Paul Tapsell

Paul Tapsell
Australian National University & Takarangi Research

D.Phil (Ox), Professor

About

51
Publications
24,834
Reads
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581
Citations
Introduction
Empowering Indigenous (marae/kāinga) communities to strategically embrace ancestral values (kin-framed accountability, resilience and innovation) in their struggle to not just survive, but get in front of escalating impacts of colonisation (social disruption, dislocation, poverty, homelessness, resource depletion and not least climate crisis) and become accepted contributors to nations' future well being.
Additional affiliations
January 2020 - April 2020
Te Potiki National Trust
Position
  • Chair
Description
  • Principal/lead Researcher: NSC (NZ), 2019-2022; and MBIE (NZ) 2019-2024. Support reestablishment of NZ local Indigenous communities (tribal marae) and their re-engagement with ancestral resources (www.maorimaps.com) to improve Māori well being nationwide.
July 2018 - January 2020
University of Melbourne
Position
  • Managing Director
Description
  • Successfully led a team that designed, developed and launched the University's first cross-disciplinary Indigenous Studies Program, better serving 21st century Indigenous communities, researchers, students.
July 2018 - April 2020
University of Melbourne
Position
  • Professor
Description
  • Chief Investigator on three ARC Fund (AUS): LEIF, 2018-2020; DISCOVERY, 2020-2022 x 2; Asst Investigator Marsden Fund (NZ) 2019-2021.
Education
October 1995 - October 1998
University of Oxford
Field of study
  • Museum Ethnography / Social Anthropology

Publications

Publications (51)
Chapter
The greatest challenge of being an anthropologist is being me. From one decade to the next I have been a cross-cultural island of self-consciousness, framed by the cross-generational memories of wider kin. Wisdom comes in many forms, but as I tell my students (at least those who turn up to class), it cannot be found on the internet. Somewhere betwe...
Article
Full-text available
Indigenous research methods centralises the importance of Indigenous ways of researching, validating and interpreting knowledge. In Māori kin-community (kāinga) contexts this methodology is called whakapapa. It is an ethical approach to research. Through three kāinga case studies, our article explores whakapapa methodology as an expression of Kaupa...
Book
Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Ngāti Raukawa) charts the destruction caused by the alienation of his people from their kāinga and whenua, and from each other. Colonialism and capitalism, extraction and exploitation, have diminished Papatūānuku to the point of extinction and the Earth mother now dem...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
‘Dare we elevate kāinga as a way of achieving regionalised ecological accountability, and in the process can we bring humanity back into balance with the universe?’ Through his own experience and the stories of his tīpuna, Paul Tapsell (Te Arawa, Tainui) charts the impact of colonisation on his people. Alienation from kāinga and whenua becomes a wi...
Chapter
'The creation of new science requires moving beyond simply understanding one another's perspectives. We need to find transformative spaces for knowledge exchange and progress.' Māori have a long history of innovation based on mātauranga and tikanga – the knowledge and values passed down from ancestors. Yet Western science has routinely failed to ac...
Chapter
'The creation of new science requires moving beyond simply understanding one another's perspectives. We need to find transformative spaces for knowledge exchange and progress.' Māori have a long history of innovation based on mātauranga and tikanga – the knowledge and values passed down from ancestors. Yet Western science has routinely failed to ac...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Submission to the Climate Change Commission Draft Advice Report
Chapter
Full-text available
Book
Full-text available
The authors would like to acknowledge all who generously gave of their time, expert advice and energy over the past five years to help make each chapter in this publication a reality. With honesty, humour and humility they each revealed a hint of the many still untold stories of Māori kin community-based entrepreneurs throughout Aotearoa. Each are...
Chapter
ćəsnaɁəm , the city before the city is a boundary-breaking exhibition that has successfully challenged the museum world to revisit who is the curator and who is the audience. This chapter provides an indigenous-framed insight into kin accountability as (re)presented to the museum world from the local tribal/aboriginal community perspective of Musqu...
Article
Full-text available
What is the future of curatorial practice? How can the relationships between Indigenous people in the Pacific, collections in Euro-American institutions, and curatorial knowledge in museums globally be (re)conceptualised in reciprocal and symmetrical ways? Is there an ideal model, a ‘curatopia,’ whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia, which ca...
Article
Full-text available
In 1923 Apirana Ngata set up the Board of Maori Ethnological Research under Section 9 of the Native Land Amendment and Native Land Claims Adjustment Act. The purpose of the Board, also known as Te Poari Whakapapa, was the “study and investigation of the ancient arts and crafts, language, customs, history, tradition, and antiquities of the Maori and...
Chapter
In this chapter I consider the extraordinary experiment of Indigenous curating of a First Nations exhibition in Canada as viewed from a tribal Māori perspective of Aotearoa New Zealand. As a tribal review of a tribal exhibition this chapter is necessaily personal and reflexive, as well as academic and analytical. I consider the parallels and differ...
Chapter
Full-text available
Putting whenua back in the picture This is an aspirational call to our nation to lift its awareness around the interconnection of health and well-being for our environment, animals and people. At the heart of our intercultural health system is whenua – life-giving placenta – consisting of the microbe-rich soils of Papatūānuku (Earth Mother), nouri...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter offers a glimpse into being pre-Indigenous in the Māori cultural heritage sector of New Zealand museums. Through taonga it provides an insider perspective of the challenges and opportunities of being Māori since British colonization (1840 Treaty of Waitangi) up to Te Māori in the 1980s; the bicultural influence of Te Papa / Museum of N...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Exploring the links between resilience, sustainability and entrepreneurship from an indigenous perspective means exploring the historic and socio-cultural context out of which a community originates. From this perspective, informed insight into a community’s ability to adapt and to transform without major structural collapse when confronted...
Chapter
This chapter focuses on the repatriation trajectory of illicitly acquired Maori ancestral human remains (AHR) and associated treasures (or belongings: taonga) into the early twenty-first century. Presented in two parts, it opens with an historical overview of the New Zealand (NZ) cultural landscape, particularly from the time of the Te Maori Art Ex...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter outlines the life and transformation of Te Haupapa from human into taonga (ancestral treasure) during the brutal musket wars of the 1830s. Today Te Haupapa takes the form of a Napoleon era cannon and rests at the now quiet coastal village of Maketu under the guardianship of Ngāti Whakaue of Te Arawa.
Chapter
Full-text available
How do we measure an exhibition’s success? This chapter provides an insight into the Ko Tawa journey and the challenges facing museums seeking to translate indigenous knowledge into an exhibitionary context. To assist my discussion, I have provided the originating context (tribal Maori) of the Ko Tawa story on which to explore the opportunities and...
Chapter
Full-text available
What motivated the distant ancestors of the Māori to leave 'home' some 150 generations ago and to become a distinctive people who genealogically organise their universe to revolve around an oceanic-based marae culture? Tribal Marae: Crisis? What Crisis? explores the evolution of the marae from ancient Pacific origins up to modern New Zealand times....
Article
In Maori communities, entrepreneurial activity occurs through the interaction of potiki (opportunity seeking entrepreneur) and kaumatua (senior lore-specialists), all the while mediated and guided by visionary leadership (rangatira). The mediated interplay between these actors in the Maori community is illustrated by takarangi - a double spiral of...
Book
Full-text available
In the Maori world, taonga and stories are intimately connected. Be it a song or a weapon, a painting or a cloak, taonga open doorways to ancestral imaginings of time and place. But what happens when the resources that define taonga are appropriated by another value system, and recast in terms of ownership rather than belonging? What stories are th...
Article
Full-text available
This article explores some of the theoretical insights emerging from work in the field of social entrepreneurship and complexity theory. It draws on a neo-Schumpeterian understanding of innovation as self-organization, as it arises in the process of social entrepreneurship. Drawing on complexity theory, we use the lens of self-organization and comp...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the importance of taking into account contextual factors when building governing mechanisms, so that the subsequent processes and structures are appropriate and sustainable. Design/methodology/approach – The paper utilises the singular case study illustration of Maori Maps, an indigenous social a...
Chapter
Full-text available
Traditionally, museums have focused their Maori collections according to values that are more reflective of the colonial practice of acquisition and capture than the originating genealogical matrix of relationships out of which they were prestated. 1 Since the 1980s the 're-presenting' of primitive Maori art objects as taonga (ancestral treasures)...
Article
Purpose – This paper examines the models used to teach and encourage indigenous entrepreneurial activity, with a focus on indigenous entrepreneurship in a Maori context. Design/methodology/approach – In particular, the paper explores the pedagogical challenges from the perspective of indigenous entrepreneurship understood from a Maori context and...
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the notion of social innovation as it arises in indigenous com- munities. In particular, we consider entre- preneurial activity in Maori communities where innovation arises through the in- teraction of the young opportunity seek- ing entrepreneur (potiki) and the elder statesperson (rangatira). To explore this behavior in more d...
Chapter
Full-text available
This essay explores the development of Maori tribal portraiture from a kin-community perspective. It traces the various transformations that have led to the acceptance of two dimensional portraits as taonga (ancestrally empowered treasures or belongings) and the central role they provide within the core Maori social practice of tangihanga (death ri...
Chapter
Full-text available
This article is the first of three essays that explore the trajectories of Maori ancestral remains associated with the Auckland War Memorial Museum since 1869, and the remedies now being applied. The second essay is due to be published in 2016 out of University of New Mexico Press and the third, currently under draft, will be presented at WAC 2016...
Article
Full-text available
This article examines the ceremonial courtyard called a marae, the quintessential focus of tribal Maori society, which not only represents customary authority over surrounding land but also provides the forum on which taonga (ancestral treasures) are ritually performed. Historically rooted in the Pacific, the tribal marae has stayed intact for coun...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter provides a perspective for international museums and repositories of cultural material to better understand the advantages of forming long-term relationships with the local indigenous kin groups, upon whose ancestral lands their institutions stand.
Article
Full-text available
During my time working as a curator in the Rotorua Museum (1990-1994), I experienced the power that taonga can bring when they are returned home to their descendants (Tapsell 1995a). As a member of the Maori tribal group, Te Arawa, now studying anthropology and museums at Oxford University, I have produced this essay with the aim of synthesising th...

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