This article argues that growing confidence in anthropology as a tool for managing the adaptation of a resurgent M (a) over bar ori population to modernity shaped a "politics of knowledge" regarding New Zealand's indigenous people in the mid-twentieth century. We examine the relationship between anthropological discourse, state policy, and the Maori struggle to uphold traditional ways, through the prism of Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole's psycho-ethnographic study entitled Some Modern Maoris (Beaglehole, E., and P. Beaglehole. 1946. Some Modern Maoris. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research). This paper demonstrates that the study was the product of a nexus between concerns for Maori welfare, a perceived need for empirical research that could be applied to the "problem" of indigenous adjustment to contemporary conditions, and American philanthropy. For this reason, and as a detailed record of a small community when Maori society was on the cusp of post-Second World War transformations, we contend that the study deserves to be recovered from historical obscurity.
- 9926516610601891
- The Politics of Knowledge: Anthropology and Māori Modernity in Mid-Twentieth-Century New Zealand
- Daniel MorrowBarbara Brookes
- History and anthropology, Vol.24(4), pp.453-471
- History
- Taylor & Francis
- 01/01/2013
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- English
- Journal article