Steven Webster
Biographic Data
| ID | 3601672 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steven Webster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steven |
| FAMILY NAME | Webster |
| SIGNATURE | WEBSTER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Auckland |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 474 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Family Organization and the Domestic Group
Social Ranking, Hierarchy, and Leadership [1974]
Returning to Q'ero: Sustaining Indigeneity in an Andean Ecosystem 1969-2020
Whakamoana-ed (set adrift)? Tūhoe Māori confront commodification, 1894-1926
Between 1894 and 1926 the people of the Te Urewera mountain wilderness, the rohe pōtae ‘sanctuary’ of the Nāi Tūhoe Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand, confronted a series of colonial policies that potentially had the historical effect of commodifying their land, kingroups and ancestors. Significantly, these policies were sincerely intended to establish Tūhoe home-rule until about 1908, when they became increasingly predatory in a Crown purchasing cam…
Māori Indigeneity and the Ontological Turn in Ethnography
This essay proposes an understanding of commodity fetishism that can mediate between divergent understandings of Māori indigeneity in a politically progressive way. To do this, an account of the Māori concept of whakapapa in terms of a recursive ontology is held up to a critique of such ontological turns in ethnography. The comparison shows that both approaches pursue ethnographic understanding in terms of a paradoxical relationship between creat…
Ōhāua te Rangi and reconciliation in Te Urewera, 1913-1983
This essay is an ethnohistorical reconstruction of Tūhoe Māori cognatic descent groups (hapū) in their struggle to maintain control over ancestral lands centred around the community of Ōhāua te Rangi deep in the Urewera mountains of New Zealand. The famous social anthropologist Raymond Firth happened to visit this community when it was in the middle of these struggles in 1924, documenting one hapū and its settlement with photos. The wider context…
Māori kinship and power: Ngāi Tūhoe 1894-1912
The large Urewera National Park of New Zealand, recently returned to control of the Tūhoe (and other Urewera) Māori, was originally established (1896-1907) as the Urewera District Native Reserve under their virtual home-rule. Discovery of extensive marriage alliances between clusters of Tūhoe hapū ̃'ancestral descent groups' involved in the 1899-1903 investigation raises the relationship between kinship and political economic power in the context…
Māori Indigeneity and Commodity Fetishism
The Māori have survived at least three different sustained efforts to assimilate them since colonisation. I would argue that each time they have emerged as a substantially different culture as well as a different part of New Zealand society, and new efforts to assimilate them have had to confront the unpredictable results. To generalise, the first effort of assimilation was propelled by enlightened colonial arrogance, and finally by force; anothe…
The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century
Are Maori Hapu ‘Houses’? Are Whakapapa ‘Strategic Improvisations’? The Ethnohistorical Evidence From Ngai Tuhoe
A recent exchange regarding the nature of Maori hapu has revived the old controversy whether or not ancestral descent groups can be organised on the basis of cognatic descent (through either or both parents in each generation). An innovative application of Levi-Strauss’s concept of a house society, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, has challenged an answer to the old controversy, widely accepted since the 1970s, that hapu are entire descent cate…
Do Maori know what a hapuu is: Comment
He Kaawai Hapuu Tuuhoe no te Ao o Mua: An ethnohistorical reconstruction of one hapuu branch of Ngai Tuuhoe in the Urewera District Native Reserve 1899-1903
The Tuhoe (or Ngai Tuuhoe) are an iwi or 'tribe' of the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. This essay attempts to reconstruct the kinship and social organisation of a particular Tuhoe descent group at the turn of the last century, 1899-1903. It is concerned primarily with family organisation of the descent group through the four generations that were living at the time; the wider hapuu affiliations of this descent group are reconstructe…
Maori Hapu as a Whole Way of Struggle: 1840S–50s Before the Land Wars
Research in Maori land history, burgeoning under the influence of the Waitangi Tribunal since the mid‐1980s, promises a better understanding of the history of Maori kinship as well as New Zealand political economy. It has often been merely assumed, for instance, that contemporary hapu are a (or the) traditional form. I argue that Maori kinship and especially hapu or their equivalent need to be better understood in historical perspective. This ess…
Marae artworks and the reproduction of Maori ethnicity
This essay approaches ethnic process through a description and analysis of the struggle to build a Maori marae at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. One goal is simply to document certain events 1976–1988. This specific history is then examined in terms of the artworks of the marae , and the particular ways in which stuggles to control these works became focused on the issue of authentic Maori culture. Resistance and opportunism among unive…
Escaping Post-cultural Tribes
Apres une presentation des bases et des dilemmes du post-modernisme, l'A. montre sa situation en anthropologie. Voulant defier cette orientation, il explore l'histoire et l'economie politique des populations indigenes de Nouvelle-Zelande et d'Amerique du Nord, prises comme « tribus ». Il considere une affirmation post-moderniste selon laquelle une telle alterite culturelle offre un echappatoire a la condition hegemonique de la post-modernite
Postmodernist Theory and the Sublimation of Maori Culture
The Historical Materialist Critique of Surrealism and Postmodernist Ethnography
A Zapotecan Meritocracy
Some History of Social Theory in Sahlins' Structuralist Culture History
Capitation for Medical Care: The Importance of Health Status in Older Patients
Wasson, John H. MD; Sauvigne, Arthur E. MD; Balestra, Dominic MD; Mogielnicki, R Peter MD; Nelson, Eugene DSc; Frey, Walter G. MD; Webster, Steven MS Author Information
Realism and Reification in the Ethnographic Genre
This essay considers, from the vantage point of critical theory, some of the implications of an ethnographic genre of realism. Following Raymond Williams's discussion of the contemporary meanings of 'realism' in terms of attitudes towards the world and toward representations of it, I suggest that the current predicament of ethnography is to have purveyed a particular form of realism without awareness of the representational conventions with which…
Symbolic Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology [and Comments and Reply]
Using the hermeneutical theory of Paul Ricoeur, it is possible to discern symbolic dimensions in cultural anthropology. Symbols, here, are dominant images in anthropologists' texts, creatively posited by inquirers, that, most importantly, possess a surplus of meaning. A symbol's fullest surplus of meaning is a prereflexive and comprehensive "understanding" (Verstehen) that may encompass a scholar's attempts at "explanation" (Erklaren). Examples o…
Ethnography as storytelling
Dialogue and fiction in ethnography
Interpretation of an Andean Social and Economic Formation
The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century
Ceramic Ecology of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru: Implications for Prehistory [and Comments and Replies]
The paper examines some of the interrelationships of environment and ceramic specialization in the area around the village of Quinua, Department of Ayacucho,Peru. The study reveals that agricultural land dependent on rainfall provides a significant limiting factor in the development of full-time ceramic specialization. Furthermore, the complex series of Quinua ceramic styles depends upon a diverse set of ceramic resources which are mined nearby i…
Native Pastoralism in the South Andes
Although it has usually been recognized that the Andean llama and alpaca (Lama glama and Lama pacos, respectively; Gilmore I950) were aboriginal domestic herd animals, it has been widely assumed that pastoralism never became a primary mode of adaptation in the New World, and that even subsequent to the conquests it was anomalous and restricted to European animals. Ethnographers of the Central Andes have considered the herding of lamoids a subsidi…
Escaping Post-cultural Tribes
Apres une presentation des bases et des dilemmes du post-modernisme, l'A. montre sa situation en anthropologie. Voulant defier cette orientation, il explore l'histoire et l'economie politique des populations indigenes de Nouvelle-Zelande et d'Amerique du Nord, prises comme « tribus ». Il considere une affirmation post-moderniste selon laquelle une telle alterite culturelle offre un echappatoire a la condition hegemonique de la post-modernite
Some History of Social Theory in Sahlins' Structuralist Culture History
Realism and Reification in the Ethnographic Genre
This essay considers, from the vantage point of critical theory, some of the implications of an ethnographic genre of realism. Following Raymond Williams's discussion of the contemporary meanings of 'realism' in terms of attitudes towards the world and toward representations of it, I suggest that the current predicament of ethnography is to have purveyed a particular form of realism without awareness of the representational conventions with which…
Interpretation of an Andean Social and Economic Formation
Mathematics in Structural Theory [and Comments and Reply]
Levi-Strauss, amongst other anthropological theorists, has argued for the incorporation of mathematical formalization into anthropological theorizing. The integration of mathematical formalization with anthropological theory is examined in this article through the structural analysis of fandango (wedding) ritual as it is practiced among the Zapotec in a small village near Oaxaca, Mexico. The correspondence that is found between the details of the…
Kinship and Affinity in a Native Quechua Community: (596492011-004)
Do Maori know what a hapuu is: Comment
Symbolic Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology [and Comments and Reply]
Using the hermeneutical theory of Paul Ricoeur, it is possible to discern symbolic dimensions in cultural anthropology. Symbols, here, are dominant images in anthropologists' texts, creatively posited by inquirers, that, most importantly, possess a surplus of meaning. A symbol's fullest surplus of meaning is a prereflexive and comprehensive "understanding" (Verstehen) that may encompass a scholar's attempts at "explanation" (Erklaren). Examples o…
The Contemporary Quechua Indigenous Culture of Highland Peru: An Annotated Bibliography
Are Maori Hapu ‘Houses’? Are Whakapapa ‘Strategic Improvisations’? The Ethnohistorical Evidence From Ngai Tuhoe
A recent exchange regarding the nature of Maori hapu has revived the old controversy whether or not ancestral descent groups can be organised on the basis of cognatic descent (through either or both parents in each generation). An innovative application of Levi-Strauss’s concept of a house society, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, has challenged an answer to the old controversy, widely accepted since the 1970s, that hapu are entire descent cate…
He Kaawai Hapuu Tuuhoe no te Ao o Mua: An ethnohistorical reconstruction of one hapuu branch of Ngai Tuuhoe in the Urewera District Native Reserve 1899-1903
The Tuhoe (or Ngai Tuuhoe) are an iwi or 'tribe' of the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. This essay attempts to reconstruct the kinship and social organisation of a particular Tuhoe descent group at the turn of the last century, 1899-1903. It is concerned primarily with family organisation of the descent group through the four generations that were living at the time; the wider hapuu affiliations of this descent group are reconstructe…
The Contemporary Quechua Indigenous Chilture of Highland Peru: An Annotated Bibliography-II
The Contemporary Quechua Indigenous Culture of Highland Peru: An Annotated Bibliography
Native Pastoralism in the South Andes
Although it has usually been recognized that the Andean llama and alpaca (Lama glama and Lama pacos, respectively; Gilmore I950) were aboriginal domestic herd animals, it has been widely assumed that pastoralism never became a primary mode of adaptation in the New World, and that even subsequent to the conquests it was anomalous and restricted to European animals. Ethnographers of the Central Andes have considered the herding of lamoids a subsidi…
Ceramic Ecology of the Ayacucho Basin, Peru: Implications for Prehistory [and Comments and Replies]
The paper examines some of the interrelationships of environment and ceramic specialization in the area around the village of Quinua, Department of Ayacucho,Peru. The study reveals that agricultural land dependent on rainfall provides a significant limiting factor in the development of full-time ceramic specialization. Furthermore, the complex series of Quinua ceramic styles depends upon a diverse set of ceramic resources which are mined nearby i…
Kinship and Affinity in a Native Quechua Community: (596492011-004)
Mathematics in Structural Theory [and Comments and Reply]
Levi-Strauss, amongst other anthropological theorists, has argued for the incorporation of mathematical formalization into anthropological theorizing. The integration of mathematical formalization with anthropological theory is examined in this article through the structural analysis of fandango (wedding) ritual as it is practiced among the Zapotec in a small village near Oaxaca, Mexico. The correspondence that is found between the details of the…
Interpretation of an Andean Social and Economic Formation
Dialogue and fiction in ethnography
Ethnography as storytelling
Symbolic Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology [and Comments and Reply]
Using the hermeneutical theory of Paul Ricoeur, it is possible to discern symbolic dimensions in cultural anthropology. Symbols, here, are dominant images in anthropologists' texts, creatively posited by inquirers, that, most importantly, possess a surplus of meaning. A symbol's fullest surplus of meaning is a prereflexive and comprehensive "understanding" (Verstehen) that may encompass a scholar's attempts at "explanation" (Erklaren). Examples o…
Realism and Reification in the Ethnographic Genre
This essay considers, from the vantage point of critical theory, some of the implications of an ethnographic genre of realism. Following Raymond Williams's discussion of the contemporary meanings of 'realism' in terms of attitudes towards the world and toward representations of it, I suggest that the current predicament of ethnography is to have purveyed a particular form of realism without awareness of the representational conventions with which…
Capitation for Medical Care: The Importance of Health Status in Older Patients
Wasson, John H. MD; Sauvigne, Arthur E. MD; Balestra, Dominic MD; Mogielnicki, R Peter MD; Nelson, Eugene DSc; Frey, Walter G. MD; Webster, Steven MS Author Information
A Zapotecan Meritocracy
Some History of Social Theory in Sahlins' Structuralist Culture History
The Historical Materialist Critique of Surrealism and Postmodernist Ethnography
Postmodernist Theory and the Sublimation of Maori Culture
Marae artworks and the reproduction of Maori ethnicity
This essay approaches ethnic process through a description and analysis of the struggle to build a Maori marae at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. One goal is simply to document certain events 1976–1988. This specific history is then examined in terms of the artworks of the marae , and the particular ways in which stuggles to control these works became focused on the issue of authentic Maori culture. Resistance and opportunism among unive…
Escaping Post-cultural Tribes
Apres une presentation des bases et des dilemmes du post-modernisme, l'A. montre sa situation en anthropologie. Voulant defier cette orientation, il explore l'histoire et l'economie politique des populations indigenes de Nouvelle-Zelande et d'Amerique du Nord, prises comme « tribus ». Il considere une affirmation post-moderniste selon laquelle une telle alterite culturelle offre un echappatoire a la condition hegemonique de la post-modernite
Maori Hapu as a Whole Way of Struggle: 1840S–50s Before the Land Wars
Research in Maori land history, burgeoning under the influence of the Waitangi Tribunal since the mid‐1980s, promises a better understanding of the history of Maori kinship as well as New Zealand political economy. It has often been merely assumed, for instance, that contemporary hapu are a (or the) traditional form. I argue that Maori kinship and especially hapu or their equivalent need to be better understood in historical perspective. This ess…
He Kaawai Hapuu Tuuhoe no te Ao o Mua: An ethnohistorical reconstruction of one hapuu branch of Ngai Tuuhoe in the Urewera District Native Reserve 1899-1903
The Tuhoe (or Ngai Tuuhoe) are an iwi or 'tribe' of the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. This essay attempts to reconstruct the kinship and social organisation of a particular Tuhoe descent group at the turn of the last century, 1899-1903. It is concerned primarily with family organisation of the descent group through the four generations that were living at the time; the wider hapuu affiliations of this descent group are reconstructe…
Do Maori know what a hapuu is: Comment
Are Maori Hapu ‘Houses’? Are Whakapapa ‘Strategic Improvisations’? The Ethnohistorical Evidence From Ngai Tuhoe
A recent exchange regarding the nature of Maori hapu has revived the old controversy whether or not ancestral descent groups can be organised on the basis of cognatic descent (through either or both parents in each generation). An innovative application of Levi-Strauss’s concept of a house society, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, has challenged an answer to the old controversy, widely accepted since the 1970s, that hapu are entire descent cate…
The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century
Māori Indigeneity and Commodity Fetishism
The Māori have survived at least three different sustained efforts to assimilate them since colonisation. I would argue that each time they have emerged as a substantially different culture as well as a different part of New Zealand society, and new efforts to assimilate them have had to confront the unpredictable results. To generalise, the first effort of assimilation was propelled by enlightened colonial arrogance, and finally by force; anothe…
Māori kinship and power: Ngāi Tūhoe 1894-1912
The large Urewera National Park of New Zealand, recently returned to control of the Tūhoe (and other Urewera) Māori, was originally established (1896-1907) as the Urewera District Native Reserve under their virtual home-rule. Discovery of extensive marriage alliances between clusters of Tūhoe hapū ̃'ancestral descent groups' involved in the 1899-1903 investigation raises the relationship between kinship and political economic power in the context…
Sociology (27 works) · Anthropology (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · History (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Ethnology (10 works) · Geography (10 works) · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights (10 works) · History (9 works)