Michèle D. Dominy

Hearing grass, thinking grass: postcolonialism and ecology in Aotearoa-New Zealand:

This article examines the land and its biota as actors in colonialist and postcolonialist processes in Aotearoa-New Zealand. It provides a cultural analysis of Monday’s warriors, Maurice Shadbolt’s novel of cultural encounter between Maori prophet Titokowaru and nineteenth-century colonials, Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s environmental history Tutira: the story of a New Zealand sheep station, and the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in the South Island pastoral high country. These narratives of Aotearoa provide an opportunity for a productive convergence of modes of discursive analysis and detailed observation. They suggest how textual, historical and ethnographic analysis can examine the significance of land and place in relation to biogeophysical and cultural components. The article argues that introduced grass as a material commodity with social value, and as an instrument of colonial domination and its accompanying agricultural conquest, is an ecological signifier through which identity can be emplaced and land embodied for pakeha and Maori actors. Thinking through grasslands better enables us to consider the mixed authenticities of place and identity. This works as a device for revealing the twisted entanglements within emergent postcolonialism, as Aotearoa, like other settlement nations, collectively invents itself and discovers that there is no fixed place to which one can return.

Anthropology in the ‘Savage Slot’: Reflections on the Epistemology of Knowledge

During the past decade or two, anthropologists have been reshaping their discipline, reassessing the future of anthropological ways of knowing, and repositioning their work in relation to their field communities and their audiences. A 1997 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminar on the ‘Politics of Representation in the Pacific’, convened at the East–West Center by Vilsoni Hereniko and Geoffrey White, presented an opportunity to discuss this development among a group of scholars drawn not only from anthropology but also from the arts, humanities and social sciences. Seminar participants outside the discipline posited a radical and discomforting critique of anthropology by othering its practitioners and marginalising it as an unchanging and homogenising discipline, engaged with reproducing Western-based ideas of the ‘primitive’. Rolph Trouillot (1991) defines this type of disciplinary categorisation as placing others in a ‘savage slot’ (see also Lederman 1998, 436). Although some participants initially rejected the legitimacy of the anthropological voice and ethnographic practice, by the end of the seminar some of these participants had reassessed their stance, agreeing that ‘doing field research’ was of value, even if the modes of writing about these experiences were in turmoil. In retrospect, this seminar offered an opportunity to reassess the positioning of anthropology as a discipline within the multicultural framework of subaltern critique that came to typify academia near the turn of the twenty-first century, and in relation to the neocolonial and postcolonial persons and communities with whom anthropologists continue to interact. This special issue of Anthropological Forum

Settler Postcolonial Ecologies and Native Species Regeneration on Banks Peninsula, Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT The 2050 Ecological Vision for Banks Peninsula, New Zealand is ‘to create an environment in which the community values, protects and cares for the biodiversity, landscape and special character of Banks Peninsula’. Its aspirational goals point to the peninsula conservation trust’s vision for success on the moral horizons of land and place. These horizons stretch visually from the volcanic crater ridgelines to the outer coastal bays and the sea beyond. Temporally they span 175 years of cultural encounters of peoples and biota, and reveal community-based strategies designed to support thriving biodiversity on land that has been used primarily for production. This article draws on the event, textual and interview data as well as fieldwork conducted in 2015 during the 175th anniversary of organised European settlement. Settler pasts and presents are negotiated in natural heritage preservation through the restoration of native flora and fauna in natural areas and protected connectivity corridors. A settler postcolonial ecology for these hill country lands is committed to the simultaneous conservation of biological and cultural diversity in which indigenous flora and fauna, landscapes and people, are irreversibly hybridised, and endemic species become constitutive of a postcolonial national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Moral horizons of land and place

ABSTRACT A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.

The Rural Entrepreneurs: A History of the Stock and Station Agent Industry in Australia and New Zealand

1. A quintessentially Australasian institution 2. The development of the stock and station agent industry 3. The farming community network 4. Financial services 5. Marketing services: livestock, land, and produce 6. Marketing services: wool consignment and brokerage 7. Information, advisory, and advocacy services 8. Organisational structures and administrative practices 9. Inter-organisational relations: competition, cooperation and collusion among agency firms 10. Conclusion: business intermediation and rural entrepreneurship.