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.
Geary, D. C. (2002). Principles of evolutionary educational psychology, Learning and Individual Differences, Pergamon, 12, 317-345.
Graham, D. (2000) ‘Fishing, food-gathering are “customary” rights’, New Zealand Herald, 30 August, p.13
Iwi Investment Wananga Report, 2010, The Report of the Iwi Collaboration Infrastructure Wananga, held at Tapu teRanga Marae 9-10 August 2010 www.iwichairs.maori.nz Available 17 March 2011
Li, T. (2010). Indigeneity, Capitalism, and the Management of Dispossession. Current Anthropology. 51(3); 396-420.
Lynch, C. & Rata, E. (2018) Culturally responsive pedagogy: A New Zealand case study, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 27:4, 391-408.
Maton, Karl and Moore, Rob (2010) (ed.) Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education, Coalitions of the Mind. Continuum.
Nepe, T., Rata, E., Smith, G. H., Smith, L. (1989). Proposals for the Establishment of Kura
Kaupapa Maori, Access, 8 (1).
Munz, P. (1999). Open and Closed Research. New Zealand Books, December, pp. 4-6).
Popper, K. (2003). The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol Two: Hegel and Marx. London: Routledge.
Rata, E. (1989). Kura Kaupapa Maori PPTA Journal, Term 3, November, 31 – 33.
Rata, E. (1991). Maori Survival and Structural Separateness. Unpublished M.Ed. Thesis, University of Auckland.
Rata, E. (1996a). ‘Goodness and Power’: The Sociology of Liberal Guilt, New Zealand
Sociology, 11(2), 231-274.
Rata, E. M. (1996b). The Emergence of Tribal Capitalism. Unpublished Thesis. University of Auckland.
Rata, E. (2002). Democratic principles in teaching and learning: A Kantian approach. Monograph research series of the Auckland College of Education. ISSN 1175-8740
Rata, E. (2003). The Treaty and Neotribal Capitalism, Public Sector: The Journal of the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand, 26 (3) 2 – 6.
Rata, E. (2011). Theoretical Claims and Empirical Evidence in Maori Education
Discourse. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(10), 1060-1072.
Rata, E. (2011) Discursive Strategies of the Maori Tribal Elite, Critique of Anthropology,
31(4). 359–380.
Rata, E. (2013). Knowledge and the Politics of Culture: An example from New
Zealand’s Higher Education Policy and Practice. Anthropological Theory, 13 (4), 329-346.
Rata, E. (2017) Ethnic Revival. In Fathali M. Moghaddam Ed. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Rata, E. (2013). Knowledge and the Politics of Culture: An example from New
Zealand’s Higher Education Policy and Practice. Anthropological Theory, 13 (4), 329-346.
Rata, E. (2018) Connecting Knowledge to Democracy In Knowledge, curriculum and equity: Social realist perspectives. In Barrett, B., Hoadley, U. & J. Morgan, (Eds.), Routledge. (pp. 19-32); London: Routledge.
Rata, E. (2019). Response. Waikato Journal of Education, 24(1), 103-105.
https://doi.org/10.15663/wje.v24i1.675
Rose, S. (2015). Two thematic manifestations of neotribal capitalism in the United States, Anthropological Theory, 15, 2, 218-238.
Round, David (2000) ‘Judicial Activity and the Treaty: The Pendulum Returns’, Otago Law
Review 19(4): 653-671.
Schroder IW (2003) The political economy of tribalism in North America: Neotribal capitalism? Anthropological Theory 3(4): 435–456.
Smith, G. H. (2012). Interview: Kaupapa Māori: The dangers of domestication. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 47, 2, 10-20.
Smith, L.T. (1999). Decolonising Methodologies. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.
Stewart, G.T., & Devine, N. (2019). A critique of Rata on the politics of knowledge and Māori education. Waikato Journal of Education, 24(1), 93-101. https://doi.org/10.15663/wje.v24v1.665
TPK, Te Puni Kokiri, Ministry of Maori Development (2001) He Tirohanga o Kawa ki te Tiriti o Waitangi: A Guide to the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi as expressed by the Courts and the Waitangi Tribunal. Wellington: Department of Justice.
Widdowson, F. and Howard, A. (2008). Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
FUTURE PATHWAYS TE ARA PAERANGI GREEN PAPER SUBMISSION
From:
Professor Elizabeth Rata, University of Auckland
Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd, FRSNZ, University of Auckland, Rutherford Medalist 2020
b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz
14th March 2022
Submission to:
Future Pathways Policy Team
Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment
SCIENCE AND POLICY
The broad term ‘science’[1] refers to the knowledge created by scientific methods and procedures[2]. Nations which allow ideologies to shape scientific research soon lose standing in the international science community. This will happen to New Zealand if the Green Paper’s “tiriti-led system” is implemented.
Scientific research may well inform policies in ways which do accommodate cultural values and practices. This is evidence-based policy. But policy follows research; it does not precede it. Science can inform policy but policy informing science leads to misinformation and the loss of scientific integrity. This would be equivalent to making science ‘Christian-led’ (or, if we were in another country, ‘Taliban-led’ or ‘Hindutva-led’ or ‘Xi Jinping thought-led’). It will not further science in New Zealand but will reduce this country’s attractiveness to international students and research collaborations.
SCIENCE AND MĀTAURANGA MĀORI
Enabling mātauranga Māori
The Green Paper assumes that mātauranga Māori should be ‘enabled’ in research institutions. It fails to recognise that science and traditional knowledge are fundamentally different in terms of their constitution, methods, procedures, value to society, and policy requirements.
Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. It proceeds by conjecture and refutation. It requires doubt, challenge and critique, forever truth-seeking but with truth never fully settled.
Traditional knowledge, including mātauranga Māori, employs supernatural explanations such as ‘mauri’ and other vitalist concepts, for natural and social phenomena. It also includes practical knowledge (proto-science or pre-scientific), acquired from observation, experience, and trial and error. Such traditional knowledge provides ways for humans to live in the environment[3]. Examples are ocean navigation by the stars and currents, efficacious medicines from plants, and social structures organised according to kinship relations and birth status.
Protection
The Green Paper’s reference to protect(ing) mātauranga Māori” (p. 5) is alarming. A fundamental principle of science is that no knowledge is protected. It develops from the systematic criticism and refutation of its own ideas[4]. Knowledge that requires protection is belief, not science.
Science produces knowledge which may support or reject cultural knowledge. This means that the relationship between the two is necessarily one of tension. Mātauranga Māori’s inclusion in science is a rejection of this necessary relationship; indeed it goes further by placing research under cultural authority and interests. Knowledge authorised by culture is ideology, not science.
SCIENCE AND THE TREATY
New Zealand universities[5] already undermine the conditions required for scientific research by requiring adherence to treaty principles, a practice which goes much further than intended by the term ‘acknowledgement’ used in the 1990 Education Act[6]. The Green Paper’s “tiriti-led system” proposes to take that adherence much further in ways that will give ideology authority over science, imposing direction and constraints so that New Zealand research cannot meet international standards.
The intellectual freedom required for science is incompatible with a “tiriti-led system”. Such a system will need to remove New Zealand’s current legislative requirements that academic staff and students have the freedom “within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions” and that the university’s “principal aim is to develop intellectual independence”. These aims are to be achieved by “people who are active in advancing knowledge, who meet international standards of research and teaching, who are a repository of knowledge and expertise and who accept a role as critic and conscience of society”.
Either New Zealand strengthens its commitment to science’s universalism or it continues down the destructive path of cultural ideology. The Green Paper’s reference to creating a “modern research system that is Tiriti led” is nonsensical. Research which includes the controls that characterise traditional knowledge cannot be modern.
Tinkering with the Green Paper will not improve matters given that its numerous faults arise from the very assumption upon which the Paper is built. This is the incorrect belief that a treaty-justified co-governance system is already in New Zealand’s constitution. A new constitution of Iwi-New Zealand Government co-governance has not been placed before the public and has not been agreed to.
The Green Paper must be soundly criticised for being complicit in ideological interests which use policy to make constitutional reform by stealth rather than by Parliament[7].
Please note:
Our submission is available for public circulation. It contains nothing that is confidential.
We wish to be engaged throughout the Future Pathways Programme.
[1]“The word science is used to refer to the systematic organization of knowledge that can be rationally explained and reliably applied. It is inclusive of the natural (including physical, mathematical and life) science and social (including behavioural and economic) science domains, which represent the ISC’s primary focus, as well as the humanities, medical, health, computer and engineering sciences.” (International Science Council, Position Paper, ‘Science as a Global Public Good, October, 2021, p. 1, footnote 1)
[2] “Science is a special form of knowledge; a formalised approach to knowledge that is rationally explicable, tested against reality, logic, and the scrutiny of peers. It has two fundamental attributes that form its bedrock, and which are ultimately the source of its value as a global public good:
• that knowledge claims and the evidence on which they may be based are made openly available to be tested against reality and logic through the scrutiny of peers;
• that the results of scientific inquiry are communicated promptly into the public sphere and circulated efficiently to maximise their availability to all who may wish or need to access them.” (Ibid, p.1)
[3] Evolutionary cognitive scientists, for example David Geary, refer to this type of knowledge as ‘primary’ and distinguish it from the cognition required for ‘secondary knowledge, i.e. science.
[4]Was Einstein wrong? Why some astrophysicists are questioning the theory of space-time’.
‘We may need to kill off one of the most important theories of all time.’
[5] Rata, E. (2013). Knowledge and the Politics of Culture: An example from New Zealand’s Higher Education Policy and Practice. Anthropological Theory, 13 (4), 329-346.
[6] https://www.newsroom.co.nz/science-or-ideology-the-nz-university-at-the-crossroads
[7] Rata, E. (2005). Marching through the Institutions, The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi, Sites New Series, 1 (2) 56 – 81.
Elizabeth Rata
e.rata@auckland.ac.nz
August 2003
This paper was published in Public Sector, The Journal of the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand, Vol 26, No 3 September, 2003, pp. 2 – 6
The Treaty of Waitangi has become a talisman for a bicultural New Zealand. Such a leap from prior obscurity to ‘oracle’ status (Sharp, 2002) can be explained in a number of ways. The orthodox explanation is that Maori have overcome colonial-imposed subordination for the economic and political partnership promised by the treaty. In this paper I propose a different interpretation. I argue that the treaty’s elevation has occurred within the context of fundamental changes to the global political economy, most notably the repositioning of pre-colonial elites as the new elites of localised forms of the capitalist economy (Friedman, 1994; Wallerstein, 1991). In New Zealand’s case the localised form of capitalism is neotribal capitalism (Rata, 1999; 2000) under the control of a comprador bourgeoisie or brokering elite. As a result of successive governments’ acceptance of neotribal capitalism’s neotraditionalist ideology, this Maori elite has controlled the shifting interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi (Rata, 2003, 2003a), along with the concepts of indigeneity and customary rights.
In the first stages of biculturalism, the treaty was promoted as a framework for the settlement of historical grievances. From the mid-1980s, its interpretation had shifted to a ‘partnership’[1] between two distinctive political entities, – the neotribes and the government. As a consequence the brokering elite emerged as a neotribal capitalist aristocracy with sufficient institutionalised power to make new claims for economic resources (such as seabeds and native flora), and claims for political recognition on the basis of partnership alone.
As the main ‘site’ of neotribal brokerage, the treaty, as interpreted by the Waitangi Tribunal, plays a crucial role in legitimating the material and political aspirations of the neotribal elite. Supportive of the elite’s interpretation but retaining the pan-Maori aspirations of earlier ‘honour the treaty’ protests, is the ongoing faith of still-marginalised Maori in the promises of treaty rhetoric as well as the aspirations of the tribes that have yet to receive any treaty settlements. With this diverse support, the Tribunal’s interpretation of the treaty has become the orthodox interpretation. The following beliefs are held to be true and non-negotiable: The treaty is a ‘partnership’ between the tribes and the government, one that entitles the tribes to economic and political rights in perpetuity. Secondly, its ‘principles’ are the basis for a bicultural nation in which tribal authority is incorporated into government institutions and processes. Finally, the ‘presentist’ (Oliver, 2001) orthodox interpretation places the treaty above history. Its authority is ‘spiritual’ or ‘otherworldly’, and outside the political conditions of its real historical context.
The religious imagery of treaty orthodoxy illustrates the doctrinal status of a spiritually mandated authority, an authority which takes it out of the realm of critical scrutiny. According to Margaret Wilson (cited in O’Brien, 2003: 15), the treaty is a ‘convenant’ which has a ‘higher purpose’ (than that of a legal contract), one ‘of defining the relationship binding two peoples’. The word ‘atone’ in the government’s apology to the Tainui tribe (New Zealand Herald, 23 January 1995) conveys the idea of the expiation of a sin-inspired guilt, while the idea of a ‘foundation document’ with a spirit that ‘still speaks today’ evokes a timeless and commanding manifesto. This ‘otherworldliness’ takes the treaty from the combative political sphere to a level of unquestioning reverence. Such elevation of a historical agreement to a level where it provides a forever ongoing ‘spirit’ suggests that the treaty’s authority challenges even the ‘spirit of the law’, the authority mandate for the supremacy of the law over all other forms of authority in liberal-democracies. It combines the very political purposes of the elite (of this world) with the spiritual purpose of providing hope for those Maori who remain marginalised from fulfilling involvement in New Zealand society.
The elevation of the Treaty of Waitangi to such an authoritative, almost unchallengeable, orthodoxy[2] deserves intense scrutiny. Such scrutiny is difficult in a climate in which those who hold a different opinion are believed to be ‘in error’ rather than in informed disagreement. The government’s continued confidence that increased education and leadership will convince the general public of the value of the treaty to New Zealand (Upton, 2003) belies an uncomfortable fact. It is not only the poorly informed who lack the required faith in the treaty. Perry and Webster’s 1999 survey of attitudes to the treaty and the Waitangi Tribunal found that the treaty ‘is a major point of division within the country’. Only five percent of those surveyed ‘think that the Treaty should be strengthened and given the full force of law’. ‘About 34 percent want the Treaty abolished’ (1999: 74).
There is also a small but growing body of scholarly literature (to which this paper contributes) interested in extending treaty discussion beyond the Waitangi Tribunal’s doctrinal orthodoxy. This paper’s contribution is an examination of the political-economic context of the current orthodox interpretation. Treaty revivalism is located within the post-1970s’ restructuring of the global economy, the corresponding shift from universal class-based politics to identity politics (Wallerstein, 1991; Friedman, 1994; Turton, 1997), and the re-emergence of traditional elites as capitalist aristocracies. Treaty politics have played a major role in the New Zealand experience of these global elite repositionings.
Neotribal capitalism refers to structuring of material resources and peoples’ relationships to these resources that was enabled by the juridication and capitalisation processes of the treaty settlements. These processes established the ‘neotribe’, a politico-economic organisation that is fundamentally different from the traditional tribe. That difference is the result of the treaty settlement processes of privatisation and capitalisation of resources, and the accompanying establishment of political structures of control (or modes of regulation) over the relations of people to those resources and to one another. Economic resources were capitalised in the processes of privatisation to the neotribes (firstly juridified as the legitimate owners) and made available for the commodity production and profit-making that distinguishes all capitalist economies. However, and this is the critical point to the argument made in this paper, the neotribe is not only an economic corporation based upon capital resources. It is also a political organisation in that it structures the social environment for the production and reproduction of capital accumulation. Unlike a liberal-democratic politico-economic organisation that actively regulates the social inequalities created by capitalism’s ‘coercive law’ (Lipietz cited in Boyer, 1990: 34) of accumulation, the capitalist neotribe lacks the institutions and processes to ensure democratic political regulation.
In non-democratic systems such as neotribal capitalism, an all-powerful state or an all-powerful oligarchy controls production, redistribution and the social environment of production. Class consciousness is replaced by collective consciousness. The interests of the tribal collectivity are considered to be the interests of each of its members. The antagonism between the interests of those who control and benefit from neotribal economic resources and those who don’t are concealed in collective membership. It is the control of both the economic and political/ideological spheres by the same elite and the lack of division between the spheres that distinguishes the neotribal regime from liberal-democracy and is what defines it as non-democratic.
It would be naive to deny the existence of powerful oligarchies in liberal-democratic versions of capitalism. Undoubtedly the owners and controllers of production in liberal-democracies do have, because of their economic strength, the advantage in terms of greater political power to influence the regulation of the social environment. What does matter however, is that control of political regulation is not theirs of right. It can be, and often is, challenged by individual citizens and associations of citizens claiming greater entitlement to the fruits of production via the processes of distribution.
New Zealand biculturalism is a local version of the identity movements that replaced the universalist class-based politics of the prosperous post-war decades. 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 of identity recognition. These sites include women’s studies and Maori studies in academia along with government policies that targeted the marginalised groups.
In the early 1970s a small group of tertiary educated Maori became the leaders of the cultural revival (Fitzgerald, 1971) that signalled the first stage of ‘glocal’ identity politics in New Zealand. With the galvanising of the pan-Maori movement of the 1960s into a political movement in the 1970s, the base was established for further transformation into neotribalism under the control of the elite. This group had entered the political arena through their leadership roles in the pan-Maori movement. The shift to tribal identification meant that they could use their political connections acquired in the earlier radical protests[3] in the cause of specific tribal interests and become recognised as brokers between the government site and the tribal site. Subsequently their brokerage role provided access to economic resources of the settlements on behalf of the tribes rather than pan-Maori. The use of ‘tradition[4], in culturalist discourse, especially one located in the ‘blood and soil’ rhetoric of indigenous status, justified and legitimised this political role and its material benefits. With reference to Glazer and Moynihan (1973), David Turton (1997: 11) has explained the “strategic efficacy” of ethnicity in ‘mobilizing groups around common material interests’ as the result of the symbolic content of ethnicity. The symbolic content or ideology ‘masks or “mystifies” those interests for the group members themselves’. The treaty’s symbolism serves this mystifying purpose and explains the religious imagery that accompanies treaty discourse, including its ongoing talisman status for marginalised Maori and its acceptance (albeit reluctantly by many) in the public domain of a secular society.
By the end of the 1980s Maori revivalist leaders 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 treaty. The consequences of unjust colonial practices were to be addressed through historical grievance settlements. The powers of the Waitangi Tribunal 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 politicised indigenous identity. Those Maori who had led the cultural and indigenous movements become the tribal brokers, 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. The following description[5] of the initial inclusion of Treaty ‘principles’ in legislation provides a vivid account of the way in which brokerage between the Maori elite and government biculturalists occurred.
‘Section 9 of the State-owned Enterprises Act 1986 provides: “Nothing in this Act shall permit the Crown to act in a manner that is inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”. That is the first reference in legislation or policy to the principles of the Treaty – indeed, the first indication that the Treaty has principles. Their history began when in 1986 Ministers were considering the SOE legislation, then in Bill form. Concern was felt that its passage might lead, or be perceived to lead, to infringement of rights guaranteed to Maori by the Treaty as Crown assets were transferred to the new enterprises to become assets of the enterprises. That concern led to the Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Palmer, travelling to meet Sir Hepi Te Heuheu, the paramount chief of Ngati Tuwharetoa, at his home. Sir Hepi expressed that concern directly to Mr Palmer, and told him that it would be allayed if the Bill were to provide as the Act now does. This was agreed to, and section 9 was duly enacted.’ (Berthold, 2003). However as Parliament did not indicate what the principles of the Treaty are, it fell to the Courts to discover them.
Brokerage also covers the inclusion of Maori advisers in developing government policy, and the influences and processes that strengthened the Waitangi Tribunal, and enabled the treaty settlement process to expand. Such brokerage mediated the relationship between Maori revivalists and government biculturalists, altering both groups in significant ways in the process. Citing Burt (1992), McAdam et al (2001: 142) argue that the brokerage process is itself transforming. ‘Brokerage produces new advantages for the parties, especially for the brokers.’ This was especially so for those Maori who moved from leadership of a pan-Maori cultural revival to leadership of tribal treaty claims. It was also true for those Maori who filled the new structural positions of adviser, kaumatua, and tangata whenua representative on the various councils, committees and panels that opened up as a result of the treaty partnership concept. Structural mobility on such a scale meant that many new professional Maori were promoted rapidly in order to fill the positions available. In some cases, it could be argued, this meant that individuals were promoted over and above their qualifications and experience. The rationale for such promotion was the candidate’s Maori ethnicity and understanding of Maori tikanga, acceptable by neotraditionalist standards but at odds with liberalism’s achievement-based meritocracy.
Elite control of the tribal settlements enabled the brokerage of tribal property in its capitalised and commodified form into national and international economic circulation. The acquisition of considerable economic resources, both real and anticipated, led to political power. Within the tribes, the elite established modes of regulation to unite the economic and ideological dimensions of the neotribal social structures. In turn, the consolidation of political power within the neotribal corporations resulted in increased brokerage leverage with the government. A political relationship was developed using the concept of a treaty partnership to link the new corporate tribes and the government. That partnership discourse currently enables the political brokerage of the neotribal modes of regulation into a new tribal –government political relationship. Tribal representatives and interests are included in government institutions at local and national level and with the recognition of specific Maori interests in the political process.
The success of the elite’s political brokerage in institutionalising neotribal capitalist modes of regulation into all areas of government has profound implications for democratic institutions and processes. Significant and unintended outcomes have occurred in the area of constitutional politics. The Waitangi Tribunal, as the main institutional site for the brokerage of neotraditionalism by the neotribal elite, has, according to Sharp (1997: 452) become ‘a central player in a largely unforeseen unfolding of law and policy, and opened up an as yet largely unexplored vista of constitutional change’. These legal and policy changes have consolidated the elite’s considerable political and economic power, a power derived initially from their control of the settlement process. It is justified by claims that the new tribes are the legitimate inheritors of the traditional social structures that first entered a political agreement with the state with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. In turn, this justification is legitimated by the government’s uncritical acceptance of neotraditionalist ideology.
In the same way that ‘honouring the Treaty’ became a mantra of bicultural politics in the late 1970s and 80s, ‘Treaty partnership’ became the mantra of neoliberal politics a decade later. The resulting bicultural – neoliberal combination contributed significantly to neotribal capitalism. By recognising the neotribes as traditional and thereby enabling them to inherit the historical grievance settlements and to become the legal owners of traditional resources, government biculturalists first legitimated the neotraditionalist discourse. By recognising the new propertied tribes as political modes of regulation through the devolution of government regulatory functions to the tribes, government neoliberals, in the 1990s, enabled what are essentially economic corporations, to acquire a constitutional type political status, one embedded in treaty partnership discourse.
Brokerage has followed the same process throughout the shift from honouring the treaty by recognising historical grievances to accepting the concept of a treaty partnership. First, the claimants establish traditional ‘authenticity’ to ownership, then the resource is juridified as legal property available for contractual purposes. In its privatised character it is then available for capitalisation, providing the resource for commodity production and profit accumulation. While this suggests intentions and planning, such a comprehensive forward-looking strategy is from the neotribal side alone[6]. Apart from a desire to give the treaty constitutional status (Wilson, 1998), at a policy strategy level the government’s side is characterised by ad hoc re-active politics.
Andrew Sharp (1997: 452) has drawn attention to the unprecedented way in which ‘governments were losing control of policy formulation and execution’ in relation to the treaty. Such short-sighted and reactive political management by successive governments in response to treaty orthodoxy is illustrated by Simon Upton’s description of the early 1990s National Government’s incorporation of treaty principles 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’, Upton said from the hindsight of 2003 in respect to 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 the neotribes rather than its own policies, Upton added 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 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, 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’s findings (New Zealand Herald, 28. Nov. 2000, p. A3) 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’.
The government’s uncritical acceptance of the neotribe’s ideology of neotraditionalism could not have occurred without a supporting culturalist discourse from the government side. The two discourses combine to erase the historical consciousness that could jeopardise the elite’s control over material and intellectual resources. ‘In societies where the state class totally dominates the accumulation of commercial wealth’ (in contrast to the merchant class) ‘its own political power, which is identical to its economic power, that is, its ability to survive, is directly jeopardised by any form of historical consciousness. On the contrary, its requirements are more mythological in nature, a consciousness that de-temporalises its position in the cosmos’. (Friedman, 1994: 65) (Indeed this mythological requirement reinforces the possibility that an indigeneity legitimating discourse is emerging to replace treaty legitimation – refer to footnote 7).
In neotribal capitalism that ‘state class’ is the neotribal elite in that they control both economic and ideological domains of neotribal society. Along with a dehistoricised consciousness, neotraditionalism promotes the belief that the interests of the elite are the interests of the people. The idealism of this position (along with the reification of power) is demonstrated by E. T. Durie’s (1998: 8) confident assertion that the ideal values of leadership are, in fact, the reality. He states that ‘. . .two important values are discernible. One is that in Maori society power ascends upwards from the people below as compared with western society where power is from the top down, from a sovereign body above to the people below’.
Culturalism also serves neotraditionalism by emphasising ethnicity as a valid social and political category of differentiation. Despite extensive Maori-Pakeha intermarriage, and the widespread acceptance that all Maori have one or more Pakeha ancestors (Callister, 2003), the success of the ‘two worlds’ ideology demonstrates the process of ethnic boundarisation as a neotraditionalist strategy. Because ethnicity is a relational concept this firming of the boundaries between Maori and Pakeha simultaneously weakens the modernist principle of universalism and strengthens the concept of social division on the basis of ethnicity. Creating boundaries creates a ‘space in the middle’ that needs to be crossed. This is the brokerage site where brokers provide essential and profitable services.
The treaty partnership concept is the second stage of the process of institutionalizing neotribal capitalism into government structures and processes. Having distinguished the two protagonists in the first stage of ethnic differentiation, the use of neotraditionalism to create ethnic boundaries, and treaty historical grievances, the partnership stage re-integrates the protagonists. Because differences have been naturalised so are no longer debated, similarities can now be re-constructed. Brokerage too, changes. Institutionalised partnership has greater permanency than the limited brokerage involved in one-off treaty settlements. As partners in government institutions the neotribes are positioned to claim a fixed and permanent partnership – one located in constitutional inclusion. From the reference in a 1986 Court of Appeal decision (Graham, 2000), treaty partnership has overtaken treaty settlements as the means by which the neotribal elite can undertake the following process.
First, political power is acquired to control tribal property acquired from the settlements. This is achieved by establishing modes of regulation that are recognised by the government in terms of treaty principle two, the rangitiratanga principle, or principle of self-management. Second, resources, such as airwaves, seabeds and foreshores, flora and fauna, gas and oil, that were not included in the original historical grievance claims, are claimed on the basis of treaty partnership rather than on the basis of treaty reparations for historical injustices. (The very recent shift from treaty justification discourse to customary discourse in referred to in footnote 7). Third, the partnership concept is used to establish and control the modes of regulating these resources. These strategies have led to the strengthening of a treaty partnership concept to the point where it is a driving rationale of treaty orthodoxy.
Treaty partnership justification is derived from the extrapolation of the possession guarantees in article two of the Treaty of Waitangi into the concepts of governance and citizenship in the first and third treaty articles. There is a shift from claims based upon reparation for past wrongs (in reference to the Treaty of Waitangi, article two) to one of entitlement based upon a political partnership with reference to article one. The interpretation of partnership in turn then enables the tribes to claim economic resources and political positioning on the basis of the political ‘partnership’ rather than on the basis of historical grievance reparations only. At this stage the juridification and institutionalisation of partnership principles in legislation such as health, education and conservation, enables the capitalist neotribes to acquire an institutionalised regulatory function and enables the neotribal elites to become an institutionalised oligarchy. This unites the tribes’ economic and political dimensions, and provides the basis for the unchallengeable political control of economic resources by an undemocratic, hierarchical regime.
The tendency, in the early 1980s, to consider the Articles of the Treaty of Waitangi in isolation from each other (a consequence of the leading role played by judicial interpretations) limited interpretations that could arise from the consideration of the meaning that exists in the relationship between the three articles. The effect of the isolated method of interpretation was that the meaning of the articles in terms of an integrated purpose was lost. The concepts of sovereignty (and its expression in terms of governance or regulation) in article one, of resource possession in article two, and citizenship in article three, were not considered in totality, that is, with the meaning of one article being dependent upon the meaning of the others. However, by the late 1980s, a new ‘total’ interpretation emerged as article two, not article one, became the referent for interpreting all the articles of the treaty. This emphasis on article two was the result of the earlier treaty focus in terms of the resource reparation. It has led to the second article driving the meaning of the first and third articles.
Extrapolating the concept of governance from article one (regarding sovereignty secession) into article two (concerning economic resources), from where it acquired a determinacy which rebounded back upon article one has enabled tribal members to be reconceptualised as subjects of the capitalised resource possessing tribe. In this interpretation (one driven by the Waitangi Tribunal), the right to govern (by establishing modes of regulation) results from resource possession. In other words, if the tribe is considered to be the owners of the capitalised economic resources, then the right of governance proceeds from that status.
The effect of basing the political right to regulate a social group upon the economic right to acquire possessions shifts both governance and political subjectivity from the democratic state to the non-democratic capitalist neotribe. However, the undemocratic and class structure of the contemporary neotribe is unrecognised because the tribes are conceptualised as communal and non-exploitative structures. As in the traditional tribe, leaders are seen to be acting in the best interests of their peoples. Temm (1990: 104) makes explicit this assumption. ‘If there is to be a partnership, as envisaged by the Treaty, that partnership must be between the Crown on the one hand, representing all people who live in New Zealand and who are not of Maori descent, and the tribes of Maoridom on the other hand, who will speak through their rangatira (leaders)’ (1990: 104).
In this way the elite group who first assumed control of the capitalised resources in the early stages of settlement allocation have acquired the political ‘right’ to establish and control the neotribal modes of regulation, including the regulation of the neotribal economies. Unlike the New Zealand capitalist class whose control over the economic dimension of society is regulated by the contradictory character of the state, as simultaneously a capitalist and a democratic state, the neotribal political economy lacks a democratic site for class antagonism (Rata, 2000: 225- 232; 2003). There is neither an institutional site ‘the contradictory capitalist-democratic state’ nor a democratic subject ‘the citizen’ within the tribal economy for legitimate challenge to the ruling elite and to the unequal distribution of wealth. The ruling elite of neotribal capitalism cannot be removed from political office by tribal ‘citizens’ because citizenship is not an institutionalised status in neotribal capitalism.
My pessimistic conclusion is that, through the establishment of a treaty orthodoxy based upon neotraditionalism and driven by the neotribal elite, and through the culturalism-based acceptance of this ideology and strategies, successive governments have created the conditions for the undermining of democracy in New Zealand. Ironically, this destructive process has been done in the name of the very democracy that served so well those of the new professional class who benefited from the prosperity of the post-war decades and who became the accommodating biculturalists of the 1980s and 1990s. It remains to be seen whether the emergent customary rights – indigeneity discourse will replace current treaty discourse as the neotribal elites’ legitimating discourse and further naturalise ‘two worlds’ ideology. Whether or not this is the case, both discourses are ideologies of a non-democratic elite, and both are subversive of the conditions necessary for democratic regulation.
References
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities, London: Verso.
Babadzan, A. (1988[1983]). Kastom and nation-building in the South Pacific. In R. Guidieri, F. Pellizzi, S. Tambiah, (Ed.) Ethnicities and Nations, (pp. 199 – 228). Houston: Rothko Chapel.
Babadzan, A. (2000). Anthropology, Nationalism and ‘the Invention of Tradition’. Anthropological Forum 10, 2, 131 – 155
Barry, B. (2001). Culture and Equality, An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
Berthold, T. (2003). Private correspondence with the author, 7 July. Quoted with permission.
Boyer, Robert (1990). The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press.
Callister, P. (2003) Ethnicity measures, intermarriage and social policy,
paper presented at the Connecting Policy, Research and Practice conference, Wellington, 29-30 April.
Durie, E. T. (1998). Ethics and Values. Te Oru Rangahau Maori Research and Development Conference, Massey University, Palmerston North, 7 – 9 July.
Fitzgerald, T. K.. (1971). Social Position of the Maori, Ann Arbor, Michigan, University Graduate.
Friedman, J. (1994). Cultural Identity and Global Process. London: Sage.
Friedman, J (2001). ‘Indigenous Struggles and the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’. In. Dirlik, A. and Prazniak, R. (Ed).. Place and Politics in the Age of Global Capitalism. (pp.. 53 – 72). New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Gitlin, T. (1995). The Twilight of Common Dreams. NY: Metropolitan Books.
Graham, D. (2000) ‘Fishing, food-gathering are “customary” rights’, New Zealand Herald, 30 August, p.13
Handler, R. (1988). (2nd ed.) Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990). Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
Irwin, K. (1990) The Politics of Kohanga Reo, In. Middleton, S. Codd, J. and A. Jones (ed). New Zealand Education Policy Today. Wellington:Allen & Unwyn (pp. 110 -120).
Jones, S. (1993) Iwi and Government (extract). In. E Ao Marama, Regaining Aotearoa, Maori Writers Speak Out, Volume 2 He Whakaatanga o Te Ao, The Reality, Witi Ihimarea Ed. pp.246 – 250. Auckland: Reed
Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kuper, A. (1999). Culture, the Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
Landes, D. (1998). The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. London: Abacus.
Listener. (16 December 2000). Wellington.
Marx, K. ([1867], 1976). Capital, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd.
McAdam, D. Tarrow, S. and C. Tilly (2001). Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge, Mss.: Cambridge University Press.
Ministry of Education (1999). The National Education Guidelines. Wellington
New Zealand Herald, (2000).‘Big “No” for Treaty Clauses’. 28 November, A3. Auckland: Wilson and Horton.
Oliver, W. H. (2001). The Future Behind Us. In. Sharp, A. and McHugh, P. (Eds). Histories, Power and Loss. (pp. 9 – 31). Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.
Perry, O. and Webster, A. (1999). New Zealand Politics at the Turn of the Millennium. Auckland: Alpha Publications.
Rata, E. (1999). A Theory of Neotribal Capitalism. Review, XXII, 3, 231 – 290.
Rata, E. (2000). A Political Economy of Neotribal Capital. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Rata, E. (2002). Democratic Principles in Teaching and Learning. Auckland: Auckland College of Education Monograph Series.
Rata, E. (2003). Late Capitalism and Ethnic Revivalism, ‘A New Middle Age’. Anthropological Theory March, 3.1, 43 – 63.
Rata, E. (2003a) Leadership Ideology in Neotribal Capitalism, Political Power and Social Theory. Vol 16
Report of the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification. (2002). Wellington: Government Printer.
Sandall, R. (2001). The Culture Cult. Boulder: Westview:
Sharp, A. (2002). Blood, custom and consent: Three kinds of Maori groups and the challenges they present to govenments. University of Toronto Law Journal, 9, xii, 9 – 37.
Sharp, A. (1997). Civil rights, amelioration, and reparation. In Brown, M. E. and Ganguly, S. (Ed). Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific. (pp. 421 – 456). Cambridge, Mss.: Harvard University Press.
Tau, T. M. (2002). Treaty-based Guidelines and Protocols: for Tertiary Institutions. Draft paper, Te Tapuae o Rehua, quoted with permission of the author.
Temm, Paul (1990) The Waitangi Tribunal. The Conscience of the Nation. Auckland: Random Century.
Turton, David (Ed), (1997) War and Ethnicity, Global Connections and Local Violence. Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress, San Marino (RSM): University of Rochester Press.
Upton, S. (2003). Retelling our national [hi]story. Upton-on-line. 8 June. http://www.wave.co.nz/supton/uptononline/2003/8-june-2003.htm
Wallerstein, I. (1991). Social Conflict in Post-Independence Black Africa: The Concepts of Race and Status-Group Reconsidered. In. Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, I. (Eds). Race. Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. (pp. 187 – 203). London: Verso.
White, G. (2001). Natives and nations: identity formation in postcolonial Melansia. In Dirlik, A. and Prazniak, R. (Ed). Place and Politics in the Age of Global Capitalism. (pp. 139 – 166). New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Wilson, M. cited in O’Brien, T. (2003). A Law Unto Herself. Canvas, New Zealand Herald. (pp. 14 – 15). Auckland: Wilson and Horton.
Wilson, M. (1998). The Treaty of Waitangi, An Instrument for Constitutional Reform. Paper for the Ministry of Justice, 3 June.
Young, I. M. (2000). Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[1] Douglas Graham, a former Minister of Treaty Negotiations, has warned against the tendency to locate partnership in the Treaty of Waitangi. ‘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 partners had, but they did not say that the treaty actually created a partnership nor did it’. (Graham, 2000: 13)
[2] According to Margaret Wilson (1998: 1) ‘It is accepted that it is only a question of time before some form of constitutional recognition is given to the Treaty of Waitangi.’
[3] Many brokerage relationships between Maori neotribalists and Pakeha biculturalists were formed in the days of radical student politics, in the shared protests against the Vietnam war and, particularly, the anti-Springbok rugby tour of 1981. The protests against racism in another country marked the shift from a shared political platform to a new relationship between Maori and Pakeha. Maori turned to their own protests against racism in New Zealand and the role of bicultural Pakeha changed from co-activist to supporter in respect to Maori issues.
[4] ‘Culturalism’ or the reification of tradition and culture is well documented in studies by Hobsbawm, 1983; Handler, 1983; Babadzan, 1988 Friedman, 1994; Anderson, 1991, Turton et. al. 1997; Giltin, 1995; Kuper, 1999, Sandall, 2001 among others. According to Hobsbawm (1983: 1) tradition is defined as ‘a set of practices . . .which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’. ‘Concepts of culture and tradition (are divorced) from historical forces of economic change’ (Dirlik cited in White, 2001:140). ‘As an anthropological ideology, culturalism is ‘increasingly used as a privileged tool to legitimise political domination’ (Babadzan, 2000: 150) with its sacralisation of cultures and identities. Babadzan also refers to the way that culture is ‘transformed and essentialised (2000: 149) with ‘anthropologists appropriating the ethnic-culturalist discourse that actors themselves hold about the meaning of their practices’.
[5] This description, including the account of the meeting between Mr Palmer (later Sir Geoffrey) and Sir Hepi Te Heuheu, was provided to the writer by Mr Tom Berthold.
[6] In moves which point to the elite strengthening its control over the political re-positioning process a new legitimacy strategy may well be emerging. There are indications that justifying iwi resource ownership and political control in a treaty partnership may be replaced by the more comprehensive concept of ‘customary rights’ embedded in indigeneity. This approach would overcome the limitations of relying on treaty interpretation alone. It would enable the elite to claim full ownership of resources and full control over neotribal governance rather than the 50% implied by partnership. These claims would be justified in international law regarding indigenous rights. A recent statement by Professor Mason Durie indicates this shift from treaty discourse to customary discourse. Indigeneity rather than the treaty is linked to constitutional rights. His comment that ‘the position of Maori as the indigenous people of New Zealand needed better constitutional recognition’ (Cited in Berry, 2003) contains several significant indicators of a change in the discourse. The word ‘indigenous’ rather than ‘the treaty’ and ‘Maori’ rather than ‘iwi’ reverses the trend from ‘Maori’ to ‘iwi’ that first occurred in fisheries documents in the early 1990s (Rata, 2000). However ‘the concept of indigeneity is a political construct of historical and geographical placement’ (Rata, 2002) and will prove as problematic in the future (if these indicators are correct) as treaty discourse is currently. An autochtonomous priority based in mythological origins, rather than a historical uniqueness, as the legitimising tool for economic and political claims further naturalises Maori as a racial category.
This article was first published in The Democracy Project, 23 April 2022
Revolutionary moves to decolonise mainstream education are outlined in two Ministry of Education documents.
‘Te Hurihanganui A Blueprint for Transformative Systems Shift’ confidently asserts that ‘through decolonisation of the education system Māori potential will be realised’ while the Curriculum Refresh also prescribes a hearty dose of the same medicine.
Decolonisation, according to Te Hurihanganui ‘means recognising white privilege, understanding racism, inequity faced by Māori and disrupting that status quo to strengthen equity’. There will be opportunities for an expansion of the decolonisation cadre as ‘Māori exercise authority and agency over their mātauranga, tikanga and taonga’.
The Curriculum Refresh, meanwhile, proposes that ‘knowledge derived from Te Ao Māori will sit at the heart of each learning area, along with other knowledge-systems that reflect the cultural uniqueness of Aotearoa New Zealand.’
Decolonisation is a key strategy of He Puapua’s ethno-nationalism agenda. Political categories based on racial classification are to be inserted into New Zealand’s institutions. In education this means that the universal, secular system set up by the 1877 Education Act will be replaced with a radically different system based on two racial categories – Māori and non-Māori, despite the fact that such categories deny the reality of both New Zealand’s multi-ethnic population and Māori multi-ethnicity. According to 2018 census over 45 percent of those identifying as Māori also identified with two ethnic groups with approximately 7 percent identifying with three ethnic groups. Some Māori families have a parent who does not identify as Māori.
While decolonisation is underway in all the nation’s institutions, education is the key ideological institution. The Curriculum Refresh’s ‘other knowledge-systems’ approach re-defines academic knowledge as just another knowledge-system, rather than what it actually is – the universal knowledge developed across the disciplines and altered for teaching at school.
Destroying confidence in the science – culture distinction, a distinction which is one of the defining features of the modern world, will be decolonisation’s most significant and most dangerous victory. According to the International Science Council science is ‘the systematic organization of knowledge that can be rationally explained and reliably applied. It is inclusive of the natural (including physical, mathematical and life) science and social (including behavioural and economic) science domains . . . as well as the humanities, medical, health, computer and engineering sciences.
In contrast, culture is the values, beliefs and practices of everyday life – the means by which children are socialised into the family and community. For a Māori child, this may well involve immersion in marae life – or it may not. But the experiences of everyday life should not be confused with the ideology of cultural indoctrination, what I call culturalism or traditionalism and others call decolonisation. It is this ideology which is permeating the government, universities and research institutes, the Royal Society Te Apārangi, and mainstream media. Here we are presented with an idealised Māori culture of what should be, not what it actually is.
It is as much a moral, quasi-religious project as a political one, its religiosity responsible for the intensity, and perhaps success, of its march through New Zealand’s institutions. Indeed, the spiritual is a central theme in decolonisation. The belief is promoted that Māori are a uniquely spiritual people with a mauri or life force providing the link to their ancestors – the genetic claim for racial categorisation. Political rights for the kin-group are justified in this claim.
However the evidence does not support an idealised picture of Māori spirituality. According to the 2018 census 53.5 percent of those identifying with Māori ethnicity had no religious affiliation. The number identifying with Māori religious, beliefs and philosophies is small and declining, from about 12 percent in 2006 to 7 percent in 2018. As more Māori enter the professional class it is likely that this trend will continue.
Given that over 50 percent of Māori already have no religious affiliation, it is doubtful that there is a constituency for a spiritual-based education. This is where decolonisation plays its part with Te Hurihanganui and the refreshed curriculum promoting the ideological version of culture. Those hesitant Māori who are suspicious of the ideology will be outed as ‘colonised’, in obvious need of decolonisation.Those who are now racially positioned on the other side, officially the non-Māori, will require decolonisation to ensure support for the new moral and political order. Numerous consultants are already on hand to provide this profitable reprogramming service. Intransigent dissenters, who determinedly refuse the correct thinking will be ostracised as fossilised racists and bigots.
The tragedy is that this decolonising racialised ideology will destroy the foundations of New Zealand’s modern prosperous society. The principles of universalism and secularism are
its pillars in education as elsewhere. Academic knowledge is different from cultural knowledge because it is universal and secular. We could certainly live without this knowledge – our ancestors did, but would we want to?
Academic knowledge is difficult to acquire, not easily derived from experience, and involving abstractions. The formidable task of acquiring even a small amount of humanity’s intellectual canon is made even more complex and remote because abstractions are only available to us as symbols – verbal, alphabetical, numerical, musical, digital, chemical, mathematical – creating two layers of difficulty. While it is unsurprising that the much easier education using practices derived from action rather than abstraction is more attractive, to take this path, as teachers are required to do, is a mistake.
We humans are made intelligent through long-term systematic engagement with such complex knowledge. Yet decolonisers reject the fundamental difference between science and culture claiming instead that all knowledge is culturally produced, informed by a group’s beliefs and experiences, and geared to its interests. Indigenous knowledge and ‘western’ knowledge are simply cultural systems with academic education re-defined as the oppressive imposition of the latter on the former.
What is deeply concerning is the extent to which this ideology is believed by those in education and uncritically repeated in mainstream media. A secondary school principal is quoted describing the ‘dangers of prescribing a powerful knowledge curriculum’. Such an ‘Eurocentric’ approach is ‘a colonial tool of putting old western knowledge ahead of indigenous communities’ rather than an emancipatory knowledge that liberates Westernised, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, African and indigenous groups. Elsewhere another teacher goes further, calling educational success ‘white success’ and in opposition to succeeding ‘as Māori’ – which, to follow this logic, would mean not learning English or reading. There can be only one solution in this scenario – replace the oppressor’s knowledge through the comprehensive decolonisation programme now revolutionising New Zealand education.
Decolonisation is not only destructive but simplistic. Although cultural knowledge is not science, 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 that Te Hurihanganui describes as the “rich and legitimate knowledge located within a Māori worldview’. But this is not induction into belief and ideological systems. The home and community groups are for induction into cultural beliefs and practices.
What about the proto-science (pre-science) in all traditional knowledge – such as 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.
Ironically, decolonisation ideology is justified using the universal human rights argument for equity. But the equity case misrepresents the problem. As with all groups, it is not ethnic affiliation but class-related cultural practices that are the main predictors of educational outcomes. Māori children from professional families are not failing. Rather it is those, Māori and non-Māori alike, living in families experiencing hardship and not engaging in cognitive practices of abstract thinking and literacy development, who are most likely to fail at school. This is not inevitable. Education can make a difference to a child’s life chances but it requires all schools, Māori medium immersion and mainstream alike, to provide quality academic knowledge taught by expert teachers.
Te Hurihanganui’s claim that ‘the Blueprint is based on evidence of what works for Māori in education’ gives no indication that the evidence is seriously compromised. Are Māori students in full immersion Māori education (MME) more successful than those in mainstream schools? At first glance this claim does appear substantiated. In 2020, 83.7 percent of Māori students in MME attained NCEA Level 2 compared to 71.8 percent in English medium education. However the numbers of students in each school type reveal a different picture. According to 2021 figures, 8,056 (4.3 percent) of Māori students attended Māori immersion schools where 51 percent or more of the instruction is in the Māori language. Another 29,499 Māori students (15.7 percent) are in mixed medium education with varying degrees of Māori language immersion or instruction. A full 80 percent (150,318 Māori students) attend English language or mainstream schools.
Given the sizeable difference between the numbers of Māori students in mainstream schools and those in full and mixed immersion education combined, any comparison should be considered unreliable, even meaningless. In addition, a nuanced comparison would need to compare the NCEA Level 2 subjects taken by Māori students. The extent of abstraction in a subject creates varying degrees of difficulty, something found, for example, in the difference between physics and communication studies.
Do parents of Māori children want a decolonised cultural-based education system? Here too, the evidence suggests otherwise. Under 5 percent of Māori students attend full immersion education where over 50 percent of instruction is in the Māori language. Even the flagship kohanga reo is in long-term decline from a peak of 767 kohanga in 1996 to 434 in 2021.
The 1990 Education Act established kura kaupapa Māori recognising its founders’ aims – to increase Māori achievement, to contribute to the revival of the Māori language, and to produce bilingual and bicultural citizens for New Zealand.
However the citizenship aim, one based on the democratic principle of the universal human being, cannot be met by a decolonising agenda. The universal and secular principles of the 1877 Education Act were intended to create a collective consciousness – the People of New Zealand as the Act’s title states – for a racially and culturally diverse population.
The exemptions in the 1877 Act reveal a fledgling liberal culture, a mix of idealism and pragmatism now recognisable as a distinctively New Zealand character. Parents who objected to Protestant history lesssons could remove their children from class. Māori opposed to government provision were exempted from compulsion. Private and church schools were permitted and a pragmatic accommodation for the country’s climate and geography, and for the regular outbreaks of disease, can be seen in flexible attendance regulations.
Unlike authoritarian regimes, liberalism can tolerate some dissent. What it cannot tolerate is the removal of its very foundations – those principles of universalism and secularism that anchor democratic institutions into modern pluralist society. The separation of public and private, of society and community, makes room for both science and local culture. (The recent commonplace practice of using ‘community’ for ‘society’ is one of a number of indications that the separation is being undermined.) Valuing culture and devaluing science in a merger of the two fatally undermines the universalism and secularism that creates and maintains a cohesive society out of many ethnicities and cultures.
Decolonisation will indeed divide society into two groups – but not that of coloniser and colonised locked into the permanent oppressor-victim opposition used to justify ethno-nationalism. Instead one group will comprise those who receive an education in academic subjects. These young people will proceed to tertiary study with a sound understanding of science, mathematics, and the humanities. Their intelligence will be developed in the long-term and demanding engagement with this complex knowledge. It is to be hoped, though this cannot be assumed, that they will have the critical disposition required for democratic citizenship, one that is subversive of local culture and disdainful of ideology.
The second group comprises those who remain restricted to the type of knowledge acquired from experience and justified in ideologies of local culture. Distrustful of academic knowledge as colonising and oppressive, ethnically-based cultural beliefs and practices will provide the community needed for social and psychological security. In this restricted world they are insiders. And as there are insiders, there must be outsiders – in traditionalist ideologies these are the colonists who are seen to have taken everything and given nothing. And yet the tragedy is that it is the cultural insiders who are to be the excluded ones – excluded from all the benefits that a modern education provides.
A revolution is coming. The government’s transformational policies for education make this clear. It will only be stopped by a re-commitment to academic knowledge for all New Zealand children, rich and poor alike, within a universal and secular education system. Colonisation is not the problem and decolonisation is not the solution.
Author’s Note: Elizabeth Rata is a professor of education at the University of Auckland and a founding member (in 1987) of Te Komiti o Nga Kura Kaupapa Māori o Tamaki Mākaurau
Rata, Elizabeth (2004) ‘Marching through the Institutions’: The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi
Published in Sites, New Series, WINTER 2004 VOLUME 1 NO. 2
From the Editorial
ARTICLES
Jacqueline Leckie 1
Anthropology and expert knowledges: introduction
‘Kolig and Rata’s papers remind us of a legacy from the original series of Sites – lively and rigorous academic debate surrounding Maori, Pakeha and other ethnic cultures in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Kolig and Rata’s papers could be considered foundational and controversial papers for reinvigorated dialogue on national, indigenous and ethnic issues in future Sites issues.’
From the author: Please note – the journal archives start at 2005. They do not include the first year of publication.
‘MARCHING THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS’: THE NEOTRIBAL ELITE AND THE TREATY OF WAITANGI
Elizabeth Rata
Faculty of Education and Department of Political Studies
University of Auckland
ABSTRACT
The successful ‘strategic march through the institutions’ of New Zealand’s democratic government by non-democratic corporate neotribes is the consequence of neotribal control over the interpretation and symbolism of the Treaty of Waitangi. The neotribal elite’s success is caused both by the widespread acceptance of their neotraditionalist ideology and by their brokerage of that ideology and its agents into government institutions
INTRODUCTION
The elite of neotribal capitalism[1] have played a decisive and self-interested role in controlling shifts in the interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi. In the identity politics of the 1970s ‘honouring the treaty’ initially referred to restitution for illegal land confiscations. From the late 1980s treaty interpretation shifted from its focus on reparations to the idea of a political partnership between the tribes and the government. In recent years that political partnership has been extended to ideas of a constitutional arrangement (TPK, 2001: 14; M. Durie, 2003; E. T. Durie, 1998; Wilson, 1998).
Control over the interpretation and symbolism of the Treaty of Waitangi was one of the most effective of the brokerage mechanisms used by the emergent neotribal elite. It enabled a strategic march through the institutions of a democratic society by non-democratic neotraditionalist forces. Elsewhere (Rata, 2003a) I examined the brokers or compradors (using the examples of Sir Tipene O’Regan, Sir Robert Mahuta and Professor Tamati Reedy), the brokerage mechanism, and the ideology of revived traditional leadership. This paper focuses specifically on the ‘partnership’ interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi and its contribution to the success of the elite’s brokerage strategy.
THE NEOTRADITIONALIST CONTEXT
In contrast to, and as a critique of the view that Treaty of Waitangi based claims for economic compensation and political partnership are justified in terms of the need to compensate Maori for a putative colonial-imposed subordinate status, treaty revivalism is better understood within the late twentieth century context of fundamental changes to the global political economy. Jonathan Friedman (1994; 2001) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) are among world systems theorists who argue that one of the features of late capitalism is the repositioning of pre-colonial elites as the new elites of localised forms of the capitalist economy. In New Zealand’s case the localised form of capitalism is neotribalism under the control of a comprador bourgeoisie or brokering elite. Its ideology is neotraditionalism (Habermas’ [2001] ‘conscious traditionalism’). Contemporary capitalism’s relations of production are concealed by beliefs in a restored (and romanticised) kinship social structure characterised by benign birth-ascribed leadership (Rata, 2003b).
The shift to the ‘partnership’ interpretation dates from the 1987 Court of Appeal decision that likened the relationship between the tribes and the government to a partnership (TPK, 2001: 78). During the 1990s the tribal leaders actively promoted the idea of two distinctive socio-political entities in partnership – the ‘neotribes’ and the government[2] (E. T. Durie, 1998). Successive governments’ support for the idea of a treaty partnership during that decade enabled the leaders to use partnership and principles concepts as brokerage mechanisms for a strategic march[3] through the institutions of government.
As a consequence of the transformative capacity of the brokerage function (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, 2001; Overbeek, 1990; Rata, 2003b) the leaders of the retribalisation movement have emerged as a neotribal capitalist elite, an‘aristocracy’ in the making[4]. By the late 1990s the elite has sufficient institutionalised power to make new claims for economic resources (such as seabeds and native flora), and claims for political, to the level of constitutional, recognition on the basis of partnership alone.
The treaty, as interpreted in Waitangi Tribunal reports, is the main ‘site’ of neotribal brokerage. The Tribunal played a crucial role in legitimating the material and political aspirations of the neotribal elite. Under the lengthy chairmanship of E. T. Durie, the Waitangi Tribunal used its reports to create the ‘instrumental presentism’ (Oliver, 2001: 9) and the channelling of retribalisation[5] that has served the elite’s economic and political aspirations. Three disparate groups have supported the Tribunal’s interpretation. The first group comprises the still-marginalised Maori who retain the pan-Maori aspirations of earlier ‘honour the treaty’ protests. These people were the intended recipients of bicultural social justice initiatives. The second group are those tribes that have yet to receive any treaty settlements.
Finally, the most influential supporters of the Waitangi Tribunal’s interpretation of the treaty are the ‘culturalists’[6]. Located in social science departments in universities and in the professions of education, health, law, the media, the church, and social services, culturalist ideas have informed academic analysis, government policy and guided popular understanding since the 1970s. By the 1990s the culturalist intellectual approach (also variously known as cultural idealism, cultural theory, cultural relativism, and identity politics) had attained the status of orthodox doctrine in New Zealand. However its flawed adherence to cultural relativism, its ahistorical approach to social change, and its ethnic-culture reductionism are increasing subject to strong criticism by writers from a range of disciplines. These include, for instance, Barry (2001), Bunge (1998), Friedman (2001), Gitlin (1995), Kuper (1999), Matthews (2000), Munz (1992, 1994), Nanda (2003), Sandall (1999) and Windschuttle (1994).
Culturalism has informed treaty interpretation in numerous ways. It places the treaty outside history and outside the political and economic context of human intentions and actions. ‘Human beings (are construed) as products rather than as producers of culture’ (Hannerz, 1992: 16). Such an ahistorical or ‘presentist’ (Oliver, 2001) view fixes the meaning of the treaty in a timeless spiritual realm that guides human behaviour rather than being the result of peoples’ motives and actions at a certain historical moment.
Steven Webster (1998: 1-2) has referred to the role played by ‘most New Zealand-based social anthropologists since the 1970s (who) have been caught in theories of culture which present the Maori as somehow outside history’. In other writing I have the analysed the pervasive influence of culturalism in education in several influential policy documents (see Rata, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c). A recent critique by Christopher Tremewan (2004: 4) refers to culturalism as ‘a central component of Kiwi political correctness, a moral enforcement incomprehensible in terms of lived social reality but comprehensible in terms of a reconstructed social reality. It insists on a biological connection between ethnicity, culture and entitlement and, in my view, is better termed cultural fundamentalism. Its historical antecedents are invidious. Yet it dominates policy prescriptions and academic analysis of New Zealand society.’
Culturalist ideas of primordial ethnic-cultural difference, cultural relativity and ahistoricism underpin Tribunal reports and with support from (bi)culturalists in government, the courts, academia and the professions, the Tribunal’s interpretation of the treaty has become the orthodox interpretation, one that serves the political interests of the neotribes. According to W. H. Oliver (2001: 9) the Tribunal ‘reports exemplify an instrumental but – because never explicitly avowed – elusive way of writing and using history’. Oliver refers to the Tribunal’s ‘presentism and the way in which this is shaped by a current political agenda and by the anticipation of its achievement in the future’.
This culturalism approach is also found in judicial decisions. ‘In the important 1987 Lands case the Court of Appeal said that the Treaty should be interpreted as a “living instrument”, which laid the foundation for “an ongoing partnership” between Maori and the Crown, and which must be seen as “an embryo rather than a fully developed and integrated set of ideas” (TPK, 2001: 15). ‘In 1990 Sir Robin Cooke, the then President of the Court of Appeal, speaking extra-judicially, said of the Treaty: ‘It is simply the most important document in New Zealand history’. (TPK, 2001: 14).
Culturalist beliefs underpinning the orthodox interpretation of the treaty are demonstrated in the Te Puni Kokiri publication Guide to the principles of the treaty of Waitangi as expressed by the Courts and the Waitangi Tribunal (TPK, 2001). The Guide refers to the treaty as ‘the founding document of New Zealand’, ‘an exchange of promises between two sovereign peoples, giving rise to obligations for each party’ (2001: 14). It is a ‘partnership’ between the tribes and the government, one that entitles the tribes to economic and political rights in perpetuity. It has constitutional significance. Treaty ‘principles’ are the basis for a bicultural nation in which tribal authority is incorporated into government institutions and processes.
The neotribal justification for two separate socio-political organisations in contemporary New Zealand uses a presentist, ‘two worlds’ approach. This is despite the contemporary realities of fluid and mixed ethnicity (Callister, 2003; Chapple, 2000), the modernist culture shared by all New Zealanders (one enriched and textured by the cultural heritage of its contributing ethnic groups), and the single democratic socio-political system that replaced the traditional kinship organisations.
In the culturalist approach, because the treaty’s authority is ‘spiritual’ or ‘otherworldly’, and outside the political conditions of its real historical context, contemporary realities are ignored. The religious imagery of treaty orthodoxy illustrates the doctrinal status of a spiritually mandated authority, an authority that takes it out of the realm of critical scrutiny. According to Margaret Wilson (cited in O’Brien, 2003: 15), the treaty is a ‘convenant’ that has a ‘higher purpose’ (than that of a legal contract), one ‘of defining the relationship binding two peoples’. The word ‘atone’ in the government’s apology to the Tainui tribe (The New Zealand Herald, 23 January 1995) conveys the idea of the expiation of a sin-inspired guilt, while the idea of a ‘foundation document’ with a spirit that ‘still speaks today’ evokes a timeless and commanding manifesto. This ‘otherworldliness’ elevates the treaty from the combative political sphere to a level of unquestioning reverence.
The treaty combines the very political purposes of the elite (of this world) with the otherworldliness of a past considered to be forever present in the unchanging spirit of the people, carried from the ancestors to the present and projected into the future. Oliver (2001: 25) captures these dual and contradictory purposes with his comment that the Tribunal ‘looks for a revival of traditional tribal politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the creation of a tribal economic base’ through an approach which reasserts, ‘to the point of reinventing, the evidences of continuity and denying the significance, if not quite the actuality, of change’.
In contrast to culturalism, a world systemic analysis (Friedman, 1994; Bunge, 1998) locates causation in the actions of real people living in historically specific circumstances. Traditional revival and other fundamentalist movements are understood, not as responses to nineteenth century colonisation but as contemporary responses to contemporary circumstances. In the case of neotribal capitalism the context is the post-1970s’ restructuring of the global economy, the corresponding shift from universal class-based politics to identity politics, and the re-emergence of traditional elites as a capitalist ruling class[7]. Treaty politics expresses the New Zealand experience of the global elite repositioning.
THE NEOTRIBAL ELITE
New Zealand biculturalism is a local version of the identity movements that replaced the universalist class-based politics of the prosperous post-war decades. 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 of identity recognition. These sites include women’s studies and Maori studies in academia along with government policies that targeted the marginalised groups.
In the early 1970s a small group of tertiary educated Maori became the leaders of the cultural revival (Fitzgerald, 1971) that signalled the first stage of ‘glocal’ identity politics in New Zealand. With the galvanising of the 1960s’ pan-Maori cultural renaissance into a political movement in the 1970s, the base was established for further transformation into neotribalism under the control of the elite. This group had entered the political arena through their leadership roles in the pan-Maori movement. The shift to tribal identification meant that they could use their political connections acquired in the earlier radical protests[8] in the cause of specific tribal interests (O’Regan, 1994: 43). They became recognised as brokers between the government site and the tribal site, a brokerage role provided access to economic resources of the settlements on behalf of the tribes rather than pan-Maori.
By the end of the 1980s Maori revivalist leaders 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 treaty. The 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act that allowed claims to be backdated to 1840 established the Waitangi Tribunal as the main brokerage site between the emergent neotribal elite and the government. Political recognition and institutionalisation were extended throughout the 1990s to include the concept of a political equal ‘partnership’ between the tribes and the government. For instance the principle of partnership was first identified explicitly in the Tribunal’s Manukau Report (1985) (see TPK, 2001: 80). By 1987 the Court of Appeal could say that the treaty established a relationship ‘akin to a partnership’ (TPK, 2001: 78). And by the time of the publication of the Muriwhenua Land Report of 1997, the Tribunal ‘anchored its view of the equal status of the treaty partners in likely Maori perspectives at the time of signing of the Treaty: “That Maori and the Governor would be equal, not one above the other”’ (TPK, 2001: 81).
Culturalist beliefs informed the interpretation of the treaty held by both the Tribunal and the courts. As early in the brokerage process as 1988, a government document Environmental Management and the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi (1988: 19, reprinted by the Dunedin Law Community Centre, 1995) contains a chart ‘Summary of Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi defined by the Waitangi Tribunal and the Court of Appeal’. Column one summarises the Tribunal’s interpretation of the principles. Column two is the Court of Appeal’s summary. Both interpret treaty partnership as an unproblematic reality. In the Tribunal column ‘the Treaty implies a partnership, exercised with utmost good faith’. The Court of Appeal statement is even stronger. ‘The Treaty requires a partnership and the duty to act reasonably and in good faith (the responsibilities of the parties being analogous to fiduciary duties)’ (Dunedin Community Law Centre, 1995: 13).
Tribal institutions, such as the Ngai Tahu and Tainui Trust Boards, given renewed impetus by the treaty reparation settlements, provided the structures for the materialisation of this politicised ‘partner’ identity. As previously noted, some of the leaders who had led the cultural and indigenous movements become tribal brokers, a comprador bourgeoisie, on behalf of the newly established tribal economies (Rata, 2003a). It was a transformation that occurred within the brokerage process itself as institutional sites (for example, the Waitangi Tribunal, the Crown Forestry Rental Trust, the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission) were established. The positions within the new sites provided privileging roles for the brokers: ‘Brokerage produces new advantages for the parties, especially for the brokers’ (Burt cited in McAdam et al, 2001: 142).
The first generation of the emergent neotribal elite include individuals who acted on behalf of neotribal interests. Amongst this group are: Sir Tipene O’Regan, Hon. Matiu Rata, Sir Robert Mahuta, Sir Graham Latimer, Justice E. Taihakurei Durie, Professor Mason Durie, Professor Whatarangi Winiata, Api Mahuika, Professor Tamati Reedy, Sir Hepi Te Heuheu, Professor Ngatata Love, Sir Paul Reeves, and Professor Hirini Sidney Mead. They negotiated[9] for political and economic (including knowledge) 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.
Individuals and families within the emergent elite may be at different stages in the trajectory of elite emergence. Some will maintain their place in this structural class and continue along the trajectory over the course of several generations while others may not. (Indeed Laslett [1984] has observed that upward and downward social mobility is a distinguishing feature of societies structured according to capitalist relations). What is important is the creation of the structural position itself. However individuals are important in that the new class structured position is the result of their role in the brokerage function.
Their control of the main brokerage site, the Waitangi Tribunal, was pivotal in establishing, then naturalising, the concepts of treaty partnership and principles. Mason Durie (2003a: 94) has referred to the Tribunal’s role in ‘rewriting New Zealand’s history’. The Tribunal intentionally and actively undertook this task. Oliver (2001: 10) describes how E. T. Durie, chair of the Tribunal from 1981 to 2000 ‘made clear his belief that the Tribunal should help to rewrite New Zealand history “from a Maori point of view”’. Also important was the elite’s control over knowledge production, attested to by the number of neotribalists who hold professorial chairs in the universities and directorships of the whare wanangas. In publications, conference presentations, reports, masters and doctoral dissertations, and speeches, neotribal intellectuals defined and codified the parameters and content of neotraditionalism.
The most influential publications include Ranginui Walker’s 1990 Ka Whawhai Tonu, Struggle Without End. More recent publications draw on several decades of articles, presentations and postgraduate dissertations. These include three recent books by Professor Mason Durie, Te Mana, Te Kawanatanga, The Politics of Maori Self-Determination, 1998, Mauri Ora: The Dynamics of Maori Health, 2001, and Launching Maori Futures, 2003. Professor Sidney Mead’s Landmarks, Bridges and Visions, 1997 and Tikanga Maori, 2003, and Professor Linda Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, published in 1999, are major neotraditionalist texts.
These writings exemplify the symbolic use of tradition to justify and legitimise the elite’s political role and the material benefits that accrue to them. Neotraditionalism is entrenched as its symbolic content or ideology ‘masks or “mystifies” those interests for the group members themselves’ (Turton, 1997: 11). The use of spiritual symbolism in neotraditionalist writings such as Mead’s Tikanga Maori and in treaty rhetoric serve this mystifying purpose. The symbolism of oppressor and victim is a strong theme in neotribal revisionist writing (Bishop, Berryman, Tiakiwai and Richardson, 2003; G. H. Smith, 1997). It underpins the redemptive and reparative beliefs used to justify treaty claims. In his analysis of the Taranaki and Muriwhenua Reports, W. H. Oliver (2001: 26-27) discusses the Tribunal’s ‘redemptive history’, in its ‘depiction of a “possible” past is a “known” future, a kind of paradise lost at the dawn of colonial time. It is not altogether strange to find in its history some of the elements of a religion of the oppressed and the promise of delivery from bondage into the promised land’.
One short section of the Taranaki Report (Wai, 143, 1996: 12.2) shows how the narrative style of the tribunal reports identified by Oliver (2001) evokes the good versus evil struggle found in all mythological epics. The use and number of words and phrases describing the government create a vivid caricature of evil: ‘macabre’, ‘fraud’, ‘corruption’, ‘cruel’, ‘machinations’, ‘violations’, ‘war of aggression’. The good versus evil struggle is played out in heightened poetic imagery: ‘emblazons in vivid relief’, ‘protests of desperation’, ‘to destroy, by stealth and by arms’. The dramatic effect produced by this writing is not just in the word meaning. The rhythmic phrasing and periodic sentences of the syntax itself contributes to the binary opposition between oppressor and victim with active and passive voices supporting the ascribed roles of each protagonist.
This use of syntactical phrasing to add to the dramatic quality of the writing and to build tension is clearly demonstrated in the following quotation (taken from the same short section of the Taranaki Report, the italics are mine) ‘. . . . Maori custom, law and institutions were judged by those who did not know them, and the judgments were wrong. The right of Maori to make their own decisions about who controlled the dispossession of land and the nature of the interests held was negated, and the immediate result was war. The long-term consequence was that the Government enforced a plan to alter Maori land tenure and to destroy, by stealth and by arms, the capacity of Maori to manage their own properties and to determine rights with them. The relationship the Government imposed was that of dominance and sub-servience.’
A final example, also from section 12.2 of the Taranaki Report (Wai 143, 1996), captures vividly the range of language techniques used in the reports (despite being only a sentence fragment): ‘the invasion and sacking of Parihaka must rank with the most heinous action of any government, in any country, in the last century.’ The build-up of qualifiers ‘must’, ‘most’, ‘any’ and ‘any’ in such a short space empowers the sentence with authority. ‘Invasion’, ‘sacking’, ‘heinous’ evoke poetic epics of battles between the forces of good and evil. Finally, the periodic triple construction of the final phrases ‘of any government, in any country, in the last century’ is one of the most effective and evocative oratorical devices used in persuasive language.
THE BROKERAGE OF TREATY PRINCIPLES
The development of treaty principles to express the putative partnership led to a major extension of the neotribal elite’s control of treaty interpretation. The following description[10] of the development and inclusion of Treaty principles in legislation provides a vivid account of what is probably one of the main brokerage ‘events’ – the brokerage of the principles of the treaty into New Zealand’s democratic institutions.
Section 9 of the State-owned Enterprises Act 1986 provides: ‘Nothing in this Act shall permit the Crown to act in a manner that is inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’. That is the first reference in legislation or policy to the principles of the Treaty – indeed, the first indication that the Treaty has principles. Their history began when in 1986 Ministers were considering the SOE legislation, then in Bill form. Concern was felt that its passage might lead, or be perceived to lead, to infringement of rights guaranteed to Maori by the Treaty as Crown assets were transferred to the new enterprises to become assets of the enterprises. That concern led to the Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Palmer, traveling to meet Sir Hepi Te Heuheu, the paramount chief of Ngati Tuwharetoa, at his home. Sir Hepi expressed that concern directly to Mr Palmer, and told him that it would be allayed if the Bill were to provide as the Act now does. This was agreed to, and section 9 was duly enacted.’ However as Parliament did not indicate what the principles of the Treaty are, it fell to the Courts to discover them. (Berthold, 2003).
The development of principles to express the treaty partnership and the inclusion of these principles in legislation activated the march through the institutions of a non-democratic neotraditionalist ideology. The process was quick. ‘As of May 2001 there were over thirty pieces of legislation that refer to the Treaty of Waitangi or its principles’ (TPK, 2001: 20). Fourteen acts of legislation ‘contained clauses requiring some action in respect of the Treaty’. These include the Conservation Act 1987 (section 4), the Hazardous Substances and new Organisms Act 1996 (section 8), the New Zealand Public Health and Disability Act 1996 (section 4) and the Resource Management Act, 1991. A further eighteen acts contained ‘treaty references not amounting to a direction to act’ (TPK, 2001: 111). The latter were Waitangi Tribunal reports.
These legislative acts carried neotraditionalism into many areas of government life. Policy and practice at all levels of government institutional operation were affected. The following examples of the influence are from several areas in the education sector. They show the consequences for policy and practice that follow from the legislative requirement to acknowledge the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi (Education Act 1989 (see section 181(b) added in 1990). The National Education Guidelines (Ministry of Education, 1999: 1) require that school programmes ‘for increased participation and success through the advancement of Maori education initiatives (be) consistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’. The Group Special Education Maori Strategy (Ministry of Education, 2004) opens with the brokerage-facilitating statement ‘The Treaty of Waitangi is the principal founding document of our land’.
The early childhood education document Quality in Action (Ministry of Education, 1998) asks educators to ‘reflect (on) the unique place of Maori as Tangata whenua and the principle of partnership inherent in Te Tiriti o Waitangi’ (ibid 1998: 63) along with recommending that ‘Management ensure that their service’s budget and financial policies reflect a commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi’ (ibid 1998: 81). Policy distinctions between Maori and non-Maori contribute to naturalising the culturalist ‘two worlds’ view of New Zealand society and to consolidating ideological boundaries between people on the basis of race. Emerging practices that treat children differently according to their race reinforces these race boundaries.
Widespread beliefs had developed among teachers that Maori children have a different ‘way of knowing’ and different learning styles from other children. According to Cormack (1997: 165): ‘Maori children generally work best as individuals when they know that they are part of a group which in turn is part of a larger groups, a secure hapu and iwi base in the classroom’. The previously cited Quality in Action (Ministry of Education 1998: 64) refers to a ‘Maori pedagogy (that) incorporates philosophical and spiritual beliefs, preferred learning styles, conditions conducive to learning, methods of transmitting knowledge, and appropriate people to pass on this knowledge.’ References are made to ‘Maori theories of human development’, and to the need to ‘recognise that different whanau, hapu and iwi vary in their views on the roles and significance of gender, ability and age’ (ibid 1998: 46).
There are examples from outside education of the far reach of treaty principles legislation into policy and practice such as requirements for Maori representatives to serve on committees and for consultation with iwi groups. The Royal Commission’s Report on Genetic Modification recommends that Institutional Biological Safety Committees (IBSCs) include at least one Maori member, appointed on the nomination of the hapu or iwi with manawhenua in the locality affected by an application’ (Report of the Royal Commission, 2001: 353).
A further example can be supplied from the Health Research Council of New Zealand which in its ‘Partnership Programme Request for proposals Expression of Interest Form EO1204-OHS’ (HRC, 2004) requires applicants to ‘meet at least the minimum requirements for Maori responsiveness’. These include the identification of ‘the Maori group(s) that were consulted regarding the proposal’, a description of ‘the ongoing role they will have in the further development and/or implementation’ of the research project’, an explanation if ‘any Maori participants’ are involved in the research, and the requirement to ‘identity any Maori researchers or research staff named’ on the proposal (HRC, 2004: 3).
As the brokerage function became institutionalised into government departments with the legislative requirement to acknowledge the principles of the treaty, several layers of brokers emerged below that of the elite themselves. These were people ‘on the ground’ who served as Maori advisers, iwi consultants and representatives, and kaumatua. They worked, often tirelessly, on numerous committees at national and local level in all areas of government activity including education, health, social welfare, local government, and conservation.
Such brokerage mediated the relationship between Maori revivalists and government biculturalists altering both groups in significant ways in the process. Citing Burt (1992), McAdam et al (2001: 142) argue that the brokerage process is itself transforming. ‘Brokerage produces new advantages for the parties, especially for the brokers.’ This was especially so for those Maori who moved from leadership of a pan-Maori cultural revival to leadership of tribal treaty claims. It was also true for those Maori who filled the new structural positions of advisor, kaumatua, and tangata whenua representative on the various councils, committees and panels that opened up as a result of the treaty partnership idea.
Structural mobility on such a scale meant that many new professional Maori were promoted rapidly in order to fill the positions available. In some cases, it could be argued, individuals were promoted over and above their qualifications and experience. The rationale for such promotion was the candidate’s Maori ethnicity and understanding of Maori tikanga, acceptable by neotraditionalist standards but at odds with the achievement-based meritocracy of New Zealand democracy.
MARCHING THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS
Hazlehurst (1993: 74 – 75) locates the early development of the neotribal strategic project for institutional change in the 1980 – 1981 formation of the Maori Mana Motuhake Party. She refers to Ranginui Walker’s program of institutional transformation ‘. . . responsibility was to be firmly located in whanau, hapu and iwi’. By the end of the 1990s another highly influential neotribal broker, Professor Mason Durie, has successfully brokered the ‘Durie Principles’ into every area of Maori educational policy. The three Hui Taumata Matauranga (the first, in February 2001 was convened by Tumu Te Heuheu) show the driving force of neotribal ambitions for education (M. Durie, 2003a). The hui also show the strategic direction moving beyond education, possibly into a broader constitutional partnership including all government sectors as indicated below:
The Hui Taumata process has been innovative and appealing as a practical demonstration of the Treaty of Waitangi relationship, it has also provided a model for the articulation of collective Maori aspirations. . . in order to understand the interface between te ao Maori and the wider society , whether it is linked to education or health or employment or the economy, Maori need to have a clearer framework within which sectoral endeavours can be conceptualised. Thinking in sectors such as the education sector, the health sector, the social services sector – can distort te ao Maori. To that end it may be timely to consider creating an opportunity for Maori to identify their own priorities and plans on a broader front, using a similar process to the Hui Taumata Matauranga but focussing on higher level aspirations and goals, including constitutional arrangements. (Durie, 2003a: 18).
E. T. Durie’s long tenure as chair of the Waitangi Tribunal is an additional good example of an influential brokerage position within a pivotal government institution. The Tribunal played a major role in shifting the interpretation of the Treaty from its role as a grievance settlement mechanism to its role in justifying political, even constitutional, partnership. His strategic plan for the cultural change required for a constitutional ‘arrangement’ incorporating ‘the Treaty as a basic tenet’ (Wilson, 1998: 3-4) demonstrates the political aspirations of a broker in an institutional position with real driving power.
Brokerage into specific institutions such as government ministries and statutory organisations led to institutional links between the government, the neotribalists and the courts. This enabled the march through the institutions to proceed with relative ease. For example the link between the political and judicial areas of government is made explicit in E. T. Durie’s (1995: 3) suggestion of a political role for the judiciary in regard to indigenous issues:
The courts may be called upon to play a larger role in such political issues, at least where statute law has left some openings. In New Zealand for example, where the Waitangi Tribunal may direct the transfer of state properties to Maori in reparation for historical losses, there is the question of whether the Tribunal should compensate to the fullest extent of proven loss, or should consider it necessary to restore the tribe to a reasonable equilibrium. The issue may be seen as political, but given the lack of statutory direction to the Tribunal, the issue may fall to be determined by the courts, in High Court proceedings that are now current.
Comprehensive and forward-looking brokerage strategy has been driven by the neotribes. Andrew Sharp (1997: 452) has drawn attention to the unprecedented way in which ‘governments were losing control of policy formulation and execution’ in relation to the treaty. This is most clearly demonstrated by the way in which the treaty principles have been brokered into government legislation with enormous consequences for all sectors and levels of government activity.
Simon Upton’s description of the early 1990s National Government’s incorporation of treaty principles into legislation through the highly influential 1991 Resource Management Act reveals an almost cavalier approach to this most far-reaching of government activities. ‘I am quite sure that none of us knew what we meant when we signed up to that formula’. By ‘formula’, Upton (from the hindsight of 2003), referred to 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 the neotribes rather than its own policies, Upton added 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 of any particular group amounted to a legislative evasion”.’ (Simon Upton quoted in the New Zealand Herald, 22-23 Feb. 2003). Until recently the Labour Government also appeared not to have grasped the significance of the brokerage of treaty principles into legislation[11]. In 2000, Helen Clark, acknowledged that ‘there is no one in Cabinet actually co-ordinating the insertion of treaty clauses into new legislation’ (Listener, 2000: 22).
THE PROCESS OF TREATY RE-INTERPRETATION
Neotraditionalist ideology naturalises ethnic division to create the belief the New Zealand society is divided into two political partners, the tribes and the government, characterised by fundamental ethnic and cultural differences that must be recognised in distinctive socio-political structures. Furthermore this relationship between the two ‘partners’ was agreed to in 1840 and is considered to be ongoing.
The concept of partnership, authorised in the treaty’s timeless authority, was made concrete by legislating the treaty principles. With the legislative recognition of two separate entities, the way was opened for the next stage in the brokerage of neotribal influence and interests. Similarities can now be re-constructed. The partners can agree to relate in particular ways. For example iwi partnerships are created in health and education with iwi providers taking on some of the functions of government agencies[12]. The whare wanangas are an example of the way in which the partnership is cemented into practice.
Brokerage too undergoes changes. Institutionalised partnership has greater permanency than the limited brokerage involved in one-off treaty settlements. Having become partners in government institutions (the result of the insertion of the principles into legislation), the neotribes are positioned to claim a fixed and permanent partnership – one located in constitutional inclusion. Treaty partnership has overtaken treaty settlements as the means by which the neotribal elite can continue and consolidate their march through the institutions. The final stage is that of neotribal brokerage into a constitutional arrangement.
Treaty interpretation changes throughout these stages. Treaty partnership was initially justified by extrapolating the possession guarantees in Article Two of the Treaty of Waitangi into the concepts of governance and citizenship in the first and third treaty articles. There is a shift from claims based upon reparation for past wrongs (in reference to the Treaty of Waitangi, Article Two) to one of entitlement based upon a political partnership with reference to Article One. The new interpretation then enabled the neotribes to claim economic resources and political positioning on the basis of the political ‘partnership’ rather than on the basis of historical grievance claims only.
Extrapolating the concept of governance from Article One (regarding sovereignty secession) into Article Two (concerning economic resources), from where it acquired a determinacy which rebounded back upon Article One has enabled tribal members to be reconceptualised as subjects of the capitalised resource possessing tribe. In this interpretation (one driven by the Waitangi Tribunal), the right to govern (by establishing modes of regulation or tribal self-management institutions, policies, practice and beliefs) results from resource possession. In other words, if the neotribe is considered to be the owners of the capitalised economic resources, then the right of governance proceeds from that status. At this stage the neotribes have the economic and political platform to launch the campaign for constitutional recognition.
CONCLUSION
For over two decades a group of neotribal leaders have controlled the shifting interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi. That control has, through complex brokerage processes, led to the group’s own emergence as a self-interested political elite. The elite’s ‘strategic march through the institutions’ is now at the final constitutional stage. Mason Durie’s (2003: 105-116) recommendations for a new constitutional framework would create two separate socio-political organisations based upon race origins and justified according to culturalist beliefs that ‘race causes culture’ (Rata, 2004a).
The neotribal ‘side’ will be organised according to non-democratic principles of kinship, race heritage, and hierarchical leadership. Its policies and practices, justified by the neotraditionalist ideology of revived and romanticised communalism, will conceal the self-interested class character of the ruling elite. It is difficult to see how, given the incompatibility between the non-democratic race-based neotribal structure and the democratic institutions of the New Zealand state that both forms can be accommodated within the one nation. Yet that is the implicit assumption behind the idea of a treaty partnership and the brokerage of the treaty principles into legislation.
NOTES
[1] Neotribal capitalism (Rata, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2003) refers to ‘the view of modern tribes as organizations of capitalist accumulation that are legitimised through a “neotraditionalist” ideology that re-create present-day class relations in colonial terms’ (Schroder, 2003: 435). The neotribe is not the revived traditional tribe but the new and non-democratic socio-political organisation of an emergent capitalist elite. Schroder (2003) uses the model of neotribal capitalism in his analysis of Native North America. Larson and Zalanga’s (2003) account of indigenous capitalism and elite class emergence in Malaysia and Fiji provides an excellent discussion of the complex connection between class and ethnic relations. In New Zealand, as in Malaysia and Fiji, ‘ the tension between class and ethnicity in relation to the emergence of the indigenous capitalists has been managed by downplaying the class-basis for political mobilization, emphasizing instead ethnic-based mobilization. Simultaneously, the connections between lower- and under- class individuals across ethnic lines are downplayed.’ (Larson and Zalanga, 2003: 95).
[2] For an analysis of the incompatibility between the reactionary non-democratic neotribal organisation and the democratic socio-political system institutionalised in New Zealand government see Rata (2004).
[3] An account of the ‘strategic march through the institutions’ and the transformation of Maori revivalism from a prefigurative to a strategic political movement is available in Rata (2000: 93-109).
[4] I use the term ‘aristocracy’ to refer to the promotion by the new elite of the non-democratic concept of birth-ascribed authority in the neotribal socio-political organisation. According to Sidney Mead (1997: 203) ‘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’. Ranginui Walker has referred explicitly to ‘aristocracy’ in commenting on disputes amongst Tainui leaders. ‘Professor Walker dismissed the emphasis being placed on democracy. “ Tainui must adopt a more collegial and consensual leadership or they will continue to undermine the aristocracy”” (The New Zealand Herald, 19-20 August 2000). A further example of the non-democratic ‘aristocratic’ values of the neotribal elite is provided by E. T. Durie’s reference to Sidney Mead. In the Foreword to Mead’s book, Tikanga Maori, a work acknowledge by Durie as ‘scholarly’, the distinctly unscholarly reference is made to Mead’s ‘respected family lines’ (Durie, 2003: ix). The juxtaposition of ‘scholarly’ and ‘family lines’ reveals the non-democratic ideology of neotribal capitalism given that birth-ascribed authority is in opposition to the universalism and equality of modernist scholarship. Tikanga Maori is a very detailed example of the reactionary character of neotraditionalism. The ideology’s commitment to birth-ascribed authority explains the frequent use of ‘Crown’ rhetoric rather than the modernist terms of ‘government’ or ‘state’.
[5] ‘The tribunal became the institutional mechanism for legal processes to be undertaken between the government and the tribes. Crucially it systematised a tribal – state relationship by conferring a juridified identity upon the concept of tribe grounded in treaty partnership, thus legitimating and incorporating within the capitalist order the existence of a mode of regulation based upon a tribal form’ (Rata, 2000: 202). The Tribunal can be seen as the ideological ‘base’ for the march through the institutions.
[6] ‘Culturalism’ or the reification of tradition and culture is well documented in studies by Hobsbawm (1983). Handler (1983), Babadzan, (1988), Friedman (1994), Anderson (1991), Turton et. al. (1997), Giltin (1995) and Kuper (1999) among others. According to Hobsbawm (1983: 1) tradition is defined as ‘a set of practices . . . which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’. ‘Concepts of culture and tradition (are divorced) from historical forces of economic change’ (Dirlik cited in White, 2001:140). ‘As an anthropological ideology, culturalism is ‘increasingly used as a privileged tool to legitimise political domination’ (Babadzan, 2000: 150) with its sacralisation of cultures and identities. Babadzan also refers to the way that culture is ‘transformed and essentialised (2000: 149) with ‘anthropologists appropriating the ethnic-culturalist discourse that actors themselves hold about the meaning of their practices’. Kolig (2002: 8) refers implicitly to the modernist character of cultural revival in his description of ‘retraditionalisation . . . supported by globalisation through the freedom of choice’.
[7] Barry (2001), Friedman (1994), Turton (1997), Turner (2003), Wallerstein (1991), Kuper (1999), Gitlin (1995), Nanda (2003), Sandall (2001), Ekholm Friedman (2003) and Martinelli (2002).
[8] Many brokerage relationships between Maori neotribalists and Pakeha biculturalists were formed in the days of radical student politics, in the shared protests against the Vietnam war and, particularly, the anti-Springbok rugby tour of 1981. The protests against racism in another country marked the shift from a shared political platform to a new relationship between Maori and Pakeha. Maori turned to their own protests against racism in New Zealand and the role of bicultural Pakeha changed from co-activist to supporter in respect to Maori issues.
[9] Larson and Zalanga (2003: 88) describe how the ‘new indigenous elites have political and economic involvement and connections that span across other capitalist groups and traditional indigenous authority’.
[10] This description, including the account of the meeting between Mr Palmer (later Sir Geoffrey) and Sir Hepi Te Heuheu, was provided to the writer by Mr Tom Berthold.
[11] Since the Leader of the Opposition, Don Brash’s, Orewa speech in January 2004 revealed the extent of the public’s disquiet with treaty politics, the Labour Government has indicated a willingness to reconsider treaty policies.
[12] See the Ministry of Education Statement of Intent 2003 – 2008: Iwi Education Partnerships, (Ministry of Education, 2003)
REFERENCES
ANDERSON, B. 1991 Imagined Communities, London: Verso.
BABADZAN, A. 1988 [1983] ‘Kastom and nation-building in the South Pacific’, in R. Guidieri, F. Pellizzi, S. Tambiah (ed) Ethnicities and Nations, Houston: Rothko Chapel: 199-228.
BABADZAN, A. 2000 ‘Anthropology, Nationalism and ‘the Invention of Tradition’’, Anthropological Forum 10 (2): 131-155.
BARRY, B. 2001 Culture and Equality, An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
BERTHOLD, T. 2003 Private correspondence with the author, 7 July. Quoted with permission.
BISHOP, R. Berryman, M. Tiakiwai, S. and C. Richardson 2003 ‘Te Kotahitanga: The Experiences of Year 9 and 10 Maori Students in Mainstream Classrooms’, Report to the Ministry of Education. Wellington: Ministry of Education.
BUNGE, M. 1999 Social Science Under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
CALLISTER, P. 2003 ‘Ethnicity measures, intermarriage and social policy’, Connecting Policy, Research and Practice Conference, Wellington, 29-30 April.
CHAPPLE, S. 2000 ‘Maori Socio-Economic Disparity’, Political Science, 52 (2): 101-115.
CORMACK, I. 1997 ‘Creating an Effective Learning Environment for Maori Students’, in P. Te Whaiti, M. McCarthy, and A. Durie (eds) Mai I Rangiatea, Maori Wellbeing and Development, Auckland and Wellington: Auckland University Press and Bridget Williams Books.
DUNEDIN COMMUNITY LAW CENTRE, 1995 Introduction to the Waitangi Tribunal. Dunedin.
DUNEDIN COMMUNITY LAW CENTRE 1995 Environmental Management and the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi: Report on Crown Responses to the Waitangi Tribunal 1983 – 88. New Zealand Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Reprinted in Dunedin: Dunedin Community Law Centre.
DURIE, E. T. 1995 ‘United Nations or United Peoples?’, Paper presented at the 50th Anniversary Conference, Australasian Law Teachers’ Association, Cross Currents: Internationalism, National Identity and Law.
@http://www.austlii.edu.au/special/alta/alta95/durie.html
DURIE, E. T. 1998 ‘Ethics and Values’, Te Oru Rangahau Maori Research and Development Conference, Massey University, Palmerston North, 7 – 9 July.
DURIE, M. 1998 Te Mana, Te Kawanatanga The Politics of Maori Self-Determination. Auckland: Oxford University Press.
DURIE, M. 2001 Mauri Ora: The Dynamics of Maori Health. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
DURIE, M. 2003 Nga Kahui Pou Launching Maori Futures, Wellington: Huia.
DURIE, M. (2003a) ‘Maori Educational Advancement At the Interface Between Te Ao Maori and Te Ao Whanui’, Paper Presented at Hui Taumata Matauranga Tuatoru, 9 March, Turangi/Taupo.
EKHOLM FRIEDMAN, K. 2003 State Classes, the Logic of Rentier Power and Social Disintegration: Global Parameters and the Local Structures of the Decline of the Congo. in J. Friedman (ed), Globalisation, the State and Violence, Walnut Creek: Altamira Press: 343-378.
FITZGERALD, T. K. 1971 Social Position of the Maori, Ann Arbor, Michigan, University Graduate.
FRIEDMAN, J. 1994 Cultural Identity and Global Process, London: Sage.
FRIEDMAN, J. 2001 ‘Indigenous Struggles and the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’, in A. Dirlik, and R. Prazniak, (eds), Place and Politics in the Age of Global Capitalism, New York: Rowman and Littlefield: 53-72.
GITLIN, T. 1995 The Twilight of Common Dreams, NY: Metropolitan Books.
HABERMAS, J. 2001 ‘Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy’ in S. Seidman and J. Alexander (eds) The New Social Theory Reader, Contemporary Debates, London and New York: Routledge: 31-38.
HANDLER, R. 1988 (2nd ed.) Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
HANNERZ, U. 1992 Cultural Complexity, Studies in the Social Organisation of Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press.
HAZLEHURST, K. 1993 Political Expression and ethnicity, Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
HOBSBAWM, E. 1990 Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
HRC, 2004 ‘Health Research Council of New Zealand Partnership Programme Request for Proposals Expression of Interest Form EO1204-OHS’. @www.hrc.govt.nz
KOLIG, E. 2002 ‘Introduction: Cultural Revival, the Construction of Indigeneity and the World-System’, in E. Kolig and H. Muckler (eds.) Politics of Indigeneity in the South Pacific, Hamburg: Lit Verlag.
KUPER, A. 1999 Culture, the Anthropologists’ Account, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.
LARSON, E. and S. Zalanga 2003 ‘Indigenous Capitalists: The development of indigenous investment companies in relation to class, ethnicity and the state in Malaysia and Fiji’, Political Power and Social Theory, 16: 73-102.
LASLETT, P. 1984 The World We Lost: Further Explorations. London: Prentice Hall.
LISTENER, 16 December 2000. Wellington.
MARTINELLI, A. 2002 ‘Markets, Governments, Communities and Global Governance’, Presidential Address, International Sociological Association XV Congress, Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, July.
MATTHEWS, M. 2000 Time for Science Education, New York: Kluwer Academic.
MARX, K. 1867, 1976. Capital, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd.
MC ADAM, D., S. Tarrow, and C. Tilly (2001) Dynamics of Contention, Cambridge, Mss.: Cambridge University Press.
MEAD, S. 1997 Landmarks, Bridges and Visions, Aspects of Maori Culture, Wellington: Victoria University Press.
MEAD, H. 2003 Tikanga Maori, Wellington: Huia Publishers.
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, 1998 Quality in Action, Wellington: Learning Media.
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, 1999 The National Education Guidelines, Wellington: Learning Media.
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, 2003 ‘Ministry of Education Statement of Intent 2003 – 2008: Iwi Education Partnerships’.@ http://www.minedu.govt.nz
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, 2004. ‘Group Special Education Maori Strategy’. @http://www.minedu.govt.nz
MUNZ, P. 1994 ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy-Dress’, The New Zealand Journal of History, 28 (1): 60-75.
MUNZ, P. 1992 ‘What’s Postmodern Anyway?’, Philosophy and Literature, 16: 333-353.
NANDA, M. 2004 Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, New Jersey:Rutgers.
O’BRIEN, T. 2003 ‘A Law Unto Herself’, Canvas, New Zealand Herald, Auckland: Wilson and Horton: 14-15.
OLIVER, W. 2001 ‘The Future Behind Us’, in A. Sharp, and P. McHugh, (eds). Histories, Power and Loss, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books: 9-31.
O’REGAN, T. 1994 ‘Readying the Canoe Upon the Beach’, in R. Capper, A. Brown and W. Ihimaera (eds), Kaupapa New Zealand, Vision Aotearoa, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.
OVERBEEK, H. 1990 Global Capitalism and National Decline, London: Unwin Hyman.
RATA, E. 1996 ‘The Emergence of Tribal Capitalism’, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Auckland.
RATA, E. 1999 ‘A Theory of Neotribal Capitalism’, Review, XXII (3): 231-290.
RATA, E. 2000 A Political Economy of Neotribal Capital, Lanham: Lexington Books.
RATA, E. 2003 ‘An Overview of Neotribal Capitalism’, Ethnologies Comparees. Oceanie, debut de siecle (6) Spring:1-10.
RATA, E. 2003a ‘Leadership Ideology in Neotribal Capitalism’, Political Power and Social Theory 16: 43-72.
RATA, E. 2003b. ‘Late Capitalism and Ethnic Revivalism, ‘A New Middle Age’’, Anthropological Theory March, 3 (1): 43-63.
RATA, E. 2004 ‘Neotribalism or Democracy, You Choose’, Paper presented at the Aotearoa Tertiary Equity Committee Conference, Auckland, 3 September.
RATA, E. 2004a. ‘Kaupapa Maori Education in New Zealand’, in J. Demaine (ed) Citizenship and Political Education Today, London: Palgrave, The Macmillan Press: 80-103.
RATA, E. 2004b ‘Ethnic Ideologies in New Zealand Education’, TEFANZ Teacher Education in Aotearoa/ New Zealand Conference 5 – 7 July.
RATA, E. 2004c ‘Under-Achievement in Maori Education: Why Kaupapa Maori Can’t Help’, Politics of Early Childhood Education Symposium. Auckland, 21 – 22 September.
REPORT OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON GENETIC MODIFICATION, 2002 Wellington: Government Printer.
SANDALL, R. 2001 The Culture Cult, Boulder: Westview.
SCHRODER, I. 2003 ‘The Political Economy of Tribalism in North America: Neotribal Capitalism?’, Anthropological Theory 3(4): 435-456.
SHARP, A. 1997 ‘Civil rights, amelioration, and reparation’, in M. Brown and S. Ganguly, (eds) Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific, Cambridge, Mss.: Harvard University Press: 421-456.
SMITH, L. 1999 Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples, Dunedin: University of Otago Press.
The New Zealand Herald. Auckland.
TPK, 2001 ‘He Tirohanga o Kawa ki te Tiriti o Waitangi’, Wellington: Te Puni Kokiri.
TREMEWAN, C. 2004 ‘International Students: A Fundamental Challenge to the Social Sciences’, Paper presented at the International Students for New Zealand, Policies and Prospects Conference, 28 August, University of Auckland.
TURNER, T. 2003 ‘Class projects, Social Consciousness, and the Contradictions of “Globalization”’, in J. Friedman (ed) Globalisation, the State and Violence, Walnut Creek: Altamira Press: 35-66.
TURTON, D. (ed) 1997 War and Ethnicity, Global Connections and Local Violence, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress, San Marino (RSM): University of Rochester Press.
Upton, S. 2003 Retelling our national history. Upton-on-line. 8 June. @http://www.wave.co.nz/supton/uptononline/2003/8-june-2003.htm
Wai 143 1996 ‘The Taranaki Report’, Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington: Ministry of Justice. @ http://www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz/reports/niwest/wai143/wai143b.asp
WALLERSTEIN, I. 1991 ‘Social Conflict in Post-Independence Black Africa: The Concepts of Race and Status-Group Reconsidered’, in E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein (eds) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso: 187-203.
WEBSTER, S. 1998 Patrons of Maori Culture, Dunedin: Otago University Press.
WHITE, G. 2001 ‘Natives and nations: identity formation in postcolonial Melansia’, in A. Dirlik and R. Prazniak (eds) Place and Politics in the Age of Global Capitalism, New York: Rowman and Littlefield: 139-166.
WILSON, M. 1998 ‘The Treaty of Waitangi, An Instrument for Constitutional Reform’, Paper for the Ministry of Justice, 3 June.
WINDSCHUTTLE, K. 1994 The Killing of History, Sydney: Macleay Press.
How cultural essentialism threatens intellectual freedom in the New Zealand tertiary education sector
Roger Openshaw and Elizabeth Rata
A version of this paper was published in the New Zealand Journal of Tertiary Education Policy in 2008. It has been altered and posted here in response to increase interest in academic freedom in the university and free speech in New Zealand more broadly
ABSTRACT
As a consequence of the shift from class to identity politics that characterises multiculturalism, administrators and academics in a number of Western universities are now obliged to defer to politically powerful interest groups which derive their power to condemn from culturalist principles. The ways in which this dominant intellectual orthodoxy of cultural essentialism in university management structures threatens academic freedom is illustrated in a number of case studies taken from the New Zealand experience. These include cases where staff members have suffered threats and harassment, gate-keeping mechanisms in research funding processes, and examples of research and teaching constrained by the ideology. They show the extent to which such ideological conformity compromises the scientific and critical analysis of social phenomena, thereby limiting the university’s ability to serve as the critic and conscience of society.
INTRODUCTION:
Outlining New Zealand’s tertiary policy in April 2006, the Hon Dr Michael Cullen, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Tertiary Education, and Minister of Finance observed that:
Universities are research-led institutions, and are expected to provide
a broad intellectual leadership within the community, as well as
equipping people with skills that go beyond the vocational and foster
critical thinking and innovation. Academic independence must be
protected, not only to ensure that universities can act as the
conscience and critic of society, but also to support the flexibility and
innovation that comes with independence of thought (Cullen, 2006).
For many New Zealand academics, these will be reassuring words from a senior politician and tertiary education policy-maker. In stark contrast, however, is the actual reality of intellectual repression that characterises a number of New Zealand’s tertiary institutions, one most vividly exemplified by the rather ominous phrase ‘Academic freedom is a Western concept’ that remained inscribed on a whiteboard for the edification of pre-service teacher education students in a leading New Zealand tertiary institution for much of 2005. This paper argues that, whilst for New Zealand tertiary institutions academic freedom remains essential to quality research of international standard, the concept is now seriously endangered as commitment to key stakeholders, adherence to various equity targets, and compliance to Treaty of Waitangi ‘partnership principles’ take precedence over academic independence and the university’s role as the conscience and critic of society. There are several reasons for what we see as a progressive erosion of academic freedom over the last decade in particular. Olssen argues that genuine academic freedom has been eroded by the recent introduction of the culture of managerialism in tertiary institutions. New forms of surveillance and control produce ‘a de-intellectualised discourse of competency-based training which displaces professional judgement and ethics, as well as the forms of scholarship associated traditionally with the activities of the public intellectual’ (Olssen, 2002, p. 55).
Whilst this managerial culture is commonly regarded as being an exclusive manifestation of right-wing neo-liberalism, it is our contention that the erosion of academic freedom in New Zealand has been powerfully reinforced, not just from without, but also from within the academy. A key factor here has been the way in which the liberal left itself has shifted decisively from providing strong support for academic freedom and upholding the necessity of vigorous debate over controversial issues, to an adherence to a narrow intellectual orthodoxy based largely on cultural essentialism (that is, the reification of culture, Rata, 2004), cultural relativism, and ethnic politicisation (for which we use the term ‘culturalism’).
Culturalism is the ideology of ethnic politics. In many respects it is aptly defined by the oxymoron, ‘secular religion’. In this ideology, as in religious fundamentalism, ethnic identity becomes a type of sacred identity, one blessed by tradition and evocative of a special destiny for those ‘of the faith’ (Rata and Openshaw, 2006; Nanda, 2003). Both offer the psychological security of group belonging and the stability of a known past (Friedman, 1994). The practitioners observe similar rituals and share in the use of evocative, almost mystical language to emphasise the group’s transcendence of the present into a timeless continuity between past, present and future (Keesing, 1989). Uma Narayan argues that, in Third World countries, this mindset results in the contemptuous labelling of any criticism of traditional cultural practices, even by groups such as indigenous feminists, as being foreign, Western, bourgeois and modernist. Narayan cautions us against uncritically accepting terms such as “cultural preservation” as innocuous descriptors. Rather she urges us to pay ‘critical attention to the agendas that are served by the deployment of these terms’ (Narayan, 1997, p.ix, p.6).
In those countries which have experienced relatively recent European colonisation, such as New Zealand and Australia, this intensity and wholeheartedly uncritical adoption of ritual deemed ‘traditional’ has become as much a feature of predominantly European new middle class professionals as it has amongst the indigenous groups whose culture they embrace (Rata, 2003a; Openshaw, 2006). In both instances there is manifested all too often an intensity of commitment that crosses easily into fanaticism, as the examples we provide from the tertiary education sector in New Zealand clearly illustrate. Furthermore, as these illustrations show, this doctrinal stance finds a ready ally in the consumer focused, market-orientated approach of our tertiary institutions, where good customer relations now go ‘hand-in-glove’ with the tenets of ‘cultural safety’.
GOODNESS, POWER AND LEFT-LIBERAL MILITANT ADVOCACY:
The embracement of cultural essentialism by the liberal left in its own interests has been a phenomenon common to many Western nations since the late 1960s. Gouldner (1979) and other critical scholars (e.g. Kellner and Heuberger, 1992; Eder, 1993; Lasch, 1995) have argued that the liberal left’s own ambivalent position in society as a relatively privileged ‘new middle class’ of ‘caring’ professionals has been responsible for its retreat from class politics. As early as 1968, Parkin identified the nature of the retreat by describing how many ‘middle-class radicals trained in the humanities and social sciences’ now found ‘acceptable sanctuaries in the welfare and creative professions’. In this way they benefited ‘from capitalism’s operation while at the same time avoiding direct involvement in capitalist enterprises’. It was a way to ‘exercise their talents without compromising their radical political ideals’ (Parkin, 1968, p. 192). With its liberal guilt hoisted on the uncomfortable petard (Rata, 1996) of that ‘goodness and power’ paradox described so succinctly by Gouldner (1979, p. 36), the radicalised new middle class of the 1970s and 80s made the decisive shift from class to cultural politics – a shift that enabled this class to maintain its appearance as the ‘legitimate defenders of the common good’ (Kellner and Berger, 1992, p. 11) without relinquishing its economic position.
But the shift to cultural politics did more than provide these new middle class humanists with a diversion from confronting the consequences of abandoning democratic politics based in the nation state. It also weakened the political project that had originally enabled a working class intellectual vanguard to emerge as a new professional class, the radicalised section of the mass middle class’, described by Cornel West (2005, p. 32) as ‘prosperous working class with bourgeois identity’. The ‘19th century project of reform and control, an attempt by working class movements to domesticate capital and its elites in the name of the people and their transparent democratic representative body, the state’, (Friedman, unpublished mss) was now denounced as unrepresentative – a white male club that excluded and marginalised minorities. In the new understandings of identity politics, it was no longer the proletariat (the rapidly forgotten origins of the new middle class) that experienced the oppression of capitalist exploitation. Instead ethnic groups, indigenous peoples, women, gays, the disabled, religious minorities, were the victims in a new discourse of oppressor: colonisation, the patriarchy, and ‘Western’ culture.
The liberal left of the new professional class particularly championed direct participation by minority groups in the nation’s political life on the grounds that new voices were not only heard and respected for the first time but that they contributed to the diversity of a common political culture. Ironically however, the new participatory politics of multiculturalism, whereby governments consulted directly with traditional (or in some cases, self-appointed) leaders representing the various ethnic and religious groups, proved not to be a more direct route to democracy of liberal left expectations. Instead, the brokerage functions and mechanisms of consultation, advice and appointment that accompanied cultural and ethnic politicisation transformed ethnic and religious leaders into self-interested elites whose very claims to ‘represent’ their respective groups depended upon maintaining the groups’ distinctive separateness, ensuring that only they, its leaders, crossed the erected boundaries as the legitimate voice of the group (Rata, 2003a).
Despite the increasingly undemocratic nature of multicultural politics, ‘diversity’ became the favoured discourse of left wing politics, not least for its role in deflecting attention from the liberal left’s discomfort with the contradiction between its own intellectual idealism and its relative economic privilege. This new alliance between the liberal left and identity politics portrayed in Lukes’ (2003, p. 92) ‘holistic Herderian picture’ of cultural wholes, together with its abandonment of class politics, is undoubtedly the reason for what Friedman (in press), citing Jacoby’s The End of Utopia, argues is ‘not simply the defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion’. Earlier, Bloom had argued that these ‘mutant Marxists’, ‘de-rationalise(d) Marx and turned Nietzsche into a leftist’ (1987, p. 222) as a way to simultaneously expiate the guilt of privilege and to champion the poor in an ingenious resolution of the ‘goodness and power’ paradox.
This transformation of the liberal left through its conversion from class to cultural politics was thus justified through the intellectual strand of identity politics: postcolonial theory, postmodernism and the numerous forms of cultural studies that subsequently proliferated throughout universities (Kimball, 1998). Academics, drawing upon cultural theories that insisted upon the primacy of culture, also played a major role in the boundary-making strategies that increasingly characterised ethnic politics. Turton (1997, p. 37) has acknowledged the role played by scholars in creating ideologies. ‘Whether we like it or not, our disciplines – especially, perhaps, history and anthropology provide what Hobsbawn calls the “raw material” of nationalist and ethnic ideologies’. Jonathan Friedman cites an insider critique of ‘British cultural sociology, epitomised by the Birmingham School’s move from Marxism via a culturalist version of Gramsci to ethnic and now hybrid discourse, as a shift from the ”class struggle to the politics of pleasure”’ (Friedman, mss). Indeed, as we shall shortly see, Gramsci’s notion of ‘organic intellectuals’ was hugely influential in seminal writings by New Zealand’s indigenous educationalists (L. T. Smith, 1999; G. H. Smith, 1997).
Ironically, whilst cultural relativism rapidly became a dominant force in universities, Western culture and Enlightenment values were regularly denounced as racist and sexist, even as non-Western traditionalism and tribalism were uncritically held up as examples of freedom, diversity and tolerance (Bloom, 1987, pp. 216-237). Former radical culturalist activists now turned university managers thus resolved their ideological conflicts in that role through the exercise of more limited campus hegemony (D’Souza, 1992, pp.18-19). The result for many campuses has been a climate of fear leading many scholars and students to adopt the rhetoric of anti-elitism, anti-sexism and anti-racism to avoid being labelled rightists or racists (Kimball, 1998: 351).
BICULTURALISM IN TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS
As the foregoing discussion clearly demonstrates, the rise of cultural essentialism has been a global phenomenon, not confined to any particular country. This does not mean, however, that its impact has been uniformly felt. What makes the New Zealand experience of cultural essentialism especially distinctive is its development of biculturalism1, and its justification in a new interpretation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Biculturalism was the main vehicle through which culturalism as an ideology has become embedded in its tertiary institutions, and particularly its colleges of education (Rata, 2008). This process is documented in a forthcoming study which traces the beginnings of bicultural policy from the 1960s to the present to show how New Zealand’s liberal educators became transformed into radical biculturalists to the point where it became unquestioning (and unquestionable) doctrine (Openshaw, 2006).
The tendency for biculturalism to be wielded as a weapon to isolate and to condemn those who do not step into line is particularly prevalent in tertiary institutions which do not have university status. It is in such institutions that left-liberal ‘goodness and power’ contradictions critically intersect with feelings of academic inferiority to precipitate the zealous embracement of culturalism that both distinguishes such institutions from universities, whilst at the same time furnishing staff with the appropriate ideological credentials to be accepted as radical academics. Although the Wanganui Polytechnic case discussed below is not an isolated example of this phenomenon at work, it is one of few that reached the media and hence received extensive coverage.
In 1996 two pakeha (white) Wanganui Polytechnic students, Hanne Jacobsen and Barbara Osbourne, complained of racial harassment on their social work course. Among their concerns were intimidation by classmates, separate classes for Maori and tauiwi (literally ‘foreigners’, sometimes used instead of ‘pakeha’), a demand that a karakia (prayer) be said over a photocopier before Maori articles could be copied, a Maori woman being told she could enter the course half-way through the year if she baked her tutors a cake, Maori students being allowed to start a course a week before pakeha students, because they had been disadvantaged all their lives, and all students being made to wear labels promoting issues of Maori sovereignty (Morgan, 1998, p.1). A subsequent favourable review concluded that though the incidents had taken place, the course was not racist, hence the complaints were not valid and any restrictions on free speech had been self-imposed. Incensed by this dubious outcome from a supposedly neutral body, the two pakeha students took their complaints to the Race Relations Conciliator, Rajen Prasad, who, despite strong criticism from culturalists, found that the Polytechnic had breached the Human Rights Act. Thus, some two years after the initial complaint had been laid, the students concerns were finally upheld. Looking back on the lengthy case, The Dominion newspaper argued that Osbourne and Jakobsen deserved ‘the nation’s thanks for their courage in persisting with their complaint despite the original finding and despite the attempts of the polytechnic to sweep the issue under the carpet with offers of compensation.’ The editorial further observed that whilst all people of goodwill supported closing the gap between Maori and non-Maori performance and achievement, ‘Racism is racism, and is unacceptable whether the necks of those practising it are red or brown’. (‘End polytech racism, The Dominion, 8 September 1998, p.8).
The tendency towards collective coercion of both staff and students, especially where bicultural issues are concerned, has also been noticeable within the former colleges of education, themselves descended from the older teachers’ training colleges. One reason for the strong presence of cultural essentialism within colleges of education lay in their institutional positioning, poised awkwardly between the practical world of the classroom, and the more theoretical world of university-based faculties of education, whilst at the same time obliged to implement the views of their Wellington-based political authorities. Given the ever-increasing criticism from all three sources, the adoption of biculturalism, especially when it could be readily allied to existing educational principles based on progressivism and constructivism, appeared to offer colleges considerable advantages, enabling them to forge a distinctive role within an increasingly threatening political environment (Openshaw, 1996).
Such widespread adoption of biculturalism by teacher education institutions did not go entirely unchallenged however. The Partington Report (1997) strongly critiqued ‘what may be called “Waitangism” …the doctrine that places the Treaty of Waitangi as a critical reference point in all teacher education courses as in many aspects of public life in New Zealand’ (p. 191). The Report singled out both the Wellington College of Education and the Christchurch College of Education as having responded with particular zeal to the demands of partnership between Maori and pakeha in accordance with the Treaty of Waitangi, with every course now having a Treaty and equity statement (pp. 192-94), with the effect that ‘there seems no place where you would not be expected to accept without question a very contestable interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi and its supposed educational implications’ (p. 221). The extent of ideological capture by cultural essentialist principles was said to be epitomised in the Wellington College of Education’s Early Childhood Handbook, which compared its integrated curriculum to a:
… flax rope with the learner at the centre. The rope uncoils in an endless spiral. As it uncoils it touches on three areas: Personal growth as a member of the community; Early Childhood curriculum; and Professional Development. The strands of the rope are theory, practice and the curriculum. Interwoven through the strands are the threads of issues: Bi-culturalism, Partnership with Parents/Whanau, Mainstreaming, Gender Equity, and Assessment and Evaluation. (Partington, p.98).
Such critiques, however, were to go largely unheeded when, beginning in the 1990s, the increasingly rapid pace of university-college of education mergers resulted in previously cushioned university faculties of education facing similar pressures to their polytechnic and college of education counterparts. Thus by 2006, the historically unjustified notion that the Treaty of Waitangi is a ‘partnership’ with educational implications was thoroughly naturalised in the new Bachelor of Education (Teaching) and Diploma of Teaching (ECE) programmes of the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland. The programmes contain the principle: ‘Teacher education programmes will develop the knowledge and skills necessary to practise in ways that are consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi’, and the related outcome; ‘Graduates of initial teacher education programmes will be able to practise in ways that are consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi’ (Programme Handbook, 2006, p. 4).
Such superficially bland policy rhetoric conceals the fact that newly-merged faculties of education are in their turn, uncritically incorporating highly contestable and numerous views about the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand. Separately or in various combinations, the Treaty is understood as: an ongoing political ‘partnership’ between the tribes and the government; New Zealand’s founding document; an historical document recording the strategy used by the British to annex New Zealand; a symbol of two separate cultures – Maori and pakeha; a living symbol of two fundamentally different social and political systems, indigenous and Western; a contract between Maori and pakeha; a contract between the tribes and the British Crown; the agreement allowing pakeha to live in New Zealand; an historical document of little or no relevance to contemporary New Zealand; and a political ideology of the neotribal elite (Rata, 2003b) – to articulate just a few of the conflicting views on the Treaty of Waitangi and its meaning.
Given the current range and diversity of views about the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi, its study as a highly contested document is undoubtedly an academic task of crucial importance. For this reason alone, the promotion of one single ‘correct’ view within academic programmes is highly undesirable. However, the extent of uncritical self-representation and intellectual orthodoxy found in many of the new professional degrees which include a Treaty component means that the ‘correct’ view rapidly becomes unchallengeable doctrine. The reason for such orthodoxy lies in the politicisation of culture whereby many academics in teacher education can be described in the same way that Babadzan described anthropologists, observing that (2000, p. 149), ‘anthropologists tend to appropriate the essentialist ethnic-culturalist discourse that actors hold about the meaning of their own practices rather than provide the critique that enables reflection and scrutiny’.
This problem of intellectual orthodoxy is compounded further by the recent tendency for new professions, such as teacher education, nursing, social work, and business studies, to expect their members to have higher education qualifications specific to the profession, rather than an undergraduate diploma or a postgraduate diploma in the professional area underpinned by a degree in the liberal arts, humanities and social sciences. Certainly, these new degree courses are able to draw on the intellectual ideas of the more established social sciences and humanities which, through their wider theoretical base, have the potential to provide greater intellectual rigour. On the other hand, without constantly delving back into that intellectual well to ensure that the theoretical framework of the new subjects remains under constant scrutiny, those frameworks rapidly become rigid orthodoxies.
A specific problem here is that the intellectual framework for these vocational subjects was laid down during the high point of culturalism in the 1980s. There it seems likely to remain, as academics in these subjects tend to concentrate on issues pertinent to the profession itself, rather than attempt to rework the established intellectual framework which would involve wrestling with the philosophical issues of causality and concept definition. One indication of this shortcoming is that the ‘culture wars’ (Kuper, 1999; Sandall, 2001) raging in anthropology, history and sociology since the mid-1990s are almost unknown in New Zealand teacher education studies.
Considering this intellectually depressing situation it is perhaps hardly surprising that in New Zealand several decades of vocational studies at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in subjects based upon rigidified social science theoretical positions have produced an uncritical conformity to culturalism with highly disputed concepts of ethnicity, culture, and increasingly ‘diversity’ taken as givens. It seems likely that the separation of vocational studies from their intellectual roots will lead to greater ideological conformity amongst professionals, as new generations of professionals take their first degrees in the vocational subjects themselves rather than acquiring a more general bachelor’s degree in the humanities, social sciences or general sciences, followed by a post-graduate qualification in the professional subject.
The limited intellectual legacy and hierarchical management style typical of many former colleges of education is not the only culprit involved in the increasing assault on basic academic freedoms within New Zealand universities. The tendency of cultural essentialism to permeate both university management structures and university student organisations already noted by a number of overseas commentators, continues to be demonstrated in several recent New Zealand cases where staff have suffered threats and harassment. At Wellington’s Victoria University in February 2000, Paul Dunmore, an associate professor in accounting and commercial law, refused to attend a Maori blessing of Rutherford House. He argued in an interdepartmental email that an institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge was inaugurating its new premises with ‘an act of animist superstition’, adding that he would have opposed other religious superstitions on similar grounds. The following month, the editor of Victoria University’s student magazine Salient denounced Dunmore as ‘bigoted’ and ‘ill-educated’, ominously warning that ‘academic freedom is not the right of academics to speak out on any issue, no matter who it might harm, embarrass, demean, belittle, or ridicule’, and calling for the recalcitrant professor to be disciplined by the university (‘”Bigoted” prof under fire. Row over Maori blessing boycott.’ Manawatu Evening Standard, 6 March 2000, p.3). A senior academic and philosopher at the University of Canterbury compared this disciplinary call to those of Nazi Germany’s brownshirts, arguing that the editor was following a long tradition that stretched back from Pol Pot, through Mao Tse-tung, to Hitler. A subsequent article by Peter Rochford, Maori Vice-president of the Association of University Staff, however, strongly upheld the dominant culturalist perspective also embraced by the university’s management. Rochford condemned both dissenting academics and supported the call for disciplinary action on the grounds that New Zealand was a bicultural society within which each culture had the right to its own world-view, without denigration. In Rochford’s view, senior university staff had a particular responsibility to uphold the University’s conduct statute which specifically prohibited causing racial disharmony whilst insisting that all staff consider the University’s role, values and standing (Rochford, 2000, p.4).
It is not just outspoken staff members who are put at risk by the continuing dominance of culturalist ideology within university management structures. Ongoing research itself is also threatened, as recent events at the University of Otago demonstrate. In the South Island, Ngai Tahu is the recognised Treaty partner and tertiary institutions are obliged to work with the tribe to ensure ‘a functional relationship based on the Treaty of Waitangi’. In 2003, a paper entitled ‘Treaty-based Guidelines and protocols for tertiary educated institutions’, attempted a much-needed scholarly analysis of the relationship between traditional societies as represented by Ngai Tahu, and modernism, as represented by western science and social sciences taught within the university (Tau, et al., 2003). In contrast to much university-based research by both Maori and pakeha academics that asserted the primacy of cultural relativism and cultural safety, the document strongly upheld the principals of academic freedom and critical rationalism (p.6). Pointing out that tribal systems were essentially ‘closed,’ it was argued that Ngai Tahu would be best to accept that its knowledge system had been superseded by one that was vastly superior. Its authors also correctly viewed the system as being global rather than wholly Western or pakeha-specific, in that other cultures (Babylonian, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Arab) had materially contributed to its development. The only sensible option was therefore to regard Ngai Tahu’s traditional belief system as a cultural construct that deserved preservation and study, whilst accepting the need to modernise. Thus in science, the authors argued, the problem was essentially one of ensuring suitable Maori academic leadership and presenting knowledge in culturally relevant ways rather than attempting to define knowledge in a way that located it, ”within the infinitely regressive slops of relativity’ (p. 22)
Notwithstanding this sensible document, however, the consultative process is still prone to capture by excessively culturalist-minded university bureaucracies. The University of Otago’s recent policy decision to consult Ngai Tahu over, not just research concerning or involving Maori, but all research undertaken by employees of the university, is a case in point. An Otago Daily Times editorial entitled ‘Research Restricted’ (Friday 22 August 2003), whilst welcoming the debate and the principle of wide research consultation, warned of the immense bureaucracy involved in having all research considered in this manner, not to mention the privileged position a single group now enjoyed regarding the control of researchers.
The extent to which the research bureaucracy has grown exponentially to the point of being ‘anti-research’ is exemplified by the recent experience of a Masters student in seeking to gain ethics approval for a small research study about the challenges faced by three nurses working in remote rural areas in New Zealand in respect to emergency call outs (personal communication). For reasons which were not made clear to the student, the ethics approval must be authorised by the National Health and Disability Ethics Committee (HDE), not the university where the student is actually enrolled. Questions about what this means for a university’s control over its own research policy aside, the research has been considerably delayed by the HDE Committee’s requirement that the researcher consult with the regional Maori Health Manager before ethics approval is given. This is notwithstanding the crucial fact that the researcher will not be asking any of her three participants if they identify as Maori. The powerless student’s frustrations are compounded and the research further delayed by the HDE Committee’s insistence that written evidence be provided of the consultation with Maori before ethics approval enables the interviews to take place. The Maori Health Manager’s failure to put his verbal agreement in writing despite repeated requests means that the research is threatened and the student’s degree completion put at risk. The consultancy role of such positions as Maori Health Manager provides a clear example of the gate-keeping power implicit in the brokerage function which operates as a result of the politicisation of ethnicity. In addition the HDE Committee’s insistence on frequent and regular progress reports, despite the delay caused by its insistence on written evidence of consultation with Maori, means that a small research study and all the student’s financial and career commitment to acquiring postgraduate qualifications are in jeopardy. The bureaucratic gatekeeping operated by ethnicised brokers at all levels of research activity, of which this is just one example, leads to an ‘anti-research’ culture, one quite at odds with the claims made by New Zealand universities to spear-head a research-driven society.
Despite the dominance of culturalist ideology in all areas of New Zealand’s intellectual life, there are a small but growing number of academics who are publishing critical analyses. John Clark’s (2006) examination of the action of New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa, in suppressing in a display any references to the massacre of the Chatham Islands people by Maori invaders from the mainland follows an earlier work by the historian, Peter Munz (2000) which discussed the objection of four eminent New Zealand historians to the museum’s display. Both objected to the museum’s justification that there was no real objective truth and that Matauranga Maori (Maori knowledge) must be protected at all costs. Munz referred to the museum’s portrayal of Moriori history as political propaganda’ (p. 16) and ‘gross historical misrepresentation’ (p. 13). He ascribed the museum’s approach to academics’ ‘propagation of widespread delusions’ which happen to be “politically correct” (p. 16). Similarly, Clark critiqued the tendency within tertiary institutions to claim the equal validity of different knowledge bases which are held to be mirror opposites. Thus, typically (western) science is characterised as analytic, sceptical, and evidence-based, whilst the other is said to be holistic, has accepted truths, is close to the natural environment and emphasises relationships. A particularly vivid example of this Western-indigenous dualism comes from a Maori education administrator’s invited speech to senior officials of the New Zealand Treasury.
The Päkehä world is clearly compartmentalized. There is a compartment for the mundane and another for the spirit. This allows good Christians to rob and pillage during the week and to go to church on Sunday all with a clear conscience. For indigenous peoples the compartmentalization of one’s life and mind is not customarily part of their makeup; the world of the spirit and the world of the mundane are not clearly separated although today as a result of colonization separation has begun and sometimes with dire consequences. (Hook, 2006)
A recent paper by Dannette Marie and Brian Haig (2006) reveals the extent of culturalist orthodoxy in controlling research funding. They express concern that New Zealand’s ‘Health Research Council describes kaupapa Maori research (ie Maori science, paradigms and methodologies) as ‘world-class’ when its methodology has not been subject to critical evaluation, and little of that research has been published in peer-reviewed journals’. Their analysis demonstrates just how pervasive adherence to culturalism is throughout all stages of the research process. ‘Statements requiring research scientists to endorse this methodology are now variously found in government science policies, national-level research funding guidelines, national and university ethics committees guidelines, and professional bodies’ research codes of conduct. Further, many departments in the state services sector have commissioned KMR (Kaupapa Maori Research), and a wide range of disciplines within the tertiary sector now teach KMR methodology as a stand-alone, fully-fledged conception of inquiry’ (p. 18). Indeed, so institutionalised is the uncritiqued idea of kaupapa Maori research that it is incorporated into the system for determining the allocation of research funding to tertiary education organisations (the Performance-Based Research Fund – PBRF), where it plays a significant role in the assessment of the quality of researchers and the resulting career development opportunities. According to Alcorn, Bishop, Cardno et al (2004) ‘the quality of Maori research in education is high. Many Maori education academics were among those receiving the highest quality rating (12% of all A and B grades were in Maori education)’ (p. 281). This success is directly tied to the acceptance by academia of kaupapa Maori research. ‘Perhaps the most obvious feature was the success of Maori academics in education in developing alternative and critical epistemological models and research methodologies’ (p. 281). Within such a repressive ideological climate, it becomes almost impossible for researchers who wish to develop a critique of culturalism, or even to resist its adherence criteria, to undertake or develop research projects given the extent of the gate-keeping at all stages of the research funding approval process.
Christopher Tremewan’s 2005 article, ‘Ideological Conformity: A Fundamental Challenge to the Social Sciences in New Zealand’ is another provocative challenge to social scientists about the considerable implications of ideological conformity to cultural essentialism. He asks that social scientists engage with ‘the ideological verities which have become aligned with government social policy, which (are) legislatively programmed and ideologically policed.’ Tremewan also perceptively refers to the social sciences as ‘the dead hand that stifled rather that promoted critical debate’ and failed ‘to provide an adequate critique of social norms’ in New Zealand (p. 2).
These papers join earlier work by Nash (1990), Openshaw et al. (1993), Rata (1996, 2000); Oliver (2001), Chapple (2000, 2004) and others in resisting the demands of current intellectual doctrine for a scientific and critical analysis of social phemomena. The current impact of culturalism, however, is such that questions of who controls what counts as legitimate knowledge – and who counts as knowledge-brokers – have become central issues for the maintenance of academic freedom. Ironically, the politics of so-called inclusion, whereby every course development committee and every research ethics and funding committee is required to include a Maori representative, has resulted in the politics of exclusion.
The situation is exacerbated when state agencies continue to act on culturalist principles, frequently fusing them with the rhetoric of the global marketplace to give them added power. The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology for ‘instance, has recently announced that it is to spend more than $1 million a year on research projects into indigenous Maori knowledge. Justifying the expenditure, the Foundation’s Strategy Manager, John Kupe, claimed that New Zealand could be ‘a world leader in understanding the contribution that indigenous knowledge could make to science and innovation, through traditional technologies which have the potential to deliver products and processes that are globally unique and will give New Zealand a marketing edge’ (Dominion Post, 20 April 2006).
The links between cultural essentialism, indigenous science, and global entrepreneurship are noteworthy in the above press release. Maori business has also taken on a life of its own, with people now believing there is such a thing as Maori business (Devlin, 2006). Even in tertiary institutions the concept is promoted on the basis of frequently unsubstantiated assertions which, in turn, are based on essentialist ideology. Academic positions are created; academic courses proliferate, in turn creating the need for advisers and consultants. The growing brokerage infrastructure must be administered, employing more people, necessitating further funding, and further institutional commitment – all without the term and its underlying culturalist ideology being critically examined.
Yet what exactly is Maori knowledge? Many education faculties in New Zealand’s tertiary institutions seem all too willing to include such knowledge, uncritically. One example of this is Auckland University’s Faculty of Education, which recently stated as its goal that ‘Teacher education programmes will develop flexible and accurate understanding of subject matter knowledge, and related to te ao Maori dimensions, associated with the core activities of teaching in curriculum areas’ (Programme Handbook, p.4). (‘Te ao Maori dimensions’ refers to knowledge and understandings of the Maori world.) And if education faculties and even whole universities are culpable in this respect, then who can blame New Zealand’s Energy Safety Service for recently issuing a ludicrous household safety pamphlet outlining the current electrical code of practice recently issued for household use as follows:
From a Maori perspective, the term “earth” or Papatuanuku translates as Earth Mother – the source of all energy. When aligning this concept to the flow of electricity, a useful parallel can be made to the 3-pin plug
Electricity Maori
Active (phase) Spiritual element, active, tapu
Neutral Physical element, neutral, noa
Earth Mauri or life force derived from
Papatuanuku or Earth Mother
(Deputy Secretary, Energy Safety Service, 2004).
Juxtaposing science and mythology in this way, does justice to neither. Rather, it leads to the mockery of both. Mythology is indeed important as the symbolic code that creates social and historical consciousness and cements the important social bonds that enable societies to cohere. However, as Marie and Haig note (2006, p.17), ‘the unsatisfactory conclusion drawn by epistemological relativism is that one group’s belief in supernatural causation, for example, is epistemologically equivalent to another group’s belief in naturalistic causation’. But science surely has a separate function; one jealously guarded in the secularism of the university. Indeed if this separation of belief and science were not the case, pakeha academics would still legitimately be debating key traditionalist questions that reflect a European medieval world view – such as: ‘How many Angels candance on a pin head?’ Indeed, if advocates were being really consistent about applying bicultural and culturally essentialist principles, it could be argued that the Energy Safety Service pamphlet requires urgent revision in the interests of Treaty partnership to incorporate a third column based on traditional Christian cosmology, thus relegating the so-called ‘scientific’ point of view to one of three equally valid world views.
EXPANDING THE WEB OF CULTURAL SAFETY:
Whilst biculturalism stands out as the dominant New Zealand variation of a now dominant Western ideology, cultural essentialism as a doctrine has also had a significant impact on research and teaching to the extent where academic freedom has been strongly threatened. As a result tertiary administrations are now obliged to defer to politically powerful interest groups that derive their power to condemn from culturalist principles. This paper concludes by briefly examining two seemingly different events, – the first concerning an academic and the Mormon Church, and the second, concerning supposedly insulting portrayals of Chairman Mao. It should be emphasised that we are not attempting to defend or to justify the positions taken by the individuals involved in these controversies. Rather, our intention is to further illustrate how essentialist concerns have come to increasingly dictate the way tertiary institutions respond to controversy.
In August 1998 Raymond Richards, a Senior Lecturer in History and American Studies, taught a first-year course in the history of the United States. This course included a lecture on Mormonism which, Richards contended, was based on the research of many respected historians in the field that held Mormonism was a cult, and that its founder, Joseph Smith, was a conman, fraudster and megalomaniac (Dominion, 2 October 1998, p.5). Following this lecture, Richards was informed by the University’s Mediator, that some students had formally charged him with harassment. They demanded an apology and equal time in which to present the Mormon view. According to Richards, he subsequently received threatening calls but received no support from university management. His letter to Vice-Chancellor, Bryan Gould, which made reference to the concept of academic freedom, allegedly received the response that he would try to ‘provide some satisfaction to the complainants.’ Richards subsequently related that he was obliged to consent to a public debate with the Mormon Church which resulted in a lecture theatre confrontation in which he was accused of being both incompetent and unprofessional. Although Richards kept his job, and the students later withdrew their complaint, one result of the furor was that several of his colleagues told him that they would drop controversial topics from their programmes to avoid harassment charges (Richards, 2002).
In May 2006, the Manawatu Standard reported a furor on Massey University’s Turitea Campus when angry Chinese students protested over the alleged ‘send-up’ of Chairman Mao in the student magazine Chaff (Issue 10, May 2006, front cover). A number of Chinese students termed the article racist and likened it to the portrayal of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper the preceding February, warning that Chinese students spent a lot of money in New Zealand, and implying that this beneficial practice could be endangered. Perhaps with similar threats in mind, the Massey University Officer, Bruce Graham, claimed that the cover showed a lack of respect and was in extremely poor taste, though he accepted the magazine’s editorial independence (Manawatu Standard 1 May 2006, p.1). Despite considerable pressure including a warning from New Zealand’s Race Relations Conciliator, Joris De Bres, that student magazines should be responsible, the editors of Chaff bravely refused to apologise. It is noteworthy, however, that a subsequent Chaff issue featuring an article on world cup soccer that identified one player’s weakness as ‘being French’, whilst questioning whether readers could really trust anyone playing from Germany because Hitler had come from that country, apparently attracted no adverse comment. Doubtless, American students too, would be expected to show the same forbearance regarding satirical portrayals of President Bush. Culturalism, it seems, disavows even the cultural relativism its own supporters claim to embrace.
CONCLUSION:
Unfortunately, the otherwise worthy sentiments expressed by Dr Cullen concerning the role and mission of New Zealand universities cited at the beginning of this article are being undermined, largely because the academic freedom essential for progress is both hampered and threatened by the uncritical acceptance and promotion of culturalism.
At the heart of cultural essentialism, and biculturalism, lies an essential contradiction that make them dubious approaches for universities to embrace uncritically, especially given their oft-stated goals of promoting intellectual leadership, critical thinking and independence of thought. Culturalists insist that all ways of knowing are inherently equal. In practice, however, they embrace an inverse cultural hierarchy with indigenous knowledge at the top, Western, secular, pakeha culture at the bottom, and the various other cultures strung out in between these polarities. In the hands of tertiary bureaucracies predominantly concerned with keeping their clients happy, however, the case studies we have presented suggests that the dominant response to this contradiction has been the adoption of a somewhat pragmatic cultural hierarchy in respect to which particular cultures enjoy priority in the enforcement of its viewpoints and the suppression of others. If true, then the formulation of some rules of engagement for tertiary staff is probably possible. Hence, university staff who come under fire for supposedly ridiculing Maori culture, especially spirituality, would be unlikely to survive, but would be on fairly safe ground in critiquing say, Protestantism or Roman Catholicism. Attacking Mormons would probably have a variable outcome for the perpetrator, depending on the grounds the complainants based their case on, and their ability to form alliances with more politically influential groups around common interests. Satirising Chairman Mao is apparently off-limits, but Americans, Hitler, and Germans generally, are legitimate – and safe – subjects for denigration.
This paper, however, is ultimately not about scoring cheap points off dominant ideologies. Neither should our critique of the impact of culturalism on New Zealand’s tertiary institutions in its various guises imply a rejection of the role of academics in identifying and critiquing the social reality – including the reality of social inequalities and the fact that groups self-identify or are identified by others in ethnic terms. We are not asserting that specific groups do not experience a particular social reality as a consequence. Neither are we in favour of ‘Maori-bashing’, or deliberately seeking to insult either Chinese or Mormons. Rather, our concern lies with the issue of power, especially with the way power is currently being wielded and its consequences for academic freedom. For instance, it is noteworthy that although the historical experience of women in New Zealand in some ways parallels that of Maori, direct constraints upon researchers has only occasionally occurred. Moreover, widespread formal requirements that women as an identifiable group be widely consulted by tertiary management, much less vested with the power to effectively discourage research deemed inappropriate, has been far less evident. For these reasons, as critical academics in the social sciences, we are increasingly concerned that the ideology of culture and biculturalism not only hampers us in examining other possibilities, but that institutionalised culturalism has made any serious criticism a risky task.
Instead of meekly surrendering what previous generations of academics have fought so hard to protect to those cultural groups deemed to have the most justification for defining the nature of the academic task, we wish to endorse a tertiary climate where academic objectivity has been restored, as opposed to the prevailing ‘I know because I am’ rhetoric. Only within such a climate will it again become possible within the academy for biculturalism in all its guises to be critically examined as a political approach based upon cultural essentialist values, that in turn, are contestable – the same as we would wish to do for any other ideology, value or creed. Only in this way can we return to the ideal of the university as a true market place where ideas, theories and innovations can be critically examined in a true spirit of academic freedom.
References:
Alcorn, N., Bishop, R., Cardno, C., Crooks, T., Fairbairn-Dunlop, Hattie, J.,
Jones, A., Kane, R. O’Brien, & J. Stevenson (2004) Enhancing Education Research in New Zealand: Experiences and Recommendations from the PBRF Education Peer Review Panel, New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 39(2), 275-302.
Babadzan, A. (2000) ‘Anthropology, Nationalism and “the Invention of
Tradition”,’ Anthropological Forum, 10(2), 131-155.
‘“Bigoted” Prof Under Fire.’ Row Over Maori Blessing Boycott’ (2000).
Manawatu Evening Standard, 6 March.
Bloom, A. (1987) The Closing of the American Mind (New York, Simon and
Schuster).
Chaff. Palmerston North: Massey University Students Association. Issue 10,
May 2006. Front cover entitled ‘Cosmopolitan – Chairman Mee-ow.’
Chapple, S. (2000) ‘Maori Socio-Economic Disparity,’ Political Science,
52(2), 101 – 15.
Chapple, S. (2005) ‘Sex Inequality in the Maori Population in the Prehistoric,
Protohistoric and Early Historic Eras in a Trans-Polynesian Context,’ The Journal of Pacific History, 40(1), 1-21.
Clark, J. (2006) ‘Dogmas of Ethnicity,’ in: E. Rata & R. Openshaw (Eds)
Public Policy and Ethnicity, The Politics of Ethnic Boundary-Making (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan), 170-184.
Cullen, M. (2006). Ensuring Quality and Relevance – Future Directions for
Funding Tertiary Organisations. Speech to Stakeholders. Speech
notes. Wellington. 4 April.
Delvin, M. (2006) ‘Ethnicity in Business, The Case of New Zealand Maori,’
in: E. Rata & R. Openshaw (Eds) Public Policy and Ethnicity, The Politics of Ethnic Boundary-Making (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan), 81-94.
D’Souza, D. (1992) Illiberal Education. Political Correctness and the College
Experience (Ashland University, Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs).
‘End Polytech Racism,’ Dominion, 8 September 1998, p.8.
Deputy Secretary, Energy Safety Service (2004) New Zealand Electrical Code
of Practice for Homeowner/Occupier’s Electrical Wiring Work in Domestic Installations (Wellington, Energy Safety Service).
Dominion, 2 October 1998, p.5. Article entitled, ‘Mormon Students Withdraw
Complaint.’ No author given.
Dominion Post. 4 September 2003, B4. Editorial entitled ‘Academic Freedom
Must Apply To All’. No author given.
Eder. K. (1993) The New Politics of Class (London, Sage Publications).
Friedman, J. (1994) Cultural Identity and Global Process, London: Sage.
Friedman, J. ‘Aspects of the Inversion of Ideology,’ unpublished manuscript.
Quoted with permission of the author.
Gouldner, A. (1979). The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class
(London, Macmillan).
Hook, R. (2006) ‘A Future for Mäori Education,’ Speech to New Zealand
Treasury, Victoria University of Wellington, September 26,
http://www.treasury.govt.nz/academiclinkages/hook/tgls-hook.pdf
Kellner, H. & Heuberger, F. W. (1992) (Eds) Hidden Technocrats, The New
Class and New Capitalism (London, Transaction Publishers).
Kellner, H. & Berger, P. L. (1992) ‘Life-Style Engineering: Some Theoretical
Reflections,’ in: H. Kellner & F. W. Heuberger, (Eds) Hidden Technocrats, The New Class and New Capitalism (London: Transaction Publishers), 1-22.
Kimball, R. (1998) Tenured Radicals. How Politics has Corrupted our Higher
Education (Chicago, Ivan R.Dee. Elephant paperback edition).
Kuper, A. (1999) Culture, The Anthropologists’ Account, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Lasch C. (1995) The Revolt of the Elites (New York, W. W. Norton &
Company).
Lukes S. (2003) Liberals and Cannibals, The Implications of Diversity
(London, Verso).
Manawatu Standard, 18 May 2006, p.1. Article entitled, ‘Students see red over Chaff Mao send-up,’ by Caitlin McKay).
Marie, D. & Haig, B. (2006) ‘Kaupapa Maori Research Methodology: A
Critique And An Alternative.’ New Zealand Science Review. 63(1), 17-21.
Morgan, J. (1998). ‘Inquiry into Polytech Finds Anti-Pakeha Bias’. Dominion,
4 September, p.1.
Munz, P. (2000).Te Papa and the Problem of Historical Truth. History Now,
6, (1), 13-16.
Nash. R. (1990). ‘Society and Culture in New Zealand: An Outburst for 1990,’
New Zealand Sociology, 5(2), 99-124.
Nanda, M. (2003). Prophets Facing Backward. Postmodern Critiques of
Science and Hindu Nationalism in India. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London, Rutgers University Press.
Naryan, U. (19970. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-
World Feminism. New York, Routledge.
Oliver W. H. (2001) ‘The Future Behind Us,’ in: A. Sharp, P. McHugh (Eds)
Histories, Power and Loss (Wellington, Bridget Williams Books), 9–30.
Olssen, M. (2002) The Neo-Liberal Appropriation of Tertiary Education
Policy in New Zealand: Accountability, Research and Academic Freedom. “State-of-the-Art’ Monograph No 8. (Palmerston North, New Zealand Association for Research in Education).
Openshaw, R. (2006) ‘Putting Ethnicity into Policy,’ in: E. Rata & R.
Openshaw (Eds) Public Policy and Ethnicity, The Politics of Ethnic Boundary-Making (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan), 113-128.
Openshaw, R., Lee, G. & Lee, H. (1993). Challenging the Myths. Rethinking
New Zealand’s Educational History (Palmerston North, Dunmore Press).
Openshaw, R (1996) Between Two Worlds. A History of Palmerston North
College of Education 1956-1996 (Palmerston North, Dunmore Press).
Parkin, F. (1968) Middle Class Radicalism (Manchester, Manchester
University Press.
Partington, P. (1997). Teacher Education and Training in New Zealand
(Auckland, Education Forum), November.
Programme Handbook (2006) Bachelor of Education (Teaching) and Diploma
of Teaching (ECE), Faculty of Education, University of Auckland.
Rata, E. (2003a). ‘Leadership Ideology in Neotribal Capitalism,’ Political Power and Social Theory. 16. 45 – 73.
Rata, E. (2003b). ‘The Treaty and Neotribal Capitalism,’ Public Sector, 26(3),
2 – 6.
Rata, E. (2000) A Political Economy of Neotribal Capitalism (Lanham, MD,
Lexington Books).
Rata, E. (1996). ‘“Goodness and Power”: The Sociology of Liberal Guilt,’
New Zealand Sociology, 11(2), 231 – 274).
‘Research Funds for Maori Knowledge,’ Dominion Post, 20 April 2006, A2.
‘Research Restricted’. Otago Daily Times. 22 August 2003. Editorial. No
author given.
Rata, E. (2008in press) Educating for Citizenship in a Bicultural Society, In
Brown, S., O’Neill, J. & A. St George (Eds.) Facing the Big Questions in Education: Purpose, Power and Learning (Melbourne: Cengage).
Rata, E. (2004) Neotribalism and Public Policy, Political Science, 56(1), 55 –
64.
Rata, E. & Openshaw, R. (2006) (Eds) Public Policy and Ethnicity, The
Politics of Ethnic Boundary-Making (Houndmills,Palgrave Macmillan). Introduction, pp.1-24.
Richards, R. (2002) ‘Mormonism and academic freedom’. New Zealand
Skeptic. No 62 (Summer), pp.3-7.
Rochford, P. (2000) ‘Treaty? What Treaty?’ He Paku Korero, March. (Bi-
annually). Association of University Staff, Wellington, pp.3-4
Sandall, R. (2001) The Culture Cult (Boulder: Westview Press.)
Smith L. T. 1999. Decolonising Methodologies (Dunedin, University of Otago
Press).
Smith G. H. (1997) The Development of Kaupapa Maori: Theory and Praxis.
Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Auckland.
Szelenyi, I. (1991) in: C. G. Lemert, (Ed) Intellectuals and Politics: Social
Theory in a Changing World (London, Sage Publications).
Tremewan C. (2005) ‘Ideological Conformity: A Fundamental Challenge to
the Social Sciences in New Zealand.’ Sites New Series 2(1), 1-27.
West, C. (2005) ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference,’ in: C. McCarthy,
W. Crichlow, G. Dimitriadis, & N. Dolby (Eds) Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (New York, Routledge), 29-42.
Tau, T. M., Ormsby, D., Manthei, M. & T. Potiki, T. (2003) Tertiary-based
Guidelines and Protocols: For Tertiary Education Institutions. Christchurch: Te Tapuae o Rehua Ltd in association with University of Otago Press.
Turton, D. (Ed) (1997) War and Ethnicity, Global Connections and Local
Violence (Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress, San Marino (RSM), University of Rochester Press).
1 ‘Originally a progressive project committed to incorporating Maori culture into the nation’s symbolic identity, biculturalism became the vehicle for separatist ethnic politics and a fundamentalist ‘blood and soil’ ideology under the control of an emergent neotribal elite’. (Rata, 2005: 267). The post-1987 interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi as a political ‘partnership’ between the revived tribes and the government played a crucial role in reshaping biculturalism.
A version of the article ‘History of Kaupapa Matauranga Māori at Auckland University in the 1990s’ was later published as a chapter:
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.
Elizabeth Rata
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.
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. 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 article are threefold[1]. 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[2]; 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[3].
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[4]. 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’[5]. 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.
Geary, D. C. (2002). Principles of evolutionary educational psychology, Learning and Individual Differences, Pergamon, 12, 317-345.
Graham, D. (2000) ‘Fishing, food-gathering are “customary” rights’, New Zealand Herald, 30 August, p.13
Iwi Investment Wananga Report, 2010, The Report of the Iwi Collaboration Infrastructure Wananga, held at Tapu teRanga Marae 9-10 August 2010 www.iwichairs.maori.nz Available 17 March 2011
Li, T. (2010). Indigeneity, Capitalism, and the Management of Dispossession. Current Anthropology. 51(3); 396-420.
Lynch, C. & Rata, E. (2018) Culturally responsive pedagogy: A New Zealand case study, International Studies in Sociology of Education, 27:4, 391-408.
Maton, Karl and Moore, Rob (2010) (ed.) Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education, Coalitions of the Mind. Continuum.
Nepe, T., Rata, E., Smith, G. H., Smith, L. (1989). Proposals for the Establishment of Kura
Kaupapa Maori, Access, 8 (1).
Munz, P. (1999). Open and Closed Research. New Zealand Books, December, pp. 4-6).
Popper, K. (2003). The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol Two: Hegel and Marx. London: Routledge.
Rata, E. (1989). Kura Kaupapa Maori PPTA Journal, Term 3, November, 31 – 33.
Rata, E. (1991). Maori Survival and Structural Separateness. Unpublished M.Ed. Thesis, University of Auckland.
Rata, E. (1996a). ‘Goodness and Power’: The Sociology of Liberal Guilt, New Zealand
Sociology, 11(2), 231-274.
Rata, E. M. (1996b). The Emergence of Tribal Capitalism. Unpublished Thesis. University of Auckland.
Rata, E. (2002). Democratic principles in teaching and learning: A Kantian approach. Monograph research series of the Auckland College of Education. ISSN 1175-8740
Rata, E. (2003). The Treaty and Neotribal Capitalism, Public Sector: The Journal of the Institute of Public Administration New Zealand, 26 (3) 2 – 6.
Rata, E. (2011). Theoretical Claims and Empirical Evidence in Maori Education
Discourse. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(10), 1060-1072.
Rata, E. (2011) Discursive Strategies of the Maori Tribal Elite, Critique of Anthropology,
31(4). 359–380.
Rata, E. (2013). Knowledge and the Politics of Culture: An example from New
Zealand’s Higher Education Policy and Practice. Anthropological Theory, 13 (4), 329-346.
Rata, E. (2017) Ethnic Revival. In Fathali M. Moghaddam Ed. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Political Behavior, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Rata, E. (2013). Knowledge and the Politics of Culture: An example from New
Zealand’s Higher Education Policy and Practice. Anthropological Theory, 13 (4), 329-346.
Rata, E. (2018) Connecting Knowledge to Democracy In Knowledge, curriculum and equity: Social realist perspectives. In Barrett, B., Hoadley, U. & J. Morgan, (Eds.), Routledge. (pp. 19-32); London: Routledge.
Rata, E. (2019). Response. Waikato Journal of Education, 24(1), 103-105.
Rose, S. (2015). Two thematic manifestations of neotribal capitalism in the United States, Anthropological Theory, 15, 2, 218-238.
Round, David (2000) ‘Judicial Activity and the Treaty: The Pendulum Returns’, Otago Law
Review 19(4): 653-671.
Schroder IW (2003) The political economy of tribalism in North America: Neotribal capitalism? Anthropological Theory 3(4): 435–456.
Smith, G. H. (2012). Interview: Kaupapa Māori: The dangers of domestication. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 47, 2, 10-20.
Smith, L.T. (1999). Decolonising Methodologies. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.
Stewart, G.T., & Devine, N. (2019). A critique of Rata on the politics of knowledge and Māori education. Waikato Journal of Education, 24(1), 93-101. https://doi.org/10.15663/wje.v24v1.665
TPK, Te Puni Kokiri, Ministry of Maori Development (2001) He Tirohanga o Kawa ki te Tiriti o Waitangi: A Guide to the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi as expressed by the Courts and the Waitangi Tribunal. Wellington: Department of Justice.
Widdowson, F. and Howard, A. (2008). Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
[1] I refer to a number of my own publications in order to illustrate the changing trajectory of my scholarship with respect to the knowledge/power issue.
[2] This article was published in Access as Nepe, T., Rata, E., Smith, G. H., Smith, L. (1989). Proposals for the Establishment of Kura Kaupapa Maori, Access, 8 (1). I remember how we authors congratulated ourselves at the time on securing an academic publication. Several years later I was surprised and dismayed to find that the article was no longer in the journal. It had been replaced by one that contained some of the same material. The replacement article is Smith, G (1989). Kaupapa Māori: Innovation and Policy Development in Māori Education. Access, 8, 1, 25-43. I do not know when the replacement occurred. I have retained the original citation in my Curriculum Vitae to this day.
[3] My 2011 publication in Critique of Anthropology discusses the neotribal elite’s promotion of several key discourses. These include an ahistorical presentism with the reification of indigeneity in a timeless primordialism
[4] For reasons that are unknown to me the review was not published.
[5] My knowledge/power interest was recently re-activated by an account of my ideas by another of the ‘inheritors’ of the School of Education (Stewart and Devine, 2019). Like myself, one of the authors, Nesta Devine, and a contributor to this festschrift, completed her PhD in Auckland’s School of Education at the end of Roger Dale’s influential decade. Her supervisers were Dale’s colleagues, Michael Peters and James Marshall, the latter I mention above.
My recent article about the role that the concept of a Treaty ‘partnership’ has played in the development of ethno-nationalism provoked a critical response from Professor Andrew Geddis. We obviously have different opinions about the value of a Treaty partnership in New Zealand’s liberal democracy. My purpose here is to address the specific matters raised by Geddis.
He is correct to point out that original 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act only permitted complaints to the Waitangi Tribunal about post-1975 breaches of the ‘principles of the Treaty by the Crown’. This does not in any way detract, as Geddis maintains, from my conclusion about the role of the 1985 Amendment Act. I argued that what differentiates the 1985 Amendment Act from the 1975 Act is the ‘recognition of iwi-Māori rather than pan-Māori as the inheritors of Treaty settlements’. That recognition established the reviving tribe as “both political player and economic corporation” and has been foundational in promoting the tino rangatiratanga or ethno-nationalism exemplified in the He Puapua report. I stand by this conclusion.
Geddis is also correct to say that the 1975 Act refers to the principles of the Treaty. I had stated that the State Owned Enterprises Act 1986 represents “the first reference in legislation or policy to the principles of the Treaty – indeed, the first indication that the Treaty has principles”. I was referring to the beginning of the process of enacting the “principles” of the Treaty by including them in legislation and policy beyond the two Treaty Acts themselves. In response to his criticism I would add the following italicised words to ensure that my point is clear. “This is the first reference in other legislation or policy to the principles of the Treaty – indeed, the first indication that the Treaty has principles which could be enacted in legislation and policy”. I had thought that the sentence context supported my point but I accept the need for clarification and am pleased to have the opportunity to do so.
Geddis points out that there are now ‘44 current parliamentary enactments’ which contain the phrase “principles of the treaty”. I accept his rebuke that this number is substantially less than the 1800 enactments on our statute books. However I continue to maintain that this number is significant, not least because of the areas of public life to which they refer and to their flow-on effects. Legislation leads to policies and to the practice of policies. My own area of education contains numerous examples of this. I will limit myself to one example – that of teaching course reviews. I teach in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland. After teaching a course, whether undergraduate or post-graduate, I complete an obligatory course review. A section in the review template asks: “How does the course critically reflect Treaty of Waitangi obligations (Māori histories, traditions, values, identity, language, culture and Mātauranga Māori (Māori ways of knowing, doing and being)?”
This obligation is justified with reference to the 1989 Education Act requirement. The Act states that it is the duty of University Councils to “acknowledge the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”. That legislation led to comprehensive policies developed by the 2003 Maori Tertiary Education Framework and subsequently. In turn these policies have put Treaty “acknowledgement” into a wide range of obligatory practices in higher education. They include not only the teaching course reviews I mention above but research procedures and funding applications.
The compulsory education sector, health, social work, local government and justice are among other areas of public life similarly affected by Treaty principles. Unfortunately in his focus on the number of statutes, Geddis deals neither with their significance nor with my key point. This is that “adequate justification was not given to the New Zealand people when the process” of inserting Treaty principles into legislation “began and there has certainly been no justification since. The peoples’ agreement has never been sought”.
Justice Robin Cooke described the 1987 Court of Appeal case which interpreted the Treaty principles as “perhaps as important for the future of our country as any that has come before a New Zealand court”. Despite the fact that legal interpretations have political consequences, it is difficult, almost impossible, to have an open discussion about what is a valid judicial interpretation and what is political activism by the judiciary – the latter I claim to be the case in the 1987 decision. Since the late 1980s Treaty matters are ring-fenced in the esoteric world of the Law. The public is left hesitant to question such putative authority. Yet public engagement with decisions which have huge constitutional consequences is needed now more than ever as we deal with the possibility of tino rangatiratanga for New Zealand’s future.
Geddis notes that the phrase “the principles of the Treaty” had been considered and applied by the Waitangi Tribunal in eight of the Tribunal’s reports prior to 1986. However, Waitangi Tribunal reports are not legislation – I was writing about legislation. He refers to the Tribunal’s role in influencing the Court of Appeal’s 1987 decision regarding its interpretation of the 1986 State Owned Enterprises Act. Rather than ‘badly misrepresent(ing) the complex interaction between the Tribunal and the courts in this area’ as he states, I find that his comment strengthens my argument.
I am alarmed that Waitangi Tribunal reports do influence the courts to the extent he claims. If this is the case, then my concern about judicial activism playing a key role in the contemporary interpretation of the Treaty is confirmed. Indeed the path from the Tribunal to the courts to ethno-nationalist politics is illustrated by a comment made in 1989 by Sir Hugh Kawharu. Kawharu acknowledged the significance of the 1987 Court of Appeal judgement in particular as the ‘resurgence of acceptability of tribal authority’.
I will not comment on Professor Geddis’ allegations of “carelessness” and “poor scholarship”. Such language is used in order to undermine an opponent’s arguments and has no place in discussions of this nature. Published in The Democracy Project, 25th July 2021
Elizabeth Rata and Carlos Zubaran
A version of the article reproduced below was first published in 2009 as ‘When Criticism is Silent: Mental health in New Zealand’, chapter 6 in Openshaw, R & Rata, E. (Eds.), The Politics of Conformity. Pearson Publishers.
In 2016, Rata and Zubaran published ‘Ethnic Classification in the New Zealand Health Care System’ in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Issue 41, pages 192- 209.
The version below was adapted in July 2021 from the 2009 chapter in response to the Government’s intention to establish a separate Maori Health Authority.
Authors’ Biographies (July 2021)
Professor Elizabeth Rata is the Director of the Knowledge in Education Research Unit (KERU). She is based in the School of Critical Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Auckland. Her expertise includes investigating the politics of ethnicity in New Zealand internationally with a focus on government policy, primarily though not exclusively, on education policy.
Professor Carlos Zubaran Jr holds a Conjoint Professorial appointment with the School of Medicine at Western Sydney University and is also the Acting Clinical Director of the Drug and Alcohol Program at St John of God Richmond Hospital. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and member of the its Faculty of Addiction Psychiatry and was the recipient of the World Psychiatric Association International Fellowship Award (1996) and the US National Institute on Drug Abuse Distinguished International Scientist Award (2009). Professor Zubaran is the co-chair of the Section of Transcultural Psychiatry of the World Psychiatric Association. He has worked as a clinical psychiatrist in the New Zealand health system.
Introduction
Descriptions of Māori mental health made disturbing reading at the time this article was first written in 2009 and continue to do so in 2021. The suffering of individuals, the distress to families, and the loss of healthy active citizens to New Zealand society speak loudly from the bald statistics of government reports (Ministry of Health, 2006). At least since the 1980s and 1990s, the health status of New Zealanders has been characterised by marked disparities between Māori and non-Māori, ‘particularly for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The situation is exceptionally serious for male Māori adults under the age of 40, the group most likely to be clients of mental health services’ (MoH, 2006, p. 131). Adding to the human suffering is the growth in anxiety and eating problems along with the more traditional ‘mood, alcohol and drug disorders’ (p. 131).
Mason Durie’s Māori Health Model, Te Whare Tapa Wha was embraced as the solution (Ministry of Health, 2009; Durie, 2006; Chaplow, Chaplow & Maniopoto, 1993; Dyck & Kearns, R., 1995; Cunningham, 2000). Despite an absence of scientific scrutiny (Marie & Haig, 2006), the model has become the orthodox and unchallengeable approach to Māori mental health policy and practice in the New Zealand health system. The model informs not only Māori mental health but underpins the spread of a distinctive ethnicised approach throughout the health sector in professional practice, administration, and the structure of the system itself (He Korowai Oranga, Maori Health Strategy, 2002). In 2021 this distinctive approach has become so uncritically accepted that it is to be formalised in the state’s governance structures. In May 2021 the government announced that a Steering Group, led by Sir Mason Durie will provide advice to the Transition Unit overseeing the establishment of a separate Māori Health Authority.
The Māori Health Authority is based on the belief that ethnically separate health care leads to improved health which, in turn, contributes to greater social equality. However, there is no agreement among scientists that this is, in fact, the case. Indeed, some authors caution that the continued use of imposed ethnic categories actually enforce disadvantages and perpetuate inequality (Ellison et. al., 1997) as classification systems reinforce stereotypes and condone inequalities. Importantly too, ethnic categorisation obscures factual causal relationships (Kaplan & Bennett, 2003). Socio-economic location, sub-cultural factors, racial discrimination, and their complex interplay are more likely candidates contributing to low mental health status:
What the science says
The view that ethnicity significantly influences beliefs held about psychopathology and that Maori and non-Maori express distinct attitudes towards mental health (Ministry of Health, 2001) is not confirmed through formal scientific scrutiny. Indeed, a comparative study conducted to investigate lay perceptions of Maori and non-Maori participants using a major depressive disorder as a paradigm, found that no evidence of different views was observed between the two groups (Marie, Forsyth & Miles, 2004). These findings challenge the claim that Maori and non-Maori individuals have different understanding and familiarity with mental illness (Marie & Miles, 2007).
Government policy encourages health professionals to accommodate elements of the alleged Māori non-Māori distinction into their professional practices (McCreanor & Nairn, 2002). An example of this is the common belief within the New Zealand mental health community that patients from a Māori cultural background develop more side effects to conventional antipsychotic medication in comparison with the general population, particularly movement disorders (Mahmoud, 2008). As a consequence, there is a stigma attached to the use of these neuroleptics in this population. This may negatively influence the attitudes and reactions of Māori patients to their recommended treatment.
Recent advances in pharmacogenetics suggest that different genetic make-up may interfere in the way drugs are metabolised and consequently reduce effects of medications in humans (Wilffert, Zaal & Brouwers, 2005). Significantly however, these differences do not translate necessarily into categorical distinctions of race or ethnicity (Parra, Amado, Lambertucci, Rocha, Antunes & Pena, 2002). Furthermore, the impact of pharmacogenetics on public health may be more limited than previously expected, since additional factors are critically involved in the mediation of a pharmacological response (Kollek, van Aken, Feuerstein & Schmedders, 2006; Collier, 2003).
Race and Ethnic Identification
The application of an unscientific racial model to clinical practice is set within and reinforced by practices of racial or ethnic categorisation. In at least one New Zealand regional mental health unit, patients with psychiatric disorders and deemed by the admitting nurse or doctor to be Māori – based on self-identification, appearance, or surname – will be treated within the Māori mental health framework. That patient will only be treated under the usual mainstream mental health system reserved for all other patients, including Asians, Pacific peoples, and those of European descent if the patient clearly states a preference for the mainstream option (personal communication).
The fundamental difficulties in using ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ as variables in public health surveillance include differences in terminology, data collection procedures, perceptions of group identity, and changing demographics of population subgroups (Barnes, de Leon, Lewis, Bienias, Wilson & Evans, 2008; Harris, Tobias, Jeffreys, Waldegrave, Karlsen, Nazroo, 2006; Bramley, Hebery, Tuxxio, Chassin, 2005; Chandola, 2001). There are significant inconsistencies and systematic biases (Bennet, 1997) leading to ‘statistical ghettos’ (Graham, Jackson, Beaglehole, de Boer, 1989) in major sources of racial and ethnic analysis.
In the United States the concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are weakly defined and the way by which ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ is incorporated into studies or measured among government agencies is inconsistent (Warren, Hahn, Bristow, Yu, 1994; Sheldon, Parker, 1992). In New Zealand, the conceptual confusion of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ has been resolved by a sleight of hand, whereby ‘race’ is placed in opposition to ‘ethnicity’. Statistics New Zealand (2005) defines ‘ethnicity (as) the ethnic group or groups that people identify with or feel they belong to. Ethnicity is given as a measure of cultural affiliation, as opposed to race, ancestry, nationality or citizenship. The use of the term to replace ‘race’ was an attempt in the post-1960s’ period to reject the biological or genetic component attributed to race, and to understand descent-group identity in terms of socially constructed values, beliefs and practices alone. However, ‘ethnicity’ makes no sense if it does not include the concept of group belonging that has a genetic or biological base (Yinger, 1985).
Despite the efforts of one Maori leader, Pita Sharples (Stokes, 2003), to side-line the uncomfortable inclusion of ‘blood’ for a socially constructed notion of ethnicity, saying that ‘culture is not about the amount of blood you have, it is about beliefs, customs and aspirations’ it is the case that to be eligible for the Maori electoral roll and to claim tertiary Māori scholarships for example, a person does need to be descended from a Māori ancestor. Willie Jackson recognises this genetic component in describing ‘whakapapa’ (genealogy) as ‘what determined being Māori, the ability to link genetically to a Māori ancestor’ (Stokes, 2003). Both Whatarangi Winiata and Sidney Mead are very clear that genetic ancestry is the primary criteria for Māori ‘membership’. ‘A person who is 1/1024 requires only nine or ten generations ancestry to be identified with a full Maori. By contrast, a person who does not have one dot of Maori ancestry is unable to do this. Whakapapa is vital in Maori organisational arrangements and, of course, they are central together with whakapapa per se to tikanga Maori’ (1988, cited in Tremewan, 2006, p. 110). ‘If you are born a Maori, then you have to accept the consequences of that biological fact, and the culture that comes with it’ (Mead, 1997, p. 8).
The race/ethnicity conceptual confusion is not confined to ideology and policy. There is a lack of scientific consensus on the nature of ‘race’ and ethnicity. Indeed the concept of race or ethnicity as a biological category is not supported scientifically. The World Health Organisation does not record race or ethnicity in its international health statistics (Hahn & Stroup, 1994). The use of race or ethnicity is considered reductionist by some commentators who describe the labels as a misleading, stereotypical, and racist scheme that exert ideological and political functions (Yankauer, 1987; Caldwell & Popenoe, 1995; Hayes-Bautista, 1980).
In addition the collection of individuals according to continent of origin based on patterns of allelic frequency does not validate the claim of genetically defined races (Haga & Venter, 2003). The conclusion of the Human Genome Project is that the scientific evidence indicates that any two human individuals are about 99. 9 percent the same genetically. The remaining 0.1 percent represents approximately three million differences between each individual’s DNA. Only a small fraction of these differences are responsible for variations in health, behaviour and other human characteristics (Cargill et. al., 1999; Halushka et. al. 1999).
Furthermore, the greater part of phenotypic traits (including pharmacogenetic variability and nongenetic factors) results from a complex interaction between genetic and nongenetic factors (Goldstein, Tate & Sisodiya, 2003; King, Rotter & Motulski, 1992). Humans are much more than a plain sum of genes, simplistic concepts of ‘race’ are ‘bad medicine’ and ‘bad science’ (Patrinos, 2004). This means that racial classifications do not adequately describe the distribution of genetic variation in humans (Tishkoff & Kidd, 2004).
Differences in human skin colour are fallacious indicators of biological differences among populations (Parra, Kittles & Shriver, 2004). ‘Race’, whether imposed or self-identified, is a weak surrogate for genetic and nongenetic factors associated to health status (Royal and Dunston, 2004). Current genetic data reject the notion that purportedly different ‘human races’ genetically constitute distinct human populations. Studies developed during the last decade (prior to 2009) provide evidence that there is no connection between self-identified race or ethnicity and frequency of particular genetic variants (Angier, 2000; Marshall, 1998). The low level of genetic variability and of structuring of the human species is incompatible with the existence of race as a biological entity (Pena, 2005).
The American Medical Association (AMA) admits that the recognition of race and ethnicity as socially defined entities presents significant challenges to public health surveillance and medicine and that the current classification systems have limited usefulness in public health or medicine (Kaplan & Bennet, 2003). Yet, in New Zealand, public health policy and practice remains informed by ideological views that support ethnic or racial categorisation. In the following section we examine and criticise three justifications for the Maori models of health: ethnicised world-views, separate systems in the past, and the use of ethnicity as a social construct.
A ‘world view’ justification
It is claimed that Maori commonly believe that cosmological or spiritual forces may cause illness and psychological distress with ‘health related to unseen and unspoken energies’ (Ministry of Health, 2009). This Maori knowledge or matauranga Maori approach is then contrasted with the Western biomedical model (Durie, 1999). The latter is referred to as representing the views of the white descendants of European settlers, and positioned as an oppositional system to the Maori model of health understanding (Marie et. al., 2004). These purported differences in world and health views are deemed not only irreconcilable but also not amenable to exegesis, since, for the proponents of these ideas, ‘indigenous knowledge cannot be verified by scientific criteria’ (Durie, 2006).
Indeed, there is widespread acceptance, even in universities, of the claim made by an academic at Auckland University of Technology that ‘indigenous people already have their own answers’ (Harvey, 2005, B3). However, the philosopher, Mario Bunge (1998) warns against confusing science and local knowledge. For Bunge the scientific method cannot remain at the local. ‘All sciences . . . seek patterns underneath data, and all of them account for individuals in terms of universals, and employ particulars to guess at and check generalities. Facts and stories can be local; science never is’ (p. 23). That warning was also issued by New Zealand historian, Peter Munz. In his damming review of Linda Smith’s influential book, Decolonising Methodologies Munz refers to its ‘mischief’ in failing to distinguish between the knowledge of local communities which serves as ‘social cement’ and science which serves as the ‘disinterested scrutiny of evidence’. (1999, p 5).
The reduction of universal modern science to localised cultural knowledge serves to protect it from the scrutiny applied to scientific knowledge. It means that ideology presented as science, such as Durie’s Māori mental health model, moves unchallenged into health policy and professional practice.
Earlier we used the example of the belief within the New Zealand mental health community that patients from a Maori cultural background present a higher prevalence of adverse reactions to conventional antipsychotic medication in comparison with the general population, particularly movement disorders (Mahmoud, 2008). Unfortunately the lack of scrutiny means that the consequences of such clinical practice for Maori patients are unknown but may well include the unsubstantiated rejection of an effective class of neuroleptics, and unwarranted abbreviation of the pharmacological arsenal to treat psychosis.
Historical justification
The historical inclusion of racial and ethnic differences (Marie, Forsyth, Miles, 2004) in the development of New Zealand public policy is used to support expanding the dichotomy in the way Durie (2006) proposes for Maori mental health. The Maori Health Strategy, He Korowai Oranga (2002) is committed to ‘fulfilling the special relationship between iwi and the Crown under the treaty of Waitangi’ (p. 2). This political approach is in the interests of tino rangatiratanga, an ethno-nationalist movement which has re-interpreted the Treaty of Waitangi as an agreement between two equal political entities. Accordingly, the claim is made to separate systems of governance under the control of the respective political entities. The current establishment of the Māori Health Authority is the realisation of this agenda in the health sector.
Within ethno-nationalist politics (see, for example, statements by Whatarangi Winiata in Tremewan, 2006), separate Maori systems are justified in terms of the putative revival of historical tribal structures and organisational systems. The existence of a separate Maori health system in the 19th century contributes to justifying a contemporary distinction in the same way that the historical existence of the Native Schools is used in education to justify kura kaupapa Māori.
However, there is a profound difference between the distinction that existed between Māori and non-Māori health services in the past and the distinction claimed today. The former is attributable to specific material conditions, the latter is the ideology of tino rangatiratanga politics. Graham Butterworth’s (2006) account of the heritage of Māori health care in the hospitals established by Governor Grey during the colonial period shows that the separate treatment of Māori was in response to the situation of Māori at that time.
Disease, poor sanitation, geographical isolation, a limited government infrastructure and government concerns about Māori responses to the rapidly growing settler population saw Grey adopt pragmatic policies. Grey’s hospitals gave ‘free admission to Maori patients, appointed native medical officers to treat Maori in their home areas and even instituted campaigns to vaccinate Maori’ (p. 192). By 1866, there were ‘some 29 appointees (about 20 percent of registered medical practitioners)’. ‘This service was to continue into the 20th century until the advent of social security in July 1939 made hospital services free and lowered the cost for doctor’s services’ (p. 192).
The Department of Health, established in 1900 ‘was given responsibility for Maori health and gradually given the power and resources to become effective’ (p. 193). Butterworth describes the influence of the Maori Councils Act 1900 which ‘set up elected Maori councils and village committees with the responsibility to enforce sanitary bi-laws. Dr Maui Pomare began a ‘vigorous campaign of health reform’ (p. 193). ‘The Maori infant mortality rate, which had dropped progressively from 400+ between 1844 and 1857 to 230 per thousand between 1901 and 1911’ (p.194) was still very high. According to Butterworth, this was the result of endemic contagious disease rather than epidemic disease. (‘The drop continued and in the 1961-1965 period was at 40 per thousand births’ [p. 196]). ‘In 1904 a Native Sanitary Inspectorate, drawn from local Maori leaders, was created to improve the villages. Subsidised doctors were continued and Public Health Nurses were appointed to work in Maori areas’ (p. 196). ‘By the 1930s, a new approach to Maori health provision meant that the whole health system was to be responsible for Maori health not a small inadequately funded group’ (p. 196).
The historical distinction in health care between Māori and non-Māori was not to the disadvantage of Māori. Free Māori health care in the state system may be contrasted with fee-paying public health for many non-Māori – one that was a huge burden for most New Zealanders until the welfare policies of the 1930s’ First Labour Government were introduced. Janet Frame’s character, Grace Gleave, describes the ‘moments of pure happiness when the notice came from the Health Department that medical and hospital attention were to be free, free, and their father had collected all the unpaid hospital and doctors’ bills, brushed the dust from their windows, opened them, smoothed them, read them aloud, shuffled them into a pile, and with a shout of joy, pokered the ring from the stove and thrust them into the fire (2007, p. 155). In similar vein is Ida Frazer’s (2002) reference to the financial hardship experienced by her family in the early 1930s when one of eight siblings spent 6 months in Auckland Hospital suffering from rheumatic fever.
The history of separate Māori and non-Māori health care and its grounding in specific material conditions also explains the continuation of some separate forms of health provision well into the 20th century. For example, the voluntary Plunket Society, dealt mainly with non-Maori mothers and babies because Maori mothers were already catered for. Linda Bryder (2003) refers to ‘the complex relationship between Plunket and Maori’ (p. xv) that resulted from the early inclusion of Māori health care in the public system. ‘The department and Plunket reached an agreement early on that departmental, not Plunket, nurses would deal with Maori infant health. Maori women were entitled to use the Plunket clinics, though few did so’ (p. xv).
Separate health provision for Māori, just as separate education provision with the Native Schools, was the result of the specific material conditions of an historical period. In contrast, the justification for separate Māori provision today, while drawing on the historical precedent, is an ahistorical or, to use W.H. Oliver’s (2001) term, a ‘presentist’ ideology. Māori and settler descendants are promoted as distinctive ethnic or racial groups, a distinctiveness said to continue throughout time, justifying its recognition in separate public services that are also to be ongoing and under the control of ‘revived’ tribal authority.
The re-interpretation of historical processes for contemporary tino rangatiratanga ideology is not confined to health services. Mason Durie’s considerable influence extends from health and education to the historical revisionism of Nga Tai Matatu: Tides of Maori Endurance (2005) where, as Butterworth (2006) demonstrates in his analysis of Durie’s ‘rather slipshod’ (p. 191) use of population and land ownership figures, the unsustainable Sorrenson thesis that ‘land loss equals population decline’ is promoted.
Social construct justification
In recent decades the use of racial categories tends to rely mainly on its putative salience as a social construct (Krieger, 2003) rather than in appeals to explicit biological difference. In the New Zealand situation the social construction premise is that low Maori mental health status is the result of being Māori; that is, to be Māori today is to experience life as an indigenous but colonised, hence ‘damaged’ individual within a decimated social structure, the tribe. According to Durie (2003) the ‘climate ofmaterial and spiritual oppression’ faced by members of indigenous populations worldwide produces an ‘increased susceptibilityto disease andinjury’ (pp. 510-11).
Ethnic identity is believed to contain and transmit to subsequent generations the historical experiences of the ethnic group in specific material ways, such as location in an inter-generationally disadvantaged group, but also metaphysically through a ‘wairua’ or ‘spirit’ (Herder’s ‘volkgeist’). The claim is that Māori subordinate status was established by colonisation and is maintained in the social and political relationships between subsequent generations descended from colonisers and colonised. These dominant-subordinate relationships are claimed to be built into New Zealand’s social and political structures. As a consequence, the claim continues, individuals, as a result of their Maori ethnicity, inherit and are locked into the inferior and unequal status built into these social and political structures (Bishop & Berryman, 2006). Finally, it is claimed that this ‘structural oppression’ is expressed in a number of ways at both individual and group level; in mental illness, educational underachievement, prison incarceration, and welfare dependency.
Because colonisation is considered to be the root cause of the structural inequality between the two discrete ethnic groups, Māori and non-Māori, the solution is considered to be the decolonisation of social and political structures (Smith, 1997). The political explanation of structural inequality leads to a political solution; establish separate ethnic structures and systems. Political structures are to be changed by establishing separate Maori systems of governance at all levels, from constitutional separateness at the highest level to the separate administration of services, including health, local government, justice, and education at an operational level. The establishment of Maori mental health is one example of this desired shift to ethnic separateness at a structural level. The Durie Principles (Durie, 2003) upon which separate Maori education is currently being founded another. The 2021 Maori Health Authority’s establishment is the apotheosis of this political movement in health.
The wide-spread belief in an on-going colonial imposed oppression is considered to operate at the social and psychological level as well as a socio-political structural level. Tino rangatiratanga ideology attributes a primary and determining ethnic or racial identity to individuals, one linking the individual to the kin-group and to the group’s ancestral experiences. The person is brought to recognise the consequences of those experiences in his or her own life through the process of ‘conscientisation’.
‘Conscientisation’ is taken from the writings of Paulo Friere, works that have been highly influential in New Zealand from the 1970s and is used to support ethnic politics. The recognition of historically imposed and on-going oppression includes an understanding of how the consequences of colonisation are believed to be maintained politically in the structural inequalities of contemporary New Zealand. The awareness also enables the individual to embrace the intergenerational ‘spirit’ of the people which, it is believed, carries the memory of oppression from one generation to the next to cause mental or spiritual illness in succeeding generations.
The hegemonic nature of these ideas even amongst health professionals is most clearly shown in the favourable reception given by psychologists to Tariana Turia’s (2000) speech to the New Zealand Psychological Society Conference. Turia evoked a ‘holocaust suffered by indigenous people including Maori as a result of colonial contact and behaviour’, one that ‘inevitably wounds the soul’, requiring ‘generations of oppression since colonial contact’ ‘to be articulated, acknowledged and understood’. She referred to Professor Mason Durie identification of ‘the onset of colonisation and the subsequent alienation and theft of the land as the beginning of Maori health issues that manifest themselves today’. The outcome is a ‘post-colonial trauma’ ‘passed down from the period of the Land Wars to current generations’.
Having identified the problem as one of on-going colonial oppression, the social psychological solution is to strengthen the essentialised Māori identity through cultural affirmation (Durie and Kingi, 1997). It is claimed that identification with the ancestral ethnic group that has experienced oppression will enable the descendants of the group to first acknowledge, then reject oppressive experiences and to benefit from the revival of pre-colonial, pre-oppressive cultural integrity. This decolonising approach can be seen in the development of Māori cultural programmes in education, prisons, and the probation service as well as Durie’s Maori mental health model.
However, Toon van Meijl’s (2006) research into marae-based courses found that this approach ‘does not support all categories of Maori people who are struggling with their ethnic identity. Rather it creates an unexpected crisis of identity for those Maori who are unable to identify in terms of cultural ideology as they believe they can never meet the orthodox criteria for recognition as genuine Maori’ (p. 930). Van Meijl suggests that ‘the presentation of Maori cultural identity is fundamentally different from the self-representation of alienated young urban Maori people’, ‘leaving the self of some Maori bewildered with their personal yet deviating notions of Maoriness’ (p. 931).
Class or ethnicity?
The focus on the social construction of ethnic identity in explaining the low status of Māori mental health tends to reduce other factors to secondary status. Te Rau Hinengaro, for example, does recognise that the experience of socio-economic disadvantage in lower household incomes, less education and living in areas of high deprivation ‘contributes to the differences between Māori and non-Māori (particularly for serious disorder, substance disorder and disorders overall)’ (Ministry of Health, 2006, p. 131). However, the Report points out that this ‘does not explain all the disparities between Maori and non-Maori’ (p. 131). It is here in the ‘unexplained disparity’ that one of the claims for separate Maori mental health policy and practice is made. Those who promote the Māori mental health model do so on the premise that the disparity, which can’t be explained by socio-economic factors, is therefore attributable to a fundamental difference between Māori and non-Māori. This position is supported by Hawker, Bakhshi, Ali & Farrington (1999) who found no evidence for a justification for the observed inequalities based only on socio-economic deprivation. However, other studies do not support this finding.
Roy Nash (2001) suggests that the placement of Māori within very broad socio-economic categories is significant. For example, he notes a ‘particularly large difference between the ability scores of Maori and pakeha students from the upper professional category: where pakeha occupations are predominantly secondary school teachers, administrative civil servants and senior business executives with a high proportion of scientists, doctors, dentists and lawyers, Maori occupations tend to be predominantly secondary school teachers, primary school teachers, and executives within Maori organisations. Many of these latter, in particular, have very low educational qualifications’ (p. 27). Nash considers that in discussing the ‘is it class or ethnicity?’ question the ‘issue at stake in this argument is the significance of within class differences in literate resources in both populations’ (p. 29, italics in the original).
Marie, Fergusson, and Boden (2008) were also unable to locate evidence of cultural factors contributing to Maori disadvantage in education. They found instead that educational underachievement amongst Māori is caused by disparities in socio-economic status during childhood with the same factors producing educational disadvantage amongst non-Māori. The attribution of disparities between Māori and non-Māori to specific socio-economic location rather than an unidentified ethnic or cultural factor is supported by Simon Chapple’s influential research.
Chapple (2000) draws attention to the disproportionate sub-cultural disadvantage experienced by those who identity only as Māori, who have no educational qualifications, and who live outside the major urban centres (p. 101). He describes those Māori who are most disadvantaged as ‘sole Maori with low literacy, poor education, and living in geographical concentrations that have socio-economic problems, not the Maori ethnic group as a whole. There are probably also sub-cultural associations with benefit dependence, sole parenthood, early natality, drug and alcohol abuse, physical violence, and illegal cash-cropping’ (p. 115).
The national mental health survey also found that the prevalence of disorders was greatest among those Maori with lowest household income and levels of education (Baxter, Kingi, Tapsell, Durie & McGee, 2006). Sub-cultural associations, particularly involving long-term drug use by those in disadvantaged socio-economic groups, is relevant to understanding the low status of Māori mental health. A study designed to compare the profile of clients attending alcohol and other drug treatment services in New Zealand with data from a 1998 survey revealed that Māori clients were younger, used cannabis more, and were less likely to live in a large city and to attend follow-up appointments (Adamson S, Sellman D, Deering D, Robertson P, de Zwart K., 2006).
Chapple’s research on the ‘is it class or ethnicity?’ question suggests that ‘the policy issue may need to be viewed primarily at a sub-cultural and socio-economic level rather than the coarse ethno-cultural level of Maori/non-Maori binaries’ (2000, p. 115). This approach is supported by research by Sankar et. al (2004) and Collins (2004) who also regard racial or ethnic disparities as deriving primarily from differences in a myriad of factors, including culture, diet, socio-economic status, education, access to health care, discrimination and additional social determinants and criticise the excessive emphasis on genetics as a foremost explanatory element for health disparities.
Bramley, Hebert, Tuxxio and Chassin (2005), and Chandola (2001) favour socio-economic deprivation as the main factor in accounting for explaining different health outcomes according to distinct ethnic groups while Bhopal (2002) argues that analysing ethnic or racial inequalities in health status without a material groundwork on socio-economic factors is naïve. According to Ellison, de Wet, Ijsselmuiden and Richter (1997) the focus should be directed to all socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals.
Significant evidence supports the proposition that socio-economic differentials are likely to be a fundamental explanation for the observed inequalities in health status among minority groups (Nazroo, 2003). However, in understanding the reasons for the low health status experienced by various sub-groups, it is necessary to focus not only on socio-economic status but to examine both the influence of racism and discrimination, and the complex relationship that exists between socio-economic position and experiences of racism and discrimination.
Racism and discrimination
Extensive research evidence indicates that racism does play a major role as a determinant of health (Barnes, de Leon, Lewis, et. al., 2008; Paradies, 2006; Krieger, 2003) with subjective experiences of racism and discrimination, rather than race or ethnic affiliation, related to poor health outcomes (Barnes et. al., 2008; Dominguez, 2008; Peters, 2006). These experiences, rather than ethnicity or race per se, are among the main vectors through which limited access to health care and unfavourable health outcomes affect members of minority groups.
Ethnicity or race as a blanket category is insufficient to explain ethnic or racial inequalities in terms of access to health care (Alegria, Canino, Rios, Vera, Calderon, Rusch & Ortega, 2002). Personal experiences of racism, harassment and discrimination are associated with multiple indicators of poorer physical and mental health status (Nazroo, 2003). Socially inflicted trauma and internalised oppression are considered among the leading pathways through which racism can harm health (Krieger, 2003). Discrimination is multidimensional and produces negative emotional states such as anxiety and depression, which in turn alter biological processes or patterns of behaviour (James, 2003).
However, as with the influence of socio-economic location, disagreement exists among researchers concerning both the extent of the direct influence of racism, and also with how the interplay between these experiences of racism and socio-economic status act to affect health status. A number of studies have identified the association between self-reported experiences of racial discrimination and poor physical and mental health outcomes for a range of ethnic groups in various countries. (Karlsen & Nazroo, 2002, 2004; Williams, Neighbors & Jackson, 2003). Correlations have also been found between self-reported experience of discrimination and unfavourable health outcome in New Zealand (Harris, Tobias, Jeffreys, Waldegrave, Karlsen, Nazroo, 2006). The latter found that self-reported experiences of discrimination are strongly associated with poor health for all ethnic groups, independent of the effect of socio-economic position. However, other studies have found it likely that racism is experienced more frequently by individuals in marginalised socio-economic groups rather than people in the middle and upper-middle class as well as which sub-groups experience persisting obstacles at the level of health care provision (Adamson, Ben-Shlomo, Chaturvedi & Donovan, 2003).
The type of discrimination associated with higher mental health needs is also relevant to understanding which sub-groups in the population are most affected. One study conducted in multiple New Zealand regional hospitals revealed that volunteers who self-identified as Māori or Pacific had reported more psychotic phenomena compared to a group consisting of ‘all other’. The differences between ethnic groups also varied according to socio-economic deprivation level (Trauer, Eagar & Mellsop, 2006). In addition, discrimination is not confined to the Māori – non-Māori binary. In the work setting, Asians reported the highest prevalence of discrimination (Harris et. al., 2006). Other immigrants, including non-English Europeans of white appearance, may be particularly vulnerable to racial discrimination due to limited proficiency in the native language, illegal visa status, and different cultural and religious backgrounds.
Another study (Harris et.al., 2006) of the personal experiences of racial discrimination, for example, ethnically-motivated physical or verbal attacks and different types of unfair treatment that affected different minority groups in New Zealand, including Asians, Pacific peoples and Maori, found that Maori reported the highest prevalence of ‘ever’ experiencing any of the forms of racial discrimination (34 percent). This was followed by similar levels among Asian (28 percent) and Pacific peoples (25 percent). However, this finding requires further investigation. Both the method of classification and the fact of skin colour are implicated in any analysis of discrimination towards Maori. In the matter of classification, descendants from intermarriage between Maori and ‘white’ parents who select the two corresponding census categories will be classified as Maori only. This is the case even if the person does not present physical attributes to suggest a Maori categorical affiliation.
Socio-economic class appears to be implicated in links between discrimination and skin colour. A Māori person with ‘white’ physical appearance is more likely to identify as both Maori and non-Maori. This group tends to be ‘socially and economically much better off than all other Maori’ (Callister, 2008, p.21) and therefore less exposed to the full spectrum of racism and discrimination experienced by individuals who record Maori-only ethnicity in official surveys. The latter group may include those who ‘look more Maori’, and ‘if discrimination is common in New Zealand, the Maori-only (or Pacific peoples) group would be more likely to suffer discrimination from police, landlords and healthcare providers’ (p, 21).
Skin colour is certainly implicated in the cultural politics of the professional class. According to a Maori involved in tribal development with reference to Maori in senior positions in the public sector, ‘fair-skinned Maoris are one of the stealthiest, most potent weapons for pushing the Maori cause in the public and private sectors’ (Himona, cited in Rice, 1989, p.1).
A legacy of incongruent health care data
A series of studies have highlighted inconsistencies and discrepancies in the way that race, and more recently ethnicity, have been defined in New Zealand for the purpose of health care, monitoring and policy making (Smart et. al, 2002; Thomas, 2001; Blakely, Robson, Woodward, 2002). The definition of race and ethnicity has been specifically criticised in the context of ischemic heart disease (Priest & Jackson, 1994), diabetes (Swan, Lillis & Simmons, 2006), breast cancer (Curtis, Wright & Wall, 2005) and paediatric community care (Bramley & Latimer, 2007). The authors of the latter publication concluded that the poor quality of data based on ethnicity was ‘an ongoing issue’ in the New Zealand health sector (p. 46). In fact, continuous investigation over more than two decades in New Zealand has consistently documented erroneous information in hospital records and highlighted significant inaccuracy of ethnicity data (Swan et. al., 2006). In addition, the validity of Maori mortality statistics has been challenged due to discrepancies in ethnic classification (Graham et.al., 1989).
Data from the coronary heart disease register for almost a decade indicate that, when ethnicity, as recorded during hospital admission, was compared with self-defined ethnicity, the number of those classified as Maori increased almost 12 percent while only 0.5 percent of those classified as ‘other’ considered themselves to be Maori (Priest & Jackson, 1994). Discrepancies specific to each classification group have been identified. The misclassification of ethnic identity was found ‘particularly problematic’ in the group labelled as the ‘other’ ethnic group (Swan et. al., 2006).
Bias can arise when comparing health standards in Māori and non-Māori populations. In a study that reviewed 98 research reports comparing Māori and non-Māori samples from 1980 to 1996, only 19 percent of the articles reported any information about the criteria used for categorising ethnicity and only less that 3 percent mentioned how people of dual or multiple ethnicity were categorised. This led to the conclusion that much of the New Zealand research comparing Māori and non-Māori samples is biased and that most articles in that period did not meet minimum expected standards for reporting procedures for categorising ethnicity (Thomas, 2001). Even in a well developed study using linked census and mortality cohort datasets, changes in definition of ethnicity have been recognised as a possible source of bias in the study (Blakely, Fawcett, Hunt & Wilson, 2006).
Additional evidence comparing ethnic differences in mental health and health style choices among New Zealand ‘Europeans’, Pacific Islanders, and Māori indicated that the latter population group was more likely to be concerned about abuse and anger control (Goodyear-Smith, Arroll, Coupe & Buetow, 2005). The authors acknowledged that the priority system of coding ethnicity ‘gives special priority to Maori’, a faulty system which ‘loses detail and makes assumptions’ (p. 6). Furthermore, people classified within the group of ‘unknown ethnicities’ belong in fact to a variety of ethnic groups and their inclusion in the group of ‘others’ is also inappropriate (Bramley & Latimer, 2007). The use of the term ‘non-Māori’ to those who are not Māori was described as ‘extreme’ example of inaccurate labeling of human populations (Reinken, Salmond & de Lacy, 1983). Although some researchers have recommended methodological ‘adjustments’ for classification and measurement for public health surveillance purposes in New Zealand (Blakely et. al., 2002), the persisting bias and methodological obstacles for that are likely to persist.
Conclusion
While advocates for Durie’s Māori mental health model do accept that social-economic factors contribute to the low status of Maori mental health, they do so from the premise of a Māori non-Māori binary and in the interests of tino rangatiratanga politics. Whether that ethnic distinction is given a biological basis or is regarded as a socially constructed distinction (which does in fact contain a biological or genetic component), the very use of ethnicity or race as a valid category for public policy and professional practice is poor science.
The hegemonic power of ethno-nationalism forecloses the possibility of discussion about whether in fact a separate Maori mental health system is in the best interests of patients specifically, and improving health status more generally. It is assumed, without reliable scientific evidence, that the separate Māori Health Authority currently being established will address Māori patients’ health needs. The intrusion of ethnic politics into health policy on such a scale has compromised science in a number of ways. Along with the elevation of ideology to ‘science’, fallacious assumptions spur research enterprises on ‘ethnic drugs’, i.e. BiDil, and ethnic estimation research, which ‘are poised to exert a cascading effect—reinscribing taxonomies of race across a broad range of scientific practices and fields’ (Duster, 2005). Within the New Zealand health system, professionals, despite being educated in the critical tradition of scientific thought, uncritically practise a non-scientific racial ideology.
The ideological and methodological issues we have discussed do not lessen the suffering and distress experienced by Māori mental health patients. Our concern is not to ignore this suffering nor to divert attention from the need to reduce social disparities between groups in the interests of social justice and human rights. Rather we have identified how the belief, that equality for Māori is achieved through separate and different policies and practices such as the Maori model in mental health, operates at a hegemonic level ensuring an uncritical conformity to racially separate policies and practices.
We conclude with the caution that rights-driven social policies and health care initiatives, despite the best intentions, have the potential to be detrimental (Hunter, 2002; 2006) and share the caution expressed by Ellison et. al., (1997) and Kaplan & Bennett (2003) among others, that the continued use of imposed categories may actually enforce disadvantages and perpetuate inequality. Such an outcome is the very opposite of the intentions of those New Zealanders whose commitment to separate Māori initiatives is driven by universalist liberal ideals of justice and equality.
To ensure that mental health patients receive the best care we suggest that New Zealand health policy and practice address itself to the issue of which specific sub-groups experience discrimination, in all its damaging forms including racism, as well as the complex links between such experiences and low socio-economic status and marginalised life-styles.
References
Adamson, J., Ben-Shlomo, Y., Chaturvedi, N. & Donovan, J. (2003). Ethnicity, socio-economic position and gender – do they affect reported health-care seeking behaviour? Social Science and Medicine, 57, 895-904.
Adamson, S., Sellman, D., Deering, D., Robertson, P. & de Zwart, K. (2006). A profile of the alcohol and drug treatment population in New Zealand; a comparison of 1998 and 2004 data. The New Zealand Medical Journal, 119(1238), U2284.
Afshari, R. & Bhopal, R.S. (2002). Changing pattern of use of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ in scientific literature. International Journal of Epidemiology 2002, 31:1074.
Alegria, M., Canino, G., Rios, R., Vera, M., Calderon, J., Rusch, D. & Ortega, A.N. (2002). Inequalities in use of specialty mental health services among Latinos, African Americans, and non-Latino whites. Psychiatric Services, 53(12), 1547-1555.
American Medical Association. Classification of data on race and ethnicity. Report 5 of the Council on Scientific Affairs (I-00), 2000;2004.
Angier, N. (2000). Do races differ? Not really, genes show. The New York Times, 22 August, F1.
Aspinall,P. (1997). The conceptual basis of ethnic group terminology and classifications. Social Science and Medicine, 45, 689-98.
American Anthroplogical Association (1997). Response to OMB Directive 15: Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting. Retrieved February 20, 2009, from http://www.aaanet.org/gvt/ombdraft.htm
Barnes, L., de Leon, T., Lewis, J., Bienias, J., Wilson, R. & Evans, D. (2008). Perceived discrimination and mortality in a population-based study of older adults. American Journal of Public Health, 98(7), 1241-1247.
Baxter, J., Kingi, T., Tapsell, R., Durie, M. & McGee, M. A. (2006). Prevalence of mental disorders among Maori in Te Rau Hinengaro: The New Zealand Mental Health Survey. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 40(10), 914-923.
Bedford, R., Didham, R., Ho, E. & Hugo, G. (2004). Maori internal and international migration at the turn of the century: An Australian perspective. New Zealand Population Review, 30(1-2), 131-141.
Bennet, T. (1997). “Racial” and ethnic classification: two steps forward and one step back? Public Health Reports 112, 477-480
Bhopal, R. & Donaldson, L. (1998). White, European, Western, Caucasian, or what? Inappropriate labeling in research on race, ethnicity, and health. American Journal of Public Health, 88, 1303-7.
Bhopal, R., & Rankin, J. (1999). Concepts and terminology in ethnicity, race and health: Be aware of the ongoing debate. British Dental Journal, 186, 483-484.
Bhopal R. (2002). Heterogeneity among Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis is key to racial inequities. British Medical Journal, 325, 903.
Bhopal, R. (2002). Revisiting race/ethnicity as a variable in health research. American Journal of Public Health, 92(2), 156-157.
Bishop, R., Berryman, M. (2006). Culture Speaks: Cultural Relationships and Classroom Learning. Wellington: Huia.
Blakely, T., Robson, B. & Woodward, A. (2002). Measuring Maori health status accurately – more needs doing. New Zealand Medical Journal, 115(1151), 149-50.
Blakely, T., Fawcett, J., Hunt, D. & Wilson, N. (2006). What is the contribution of smoking and socioeconomic position to ethnic inequalities in mortality in New Zealand? The Lancet, 368(9529), 44-52.
Bramley, D., Hebert, P., Tuzzio, L. & Chassin, M. (2005). Disparities in Indegenous Health: A cross-country comparison between New Zealand and the United States. American Journal of Public Health, 95, 844-850.
Bramley, D. & Latimer, S. (2007). The accuracy of ethnicity data in primary care. The New Zealand Medical Journal, 120(1264), 40-47.
Broughton, H.R. (1984). A viewpoint on Maori health. New Zealand Medical Journal, 97, 290-1.
Butterworth, G. (2006). Historical revisionism in New Zealand: Always winter and never christmas. In R. Openshaw & E. Rata (Eds.), Public Policy and Ethnicity: The politics of ethnic boundary making. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bunge, M. (1998). Social Science under debate: a philosophical debate. Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Caldwell, S. & Popenoe, R. (1995). Perceptions and misperceptions of skin color. Annals of Internal Medicine, 122(8), 614-617.
Cain, V. & Kington, R. (2003). Investigating the role of racial/ethnic bias in health outcomes. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 191-192.
Callister, P. (2004). Seeking an ethnic identity: is ‘New Zealander’ a valid ethnic category? New Zealand Population Review, 30, 5-22.
Callister, P., Didham, R., Potter, D. & Blakely, T. (2007). Measuring ethnicity in New Zealand: Developing tools for health outcomes analysis. Ethnicity and Health, 12(4), 299-320.
Callister, P. (2008). Skin colour: Does it matter in New Zealand? Policy Quarterly, 4(1), 18-25.
Cargill, M., Altshuler, D., Ireland, J., Sklar, P., Ardlie, K., Patil, N., et al. (1999). Characterization of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in coding regions of human genes. Nature Genetics, 22, 231-8.
Chandola, T. (2001). Ethnic and class differences in health in relation to British South Asians: using the new National Statistics socio-economic classification. Social Science and Medicine, 52, 1285-1296.
Chaplow, D., Chaplow, R., & Maniopoto, W. (1993). Addressing cultural differences in institutions: changing health practices in New Zealand. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 3, 307-321.
Chapple, S. (2000) Maori Socio-Economic Disparity, Political Science, 52(2), 101-115.
Chaturvedi, N. (2001). Ethnicity as an epidemiological determinant–crudely racist or crucially important? International Journal of Epidemiology, 30, 925-7.
Collins, F. (2004). What we do and don’t know about ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, genetics and health at the dawn of the genome era. Nature Genetics, 36, 13-15.
Collier, D. (2003). Pharmacogenetics in psychosis. Drug News Perspect, 16(3), 159-165.
Cunningham, C. (2000). A framework for addressing Maori knowledge in research, science and technology. Pacific Health Dialogue, 7, 62-69.
Curtis, E., Wright, C. & Wall, M. (2005). The epidemiology of breast cancer in Maori women in Aotearoa New Zealand: implications for ethnicity data analysis. New Zealand Medical Journal, 118, U1298.
Department of Statistics (1988). Report of the review committee on ethnic statistics (pp. 44-45). Wellington: Author.
Dominguez, T.P. (2008) Race, racism, and racial disparities in adverse birth outcomes. Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology, 51, 360-370.
Dyck, I., & Kearns, R. (1995). Transforming the relations of research: towards culturally safe geographies of health and healing. Health and Place, 1, 133-147.
Durie, M & Kingi, K. (1997). A framework for measuring Maori mental health outcomes. A report prepared for the Ministry of Health. Research report TPH 97/5. Massey University, Department of Maori Studies.
Durie, M. (1999). Mental health and Maori development. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 33, 5-12.
Durie, M. (2003). The health of indigenous peoples. British Medical Journal, 326, 510-511.
Durie, M. (2005). Tai Matatua; Tides of Endurance. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Durie, M. (2006) Understanding health and illness: Research at the interface between science and indigenous knowledge. International Journal Epidemology, 33, 1138-1143.
Duster, T. (2005). Medicine. Race and reification in science. Science, 307, 1050-1051.
Ellison, G., de Wet, T., Ijsselmuiden, C. & Richter, L. (1997). Segregated health statistics perpetuate racial stereotypes. British Medical Journal, 314, 1485.
Frame, J (2007) Towards Another Summer, Sydney, Vintage Books.
Frazer, I. (2002). The O’Dwyer Family History, 1851-1945. Privately published.
Graham, P., Jackson, R., Beaglehole, R. & de Boer, G. (1989). The validity of Maori mortality statistics. New Zealand Medical Journal, 102, 124-126.
Goldstein, D., Tate, S. & Sisodiya S. (2003). Pharmacogenetics goes genomic. Nature Reviews Genetics, 4, 937-47.
Goodyear-Smith, F., Arroll, B., Coupe, N. & Buetow, S. (2005). Ethnic differences in mental health and lifestyle issues: results from multi-item general practice screening. New Zealand Medical Journal, 118, U1374.
Gould, S. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: Norton.
Haga, S. & Venter, J. (2003). Genetics. FDA races in wrong direction. Science, 301, 466.
Hahn, R. & Stroup, D. (1994). Race and ethnicity in public health surveillance: criteria for the scientific use of social categories. Public Health Reports, 109, 7-15.
Halushka, M., Fan, J., Bentley, K., Hsie, L., Shen, N., Weder, A., et al. (1999). Patterns of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in candidate genes for blood-pressure homeostasis. Nature Genetics, 22, 239-47.
Harris, R., Tobias, M., Jeffreys, M., Waldegrave, K., Karlsen, S. & Nazroo, J. (2006). Racism and health: the relationship between experience of racial discrimination and health in New Zealand. Social Science and Medicine, 63(6), 1428-1441.
Hawker, J., Bakhshi, S., Ali, S. & Farrington, C. (1999). Ecological analysis of ethnic differences in relation between tuberculosis and poverty. British Medical Journal, 319, 1031-1034.
Hayes-Bautista, D. (1980). Identifying “hispanic” populations: the influence of research methodology upon public policy. American Journal of Public Health, 70, 353-6.
He Korowai Oranga, Maori Health Strategy (2002). Wellington: Ministry of Health. www.moh.govt.nz
Helms, J. (1996). Toward a methodology for measuring and assessing racial as distinguished from ethnic identity. In G. Sodowsky & J. Impara (Eds.), Multicultural assessment in counseling and clinical psychology (pp.143-192). Lincoln, NE: Burrows Institute of Mental Measurements.
Hunter, E. (2002). “Best intentions” lives on: untoward health outcomes of some contemporary initiatives in Indigenous affairs. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 36, 575.
Hunter, E. (2006). Social engineers and bystanders: the limits of ‘responsibility’ in Indigenous affairs. Australas Psychiatry, 14(1), 24-32.
James, S. (2003). Confronting the moral economy of US racial/ethnic health disparities. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 189.
Johnson, C. (1974). Consistency of reporting of ethnic origin in the current Population Survey (Tech. Paper No.31.). Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Census.
Kaplan, J. & Bennett T. (2003). Use of race and ethnicity in biomedical publication. Journal of the American Medical Association, 289, 2709-16.
Karlsen, S. & Nazroo, J. (2002). Relation between racial discrimination, social class, and health among ethnic minority groups. American Journal of Public Health, 92, 624-630.
Karlsen, S. & Nazroo, J. (2004). Fear of racism and health. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 58, 1017-1018.
Kearns, R., Smith, C. & Abott, M. (1991). Another day in paradise? Life on the margins in urban New Zealand. Social Science and Medicine, 33, 369-379.
King, R., Rotter, J. & Motulski, A. (1992). The genetic basis of common diseases. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krieger, N. (2003). Does racism harm health? Did child abuse exist before 1962? On explicit questions, critical science, and current controversies: an ecosocial perspective. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 194-9.
Kollek, R., van Aken, J., Feuerstein, G., & Schmedders, M. (2006) Pharmacogenetics, adverse drug reactions and public health. Community Genet, 9, 50-54.
Mahmoud, H. (2008). Neuroleptic-induced movement disorder in psychotic patients in a New Zealand hospital: Ethnic variation. European Psychiatry, 23, 164.
Marie, D., Forsyth, D., & Miles, L. (2004). Categorical ethnicity and mental health literacy in New Zealand. Ethnicity & Health, 9(3), 225-252.
Marie, D & Haig, B. (2006). Kaupapa Maori Research methodology: A Critique and An Alternative. New Zealand Science Review, 63, 17-21.
Marie, D. & Miles, B. (2007). Does social group status influence social distance in relation to depression? New Zealand Journal of Psychology , 36, 34-41.
Marie, D., Fergusson, D. Boden, J. (2008) Educational achievement of Māori: The roles of cultural identity and social disadvantage, Australian Journal of Education. 52(2), 183-196.
Marshall, E. (1998). DNA studies challenge the meaning of race. Science, 282, 654-5.
Mahmoud H. (2008). Neuroleptic-induced movement disorder in psychotic patients in a New Zealand Hospital: Ethnic Variation. AEP (Association of European Psychiatrists). Nice, France.
McCreanor, T. & Nairn, R. (2002).Tauiwi general practitioners talk about Maori health: interpretative repertoires. New Zealand Medical Journal , 115, U272.
Mead, S. (1997). Landmarks, Bridges and Visions. Aspects of Maori Culture. Wellington: Victoria University Press.
Ministry of Health (2001). Making a World of Difference: Whakanui Oranga. Wellington: The New Zealand Disability Strategy, Ministry of Health.
Ministry of Health (2006). Te Rau Hinengaro, the New Zealand Mental Health Survey. Retrieved January 19, 2009, from http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf/pagesmh/5166
Ministry of Health (2009). Maori Health Models, Te Whare Tapa Wha. Retrieved January 19, 2009, from http://www.maorihealth.govt.nz/moh.nsf
Munz, P. (1999). Open and Closed Research. Review of L Smith Decolonisiing methodologies. New Zealand Book, December, pp4-6.
Nash, R. (2001). Models of Maori educational attainment: Beyond the “class” and “ethnicity” debate. Waikato Journal of Education, 7, 23-36.
Nazroo, J. (2003). The structuring of ethnic inequalities in health: economic position, racial discrimination, and racism. American Journal of Public Health, 93, 277-84.
Oppenheimer, G. (2001). Paradigm lost: race, ethnicity, and the search for a new population taxonomy. American Journal of Public Health, 91, 1049-1055.
Openshaw, R. & Rata, E. (2007). The weight of inquiry: conflicting cultures in New Zealand’s terciary institutions. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 17, 407-425.
Paradies, Y. (2006). A systematic review of empirical research on self-reported racism and health. International Journal of Epidemiolog, 35(4), 888-901.
Parra, F., Amado, R., Lambertucci, J., Rocha, J., Antunes, C. & Pena, S. (2002). Color and genomic ancestry in Brazilians. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100(1),177-182.
Parra, E., Kittles, R., & Shriver, M. (2004) Implications of correlations between skin color and genetic ancestry for biomedical research. Nature Genetics, 36, S54-60.
Patrinos, A. (2004). ‘Race’ and the human genome. Nature Genetics, 36, 1-2.
Pena, S. (2005). Reasons for banish the concept of race from Brazilian medicine. História, Ciência e Saúde – Manguinhos, 12, 321-346.
Peters, R.M. (2006). The relationship of racism, chronic stress emotions, and blood pressure. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 38(3), 234-240.
Pfeffer, N. (1998). Theories of race, ethnicity, and culture. British Medical Journal, 317, 1381-4.
Priest, P. & Jackson, R. (1994). The validity of Maori hospital discharge statistics for ischaemic heart disease in New Zealand. New Zealand Medical Journal, 107, 3-4.
Pryor, E., Goldman, G., Sheridan, M. & White, P. Measuring ethnicity: Is ‘Canadian’ an evolving indigenous category? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 15, 214-235.
Rata, E. (2000) A Political Economy of Neotribal Capitalism. Lanham, Md & Oxford: Lexington Books.
Rata, E. (2008) Educating for Citizenship in a Bicultural Society. In. A. St.George, S. Brown & J. O’Neill (Eds), Facing the big questions in teaching: Purpose, power and learning (pp. 51-62). Melbourne, Vic.: Cengage Learning.
Rasanathan, K., Craig, D. & Perkins, R. (2006). The novel use of ‘Asian’ as an ethnic category in the New Zealand health sector. Ethnicity & Health, 11, 211-227.
Reinken, J., Salmond, C. & de Lacy, A. (1983). A Critical appraisal? New Zealand Medical Journal, 96, 174-176.
Rice, V. (1989, February 24). Fair-skinned Maoris ‘potent weapons in war of stealth’. Dominion, p.1.
Roughan, J. (2006, March 25). An acute sense of belonging. New Zealand Herald.
Royal, C. & Dunston G. (2004). Changing the paradigm from ‘race’ to human genome variation. Nature Genetics, 36(11), 5-7.
Sankar, P., Cho, M., Condit, C., Hunt, L., Koenig, B., Marshall, P., et al. (2004). Genetic research and health disparities. Jama, 291, 2985-9.
Sarich, V. & Miele, F. (2004). Race, the reality of human differences. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Senior, P. & Bhopal, R. (1994). Ethnicity as a variable in epidemiological research. British Medical Journal, 309, 327-330.
Sheldon, T. & Parker, H. (1992). Race and ethnicity in health research. Journal of Public Health Medicine, 14, 104-10.
Smartt, P., Marshall, R.J., Kjellstrom, T. & Dyall, L. (2002). Reporting comparisons between Maori and non-Maori populations. New Zealand Medical Journal, 115, 167-169.
Smith, G.H. (1997). The development of kaupapa Maori: Theory and praxis. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Auckland.
Statistics New Zealand (2005) Statistical Standard for Ethnicity 2005. Wellington: Statistics New Zealand. Retrieved February 20, 2009, from http://www.stats.govt.nz
Stokes, J. (2006, September 25). ‘Brash Outrages Maori By Questioning Their Identity’. New Zealand Herald, p. A3.
Sundborn, G., Metcalf, P., Schaff, D., Dyall, L., Gentles, D. & Jackson, R. (2006). Differences in health-related socio-economic characteristis among Pacific populations living in Auckland, New Zealand. The Medical Journal of New Zealand, 119, 1-11.
Swan, J., Lillis, S. & Simmons D. (2006). Investigating the accuracy of ethnicity data in New Zealand hospital records: still room for improvement. New Zealand Medical Journal, 119, U2103.
Te Ropu Rangahau Hauora a Eru Pomare. (2000). Counting for Nothing: Understanding the Issues in Monitoring Disparities. Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, 14, 1-16.
Terris, M. (1973). Desegregating health statistics. American Journal of Public Health, 63, 477-80.
Thomas, D.R. (2001). Assessing ethnicity in New Zealand health research. New Zealand Medical Journal, 114, 86-88.
Tishkoff, S. & Kidd, K. (2004). Implications of biogeography of human populations for ‘race’ and medicine. Nature Genetics, 36, 21-27.
Trauer, T., Eagar, K. & Mellsop, G. (2006). Ethnicity, deprivation and mental health outcomes. Australian Health Revue, 30, 310-321.
Travassos, C. & David, R. (2004). The concept and measurement of race and their relationship to public health: a review focused on Brazil and the United States. Cadernos de Saúde Pública. 20, 660-678.
Tremewan, C. (2006). Re-politicising Race: The Anglican Church in New Zealand. In R. Openshaw & E. Rata (Eds.), Public Policy and Ethnicity: The politics of ethnic boundary making. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tongan educator senior lecturer at AUT – her response to Genographic Project’s research into peoples’ origins and spread (Harvey, C. Stirring up the gene pool, NZ Herald, 30 July 2005, B3
Turia, T. (Hon.) (2000, 29 August). Speech to NZ Psychological Society Conference 2000, Waikato University, Hamilton. Retrieved February 13, 2009, from http:www.converge.org.nz/pma/tspeech.htm
Van Meijl, T. (2006). Multiple identifications and the dialogical self: urban Maori youngsters and the cultural renaissance. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 12, 917-933.
Wang, V & Sue, S. (2005). In the eye of the storm: race and genomics in research and practice. American Psychologist, 60(1), 37-45.
Warren, R., Hahn, R., Bristow, L. & Yu, E. (1994). The use of race and ethnicity in public health surveillance. Public Health Reports, 109, 4-6.
Wilffert, B., Zaal, R. & Brouwers, J.R. (2005). Pharmacogenetics as a tool in the therapy of schizophrenia. Pharmacy World and Science, 27(1), 20-30.
Williams, D. (1996). Race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status: measurement and methodological issues. International Journal of Health Services, 26, 483-505.
Williams, D., Neighbors, H. & Jackson, J. (2003). Racial/ethnic discrimination and health: findings from community studies. American Journal of Public Health, 93(2), 200-208.
Willis, D. (2001). Them and us: the politics of population taxonomy. American Journal of Public Health, 91, 1048-9.
Yankauer, A. (1987). Hispanic/Latino–what’s in a name? American Journal of Public Health, 77, 15-7.
Yinger, J. M. (1985). Ethnicity, American Review of Sociology, 11, 151-180.
INCLUSIVE BICULTURALISM
Useful Terms
A full account of inclusive and exclusive biculturalism in relation to the nation and to iwi is available in the paper on my website titled ‘Inclusive Biculturalism, Exclusive Biculturalism and the Nation’.
Inclusive biculturalism
This term includes, but is not limited to:
- Māori culture (including language) is valued by all because it is unique to this land.
- Settler-descendant culture is valued by all because it is unique to this land.
- All cultural practices, both Māori and non-Māori, are accommodated in the public sphere if consistent with the principles of liberal democracy. Eg. tolerance, secularism, gender equality.
- ‘Race’ and ‘culture’ are separated. This requires differentiating between ethnicity/race/generic heritage/whakapapa on the one hand and cultural identity on the other. The distinction allows individuals to identity with a culture even if they don’t have ethnic/race descent from the group which practised the culture. (In exclusive biculturalism, ‘race’ and ‘culture’ are not separated.)
Bicultural society
This term refers to the recognition of Māori and non-Māori culture in civil society. It doesn’t refer to the actual ethnicity/race of people but to historical beliefs and practices which are valued today. The reason for their combined value is that represent a unified New Zealand. For example, the Maori strand would include the Maori language, traditional rituals such as tangi, and so on. The non-Māori strand would include the egalitarian ideals of colonial society, non-familial friendship, love of the outdoor leisure pursuits and so on. Many practices are valued in both cultures, e.g. family-centric, elder respect.
The non-politicised symbols of New Zealand’s biculturalism society would be the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and the 1852 Constitution Act. Both would be celebrated as founding historical documents whose purpose is to unite all New Zealanders by evoking a history that can be shared.
Pluralist population
This term refers to the fact that the population consists of individuals from plural ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Some choose to maintain their heritage culture while others don’t.
Liberal-democratic state/government
This term refers to New Zealand’s Westminster style of democratic government. It is based on the principle of the free universal human being.
Elizabeth Rata
8th July 2021