Steven Webster – författare

Following on from Volume I on the formation of the Urewera District Native Reserve, this monograph examines the period from 1908 to 1926, during which time the Crown subverted Tūhoe control of the UDNR, established a mere decade earlier. While Volume I described how the Tūhoe were able to deploy kin-based power to manipulate Crown power as well as confront one another, this volume describes ways in which the same ancestral descent groups closed ranks to survive nearly two decades of predatory Crown policies determined to dismantle their sanctuary. A relentless Crown campaign to purchase individual Tūhoe land shares ultimately resulted in a misleading Crown scheme to consolidate and relocate Tūhoe  land shares, thereby freeing up land for the settlement of non- Tūhoe  farmers. By the 1950s, over 200 small Tūhoe blocks were scattered throughout one of the largest National Parks in New Zealand. Although greatly weakened by these policies in terms of kinship solidarity as well as land and other resources, Tūhoe resistance continued until the return of the entire park in 2014—with unreserved apologies and promises of future support. 

In both volumes of A Separate Authority (He Mana  Motuhake), Webster takes the stance of an ethnohistorian: he not only examines the various ways control over the Urewera District Native Reserve (UDNR) was negotiated, subverted or betrayed, and renegotiated during this time period, but also focuses on the role of Māori hapū, ancestral descent groups and their leaders, including the political economic influence of extensive marriage alliances between them. The ethnohistorical approach developed here may be useful to other studies of governance, indigenous resistance, and reform, whether in New Zealand or elsewhere.

In this book, social anthropologist Steven Webster provides an ethnohistory of sustainability among the indigenous Andean community of Hatun Q’ero since the 1960s. He first revisits his detailed ecological research among the remote Q’ero in the high Andes of Southern Peru in 1969–1970 and 1977. At that time, Q''ero was a community comprised of several hamlets in converging valleys based primarily on alpaca herding at about 4,300 meters, and composed of about 400 persons in about 80 families. He then relies on the few ethnographies by other anthropologists to document changes in Hatun Q''ero by 2020 , spanning 1980-90s when the nation was immersed in agrarian reform followed by virtual civil war between Maoist guerrillas, the government, and the highland peasantry. Through all of these ideological and political-economic developments the sustainability of Q''ero as an integral ecological and social community as well as a famously Incaic cultural tradition becomes a global as well as national issue.