Jacob Culbertson

JACOB CULBERTSON, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in September 2017 to aid research and writing on “Recombinant Indigeneities: Māori Environmental Design and the Architecture of Biculturalism.” The book, House of Knots: Māori Environmental Design and the Architecture of Biculturalism, traces a series of controversies around Māori images and concepts in urban public space, drawing on three years of fieldwork with architects, bureaucrats, and artists (both Māori and not). In one respect, tracing these building projects comprises an ethnography of New Zealand’s impending “post-settlement era,” by which the state seeks to settle all outstanding treaty claims and to then work with Māori on an equitable, collaborative basis. But Māori landscapes are anything but settled. Complex political ecologies — both ancestral and technocratic — emerge in the messy, creative work of designing and negotiating uniquely Māori places. In that regard, the book also details the practices of innovation and regulation, and of political inclusion and refusal, that determine what counts as “architecture” and “the environment” — questions that are at the heart of “indigenizing” these fields, as well as anthropology’s concern with comparison.