Being Present: Embodying Political Relations in Indigenous Encounters with the Crown
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Being Present: Embodying Political Relations in Indigenous Encounters with the Crown Te Kawehau Hoskinsa,* and Avril Bellb a
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. [email protected] [email protected] *Corresponding author.
Abstract Political encounters between settler governments and indigenous communities are freighted with the unresolved issues of indigenous independence asserted under ongoing conditions of colonial domination. Within political science, these encounters have been primarily theorised and analysed as struggles of indigenous communities for political recognition from settler states. Further, the politics of recognition is widely understood as colonising by indigenous scholars, with some arguing for an alternative politics of (indigenous) resurgence and refusal, a ‘turning away’ from the state. In this article, we argue that in the case of Ma¯ori in Aotearoa ‘turning up’ is the ethical and correct practice of politics, a practice stemming from the relational ontology of the Ma¯ori world. Thus ‘turning up’ rather than ‘turning away’ can, for Ma¯ori, itself be a practice of refusal. We outline the centrality of the embodied, face-to-face encounter within Ma¯ori politics, and identify the ongoing presence of the sovereign’s body and embodiment more broadly within the Westminster tradition, as symbolised in the concept of the Crown. Building on these compatibilities within distinct political ontologies, we argue for the potential and productivity of face-to-face political encounters, and call on the New Zealand Crown to also prioritise ‘turning up’ in its engagement with indigenous communities. Contemporary Political Theory (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00439-9 Keywords: indigenous-settler relations; political ontologies; the face-to-face; politics of recognition; indigenous thought
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Hoskins and Bell
Political Personhood We begin this article by picking out two moments of the many in which iwi (tribes), hapu¯ (sub-tribes) and the New Zealand Crown have met face-to-face. Both point to the divergence in expectations between Ma¯ori and government regarding appropriate political engagement. This mismatch relates to differing understandings of the importance of face-to-face, embodied relations, which in turn links to different understandings of the enactment of political power. In the modern western tradition, we are used to understanding political power as bureaucratic and disembodied, travelling in documentary form, in contrast to the Ma¯ori understanding of embodied power operating in face-to-face and oral/dialogical form. In the article we unpack these two distinct approaches to political power and engagement, highlighting points of connection – as each side has ‘conditioned’ the other in Aotearoa New Zealand over 200 years of political engagement – and also bringing to the fore the ways in which personhood remains present but abstracted within the western political tradi
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