Abstract
The use of hybridity today suggests a less coherent, unified and directed process than that found in the Enlightenment science’s cultural imperialism, but regardless of this neither concept exists outside power and inequality. Hence, hybridity raises the question of the terms of the mixture and the conditions of mixing. Cultural hybridity produced by colonisation, under the watchful eye of science at the time, and the subsequent life in a modern world since does not obscure the power that was embedded in the moment of colonisation. Indigenous identities are constructed within and by cultural power. While we all live in a global society whose consequences no one can escape, we remain unequal participants and globalisation remains an uneven process. This article argues that power has become a constitutive element in our own hybrid identities in indigenous people’s attempts to participate in science and science education. Using the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand (called Māori) as a site of identity construction, I argue that the move from being the object of science to the subject of science, through science education in schools, brings with it traces of an earlier meaning of ‘hybridity’ that constantly erupts into the lives of Māori women scientists.
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Notes
A common saying in the 1970s in Aotearoa New Zealand to mean ‘do you have coloured blood’?
Poi are used in dances. They are soft balls on the end of string and twirled to different beats.
The Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty of Waitangi was the founding settlement document between Māori and the British settlers. Descendents of British settlers are now known as Pākehā.
The National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology.
Beever and Greeson (1995) suggest Māori knew the Polytrichum moss, and probably the Polytrichadelphus as well, as ‘tetere-whete’ and ‘totara’. Apparently the ‘totara’ tree is not unlike the foliage of polytrichaceous mosses.
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Executive Summary written by Georgina Stewart.
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McKinley, E. From object to subject: hybrid identities of indigenous women in science. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 3, 959–975 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-008-9128-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-008-9128-7