Counting Stories, Moving Ethnicities

Counting Stories, Moving Ethnicities: Studies from Aotearoa New Zealand is a new collection of essays published by FASS (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences), University of Waikato, at the end of 2012.

The editors, Rosalind McClean, Brad Patterson and David Swain, first came together at a one-day workshop in Wellington, where participants met to pool ideas and to share progress from recent research on ethnic and cultural transfers in the ‘British world’. The theme of the workshop was ‘ethnic counting’. Counting Stories includes substantially revised papers presented at the workshop as well as additional chapters that were subsequently commissioned by the editors.

Key Themes

The main focus for this new book is to unpack Pākehā (‘European New Zealand’) identities. There are significant reflections also on Māori. The book explores how stories are embedded in attempts to count and to classify peoples. It provides historic overview from multi-disciplinary perspectives as to ways that counting processes consequent upon European colonisation have been instrumental in ‘moving’ ethnicities in Aotearoa New Zealand. Counting Stories explores how ethnicities are constantly changing across time and place. Human migrations and power struggles are integral to this on-going social and cultural process.

Although written from the contextual focus of Aotearoa New Zealand, the key themes of Counting Stories, Moving Identities are central to processes of social change in world history since ancient times.

View the Table of Contents
Download the Order Form
E-mail [email protected] for more information