This thesis focuses on the contested nature of landscape in New Zealand and on the
complex relationships and social processes that are associated with that contest. This
includes relationships between people as well as relationships between people and land.
A landscape may be seen as a culmination of lived daily experience that acts as a
repository for our memories of events and experiences to which we are connected. As we
remember or forget our experiences or events, we construct narratives relating how we are
tied to our landscape and what that may mean. This becomes a compounded process as
more than one group adds different stories that are vying to be told.
Even though New Zealand is a post-colonial nation, neither the groups involved, nor their
stories can be divided between primordial categories like colonial or Indigenous. Following
this, the anthropology of the State informs us that the State is not a unified organization,
but rather is imagined as such through our daily experience with individual institutions that
are associated with it. Therefore, the struggle here, I will argue, is between multiple agents
that are attempting to position themselves in relation to each other and their shared,
multilayered landscape. According to Bourdieu (1998), the lesser goal of this struggle is to
maintain or gain social position in relation to the other groups; the greater goal is the ability
to reproduce the landscape according to their own interests. In order to do so, groups
agree to the value of resources, which Bourdieu calls capital, and then struggle for the
ability to control them or direct their use. This thesis aims to explain how those
groups move toward those goals.
More specifically, I address these issues through my fieldwork with Maori from Onuku on
Banks Peninsula, New Zealand and three non-Maori organizations that are involved with
the site. My interviews and observations with participants focused on the site of
Takapuneke, which was the location of a massacre of the Onuku communityʼs relations in
1830. This site was chosen because of an initial threat of development that would have
destroyed its inherent meaning to the local Maori community. My fieldwork will analyze that
data to understand the Onuku Runangaʼs (council) construction of Takapuneke as
tapu, which is often taken to mean ʻsacredʼ. My analysis will also show the constructions
of the site as strictly historical by the non-Maori organizations and the perceptions behind
those constructions. I find that the outcome of these complex relationships over the site of
Takapuneke is that there is no determined result to the struggle that has been and
continues to take place over the issues around the site. These issues are in process just
as are the constructions of the landscape and the relationships between all of those
involved. While there has been a stabilization of the situation, which I will discuss, that is
merely temporary due to the fact that the groups involved have varying amounts of agency
(and capital) that they can exercise in order to continue the struggle when the conditions
benefit them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/2984 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Huddleston, Chad |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. School of Social and Political Sciences |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Chad Huddleston, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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