The Politics of Ontological Engagement: Indigenous and Post-Qualitative Methodologies

• In Event: 35.067 - Rethinking Ethnography in the Posthuman Turn

Abstract

Objectives
The new so-called ‘post-qualitative’ strand of theory in educational research (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013) challenges us to consider a methodology sensitive to non-human others, including objects. Underpinning some forms of this methodology is the suggestion that material objects’ own intrinsic thingly power and being, ‘outside’ our human interpretation of them, requires that they be encountered ontologically, ‘on their own terms’. While Indigenous researchers always-already understand the active power of objects, the ontological turn has shaken non-indigenous qualitative researchers’ most cherished methodologies whose epistemological focus relies on interpretation and representation to access the world (or the many worlds produced by those interpretations).

Our contribution to this symposium on the future of ethnographic research in a post-qualitative era asks about the political implications of post-qualitative work. As indigenous and non-indigenous researchers working together, we seek to contribute to debate about the relationship between indigenous and post qualitative methodologies.

Theoretical Framework and Argument
Our research task is to take seriously an ontological/post qualitative methodology that cultivates an openness-to-surprise, that is, a sensitivity to the unexpected effects of the object itself, rather than an openness-to-interpretations of it. We encounter an object – Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 by Maori leaders and Governor Hobson on behalf of the Crown to establish the nation now known as New Zealand). The question arises as to how even to name this thing which is also a rat-eaten and water-damaged parchment with a mysterious patina of age with a force in modern New Zealand politics, and a taonga - a sacred and powerful thing-in-itself that connects the authority of the signatories’ tribe to the authority of the Queen of England regardless of its content. For indigenous Maori today, the ancestors’ inked signs render this object live. When encountered face to face, the living document calls forth descendants’ emotional greetings from within another world of objects and relationships.

Scholarly Significance
Why do this work politically? Why bring indigenous methodologies into relation with post-qualitative thinking? Who benefits? What does post qualitative research want from indigenous thought, and how do we reckon with the ruins of ethnographic methods in indigenous worlds? How can ethnography learn from indigenous methodologies more than doing a quick dash-and-grab? Our thinking through the ontological worlds of the relational Treaty object contributes to deeper thinking about the political relationship between indigenous thought and post qualitative methodology.

Authors

• TeKawehau Hoskins, University of Auckland

• Alison Jones, University of Auckland