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Simon Barber

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Simon Barber's PhD research project

Geometries of Life

The central concern of my thesis is the ongoing colonial encounter between MÄori and PÄkehÄ (European settlers). It seeks to translate perspective across MÄori and PÄkehÄworlds without subordinating either world to the terms of the other.

The condition of possibility for the work has been my encounter with an other, oroutside, of my own thinking at two wÄnanga (MÄori places of learning). Âé¶¹¹ÙÍø at thesewÄnanga, and living in the MÄori place of PÅrangahau, has constituted a non- ethnographic fieldwork, or field geotheory, that provides the generative ground of thethesis. My learning at these places enabled me to detail a constellation of MÄoriconcepts, making possible a sketch of some of the patternings of MÄori life and thinking,and opening me up to an experimental inhabitation and use of those concepts.

In the two chapters following the introduction – ‘MÄori Geometries’ and ‘PÄkehÄGeometries’ – I describe something of the basal motifs of MÄori and PÄkehÄ worlds: reproduction and monetary exchange, respectively. In each account, the central motif described is both a patterning traced by a mode of life and an epistemological diagram of the structures of thought that co-constitute with(in) that pattern.

The third and fourth chapters follow the clash and entanglement of these two worlds through historic and ongoing processes of colonial encounter. My specific focus is Te Waipounamu (the South Island), where my people KÄi Tahu are from. The third chapter is concerned with the way in which the land has become commodified and subject to the inscriptions of private property. The fourth chapter tracks a set of ideas that arrive and become indigenised, finding fertile ground in the land reconfigured as commodity, resulting in an indigenous neoliberalism.

A final chapter works with with the notebooks Marx kept of his readings onindigenous societies in the last few years of his life. It also conducts a reading of Marxfrom the perspective of the MÄori concepts described in the first chapter. Throughdouble-directional reading I imagine a MÄori MÄrx, sketching some of the contours ofthe theory she might produce.

Simon is a member of Roundtable three.