Whare Karakia: Māori Church Building, Decoration, and Ritual in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1834-1863, a new book by Richard A. Sundt, one of our Chapter Members, is slated to be released in August 2010. Professor Sundt will also be a session chair for the forthcoming SAH 70th Anniversary Meeting in Chicago in April. Reflecting his varied territories of interest, his session there is titled Late Gothic and Neo-Gothic Architecture in Latin America.
Whare Karakia describes how with the arrival of Anglican missionaries to New Zealand in the nineteenth century, Māori were slowly converted to Christianity and recruited to build New Zealand’s early churches. These early whare karakia—houses of worship—were in a distinctive and arresting new style that combined Māori art and architecture with elements from British ecclesiastical traditions. By the peak decades of the missionary movement (1830s to 1850s), indigenous builders had transformed the small-to-moderate-sized whare into the larger whare-style structure. The whare scheme, with its central row of posts, became the most common building type for Māori churches, and while initially challenging Western architectural presumptions around the use of ritual space, it was later accepted by the Anglican establishment as a convenient model for its missions.
Richard Sundt describes the technological process through which this occurred and examines the interactions between Māori and missionaries during this period—from the training Māori received in European building technology, to the resolution of arguments over carving, painting and the use of liturgical space as they applied these skills to their first attempts at church building.
A ground-breaking work that sheds new light on the history of religion, architecture, and the story of Māori and Pākehā in New Zealand, Whare Karakia is extensively illustrated with rare and detailed images and plans of churches now destroyed.
A PDF with more information and images can be downloaded by clicking on the following link: WHARE KARAKIA
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