Dame Anne Salmond’s most ambitious book to date.

TEARS OF RANGI: EXPERIMENTS ACROSS WORLDS

Anne Salmond
Hardback, 228 x 152mm , 512 pages
978 1 86940 865 7
Māori studies, 24 July 2017, $65.00
Auckland University Press.

 

Dame Anne Salmond’s most ambitious book to date. 

In Tears of Rangi Dame Anne Salmond looks at New Zealand as a site of cosmodiversity, a place where multiple worlds engage and collide. Beginning with a fine-grained inquiry into the early period of encounters between Māori and Europeans in New Zealand (1769–1840), Salmond then investigates such clashes and exchanges in key areas of contemporary life – waterways, land, the sea and people. 

We live in a world of gridded maps, Outlook calendars and balance sheets – making it seem that this is the nature of reality itself. But in New Zealand, concepts of whakapapa and hau, complex networks and reciprocal exchange, may point to new ways of understanding interactions between peoples, and between people and the natural world. Like our ancestors, Anne Salmond suggests, we too may have a chance to experiment across worlds. 

Tears of Rangi has also provided the catalyst for a documentary series, Artefact, produced by Jane Reeves (Greenstone Pictures) and featuring Salmond talking to local and international authorities about ‘experiments across worlds’. It releases on Māori Television early next year. 

About the author

Dame Anne Salmond is Distinguished Professor of Māori Studies at the University of Auckland and author of books including The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (2003, Penguin UK, Penguin NZ, Yale University Press); Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (2007, University of California Press, Penguin NZ) and Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas (2011, University of California Press, Penguin NZ). Among many honours and awards, she is an International Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy; in 2013 she became New Zealander of the Year and winner of the Rutherford Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand.