“Empirical Anthropologists Advocating Cultural Adjustments”: The Anthropological Governance of Āpirana Ngata and the Native Affairs Department

In 1929, āpirana Ngata published an article titled “Anthropology and the government of native races in the Pacific”. This would appear to confirm the link between anthropology and the rule of indigenous populations in New Zealand and its Pacific empire, but the evidence presented in this article suggests a more complex situation. This paper examines the “empirical anthropology” of Ngata and Peter Buck and the ways in which their activities reshaped the policy and practice of the Department of Native Affairs between 1920 and 1935, particularly through the notion of cultural “adjustments” or “adaptation”. Archival research reveals that behind the activities of the Dominion Museum, the Polynesian Society and its Journal was a Māori-led body, the Board of Māori Ethnological Research, which redirected government collecting, research and publication from salvage to the maintenance and revival of Māori cultural heritage in the service of tribal social and economic development. Seen through the theoretical framework of assemblage theory, we can see how a malleable idea of culture was employed in social governance in quite different ways to the colonial governmentality at work in other settler colonies at this time. The paper argues that this form of “anthropological governance” effectively de-territorialized state institutions, thereby creating a distinctive space for the native exterior to the nation.     

Religion and political principle: New studies on the political theory of the english revolution

William Lamont, Richard Baxter & the Millenium, Croom Helm, London, 1979.

James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke & His Adversaries Cambridge University Press, 1980.

C.C. Weston & J.R. Greenberg, Subjects and Citizens: The Grand Controversy Over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

George Yule, Puritans in Politics: The Religious Legislation of The Long Parliament, Sutton Courtney, Oxford, 1982.     

The History of Political Thought as secular genealogy: the case of liberty in early modern England

ABSTRACT

The History of Political Thought originated in, and partially remains an adjunct to the academic study of politics. As such it is not a mere subject matter or authentic tradition of speculation, but a secularising genealogy in some tension with an impulse to rigorous historicity. It provides an under-acknowledged context for the thinkers and concepts placed within it. The difficulties and consequent distortions are illustrated with reference to seventeenth-century discussions of liberty. It is argued that notions of negative liberty and Republican liberty as an ideological alternative are secularising genealogical projections that distort the character of seventeenth-century debate; but that republican liberty can be reformulated in more historically plausible terms as a special case of one of the entailments of contentious office-holding in and beyond a secularised conception of the political. Thomas Hobbes's conceptions of liberty provide a concluding illustration.     

The dynastic triangle in international relations: Modena,England, and France, 1678–85

This article is a case study of how dynastic marriages in the early-modern period were wont to disappoint the participants. In this era, ruling dynasties frequently sought to marry suitable members of their family networks to well-placed clients in other states. These marriages were frequently intended to cement friendship or bind political wounds caused by previous conflicts. In 1673, the marriage between James Stuart, Duke of York, and Maria Beatrice d’Este, sister to the Duke of Modena, was sponsored by Louis XIV, King of France, thus giving rise to what one might term a ‘dynastic triangle’. This article, written from the Este perspective, demonstrates how the Duke of York and the King of France each subsequently failed, on two occasions, to support Francesco II d’Este's geopolitical objectives in northern Italy. For York, and his brother King Charles II, the failure to assist the Duke of Modena was as a result of their political inability to do so. On the other hand, Louis XIV's refusal to help Modena was because of conflicting French objectives in Italy. The negative Este reaction was both an indication of the Italian states’ fear and distrust of France, and a reminder that small states had ambitions and goals which were difficult to attain when not sponsored by a larger power. But these goals were often pursued when such sponsorship appeared likely, and were often unrealistic. The strains in dynastic relationships usually resulted from realisation that certain goals were irreconcilable.     

Historiographical Myth,Discipline, and Contextual Distortion

Summary

Although academic disciplines are given to mythologising their own histories, corrective historicisation is no straightforward matter. Anachronisms are most difficult to avoid where our own tacit understandings of the world are used to help structure contexts that are themselves often unstable and indeterminate. This is often the case in attempts to relate agents and propositions to a context of pre-existing problems. Propositions and concepts that are the result of satiric reduction, or unintended consequence, disrupt narrative sequences that lead directly and neatly to present disciplinary identities.