Engaging critically with ‘objective’ critical analysis: a situated response to Openshaw and Rata

Abstract

Roger Openshaw and Elizabeth Rata conceptualise Kaupapa Māori as a dominant intellectual orthodoxy in New Zealand, which creates a ‘culturalist ideological conformity’ that limits the university’s ability to serve as the critical conscience of society’. They argue for the primacy of academic objectivity as the criteria for what counts as ‘weighty inquiry’ and against essentialism and cultural elitism. This paper offers a situated reading of Openshaw and Rata’s statements against the arguments of indigenous and postcolonial theorists who also challenge essentialism and cultural elitism, such as Marie Battiste, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Jacqui Alexander. This paper also outlines the framework for a dialogical contestatory ethos, which emerges from these theories as a way forward beyond absolute relativism and cultural supremacism in the academic debate.

Keywords:

• Kaupapa Māori
• indigenous epistemologies
• culturalism
• higher education

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the comments of my colleagues from Aotearoa, Brazil, Ireland and the UK and two anonymous reviewers that contributed to the revisions of this article.