CeMoRe Seminar - Kynan Gentry on Maori Culture
Date: 26 January 2010 Time: 4.15 - 6.00pm
Venue: Institute for Advanced Studies MR2
Throwing stones at Napoleon: the battle for control of 'authentic' Maori material culture in New Zealand, 1875-1925 - Kynan Gentry
This seminar will explore the mobilities of Maori material culture in New Zealand in the fifty years up until 1925. In the closing decades of the nineteenth-century New Zealand's settler society began to self-consciously identify themselves as New Zealanders as opposed to displaced Britons. The Maori cultural landscape was central to this identity, and by the beginning of the First World War images of Maori culture were inseparable from the country's transnational identity - especially in the realm of tourism. As the importance of Maori culture grew, so too did state efforts to control it through the management and direction of indigenous performance, and through the legislative moves to nationalise Maori material culture. Parallel to this, state efforts to dismantle Maori culture in the name of assimilation also saw the employment of notions of cultural authenticity that assigned 'authentic' Maori culture to the distant past. The growing importance of Maori cultural performance to New Zealand identity also placed Maori in a position of power, and material culture would inevitably form the basis of the Maori counter-colonial response.
There will be a drink in County bar following Ky's seminar - please come and join us
Contact:
Who can attend: Anyone
Further information
Associated staff:
Organising departments and research centres: Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe), Culture, Theory, Context, History, Mobilities.Lab, Politics and International Relations, Sociology
Keywords: Cultural anthropology, Cultural geography, Cultural Studies, Culture
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