https://www.academia.edu/17321004/In_Human_Parasites_Posthumanism_Papat%C5%AB%C4%81nuku
You said:
These three concepts are central to Māori worldviews and ways of relating to the world, land, and identity.
Papatūānuku (Earth Mother)
Papatūānuku is the Earth Mother in Māori cosmology. She is the source of life, nurturing all living beings. She and Ranginui (Sky Father) were once tightly embraced in darkness until their children separated them, creating the world as we know it. Papatūānuku represents land, nourishment, and the deep, ongoing connection between people and whenua (land). To Māori, land is not just property—it is a living ancestor.
Tūrangawaewae (A Place to Stand)
Tūrangawaewae translates to "a place to stand." It refers to a person's roots, belonging, and identity, often tied to their ancestral land. It is about having a place where one has the right to stand with dignity, strength, and connection. It is both literal (ancestral land, marae) and metaphorical (a deep sense of belonging and identity). Tūrangawaewae is essential to Māori identity and wellbeing.
Whakapapa (Genealogy, Connection, Layering)
Whakapapa is more than genealogy—it is a way of understanding relationships, history, and interconnection. It traces lineage not only through human ancestry but also through land, rivers, mountains, and non-human beings. It is a way of placing oneself within a web of relationships that extend across time and space. Whakapapa links people to the past, giving meaning to the present and guiding the future.
Together, these concepts express a Māori way of seeing the world—where land, identity, and relationships are deeply interconnected.
You said:
Yes—there are deep conceptual resonances between Papatūānuku and the Free Energy Principle (FEP) & Active Inference, particularly through ideas of embeddedness, relationality, and anticipatory adaptation.
1. Papatūānuku & The Free Energy Principle: A System in Constant Exchange
The Free Energy Principle (FEP), as formulated by Karl Friston, suggests that all living systems minimize free energy (prediction error) to maintain homeostasis and persist over time. This principle describes how organisms model their environment to reduce surprise, maintaining a stable existence within a constantly shifting world.
Papatūānuku is not just "the land"—she is an ancestral, living system that embodies continuous adaptation, interdependence, and self-organizing regulation:
- The biosphere minimizes free energy by adjusting to changes in climate, ecosystems, and human interventions.
- Māori ecological practices, such as ritenga (customs) and rāhui (temporary bans on resource use), mirror active inference—they emerge from an attunement to environmental fluctuations to maintain systemic equilibrium.
- Just as an organism resists entropy by predicting and correcting errors in its environment, Papatūānuku, as a complex ecological system, can be seen as actively inferring states of balance or crisis (e.g., how forests recover after deforestation or how rivers reshape landscapes).
Thus, Papatūānuku is not a passive substrate but an active, anticipatory system, continuously engaged in adaptive regulation—just like an organism governed by the FEP.
2. Tūrangawaewae as an Epistemic Homeostasis System
FEP suggests that organisms maintain epistemic homeostasis—meaning they must construct models of the world that help them persist within it. Tūrangawaewae, the “place to stand”, is not just about physical land—it is about a coherent, meaningful model of existence.
- Losing tūrangawaewae (through colonial displacement, urbanization, or cultural alienation) increases free energy because one's predictive model no longer fits lived reality. This manifests as existential distress, identity loss, and disconnection from stabilizing structures.
- Re-establishing tūrangawaewae—reconnecting with whenua, language, and whakapapa—restores coherence, reducing free energy by realigning the self within a meaningful framework.
- This aligns with Active Inference, where an agent updates its priors to maintain a viable model of the world—in this case, Māori communities regenerate coherence through cultural revival, land return, and relational networks.
From an Active Inference perspective, tūrangawaewae is an adaptive state of being—where one's model of the world aligns with one's lived reality, reducing uncertainty and increasing resilience.
3. Whakapapa as a Deep Hierarchical Model
FEP emphasizes that organisms maintain deep, hierarchical generative models of their environment—where past experiences shape how they predict and engage with future events.
Whakapapa is precisely this: a layered, recursive, historical model that integrates ancestry, land, myth, and ecological knowledge. It functions as an intergenerational prediction system:
- Whakapapa provides priors—ancestral knowledge that informs how one navigates life.
- Māori ecological practices—such as maramataka (lunar calendars for planting and harvesting)—are predictive models that have developed through generations of active inference.
- Colonization disrupted whakapapa by removing access to ancestral priors, forcing Māori into foreign predictive models (individualism, capitalist time structures, industrial land use), which generate epistemic instability and heightened free energy.
Restoring whakapapa is an act of recalibrating predictive models, re-establishing intergenerational coherence, and reducing existential uncertainty.
Conclusion: Papatūānuku as an Active Inferential System
If we take FEP seriously, we must move beyond viewing land as a passive object of human control. Papatūānuku, as an active, self-organizing system, infers and adapts to change—just as organisms do. The Māori worldview already frames land, people, and ancestors as an interconnected system of mutual inference—an idea that aligns deeply with predictive processing, ecological enactivism, and systems thinking.
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