasing numbers as ethnic Pakeha in relation to Maori rather than in terms of a national New Zealander identity.

[5] Foucault’s (2001: 71) concept of ‘genealogy’ as ‘the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allow us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today’ is re-interpreted to emphasise the ‘local memories’ and the primacy of the ‘immediate experience’ at the expense of the ‘erudite knowledge’.

[6] iwi – tribe, whakapapa – genealogy, mana – status, marae – meeting place, whanau – extended family, hapu – collectivity of whanau

[7] kura kaupapa Maori – Maori language and culture schools

[8] Chris Trotter (2003: 47) refers to the de-socialising of the Labour movement by the new professional class and their identity politics. ‘(T)hroughout the Labour movement – where whole layers of working-class leadership were being quietly, and in a few cases noisily, shunted aside. It had begun in the parliamentary Labour Party as far back as the 1970s but, by the end of the 1980s, vitually the entire Labour Party organisation, and whole swathes of the trade union movement, had fallen victim to the same relentless forces of what was called ‘”professionalisation”.’

Elizabeth Rata

1^st June 2022

The article was published in The Australian, 25^th May 2022

New Zealand’s constitution is currently undergoing a major heart and lung transplant via co-governance arrangements between Māori corporate tribes and the government.

It beggars belief that one of the modern world’s first democracies — founded in the fledgling 1852 Constitution Act — is descending into ethno-nationalism but the Labour Government is determined to embed racialised policies across a swathe of the nation’s laws and institutions, and not least in education.

Led by radical intellectuals of the corporate tribes and enabled by social justice warriors armed with an unassailable moral righteousness, New Zealand’s entire education system is rapidly being revolutionised.

Proposals in a recent government Green Paper for a Treaty of Waitangi-led science and research system include recognising mātauranga Māori (traditional knowledge) as equivalent to science.

The universities too are indigenising. According to the University of Auckland’s Pro-Vice Chancellor (Māori), this means “finding ways where Māori knowledge, ways of being, thinking and doing can thrive”.

Proposals to transform the university curriculum and teaching by inserting mātauranga Māori and kinship-based teaching and learning practices are now in the consultation phase.

The revolution does not stop there. The entire school sector is to be “decolonised”. The Ministry of Education’s ‘Te Hurihanganui A Blueprint for Transformative Systems Shift’ will include recognising “white privilege” and understanding racism in schools while the Ministry’s Curriculum Refresh will place ‘knowledge derived from Te Ao Māori (the Māori world)’ in the curriculum.

These initiatives, targeted at all levels of the education system will provide opportunities for an expansion of the cadre of decolonisers as ‘Māori exercise authority and agency over their mātauranga (knowledge), tikanga (customs) and taonga (treasures)’.

Four strategies will ensure the revolution succeeds:

First, the opposition is being positioned as racist and reactionary, effectively silencing debate and creating self-censorship.

Second, government servants are required to accept the revisionist notion that the Treaty of Waitangi is a ‘partnership’ between two co-governing entities. Reprogramming services by government-paid consultants are on hand to encourage appropriate attitudes — signalled most obviously by insisting on using the correct language.

Third, the abandonment of universalism by the well-educated liberal-left who inhabit elevated positions in government and the caring professions will remove democracy’s very foundation. This is the principle of a shared universal humanity with the individual as the political category. It is the final point in the four decades convergence of post-modern relativism and identity politics. 

The fourth strategy will be the clincher. It is the use of intellectual relativism to destroy the separation of science and culture that characterises the modern world.

Traditional cultural knowledge, including mātauranga Māori, employs supernatural explanations for natural and physical phenomena. It also includes practical knowledge (proto-science or pre-scientific), acquired from observation, experience, and trial and error.

Such traditional knowledge has provided ways for humans to live successfully in their environment. Sometimes this has occurred in highly sophisticated ways, such as ocean navigation by the stars and currents, while efficacious medicines from plants may have helped to advance scientific or technological knowledge. Consequently, the role of traditional knowledge in humanity’s history justifies a place somewhere in the educational curriculum. But it is not science. It does not explain why natural and physical phenomena occur — just that they do.

Science provides naturalistic explanations for such phenomena in the discovery of empirical, universal truths. It proceeds by conjecture and refutation. It requires doubt, challenge and critique, forever truth-seeking but with truth never fully settled. 

Science’s naturalism and its self-criticism are anathema to the science-culture equivalence claim. A fundamental principle of science is that no knowledge is protected from criticism, yet the Green Paper refers to protecting mātauranga Māori. Knowledge that requires protection is belief, not science. Knowledge authorised by culture is ideology, not science.

Furthermore, mātauranga Māori’s inclusion in science throughout New Zealand’s education system will place research under cultural authority. Alarmingly, that authority is to be wielded by evangelical commissars who cannot be questioned.

The outrage encountered by those foolish or brave enough to mount a defence of science shows how important science-culture co-equivalence is to the overall decolonisation strategy.

Decolonisers will not, indeed cannot, tolerate its rejection. To do so would expose the fundamental premise of a racial ideology which claims that there is no universal human being and no universal science.

***********

This article was published as a chapter in:

Rata, E. (2020). The History of an Intellectual Dispute at Auckland’s School of Education. In Bonal, X., Coxon, E., Novelli, M.& A. Verger. Education, globalisation and the state: Essays in honour of Roger Dale. (pp. 153-164). New York: Peter Lang.


The History of an Intellectual Dispute at Auckland’s School of Education

Elizabeth Rata
e.rata@auckland.ac.nz

Abstract

The article has three aims. The first is to trace the origins of the knowledge/power orthodoxy in New Zealand’s educational studies to the influence of Critical Theory and postmodernism in the School of Education during the 1990s. The second is to justify both my opposition to the orthodoxy and my claim that kaupapa Māori is an ideology in the interests of the retribalising elite. This is contrasted with my claim that neotribal capitalism is an objective theory of elite emergence. The third is to locate the potential objectivity of knowledge in the accountability procedures of the scientific method. I conclude by identifying a foundational flaw in kaupapa/matauranga Māori theory. This is the confusion of the ethical relation between the researcher and the research subjects with the scientific method of investigation, analysis, and theorising.

Key Words
Knowledge, Objectivity, Neotribal Capitalism, Kaupapa Māori, Matauranga Māori



Bionote

Elizabeth Rata is a professor of education in the School of Critical Studies, Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland. She is the Director of the Knoweldge in Education Research Unit (KERU) where she leads the international Knowledge-Rich School Project. This project is trialling the usefulness of the Curriculum Design Coherence Model for teacher professional development and pre-service teacher education. Roger Dale supervised her masters thesis about the establishment of kura kaupapa Māori and her doctoral thesis about neotribal capitalism.


Introduction

The ‘culture turn’ from a class explanation of inequality, one grounded in political economy theory, to a culture explanation is now the orthodox explanation for social divisions in New Zealand. The School of Education at the University of Auckland was a major contributor to the ‘culture turn’ during the 1990s when Roger Dale was a professor in the School. It was a period of intense intellectual activity and served as the convergence site for two sets of ideas about the knowledge – power relation which were used to justify the class to culture shift. Both sets of ideas, Critical Theory and Postmodernism, conceptualise knowledge as always and necessarily ideological, as subjective, and tied to the knower and their interests in what became known more broadly as standpoint or identity approaches (Maton and Moore, 2010).

Although I initially shared this knowledge/power orthodoxy; that knowledge is always ideological (Rata, 1991), I have increasingly developed an alternative position. I now argue that it is possible for knowledge to be separated from the ‘knower’ and, as a consequence of the separation, to become objective and no longer serve as the ideology for a group’s political and economic interests. The separation occurs in processes both of disciplinary accountability and of objectification, generalisation, and universalisation (Rata, 2018). My intentions in this chapter are threefold . One is to trace the origins of the knowledge/power orthodoxy to the influence of Critical Theory and Postmodernism in the School of Education during the 1990s. The second is to show how my opposition to the orthodoxy did in fact emerge out of Marxist Critical Theory although it has now taken a different turn. The third is to locate the potential objectivity of knowledge in the accountability procedures of the scientific method.

Knowledge of the powerful and the powerless

One set of ideas which supported the knowledge/power conflation was centred on the New Sociology of Education (NSOE), specifically the ideas of Critical Theory. Roger Dale’s arrival at the School of Education in 1988 cemented the centrality of Critical Theory in the School’s burgeoning growth, an influence seen both in academic publications and in postgraduate theses. His appointment as Professor and Head of School generated a sense amongst us (I was one of those postgraduate students) that the School was part of the progressive NSOE movement rejuvenating the discipline and connecting us to advocacy educational approaches worldwide. The assumption that academic knowledge was in the service of political advocacy was not only taken for granted but we believed that it gave us moral authority to use our scholarship for the social justice ideals we claimed for ourselves.

We postgraduate students assumed that Critical Theory and Postmodernism were bedfellows, despite the absence of class analysis in the latter, an assumption based on the idea shared in both that knowledge is ideology, created and used in the interests of the knowers. According to our analysis, if knowledge and power are intimately connected then that logic also applies to knowledge of the powerless. Furthermore, the knowledge of the disadvantaged is rendered powerless in the oppression visited upon the subjugated by those whose knowledge is used in their own interests. In New Zealand’s case, these were the interests of the coloniser, interests justified by ‘Western’ knowledge. The ‘knowledge of the powerless’ versus ‘knowledge of the powerful’ approach was the seed for kaupapa/matauranga Māori theory.

The phrase ‘in whose interests’ had became the guiding question in our postgraduate studies. We took the knowledge/power mantra into the academic careers which opened up for us as teacher education moved into the universities in the early 1990s. Positions in the newly created Ministry of Education and in the NZ Centre for Educational Research also provided opportunities. This brief period of significant structural change in higher education enabled us to move into these influential positions where we (and our ideas) have remained. It was a heady time for those of us who acquired academic employment in that brief window of opportunity, one that may explain the confidence we had that our ideas were justified, if not by their logic, then by the good intentions which drove them. We were the new professional class ‘doing well by doing good’ (Rata, 1996a). Underpinned by the moral authority of social justice ideals, knowledge/power theory was protected from critique, not least because it advocated for the ‘knowledge of the powerless’ against the ‘knowledge of the ‘powerful’. For working class Māori who suffered from the decade’s neoliberal reforms, the scholarly advocacy of kaupapa Māori was timely. Inequality was to be understood as colonial-imposed oppression and not as the effects of contemprary politics.

Roger Dale’s Critical Theory credentials caused considerable excitement amongst postgraduate students in the School. Many of us, including myself, Tuakana (Tuki) Nepe, Linda Smith, and Graham Smith were involved in the establishment of kaupapa Māori education within the broader Māori revival movement (Nepe et. al, 1989 ; Rata, 1989; 1991). Here was the opportunity to acquire the theory with which to inform our politics. We used the ideas of ‘praxis’ from Critical Theory and of ‘knowledge/power’ from Postmodernism to justify our research. We insisted that knowledge can never be objective, that it is always and necessarily the ‘knowledge of the powerful’ acting against the ‘knowledge of the powerless’. In this way, kaupapa Māori theory was able to position itself as the praxis of the powerless.

Following the completion of our masters’ degrees (mine supervised by Roger Dale was an account of the Kaupapa Māori schools’ establishment [Rata, 1991] with Tuki Nepe’s (1990) describing kaupapa Māori theory, three of us went on to complete doctoral degrees also under his supervision. These are neotribal capitalism theory which I developed in my PhD thesis in 1996 (book 2000), Linda Smith’s decolonising methodologies theory (1996, book 1999) and Graham Smith’s 1997 PhD thesis about kaupapa Māori theory and practice.


Neotribal Capitalism and Kaupapa Māori


Neotribal capitalism (Rata, 1996b, 2000) theorised the production of the conditions of social life in Māori society using Marxist economic determinacy. (In that, I was true to Critical Theory’s premise.) I identified three main themes. The first is the global-local dialectic which characterises capitalism. Local versions are characterised by their own particular racial, ideological, and historical circumstances but are structured by the class relations of that economic system. The second theme concerned the emergence of localised elites as access to resources and power was enabled by changing material conditions. The third theme identified the ideological character of local versions of global capitalism where I argued that, however strong the idealistic forces of pre-figurative movements such as cultural revivalism, they are ultimately compromised by class relations.

Localising politics, in New Zealand as elsewhere, contributed to capitalism’s neoliberal regulation by weakening the universalist democratic nation-state. The response was the turn to populist ideologies which promise the social belonging of the past. I used the shift from 1970s’ pan-Māori cultural revivalism to retribalisation to illustrate this theme, adopting from anthropology the term ‘culturalism’ to refer to neotraditionalism as the justifying ideology of retribalisation (Rata, 2003). The contemporary tribe is presented as the restoration of the traditional socio-politicial order, rather than, as I maintain, an economic corporation like any other, but one with political, even constitutional, ambitions. In contrast to my thesis, kaupapa Māori theory moved from its Marxist origins to provide the justification for retribalisation as a progressive political movement on behalf of all Māori. Critical Theory’s class analysis was abandoned but kaupapa Māori theory retained the Marxian emphasis on ‘praxis’, holding that “Kaupapa Māori contains the necessity of political action” (Smith, 2012, p. 12).

That political action was the retribalisation strategies which acquired momentum following four significant events. The first was the 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Act which enabled reparation claims to be back-dated to 1840 re-casting pan-Māori revivalism as retribalisation. The second was the State-owned Enterprises (SOE) Act 1986 (Section 9). “Nothing in this Act shall permit the Crown to act in a manner that is inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”. The history of Treaty principles in policy began at this time with the transfer of government assets to the new SOEs. Discussions between the Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Palmer and Sir Hepi Te Heuheu of Ngati Tuwharetoa produced section 9. “However as Parliament did not indicate what the principles of the Treaty are, it fell to the Courts to discover them.” (Berthold in Rata, 2003)

The 1987 Court of Appeal decision was the third significant retribalisation event. The Chief Justice referred to the Treaty relationship as “akin to a partnership” (TPK, 2001, p. 78) not that it was a partnership (Round, 2002). However the word ‘partnership’ quickly became a central retribalising strategy. “This so-called partnership concept came into common parlance after a Court of Appeal case in the 1980s. The judges were attempting to describe the duties the parties to the treaty owed to each other. They likened it to the obligation partners in a partnership had, but they did not say that the treaty actually created a partnership nor did it”. (Graham, 2000, p. 13). With the fourth significant event, the 1991 Resource Management Act, which incorporated newly written Treaty principles into legislation, the corporate tribes and their interests moved into public institutions, a process which laid the foundation for constitutional claims.

It is unsurprising that the neotribal capitalism theory and Kaupapa Māori theory were developed in this political context. Both were responding to retribalising politics, albeit with opposing explanations. What may be surprising is that the opposing theories were developed in doctoral studies under the same superviser at the same time. I was developing the case for retribalisation as a process of elite emergence, one common to capitalism and initiated by the transfer of economic resources to the tribes and their political interests in the neoliberal climate. In contrast, kaupapa Māori theory was developing the justification for retribalisation as the restoration of traditional tribal governance. Retribalisation politics were seen to resist capitalism’s exploitative ‘logic of the commodity’ by providing an alternative ‘logic of the gift’. The logic of the gift idea, despite its origins in Mauss’ very ‘Western’ anthropology, is an attempt by indigenous academics to justify the ‘communal capitalism’ or ‘collective capitalism’ idea promoted by retribalising elites (Iwi Investment Wananga Report, 2010).

‘Communal or collective capitalism’ however is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is a system which creates surplus value from the unpaid labour of the worker, surplus which, as profit, is taken by the capitalist. That exploitation, and with it the resulting class inequality, is built into the system itself. Political regulation may well be used to offset the resulting inequalities, and democratic governments seek to achieve this with various redistributive policies, but the inequalities are already created for political regulation to be required. However, the kaupapa Māori explanation of retribalisation is of the revival of a traditional system, with communal social relations carried into the new tribal corporations. In contrast, I argue that the contemporary tribe is structured according to the class relations not according to the communal relations of traditional tribal society. It is for this reason that I describe kaupapa Māori as an ideology, one which conceals the new structuring principle of the contemporary neotribe. However, establishing continuity to the past using discourses of traditinal revival (Rata, 2011) is an effective strategy used to access economic resources and political governance. It is not for nothing that the term whakapapa (genealogy) has assumed a significant discursive function .

The orthodox and largely uncritiqued view of retribalisation and its justification in kaupapa Māori theory that was laid down in the 1990s has been carried into the education system by a small but highly influential group of politicised graduates. It is to be found in Ministry of Education policy, the Teacher Graduating Standards, the localised national curriculum, and the shift to culturally-responsive pedagogies (Lynch and Rata, 2017). It influences social relations and practices at a daily level – operating as Foucault’s microtechnologies in naturalising the ideology. Even among academics and policy makers there appears to be little or no historical consciousness of contemporary Treaty interpretation, despite ‘partnership’ and ‘principles’ being as recent as the 1980s.

Objective Knowledge

At the time of my PhD, I had not identified the knowledge/power conflation as a central problem to my work. In fact, identifying retribalisation as a culturalist ideology in my PhD merely reinforced my use of the conflation, although in my case, it was an emergent elite using the justification of powerless Māori to serve its political strategies. It was not until my 2000 reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason did I understand that a logical explanation for objective knowledge existed. Alternatives had not been provided when I did postgraduate study. Two years later I published a short monograph, Democratic principles in teaching and learning: A Kantian approach. Professor James Marshall sent me a courtesy pre-publication copy of his critique, one intended for publication in Access . He made it clear that I was in error; that knowledge was to be considered subjective, not objective as I was claiming. The ideas about knowledge in that monograph lay dormant until 2012 when I published The Politics of Knowledge in Education. By then I was increasingly dissatisfied with the taken-for-granted assumption that knowledge is always ‘in someone’s interests’ . What was the case for the opposite – that knowledge may become objective under certain conditions? If so, what are those conditions?

I identify four possible ways of responding to these questions. The first is the rationalist approach, the idea of a categorical apparatus identified by Kant as the means by which our cognition develops as we begin to classify and categorise in order to impose meaning on our experiences. Systems of presuppositions build human intelligence as the individual’s mental apparatus becomes increasingly more sophisticated with the abstraction of its contents (thoughts) from experience. Cognitive architecture theory and evolutionary educational theory (Geary, 2002) support this understanding of intelligence belonging to the individual but built as the individual is socialised into rationalised symbolic systems. In other words, individualising and socialising processes occur interdependently. It is a universalist view of human reason which allows for the unity of humankind given that cognitive processes (e.g. memorising, classifying, categorising and so on) are available to all. In turn these instruments of thought produce the thought itself. That objective ‘product’ is available to all through its generalisable capacity and because thought products can be shared using the symbolic system that is simultaneously the instrument of thought (individualising) and the means of communicating that thought (socialising).

A second approach regards knowledge as always subjective, that is always tied to the thinker. Its function as the means of communication within and for social relations is emphasised over its function as the individual’s thinking instrument. The source of thought is located in, and remains tied to, the myths, religions, languages, arts, and sciences of traditional knowledge and not in individual cognition. The knowledge to be valued and considered disciplinary may be the folk (Geary, 2002) or traditional knowledge of socio-historical groups as with kaupapa/matauranga Māori. It may be Hegel’s national spirit (as with ‘blood and soil’ nationalisms) or Marx’s class consciousness. Today, we see this knowledge in the ideologies of contemporary populist movements where traditional beliefs are harnessed to revived exclusive nationalisms.

This is the understanding of knowledge found in post-1970s’ revival of ethnicity as a structuring socio-political category (retribalisation in New Zealand) (Rata, 2017). It is the point I make in the introduction where I locate the impetus occurring in the School of Education for identifying the ‘knower’ as the ethnicised/racialised or indigenous subject. The subjective knowledge the group has of itself is considered to be the truth about the group, making any claims for objectivity redundant. Knowledge about the group by non-group or non-authorised members, especially when that knowledge makes claims to be objective (as I do with neotribal capitalism theory) is considered to be the use of knowledge to oppress the group. Only those within a group (or with the group’s permission [Rata, 2013]) can have a true understanding of the group’s experiences and interests. Because this knowledge is relative to the group, it can only be judged in terms of accountability criteria it sets for itself. This forecloses the requirement for accountability according to a discipline’s procedures concerning the scientific method. Indeed, disciplinary knowledge with its claims for rational objectivity is seen as just another cultural story, hence the rapid development of the indigenous versus Western dichotomy by the promoters of this approach.

In the past decade a third approach has emerged which seeks to reclaim the epistemological integrity of disciplines, that is, to recognise that scientific disciplines have developed ways to investigate and explain social and natural phenomena and procedures to ensure the rigour of those methods. This Durkheimian inspired response, referred to as ‘social realism’ (seminal writers include Rob Moore, Johan Muller, and Michael Young) locate the source of knowledge in the socio-historical conditions of power, as does the second approach above. But social realism argues for the possibility of objective knowledge as a consequence of the separation of the knower and the knowledge. The issue is how that separation occurs. Concepts that are central to a discipline can become separated (abstracted) from the conditions of their creation and used as the tools for both the creation of the research object (epistemology) and for its analysis and theorising (methodology) (Rata, 2018). An example is my use of class theory in neotribal capitalism. However, disciplinary concepts are insufficient to guarantee objectivity. The researcher’s selection of these concepts may be biased by her politics. This makes accountability to a discipline’s procedures, to the use of the scientific method, of crucial importance.

The central role of the scientific method is the main idea in the fourth approach. Creating knowledge that is objective depends on this method. Popper (2003) refers to the processes “of trial and error, of inventing hypothesis which can be practically tested, and submitting them to practical tests” (p. 241). Procedural accountability includes the use of recognised disciplinary concepts and of peer review in academic journals that are themselves accountable. That accountability moves the ideas outside the discipline to the public where their implications as well as their methods are available for scrutiny. Such openness to public criticism holds the discipline as well as the researcher to account. This can only occur if the knowledge is seen to be in the interests of humankind and not of the research subjects. That requires its objectification, its separation from the research subject. In Popper’s words, objective knowledge is “a product of the social or public character of scientific method” (p. 243).

Conclusion

My purpose in this paper has been to describe the development of two fundamentally different theories, neotribal capitalism and kaupapa/matauranga Māori in Auckland’s School of Education in the 1990s. Roger Dale’s doctoral supervision at the University of Auckland contributed to the ways in which his students (Linda Smith, Graham Smith, and myself along with many others), took very different paths in seeking the truth about knowledge. While my argument has taken me a long way from my doctoral colleagues, at that time our opposing ideas were just being developed. There was not the clarity about what was occurring that hindsight provides therefore it is timely to revive the discussion.

I continue to regard kaupapa Māori theory as the justifying ideology of retribalisation politics. Moreover I also continue to claim that neotribal capitalism is not ideology but an objective explanation for retribalisation. This claim is likely to add to the outrage already levelled at my research (and at me because for my critics the research and the researcher are tied). Surely neotribal capitalism is ideological, a theory in the interests of ‘Western’ knowledge, representing the politics of this researcher? My reply lies in the difference in accountability between the two theories.

For knowledge to be objective science, researchers must be accountable to their respective disciplines for the rigour of the method, and following that, the disciplines which guarantee that rigour must be accountable to the human society that their science serves. In contrast, the indigenous methodologies approach of kaupapa/matauranga Māori is that research methods are accountable to the people being researched. If that is the case then it is true that the research cannot be objective because it is always tied to the research subjects.

This argument for accountability to the researched is flawed. The ethical relation between the researcher and the research subjects is confused with the scientific method. However, the ethnical conduct of the research concerns the moral relationship between researchers and their subjects (human and non-human). For this moral relationship the researcher is accountable to those being researched using ethical guidelines developed within disciplines and institutions. But the scientific method used in the research is another story. For those methods of investigation, analysis, and theorising, the researcher is accountable to the discipline and to society.

My neotribal capitalism theory is an example of such disciplinary methods. My investigation into retribalisation processes and the way I theorised those processes are made available in a range of disciplinary journals (Li, 2010; Rose, 2017; Schroeder, 2003). In addition, anyone else can join the criticism in terms of how the theory may be a useful (or not) contribution to understanding society. Only ongoing criticism will tell if the theory stands up to scrutiny. But indigenous methodology will not recognise the validity of external criticism (although it does of course occur, e.g. Widdowson and Howard, 2008). For example, my critique of retribalisation is rejected on the grounds that I am not ‘authorised’ by the group. Because it is the ‘knower’ not the ‘knowledge’ which is held to account, a non-authorised researcher is troublesome. In Popper’s terms, the theory of neotribal capital is ‘open’ while kaupapa/matauranga Māori is ‘closed’ (Munz, 1999). The former remains science while the latter is belief.

A final note

It has been a deeply rewarding intellectual path since I began my postgraduate studies under Roger Dale’s supervision at the University of Auckland. We, his students, Linda Smith, Graham Smith and myself, have taken very different paths in seeking the truth about knowledge. What is more important than our different explanations about the society we live in is how we have used the scientific method. My first commitment is to the method’s accountability procedures. These ensure that ideas are continually ‘put on trial’ to be judged by everyone. The task of science is the ongoing search for truth but ironically it is a search that can never end because scientific ideas must remain provisional, must never become ‘truth’ for them to be science and not belief.






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