Culture, for and against: Patterns of “Culturespeak” in New Zealand

Abstract

Culture is invoked not only as a means of justifying redress for discrimination or historical injustice, but also as a standard of accountability by which the upholding of rights (or their suppression) can be measured. Rather than assume conceptual coherence regarding the notion of culture that such applications appear to share, it is proposed to analyse them as terms within a broad and open-ended field of "culturespeak," a concept generally ascribed to Ulf Hannerz.