I love our Postgraduate Research Seminars

Yesterday, I was on campus for the latest Postgraduate Research Seminar organised by my School. This is where the BA Hons. and Masters students present their research projects to the School's staff, fellow students, and the wider research community at the university, and I always find them very stimulating. Sure, you get the odd esoteric philiosophy student whose work goes right over my head, but generally, there are at least a few presentations I find really interesting, and sometimes, the odd one that gives me a new perspective or fresh questions to ask about my own research. Because the School is multidisciplinary, it's always an intriguing mix of topics. I've seen everything from the historico-archeaological debate over the siege of Troy to Christian Science beliefs about reason, and from the the ethics of pre-natal screening to the history of fascism in pre-World War II rural New Zealand. 

This year, one of the stand-outs for me was a case history of an intriguing late nineteenth-century land dispute. The case involved an indigenous Maori woman using the procedures of the colonial legal system to convert lands that had been under native leasehold title into individual freeholds under her own name. This process embroiled her in a long-running and apparently very acrimonious legal battle with another woman landholder of European ethnicity, and the dispute eventually saw the European woman being 'run off' and returning to Europe. The student in question is using this as a case study to explore the workings of the Native Land Court in that era, but I found it a fascinating example of some quite unexpected dynamics of both gender and ethnicity, in that a Maori woman used all the powers of the externally imposed colonial legal system (effectively, 'white man's law') to her own advantage (fee simple land title being more secure and, ultimately, more economically advantageous than either 'native' or Crown leasehold title). While the tiny amount I know about this case is only what was presented in this seminar, it does seem to be one of those examples that reinforces the point that feminist approaches to history cannot ignore other categories of identity - such as ethnicity or class - or they will fail to tell the whole story about how power was operating and being negotiated in any particular historical context. In other words, you can't assume all women are 'sisters' and have common interests just because they share two X chromosomes!

A medievalist meets Maori history

It’s Sunday evening, and I’ve just returned from one of the periodic two-day intensive courses on historical methodology I’m being put through this year. Today’s session was on Maori historical methodology - whether there is such a thing, and if so, what it is and how, and by whom, it should be applied. As someone steeped in medieval European history, you might think this would be completely irrelevant for me - and that’s what I thought, too, at first - but that didn’t turn out to be the case. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it was quite a revelatory session.

The crux of the matter we discussed was the question of who ‘owns’ history, and there was much conversation about contemporary debates over whether or not Pakeha (New Zealanders of white European descent) can write Maori history, and if so, how they should go about it. For historians trained in the western tradition of academic history, where documents and archives are often considered the authoritative starting point, it must be something of a mind shift to be told that they cannot even access those archives until they have talked to the kaumatua (tribal elders) and established a relationship of trust. Often, too, the written archives - which are most frequently, though not always, ‘outsider’ views of Maori history and cultural traditions - are considered inferior to the oral traditions maintained on the marae.

I’m a complete neophyte in this area, so I hope any tangata whenua who may read this will not be offended by my naivety, but the aspect of Maori historical epistemology that really entranced me was that Maori do not view time as linear, but as cyclical, where past, present and future all co-exist. It’s not just that Maori have enormous respect for their ancestors, but that they are their ancestors and their ancestors are (in) them. Sir Tipene O’Regan, an historian and Maori ‘elder statesman’, put it this way:

“I and my tribe are the present expression of our tupuna [ancestors] and the source of our uri, our descendants. We are both past and future, as well as ourselves…To inquire into my history or that of my people, you must inquire into my whakapapa. My tupuna may be dead but they are also in me and I am alive. To know them, you must know me! In order to deal with them, you must deal with me!”

For me, the most compelling aspect is whakapapa, which is genealogy but also so much more than genealogy. It is tracing a relationship back to its beginning, to the elemental forces that formed the sea and the land, human life and all that sustained it. As I observed at one point today, during a (rather heated) debate about Pakeha doing Maori history, and about the ‘ownership’ of histories which involve both Maori and Pakeha ancestors, it seems to me that at some point, all Maori history is also ‘family’ history, with all the fraught emotional baggage and byzantine politics that can entail.

I think it was Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie(2) who pointed out that western academic history is utterly wedded to a Judeo-Christian linear view of time, involving a one-way trip from Creation, through Fall and Resurrection/ redemption, to, eventually, an end times/Apocalypse scenario. This linearity is so fundamental to the epistemologies of western societies that I suspect even those of us who are non-believers are probably incapable of ever really escaping it in order to see life on Earth in some other way. Having said that, it seems to me that some of the new work on the ‘post-medieval’ is beginning to challenge and disrupt that linearity from the inside, by consciously interrogating the role a certain idea of the ‘medieval’ past plays in constructing our own ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ worldview.

That’s a topic for another discussion, but in the meantime, can I just say that I am heartily glad I have settled on 14th century England, rather than 19th century New Zealand, as my field of research?

1. Tipene O’Regan, “Who Owns the Past? Change in Maori Perceptions of the Past”, in John Wilson, ed., From the Beginning: The Archaeology of the Maori, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1987, p.142.

2. I could be wrong here. Maybe it was Braudel? I know it was one of those Annales dudes, but it's Sunday night and I'm too lazy to go and dig out my notes...