Is there an indigenous response to financial crises? : the evolution of Maori cultural political economies

Abstract

If economic strategies are framed by culturally-bound collectives that draw on particular ideas, values and beliefs, then Cultural Political Economy (CPE) offers a useful standpoint for understanding human responses to crises, including the current financial crisis. To better understand the methodological standpoint and possibilities of such an approach, this paper investigates the linkages between the philosophies and practices that originate with Indigenous peoples, and the distinct cultural logics that inform their past, present and future responses to crises. What successive ‘new economies’ have had in common for Indigenous peoples is 1) the dominance to change the type of crisis Indigenous communities are vulnerable to, and 2) both the power and inclination to exclude Indigenous thought and practice from building resilience and appropriate response mechanisms to these crises. Māori - the Indigenous people of New Zealand - have endured various crises since the first sustained ‘contact’ with Europeans in C18th, including the often brutal effects of colonisation in the C19th and the affects of ‘true’ financial recessions in the C20th. Now re-emerging as a burgeoning ‘sector’ embedded in a wider NZ economy, Māori economic concepts and practices will potentially have major affects in the C21st and beyond. In their endurance over this time, Māori have drawn upon social memory, cultural traditions (including resistance and collaboration), concepts of socio-ecological resilience, and the need to secure the intergenerational transfer of assets, practices evident over the millennium of Māori settlement. But Indigenous CPEs are not static; indeed increasing the resilience of Māori communities can only be achieved by the timely adoption of relevant innovations in a manner that sees ‘sustainability’ comprehensively diffused across Māori land and through Māori society. Reassuringly, the politics of identity have enabled the politics of redistribution.