Being in the place world: toward a Māori “geographical self”

Abstract

The concept of place is central to geography, and is also seminal to the thinking of Indigenous peoples, including the Māori of Aotearoa/New Zealand. However, few geographical studies of Indigenous peoples have used conceptions of place that depart from Western modes of representation. This article explores how the phenomenological concept of the “geographical self” can illuminate Māori thought about self, body, landscape, and place. It uses an approach known as kaupapa Māori, which while based in European epistemology enables us to identify relevant aspects of the Māori knowledge system and weave them into academic theories and methodologies. Three dimensions of Māori knowledge (genealogy as a way of knowing things, understandings of time, and the importance of the spoken word rather than visual representation) are used to demonstrate how Māori identify themselves, conceptualize the body as an arbiter of interaction with the environment, and create landscape through place naming. It is argued that for Māori the world is represented, indeed created, in speech and the act of naming, including the naming of places, which impresses ancestors and deities into the landscape in such a way that a place and its knowledge cannot be separated.