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A Description of the Maori Marae

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A Description of the Maori Marae M. R. AUSTIN PROLOGUE The Maori people inhabited New Zealand for nearly one thousand years before the arrival of Europeans following Cook's rediscovery of the country in 1769. The contact process was (relatively) peaceful, with the majority of Maoris living in rural settlements up until the 1940's. These settlements typically focused on a community building (the meeting house), often shabby and run-down, with an associated open space (the marae) and minimal building form. Not surprisingly this focus could generally be ignored by the European majority as unimportant in the mainstream of New Zealand life. Studies of the Maori have naturally tended to concentrate on the social relations and institutions and the extraction of traditional knowledge, with the architecture treated as surviving monuments to a dying culture. With this orientation, meeting houses are studied as decorated art objects, and information is gleaned from the history and meanings of the carvings. The marae is not treated as architecture at all. Yet those who visit a marae for a Maori occasion often remark on the uniqueness of the experience from the moment of welcome to farewell. This is usually described in sentimental and superficial terms which can often trivialize the experience. It is proposed here that this experience can be interpreted by considering the architecture, social action, and world view of the Maori. Any one of these factors considered alone is not sufficient to account for the significance of the marae.

A Description of the Maori Marae M. R. AUSTIN PROLOGUE The Maori people inhabited New Zealand for nearly one thousand years before the arrival of Europeans following Cook's rediscovery of the country in 1769. The contact process was (relatively) peaceful, with the majority of Maoris living in rural settlements up until the 1940's. These settlements typically focused on a community building (the meeting house), often shabby and run-down, with an associated open space (the marae) and minimal building form. Not surprisingly this focus could generally be ignored by the European majority as unimportant in the mainstream of New Zealand life. Studies of the Maori have naturally tended to concentrate on the social relations and institutions and the extraction of traditional knowledge, with the architecture treated as surviving monuments to a dying culture. With this orientation, meeting houses are studied as decorated art objects, and information is gleaned from the history and meanings of the carvings. The marae is not treated as architecture at all. Yet those who visit a marae for a Maori occasion often remark on the uniqueness of the experience from the moment of welcome to farewell. This is usually described in sentimental and superficial terms which can often trivialize the experience. It is proposed here that this experience can be interpreted by considering the architecture, social action, and world view of the Maori. Any one of these factors considered alone is not sufficient to account for the significance of the marae.

Chapters in this book

  1. I-XVI I
  2. SECTION ONE: General Papers
  3. Introduction 3
  4. Sociocultural Aspects of Man-Environment Studies 7
  5. The Social Function of the Built Environment 37
  6. Cultural Pluralism and Urban Form: The Colonial City as Laboratory for Cross-Cultural Research in Man-Environment Interaction 51
  7. How Can We Learn about Man and His Settlements? 77
  8. SECTION TWO: Human Characteristics
  9. Introduction 121
  10. Design for Man-Environment Relations 127
  11. Human Territoriality as an Object of Research in Cultural Anthropology 145
  12. The Social Properties of Places and Things 159
  13. Some Territorial Layouts in the United States 177
  14. SECTION THREE: Environments
  15. Introduction 225
  16. A Description of the Maori Marae 229
  17. Peasant House Building and Its Relation to Church Building: The Rumanian Case 243
  18. SECTION FOUR: Mechanisms
  19. Introduction 257
  20. Analysis of a Culture Through Its Culturemes: Theory and Method 265
  21. A Decision Model for Estimating Concurrent School Attendance among Tribal Peoples of Liberia, Together with an Application Regarding Differential Cognitions Toward Traditional Housing 275
  22. Housing Standards versus Ecological Forces: Regulating Population Density in Bombay 287
  23. Conceptual Patterns in Yoruba Culture 333
  24. Values, Science, and Settlement: A Case Study in Environmental Control 365
  25. Landscape and the Communication of Social Identity 391
  26. SECTION FIVE: Case Studies
  27. Introduction 405
  28. Residential Patterns and Population Movement into the Farmlands of Yorubaland 411
  29. A Process of Urbanization: Economic and Social Innovations in a Suburban Village at Fukuyama, Japan 431
  30. Preindustrial Kabul: Its Structure and Function in Transformational Processes in Afghanistan 441
  31. Problems Involved in the Human Aspects of Rural Resettlement Schemes in Egypt 453
  32. SECTION SIX: Conclusion
  33. Conclusion 485
  34. Biographical Notes 491
  35. Index of Names 497
  36. Index of Subjects 503
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