Beyond the Coloniality of Economic Thought: Mātauranga Māori and Decolonial Kōrero Across Worlds

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the historic and ongoing epistemic colonisation of Aotearoa. It seeks to examine the relationship of thought to the material conditions of settler colonialism and capitalism, and to discuss the conditions and possibilities for new, hybrid forms of decolonial thought and knowledges to emerge. I conceptualise the colonisation of Aotearoa as a meeting and entanglement of two worlds, te Ao Māori and te Ao Pākehā. What makes this meeting and entanglement colonial has been the ongoing displacement and subsumption of te Ao Māori by te Ao Pākehā. This occurs materially, but also epistemically, as each world has its own mode of thought and respective knowledges that emanate from its distinct mode of life, bound up with its relation to colonisation. To look at how the thought of the Pākehā world colonises, I have chosen to focus on economic thought, a certain form of Pākehā thought. In contrast to this, I have also chosen to engage with mātauranga Māori to see how it proposes a decolonial alternative to economic thought. Following my first chapter on methodology, in chapter two I argue that economic thought is situated within European thought and that it is an anatopism to apply economic concepts and ideas beyond Europe’s mode of life. I then trace out the development of capitalism and argue that economic thought is intimately part of capitalism and serves to reproduce it. In chapter three I critique the coloniality of economic thought by discussing its dual strategies of nonrecognition and assimilation based in the respective logics of white supremacy and capital, the thingification of the economy and its arrival to Aotearoa. In chapter four I look at the decolonial mātauranga Māori of Te Uri o Hikihiki and the colonial economic thought of the Ngātiwai Trust Board. In chapter five I discuss the decoloniality of mātauranga Māori by identifying three aspects that makes it decolonial; its materially grounded thought, relational ontology, and kaitiakitanga. To conclude, I argue that for decolonial kōrero to occur in Aotearoa, Pākehā thought needs to understand itself as manuhiri in Aotearoa.