Tupuna Awa

'We have always owned the water . . . we have never ceded our mana over the river to anyone', King Tuheitia Paki asserted in 2012. Prime Minister John Key disagreed: ‘King Tuheitia's claim that Maori have always owned New Zealand's water is just plain wrong'. So who does own the water in New Zealand – if anyone – and why does it matter? Offering some human context around that fraught question, Tupuna Awa looks at the people and politics of the Waikato River. For iwi and hapu of the lands that border its 425-kilometre length, the Waikato River is an ancestor, a taonga and a source of mauri, lying at the heart of identity and chiefly power. It is also subject to governing oversight by the Crown and intersected by hydro-stations managed by state-owned power companies: a situation rife with complexity and subject to shifting and subtle power dynamics. Marama Muru-Lanning explains how Maori of the region, the Crown and Mighty River Power have talked about the ownership, guardianship and stakeholders of the river. By examining the debates over water in one New Zealand river, over a single recent period, Muru-Lanning provides a powerful lens through which to view modern iwi politics, debates over water ownership, and contests for power between Maori and the state.

"Second edition of a collection of Māori legends, in English and Māori"--BIM.

Anthropologists have written a great deal about the coastal adaptations and seafaring traditions of Pacific Islanders, but have had much less to say about the significance of rivers for Pacific island culture, livelihood and identity. The authors of this collection seek to fill that gap in the ethnographic record by drawing attention to the deep historical attachments of island communities to rivers, and the ways in which those attachments are changing in response to various forms of economic development and social change. In addition to making a unique contribution to Pacific island ethnography, the authors of this volume speak to a global set of issues of immense importance to a world in which water scarcity, conflict, pollution and the degradation of riparian environments afflict growing numbers of people. Several authors take a political ecology approach to their topic, but the emphasis here is less on hydro-politics than on the cultural meaning of rivers to the communities we describe. How has the cultural significance of rivers shifted as a result of colonisation, development and nation-building? How do people whose identities are fundamentally rooted in their relationship to a particular river renegotiate that relationship when the river is dammed to generate hydro-power or polluted by mining activities? How do blockages in the flow of rivers and underground springs interrupt the intergenerational transmission of local ecological knowledge and hence the ability of local communities to construct collective identities rooted in a sense of place?

Aotearoa New Zealand is frequently viewed as the most advanced country in the world when it comes to reconciliation processes between the state and its colonised Indigenous people. The fact that this book’s contributions are written by scholars who are all engaged in such processes is alone testament to this alone. But despite all that has been achieved, the processes need to be critically evaluated. This book offers an up-to-date analysis of the reconciliation processes between Māori and the Crown by leading and emerging scholars in the field. It is the first attempt to grasp the link between contemporary politics, the notion of activist research, and historical and anthropological analysis. The argument this collection is based on is that reconciliation processes are manifested in much more than government policies, legal decisions and law-making. Both research and political efforts fully involve Indigenous scholars, legal and historical academics, communities, tribes, engaged Pākehā (settlers and immigrants of European descent) and national institutions. Among other things, such negotiation processes are tangibly represented by (new) rituals, by open and media-streamed debates, and by public institutions such as the Waitangi Tribunal.

This book provides keys to decrypt current political debates on the environment in light of the theories that support them, and provides tools to better understand and manage environmental conflicts and promote environmentally friendly behaviour. As we work towards global sustainability at a time when efforts to conserve biodiversity and combat climate change correspond with land grabs by large corporations, food insecurity, and human displacement. While we seek to reconcile more-than-human relations and responsibilities in the Anthropocene, we also struggle to accommodate social justice and the increasingly global desire for economic development. These and other challenges fundamentally alter the way social scientists relate to communities and the environment. This book takes as its point of departure today’s pressing environmental challenges, particularly the loss of biodiversity, and the role of communities in protected areas conservation. In its chapters, the authors discuss areas of tension between local livelihoods and international conservation efforts, between local communities and wildlife, and finally between traditional ways of living and ‘modernity’. The central premise of this book is while these tensions cannot be easily resolved they can be better understood by considering both social and ecological effects, in equal measure. While environmental problems cannot be seen as purely ecological because they always involve people, who bring to the environmental table their different assumptions about nature and culture, so are social problems connected to environmental constraints. While nonhumans cannot verbally bring anything to this negotiating table, aside from vast material benefits that society relies on, the distinct perspective of this book is that there is a need to consider the role of nonhumans as equally important stakeholders – albeit without a voice. This book develops an argument that human-environmental relationships are set within ecological reality and ecological ethics and rather than being mutually constitutive processes, humans have obligate dependence on nature, not vice versa. This would enable an ethical position encompassing the needs of other species and giving simultaneous (without one being subordinated to another) consideration to justice for humans and non-humans alike. The book is accessible to both social scientists and conservation specialists, and intends to contribute to strengthening interdisciplinary collaborations in the field of conservation.

First Fieldwork: Pacific Anthropology, 1960–1985 explores what a generation of anthropologists experienced during their first visits to the field at a time of momentous political changes in Pacific island countries and societies and in anthropology itself. Answering some of the same how and why questions found in Terence E. Hays’ Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (1993), First Fieldwork begins where that collection left off in the 1950s and covers a broader selection of Pacific Islands societies and topics. Chapters range from candid reflections on working with little-known peoples to reflexive analyses of adapting research projects and field sites, in order to better fit local politics and concerns. Included in these accounts are the often harsh emotional and logistical demands placed on fieldworkers and interlocutors as they attempt the work of connecting and achieving mutual understandings. Evident throughout is the conviction that fieldwork and what we learn from and write about it are necessary to a robust anthropology. By demystifying a phase begun in the mid-1980s when critics considered attempts to describe fieldwork and its relation to ethnography as inevitably biased representations of the unknowable truth, First Fieldwork contributes to a renewed interest in experiential and theoretical nuances of fieldwork. Looking back on the richest of fieldwork experiences, the contributors uncover essential structures and challenges of fieldwork: connection, context, and change. What they find is that building relationships and having others include you in their lives (once referred to as “achieving rapport”) is determined as much by our subjects as by ourselves. As they examine connections made or attempted during first fieldwork and bring to bear subsequent understandings and questions—new contexts from which to view and think—about their experiences, the contributors provide readers with multidimensional perspectives on fieldwork and how it continues to inspire anthropological interpretations and commitment. A crucial dimension is change. Each chapter is richly detailed in history: theirs/ours; colonial/postcolonial; and the then and now of theory and practice. While change is ever present, specifics are not. Reflecting back, the authors demonstrate how that specificity defined their experiences and ultimately their ethnographic re/productions.

Six centuries ago Polynesian explorers, who inhabited a cosmos in which islands sailed across the sea and stars across the sky, arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand where they rapidly adapted to new plants, animals, landscapes and climatic conditions. Four centuries later, European explorers arrived with maps and clocks, grids and fences, and they too adapted to a new island home. In this remote, beautiful archipelago, settlers from Polynesia and Europe (and elsewhere) have clashed and forged alliances, they have fiercely debated what is real and what is common sense, what is good and what is right. In this, her most ambitious book to date, Dame Anne Salmond looks at New Zealand as a site of cosmo-diversity, a place where multiple worlds engage and collide. Beginning with a fine-grained inquiry into the early period of encounters between Maori and Europeans in New Zealand (1769–1840), Salmond then investigates such clashes and exchanges in key areas of contemporary life – waterways, land, the sea and people. We live in a world of gridded maps, Outlook calendars and balance sheets – making it seem that this is the nature of reality itself. But in New Zealand, concepts of whakapapa and hau, complex networks and reciprocal exchange, may point to new ways of understanding interactions between peoples, and between people and the natural world. Like our ancestors, Anne Salmond suggests, we too may have a chance to experiment across worlds.

Combining rich personal accounts from twelve veteran anthropologists with reflexive analyses of the state of anthropology today, this book is a treatise on theory and method offering fresh insights into the production of anthropological knowledge, from the creation of key concepts to major paradigm shifts. Particular focus is given to how 'peripheral perspectives' can help re-shape the discipline and the ways that anthropologists think about contemporary culture and society. From urban Maori communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, from Arnhem Land in Australia to the villages of Yorkshire, these accounts take us to the heart of the anthropological endeavour, decentring mainstream perspectives, and revealing the intimate relationships and processes that create anthropological knowledge.