1/10 Wendy Pond is a great scholar & a great rebel. Because of her adventurousness & non-conformity, few NZers know of her work. In a new podcast, though, Pond tells the story of her revolutionary work in Tonga's most remote islands.
2/10 In 1966 Wendy Pond & her husband & fellow anthropologist Garth Rogers sailed a small yacht to Niuafo'ou, Tonga's northernmost island. They were escaping the Eurocentrism & moralism of postwar NZ society, & seeking alternative ways of living.
3/10 Pond & Rogers studied the sociology & dances & poems of the island. Niuafo'ouans have their own language & culture, but they were colonised centuries ago by Tonga. Pond was a socialist, & she shared Niuafo'ouans' anger at oppression by the monarchy in distant Nuku'alofa
4/10 In their book The Fire Has Jumped, Pond & Rogers documented the mistreatment of Niuafo'ouans by Tonga's government, which forced their deportation after the eruption of their motu in '46. After a protest campaign the islanders were able to return.
5/10 The book was remarkable for its method as well as its subject. Pond & Rogers let islanders speak for themselves, weaving a narrative out of their voices. Decades before the notion of decolonising academic study became was fashionable, Pond was democratising her work.
6/10 Pond befriended Kitione Mamata, who wrote songs protesting against the neglect & impoverishment of Niuafo'ou. She wrote a remarkable essay on Mamata, & with her help his music began to appear on Tongan radio, inspiring the pro-democracy movement.
7/10 Rogers & Pond eventually separated, & Pond moved to another northern island, the famously steep volcano Tafahi. The only other palangi there was Taavi, the Dutch royal who had become a wandering 'holy man' in Tonga.
8/10 Because it is so inhospitable, Tafahi has never been home to a chief. Nor have missionaries been attracted to the island. Pond soon realised that many elements of ancient Tongan culture had survived on Tafahi.
9/10 Pond recorded hundreds of songs & dances on the island. They were relics of an egalitarian & 'pagan' way of life. Islanders sometimes danced themselves into visionary trances. Pond realised she was seeing remnants of ancient religious ceremonies.
10/10 The material Pond collected on Niuafo'ou & Tafahi is nowadays stored at Victoria University. Her remarkable thesis on dance & politics in northern Tonga is available online via VU. Her new podcast-interview can be heard at soundcloud.com/user_amps/drwe…
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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.