For reasons of force majeure, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman will not be able to attend the open class, which will be taught by Professor Frederico Delgado Rosa.
This event is an open class of the NOVA FCSH Master's degree in Antropology course "Ethnographic Archives and Histories of Anthropology"
For too long, Māori have had Pākehā (Europeans) discuss fellow Pākehā such as Elsdon Best and their ethnographies of subject peoples, their ethnological models that explain and situate Māori meanings in a Eurocentric discourse. An alternative reading of Best’s ethnography may subvert this tendency by considering that his work is inseparable from the learned input of his Māori ethnographic collaborators. Jeffrey Paparoa Holman tells a story of two worlds connected by power relations, while arguing that Best’s endeavors are not reducible to their colonial dimension in any simple way. On the one hand, the recording of a vanishing past in written form by Best and his Indigenous interlocutors was conducted for different reasons and mainly directed at two separate audiences, European and Māori, respectively. On the other side, it was a joint enterprise, with significant points of intersection. Paparoa Holman restitutes the context and significance of a paradigmatic relationship, that between the Tūhoe tribal chief Tutakangahau (1832?-1907), of the Tamakaimoana hapū (sub-tribe) of Maungapōhatu, and Elsdon Best as an auto-didact. Paparoa Holman focuses on the transformative meeting between these two men in August 1896, when the visionary chief inducted the ambitious ethnographer into his role as an amanuensis, recruited to record the history, culture, lifeways and spirituality of his iwi (tribe), under threat of settler swamping and the erasure of identity. Paparoa Holman argues that such a relationship may legitimately be viewed as orality handing over its power to the written word, but not the surrender of indigenous knowledge under threat of extinction, passing the guardianship over to Pākehā interlocutors. Rather, this was a manifestation of Indigenous agency. Tutakangahau and other Māori elders offered their repository of wisdom and knowledge to Best’s pen to fulfil the hopes of future revival.
About the author:
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman was born in London in 1947 and moved to New Zealand in 1950. A specialist in Māori studies, he is a Pākehā (of European descent) writer in the fields of anthropology and history. In addition to his memoirs and poetic work, he is the author of Best of Both Worlds: The Story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (Penguin, 2010). This landmark work reconstructs the relationship between Elsdon Best and his main informant/collaborator, Tutakangahau.
His 2013 memoir, The Lost Pilot, involved trips 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 recently retired as Reader from the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), where he worked between 2010 and 2019.
He recently donated part of his collection to the Biblioteca CRIA, and it will be the subject of an exhibition to be announced soon.
