7. TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF THE RESEARCHER AS SUBJECT IN POST/DECOLONIAL PACIFIC HISTORIES

Recent discussion has drawn out some important differences between postcolonial and decolonial theories. The former are associated primarily with the work of South Asian scholars working in cultural, literary, or historical studies; decolonial scholarship, by contrast, is located in Latin America and has emerged from sociological critiques of dependency theory. Shifting the locus of debate to the Pacific centers another subject in globalizing critiques of colonialism: the historian in indigenous communities. In this article, I examine how the role of the researcher is conceptualized in Linda Tuhiwai Smith's landmark work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). Revealing tensions between objectivity and intersubjectivity, on the one hand, and between essentialist identity and hybridity, on the other, I ask why Smith's book hinges on dichotomizing nonindigenous and indigenous researchers, who are by turn enabled or constrained in a colonial present. I situate this late twentieth-century subject in a genealogy of indigenous engagement with history and anthropology in New Zealand and contemporary problems of historical justice.     

Resurrection: who is it good for? The price of achievement at the London Hospital

The London Hospital, located in the heart of the East End, grew in tandem with the industrialization and increasing population of an impoverished area of the capital. It provided care and emergency facilities to employees of local industries amongst others. Archaeological excavations uncovered a forgotten burial ground for poor patients. Osteological and documentary evidence combined to reveal that many of the dead were first given to the hospital medical school for anatomical study. Human dissection no doubt contributed to scientific development within the medical profession, but the practice came with consequences that many at the time found unpalatable.     

Dusting Down Second Hand Rose: Gendered identities and the world of second-hand goods in the space of the car boot sale

This is concerned with the connections between second-hand exchange and consumption, and gendered identities, and draws on research conducted within car boot sales in Britain. The article demonstrates the highly gendered nature of patterns of exchange and consumption within the space of the car boot sale; connects this to the various gender identities found within conventional retail environments, notably the department store; and examines in depth the intricacies of what happens when both women and men buy from and sell to one another in the space of the car boot sale. For women, the world of the car boot sale is shown to require the negotiation of the multiple and frequently contradictory feminine subject positions embedded in exchange and consumption, notably woman as object of masculine heterosexual desire, woman as mother and woman as homemaker. For men, by contrast, the construct of masculinity to be negotiated is apparently homogeneous, utilitarian and instrumentalist-man the builder of domestic space. The article reflects on these differences and on the highly gendered pattern of exchange and consumption found within car boot sales, arguing that both are intricately connected to the expert gendered knowledges inscribed in particular commodities, knowledges which are argued to be at a premium in spaces of second-hand exchange and consumption.     

New Courses For A Gendered Geography: Teaching Feminist Geography At The University Of Waikato

An argument for a transformative feminist geography rather than a less radical gender geography anchors a discussion of two undergraduate courses developed at the University of Waikato. It is suggested that a consideration of gender in geography marginalises feminist scholarship, fosters a goal of androgyny and a politics of equality. As a result, putting gender into geography could well just add ‘women's concerns’ into an unaltered discipline and deflect the feminist focus on women's oppression and patriarchal power. The challenge then, is to create a geography which has feminism at its centre, to formulate an alternative discourse which critiques but also reconstructs the theories, concepts, subjects, politics and pedagogy of the discipline The second year course ‘Women in Australasia: Gendering Space’ and the third year course ‘Feminist Geography: Critique and Construct’ are attempts at creating such a feminist geography.