Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Note on bibliographies
- PART I THE FIELD PROPOSED
- PART II THE THREE KINGDOMS AND THE ENGLISH PROBLEM
- PART III EMPIRE AND REBELLION IN THE FIRST AGE OF UNION
- PART IV NEW ZEALAND IN THE STRANGE MULTIPLICITY
- 11 The neo-Britains and the three empires (2003)
- 12 Tangata whenua and Enlightenment anthropology (1992)
- 13 Law, sovereignty and history in a divided culture: the case of New Zealand and the Treaty of Waitangi (1992/1998)
- PART V BRITAIN, EUROPE AND POST-MODERN HISTORY
- Bibliographies
- Index
12 - Tangata whenua and Enlightenment anthropology (1992)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Note on bibliographies
- PART I THE FIELD PROPOSED
- PART II THE THREE KINGDOMS AND THE ENGLISH PROBLEM
- PART III EMPIRE AND REBELLION IN THE FIRST AGE OF UNION
- PART IV NEW ZEALAND IN THE STRANGE MULTIPLICITY
- 11 The neo-Britains and the three empires (2003)
- 12 Tangata whenua and Enlightenment anthropology (1992)
- 13 Law, sovereignty and history in a divided culture: the case of New Zealand and the Treaty of Waitangi (1992/1998)
- PART V BRITAIN, EUROPE AND POST-MODERN HISTORY
- Bibliographies
- Index
Summary
In the ninth chapter of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the volume published in 1776, Edward Gibbon wrote about the condition of the German forest peoples as they had been described by Tacitus and as they perhaps were two centuries later, when they began invading and settling in the Roman provinces. He employed language and a concept which are not what we mean when we use the term tangata whenua, but nevertheless tells us something about a literal meaning which the phrase could bear and the processes by which it has acquired the quite different meanings which it has for us.
There is not anywhere upon the globe a large tract of country which we have discovered destitute of inhabitants, or whose first population can be fixed with any degree of historical certainty. And yet, as the most philosophic minds can seldom refrain from investigating the infancy of great nations, our curiosity consumes itself in toilsome and disappointed efforts. When Tacitus considered the purity of the German blood, and the forbidding aspect of the country, he was disposed to pronounce those barbarians Indigenae, or natives of the soil. We may allow with safety, and perhaps with truth, that ancient Germany was not originally peopled by any foreign colonies already formed into a political society; but that the name and nation received their existence from the gradual union of some wandering savages of the Hercynian woods. To assert those savages to have been the spontaneous production of the earth which they inhabited would be a rash inference, condemned by religion and unwarranted by reason.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Discovery of Islands , pp. 199 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
- 2
- Cited by