Māori Indigeneity and the Ontological Turn in Ethnography

Authors

  • Steven Webster Social Anthropology, The University of Auckland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11157/sites-id401

Keywords:

Keywords, Māori indigeneity, ontological ethnography, commodity fetishism, whakapapa, surrealism.

Abstract

This essay proposes an understanding of commodity fetishism that can mediate between divergent understandings of Māori indigeneity in a politically progressive way. To do this, an account of the Māori concept of whakapapa in terms of a recursive ontology is held up to a critique of such ontological turns in ethnography. The comparison shows that both approaches pursue ethnographic understanding in terms of a paradoxical relationship between creativity and politics. It is argued that the actual convergence of these apparently divergent ethnographic approaches places them, like postmodernist ethnographic forms developed since the 1980s, in the prolonged but still promising historical materialist critique of surrealism begun in the 1920s by the modernist avant-garde.

Author Biography

  • Steven Webster, Social Anthropology, The University of Auckland
    Steven Webster is an Honorary Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at The University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he taught from 1972–1998, before retiring. He completed his PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle, immigrated with his family to Auckland in 1972, gained New Zealand citizenship in 1984, and continues to live in Ponsonby, Auckland with his family. His teaching specialisation since the 1980s has been ethnic politics, Māori land history, treaty rights, and political economy. He began field research with Ngāi Tūhoe iwi of Māori in 1972, and continues research in their ethnohistory, especially political economic implications of their kinship organisation. Between 1995 and 2001 he taught as a visitor at University of Washington, Seattle and Tacoma, Northwest Indian Tribal College, Tacoma, and Princeton University, New Jersey. In 2004 he completed ethnohistorical research for the Waitangi Tribunal on the Urewera Consolidation Scheme 1915–1926.

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Published

03-05-2019

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2019)

Section

Articles

License

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How to Cite

Māori Indigeneity and the Ontological Turn in Ethnography. (2019). Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.11157/sites-id401