Assembling Maori Architecture: Indigenous Knowledge and Expert Collaboration in an Emerging Science

Jacob Culbertson
Anthropology
UC Davis

Culbertson’s dissertation is an ethnography of Maori architecture, an emerging professional field in New Zealand that draws on traditional Maori building practices and purportedly-universal architectural practices.  Over the past two decades Maori architecture has become a crucial resource for reviving Maori traditions while literally rebuilding Maori communities.  His research asks how Maori architecture travels; that is, how Maori architects select, combine and translate into each other diverse Maori and non-Maori architectural influences to comprise their unique field of design and building practices (not just an aesthetic) and differentiate it from other architectures. 

Culbertson argues that these encounters and translations are both empirically contingent on particular design projects and theoretically generative, as they produce incommensurable (and often mutually-incomprehensible) differences while bringing together practices that push open the dichotomy between modern and non-modern ways of knowing. Over the past few years Culbertson has split his time between daily work with a collective of Maori woodcarvers in the Bay of Plenty region and interviewing professional architects and urban planners, mostly based in Auckland. Wandering through urban and rural landscapes with camera and notebook is also an important part of his research method, as is digging in on “traditional” construction projects when the opportunities arise.