CSAFE Seminar Series

SAC # TBA: Science and mātauranga Māori: do they mix?

OPEN AND FREE TO ALL INTERESTED PARTIES

When

TBA 2010, 4pm onwards

Where

CSAFE Seminar Room, 547 Castle Street, Dunedin.

Click here for a map.

Speaker

Henrik Moller

Abstract

There is enormous opportunity for partnership between mātauranga Māori and science for simultaneously building environmental, economic and cultural wellbeing. If done in the right spirit and applied to the same issues, partnership of mātauranga and science can create surprising dialogue and usefully challenge each other for more effective adaptive co-management. However better partnership is hampered by problems of lack of deeper understanding of each other’s knowledge, contested definitions and lack of a shared language, and especially by presumptions (by practitioners on both sides of the TEK-science divide) that one knowledge system is always better than the other in all circumstances. Institutional barriers reduce the number and effectiveness of cross-cultural environmental problem solving and create unequal access to resources and warrants for research and application of knowledge. But perhaps the main fundamental debate concerns whether individual researchers and managers should partition their spiritual and belief domains from bio-physical understanding of how the world works. Do we need scientists to be more spiritual in outlook, analysis and understanding? Can TEK experts accept that science also helps form wisdom and ethical environmental management? Together, what do mātauranga and science recommend to global, national and local societies for improved identification, mitigation and adaptation to environmental threats?

About the Speakers

Henrik Moller has worked with Māori communities for the past 15 years to find ways that Mātauranga Māori and science can support and peer review each other for improved social-ecological resilience. In this seminar he explores some of the ongoing debates, challenges and opportunities for cross-cultural environmental management that emerged from a recent Forum hosted by Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand (see http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/Site/publish/Journals/jrsnz/2009/default.aspx). That forum was co-edited by Henrik, Dr Janet Stephenson and Rachel Turner from CSAFE’s Tirohia he Huarahi research team.

This talk is also part of the Te Hao Mātauranga series.