- Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand
Fiona McCormack
University of Waikato, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Faculty Member
For several decades people have been grappling with how to retain the material safety and cultural richness of indigenous non-capitalist societies and economies, but also gain the health, wealth, education and life opportunities the... more
For several decades people have been grappling with how to retain the material safety and cultural richness of indigenous non-capitalist societies and economies, but also gain the health, wealth, education and life opportunities the modern capitalist world offers. This book brings together examples of attempts to forge locally appropriate versions of modernity; development that suits the aspirations and circumstances of particular groups of people. Authors question how the market economy has been variously negotiated by groups who also have other systems through which they organize their social and economic life. What has worked for these people, what has not, and why? The volume addresses how ,as a social and economic system, capitalism has been very effective in generating wealth and technological innovation, but has also been associated with great social inequity and environmental damage. Its inherent flaws have been highlighted by the escalation of ecological problems arising from growth-oriented capitalism and various economic crises, the latest being the Global Financial Crisis and its ongoing fallout.
Research Interests: Fisheries and Aquaculture
This special issue of Oceania interrogates the material and cultural factors underpinning water socioeconomies in Australia; a critical project given the wet and dry crises now unfolding in the Anthropocene. Three themes inform the... more
This special issue of Oceania interrogates the material and cultural factors underpinning water socioeconomies in Australia; a critical project given the wet and dry crises now unfolding in the Anthropocene. Three themes inform the collectionmaterialities, imaginaries and temporalitieseach of which animates a diverse array of ethnographic inquiry into transformative water futures. The radical potential of kinship is also a cross-cutting theme, with the articles collectively revealing how kin relatedness works to disrupt the categorical framing of 'modern water' as an extractive resource.
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In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life,... more
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life, exacerbating existing lines of discrimination. While justified in terms of crisis management, state expressions of citizen care during the pandemic were largely modelled in terms of a particular conflation of nature, society and economy peculiar to settler colonialism. Using bordering practices during the pandemic as a point of departure, this essay draws on scholarship on borders to interrogate settler colonialism in Aotearoa. This allows for four innovations: First, it situates Covid-19 as structure rather than event, one which accentuated historical patterns of nation-making. Second, it underscores continuities in Indigenous relations of ownership, belonging, social reproduction, kinship ethics and environmental engagements. Third, it suggests alliances between migrants, non-white and colonized peoples; those for whom borders do not remain at the periphery, but rather penetrate deep into the informal spaces of the everyday. And fourth, it recalibrates resistances as expressions of sociality aimed at reclassifying nature, economy and society.
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In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life,... more
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life, exacerbating existing lines of discrimination. While justified in terms of crisis management, state expressions of citizen care during the pandemic were largely modelled in terms of a particular conflation of nature, society and economy peculiar to settler colonialism. Using bordering practices during the pandemic as a point of departure, this essay draws on scholarship on borders to interrogate settler colonialism in Aotearoa. This allows for four innovations: First, it situates Covid-19 as structure rather than event, one which accentuated historical patterns of nation-making. Second, it underscores continuities in Indigenous relations of ownership, belonging, social reproduction, kinship ethics and environmental engagements. Third, it suggests alliances between migrants, non-white and colonized peoples; those for whom borders do not remain at the periphery, but rather penetrate deep into the informal spaces of the everyday. And fourth, it recalibrates resistances as expressions of sociality aimed at reclassifying nature, economy and society.
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This paper contributes to debates on growing inequalities in the maritime domain by using the concept of precarity to interrogate the market in Māori fisheries. To understand the particularities of this ocean precarity, I draw attention... more
This paper contributes to debates on growing inequalities in the maritime domain by using the concept of precarity to interrogate the market in Māori fisheries. To understand the particularities of this ocean precarity, I draw attention to the interrelated dynamics of dispossession, as it occurred historically in Māori fisheries through various economic orders, and indigeneity, as it articulates with both alienation and the reclamation of fishing rights. I argue that the incorporation of Māori fisheries into an Individual Transferable Quota system has generated a “political ecology of the precarious,” positioning socio-natures as working against ecological demise at the same time as contributing to it. This transforms the ancestral guardianship relationship between people and their sea, exacerbates colonially-created dispossessions and hardens divisions between economic and cultural spheres, or commercial and customary fisheries. However, precarious conditions may also be conceived ...
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In fisheries management-as in environmental governance more generally-regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to... more
In fisheries management-as in environmental governance more generally-regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolk...
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This special issue extends anthropological approaches drawing on the labor theory of value to novel forms of commodities and novel forms of labor. Uncovering hidden inequalities is a core thematic in the collection and one in which the... more
This special issue extends anthropological approaches drawing on the labor theory of value to novel forms of commodities and novel forms of labor. Uncovering hidden inequalities is a core thematic in the collection and one in which the concept of value is put to work: value is used to reveal the equivalences holding capitalist market exchanges together as well as the inequality that emerges from equality. This duality is made explicit in the triumphalist call of Big Data, Bitcoin, and eco-tourism entrepreneurs in the Global North, who proport to end world hunger or level the financial playing field, at the same time as, with a slight of hand, surplus value is extracted from producers and new forms of enclosures and private property continue to increase the gaps between “the haves and the have nots”. I apply the insights developed in the articles to my own research on Māori fisheries.
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This paper interprets the disrupted establishment of the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, a 620,000 square kilometre marine protection area, as a crucial moment in Pacific frontier making. The development of large-scale protected marine areas is... more
This paper interprets the disrupted establishment of the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, a 620,000 square kilometre marine protection area, as a crucial moment in Pacific frontier making. The development of large-scale protected marine areas is a politically charged frontier tool, in which states garner international recognition and environmental renown by setting aside large swathes of their exclusive economic zones. In the Kermadec Sanctuary, this enclosure hit against an assemblage of Indigenous histories, ecologies, repatriated fishing rights, and privatized fishing quota challenging the oftmarginalized agency of Indigenous people in frontier narratives. This paper argues that three factors are fundamental to untangling this conflict: first, the historical trajectory of terraqueous territorialization in the Kermadec region, second, the post-Treaty of Waitangi settlement dynamics of Maori marine environments, and third, the common ecosystem services model underlying conservation and ex...
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This paper explores ascriptions of dependence and independence in Māori marine environments alongside the entrenchment of colonial constructions of hierarchical kinship organisation. The modelling of independence on liberal understandings... more
This paper explores ascriptions of dependence and independence in Māori marine environments alongside the entrenchment of colonial constructions of hierarchical kinship organisation. The modelling of independence on liberal understandings of individualism is apparent in the development of the Treaty of Waitangi settlement of Māori commercial fisheries, wherein attributes of self-reliance enabled through accumulation prevail. This articulates with a fisheries management regime whose logic is grounded in neoliberal market environmentalism, exacerbating tensions between different levels of tribal organisation; iwi and hapū. The contemporary power ascribed to iwi, however, is more tempered than supposed, and the fluidity of hierarchical kin group positionings, noted in historical accounts, is still in existence today. Interdependence is historically continuous. It is expressed in the social relations embedded in cognatic kinship, marine tenures as well as kincentric ecologies and is inclusive of ancestors and fish species. The current claims of Māori to tribal seascapes are interpreted as an expression of interrelationships of stewardship, as a response to environmental demise and as a challenge to emergent social hierarchies.
Fisheries, Māori, seascapes, Indigenous interdependence, kincentric ecologies
Fisheries, Māori, seascapes, Indigenous interdependence, kincentric ecologies
The anthropology of fisheries is a core focus of maritime anthropology. Scholarship in this field is multifaceted, exploring fishing ways of life, fishing knowledge, marine tenures and economies, the gendered nature of fishing, how people... more
The anthropology of fisheries is a core focus of maritime anthropology. Scholarship in this field is multifaceted, exploring fishing ways of life, fishing knowledge, marine tenures and economies, the gendered nature of fishing, how people cope with danger and risk, and the specificities of how this particular watery nature is manifested in social, political, and cultural systems. Fishing can be defined as a productive activity that takes place in a multidimensional space, depending more on natural or wild processes than manufactured processes. The idea of fishing being closer to nature is an analytical thread, giving the anthropology of fisheries a particular edge on the multispecies and more than human ethnographic turn in contemporary anthropology. Research in fisheries anthropology has long held the connections between fisher and fish to be of central concern. Significant too, however, is the thesis that the construction of commodity fisheries as a natural domain, of which fisher...
This article draws on Māori claims to fisheries in Aotearoa New Zealand as well as their opposition to the establishment of a large scale marine protected area, to question whether commoning, as a conceptual frame, can account for... more
This article draws on Māori claims to fisheries in Aotearoa New Zealand as well as their opposition to the establishment of a large scale marine protected area, to question whether commoning, as a conceptual frame, can account for indigenous resistances in ocean environments. It argues that the theorisation of horizontal collective activism, an emphasis on a politics of relationality encompassing humans and non-humans and the potential for transformative practice in commonings, is congruent with the indigenous sociality mobilised by Māori in relation to their seascapes. As an analytical tool, however, commoning pays inadequate attention to inegalitarianism. Inequality may amplify, for instance, in the process of claiming indigenous rights, or it may otherwise be reconfigured as it articulates with the imperative of neoliberal environmental capitalism. Property – alienated, usurped or reappropriated – while considered a reductive representation of the commons is, at least for indigen...
This chapter considers the entanglement of indigeneity and neoliberalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the context of fisheries. A relationship, I argue, that is mediated by market environmentalism. This is given substance in two Acts: The... more
This chapter considers the entanglement of indigeneity and neoliberalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the context of fisheries. A relationship, I argue, that is mediated by market environmentalism. This is given substance in two Acts: The Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act 1992, which resolved commercial claims against the Crown, and the complementary Fisheries (Kaimoana Customary Fishing) Regulations 1998, which legislated for customary fishing activities. The settlement was made feasible by the implementation of new forms of enclosures in the seascape—that is, individualised property rights, ITQs (individual transferable quota).
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Restricted Item. Print thesis available in the University of Auckland Library or may be available through Inter-Library Loan. This thesis is about Maori fishers. It examines the processes that led to the situation where Maori small-scale... more
Restricted Item. Print thesis available in the University of Auckland Library or may be available through Inter-Library Loan. This thesis is about Maori fishers. It examines the processes that led to the situation where Maori small-scale fishers are currently debarred from earning a ...
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This article draws on Māori claims to fisheries in Aotearoa New Zealand as well as their opposition to the establishment of a large scale marine protected area, to question whether commoning, as a conceptual frame, can account for... more
This article draws on Māori claims to fisheries in Aotearoa New Zealand as well as their opposition to the establishment of a large scale marine protected area, to question whether commoning, as a conceptual frame, can account for indigenous resistances in ocean environments. It argues that the theorisation of horizontal collective activism, an emphasis on a politics of relationality encompassing humans and non-humans and the potential for transformative practice in commonings, is congruent with the indigenous sociality mobilised by Māori in relation to their seascapes. As an analytical tool, however, commoning pays inadequate attention to inegalitarianism. Inequality may amplify, for instance, in the process of claiming indigenous rights, or it may otherwise be reconfigured as it articulates with the imperative of neoliberal environmental capitalism. Property – alienated, usurped or reappropriated – while considered a reductive representation of the commons is, at least for indigen...
and Keywords The anthropology of fisheries is a core focus of maritime anthropology. Scholarship in this field is multifaceted, exploring fishing ways of life, fishing knowledge, marine tenures and economies, the gendered nature of... more
and Keywords The anthropology of fisheries is a core focus of maritime anthropology. Scholarship in this field is multifaceted, exploring fishing ways of life, fishing knowledge, marine tenures and economies, the gendered nature of fishing, how people cope with danger and risk, and the specificities of how this particular watery nature is manifested in social, political, and cultural systems. Fishing can be defined as a productive activity that takes place in a mul tidimensional space, depending more on natural or wild processes than manufactured processes. The idea of fishing being closer to nature is an analytical thread, giving the an thropology of fisheries a particular edge on the multispecies and more than human ethno graphic turn in contemporary anthropology. Research in fisheries anthropology has long held the connections between fisher and fish to be of central concern. Significant too, however, is the thesis that the construction of commodity fisheries as a natural domain, of which fishers are atomistic extractors to be managed, is a highly politicized process in volving the bioeconomic creation of fish stock and broader political economies. Anthropo logical research on fisheries engages critically with neoliberalizations, the extension of privatizations, and the proliferation of industrial aquaculture, thus challenging Blue Econ omy attempts to reconfigure nature-culture relationships and reposition the marine envi ronment as a locus for the enactment and perpetuation of inequality. The anthropological study of fisheries is a diverse and complex topic that has yielded a substantial body of literature providing rich ethnographic insights into distinctive marine ways of life and has intervened theoretically in major debates in the discipline. Maritime anthropology, the broader framing for fisheries anthropology, has been concerned histori cally with the lives of people who live by, off, and with the sea. It includes detailed studies of fishing communities, explores the tension between individualism and communalism, the gendered nature of work, and the prevalence of risk, danger, rites, and rituals in fish ing ways of life. Key research themes include local and indigenous marine environmental knowledge and practices, the existence of territoriality and sea tenure, as well as nu anced accounts of the changes occasioned by the imposition of new fisheries manage
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This paper contributes to debates on growing inequalities in the maritime domain by using the concept of precarity to interrogate the market in Māori fisheries. To understand the particularities of this ocean precarity, I draw attention... more
This paper contributes to debates on growing inequalities in the maritime domain by using the concept of precarity to interrogate the market in Māori fisheries. To understand the particularities of this ocean precarity, I draw attention to the interrelated dynamics of dispossession, as it occurred historically in Māori fisheries through various economic orders, and indigeneity, as it articulates with both alienation and the reclamation of fishing rights. I argue that the incorporation of Māori fisheries into an Individual Transferable Quota system has generated a "political ecology of the precarious ," positioning socio-natures as working against ecological demise at the same time as contributing to it. This transforms the ancestral guardianship relationship between people and their sea, exacerbates colonially-created dispossessions and hardens divisions between economic and cultural spheres, or commercial and customary fisheries. However, precarious conditions may also be conceived of as mobilising phenomena, giving rise to attempts to breach these divides.
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In fisheries management—as in environmental governance more generally—regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to... more
In fisheries management—as in environmental governance more generally—regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in pan- aceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of check- lists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users’ understandings of a policy’s impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the liter- ature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.
SUMMARY The concept of " silence " is used to examine the everyday experience of lived violence in the prolonged ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland. I analyze silence as coercion, cultural censorship, embodied, and an integral component... more
SUMMARY The concept of " silence " is used to examine the everyday experience of lived violence in the prolonged ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland. I analyze silence as coercion, cultural censorship, embodied, and an integral component of identity and consciousness affected by a diaspora. Silence is intrinsic to the symbolic violence that is enacted in commemorations. This is a silencing of alternative histories and memories, and the ethnic identities in which these are rooted. It is also a silencing of place and an attempt to create new kinds of territorial belongings. I explore the multiple ways through which violence is manifested both symbolically and physically, penetrates the ordinary, as well as the pivotal role of borders in the creation and maintenance of boundaries. I examine how border crossing opens up a liminal space of possibilities. I argue that border regimes are not restricted to the periphery. Rather, they penetrate deep into the center into the informal spaces of the everyday. I argue that silence is a culturally learned strategy through which fear, experienced socially, can be normalized, routinized, and negotiated. I question the efficacy of truth and reconciliation commissions, as well as the drive to " speak " violence. Although the bulk of this essay relates to the production of silence during the Troubles, I extend this analysis to the present era. [ethnicity, Northern Ireland, silence, violence]
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Abstract This article investigates the double-edged potentiality of the Waitangi Tribunal, an indigenous claims forum in New Zealand, and combines an ethnographic background to a recent claim with an anthropological interpretation of the... more
Abstract
This article investigates the double-edged potentiality of the Waitangi Tribunal, an indigenous claims forum in New Zealand, and combines an ethnographic background to a recent claim with an anthropological interpretation of the meanings and outcomes of this encounter. I suggest that the legal justice framework of the claims proceedings and the political aspect of settlements are distinct yet contingent phenomena. Both are inherently embedded in the neoliberalization of society. I suggest that marae (meeting-house complexes where tribunal hearings are held)—albeit symbolizing singular Māori spaces and distinctive loci where indigenous identity is reproduced—are equally sites where cultural and economic struggles articulate with neoliberal logics. I draw attention to the persistence of alienation in Māori society irrespective of the comparative generosity of the reparative justice program; I also consider the contradictory spaces opened for indigeneity under neoliberal governance and their unintended consequences, inventions, and creative hybridizations. I argue that a fruitful way to foreground the precarity of this engagement is by paying attention to silences. Such silences are multilevel, prefigure the claims process, are expressed as inequalities in the hearings, conscribe a particular version of a postcolonial economy, and reference a broader pattern of economic deprivation.
This article investigates the double-edged potentiality of the Waitangi Tribunal, an indigenous claims forum in New Zealand, and combines an ethnographic background to a recent claim with an anthropological interpretation of the meanings and outcomes of this encounter. I suggest that the legal justice framework of the claims proceedings and the political aspect of settlements are distinct yet contingent phenomena. Both are inherently embedded in the neoliberalization of society. I suggest that marae (meeting-house complexes where tribunal hearings are held)—albeit symbolizing singular Māori spaces and distinctive loci where indigenous identity is reproduced—are equally sites where cultural and economic struggles articulate with neoliberal logics. I draw attention to the persistence of alienation in Māori society irrespective of the comparative generosity of the reparative justice program; I also consider the contradictory spaces opened for indigeneity under neoliberal governance and their unintended consequences, inventions, and creative hybridizations. I argue that a fruitful way to foreground the precarity of this engagement is by paying attention to silences. Such silences are multilevel, prefigure the claims process, are expressed as inequalities in the hearings, conscribe a particular version of a postcolonial economy, and reference a broader pattern of economic deprivation.
Abstract New Zealand's fisheries management institutions represent a globally recognised story of a successful sustainable management regime, an accolade perceived to be based on its early and comprehensive adoption of a quota management... more
Abstract
New Zealand's fisheries management institutions represent a globally recognised story of a successful sustainable management regime, an accolade perceived to be based on its early and comprehensive adoption of a quota management system (QMS). This article questions these assumptions. There are three main strands to the argument. First, that the interpretation of sustainability in the New Zealand QMS disregards the social while simultaneously accentuating a particularly neoliberal economic paradigm in which sustainability is directed towards sustaining the wealth generating potential of quota holdings. Second, while in theory there is a separation of biological and economic conceptions of sustainability in the QMS, these processes are, in fact, deeply intertwined. Third, that the sustainability brand works to legitimise the privatisation and marketization of marine environments, to protect the income stream of quota investors, and to effectively incorporate and discipline dissent.
Keywords
Individual Transferable Quota; Sustainability; Māori; Neoliberalism
New Zealand's fisheries management institutions represent a globally recognised story of a successful sustainable management regime, an accolade perceived to be based on its early and comprehensive adoption of a quota management system (QMS). This article questions these assumptions. There are three main strands to the argument. First, that the interpretation of sustainability in the New Zealand QMS disregards the social while simultaneously accentuating a particularly neoliberal economic paradigm in which sustainability is directed towards sustaining the wealth generating potential of quota holdings. Second, while in theory there is a separation of biological and economic conceptions of sustainability in the QMS, these processes are, in fact, deeply intertwined. Third, that the sustainability brand works to legitimise the privatisation and marketization of marine environments, to protect the income stream of quota investors, and to effectively incorporate and discipline dissent.
Keywords
Individual Transferable Quota; Sustainability; Māori; Neoliberalism
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This chapter considers the entanglement of indigeneity and neoliberalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the context of fisheries. A relationship, I argue, that is mediated by market environmentalism. This is given substance in two Acts: The... more
This chapter considers the entanglement of indigeneity and neoliberalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the context of fisheries. A relationship, I argue, that is mediated by market environmentalism. This is given substance in two Acts: The Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act 1992, which resolved commercial claims against the Crown, and the complementary Fisheries (Kaimoana Customary Fishing) Regulations 1998, which legislated for customary fishing activities. The settlement was made feasible by the implementation of new forms of enclosures in the seascape—that is, individualised property rights, ITQs (individualtransferable quota).
This article uses Mauss's thesis on The Gift as a lens through which to critically compare Hawaiian and Māori fisheries. I focus, in particular, on the specific and paradoxical blending of interestedness and disinterestedness in the... more
This article uses Mauss's thesis on The Gift as a lens through which to critically compare Hawaiian and Māori fisheries. I focus, in particular, on the specific and paradoxical blending of interestedness and disinterestedness in the subsistence sector in Hawaii, and the historical separation of these phenomena in the context of fisheries management in New Zealand. As emergent financial commodities fish symbolises a new type of disjuncture between production and exchange, a disjuncture which is likely to be unsustainable in terms of either human or environmental costs.
In this article I argue that the separation of commercial and customary fishing, which was a result of the 1992 Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Settlement Act, denies their essential integration in the practices of small-scale fishers... more
In this article I argue that the separation of commercial and customary fishing, which was a result of the 1992 Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Settlement Act, denies their essential integration in the practices of small-scale fishers across time and space. Theorists who have analysed the moral economy and petty commodity production invariably conclude that commercial production (for money and/or profit) and customary production (for subsistence and the fulfilment of cultural activities and obligations) exist on a continuum and that both are indeed necessary for the survival of small-scale producers. The definition of customary activity as the absence of monetary transactions is not consistent with either international legal decisions, or with the social reality of small-scale Maori fishers, who operate in mixed economies, sometimes moral, sometimes capitalist, and exchange fish in much the same manner, sometimes in order to achieve a balance and sometimes for profit.
Purpose – The chapter compares gift and market exchange in Hawaiian and New Zealand fisheries.Methodology/approach – The chapter draws upon a combination of original ethnographic fieldwork and literature pertaining to fisheries in both... more
Purpose – The chapter compares gift and market exchange in Hawaiian and New Zealand fisheries.Methodology/approach – The chapter draws upon a combination of original ethnographic fieldwork and literature pertaining to fisheries in both New Zealand and Hawaii.Findings – The privatization of fishing rights in New Zealand, in conjunction with a social policy directed toward Maori addressing colonial dispossession, has resulted in the dominance of market exchange, the creation of a purified version of indigenous gift exchange, and the attempted elimination of any hybrid activities. This has not been a positive outcome for the majority of coastal Maori. Fisheries development in Hawai’i has taken a different path. The flexibility that inheres in Hawaiian fisheries enables ongoing participation in both gift and cash economies.Originality/value – Over the last few decades western economies have witnessed a rapid extension of market approaches to many commonly owned environmental goods, a movement which has been entrenched as global policy orthodoxy. The social consequences of this development have been under researched. This chapter challenges the neoliberal model of using market mechanisms and property rights as “the way to do” natural resource management.
Purpose – The authors introduce the chapters of Engaging with Capitalism with a discussion of anthropological and other social theory about peoples’ approaches to capitalism, especially peoples with vibrant noncapitalist social systems,... more
Purpose – The authors introduce the chapters of Engaging with Capitalism with a discussion of anthropological and other social theory about peoples’ approaches to capitalism, especially peoples with vibrant noncapitalist social systems, such as are found in Oceania.Approach – The introduction is in the form of a review of anthropological and other social theory about interactions between capitalism and noncapitalist social systems.Findings – The theoretical literature has tended to dichotomize capitalist and noncapitalist societies. While heuristically it is useful to contrast capitalist and noncapitalist social systems, in practice once societies come into the orbit of capitalism people adapt elements of capitalism to suit their aims. Furthermore, societies generally considered thoroughly capitalist also include noncapitalist features. So it is more accurate to think of societies as involving a mix of capitalism and noncapitalism, and the nature of that mix is part of what makes each society distinct.Social implications – The theoretical dichotomization of societies as capitalist or not, with capitalism understood as being universal, and noncapitalism understood in general terms such as gift economy, is prevalent in public imaginaries. Domestic social policy and international development assistance are often based on this dualistic understanding. Such programs could work better if they were based instead on an understanding that each group of people has a dynamic economic system, which includes capitalist and noncapitalist elements that interact in ways influenced by their history and locality.Value of paper – The chapter provides a conceptual scaffold for thinking about the ways people engage with capitalism
This article discusses the Māori concept of rāhui and its implementation both traditionally and in contemporary times. It situates the imposition of rāhui in structures of ownership and various property rights and legal regimes. I argue... more
This article discusses the Māori concept of rāhui and its implementation both traditionally and in contemporary times. It situates the imposition of rāhui in structures of ownership and various property rights and legal regimes. I argue that the present narrower interpretation of rāhui is largely a consequence of the transformation of Māori common property rights since colonisation in 1840. The imposition of rāhui was, and to a degree remains, fundamentally a property act—a claim to ownership, as assertion of sovereignty. The articulation of such ownership practices with the broader public and private regimes, within which they currently sit, has led to a situation characterised by struggle.
Indigeneity is a multi-faceted phenomenon, and for analytical purposes three different levels of practice may be identified: global, national, and local. This framework is used to illustrate the complex nature of recent negotiations... more
Indigeneity is a multi-faceted phenomenon, and for analytical purposes three different levels of practice may be identified: global, national, and local. This framework is used to illustrate the complex nature of recent negotiations between two Maori tribes and the government in New Zealand concerning the ownership and cultural use of coastal spaces. Indigenous claims-making is intimately bound up with neoliberal practices which, since the 1970s, have become embedded in many states, including New Zealand. It is argued here that neoliberalism is a qualitatively new form of political economy and tends to essentialize the representation of indigenous peoples while at the same time creating new, if limited, avenues for the pursuance of indigenous claims. This article highlights the contradictions generated in the process of practising indigeneity within the constraints of government policy and legislation, global arrangements, and local social organization.
This article discusses structural transformations in small-scale fisheries in a New Zealand community. Expressions of fishing practice and the people who pursue these practices are subject to three different management regimes—Commercial,... more
This article discusses structural transformations in small-scale fisheries in a New Zealand community. Expressions of fishing practice and the people who pursue these practices are subject to three different management regimes—Commercial, Recreational and Customary Regulations—each of which is rooted in a particular model of ownership. The community is simultaneously subject to globalization as represented by the local fish processing plant, a burgeoning tourist market, and the Quota Management Regime. These factors intertwine in complex ways to threaten community cohesion; yet, fishers, irrespective of category, express sentiments indicating an emergent level of solidarity based on a shared productive activity and a common distaste for various elements of globalization.
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In contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand, Maori indigenous claims to fisheries have resulted in an uneasy compromise in which private property in fisheries coexists with an important element of common ownership. Individual Transferable Quotas... more
In contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand, Maori indigenous claims to fisheries have resulted in an uneasy compromise in which private property in fisheries coexists with an important element of common ownership. Individual Transferable Quotas and the bundle of rights encoded in Customary Fisheries Regulations are the expression of this compromise. At the legal level, these reflect the major property paradigms of private and communal. In practice, neither has accommodated Maori concrete relations of owning, and social practices of exchanging, fish.
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In this article I use ethnographic material drawn from research with Māori to focus critical attention on the structural conditions that both enable and disable the reproduction of indigeneity in New Zealand. I conceptualize indigeneity... more
In this article I use ethnographic material drawn from research with Māori to focus critical attention on the structural conditions that both enable and disable the reproduction of indigeneity in New Zealand. I conceptualize indigeneity as process, as intertwined with property struggles, as dynamically constituted and reconstituted in relation to the prevailing political economy, as facilitated and inhibited by state institutions, and as both primordial and contingent. I argue that in New Zealand, a particular type of indigeneity is rewarded, one that is most closely aligned with neoliberal architecture and although indigeneity may potentially co-opt neoliberal spaces, there are costs associated with this engagement.