During research about Maori engagements with land and diaspora, I have benefited from the considerable generosity of Maori, especially among Ngati Porou, especially in Ruatoria (on the east coast of Aotearoa New Zealand). A couple of friends there suggested that I might like to visit London's Maori community, especially Ngati Ranana. Friendships have developed over the years in which I've been an occasional participant in Ngati Ranana's events and remarkable performances of Maori culture. Also, I have been privileged to bring the invitation of the Secular Order of Druids to Ngati Ranana to participate in celebrations of the solstices at Stonehenge and Avebury.
Core experiences among all these Maori friends and colleagues have led me to reflect on the importance and wider implications of protocols by which Maori make guests and honour hosts.
These protocols are comparable to those of many indigenous and other communities. They contrast with the dualism of “us versus them” cultures (especially as conducted by Bush and Blair). They recognise existing relationships and seek to enhance and enrich them. David Turner's evocation of an Aboriginal Australian approach to this implicit relationality is that there is “always a part of the one in the other”. I provide other examples of the underlying rationales and of particular, local, indigenous practices in the publications in which I discuss these ideas.
Its not enough to treat all this as ethnography: writing about “others”. In fact that would be downright rude to become a guest of a community only to write about them as if you'd not been changed, learnt at least something, been encouraged to ponder the strangeness of your own community, worldview and lifeway ...
The point is that academics need to learn how to be respectful guests now that we've realised that "objectivity” was a delusion that misled us into bad relationships and produced poor results. (We have learnt that, haven't we?!).
Perhaps, too, the point is that academia is historically and generally part of colonialism. Guesthood is a serious challenge to the existing ideologies, methodologies, relationships and practices of academia. Changing academia is a part of demolishing colonialism. Quite what academia could be like IF (big if) academics became guests remains to be seen.
My articles on this are:
| ‘Maori Diaspora Spirituality, global indigeneity and the construction of academia’ at http://www.cesnur.org/2001/london2001/harvey.htm | ||
| ‘Guesthood as ethical decolonising research method’, Numen 50.2 (2003): 125-46 | ||
| ‘Performing and Constructing Research as Guesthood’ in Lynne Hume and Jane Mulcock (eds), Anthropologists in the Field. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 168-82. | ||
| ‘Performing identity and entertaining guests: Maori diaspora in London’ in Graham Harvey and Charlie Thompson, Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. pp.121-34. |
But you should also see
| Young, D.E., and Goulet, J.-G. (eds) Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience (Broadview Press, 1994). | ||
| Smith, L.T. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999). | ||
| Spikard, J.V., Landres, J.S., and McGuire, M.B. (eds) Personal Knowledge and Beyond: the Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion. (New York University Press: 2002) | ||
| Rose, D. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (University of New South Wales Press, 2004) | ||
| Blain, J., Ezzy, D., and Harvey, G. (eds) Researching Paganisms (New York: Altamira, 2004) | ||
| Latour, B. Politics of Nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004). | ||
| Hume, L., and Mulcock, J. (eds), Anthropologists in the Field (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). |
(Just a note: don't be put off by the words “anthropology” or “sciences”: all these books contest the way these have been done until now ... )
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