Indigenous alterity, sexual indifference? On the enduring separation of mana wahine from mana Māori in cultural anthropology

Presenters: Professor Yvette Russell and Symon Palmer

In this kōrero I reflect on the treatment of mana wahine within the colonial ethnographies with a focus on the treatment of the ‘fecundity’ or generativity of mana. This analysis reveals the discursive and philosophical techniques that anthropologists used to separate mana wahine from the whakapapa of mana Māori. As generations of mana wahine theorists and the vast body of evidence presented to the Waitangi Tribunal in its ongoing Kaupapa Inquiry (WAI 2700) make clear, the colonial suppression of the mana of wāhine Māori not only misrepresented Māori ways of knowing, being and doing but also contributed to enduring social, economic and political inequities.

In the research that informs this whakaaro, Stephen D. Seely and I reflect on an internal debate in cultural anthropology in which anthropologists try to challenge their own biases by (re)reading Indigenous ways of being as ‘ontological’. We put mana wahine scholarship into conversation with the French philosopher Luce Irigaray. Her powerful critique of ‘Western’ philosophy demonstrates how the discourse of ontology proceeds on a critical forgetting of sexual difference. In contrast to the thinkers of anthropology’s ‘ontological turn’, Seely and I argue for a kaupapa of thinking Indigenous difference ontologically that more closely aligns with what Irigaray calls an ‘ethics of sexual difference’, an ethics that is manifest in mana wahine theory and practice. In the prescient words of rangatira Ruruhira Robin: ‘…it is up to our wahine to decide what their role is in this te ao hurihuri…to make mana wahine strong again because without it, there can be no mana Māori’ (1991: 4).

Yvette will be in conversation about her work with Symon Palmer (Ngāi Te Rangi), lecturer at Te Kawa a Māui, Te Herenga Waka and expert in the intersection of Māori and western philosophy and Māori speculative philosophy and metaphysics. Contact Yvette for a copy of the draft article on which this talk is based: yvette.russell@vuw.ac.nz

Yvette Russell (Whakatōhea) is Professor of Law and Feminist Theory at the University of Bristol, and a specialist on criminal law and feminist philosophy. She is the author and editor of several books, including Sexual History Evidence and the Rape Trial (BUP, 2023), with Joanne Conaghan, which won the Hart SLSA Book Prize 2025, and the SLSA Socio-Legal History and Theory Prize 2025. She is currently a visiting scholar at VUW Law School and the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies.