----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
On 17/04/16 08:00, Johannes Birringer wrote:
black
Maori cultural work -- could you tell us more how they perceive "collapsed
time"?
several accounts exist, weighty with references, hardly liquid at all,
like this one:
http://press.anu.edu.au//austronesians/inside/mobile_devices/ch08s06.html
My own sense of the marae's collapsed time, in the sense of senses,
including somatic orientation, and, in the title of the volume Richard
Kearney recently edited, 'carnal hermeneutics', finds an additional
orientation in Gilles Deleuze ... already weighing us down with references!
Paul Tapsell provided the keynote for the conference Johannes refers to,
where I conducted a workshop in a theatre form developed from several
years work with Minus Theatre, /theatre of individual life/. Paul, of
Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Raukawa, spoke of the collapsed time of the
marae, where ancestors (Tipuna) and gods (Atua) are actively present; he
also spoke of the marae as the parliaments of Maori, 800 of them
existing before European settlement, where the women were the
"economists" and the men and women were and are in audience before the
Tipuna and Atua, the Taonga adorning the Wharenui: so there is a
relationship between time and power (political economy) on the marae.
Note that between these 800 marae were apportioned every square inch of
mountain, stream and land of Aotearoa, a distribution that was itself
fluid and to each marae belonged a number not exceeding 180 people, the
maximum before the decision-making processes, self-sufficiency and
autonomy of marae would be difficult to manage. Naturally, European
settlement has forever taken power from marae, first by force, now under
law, even under conditions of reconciliation. The Waitangi Tribunal, as
Paul said, does not recognise marae as bases of power and the government
will not negotiate with them; it will only pay out 'settlements' and
agree to the sums involved to the legally recognised entities of Iwi and
the representatives of these, predominantly male. It might be said that
the time structure goes ignored with the power structure of Maori.
I realise I am here concerned with the imbrication of political economy
and collapsed time, which is timely I think. It also speaks to the
compound of time found in Deleuze's notion of the time-image that too
has a political component.
Johannes asks about a certain instrumentation communicating "beyond
racial terms", when within racial terms, those of Maori, marae became at
the end of the 19th century places the power of which came from them as
places of death, /beyond/ itself. At this time the marae's main use was
for the ritual of death, the Tangihanga, leading to the rise of the
priestly caste, Tohunga, who thereat officiated, and further to the
Prophet Movement of Maori messianism. This last was quashed under the
Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907. The shift in "sites of mourning and
recovery" it appears "connect us all" in racial terms communicated under
the instrumentation of the law.
Best,
Simon
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