Abstract
Recent re-conceptualizations of the ‘public sphere’ facilitated a much needed shift in thinking about identity politics ‘from a substance … to a movement’ (Weibel and Latour, 2007). This laid the foundation for dissolving the ‘emanatist vision’ (Bourdieu, 1990) of self-explanatory and perpetual systems and structures towards the interrogation of actions and performances that simultaneously constitute and are affected by such wider socio-political realities. Most academic contributions, however, remain on a normative or theoretical level without offering empirical insights.
This article introduces Mana Taonga as an Indigenous Māori concept of cultural politics embedded in current museum practice at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa). It creates a dialogue between Indigenous Māori practice and Western theory leading to a refined understanding of performative democracy within a museum as forum, or public sphere. The authors argue that a specific museum offers a particular place, space and empirical reality to interrogate seemingly universal concepts such as ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ by blending theoretical notions with an awareness of institutional contexts and practices.
Keywords
Collaboration: Creating dialogue betweenIndigenous practice and Western theory
This article grew out of the dissatisfaction with the artificial dichotomy between theory and practice in most conventional approaches to the analysis of cultural politics. In this context, it is somewhat ironic that even global theorizations remain clearly informed by one particular perspective. It follows that the vast majority of Western academic knowledge production can rightfully be critiqued for its purely Western focus. Since it is both impossible and undesirable to abandon one’s identity, we argue that collaboration is the methodological key to overcome the current predicament and unlock deeper understandings. By collaboration we mean dialogue, which does not involve a gestural accommodation of a subaltern part for its eventual assimilation within the dominant whole, but refers to an interpretive engagement which ‘requires that these two places … the I and the You … be mobilised in the passage through a Third Space’ (Bhabha, 1994:136).
We intend to shape such a ‘Third Space’ of knowledge production by creating a dialogue between Indigenous practice and Western theory. Both content and form of the evolving argument reflect this collaborative spirit. Mana Taonga as an Indigenous concept of cultural politics embedded in museum practice at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) is brought into dialogue with Western theoretical notions of the public sphere. The collaborative ethos of this dialogue, which is the current outcome of our mutual intellectual engagement over many years within and beyond Te Papa, is further heightened by the different authorship in this joint article. In the first section, Philipp Schorch sets the theoretical scene for an understanding of a museum as forum, or public sphere. Then, Arapata Hakiwai presents the insider Māori perspective into the practical functioning of Mana Taonga behind the scenes at Te Papa. Schorch proceeds by drawing together the theoretical argument and the empirical insights to conclude with idea of the reflexive museum, which reveals museological productions and bring these into dialogue with the museum experience, thus shaping a truly democratic forum by ‘making things public’ (Latour and Weibel, 2005).
Introduction
This article focuses on museum theory and practice, and in particular aspects of the strand of critical analysis called the ‘new museology’ (Vergo, 1989) and its relation to wider postcolonial critiques. In the course of the new museology, the reinvention of the museum as ‘forum’, or place and space of dialogue, with Te Papa being a prominent example, and the notion of the ‘public sphere’ have been closely linked (Barrett, 2011; Message, 2006, 2010). Within this context, the site ‘museum’ is a relatively new and burgeoning object of academic analysis. It has been appropriated by a myriad of related disciplines and research tends to operate in discursive cycles producing such essentialized totalities as the museum, the culture, the state or the visitor. Abstract and theoretical concepts like ‘discourse’ and ‘structure’ assume the obscure and all dominating role of an ‘invisible actor behind the scenes’ (Arendt, 1958) leading to an ‘emanatist vision’ (Bourdieu, 1990) that reduces historical subjects to incidents of discourse and embodiments of structure.
The main reason for such simplistic and reductionist accounts is a misunderstanding of ‘hegemony’ and the political. By reading museums as cultural texts and hegemonic orchestrations mirroring the reformist agenda and citizen technology of the state, such perspectives fail to consider that ‘hegemony’ is no totalizing frame but an inherently contested terrain (Laclau, 2000). In other words, the state itself is a heterogeneous and relational complex, or ‘assemblage’ (Delanda, 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), and hence is ‘no more than co-action’ (Ricoeur, 1991). In the case of New Zealand, Indigenous and other agencies are at work both within and outside the state and its institutions like museums. Likewise, museological representations should be approached not as self-evident points of departure or self-enclosed totalities, but rather as ephemeral manifestations of complicated processes performed by multiple actors in particular contexts. Consequently, culture and politics can be seen not as linear, normative prescriptions but instead as dynamic, hermeneutic negotiations. Even the most uneven distribution of colonization and globalization cannot produce a totalizing structural logic for the complex interaction and transfer between cultural worlds of meaning.
Consequently, Te Papa’s bicultural principle, which attempts to enshrine the spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between Māori and the British Crown, in museum governance, management and practice, is best approached through an interrogation of socially and politically embedded cultural actions and performances rather than the common structural overdetermination of institutional critiques. This lays the foundation for dissolving the ‘emanatist vision’ of self-explanatory and perpetual systems and structures towards the interrogation of actions and performances which simultaneously constitute and are affected by such wider socio-political realities. Before we turn to such an examination through the concept ‘Mana Taonga’, it is worth highlighting that, given the hermeneutic complexity of human affairs, ‘biculturalism’ has never been a linear, one-dimensional and superimposed ideology by the state, but rather is the dynamic outcome of a Gramscian ‘war of position’ in the fluid, ambiguous and indeterminate spaces that Bhabha (1994) calls the ‘in-between’.
McCarthy (2007, 2011) for example, has shown how the remarkable encounter of Māori and Europeans unfolded throughout the colonial cultures of display in museums, ultimately leading to Māori control and ownership of Māori collections and exhibitions. This nuanced piece of scholarship complicates the seemingly conventional wisdom of the one-sided ‘Western’ appropriation of ‘Other’ cultures by historically tracing the various forms of Indigenous agency through which ‘Māori’ appropriated the institution museum for their own strategic ends. In short, there have been overt and covert postcolonial moments and processes long before the official heralding of postcoloniality. In a more specific museological context this also means that the new museology is not that new after all. At the same time, however, there is neither a ‘bicultural New Zealand’ nor a ‘bicultural Te Papa’ in a monolithic sense, but there emerge complex bicultural experiments, arrangements and contentions in particular institutional, political and historical contexts.
Indigenous critiques of museums continue to challenge Western museology and in New Zealand’s context Māori people have created Indigenous theoretical frameworks to ensure cultural relevancy, connectivity and legitimacy. Both museological academics and practitioners are actively engaging with the politics of Indigenous recognition and advocate for stronger involvement of Indigenous people in relationships established through exhibitions and collaborative research projects. The decolonization of Western research practice is proceeding and writers like Smith (1999) have created a localized critical theory that advocates emancipation and empowerment as well as the advancement of self-determination, autonomy and independence. This wider postcolonial discourse in general and the politics of Indigeneity in particular have transformed the institution ‘museum’ from the inside and from the outside, as the subsequent introduction of Mana Taonga as an Indigenous political concept of cultural negotiation and contestation exemplifies.
Mana Taonga at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa)
In February 2010, I (Arapata Hakiwai, co-author of this article) presented a paper titled ‘Māori Taonga (treasures) and Māori Identity: Recognizing living relationships through policy and practice’ at the Australasian Registrars Conference in Christchurch, New Zealand. Central to my presentation was the recognition that Māori culture is still very much alive in all its manifestations and that Māori taonga held in museums are still important markers and symbols of Māori identity and history. Preservation, I argued, meant different things to different people and for Māori people it was as much about nourishing the vital elements of a living culture as it was for ensuring the best quality care within a museum environment.
Aotearoa New Zealand – Museums and Māori
There are around 400 museums in New Zealand, large and small, with a wide range and diversity, each with their own focus and direction. Arguably museums have in large part been the gatekeepers of culture and in control of Māori material culture for a long time. They have played their part in the colonization process in New Zealand where they have collected and interpreted Māori cultural treasures without forming close relationships with the iwi (tribes) who had originally owned the collections (Butts, 2002: 225). Many museums carry with them their undeniable Western traditions and practices, which have often remained unchanged since the time of the New Zealand wars of the 1860s when many museums in New Zealand were formed – Auckland (1862), Taranaki (1865), Hawke’s Bay (1865), Wellington (1865), Otago (1868) and Canterbury (1870).
As far as museums are concerned, Māori have been the passive observers looking from the outside in. The language of definitions, the modus operandi and the management of taonga have been largely in the hands of the dominant cultural perspective. Although we know that Māori have had some meaningful relationships with museums in New Zealand throughout their history (McCarthy, 2011), museums have been largely mono-cultural and unwelcoming to Māori. Museums are cultural constructs that reflect the traditions and practices that gave rise to them. As Peers and Brown (2003: 7) note: Museums have their own traditions of knowledge about the items in their collections, their own professional culture, their own ways of caring for and classifying artefacts, and their own goals of education and entertainment that they wish to realise from their collections in their work with the public. By and large, these differ dramatically from the perspectives and goals of source communities.
In many cases, museum practice in New Zealand is still stifling and outdated, let alone relevant and meaningful to the communities they serve. For Māori people, the past is an important and pervasive dimension of the present and future. Our ancestors are still with us, all around us, a part of us. Their mana (power & authority) and achievements are continually recounted and celebrated, not in a historic and unattached way but in natural form that embraces the present and contemporary. These words are significant because museums hold large numbers of ancestral treasures that represent our ancestors and their histories. Our treasures are much more than objets d’art for they are living in every sense of the word and carry the love and pride of those who fashioned them, handled and caressed them, and passed them on from generation to generation as taonga-tuku-iho.
The relationship between museums and Māori is at the heart of Te Papa’s policy of Mana Taonga (see Appendix). At the core of this relationship lays the contemporary relevance and value of heritage and its potential to make a difference in the lives of the people. As Kreps (2003: 10) reminds us: The New Museology movement is largely about giving people control over their cultural heritage and its preservation as part of how they maintain, reinforce, or construct their identity. The approach acknowledges the importance of preserving not only resources that represent a community’s past, but also vital elements of its living culture and its continuing development.
Mana Taonga at Te Papa
To understand Te Papa’s Mana Taonga policy (see Appendix) is to understand the history that led to its founding vision and concept. Te Papa grew largely out of what was happening in the 1980s as this was an important time in New Zealand’s history. The Waitangi Tribunal, a commission of enquiry, was given extra jurisdiction to inquire into historic claims dating back to 1840; the Kohanga Reo National Trust for early Māori education was established along with the first two Kohanga Reo or Māori language nest programmes, the first Māori university was founded, the Te Karere Māori news programme aired on television and there was a new and vibrant period of political rights for language and land.
The politics of Indigenous recognition manifested themselves in new and innovative ways including the creation of Indigenous frameworks that challenged Western ways of knowing and being. For example, Kaupapa Māori research methodologies were advocated largely in the educational disciplines in the 1990s to provide culturally relevant and meaningful education. Kaupapa Māori research theory and practice builds directly on Māori lived realities and experiences, and challenges the political context of unequal power relations and associated structures by identifying three main areas (Smith, 1997):
The validity and legitimacy of Māori are taken for granted
The survival of Māori language and culture is imperative
The struggle for autonomy over our own cultural well-being and over our own lives is vital to Māori struggles.
Te Māori Exhibition (1984–87)
Amidst the above described historical climate emerged the highly successful Te Māori exhibition that travelled to the USA in 1984 and then returned home to close in 1987. Te Māori was a watershed moment for our nation as for the first time Māori people were in large part in charge. It took over ten years to be put together and there were 174 tribal taonga included in the exhibition from museums throughout New Zealand. The Te Māori exhibition opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York on 10 September 1984 and it closed exactly three years later at the Auckland City Art Gallery on 10 September 1987. It was the result of a ground-breaking collaboration and co-operation between museums, government agencies, sponsors and Māori people.
Te Māori was transformational and it awoke the spirit of our ancestors on distant shores and stirred the imagination and minds of those working in museums. Its influence and legacy has been profound. It changed the lives of people and museums, it involved our people in ways never before undertaken, and it said to the world here are our taonga and we are its people. The world saw the magnificence of our art traditions and the presence of our people and our rituals and tikanga (customs). People saw that there was a living relationship between the taonga and their descendant kin communities. The whakataukī or proverb used for Te Māori, ‘He Toi Whakairo, He Mana Tangata’ – ‘Where there is artistic excellence, there is human dignity’, expressed the connections, relationships and whakapapa of taonga with their descendants. It signalled to the world that taonga were an important part of the social universe of Māoridom past and present. 1
The Te Māori exhibition was a defining moment for museum – Māori relations in terms of interpretation, governance and authority since it was the first real opportunity for Māori people to manage and present their taonga held in museums both nationally and internationally. The ultimate success of Te Māori challenged those who managed and controlled our taonga and emphasized the inadequacies of museum – Māori relations in a visible and tangible way. Te Māori signalled a turning point, a time for museums to examine and change the way operated.
Sid Mead, the co-curator of Te Māori, was highly critical of museum practice in New Zealand and advocated that Māori must reclaim the language of definitions and take back control of what was Māori. Mead’s (1990: 165) well known quote for the reclamation of Māori taonga remains relevant today as it was 20 years ago when he said: One way of recapturing one’s culture is to take control of the language of definitions and descriptions and to have members of the culture speak for themselves, present their culture such as their music, their dances and their various art forms in a manner they consider appropriate to them. This is a very important educational, intellectual, psychological, social and self-esteem raising exercise for members of captured cultures.
One of Te Māori’s legacies was the acknowledgement and recognition of cultural ownership. Te Papa’s Mana Taonga policy (see Appendix) was a natural progression of this along with the recognition that the old museology did not work.
Mana Taonga – power to the people
Before our National Museum opened in February 1998, it was openly acknowledged that the old museum was not right. It was a ‘stifling museology’ at its worst where Māori for the most part were the passive observers looking from the outside in. The new National Museum was to be ‘bicultural’ and it had to speak to the uniqueness of our country. Māori clearly did not want a blueprint of the old but instead a museum that recognized and embraced Māori cultural values, tikanga (customs) and knowledge systems.
Te Papa created a structured process of engagement with its communities before it opened and later called it the Mana Taonga principle (see Appendix). Mahuika (1991: 10–11), one of the creators of the Mana Taonga policy, stressed that Māori were poised to see what sort of cultural recognition the new National Museum would get stating that ‘Te Papa is seen by Māori as the first physical demonstration of a bicultural approach to taonga and, therefore, a first step towards the recognition of Māori cultural values’ and that ‘through the negotiation process that has typified the museum’s planning, Mana Māori has been transferred and translated into a bicultural expression in the new museum as Mana Taonga’.
Mana Taonga is a key statement and guiding principle for our National Museum and at its core is the recognition that there still exist living relationships and connections between taonga and their cultures of origin. Mana Taonga recognizes that communities have a right to their taonga by virtue of these concrete relationships. It acknowledges the role of communities in the care and management of taonga at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and their willingness to engage and mediate in new ways. Mana Taonga is central to Māori participation and involvement and in a very tangible way it connects iwi (Māori tribes) to Te Papa via the whakapapa or genealogical relationships of taonga and its knowledge.
This active process of engagement reflects the connections that exist between the taonga and their makers, kin and descendants. These relationships are often personal and frequently involve kanohi ki te kanohi or a face to face approach. The nature of the relationship can be expressed through such instruments as a memorandum of understanding, a legal agreement or a contract but often they are reinforced with mutual trust and respect for both parties. In all that we do at Te Papa, first we actively seek the support and approval of Māori with respect to the use of any treasure of theirs. This also extends to the interpretation and knowledge base associated with that treasure. Mana Taonga provides great scope for the inclusion of multiple ideas, different voices and competing perspectives, which echoes the hermeneutic complexities of cultural politics which we alluded to in the introduction and ultimately provides richer and more meaningful experiences to visitors. For Te Papa, Mana Taonga is an Indigenous principle that aims to restore the right of Māori to their material culture and thus awards the museum the interpretive authority through its connectivity and meaningful relationships with the communities of origin.
Perhaps the most telling symbolism of Mana Taonga was the transition from the old museum to the new museum in the late 1990s when Māori tribal treasures such as the Te Takinga storehouse and the Te Hau ki Turanga meeting house of Rongowhakaata were carried from the old museum in Buckle Street to the new museum on Wellington’s waterfront by their tribal descendants. It was a graphic reminder that the new museum vision had started. The concept of Mana Taonga was central in laying the foundation and setting a course for Māori participation and involvement in the Museum of New Zealand when Te Papa first opened in 1998.
Today it still remains a cornerstone of Te Papa’s modus operandi. Broadly speaking the concept recognizes the spiritual and cultural connections of taonga with the people, thus acknowledging the special relationships that these create. Central to Mana Taonga was also the creation of a marae specifically for the new museum. This is significant as adopting the strong Māori cultural institution of a marae also ensured that Māori values and knowledge systems were likewise respected. As Mahuika (1991: 11) noted in the early 1990s: Te Papa Tongarewa has adopted the Māori perceptions of marae, the meeting house, wharenui, and the courtyard, atea, as part of the new museum. The significance of this acceptance of the concept of marae means that Māori taonga will now have their own cultural environment. This cultural environment will enable people to greet and speak to their taonga.
Mana Taonga is a policy and principle that recognizes people and cultures. As Healy and Witcomb (2006) argue, Mana Taonga places people at the heart of the museum as a way of focusing on what is important in today’s contemporary world. By doing this, we ensure that the museum remains relevant and connected to its communities. Mana Taonga in essence activates this principle by recognizing that there are real living relationships that exist between the taonga and their descendant source communities. This ensures that cultural recognition, values and knowledge systems are acknowledged. Underpinning the concept of Mana Taonga is the recognition of living cultures and by association the importance of creating meaningful relationships with the communities and peoples from whence the objects and collections originate from and who identify with them. Te Papa’s former Chief Executive, Dr Seddon Bennington (1994: 11), once said that ‘Mana Taonga is not just a way of thinking about the relationship for Māori between objects and their makers. It is also bringing to our consciousness the role and attitude we need to develop in our engagement with other communities’.
In practice, Mana Taonga has meant a new way of doing things at Te Papa. It has seen the active engagement and involvement of our communities in everything we do. The Mana Taonga policy ensures that consultation and participation is activated at all times to ensure that Te Papa does speak with authority and that the people are involved in the telling and presenting of their own cultural histories and narratives. In an article written in 2009, former senior curator of the Māori collections at Te Papa, Huhana Smith, commented on how Mana Taonga operates for curators. Smith (2009: 8) noted that Mana Taonga recognizes the authority derived from the whakapapa relationships and that ‘such knowledge becomes the foundation for wider affiliated Māori participation at the museum and especially when research reconnects key people to taonga’. Highlighting both the challenges and opportunities Smith noted how Mana Taonga can maintain, improve and enhance relationships with tribal members and how curators can act as ‘intermediaries’ in the care, management and research of taonga on behalf of iwi, hapū and whānau (2009: 13,17).
Te Papa’s Mana Taonga policy ensures the following:
The spiritual and cultural connections of Māori and communities with their taonga and collections are acknowledged and reaffirmed.
Communities have access to taonga with which they have connections and relationships to.
Facilitating community engagement and involvement in decision-making about taonga, including how taonga might be managed, cared for, presented, interpreted and displayed.
Seeks to ensure that ‘community voices’ are heard in any exhibition of the taonga or representation of its history.
Consultation with communities occurs regarding the gathering and use of Mātauranga Māori or Māori knowledge associated with taonga, and that this knowledge is stored, cared for and used appropriately.
Museum staff is guided by appropriate tikanga or customary practice in caring for taonga along with any protocols or tikanga concerning its use.
Communities are consulted about any specific tikanga or customary practice required for the care of particular taonga.
Although the object or taonga is important within a museum context, Te Papa has always acknowledged the living relationships that exist between taonga and their kin as arguably it is this dimension that builds mutual trust and respect. As Tapsell (2003: 250) argues, ‘the key to museums successfully shifting contexts lies not simply in what they hold, but in the relationships such holdings represent to indigenous source communities, who have defied colonial expectations of dying out and continue to wrestle for kin survival’.
An important expression of Mana Taonga is Te Papa’s Iwi exhibition programme. The Iwi Exhibition, or Māori tribal exhibition programme, at Te Papa is one of the most visible expressions of Te Papa’s bicultural face. Essentially, Te Papa acts as a dynamic facilitator and provides an opportunity for iwi to work in partnership with Te Papa to tell their stories, histories and present their taonga to the world in their own way. The Iwi Exhibition changes every two and a half years and since 1998 we have had six major Māori tribal exhibitions. 2 Along with the Iwi Exhibition we employ two tribal elders for the duration of the exhibition. These elders act as ambassadors of their tribe as well as elders and ambassadors for Te Papa. The Iwi Exhibition at Te Papa recognizes Māori cultural ownership and provides iwi with the opportunity to tell their own stories in a national forum, or place and space of dialogue, thus contributing to and participating in Te Papa Tongarewa. It also offers iwi a platform to promote themselves and their cultural heritage initiatives to the world via the museum. Kaumātua or elders of the tribe also work for Te Papa during the tenure of the Iwi Exhibition as our elders share knowledge and wisdom with Te Papa as well as represent their tribe at the National Museum.
Of course there are challenges and tensions with Te Papa’s Mana Taonga policy and the operations of Te Papa as sometimes entrenched museum practice can collide with Māori values, customs and worldviews. Areas such as conservation practice, commercial operations and repatriation initiatives are examples that Te Papa continues to negotiate. Mana Taonga is an important pou or pillar of Te Papa’s bicultural foundation although there are ambiguities and conflicts inside and outside Te Papa as management, staff, visitors and stakeholders continuously debate what biculturalism means and what a bicultural Te Papa looks like (McCarthy, 2011). As we have seen in the introduction and are reminded of once again, cultural politics are not governed by some pre-determined structural logic but instead are performed and contested in particular contexts and under complex circumstances.
The Iwi Exhibitions at Te Papa connect Māori to the museum and the museum back to Māori in a highly visible way. We actively involve Māori tribes in the exhibition process and this engagement often leads to further opportunities far in excess of the exhibition arena. The Iwi Exhibitions involve a large number of people and at the opening and closing ceremonies it is not uncommon to see thousands of people there in the early morning dawn. To see young and old celebrating their histories and identities with us and the nation is a privilege. The songs, chants and rituals of both young and old, along with the words of their elders are humbling to witness. To me, this is what museums and galleries can do. They can and they do make a difference in the lives of people. Collections, access, care and how this is enacted is an important part of this transformational process. Mana Taonga is Te Papa’s policy that helps shape the way we do things. It empowers our communities in the business of the museum and it gives back authority and power to the people from where the taonga and stories originate from.
The reflexive museum
This last section draws together the preceding theoretical discussion on the ‘public sphere’ and the empirical insights of Mana Taonga as an Indigenous cultural practice underpinning identity politics at Te Papa. In the process of doing so, there appear representational strategies which can bring the complex political engagements throughout museological productions behind the scenes, as enacted through Mana Taonga, into dialogue with the museum experience, thus realizing the communicative potential of the museum as forum by creating a place of debate. Hakiwai, co-author of this article and on another occasion a formal informant of a previous research project (Schorch, 2010, 2013), presents an exciting point of departure: In some cases we do embrace the forum through the concept of Mana Taonga. We embrace that not consciously I suppose … I think the way that we use forum is more in terms of we have a lecture theatre … or the marae and the forum must be there. But we actually invoke the concept of a forum through the participation of Iwi and our communities in the processes. So back of house, meetings, whether it’s here or in the country, we are actually debating, working through issues, and to me that’s actually a concept of forum. But I think it’s couched without intuitively saying ‘oh, we are going through a forum process’. It’s more of a Mana Taonga active engagement …
As we have seen, Mana Taonga is the consideration of spiritual and cultural links between ancestral material treasures and people. It is one of Te Papa’s founding principles which substantiates the forum idea within museum practice (McCarthy, 2011) (see also Appendix). While this association is not consciously drawn, as Hakiwai points out, Mana Taonga clearly facilitates ‘active engagement … through the participation of Iwi and … communities in the processes’ of museological production and representation. In short, it is a highly political concept of cultural negotiation and contestation. Importantly, the discursive and dialogical nature of Mana Taonga enables the move beyond the ethnic confines of biculturalism and humanizes cultural politics. That is, it involves cultural actors through their interpretive performances that are enacted in the ‘articulation of cultural differences’ (Bhabha, 1994) and consequently mirrors the hermeneutic complexities in human affairs in general and the cultural domain in particular. Hakiwai proceeds with another promising concept, the marae or communal meeting place: … it’s a forum. A pōwhiri is people getting together and it is political. People get on the marae and say what they want, which usually they do. But having said that, we engage in those arenas if you like not only here but also out in the community, whether it’s talking about cultural centres, taonga or going out. I think Te Papa actively takes that sort of forum out. But we don’t acknowledge that or we don’t actually record it or document it.
At this stage, I need to refer to some theoretical notions of the ‘public sphere’. According to Arendt (1958: 198), the ‘public realm rises directly out of acting together, the sharing of “words and deeds”’. Arendt (1958: 198) further asserts that ‘action and speech create a space between the participants’, the ‘space of appearance’. A pōwhiri, a ceremonial welcome or communal meeting, on the marae creates exactly such ‘space of appearance’ and transforms a gathering place into a discursive space or a place of debate. Importantly, Hakiwai stresses that ‘Te Papa actively takes the forum out’. The physical parameters of the marae are blurred through the political Mana Taonga engagement beyond Te Papa’s walls shaping ‘a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere’ (Arendt, 1958: 198).
This dialogical terrain reflects the continuous making, becoming and emerging of a public sphere and lends empirical weight to its theoretical reconceptualization ‘from a substance … to a movement’ (Weibel and Latour, 2007). It also clearly shows that Māori’s postcolonial political involvement is not confined to the internal procedures of Te Papa, but reaches into other public spheres of political negotiations and contestations. It follows that Mana Taonga as theory, practice and policy is not to be misunderstood as neo-colonial technology to assimilate Indigenous people within state institutions. Instead, it is the current outcome of the ongoing ‘war of position’ which constantly changes the ideas of state and governmentality from within.
These political ‘moments’ or ‘processes’ characteristic of a ‘forum’ are, however, not revealed in museological representations at Te Papa and therefore remain inaccessible to visitors. As other research has shown, none of the interviewees and focus group participants referred to concepts such as Mana Taonga (Schorch, 2013). They relied instead on the interpretive support in the form of guided tours to get at least a glimpse of the complex consultations and ‘interpretive contests’ (Said, 2003) occurring behind the scenes. It is again Hakiwai who supports such a critique: I think the process is just as important, if not more, than the actual end product … we don’t reveal the processes here well enough. It’s quite intuitive and we perhaps know them in-house, but we are not that explicit in the front of house. I think if people knew exactly what we do to create these products or these things on the floor and experiences, they would be quite astounded. I dare say there are still members of the public who think that these exhibitions and so forth are done by a few people coming together. If they knew that there were in some cases hundreds and thousands of people involved in the creation, I think the mindset would be ‘huh, that’s empowering, that’s really affirming, that’s different’. And I think that’s the point of difference and probably as we go forward there will be a bit more of that in terms of communicating that far more to the public … we might know that we work with a lot of tribes. And it has taken years and negotiations, hui, but that’s not readily known. We don’t communicate that. In some cases that’s actually a very important part of the story, of the processes themselves. Rather than come in and see an exhibition, knowing that you have invested that time, that energy, the relationships that would actually help the visitors to understand what this museum stands for.
As we have seen in the preceding section, In Te Papa’s case there certainly exist extensive community consultations and contributions as through Mana Taonga, but the dynamic negotiations remain hidden back of house and do not enter the museum experience and the associated interpretive actions, movements and performances of museum visitors or cultural actors.
In this context, I have addressed elsewhere the chasm between museological production and representation and argued for a shift in conceptualizing exhibitions: from products to be presented to processes to be revealed. By presenting the processes leading to the definition of categories and the interpretation of identities, and by giving faces to decisions made, the reflexive museum can become an epitome of democracy that does not silence controversies but awards diversity public voices (Schorch, 2009). Such an understanding of the reflexive museum is linked to recent thinking in museum theory such as Bal’s ‘metamuseal function’ (Bal, 1992; Mason, 2006), which in the case of Te Papa could incorporate a ‘display of its own story in order to tell the interaction between institution and community’, thus crafting ‘an extremely effective embodiment of biculturalism’, as Message (2006: 183) rightly asserts.
While modern ‘forms’ of communication play a significant role in bridging the gap between museological ‘production’ and ‘consumption’, I argue that it is even more important to create an inherently dialogic ‘content’ within exhibitionary representations; a reflexive museum practice that pays tribute to the ‘inescapable hermeneutic complexity in moral and political affairs’ (Held, 2008: 161). In short, the reflexive museum as ‘forum’ lays open the inherently contested processes of cultural politics, that is, the endemic ‘polysemy’ (Ricoeur, 1981) in the ‘construction of culture’ and ‘invention of tradition’ (Bruner, 2005). Such politicized and moralized representations would open the doors to the ‘interpretive contests’ backstage and encourage the hermeneutic actions, movements and performances of visitors within the discursive space of the ‘museum forum’. In this case, both museological production and representation stimulate the political dynamics of the museum experience marrying the three dimensions within a vibrant public sphere, which breaks up and enriches the spaces ‘in between’ political actors and their ‘enunciations’ (Bhabha, 1994) beyond homogenizing and essentializing totalizations of state versus museum or museum versus visitor.
By pursuing these avenues in museum theory and practice, the interpretive ‘common sphere’ (Dilthey, 1976) will be enriched through political ‘intersubjectivity’ (Habermas, 1999) and the resulting ‘performative democracy’ (Weibel and Latour, 2007). By opening the doors to Mana Taonga, for example, the Māori experiment in Te Papa might also be applied elsewhere thus vitalizing other public spheres and forms of democratic engagement. Importantly, Mana Taonga is not only a museological process but a political intervention in the heart of the colonial enterprise and its postcolonial renegotiation, that is, knowledge production. And it is this very knowledge which requires further democratization by ‘making things public’ (Latour and Weibel, 2005) in and beyond museums.
Conclusion
This article created a dialogue between Mana Taonga as an Indigenous Māori political concept of cultural negotiation and contestation embedded in museum practice at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) and Western notions of the public sphere leading to a refined understanding of performative democracy. The main innovation of this paper is that museum, cultural and political studies are enriched and expanded by drawing not on yet more Western theory but Indigenous thought. The authors argue that the key lesson for scholarly work is cross-cultural collaboration, which itself performs a more democratic form of knowledge production.
Footnotes
Appendix: Mana Taonga Principle
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Broadly speaking the mana taonga concept as practiced by Te Papa, recognizes the spiritual and cultural connections of taonga with their people through the whakapapa of:
The concept is defined as follows:
The rights of mana taonga cannot be erased and continue to exist for those taonga held within Te Papa’s care. In a practical sense, mana taonga provides iwi and communities with the right to define how taonga within Te Papa should be cared for and managed in accordance with their tikanga or custom.’
(Retrieved from Te Papa Intranet)
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.