Sovereignty Under Siege?: Globalization and New Zealand by Chris Rudd & Robert G. Patman

Author:Chris Rudd & Robert G. Patman [Rudd, Chris & Patman, Robert G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138277526
Google: P2nkAQAACAAJ
Goodreads: 34703082
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-03-29T13:58:23+00:00

It is the harmonizing of all these elements that represents the challenge for 21st-century Aotearoa–New Zealand. The humanizing of the political and economic institutions and structures of Aotearoa–New Zealand will be Māori people’s greatest contribution to the present and the future. I suggest that the task of harmonizing and humanizing societies is a contribution to be offered by all indigenous communities.

The task is immense. One Māori theologian and philosopher, Māori Marsden (1991: 9), has pointed out that Māori have been dominated by Western humanistic philosophies, which contain faults in metaphysical analysis. He argued that:

Liberalism into whose morass we have been plunged in modern times is simply another name for confusion as to what our convictions really are. Mind and heart are at war with one another, and not, as commonly asserted, reason and faith.

According to Marsden (1991: 17), the period of the ‘Enlightenment’ plunged the world into darkness. The presuppositions of science elevated sense-perception and pragmatism above spiritual truth and insights; Freudian psychology relegated the highest manifestations of life, including religion, to the dark stirrings of the subconscious mind resulting from unfulfilled incest wishes of childhood; relativism denied all absolutes, norms, values, and standards; positivism maintained that valid knowledge is obtainable only through the scientific method, and that no knowledge is genuine unless based upon observable fact.

On the question of maintaining indigenous spirituality (wairuatanga) as a basis for cultural integrity, identity and action in the world, Marsden refers again to the flaws in Western thought that has dominated Anglo-Saxon outpost societies like New Zealand. In his critique of Western philosophy, Marsden asserts the significant contribution that indigenous thought and experience could bring to the region and to the process of globalization, helping to offset any implicit hegemony.

Mäori, in common with other indigenous peoples, offer an alternative world view and approach to life to that currently in place in New Zealand and the West in general. Part of this approach involves a world view with cosmic dimensions that can inform us about nature and the use of natural resources, about the unity of the material and metaphysical worlds, and about what it means to be human. For Māori, the universe is not a closed system, but rather it is a cosmos forever unfolding. It is expressed in the traditional and ancient saying from our ancestors quoted above: ‘I te kore, ki te pō, ki te ao mā rama’ — ‘out of the primal power of the cosmos, through the night, into the world of light’ (Shirres, 1998: 118-19). It is the task of the community to continually work through states of te kore, te pō and to seek te ao mā rama. From where we stand, globalization and its impact on local cultures may well be a step towards either the world of confusion (te pō ), or the world of light (te ao mā rama), or produce both confusion and enlightenment. A religious-cultural world view such as that espoused by Polynesian Māori is relevant to any discussion of culture, economics

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.