Rangahau pae iti kahurangi
Working Introduction
This is an introduction to an introduction which became a book! Or at least it threatens to do so. A drafting process is actually under way, difficult as that might be for some to apreciate as there has been a bit of a wait on this.
Rangahau pae iti kahurangi was written originally for students doing research. It continues to be requested and this may be because of the introduction rather than the research points.
Looking back and indeed across the literature over the last twenty years there has been surprisingly little in Anthropology, Maori Studies or Education written about the procedures inside the wharenui. At the time of writing Rangahau pae iti kahurangi my research teaching was happening inside meeting houses. At the time I was working with Tuhoe people at Victoria University in the then Department of Social Work. It was considered important to use the marae as much as possible for teaching purposes, classes being conducted in week long noho or stays on marae.
Looking back and indeed across the literature over the last twenty years there has been surprisingly little in Anthropology, Maori Studies or Education written about the procedures inside the wharenui. At the time of writing Rangahau pae iti kahurangi my research teaching was happening inside meeting houses. At the time I was working with Tuhoe people at Victoria University in the then Department of Social Work. It was considered important to use the marae as much as possible for teaching purposes, classes being conducted in week long noho or stays on marae.
The other feature which may be behind demand for the book is the idea of rangahau or inquiry. It may be that when the book came out and even now the idea of wananga was a more widely used term. These words connote similar things in that wananga means to study or even to worry an idea. Rangahau simply means to inquire and what Rangahau Pae iti kahurangi did was to outline the process of inquiry inside a wharenui or meeting house utilizing all of the cues for inquiry or curiosity that I could think of.
The first cue was the obvious one of the kawa o te whare. It seemed obvious to me at the time and I did not think much about it but thinking about it now and casting about as one does there does not seem to be a lot in the literature about it. There is a fair amount in the literature about te kawa o te marae. Many others have written about te kawa o te marae but there does not seem to be much about how things work inside the house where most of the talking at a hui goes on.
At the time of writing Rangahau pae iti kahurangi I had a job to do which was to teach research in meeting houses. I was not really looking for supporting literature but rather trying to use the house as best I could as an environment of inquiry and discovery, a place to ask questions. The book seems to have forced, among some readers a realignment of definitions: from the kawa as a process of encounter, a ritual of encounter as Salmond, after Hoffman and others defined it to my position where the kawa is a matter of question and answer, a matter of conjecture and definition, a way of exploring the world.
My personal preference has been to stay with rangahau as a matter of asking questions rather than a process of formal research. This meant that I looked into te kawa o te whare as a way of facilitating the answering of questions and advancing the understanding of a group of people involved in collective inquiry. This preference or predeliction might go with the idea of the kawa as a neans of exploration rather than confrontation or encounter.
As I see it now a set of protocols to do with inquiry are involved on the marae as well as in the house. Where I had started by distinguishing between the ways of the marae and the ways of researching in fact the ways of the marae and whare nui both, it seems to me, involve a process of inquiry and in fact this was one feature that drew me back to looking at the kawa on the marae itself. I began to see this as an aid to inquiry or problem solving.
Another major change to the writing has happened because of a change in vocation. While I was engaged in teaching inside the house for the time in which I wrote and used Rangahau pae iti kahurangi I have been employed to take people on tours of the outside of a marae complex as well as the inside in the last few years. Other differences are that where I was teaching social work students inside the house I have been mainly taking preschool groups including teachers and parents around the outside of the house and the marae environment.
This has meant a shift in locality but not in emphasis as I have continued to look at those aspects of the marae that encourage inquiry.
