1/10 Professor Brian Boyd is one of the world's foremost experts on the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Armed with these credentials, Boyd has waded into the argument about Matauranga Maori. Unsurprisingly, Boyd has had nothing sensible to say.
2/10 Talking to Newsroom, Boyd claimed that Matauranga Maori was a threat to science, and compared it to Christian Creationism. Because indigenous thought is 'holistic', Boyd said, Matauranga Maori will demand that every Maori oral tradition is taken as literal fact.
3/10 Boyd is worried that Matauranga Maori scholars treat Maui's fishing up of islands as historical fact, and see taniwha as long-lost pleisiosaurs lurking in our rivers and lakes. He should have talked to some of his colleagues at the University of Auckland.
4/10 As Auckland geologist Dr Daniel Hikuroa has made clear, Matauranga Maori involves searching through Polynesian traditions and practices and differentiating what is scientific from what is not. Hikuroa points to the Maori lunar calendar as a work of science.
5/10 It is ironic for a Pakeha scholar to accuse Maori scholars of wanting to treat every aspect of Polynesian tradition as literally true, because that approach was taken in the 19th & early 20th centuries by the likes of Percy Smith and Elsdon Best. The results were disastrous
6/10 As David Simmons has shown in his book The Great New Zealand Myth, Smith and Best inappropriately lumped together different waka traditions and conflated mythological and literal details from those traditions to arrive at the story of the Great Fleet of seven waka.
7/10 It's also ironic for Boyd to liken Maori scholars to Christian zealots, b/c it was Christian bigotry that disrupted Maori intellectual traditions. The Tohunga Suppression Act outlawed those traditions.Scholars like Maori Marsden had to study at secret, secluded whare wananga
8 Perhaps we could make an analogy using a subject with which Boyd is familiar. In addition to being a great novelist, Vladimir Nabokov was an expert entomologist, who discovered many species of butterflies.
9/9 It is quite possible to study Nabokov's scientific work without having to treat his novels as works of science. In the same way, it is possible for scholars like Hikuroa to separate Maori science from literary works like the legends of Maui.
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1/60 Martin Phillipps contained multitudes. He leaves an oeuvre that is vast & varied, & that can be interpreted in various ways. I see him as someone who extended & updated a distinctively Pakeha cultural tradition.
2/60 Like the music of Douglas Lilburn, the poems of Ruth Dallas, Charles Brasch & Allen Curnow, & the paintings of Bill Sutton & Rita Angus, many of Phillipps' best songs are powerful responses to the land & seascapes of southern NZ.
3/60 I'm not arguing that Phillipps was necessarily directly influenced by the names I've mentioned. He didn't need to be. He responds to the same landscape, is part of the same history, and dealt with the same dilemmas.
1/3 Sean Plunket is promoting a 15 year old who gave a speech about Oswald Spengler's theory of the decline of the West. Since neither Plunket nor the kid seem to have bothered to read Spengler they won't be aware how silly they look. Spengler has some very bad news for them.
2/5 Plunket & his young protege are culture warriors, who think Western societies have been rotted by immigration & liberalism & transgender-friendly bathrooms & so on. They think a good dose of red steak conservatism can fix things. Spengler would shake his head in despair.
3/5 Spengler was one of many would-be prophets who emerged in the chaos of post-WW1 Germany to try to explain the collapse of its army & empire & the perceived crisis of modernity. His diagnosis was extremely gloomy. He argued all civilisations have the same basic course.
1/11 When I saw a photo of Farage posing with Union Jacks I thought about an interview James Belich gave about a decade ago. Belich observed that Britishness was one of the most effective ideas in history, but that it was withering in the 21st C. Farage symbolises that decline.
2/11 Britishness is a modern idea. Linda Colley has traced its emergence to the early 19thC Napoleonic Wars, when Britain faced off against a revolutionary France. British identity spread through the world during that century. It was capacious.
3/11 Like many Scots & Welsh before them, most Pakeha in NZ identified as British. As Belich shows in his book Replenishing the Earth, the colonial project was in part an effort to spread & share Britishness. The identity had room for non-white peoples.
1/4 Altho the problem seems to have gotten worse lately, the misuse of Nazi history by politicians & media began even before the end of WW2. Winston Peters was named after the man who fought the UK's '45 election by comparing Labour's proposed welfare state to Nazism.
2/4 Nor is the problem confined to the right, as this appalling cartoon from the Key era shows. The tragedy is that NZ appeased & collaborated with Nazi Germany & fascist Italy in the '30s, & that we may be on the way to making a similar mistake today.
3/4 The topic deserves a book, & I was only able to scratch the surface, but I detailed some of the collaboration, by both the NZ state & many non-governmental organisations, in this article: We put a trade deal with the Nazis ahead of helping Jews.thespinoff.co.nz/society/27-01-…
1/5 I find the eliminationist rhetoric that's entering NZ politics from Trumpian America disturbing. We're hearing the rhetoric from the right at the moment, but I've also heard it from the odd person on the left in the past. I've got a graphic to show to NZ's eliminationists.
2/5 This is a graphic of NZ's 1902 election, when Seddon's Liberals triumphed over Massey's Conservatives. In the 122 years since, NZ has been divided into left & right blocs. They aren't going away, because they're rooted in sociology & history.
3/7 Eliminationists see people on the other side of the political divide as either evil or deranged. They see the ideas of the other side as irrational, & consequently have the illusion they can be eradicated. I've been disappointed to see some on the left adopt eliminationism.
1/7 Imagine that settler govts had not denied Maori the vote, that there had been no wars & confiscations, that Maori & Pakeha had come together in a hybrid culture. This might sound like a plot for an alt history novel, but in a remote part of NZ it was reality.
2/7 These precise & exquisite maps are part of Kaye Dragicevich's book about the gumlands of early 20thC Northland, which I acquired yesterday. Amidst the swamps & hut villages on these maps a new, Slavic Polynesian people was born.
3/7 Tarara is the Maori name for a person of Croatian & Maori ancestry. Croats fled repressive Habsburg rule to dig for kauri gum in Northland. There they met another oppressed people. This photo remembers the first Croat-Maori marriage, in 1892.