ABSTRACT
This paper examines a particular intervention in conceptions of ownership on the part of Mäori people in New Zealand. It concerns a claim that asserts Mäori interests in a range of specific things singled out as objects of legal attention, among them the products of new technologies that the law has only recently, or not yet even, decided may be owned. These interests are asserted on the basis that the things concerned are taonga, a Mäori term which may be glossed as ‘a treasure, something precious; hence an object of good or value’. A taonga might equally be a historic whalebone weapon, the Mäori language, a native plant or a body of knowledge; distinctions between the material and the ephemeral are not relevant here. Nor are ideas about animate versus inanimate entities; women and children may be exchanged as taonga, and taonga such as woven cloaks are often held as ancestors or instantiations of ancestral effect.
