The CRIA Library at Almada Negreiros College received a donation from New Zealand specialist of Māori studies, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, which includes about 50 works from his private collection, concerning the Māori context. The donation includes several monographs by the New Zealand ethnographer Elsdon Best (1856-1931), best known to be the main source of Marcel Mauss's The Gift regarding the famous vernacular concept of hau. It also includes a significant set of works on the social, political, and cultural history of New Zealand from the point of view of Māori studies.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman was born in London in 1947 and went to New Zealand in 1950. He is a Pākehā writer of history, memoir and poetry, and a specialist in Māori studies, author of Best of Both Worlds: The Story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (Penguin, 2010), a sensitive monograph that reconstructs the joint ethnographical enterprise of Elsdon Best and his main informant/collaborator, Tutakangahau.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s 2013 memoir, The Lost Pilot, involved travel to Japan in 2011 to meet the families of kamikaze pilots who had died attacking his father's aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious in 1945. Jeffrey Paparoa Holman has recently retired as a senior adjunct fellow at the University of Canterbury’s School of Humanities and Creative Arts, where he served 2010-19.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman Donation, composed of rare books that do not exist in other Portuguese libraries, is accessible to CRIA researchers and the academic community in general.

by Frederico Delgado Rosa (CRIA-NOVA FCSH)