Maori and whakapapa
Explanation
The Maori people (tangata whenua, "people of the land") of Aotearoa (New Zealand) have a sophisticated worldview centred on relations of extended kinship between all beings: humans, animals, plants, mountains, rivers, ancestors, gods. The key concept that articulates all this is whakapapa: literally "to put in layers", understood as a cosmic genealogy that connects each being with all others through unbroken lines of descent.
Maori cosmology narrates the origin of the cosmos from Te Kore (the nothing, the potential), Te Po (the night, the many levels of gestational darkness), Te Ao Marama (the world of light). The primordial parents Ranginui (Father Sky) and Papatūānuku (Mother Earth) were eternally embracing, enclosing their divine children in darkness. Their children, the great atua (gods): Tāne (forests), Tangaroa (ocean), Tāwhirimātea (winds), Rongo (peace, agriculture), Tūmatauenga (war, humanity), Haumia (wild foods), conspired and, after failed attempts, Tāne managed to separate his parents, creating the space between sky and earth where life can flourish.
From these atua descend all beings: humans, plants, animals, natural phenomena. To know one's whakapapa is to know what divine lineage one descends from, which mountains, rivers, lakes and species one is related to. In the mihimihi (formal introduction), Maoris identify themselves by mentioning their iwi (tribe), waka (ancestral canoe), maunga (mountain), awa (river) ancestral. This places the person in a cosmic network of relations.
Related concepts are: mauri (life force, principle of life that all beings and places have); wairua (spirit, soul); tapu (sacred, restricted) and noa (common, free); mana (spiritual power, prestige, legitimate authority). A person, place or thing has greater or lesser tapu according to its mauri and its mana. The balance between tapu and noa, accumulated and shared mana, is essential in Maori ethics and ritual.
For the theory of consciousness, whakapapa proposes a radically relational, intergenerational and ecological conception of the person. Human consciousness is not an isolated property of the individual biological brain, but a node in a cosmic network of relations that includes ancestors alive in memory, sacred places, related species, ancestral gods. There are parallels with African ubuntu, with Amerindian perspectivism, with indigenous cosmologies of many peoples.
Today, after decades of Maori cultural revitalization (Te Reo Māori movement since the 70s, official recognition of language and culture, Waitangi Tribunal, legal settlements for violations of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi), whakapapa and associated concepts are being actively recovered in education, health, justice, environmental management. Maori philosophers such as Roy Tikao, Mason Durie (with his Te Whare Tapa Whā health model) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies, 1999) have developed a contemporary Maori philosophy. The recent granting of legal personality to the Whanganui River (2017) as a living entity with rights is a legal expression of whakapapa: the river is person, ancestor, has its own mauri and mana. As a genealogical-cosmic conception of consciousness and person, Maori whakapapa is one of the great philosophical contributions of the Pacific to world thought.
Strengths
- Integral articulation of body-mind-community-spirit.
- Documented contemporary institutional vitality.
- Model of legal ecology (rivers as persons).
- Dialogue with integrative medicine and deep ecology.
Main critiques
- Complex and sometimes inaccurate translation.
- Risk of uninitiated appropriation.
- Limited scientific operationalization of wairua (spirit).