Geographies of economy-making: the articulation and circulation of taewa Māori across Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

The articulation of diverse Māori economies with other economies in processes of economy-making is relatively unexplored, but provides an intellectual space to rethink the constitutive elements of economy-making (economisation) and the possibilities and challenges of putting new material and relations into diverse economic circulations. The emergent discourse of the post-Treaty Settlement Taniwha Economy, in New Zealand seeks to mobilise Māori resources into capitalisation processes and unlock economy in terms of capitalocentric economic imaginaries. However, little attention has been paid to how more diverse Māori economy-making projects that emphasise cultural commitments might be encouraged to produce wider possibilities and articulate creatively with capitalist economies and state development projects. This thesis explores the geographies of taewa circulation, a marginal economy. It focuses specifically on how economic circulations of taewa are constructed, expanded and transformed through diverse and co-constitutive sets of actors, ideas, relationships, objects and politics. The thesis highlights negogiated and transformative articulations between diverse economies that demonstrate how economy is practised and economies are maintained, expanded, and reconstituted. Taewa economy is explored through a conceptual apparatus that highlights economy-making. Caliskan and Callon’s idea of economisation is brought into a productive dialogue with other concepts that see economy as more-than markets and more-than-capitalist, and which attend to the practices, diversity, situatedness, non-humaness and contestedness of economy-making. The research explores economy-making by following my own journeys through taewa economy and its defining circulations and moments of meaning making. It focuses in particular on three sets of encounters with economy-making agents and agencements in which they act: Tāhuri Whenua, a Māori vegetable collective; Aunty’s Garden, a Māori-State collective market-making experiment to get things moving in and between economies; and Potato Psyllids, pests that are currently attacking taewa across New Zealand, and winning. The thesis identifies four key findings: taewa economies are vibrant, vital, exciting and rich with human, cultural and economic possibility; the articulation of ideas, objects and investment across economies creates possibilities for expanding diverse Māori economies; who and what articulates is important in shaping these possibilities and their transformative potential; and the non-human is a significant, unpredictable and largely unknown agency of economy-making in agricultural economies. Māori and capitalist economy and human and non-human worlds are entangled, and working with these entanglements to foster better worlds requires imaginative and experimental interventions. Each of my encounters demonstrates an articulation between diverse and capitalist economies as actors move between them, things circulate around them, practices bind them together, and meanings become co-constituted across their border. These findings allow me to argue that economy (and diverse economies) is made, far more than capitalist and is not neatly bordered in separate spaces. Taking back and enacting different economic futures needs to address processes of articulation and the multiple circulations of objects and values that constitute them, as well as imagining, enacting and reproducing economies outside of capitalism. It needs to encourage the expansion of diverse economies. In Māori worlds this is a challenge that must be addressed in order to strengthen and vitalise Māori ways of being and doing.