Maori / R. H. Tawney [and nine others].

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tawney, R. H., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Māori (New Zealand people).

Civilization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

New Haven, Conn. : Human Relations Area Files, 2009.

Summary:

This collection consists of ten documents about the Maori, all in English, covering a time span from approximately 1800 to 2003. The two works by Best presents basically ethnographic data on social organization and religion, and on material culture. Buck also presents a general ethnography of the Maori with special emphasis on origins and racial affiliations, material culture, social organization, religion, and technology. Firth's study of the Maori, is a functional study of aboriginal Maori social and economic organization prior to 1840. It touches on class structure, land systems, industry, methods of co-operative labor, exchange and distribution, the psychology of work, and the role of magic in economics. Although dealing with the institutions of a single people, this monograph also discusses problems of general theory. This work is particularly valuable for its intensive study of the phenomena of cultural integration and social change from pre-European days up to about 1960. Hawthorn studied an isolated village in northern New Zealand in order to determine the various ways in which cultural changes have occurred in the society and the problems of assimilation into the European-New Zealand culture. Metge did a major study of the basic Maori social unit, the whanau (the household or extended family), and built a generalized model or picture of the primary referent within this range, a model broad enough to encompass the major variations which have developed over the years in urban as well as in rural areas. Meijl studied the Tainui Maori, the first Maori group to sign a major settlement of their historic grievance against the New Zealand government as the result of the confiscation of their lands and natural resources by the government at the end of the war between the two principals in 1860-1864. Sullivan's paper discusses the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) between the Maori and the British colonizers, which led to the usurpation of Maori sovereignty and Maori ownership of lands, fisheries, forests and other natural resources, but gave the Maori people the franchise right to vote, which they have used in their struggle to hold on to their culture and their language, and in their pursuit of economic development. The Maori are the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand. Culturally they are Polynesian, most closely related to eastern Polynesians.

Notes:

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