NZ Skeptics Articles

Elizabeth Rata

Elizabeth Rata teaches in the Faculty of Education at Auckland University and is an Honorary Research Fellow in Political Studies and founding member of the Politics of Social Regulation Research Group. She was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to Georgetown University, Washington DC in 2003. With Roger Openshaw she is the author of Public Policy and Ethnicity: The Politics of Ethnic Boundary-Making. (Palgrave Macmillan Publishing, 2006).

Ethnic fundamentalism in New Zealand

1 August 2007

Ethnic fundamentalism is a form of 'secular religion', an oxymoron that resists criticism. This article, originally presented at the NZ Skeptics conference in Auckland, September 2006, interrogates the beliefs of those who insist that ethnicity plays the primary and determining in creating the person. Are such beliefs merely old-fashioned and discredited racism in a new guise?