Published 2011 by Tāhuhu Kōrero Toi Art History, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
56 pages
190 x 150mm, softcover, with black and white illustrations
Edited by Roger Blackley
ISSN 1176-5887

In the Maori World, taonga and stories are intimately connected. Be it a song or a weapon, a painting or a cloak, taonga open doorways to ancestral imaginings of time and place. But what happens when the resources that define taonga are appropriated by another value system, and recast in terms of ownership rather than belonging? What stories are then attached to taonga, so many of which are commoditised along with the landscapes to which they relate?

In The Art of Taonga, Paul Tapsell takes us on a journey from the time of Tupaea, a traveller on Cook's Endeavour in 1769, to today. He surveys the changing meanings of taonga, including the re-engagement by source communities with their ancestral treasures, arguing that rather than being fixed in the past, the dynamic concept of taonga always responds to changing contexts and conditions. Acknowledging the crisis facing marae communities, and the concurrent dislocation of urban Maori, Tapsell interrogates the precarious future of a guiding tradition that reaches back to ancestral Hawaiki.

Paul Tapsell is Professor of Māori Studies and Dean of Te Tumu, the School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies at the University of Otago. He is the author of the prize-winning Pukaki: A Comet Returns (2000), Ko Tawa: Māori Treasures of New Zealand (2006) and many scholarly essays on taonga and their place in the Māori world.