University of Canterbury’s Professor Steven Ratuva. (Photo supplied to E Tangata)
Professor Steven Ratuva, now based in Christchurch where he heads the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury, has a few strings to his bow. But it’s as a widely travelled academic and prolific writer that he’s made his mark, worldwide, in sociology and anthropology. And, in the course of his research and deliberations, he’s come to develop a healthy disrespect for some aspects of western scholarship — especially the tendency to assume that Indigenous scholarship (from the Pacific, for instance) can’t be taken as seriously as western knowledge. He has no patience with that view, as he explains in this talanoa with Dale.
Read the insightful article on E Tangata.
