ABSTRACT
How conflicting ontological worlds contribute to intercultural misunderstandings is considered in this chapter. Clammer and others (2004: 3) claim that violence often originates from ontological and epistemological disjunctions when different cultures interact within nation states. This chapter explains how and why this can be and explores the concept in relation to interactions and transactions between New Zealand Maori and Europeans in precolonial times. Therefore, in this chapter the two knowledge systems are examined and compared. The Māori cosmological world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (and their relationship with it) was very different from that of Europeans at that time. Māori oral literature, and Māori interpretations of it, have given access to Māori epistemology and the ideas that underpin it. In contrast, European rational, secular, and Enlightenment discourses for explaining the world being explored and “discovered” were quite different than Māori/Polynesian discourses. Those ideas influenced their treatment and understanding of the tāngata whenua: concepts of what it is to be human, whether all humans had equal moral and territorial rights, how they fit into the grand scheme of things, and what the relationship is between humans and the natural world. In all these facets of European “seeing and knowing” there were conflicting understandings with Māori, which often led to misunderstandings between them.
