Knowledge and the politics of culture: An example from New Zealand’s higher education policy and practice

Introduction

In New Zealand a culturalist discourse which expresses the concept of a politicized category of people classified according to a shared history and racial ancestry has led to two main categories, Maori and Pakeha ¹ (settler-descendants), being recognized in government institutions since the late 1980s (Rata, 2011a). This paper analyses the political context and effects of the discourse with reference to policies and practices in university research and knowledge production. Accordingly, culturalism is theorized as ‘the expression of a specific historical context and a specific constellation of political interests and economic opportunities’ (Schroder, 2003: 449). Included in that constellation in 1970s–80s’ New Zealand are the liberal-Left’s desire for re-distributory social justice within an identity politics approach, the liberal-Right’s desire for increased economic productivity that includes Maori people and resources, and the emergence of the neotribal elite within the brokerage opportunities afforded by the resulting culturalist politics. This constellation of convergent forces within the wider context of neoliberalism’s globalizing market regulation is theorized in New Zealand as neotribal capitalism (Rata, 2000, 2011b). The use of the theory in this paper to analyse the ethnicity focus in New Zealand universities follows that of Strathdee (2013), who employed the same theoretical framework to conceptualize the implications of culturalist politics in the compulsory educational sector.

Brokerage between the emergent neotribal elite and the government from the alliance of Right- and Left-leaning biculturalists changed the face of New Zealand’s identity politics (Openshaw, 2009). The inclusive bicultural ideals of difference within unity of the 1970s and early 1980s shifted to retribalization and the idea of biculturalism as a relationship between iwi (tribes) and the government (the Crown) rather than as a cultural engagement between Maori and Pakeha. Three significant events provided the impetus and mechanisms for the development of extensive tribal economic and political claims. These are: the 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act enabling claims for historical grievances to be back-dated to 1840; the 1987 Court of Appeal interpretation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi as a ‘partnership’ between the government and the revived tribes with associated Treaty principles; and the ‘1998 High Court decision that “iwi” means “tribes” and tribes existing and recognized in 1840’ (Round, 2000: 668). Indeed, the significance of the 1987 judgement in particular was pointed to by Kawharu (1989: xi) as the ‘resurgence of acceptability of tribal authority’.

Those legislative and judicial developments were major contributors to the culturalist discursive environment. It is a discourse which supports the increasing recognition of tribal organizations in education policy (for example, see Ministry of Education, 2005). At a deeper, structural level it supports the emergent elite by strengthening tribal re-identification, thereby creating a tribal constituency requiring leadership. It is the existence of this constituency that enables the elite to position itself as the inheritor of traditional leadership. In turn, this role enables this elite to position the tribal corporation or ‘neotribe’ (Rata, 2000, 2011a) as the rightful inheritor of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi historical grievance settlements and the legitimate socio-political entity to represent Maori society (Mulholland and Tawhai, 2010).

Elite emergence

The present-day elite have emerged out of a three-stage process beginning with ‘the educated children of the Maori elite’ (Ward, 1999: 22) who led the cultural revival from the late 1960s. Thomas Fitzgerald (1972: 41) described them as a ‘second generation of Maori graduates [who] live exclusively in non-kin-based, non-tribal, urban areas [with] many incompletely socialised in the Maori subculture’. He identified the ‘latent manifestation of culture for these particular individuals’ as the consequence of the security provided by the economic prosperity of the post-war years. Fitzgerald explained this turn to cultural revivalism in terms of ‘the achievement of economic security [which] permits the exercise of a new kind of cultural choice’. It was a choice engaged in by Maori graduates at the universities and teachers colleges alongside those who began to identify as ‘Pakeha’ (Openshaw, 2009). As this generation moved into academia, law, education, media, the church, health and government from the 1980s, these contacts become the tribal–government networks or ‘policy assemblages’ (Shore, 2012) that integrate actors, discourse, policies and practices into a hegemonic cultural politics.

The shift to the second stage of elite emergence was prompted by the politicizing of culture as economic leverage and the recognition of the tribes as corporations. This stage was led by the retribalizing generation identified by Fitzgerald (1972) that were now part of an influential professional class of academics, politicians, retribalized leaders, and government officials. They operated in the main under the auspices of the Federation of Maori Authorities (est. 1987), although with each leader increasingly pursuing his own tribal interests (O’Regan, 1994).

The government–tribal networks include highly influential tribal intellectuals whose published writings, speeches, policy documents, and legal opinions have shaped the discourse into a major intellectual project known as kaupapa or matauranga (indigenous) Maori knowledge and research (e.g. LT Smith, 1999; Durie, 2003; GH Smith, 1997, 2012; Cooper, 2012). The positions of Maori academics in universities and government institutions demonstrates how these individuals and their networks fit Shore’s (2002) description of an elite as those who ‘occupy the most influential positions or roles in the important spheres of social life… they are the groups that dominate what Elias (1978) called the “means of orientation”: peoples whose ideas and interests are hegemonic’ (Shore, 2002: 9).

This article discusses the domination of this discourse in an account of research which analysed the Maori Tertiary Framework (Tertiary Framework, 2003). It shows how the hegemony of indigenous ideology in educational policy has been achieved by ‘mobilizing metaphors and linguistic devices that cloak policy with the symbols and trappings of political legitimacy’ making ‘normative claims that present a particular way of defining a problem and its solution, as if these were the only ways possible, while enforcing closure or silence on other ways of thinking or talking’ (Shore and Wright, 1997: 3).

Culturalism in the university

It is in the education system, particularly in the university, that culturalism is produced and enacted. Within that institution the pervasive and established nature of the discourse can be explained by its operation at both structural and phenomenal levels. The 1989 Education Act requirement that it is the duty of university councils to ‘acknowledge the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’ (Section 181[b]) inserts cultural politics at a structural level while the total package of policies developed by the Maori Tertiary Education Framework (Tertiary Framework, 2003) operationalizes the Treaty ‘acknowledgement’ in a range of practices.

The research examined two areas where the policies and practices found in the Tertiary Framework (2003) enact the Treaty acknowledgement legislative requirement and explained that enactment within the context of neotribal politics. The first area was the policy support for the production of an indigenous epistemology (kaupapa Maori). The second examined how the Treaty principle of consultation affects academics undertaking research. Although these two areas are not the only ones affected by the Tertiary Framework (for example, management, employment, and academic development are also covered), the indigenous episteme and the restrictions on research are the actual mechanisms for producing culturalism.

My argument that indigenous knowledge is an ideology in support of the tribal elite is based on differentiating between disciplinary knowledge and social knowledge (i.e. culture) (Rata, 2012). Ideology is understood in the Gramescian sense of having a material existence in the social practices of individuals, organizing action and providing people with rules of practical conduct and moral behaviour (Simon, 1982). The Tertiary Framework may be considered as one such social practice.

The first type is the disciplinary knowledge of the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences that is traditionally produced in the university. Such knowledge is characterized by the production of structures, codes, and methods intrinsic to respective disciplines (Durkheim, 2001; Bernstein, 2000; Muller, 2000; Moore, 2007a, 2007b, 2013; Young, 2008). Epistemic integrity is established as knowledge and is abstracted from the social and historical conditions of its production and objectified. A key function of the objectifying procedures is to subject truth claims to doubt, criticism, and judgement; in Habermas’ (2001: 30) words, ‘procedural reason put on trial’.

The second type of knowledge is the social knowledge of experience (also referred to as folk, culture, and doxa (Durkheim, 2001; Muller, 2000). In contrast to disciplinary knowledge where the authority for knowledge lies in the discipline’s procedures and the provisional nature of the truth claims, the authority for social knowledge lies with the group controlling the research. This may be an ethnic group but it could also be scientists themselves. It is the unseparated relationship between the knowledge producer and the product which results in the politicization of knowledge and, as I discuss below, it is this lack of separation that makes knowledge ideological. Such Foucaudian knowledge/power (Foucault, 2001) undermines the potential of science to be value-free, that is, to be separated from its originating conditions of production and universalized as an objective conceptual artifact (Bereiter, 2002; Popper, 1978).

In New Zealand the legislative requirement to acknowledge the Treaty of Waitangi along with the Tertiary Framework policies in support of promoting an indigenous epistemology undermines the process of knowledge objectification. This is so because indigenous epistemology has four features that prevent it from differentiating between the objective provisional truth claims of science and subjective socio-cultural knowledge. In the discussion of those four features that I develop below, I explain the reasons for the absence of this fundamental differentiation in indigenous (kaupapa Maori) knowledge in terms of its ideological function. While culture is, like science, a symbolic order of collective representations, it is not, as with science, knowledge separated from its producers. Whereas cultural knowledge remains connected to the social community in order to serve a social cohesive function, science has developed within disciplinary communities in order to change society by developing new understandings. (In this, disciplinary knowledge is inherently political in its subversive potential but it is not the political ideology of specific knowledge makers (Rata, 2012).) It is these disciplinary communities that establish the concepts, codes, systems and procedures that separate the symbolic product from its social and historical conditions, thereby objectifying and universalizing the knowledge.

In contrast, indigenous kaupapa Maori knowledge, like other types of standpoint or ‘voice discourses’ (Moore and Muller, 2010: 61), regards the relationship between the knower and the knowledge as inseparable. This means that indigenous knowledge must reflect and serve the interests of its producers. The ideological nature of this type of knowledge is likely to undermine two other legislative requirements that are designed to protect intellectual autonomy in New Zealand universities. The Education Act 1989 guarantees intellectual freedom to academics including ‘the freedom of academic staff and students, within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas and to state controversial or unpopular opinions’ (section 161(2)(a)). The second is the legislative requirement that universities accept ‘a role as critic and conscience of society’ (section 162(4)(a)(v)). The examples discussed in the next sections suggest that the academic freedom to serve as the critic and conscience of society is necessarily compromised by the politicization of research and knowledge production that follows from acknowledging the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand’s universities.

The Maori Tertiary Education Framework

In education, two documents in particular may be considered foundational in establishing culturalism as the orthodoxy in education policy. My purpose here is to take one of these, the Maori Tertiary Education Framework (Tertiary Framework, 2003), as the point of entry into understanding the context and effects of culturalism. The reason for focusing on policy rests on the understandings developed in the anthropology of policy that ‘policy has become an increasingly central and dominant organizing principle of contemporary society, perhaps even of modernity itself’ (Shore and Wright, 1997: 6; Shore, 2012).

The anthropology of policy is also useful as a methodology. In analysing the Tertiary Framework, the approach provides a ‘lens for analysing wider political processes and systems’ and shows ‘how policies are technologies that powerfully influence human consciousness and behaviour’ (Shore, 2012: 91). This has enabled me to embed the Tertiary Framework in the context of New Zealand’s retribalizing politics and to argue that university research is compromised by these politics.

One of the two key policy documents which has institutionalized culturalism, the Framework for the Advancement of Maori Education (Durie, 2001), has, since the turn of the century, provided the intellectual justification for a culturalist approach throughout the compulsory education sector. The Maori Tertiary Education Framework (Tertiary Framework, 2003) serves the same purpose in the post-compulsory sector, and this is the sector I concentrate on in this paper. The Tertiary Framework has a broad mandate:

As well as contributing at the strategic policy level, the framework is a tool for operational policy and TEOs (Tertiary Education Organisations). (Tertiary Framework, 2003: 12)

The structural positions created in the New Zealand university as a result of Treaty acknowledgement, ranging from Pro Vice-Chancellor Maori to Maori advisers on course development committees, are crucial to the operationalizing of power. Indeed Webster (1998: 157), in his account of the establishment of, and appointments to, Treaty-based university positions argues that ‘these institutional developments [are] materially more significant than the academic personalities and theories which currently dominate them’. I tend to think that the academic personalities and theories are as important. Although the structural positions authorize the exercise of power, it is people who exercise that power, and as members of an elite, they exercise that power within highly influential networks. For this reason, it does matter that the Maori Education Tertiary Framework was written by seminal writers in the production of the kaupapa Maori discourse (e.g. GH Smith, 1997, 2012; LT Smith, 1999).

While the Framework is not prescriptive, it has nevertheless exerted considerable influence over Maori tertiary education policy in the decade since its 2003 publication and remains on the Ministry of Education’s website. The document is considerably detailed. There are specific ‘priorities’, ‘goals’ and ‘action points’ for the development of a tribal-based tertiary education system which provide significant detail about the policies and practices to be adopted. For example:

The tertiary system should reflect genuine shared authority for Maori communities both within individual TEOs and the wider system. (Tertiary Framework, 2003: 23)

The most significant recommendation is for the cultural production of indigenous knowledge with Priority Seven, ‘Maori-centred knowledge-creation’. It includes the goals that: ‘Maori guardianship of knowledge is recognized and embraced by the system and TEOs’ and ‘TEOs and government agencies support the development of Maori intellectual independence and Maori knowledge according to tikanga Maori’ (Tertiary Framework, 2003: 39). Priority Seven has been successfully implemented in the decade since this recommendation. The next section examines the form that the priority ‘Maori-centred knowledge-creation’ has taken in the development of an indigenous epistemology (kaupapa or tikanga Maori) in New Zealand universities. This is followed by a section discussing the way in which the ‘Maori guardianship of knowledge’ goal is translated into specific policies and practices to secure the influence of that approach in research.

The four features of indigenous knowledge

Indigenous knowledge (kaupapa Maori) has four main features: the logic of the gift (Royal, 2010); genealogical links to the traditional society; an irreducible relation between the knower and the known; and the subjective nature of the episteme. This section examines how each of those features creates an ideology which expresses an ontological distinction between two separate peoples. This difference is so fundamental that it justifies separate leadership and political and economic arrangements like those proposed by the Tertiary Framework.

According to indigenous writers (for example, Walker, 1982; Smith, 1999; Durie, 2003; Kuokkanen, 2007; Kovach, 2009), the knowledge produced by an indigenous redistributive system is fundamentally different from the knowledge produced for a system based on exploitative relations. The latter, the logic of the commodity, creates and justifies capitalism’s exploitative inequalities. The knowledge of the reciprocal system, the logic of the gift, in contrast creates and justifies harmony and balance between humans and between human and non-human forces of production. This gives the indigenous episteme a considerable moral advantage. It is seen as an equalizing force between people and is promoted as the original sustainable discourse. Accordingly, it is believed to offer an alternative to capitalism’s exploitation of the natural and social worlds in a post-capitalist system. Relations of reciprocity will restore a balanced relationship between humans and nature.

By evoking the concept of a natural and sustainable relationship between nature and humans, an indigenous ideology provides the moral justification for the right to own and manage resources. It is a justification framed according to a concept of wise responsibility or kaitiakitanga (guardianship), a concept traced to the mythological genealogical link between Papatuanuku, the Earth Mother and humans. The ‘gift [is] a manifestation of reciprocity with the natural environment; it reflects the bond of dependence and respect toward the natural world. From this bond, certain responsibilities emerge’ (Kuokkanen, 2007: 33). Similarly, Mason Durie’s (2009: 2) belief in indigenous ‘wise leadership’ of the natural and human worlds expresses the same idea of the guardianship of those worlds. Through this discourse a moral position captured in the episteme is used to justify political claims while the sustainability discourse provides the scientific respectability.

The second feature of indigenous knowledge captures the idea of a genealogical tie between the ancestral gods and present-day humans, a tie that is spiritual and constituent of the life-force itself. According to Roberts and Wills (1998):

Maori epistemology is based on a view of the world in which the unifying ontological principle is whakapapa (manifesting mauri and wairua [life-force and spirit]) rather than matter (driven by mechanism) … it is the deeds of the ancestors (real and mythical) that control and guide the present generation and help determine the fate of future generations. (Roberts and Wills, 1998: 61)

This concept of ancestral forces guiding present-day ideas and practices supports the idea of historical continuity between the traditional tribe and contemporary iwi. The continuity is used to justify iwi claims for the historical inheritance of resources and governance, with the Treaty promoted as the document of inheritance. That view is not unchallenged. According to Webster (1998) and Head (2006), capitalism replaced the traditional redistributive economy and kinship social relations of production as early as the 19th century. In addition, the New Zealand polity established in an early form with the 1852 Constitution Act was based upon contractual socio-political relations. This rupture between status and contract is referred to by Henry Maine as the ‘greatest of all changes’ (Macfarlane, 2002: 16) in accounting for the emergence of modern societies that cohere but without a common past serving as the mechanism for that cohesion. However, the role of the Treaty as the document of inheritance serves to conceal the extent of the historical rupture to the structuring logic of New Zealand society. For this reason it plays a central role in culturalist discourse.

The third feature of the kaupapa Maori indigenous episteme rests on the idea of an irreducible relation between the knowledge producer and what is known. This means that knowledge is fixed permanently to its creator (Connell, 2009). It leads to two problems: one concerning the proliferation of ‘knowers’; the second, which has direct relevance for the authority for research, is the restricted nature of an episteme that cannot be universal. In his analysis of ‘standpoint knowledges’ (i.e. culturalist discourses), Karl Maton (2010) describes how ‘such discourses are legitimated on the basis of the inability of existing knowledge to articulate the voice of this previously silenced knower’ (2010: 53). He points out that, in this line of argument, ‘the potential categories of new knowers is hypothetically endless’ (2010: 54). ‘It is not what has been said that matters, it is who has said it’ (2010: 54). Similarly, Rob Moore and Johan Muller (2010) refer to ‘voice discourses [which] identify a constituency or membership category and present themselves as the representation (representative) of that constituency, as its voice’ (2010: 65). Like Maton, these writers note the ‘unstoppable spiral’ of voice identities (2010: 75), referring to it as a ‘pre-modern’ strategy of attempting to reinstate ‘who knows’ as the authority for ‘what is known’ (2010: 66).

In addition, the social, as opposed to the academic, status of the knower is important in culturalist discourse. Huia Jahnke and Julia Taiapa (1999) provide an account of who should do Maori research, one which appears in a popular textbook used widely for over a decade now in research methods courses throughout New Zealand. Drawing on a number of authoritative Maori researchers, the writers describe the criteria for undertaking Maori research.

Maori researchers are differentiated according to iwi [tribe], hapu [sub-tribe], or whanau [extended family] links. Furthermore, age and gender may also be a factor in the research process. In terms of empowerment, it cannot be assumed that it is the researcher who is necessarily doing all the empowering. (1999: 48)

In this view, the scientist’s research, or the authority for the scientist’s work, rests on one’s status within the socio-cultural group and not on the researcher’s scholarship as judged by the discipline’s procedures.

The consequences of rejecting the universal character of disciplinary knowledge are considerable for students from working-class and marginalized groups (Wheelahan, 2010; Rata and Tamati, 2013). Firstly, young people educated in voice discourse approaches such as kaupapa Maori are likely to have limited access to the ‘coalitions in the mind’ (Collins, 2000: 7) that have built disciplinary knowledge over time. This is the universal knowledge inheritance most vividly captured in Bourdieu’s phrase: ‘A twenty-year-old mathematician can have twenty centuries of mathematics in his mind’ (Bourdieu, 2004: 40).

If, as indigenous theorists claim, knowledge cannot be objectified, that is, it cannot be separated from its social conditions of production, then the claim made by indigenous writers that disciplinary knowledge is ideology, and Western ideology at that, would be correct. Given the importance of this to my argument, the fourth feature of indigenous knowledge addressed in this paper is that crucial question – what is the nature of the disciplinary episteme? Is there no separation of ‘text’ from ‘context’ so that knowledge remains tied to the knower as indigenous theorists claim? If that is the case then knowledge is always subjective and in the interests of the knowers; always from the standpoint of the knowledge producer. This is the situation described by Rob Moore (2007b: 32–3): as ‘knowledge relations came to be written as power relations between groups the possibility of knowledge that is rationally objective in a culture-transcending manner’ was rejected by those writing from a post-colonial perspective.

In Southern Theory (2009) Raewyn Connell describes ‘northern theory’ as about ‘modern social science [which] embeds the viewpoints, perspectives and problems of metropolitan society, while presenting it as universal knowledge’ (2009: viii). ‘Southern’ is her term for ‘the relations of authority, exclusion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship, appropriation – between intellectuals and institutions in the metropole and those in the world periphery’ (2009: ix). In this unequal relationship, ‘alternative ways of thinking about the world, while they persist, are readily marginalised’ (2009: xi) according to Connell. These alternative ways are considered necessary because they expose the inherent ideology of knowledge, a precondition for the emancipation of minority and indigenous peoples from the alleged imperialism of universal knowledge and the ‘dehumanising’ nature of objectification (Smith, 1999: 39).

In contrast to the knowledge-ideology approach of the standpoint writers, contemporary writers (such as this author) who use a social realist explanation present an opposing understanding of the relationship between disciplinary and social knowledge. The epistemological basis for the social realist explanation is, according to Rob Moore (2007a, 2013), drawn from the critical realist tradition. Like Michael Young and Johan Muller, and using the ideas of Durkheim, Vygotsky and Bernstein, Moore argues that knowledge can become separated from its producer and the context within which it is produced, and thereby objectified and universalized. In fact, Michael Young describes ‘knowledge differentiation’ as the ‘key idea in a realist theory of knowledge’ (2012: 140, italics in the original).

In this argument, public arenas of collective judgements about truth claims cannot be reduced to the cultures of social groups. They are the specific practices of a discipline – procedures, codes, systems by which knowledge is objectified (Moore and Young, 2010). These social realists trace the separation to Emile Durkheim’s (2001) differentiation between the sacred as the collective representations of an internally consistent world of concepts and the profane or everyday world of practical activities (Muller, 2000).

Rather than the dehumanizing process of objectification that Smith (1999: 39) describes, objectivity is, in the realist understanding, essential for the epistemic integrity of a discipline. According to Daston and Galison (2010: 17, emphasis in the original): ‘To be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower – knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgement, wishing or striving’. Given that objectification is the mechanism for the separation of text from context, the issue of knowledge objectification is the crux of the difference between voice discourse writers on the one hand and realists on the other. So how does knowledge produced in a social context become independent of its producer? The differentiation is found in two areas: in the nature of the episteme, and in the conditions of its production.

Explanations for the abstract knowledge object include realist epistemologists who consider the individual’s mental apparatus as the source of the idea. This is Kant’s cognito ex principiis – the intellectual resource of conceptual thinking that enables individuals to ‘exercise our powers of reasoning in accordance with general principles, retaining at the same time the right of investigating the sources of these principles, of testing, even of rejecting them’ (1993 [1781]: 535). Others, such as the contemporary Durkheimian social realists, locate the creation of ideas in the producer’s historical and social conditions. However, in contrast to voice discourse writers, social realists argue that a process of transformation results in the symbolic product of a material process. This product is similar to the conceptual artifacts in Popper’s World 3 (Popper, 1978; Bereiter, 2002).

Moore (2007b: 30) explains the process of transformation in this way. A ‘symbolic raw material’ undergoes ‘a mechanism of transformation, combining within an organization of the social relations of production’. Both realist epistemologists and social realists have a place for the individual and for the social context in the transformation of knowledge into an abstract object, product or conceptual artifact. Although Kant starts with the individual, he acknowledges that ideas operate within a social context and are subject to procedures. Likewise, Durkheim (1983: 98), while giving greater emphasis to the social conditions of production, also acknowledges that ‘even the collective element within it exists only through the consciousness of individuals, and truth is only ever achieved by individuals’. Whatever the source of the abstract concept – in the individual mind or in the social and historical conditions of a culture – it is developed within the ‘coalitions in the mind’ (Collins, 2000: 7) and transformed within that process. This makes disciplinary systems and procedures that authorize the process of symbolic transformation fundamental to its epistemic integrity. Their task is to ensure that the knowledge is not ideological. The location and the transformation of the idea into a material product, i.e. a conceptual artifact, that is objectified and universalized means that disciplinary knowledge and its production in universities is a completely different type of knowledge process and product from the social knowledge of culture and experience (which is ideology).

However, indigenous kaupapa Maori theorists, like other standpoint theorists, reject those disciplinary coalitions for the idea that knowledge belongs to and is authorized by cultural procedures. But this means that indigenous knowledge is closed knowledge. It serves an important purpose maintaining social cohesion by consolidating the group’s beliefs, histories, and interests. However, as Peter Munz (2000) points out, its epistemic integrity is compromised by that social function. For Munz (2000: 14) kaupapa Maori and scientific scholarship serve two entirely different purposes. The former is

a belief system designed to bond people into a community, and whether or not it gives a true factual account is irrelevant. Scholarship and science … are based on the application of unrestricted criticism and scrutiny to all beliefs, especially those alleged to be taboo. Its purpose is simply to obtain the best possible knowledge of the world.

Given the character of kaupapa Maori as closed knowledge, its place in the university is criticized by writers such as Marie and Haig (2009: 117) who note that ‘the epistemic worth of “Maori knowledge” can only be comprehended and evaluated from within the Maori cultural framework (or world-view)’. Despite the ideological nature of indigenous knowledge, the Ministry of Research, Science, and Technology document, Vision Matauranga: Unlocking the Potential of Māori Knowledge, Resources and People (Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, 2006) states that indigenous and scientific knowledge should be regarded as distinct knowledge systems or epistemologies. In their criticism of this approach, Marie and Haig describe the use of the science system ‘as an additional platform to further facilitate special Maori identity rights and claims’ (2009: 118–19).

Their objections are based on the view that the university is a public arena of collective judgement. It is where the specific practices of the disciplinary field – the procedures, codes, systems by which knowledge is objectified – are themselves constantly available to criticism. According to Moore and Young (2010: 30), it is the ‘specialist forms of social organisation’ (the knowledge disciplines) that ‘remain the major social bases for guaranteeing the objectivity of knowledge’ (2010: 30). Placing standpoint ‘knowledges’, such as indigenous knowledge, in the university undermines the practice of scrutiny and criticism essential to all disciplines. Given the incompatibility of such knowledges with disciplinary systems, codes, and procedures, what are the effects of the Tertiary Framework policy for the inclusion of kaupapa Maori research methodology in the university? The next section examines this question.

Research: Consultation or control?

The principle of consultation or reasonable cooperation is one of the Treaty principles developed following the 1987 Court of Appeal ruling that also initiated the partnership concept. Consultation with respect to research is structured into government institutions as a result of ‘various New Zealand acts of legislation including the Health Research Council Act 1990, the Crown Research Institutes Act 1992, and the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology Amendment Act 1993 [which] all express relevant provisions for Maori research’ (Marie and Haig, 2009: 120). In the university these legislation requirements support the Treaty ‘acknowledgement’ legislation. In the previous section I analysed the effect of Priority Seven of the Tertiary Framework in promoting an acceptance of indigenous kaupapa Maori epistemology. This section looks at how the consultation principle is expressed as the Tertiary Framework’s ‘Maori guardianship of knowledge’ goal in research policies and practices. I address how consultation of this kind, which includes ensuring that research uses a kaupapa Maori tikanga (methodology), has the potential to exert control over research. The effect is to compromise the legislative requirement for academics’ intellectual freedom and the critic and conscience role of the university.

Priority Seven recommends ‘Developing TEO strategies that encourage and enhance kaupapa Maori research activity, supervision and accountability for inclusion within provider charters’ (Tertiary Framework, 2003: 40–41). One of the most effective mechanisms for implementing this requirement is university ethics committees’ policies and practices. This section analyses the extent of ‘supervision and accountability’ with reference to the University of Auckland’s Ethics Manual (2009) and Application Form (2009). It should be noted that all New Zealand universities have similar requirements. So too do government organizations such as the Health Council (National Ethics Advisory Committee, 2006).

At the University of Auckland, ethics authorization is required for research using Maori participants and for research into a ‘topic of particular interest to Maori’ (University of Auckland’s Ethics Application Form, 2009: 12). The university document Guiding Principles for Research draws the attention of applicants to the University of Auckland Charter (Section 2.3.3) ‘which acknowledges the Treaty of Waitangi’ (University of Auckland, 2006: 2).

Applicants are required to explain how the intended research process is consistent with the provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi. Compliance with the Treaty is monitored by the required consultation process and the need for authorization and final sign-off from the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Maori) or his nominee. The Manual gives detailed instruction about the appropriate Maori groups with whom to consult. Names of local tangata whenua (indigenous people) are available from the Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Maori) along with advice on how to consult and people who can help in the consultation process. The Manual’s reference to the impact of research on the Maori community, with many ‘over-burdened’ with consultation requests, suggests a deeply entrenched practice. The researcher must identify the group(s) with whom consultation has taken place, describe the consultation process, and attach evidence of the support of the group(s).

All research involving human participants involves some consultation to ensure that participants’ human rights are not breached and that participants give fully informed consent before taking part in the research. But at what point does consultation become control? My example contains three areas where this issue is problematic. The first is the prior agreement required from the Maori community for research that may be considered ‘a topic of particular interest to Maori’ (University of Auckland’s Ethics Applicants’ Manual, 2009: 10). The phrase has a very broad ambit giving the Maori consultants considerable decision-making influence over what research may be undertaken. The second is the requirement that applicants declare their tribal affiliations (University of Auckland’s Ethics Application Form, 2009). This indicates that the social status of the researcher, such as tribal affiliation (or lack of), age, and gender (Jahnke and Taiapa, 1999), is a factor in the ethical approval process. Thirdly, the requirement that Maori are involved in ‘the organisation, management, and conduct of the project’ makes the Maori consultants active researchers in the project.

There are a number of consequences for research that derive from this degree of community involvement in decision-making. Steven Webster (1998: 28) has ‘noted the ethnographic silence on contemporary Maori society since the 1970s’. The reasons for this silence are suggested in Toon van Meijl’s (2000) account of the controversy surrounding the publication of his doctoral dissertation on Maori ideologies of development. He locates the controversy within the political context of ‘tribal interests controlling and constructing political ideology in terms of culture’ (2000: 101). Van Meijl describes his engagement with the influential chief who would not give permission for publication and who insisted on community approval for a required revision. With reference to Keesing, Van Meijl (2000: 102) argues that:

indigenous – ‘insiders’ – discourses of culture and tradition are to be privileged against political critique from ‘outsiders’ can no longer be sustained, particularly since in many cases we are talking about a small group of leaders and their associated gatekeepers, who claim to be representative because they have a vested interest in the cultural arguments that are at stake in the contested field of representation.

The politicization of research where the research outcomes are determined by the political interests of the group being studied is most vividly illustrated in the historical research undertaken by the Waitangi Tribunal. WH Oliver describes Tribunal reports as ‘presentist’ history where the ‘absence of a sense of historical perspective’ (2001: 23) ‘exemplify an instrumental… but elusive way of writing and using history’ (2001: 9). It is a view contained in Kerry Howe’s description of ‘much Tribunal reporting [being] about moral positioning rather than open or undirected historical investigation’ (2009: 20).

The kaupapa Maori research approach mandated by the Treaty acknowledgement legislation required on universities supports the building of boundaries between the two Treaty ‘partners’. The two groups are reified as distinctive ethnic entities. Such reification establishes the bounded nature of the respective partners and creates the need for representative leadership. It also sets in place the privileging brokerage mechanism within which the elite emerges as a result of its representative function (Rata, 2003). It is in this process that the elite justifies its existence and its privileges.

Conclusion

The institutionalization of neotribal power is clearly described in the Framework’s five guiding principles: For example, Principle Two tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) is concerned with ‘supporting aspirations for Maori self-determination, enabling provision by Maori and enshrining Maori ownership in and authority over tertiary education. The third principle, toi to mana, means empowering Maori to influence the tertiary system at all levels’ (Tertiary Framework, 2003: 17). Policy and institutions are the regulatory network of power relations. Securing the university as the institution for the cultural production of indigenous knowledge and control over research meets Lachmann’s (2003: 346) description of the importance of acquiring control of a ‘distinct organisational apparatus’, as ‘elites effect social change by acting for themselves’. By acquiring control of indigenous knowledge production and over research concerning Maori participants and topics through the enactment of the Tertiary Framework, the retribalizing elite has acquired control of the mechanisms of cultural production and socialization. These mechanisms produce the ‘shared meanings’ that contribute to ‘the formation of subjects and of subjective experience’ (Friedman, 2000: 645). In the New Zealand case, those shared meanings are a culturalist orientation to the world, one which sees the world in primordial racial groupings.

Despite the sharp delineation between the university’s role as ‘the critic and conscience of society’ (section 162(4)(a)(v) Education Amendment Act 1989) and as guarantor of academic freedom (section 161(2)(a)), the culturalist discourse of a kaupapa Maori way of knowing strongly influences academic consciousness and behaviour through the legislative and policy requirements I have discussed. This way of knowing is, according to Maori academic Marie Tau, ‘knowledge not capable of comprehension or criticism by the western canons of epistemology and method’ (Sharp and McHugh, 2001: 6). That such an understanding is now institutionalized in New Zealand’s universities owes much to the constellation of strategies, policies, actors and networks that constitute neotribal politics and that are enacted in the Tertiary Framework.