Event overview
'On Rugby, the Rastafari-I, The Māori Kinship I, and The Dread’s Anticipation of God’s Promise', with Dave Robinson
Throughout the last century, numerous anthropologists contributed to the characterisation of traditional New Zealand Māori socio-political organisation as premised upon a segmentary system of social hierarchy, governed by patriarchal chiefs, installed by the rule of primogeniture—inheritance or succession by the firstborn. In this paper, however, I examine the cosmologically grounded effort to interrupt this rule, by a genealogically junior cohort of Māori-Rastafari, who self-identify as “The Dread”. Incorporating an analysis of the group’s adornment of dreadlocks and facial tattoos, socio-cultural spaces of contestation and Māori genealogy, the paper focuses on The Dread’s fellowship with specific distant and more recently deceased kin, and their anticipation of God’s promise to elevate those who have devoted their lives to spiritual, rather than material enrichment. In so doing, I reveal The Dread’s efforts to invert the rule of primogeniture as mediated by the dual mediums of the “Māori kinship I” (Johansen 1954) and the Rastafari “I”. Both, I argue, are consonant with that which Marshall Sahlins (2011a, 2011b, 2014) terms, “‘mutuality of being’: persons who are members of one another, who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence”.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Nov 2018 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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