OUR WORK

Achieving the Objective

Acknowledging the partnership principles under the Treaty of Waitangi in its practices and policies, the Council works to achieve its objective by:

engaging in research-based advocacy;
securing the inclusion of the Trust in the process of public policy-making;
promoting public awareness of the value of the humanities-aronui in a democratic and inclusive society;
recognising distinction in the humanities-aronui;
encouraging cooperation between institutions engaged in work in the humanities-aronui;
supporting the formation of networks amongst individuals engaged in work in the humanities-aronui;
engaging in discussion and cooperation with related organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand and overseas; and
engaging in any other lawful activities conducive to the fulfilment of the Trust’s purpose.

Examples of this work include:

The Humanities Research Network Te Whatunga Rangahau Aronui

Linking Minds and Energies in the Arts, Culture and the Humanities

www.humanitiesresearch.net

The Humanities Research Network (HRN) is designed to encourage new ways of thinking about the overlapping domains of knowledge which are represented by the arts, humanities, social sciences, other related fields like law, and matauranga Maori, and new relationships among their practitioners.

The HRN supports the creation of cultural knowledge as a broadly based, multi-professional and multi-organisational practice. As more individuals and organisations join the network, it is increasingly able to provide a representation of the humanities-aronui in all its dimensions, from cultural archive to cultural production in many different organisational and professional settings, and in a variety of languages and media.

The network provides a “one-stop shop” where those engaged in any aspect of the humanities-aronui in Aotearoa New Zealand, in any organisational or private location, can make themselves and their interests known to others and can access a comprehensive range of information about the sector in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally.

Please visit this site and register if your professional interests match the purposes of the site.

Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand

www.creativecommons.org.nz

Creative Commons began in 2001 with the aim of establishing a fair middle way between the extremes of copyright-control, and the uncontrolled exploitation, of intellectual property. Its primary tool is the use of a range of copyright licences, freely available for public use, which allow creators to fine-tune control over their work, so enabling as wide a distribution as possible. Originally those licences were, although written for worldwide use, grounded in American law and practice. Creative Commons International works to establish national projects. There are now 35 national licences, with more in process.

The Council for the Humanities is leading the project to establish Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand in 2007. The website will go on-line in the near future, and the date of the launch of the first licences will be announced there and through the HRN.

Submissions on Policy Issues

For example, submissions have recently been made on the Draft Digital Content Strategy and the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN) project, Building Capability.

Two important documents setting out aspects of a framework for research policy for the humanities-aronui can be found on the HRN. They are:

The research policy developed by the Humanities Society on which the approach to government resulting in the humanities entry into the Marsden Fund was based, To establish a Public Good Fund for Research in the Domain of Culture and Society

Knowledge, innovation and creativity: Designing a knowledge society for a small democratic country (2000)

Projects to increase research funding to the arts and humanities-aronui and their contribution to government policy development

For example, a major proposal to the government seeking project funding for research in the humanities related to government policies and objectives.

Humanities-aronui Research and Public Objectives

Projects to increase recognition of distinguished and innovative work in the arts and humanities-aronui

The Council is establishing the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities.

Go to Academy

Maintaining and developing relations with like organisations

For example, memoranda of understanding with the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Australian Academy of the Humanities; attending the annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies.

Events

The second annual national Congress of the Humanities was held at Victoria University of Wellington on August 27-28, 2007.

Transformations 2007

Composing the nation: ideas, peoples, histories, languages, cultures, economies

National identity is a strategic priority of the New Zealand government, and a critical issue in the evolution of the nation-state in an era marked by globalisation, new ICTs, post-colonial revision of national histories, cultural and religious conflict, knowledge societies and creative economies.

This conference

foregrounded the diversity of research into these issues being carried out in Aotearoa New Zealand
explored the relation between this research and public policy formation on national identity, and
showcased this research, built coalitions of interest, and identified new lines of enquiry, especially across disciplines, cultures and media.

Index of presenters and titles of papers (abstracts below)

(Click on the links for full text)

Keynote Addresses

Professor Julie Ellison
Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan and Director, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and Fulbright Senior Specialist
Foreseeable Futures: The New Politics of Public Scholarship and Cultural Knowledge

Professor Alan Liu
Professor of English Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara, California
Beyond 'Good Enough' Knowledge: The Humanities and Public Knowledge in the Age of Web 2.0

Papers

Dr Sue Abel and Dr Jo Smith
School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
Maori TV and Benevolent Biculturalism

Dr Jean Anderson
School of Asian and European Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington
Disturbing the Surface, Bending the Language: composing indigenous identities in the work of Chantal Spitz and Patricia Grace

Dr Philip Armstrong, Dr Annie Potts and Dr Deidre Brown
Dr Philip Armstrong and Dr Annie Potts
Co-Directors, New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, School of Culture, Literature and Society, College of Arts, Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury
Dr Deidre Brown
School of Architecture and National Institute of Creative Arts and Industry, Te Whare Wananga o Tamaki Makaurau/University of Auckland
Introducing 'Human-Animal Studies': new interdisciplinary scholarship in Aotearoa New Zealand

Dr Karen Baehler
Public Policy, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington
A Family of Diplomats: how public policy expresses and composes national identity

Dr Avril Bell
School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, Massey University
Whaddarya? Young Pakeha talk cultural identity

Judith Bernanke
Department of Communication and Journalism, Massey University at Wellington
Shaping Opinions and Policies: New Zealand media coverage of the 2005 Venice Biennale

Sally Blundell
College of Arts, University of Canterbury
With nothing to say: the unspeakability of social violence

Dr Richard Bullen
Art History and Theory, University of Canterbury
New Zealand's Japan

Professor Charles Crothers
Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Auckland University of Technology
New Zealand National Identity: the survey evidence

Richard Dawson
School of Law, University of Canterbury
Waitangi Sovereignty Talk against Humanistic Immortality Talk: Nopera Panakareao and Emily Dickinson

John Downie
School of English, Film and Theatre, Victoria University of Wellington
What is a (National) Theatre?

Associate Professor Eveline Duerr
School of Social Sciences, Auckland University of Technology
Representing Purity: national branding and identity in New Zealand

Dr. William Farrimond
Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Waikato
'Proud to be British'?: James Baxter's tangihanga in the world of my father

Dr Peter Field
School of History, University of Canterbury
Speaking to Democracy: intellectuals and public power

Associate Professor Susy Frankel
Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington
Intellectual Property Law and Cultural Identity

Ian Goodwin
School of English and Media Studies, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey University of Wellington
New Zealand's Digital Future: a culturally diverse, socially inclusive, economically vibrant nation?

Sandra Gorter
Writer
Our Own Stories, the building blocks of a New Zealand national identity

Dr Michael Grimshaw
School of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Canterbury
"I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence will come my aid!", or, Pakeha and the condition of modernity

Dr Bronwyn Hayward, Jessica Buck, Wakaiti Dalton, Nick Kirk Aramiro Tai-Rakena, Celia Sheerin, and Holly Donald
School of Political Science and Communication, University of Canterbury
Facing the Past, Listening to Our Future: how children talk about politics, identity and environment in New Zealand.

Te Aroha Hohaia
Public Policy, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington, and Business Manager, Aatea Consultants
National Identity as a Government Priority?

Dr William Jennings
French, Department of Humanities, University of Waikato
Amelie Nothomb and the Construction of Identity

Professor Barry King
School of Communications Studies, Auckland University of Technology
Lord of the Rings and the Re-negotiation of a Kiwi National Identity

Dr Catherine Lane West-Newman
Department of Sociology, University of Auckland
Public Emotions and Beaches

Associate Professor Dr Ian J. Lochhead
Art History, School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha
Architecture, Myth and Memory in Twentieth-Century New Zealand

Dr. John Macalister
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
"That Place Would be Better Named Glover": contesting identity through the naming of places

Professor Patrick McAllister
Anthropology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Canterbury
Waitangi Day: reflections on national identity and national days

Dr Malcolm McKinnon
School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, Victoria University of Wellington
Fifty Years On: national character and identity then . . . and now?

Professor Donald Maurice
New Zealand School of Music, Massey and Victoria Universities
Alfred Hill - the New Zealand Dvorak?

Dr James Meffan
School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
'Culturalism Gone Mad': The play of cultural rhetoric in the invention of New Zealand national identity

Associate Professor Philippa Mein Smith
History, University of Canterbury
Towards a New Intellectual Orientation: antipodean perspectives in the humanities

Professor Dr Paul Morris
Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
Is This a Christian Country? New Zealand, identity and religious diversity

Dr Camille Nakhid
School of Social Sciences, Auckland University of Technology
The 2006 Review of New Zealand's Immigration Act 1987: shaping Aotearoa/New Zealand's national identity

Professor Karen L. Nero
Director, Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury
Early Carolinean and Marshallese Textiles in Aotearoa Museums: toward visual repatriation

Dr John Newton
English Program, University of Canterbury
Becoming Pakeha

Rosslyn Noonan
Chief Commissioner/Te Amokapua, Te Kahui Tika Tangata / Human Rights Commission
Human rights - at the heart of New Zealand's national identity?

Tom Norcliffe
Archivist, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga
Archives New Zealand's Contribution to National Identity

Dr Pamela Gerrish Nunn
Associate Professor of Art History, University of Canterbury,
As a Woman, I have no Country

Dr Keith Ovendon
Board of Trustees and Chair of Programmes Committee, New Zealand Portrait Gallery
Portraiture and Identity: the struggle for a National Portrait Gallery.

Dr Heidi Quinn
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury
ONZEminer - a digital tool for tracing the origins and development of New Zealand English

Alison Rutherford
University of Canterbury
"Look, Janet, look": the development of a distinctive national visual identity through the illustrations of the New Zealand School Journal 1940-60.

Kevin Sherman
Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication, Auckland University of Technology
"I am a New Zealander, a Welshman ... and a Second Lifer." What can the concept of real world nationhood tell us about online virtual worlds?

Philippa K Smith
Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication, Auckland University of Technology
From Heartland to Here to Stay? the role of charismatic documentary presenters in national identity construction

Charlotte Steel
College of Art, University of Canterbury
The Problem of Landscape

Dr Pat Strauss, Kevin Roach Annelies Roskvist, Frank Smedley and Victoria Yee
Adult Literacy and Numeracy Education, School of Languages, Auckland University of Technology
"Because I want to live in New Zealand long time." The challenges facing migrant and refugee students in New Zealand: the perceptions of one education provider

Dr Luke Strongman
Lecturer in Humanities, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand
The Best of Men Declines: post-nationalism in the poetry of Vincent O'Sullivan

Alison Stevenson
Director, New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, Victoria University of Wellington
Sam Searle
E-Research Development Coordinator, Victoria University of Wellington
Ingrid Mason
Digital Research Repository Coordinator, Victoria University of Wellington
Digital Humanities: positioning New Zealand research within global networks

Dr Derek Wallace
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
Unity and/or Identity?

Dr Patricia Te Arapo Wallace
Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury
Exploring the Interface of Science and Matauranga Maori

Professor Mark Williams
English Programme, University of Canterbury
The Other from Elsewhere: Arrested Encounters in Bicultural New Zealand

Abstracts (Click on the links for full text)

Abstract Ellison will discuss the emergence of a new cross-sectoral cultural politics at the meeting places of universities and public cultural institutions. Work at this interface is changing research and learning. Ellison will argue that cross-sectoral coalitions operate powerfully, if diversely, on local, regional, national, and international levels. In this environment, particular methodologies come to the fore, such as the growing co-dependence of the humanities and the performing arts in heritage and public memory projects. Cultural citizenship-an omnibus concept that links place, migration, ethnicity, and agency-talks back to public policy and wants to help make it, too.

The nation is a shape-shifting presence at the interface between higher education and public cultural institutions. In the work of IA, for example, 'America' has been present as presidential sponsor, as a poet's '51st dream state', as a remilitarized empire, as a contested question posed by local archaeologies and archives, as the 'crossroads' of American Studies, as the networked space of national higher ed associations, and as an idiosyncratic administrative and policy culture, or governmentality.

In New Zealand, South Africa, and many other countries, central government agencies urge policies designed to accelerate research outputs and (that loaded term) innovation. These countries face critical decisions about what qualifies as excellence in the cultural arena, who has agency in citizen-government partnerships, and what forms of change register as innovation. How cultural knowledge and the people who make it count in diverse, migratory, communicative, and persistently unequal societies is the heart of the matter.

Professor Alan Liu
Professor of English Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara, California
Beyond 'Good Enough' Knowledge: The Humanities and Public Knowledge in the Age of Web 2.0

Abstract Focusing on so-called "Web 2.0," Alan Liu examines the current, destabilizing relation between expert knowledge produced within academic, governmental, and corporate institutions and folk (or "folksonomical") knowledge produced--no longer just consumed--by the public. Public knowledge has evolved into a "collective intelligence" or "wisdom of crowds" channeled through robust circuits of folk-based information/communication media, most notably Web 2.0 with its wikis, blogs, social networking, etc. But it often works around or against established knowledge institutions; and it is unstable because it has not yet found an adequate way to negotiate authority or quality, often settling instead for "good enough" knowledge. How might existing academic, governmental, and corporate institutions collaborate with the new public knowledge to create an online society of experts and folk productive of good knowledge? Can the humanities, in particular, contribute to today's society a notion of what "good" public knowledge might be?

Dr Sue Abel and Dr Jo Smith
School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
Maori TV and Benevolent Biculturalism

Abstract In March of 2004 New Zealand's indigenous television broadcaster, Maori Television, went to air. The Maori Television Service (MTS) emerges from a long history of negotiation with the New Zealand Crown to recognise and accept that "the principles of the Treaty impose a continuing obligation on the Crown" to assist in the preservation of the Maori language by the use of radio and television (Minister of Maori Affairs document, accessed 21/11/04). As such, MTS is an initiative driven by discourses of social justice that seek to heal the trauma of colonization, a strategy of reconciliation that can be called benevolent biculturalism. This notion of benevolent biculturalism denotes a relationship between the Crown and MTS where the Crown gives kindly to iwi Maori the means for the representation and revitalization of Maori culture.

Because MTS is a publicly funded body, it is subject to certain statutory requirements. These include:
"The principal function of Maori Television is to promote te reo Maori me nga tikanga Maori [Maori language and customs] through the provision of high quality, cost-effective Maori television service, in both Maori and English, that informs, educates and entertains a broad viewing audience, and, in doing so, enriches New Zealand's society, culture and heritage." (Section 8 Maori Television Service (Te Araratuku Whakaata Irirangi Maori) Act 2003).

There are obviously tensions at play within this principal function. These tensions are exemplified by the debate among some Maori circles (and indeed within MTS itself) as to whether MTS's primary role is to deliver programming to an audience fluent in te reo; serve a wider audience (Maori and non-Maori) interested in learning te reo; broadcast material of specific relevance to a Maori audience and/or to be a 'decolonising' agent for Maori; or have a 'nationbuilding' role by normalising te reo and tikanga among a wider audience (which, some argue, means presenting a 'friendly' Maori face to the non-Maori population).

This paper, then, examines the double-edged nature of the emergence of MTS on New Zealand television.

Abstract To be a writer in the small francophone Pacific literary market is a difficult thing. To be Ma'ohi and writing in French adds a further dimension of difficulty in estranging the writer from the roots of his or her cultural identity.

In this paper I propose to look at the ways in which Chantal Spitz's legendary novel (L'Ile des reves ecrases, 1991) - the first by a Ma'ohi writer to be published - creates a Ma'ohi identity, not merely at the level of the story, but in 'distorting' (to use Margueron's expression) French literary conventions, both in terms of form and in her use of language. Her later books Hombo (2002) and Pensees inutiles et insolentes (2006) will be included in this examination of the ways in which Spitz goes about creating a Tahitian / Ma'ohi specificity on several levels, again encompassing particular stylistic innovations.

A brief comparison with Patricia Grace's work, particularly aspects of her use of language in Electric City (1986) and Baby No Eyes (1998) will attempt to identify some similarities and differences between these two writers in their work towards creating literary representations of indigenous identities.

Dr Philip Armstrong, Dr Annie Potts
Co-Directors, New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, School of Culture, Literature and Society, College of Arts, Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury
Dr Deidre Brown
School of Architecture and National Institute of Creative Arts and Industry, Te Whare Wananga o Tamaki Makaurau/University of Auckland
Introducing 'Human-Animal Studies': new interdisciplinary scholarship in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract In the arts, in popular culture, and in everyday situations and environments, the lives of humans are continually and intimately bound up with those of nonhuman animals, both real and imaginary. As with many habitual aspects of life, however, the meanings derived from this ubiquitous network of interactions most often remain invisible. Recently, across the globe, scholars and critics from a range of fields have begun to turn their attention to what has been called 'the animal question', by examining the ways in which interactions between humans and animals reflect and shape important social and cultural issues: these include how we understand our own identities and those of others; how we regard, inhabit and make use of the natural world; and how we think about what to buy, eat, wear, watch and read. A new intellectual paradigm called Human-Animal Studies has emerged.

Interest in Human-Animal Studies is rapidly expanding in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is not surprising considering the centrality of human-animal relations to our present lifestyles and our history. Indeed, a reader who opens any one of several recent histories of Maori and Pakeha immediately encounters an emerging (but so far implicit) recognition of the formative role played by human-animal practices in the establishment of both indigenous and settler cultures in Aotearoa, and the shaping of our environment. In this presentation, we will introduce key concepts and issues associated with Human-Animal Studies. Using examples from a research project, currently funded by a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden grant (entitled "Kararehe: The Animal in Culture in Aotearoa New Zealand"), we will explain the relevance of this new field of study for an investigation of cultural and national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dr Armstrong will provide examples from his work on representations of whales and dolphins in narratives about settlement and belonging, both contemporary and historical. Dr Potts will discuss her study of Pakeha urban counter-cultural perspectives to animal consumption, and how these impact on understandings of national identity.

Dr Karen Baehler
Public Policy, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington
A Family of Diplomats: how public policy expresses and composes national identity

Abstract Public policy offers an important channel through which nation-states can express various dimensions of their culture, identity, and values. Although policy reforms occasionally break through to challenge, and sometimes even overthrow, status quo thinking, most of the time policy choices tend to reflect and also reinforce prevailing beliefs and practices. This paper conceptualizes one particularly persistent set of policy-related beliefs and practices in New Zealand, provisionally labeled 'family diplomacy' and explores both its cultural origins and some of the historic and contemporary policy choices, both domestic and foreign, which have given it expression. The paper argues that this vector of cultural attitudes and policy preferences constitutes an important and sometimes underspecified dimension of national identity, and one which can provide useful guidance for future policy decisions.

Dr Avril Bell
School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, Massey University
Whaddarya? Young Pakeha talk cultural identity

Abstract As New Zealand society becomes increasingly culturally diverse, emphasis is often given to the need for migrants to 'fit in.' Little attention is paid to the attitudes and orientations of members of the host communities. However, if migrants must 'fit in,' hosts have a crucial role in 'making room' and welcoming them. This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the views of young Pakeha on a range of issues under the broad label of cultural identity politics. The analysis will centre on how participants view New Zealand identity and the place of Pakeha and other cultures within it.

Judith Bernanke
Department of Communication and Journalism, Massey University at Wellington
Shaping Opinions and Policies: New Zealand media coverage of the 2005 Venice Biennale

Abstract Government policy debates concerning arts support spending have been dominated by an economic paradigm, usually accompanied by the argument that art offers significant cultural enrichment of a material and monetary sort, not just undefined and unmeasurable social enrichment. To receive continued government support, the 'arts' has had to demonstrate tangible outcomes to correspond to the political field's arguments about the peripheral economic value provided by the arts, such as employment creation, cultural tourism, and the promotion of national identity and export commodities.

New Zealand's participation in the Venice Biennale from the start has been justified by these economic incentives. However, media coverage of the 2005 Venice Biennale exposed the conflicting motivations of the arts and political fields. To an unprecedented degree, certain news organisations played a significant agenda-setting role, shaping a nation-wide debate about art and its social function, influencing arts funding discussion in the national election and potentially affecting New Zealand's participation in future Venice Biennales. This paper will examine the discussion of the patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the debates surrounding issues of democratic values and elitism, artistic autonomy and public policy and national identity in local and global contexts as reflected in the media's coverage of the 2005 Venice Biennale.

Sally Blundell
College of Arts, University of Canterbury
With nothing to say: the unspeakability of social violence

Abstract In his treatise on the modern verse epic, Michael Bernstein argues that the stories of a particular people are held within a culture by a chosen narrator - a writer, poet or musician - as a vital bonding mechanism that defines that tribe or nation. Such voices, Bernstein claims, transmit material that becomes locked in the memory of that nation as a form of tribal encyclopaedia. What happens, however, when that tribe is broken, fractured by events which challenge the very coherence of that nation's tale?

In events such as colonisation, war or domestic violence it is all too easy for the voices of victims of, or witnesses to, such atrocity to be left outside the realm of acceptable disclosure and thus be lost from an accurate reading of that nation's identity. Keri Hulme in The Bone People and Irish writer Seamus Deane in Reading in the Dark both enlist silence as a physical illustration of those voices left outside the boundaries of acceptable narration. In doing so, we as readers are reminded not only of the risk inherent in the detailed articulation of atrocity but also of the challenge to nationhood that is posed by literary depictions of real, albeit abhorrent, violence.

Dr Richard Bullen
Art History and Theory, University of Canterbury
New Zealand's Japan

Abstract As evidenced by the collection habits of public museums and art galleries, New Zealand has identified Japan with the colourful, picturesque, decorative, and the exotically exciting. The overwhelming emphasis given to floating world pictures in particular, to the detriment of other traditions within Japanese art history, is, of course, not peculiar to New Zealand. However, the structure, conventions and aesthetics of traditional arts outside the floating world of the Edo period, I argue in this paper, in fact offer more scope for suggestive parallels with New Zealand's cultural identity than the more widely-known pictures of geisha and Hiroshige landscapes.

Professor Charles Crothers
Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Auckland University of Technology
New Zealand National Identity: the survey evidence

Abstract This paper reviews the New Zealand (and international) survey data (and the resultant secondary literature) available on the extent, type and social correlates of measures of national identity, including coverage of NZES, the NZVS, the two waves of the ISSP which are on this topic and several ad hoc surveys including SNZ studies of 'New Zealanders' and a study commissioned by the BNZ on the 'kiwi'. The results are related to sociological models of national identity and how this is related to ethnicity, nationality, different scales at which people feel affiliated and place of birth.

Richard Dawson
School of Law, University of Canterbury
Waitangi Sovereignty Talk against Humanistic Immortality Talk: Nopera Panakareao and Emily Dickinson

Abstract During Treaty of Waitangi negotiations, the Te Rarawa chief Nopera Panakareao said, through a translator, "The Shadow of the land goes to Queen Victoria of England, but the substance remains with us the Maori." What did Panakareao mean by this, when he said it and when he later critiqued it? This paper seeks to shed some fruitful light on this utterance, which has been described as "one of the seminal images of race-relations history." The utterance concerns the nature of the relationship between the parties to the Treaty. This paper, written as a contribution to the interdisciplinary movement of 'law and literature', seeks to re-imagine this relationship through a reading of one of Emily Dickinson's poems involving the topic of immortality.

John Downie
School of English, Film and Theatre, Victoria University of Wellington
What is a (National) Theatre?

Abstract Philosopher Mary Midgley has written in her recent The Myths We Live By (Routledge 2004), "Explorers do not prepare for their trips simply by making sure that their ropes and ice-axes will never fail, testing them all to destruction. Infallible equipment would be little use to them if they did not know where they were going. They concentrate first on finding out all they can about the country they are exploring. Their first need therefore is a map. And this is at first a loose, provisional mental map that they themselves must frame out of whatever materials they can find, materials which they cannot always test in advance. The main need is that this initial map should be comprehensive - should say something about all the main factors that may be encountered... Reality is always turning out to be a great deal more complex than people expect."

I'm proposing to consider 'loosely' and 'provisionally' some of the 'main factors' in the construction of 'civic' theatre architectures and practices during the coming half century. 'Theatres', both West and East, have architectural, social, and aesthetic histories, and their changing shapes and functions express the symbiotic relationship between human consciousness and the performative - wasn't it Augusto Boal who suggested that "theatre is the first human invention"? So what exactly might be a civic model of that invention, into the immediate and medium-term future? The 'performative' has become a major twenty-first century paradigm, replacing discrete and hierarchical notions of 'discipline' with a more osmotic sense of seepage between spectacle and reception, act and affect. Insofar as social and cultural change can be predicted into the near future, at least two current elements can be anticipated as continuing to contribute significantly to it. Principles of sustainability will suggest a particular tuning to ecologies, energies, and engineering, at all levels of society. And performative orientations will continue to be beset by the entanglements of the corporeal and the virtual. If urban conurbations into the immediate future are to still have the will and authority to provide specialised environments to examine and celebrate the performative in a spirit of civic conviviality and congregation (argueably still on the agenda for both good human and humanist reasons), then what diversity of 'materials' need to be introduced to encourage some sense of the 'comprehensive' in this regard? What kind of investigative map might begin to be drawn? And in a small country like New Zealand, at a time when both economic and cultural planning are often short-sighted and purely opportunistic, and the 'creative community' spiritually dependent on the tireless promiscuity of machines, how might we begin to see such modelling as informing a clearer vision for a 'National Theatre'?

Associate Professor Eveline Duerr
School of Social Sciences, Auckland University of Technology
Representing Purity: national branding and identity in New Zealand

Abstract In the context of globalisation, when claims to uniqueness and distinctiveness become integral to national branding, New Zealand's tourist representation promises a "100% pure" nature reserve in the South Pacific where a unique endemic flora and fauna embedded in a majestic landscape is conserved. In this case, purity is constructed in conjunction with insularity and remoteness. These imaginaries are based on stereotypes which already shaped New Zealand's national and international reputation as 'green and clean'. I will draw attention to the residual effects of representations and show how these concepts impact on and are reflected in identity constructions of Pakeha New Zealanders.

Dr. William Farrimond
Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Waikato
"Proud to be British": James Baxter's tangihanga in the world of my father

Abstract This paper seeks to identify significant signposts of change in ways of thinking about cultural and/or national identity by New Zealanders in the mid-to-late 20th century.
In October, 1972, during the days of James Baxter's tangihanga at Hiruharama, the mission station at Jerusalem on the Wanganui River, a formalized ritual was enacted, following protocols of both the marae and the Roman Catholic church. The gathering celebrated and mourned the life and death of a principal 20th century voice in New Zealand poetry.

Drawing on the author's own photographic and written records of this event, as well as contemporary accounts by others, and Baxter's writings, a physical and a metaphorical journey of discovery is described, challenging contemporary perceptions of who we were and providing insights into who we were becoming.

Dr Peter Field
School of History, University of Canterbury
Speaking to Democracy: intellectuals and public power

Abstract This essay explores the place of intellectuals in democracies in the broadest terms. The primary conceptual framework is what I call the social history of intellectuals. As a social history, it seeks to examine the social networking, class alliances, remuneration, and relations to power of intellectuals through time. In contrast to traditional intellectual histories that focus on ideas alone, this essay explores the relationship between--as Max Weber expressed it-- material and ideal interests. Particular attention is paid to intellectuals' variable and often ambiguous status in democracies. From Socrates in 4th-century Athens to professors in universities in New Zealand today, intellectuals and democracies have shared an intriguing history. This essay attempts to unpack some aspects of that relationship. What has been the role of democratic intellectuals in the past and what is their contemporary role?

Associate Professor Susy Frankel
Faculty of Law, Victoria University of Wellington
Intellectual Property Law and Cultural Identity

Abstract The emergence of intellectual property law in the 17th and 18th
centuries was very much tied to defining cultural identity. As intellectual property law developed it has increasingly been seen primarily as an economic tool, yet it retains many features that are about preserving cultural identity. The right of an author to be named as the author of her book or for a sculptor to object to tinsel being added to his sculpture at festive times, for example, have a policy basis connected to cultural identity. The current international debate in intellectual property centres around two issues of cultural identity. The first is that known as 'geographical indications', such as Roquefort or Koromiko. Such identifications are often a claim of cultural exclusivity. The second is traditional knowledge which is a call to retain cultural identity in the face of global intellectual property rights. This paper discusses the nexus between cultural identity and intellectual property and how that nexus can be used to support cultural identity.

Abstract The May 2005 release of The Digital Strategy: Creating Our Digital Future represents the most significant recent development in New Zealand information and communication technologies (ICTs) policy. In prioritising social inclusion, the Strategy aims to create a 'digital future' for all New Zealanders. It also emphasises the importance of ICTs to creating and accessing diverse cultural content that in turn develops and enhances New Zealand's national identity. At the same time it develops such distinctive forms of digital cultural content as a significant asset to be 'leveraged' in producing competitive advantage in a global economy.

In this way, and in line with the Labour Government's continuing reliance on 'third way' ideology, the Strategy attempts to integrate seamlessly a diverse range of goals: nation building, increasing social inclusion, increasing cultural diversity, and economic development. This presentation will argue that the third way policy discourses driving this broad agenda, whilst rhetorically seamless, in effect veil conflicts and tensions that fundamentally divide these goals. It will question the extent to which 'increasing cultural diversity' and 'nation building' are complementary aims; and will argue that, in an economic context still dominated by neoliberalism, 'leveraging' digital cultural content for commercial gain is inconsistent with the achievement of social inclusion and cultural diversity.

Sandra Gorter
Writer
Our Own Stories, the building blocks of a New Zealand national identity

Abstract National identity is comprised of stories: history, personal stories, and myths and legends, that all in some way strike a cord of recognition and tell us something about ourselves. Literature, myths and legends form the biggest apparent part of a concept of a national identity, but these are strongest when linked to historical facts. When a story has an apparent footing in historical fact it gains a quality of immediacy and solidity - be this real or imagined. This paper discusses the need firstly, to gather our own New Zealand stories and, secondly, in keeping with an essential part of New Zealand national identity, recognises the need to disseminate our stories in a way that competes internationally with the very best in the world.

Dr Michael Grimshaw
School of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Canterbury
I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence will come my aid!", or, Pakeha and the condition of modernity

Abstract This paper argues for the development of Pakeha as a particular mid 20th century regional, secular, modernist identity that developed in the South Island between the 1920s and the late 1950s. Beginning with the influence of D'arcy Cresswell who in 1923 claimed a new type of Pakeha indigeneity in a supposedly 'terra nullis', it argues Pakeha arises out of a distinctly modernist identity: secular, urban, exilic and literary.

Pakeha, as a condition of modernity, arises in the South Island because it is a claim of a type of indigeneity that is situated against the North Island. It arises out of the tensions of a providential land, a desert, a wilderness and a waste land where a new society has to be built from scratch. In this I want to qualify Pakeha as separate from both a New Zealander and from also being European. Pakeha is, as I shall argue, a type of self-description, often by implication, that arises in a specific context amongst a specific group for a specific purpose. What we may come to think of as being Pakeha today is, I argue, based upon these particular ideas, expressions and experiences. This is not to say that Pakeha in this period thought of themselves as necessarily Pakeha; often they saw themselves as New Zealanders, and as creating and expressing a particular type of new New Zealand identity. However, central to this paper is the claim that what we may now claim as the basis of Pakeha identity arises in the beliefs, expressions and experiences of this particular group in a particular context in a particular time. For Pakeha is a condition of modernity. Because of this it is no wonder that we have seen the rejection of the term Pakeha by those seeking the postmodern encompassing of 'New Zealander'. Yet 'New Zealander' is an essentially conservative term which, in its being postmodern, is understandable. For the challenge of Pakeha to New Zealanders is the challenge of a specific identity that may indeed challenge nationalist cultural essentialisms. Not all European New Zealanders are necessarily Pakeha, nor will they necessarily wish to be. For Pakeha is first and foremost a type of modernist belief.

Abstract This paper reports the results of pilot research with New Zealand children aged 8-12 years. These children form part of New Zealand's most rapidly diversifying cohort. The children interviewed were selected from a range of education programmes in the greater Christchurch area. The results compare the ways children talk about citizenship, their communities, and their environment. The findings explore the limits of children's experience of shared communities, collective action and self help citizenship. In the face of rapid change, schools are identified as significant spaces for children to talk across difference and learn about identity through community action.

Te Aroha Hohaia
Public Policy, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington, and Business Manager, Aatea Consultants
National Identity as a Government Priority?

Abstract National identity seems to have first appeared in central government strategic management frameworks when the previous National-led coalition referred to pride in a New Zealand identity in a Strategic Priority and Overarching Goal in 1999. Following the election of the Labour-led government, national identity was specifically identified as one of six Key Goals and by March 2006, national identity was declared as one of three Government Priorities. National identity has risen from being some relatively vague idea to prominence as one of three policy priorities. How so? And why national identity in particular? Having tried to follow what I thought to be a viable trail of documentation that might have explained national identity's rise as a government priority, I realised that the short answer to both questions was and is I don't know. What I did find, however, is that national identity as a government priority is rich ground for further study and discussion around policy questions such as what does it mean for New Zealand to be really a South Pacific nation, what is the relevance of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand's national identity and, of course, what do politicians have in mind when they refer to national identity?

Dr William Jennings
French, Department of Humanities, University of Waikato
Amelie Nothomb and the Construction of Identity

Abstract Contemporary Belgian francophone writer Amelie Nothomb was born in Japan into a diplomatic family and spent her childhood in a number of very different cultures including the China of the 1970s, New York and Bangladesh. This paper examines how Nothomb's characters identify with various cultures and how they attempt to construct their own identity from earliest childhood.

Professor Barry King
School of Communications Studies, Auckland University of Technology
Lord of the Rings and the Re-negotiation of a Kiwi National Identity

Abstract The history of settlement of New Zealand has been argued by some commentators to have created a bi-polar national consciousness - oriented on one front to sustain, despite shifting historical and political allegiances, the special relationship with 'Mother England' and European culture; and on the other, with the 'pre- European' history of Maori settlement.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy with its evocation of a lost age that predates human history is a metaphorical machine that works towards the re- negotiation of New Zealand national identity. By proposing a technocratic imaginative capacity that no longer looks back to the settlement period nor to an Anglophone past, a new imaginative unity is proposed that rests on the common project of producing world class entertainment.

The narrative framing of the LOTR trilogy, its extensive re-configuring - courtesy of computer generated imagery and the craft 'wizardry' of WETA workshops - of the landscape and the peoples of New Zealand as Middle -Earth will be conceptualized as the performance of an imagined community which, via concepts of creativity and Kiwi ingenuity, seeks to resolve the contradictions and tensions of a multicultural society.

In other words, the equation of New Zealand with Middle-Earth works as a fantasy that if accepted provides a shared cultural experience for all those who are fans of LOTR. The attractiveness of identification with this fantasy formation is that it mobilises a rhetoric of world class excellence and global prestige. The limitations of this rhetoric will be assessed.

Dr Catherine Lane West-Newman
Department of Sociology, University of Auckland
Public Emotions and Beaches

Abstract The desirability, or otherwise, of openly expressing and recognizing the power of feelings in social life is currently under debate. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, a contemporary politics of public emotion is shaped through the processes by which ethnic identity is formed and asserted. The proposal and enactment of the Foreshore and Seabed legislation provoked intense and mixed emotions of nostalgia, grief, and fear whose origins and expression were defined through culturally shaped perceptions of injury and entitlement.

Associate Professor Dr Ian J. Lochhead
Art History, School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha
Architecture, Myth and Memory in Twentieth-Century New Zealand

Abstract Architecture provides the physical environment within which the people of a nation spend their daily lives whether at home or at work, as well as providing the context for many of their most important rituals. Birth, marriage and death are (mostly) marked within buildings of one sort or another. The ability of buildings to shape the way in which we think of ourselves is thus ubiquitous, yet it is seldom commented on. This paper, part of a book-length study, looks at the ways in which a small selection of twentieth-century buildings have contributed to our sense of national identity. It begins with the Houses of Parliament in Wellington, a building which superficially has little to say about our sense of identity but which was, in fact, a very clear statement of New Zealand's identity at the time it was built. It examines a group of small country churches, built in Canterbury and North Otago in the 1920s and 1930s, which explore the myths of pioneer life and evoke memories of national origins. Buildings constructed to mark important milestones, such as national and provincial centennials, also address issues of memory while helping to perpetuate the myths we create about ourselves as a nation. The paper will also look at the ways in which Modernism, an architectural idiom which rejected the past, has been used to promote differing approaches to identity in the latter part of the century. The use of decorative motifs derived from Maori art as a means of inflecting buildings with a New Zealand character, will also be examined. The paper will argue that architecture is a fundamental, but little understood, medium for constructing identity, but that the nature of this identity is continually in flux.

Abstract In the 1840s Edward Gibbon Wakefield advocated re-naming places as part of the process of colonising Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2002 the Wellington Tenths Trust proposed re-naming a number of the city's suburbs with Maori names. Place names are clearly not neutral, and the naming of places becomes a locus for contesting identity. This paper traces the ebb and flow of this contestation through the discussion of selected examples, and draws links with the expression of national identity through linguistic change.

Professor Patrick McAllister
Anthropology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Canterbury
Waitangi Day: reflections on national identity and national days

Abstract The paper deals with the multi-faceted nature of Waitangi Day as New Zealand's national day, as manifested in a variety of geographical and institutional settings - Waitangi itself, Okains Bay near Christchurch, and the national media - and in terms of the changing nature of Waitangi Day over time. Some comparisons are made with Australia Day.

Abstract ". . . by then, Puritanism as we know it will be a thing of history and all I have said about the New Zealand character will no longer be true." (Bill Pearson, January 1952)

In 1952 and 1953 Landfall published two long essays on the character of New Zealanders, writer Bill Pearson's 'Fretful Sleepers' and academic Robert Chapman's 'Fiction and the Social Pattern'. In 1954 the American historian Robin Winks published These New Zealanders, also an exploration of the mores and character of New Zealanders, in whose country he had spent 1952 as a Fulbright fellow.
Though the three analyses vary in detail they share much in common, in particular a stress on the conformity and egalitarianism of New Zealand life. All touched on women, Maori and youth but the focus of all three was overwhelmingly on white adult male New Zealanders. In this paper I evaluate the similarities, differences, language and explanatory power of the three analyses. I then explore the extent to which, if at all, their analyses retain validity half a century and more later. I will conclude by considering some contemporary explorations of national identity in the light of these earlier endeavours.

Professor Donald Maurice
New Zealand School of Music, Massey and Victoria Universities
Alfred Hill - the New Zealand Dvorak?

Abstract An investigation into New Zealand's first professional composer's search, at the dawn of the twentieth century, for a national identity through musical composition. After four years of intensive training at the Leipzig Conservatorium, Alfred Hill returned to Wellington in 1891, and began a prolific career composing eventually ten operas, thirteen symphonies, seventeen string quartets and hundreds of works in a wide range of genres. After first-hand experience with the world's greatest composers such as Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikowsky, Bruch, Strauss etc, he was well equipped to generate works in the style of his contemporaries and to this he added elements of the music he encountered amongst the Maori between 1894 and 1910. This was a conscious attempt to establish a musical style with a distinct national identity. While the result may resemble a kind of European folk-influenced style, not unlike Dvorak, the music does in fact have a unique character that in its day was regarded highly by both European and Maori. While today's composers and musicologists have transferred the recognition of a national identity in music to a later generation, a renaissance of interest in the music of Alfred Hill is revealing a remarkable breadth of works embracing not only waiata of the day, but also a deeper search for an expression of Maori identity through a European art-form. This approach of adopting indigenous influences to create a national identity had been witnessed by Hill in Europe in composers such as Tchaikowksy, Smetana and Dvorak and then later by Bartok and Enescu. In order to identify a national identity in New Zealand music, it is essential that this substantial yet almost lost body of music is given recognition in its historical context.

Dr James Meffan
School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
'Culturalism Gone Mad': the play of cultural rhetoric in the invention of New Zealand national identity

Abstract Since the 1980s New Zealand has had an officially bicultural approach to policy. This was initiated in an attempt to acknowledge and do justice to the relationship defined in the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) to which indigenous Maori and the British Crown were signatories. The restoration of the Treaty to the status of 'the founding document of the nation' after over a century of neglect is lauded by many New Zealanders as an appropriate and necessary step in becoming a truly postcolonial nation. For many, our identity as a nation is forged in the spirit of this bipartite contract, despite there being considerable debate over what is actually defined and guaranteed therein. The translation of the document, originally written in English then translated into Maori, has also been to source of debate, as many of the key concepts (pertaining for the most part to of British justice and property rights) had no simple correlative in Maori language or culture.

In this paper I suggest that contemporary attempts to advance issues of postcolonial justice through a process of state-enacted 'culturalism' have led to some interesting confusions in wider New Zealand society. Ironically, a process often figured as clearing the way for a culturally coherent national identity that can adapt to a postcolonial future while acknowledging the past has led to the radical destabilisation of the very relationship between culture and national identity.

Associate Professor Philippa Mein Smith
History, University of Canterbury
Towards a New Intellectual Orientation: antipodean perspectives in the humanities

Abstract This paper builds on insights into imagining the antipodes by J. G. A. Pocock, the British and expatriate New Zealand historian of political thought, and by two Australian scholars, Bernard Smith, the art historian, and the critical theorist, Peter Beilharz. It asks what we can learn from Pocock' and Smith's scholarship on "the antipodean perception" (Pocock, 2005: 3), which in both cases has yet to receive the recognition it deserves on each side of the Tasman, in sketching out a new intellectual orientation for the humanities, and in particular for writing history in - and from - New Zealand. New Zealanders share with Australians the 'antipodean condition' of being both European (mainly British) and New Zealander or Australian (Pocock, 2005: 6; Beilharz, 1997). From New Zealand, the answer to the question: 'Whose antipodes?' is simple: New Zealand is the Antipodes of Britain. The clock tells you so. Located within a history of British colonisation, New Zealand emerges not as another antipodes, but as the Antipodes, at the very edges of modernity. The paper then asks: what significance does the pursuit of an antipodean sensibility have for the concept of national identity, and for the identity stories that communities create for themselves?

Professor Dr Paul Morris
Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
Is This a Christian Country? New Zealand, identity and religious diversity

Abstract In 2006 I was commissioned to write a draft National Statement on Religious Diversity in New Zealand. This statement was the basis of a public discussion in August 2006 and was revised and put out for public consultation by means of individual and group submissions and a series of forums around the country. The responses were impressive both in terms of number and quality and provoked a national discussion on the place of religion in contemporary New Zealand. Editorials, polls, opinion pieces and an edition of CloseUp debated the issue of whether this is a Christian country or a secular one and such questions as do we have religious rights and if so, what are they and what are their limits?

This paper offers an analysis of the responses and the discussion leading up to the endorsement of the Statement at the National Interfaith Forum in Hamilton in February 2007. The focus will be on the deliberations on national and religious identity. The 2006 census figures on religion will provide the foundation for further analysis of religious identity and identities in New Zealand.

The final section of the paper will explore the different possibilities of national religious identity and identities in a New Zealand where the number of Christians has dropped below 50% for the first time with a huge increase in migrant religions and more than a third of the population declaring 'no religion' at all. The implications for national identity will be outlined by way of conclusion.

Dr Camille Nakhid
School of Social Sciences, Auckland University of Technology
The 2006 Review of New Zealand's Immigration Act 1987: shaping Aotearoa/New Zealand's national identity

Abstract The Aotearoa/ New Zealand's government 2006 review of the Immigration Act 1987 was intended to signal the country's commitment to reducing the possibility of breaches to the nation's security. Instead, the proposed changes are likely to result in immigration policies that will restrict the conditions under which applications for residence could be approved and increase the powers of decision-makers to deny access to New Zealand, particularly with regard to refugees. On the surface, the consultation process surrounding this review appeared to be inclusive with a series of government funded and organized meetings between government officials and community groups, and the opportunity for the public to make online or postal submissions. This paper argues that the format of the consultation process and the structure and presentation of the proposed changes was intended to guide the public towards constructing a national identity that would support the government's direction on its immigration policies.

Professor Karen L. Nero
Director, Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury
Early Carolinean and Marshallese Textiles in Aotearoa Museums: toward visual repatriation

Abstract Knowledge and pride in the past are important components of national and cultural identities; museum collections play a key role as repositories of cultural knowledge for artistic knowledge and inspiration. In the past, major museums held pieces drawn from around the globe, to permit learning about other cultures and habitats. How will we as a nation reconceptualize our relations to the peoples whose cultural heritage have come to reside in our museums through multiple paths: as gifts to commemorate relationships, items traded, sold, or perhaps confiscated during colonial periods, or from disparate beginnings entered into international trade? Nations today are recognizing intellectual property rights and establishing residual rights and royalties for the visual arts. How will our museums and cultural institutions reconsider the ethical dimensions of museum collections, and forge and strengthen relationships with the peoples of their cultures of origin? What new technologies may aid these partnerships?

This research draws upon work completed as part of a larger Marsden project Bringing Together Indigenous and Museum Knowledge and Practices in which I inventoried Micronesian pieces held in the major museums of Aotearoa. The Oldman Collection, purchased by a New Zealand subscription to bring back Maori taonga, also includes world-class finely woven and decorated textiles from the Caroline and Marshall Islands of Micronesia, far outside New Zealand's colonial relationships. These pieces have been little exhibited or published, and to their Carolinean and Marshallese descendants today are unexpected treasures. The arts of fine weaving are nearly lost on the islands; few examples survived local conditions. Those preserved in international museums are important to document the artistic skill and knowledge of earlier weavers, and perhaps to access the histories these chiefly textiles once elicited. This research begins the processes of reconnecting the pieces with the descendants of their cultures of origin through documentation and visual images, providing access to the knowledge they contain.

Dr John Newton
English Program, University of Canterbury
Becoming Pakeha

Abstract This paper's title is a mild riposte to Michael King's Being Pakeha and Being Pakeha Now. King's "being" Pakeha reflects a tendency in New Zealand culture at large to think of Pakeha as a kind of pseudo-ethnicity, and hence a fait accompli. A stronger reading of Pakeha identity reminds us, firstly, to speak of culture rather than ethnicity; secondly, that Pakeha culture ('Pakehaatanga'?) is differential - it exists only in relation to Maori; and thirdly, that learning to inhabit this identity (learning what it means to be the 'other' of Maori) is a work-in-progress: a question of "becoming" rather than simply of "being".

Of this work-in-progress, analysing, owning, and attempting to making reparation for the ravages of colonialism is the most urgent and familiar dimension. But we tend to neglect the reciprocal aspect, which is one reason why, particularly in demotic culture, a strong and affirmative reading of Pakeha identity still struggles to find traction.

What happens, then, this paper asks, if we supplement a discourse of acknowledgement and reparation (the proverbial 'liberal guilt') with a discourse of exchange and transaction? "Becoming Pakeha" requires taking ownership, not just of the depredations that Europeans have visited on Maori, but also of the positive debt that Pakeha culture owes to its enabling Other.

By way of indication of what this tabling of cultural debt might look like, where it might fit and what it might offer to emerging formations in the humanities, I will introduce briefly my own work-in-progress on the Jerusalem commune (1969-1975). As a case history of cross-cultural debt, Jerusalem models a formative relationship in terms of which Pakeha culture can learn to understand itself more positively.

Rosslyn Noonan
Chief Commissioner/Te Amokapua, Te Kahui Tika Tangata / Human Rights Commission
Human rights - at the heart of New Zealand's national identity?

Abstract Internationally New Zealand is respected for its perceived strong-commitment, both in principal and in practice, to human rights at home and abroad.

This paper explores the extent to which a human rights dimension has been a distinctive element in New Zealand's development as a nation since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.
It considers perceptions that, among other outcomes, the Treaty provides the basis for racial equality; and it looks at the input of early settler campaigns for workers'rights, universal access to education, and women's suffrage.

The paper also notes New Zealand's contribution to the establishment of the United Nations and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and examines the history of bipartisan support for the ratification of international human rights conventions.

It reflects on how New Zealanders view human rights today, and suggests that human rights are an integral part of our evolving national identity.

Tom Norcliffe
Archivist, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga
Archives New Zealand's Contribution to National Identity

Abstract This paper explores the contribution a national archive, and in particular Archives New Zealand, makes to national identity. It enters the debate about how - or indeed whether - national identity should be defined, and if so what the components of that identity might be. The paper draws on the growing body of international literature which examines what archives, museums and other cultural institutions mean to the lives of individuals and communities. Finally, the paper probes the links between Archives New Zealand as the repository of official records from the past and how New Zealanders see themselves in the 21st century.

National identity is a paradox: both exclusive, marking us as different from the rest of the world, and inclusive, embracing a diversity of histories, cultures and lives lived. Yet there are common stories and characteristics around which our national identity takes shape - stories of immigration and settlement, of our relationship to the land, of resourcefulness and our desire to give others 'a fair go', and of punching above our weight in international sporting contests. Individually, these characteristics are not unique to us. It is their aggregation that makes us New Zealanders and distinguishes us from others. New Zealand's archives help us to establish and maintain our identity by gathering and holding the material through which our unique collection of themes can be found and explored.
Archives do not speak to us only of our past. Archives New Zealand also holds the record of our democracy. As keeper of the public record, Archives New Zealand represents the openness and transparency of government that we prize, and which supports New Zealand's role as a leader in the Pacific and as a respected contributor elsewhere. The role of archives in building citizenship and civil society cannot be overlooked.

Dr Pamela Gerrish Nunn
Associate Professor of Art History, University of Canterbury,
As a Woman, I have no Country

Abstract One of the most vivid manifestations in this country of the women's liberation movement that arose throughout westernised society in the 1970s was the women's art movement. In it and through it an idea of sisterhood or female commonality was advanced, expressed and developed as an alternative identity to those traditionally imposed on women in western society by virtue of their sex, which were visible if not indeed tenacious in both New Zealand traditions (pakeha and maori). This paper asks what presence national identity had in the art generated by New Zealand feminism, given the famous rejection of patriotism voiced by one of the heroines of modern Anglophone feminism, "As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world", and looks at key works to see just how it was rejected, if it was so.

Dr Keith Ovendon
Board of Trustees and Chair of Programmes Committee, New Zealand Portrait Gallery
Portraiture and Identity: the struggle for a National Portrait Gallery.

Abstract The paper offers a brief rehearsal of the importance of portraiture in the history and development of cultural, social and political identity, discussing:

the role played by portrait galleries in other developed democracies, their importance to the contemporary understanding of the past, their histories as institutions of public awareness
a brief history of the New Zealand Portrait Gallery since its foundation in 1989
the present organisation of the Gallery and its position in the web of cultural institutions of Aotearoa New Zealand
the aims of the trustees for the development of the Gallery: the role that we expect it to play in the life of the nation; and the contribution that we believe it can make to the composition of national identity.

Dr Heidi Quinn

Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury
ONZEminer - a digital tool for tracing the origins and development of New Zealand English

Abstract An important means of expressing our national identity is through the way we speak. The comparatively short history of European settlement in New Zealand provides us with the unique opportunity to investigate the emergence of a distinctively New Zealand variety of English.
ONZEminer combines an ever-growing digitized archive of historical and present-day recordings of spoken New Zealand English with search and analysis software developed as part of the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) project at the University of Canterbury. The ONZEminer archive includes interviews with speakers born as early as 1850, which makes it a particularly valuable tool for research into the development of New Zealand English.

In this presentation, I will demonstrate the search and analysis facilities currently available on ONZEminer, and I will present some of our most interesting findings on changes in the sounds and grammar of the English spoken in New Zealand over the last 150 years. The linguistic differences between the early interviews and more recent recordings in the ONZEminer archive reflect New Zealand's changing demographics and cultural orientation, and offer an important insight into the evolution of a collective national identity.

Alison Rutherford
University of Canterbury
"Look, Janet, look": the development of a distinctive national visual identity through the illustrations of the New Zealand School Journal 1940-60.

Abstract The New Zealand School Journal was (and remains) a resource used in one form or another in nearly every classroom in the country. For many children during the mid 20th century the Journal was the only locally produced children's material available to them. In 1940 the School Journal was given the task to reflect better the local conditions of its readers. This was almost immediately evident in the illustrations, and only more slowly discernable in the written material. This paper will investigate the wider impact of the illustrations of the School Journal in the development of a recognisably distinct 'New Zealand' visual identity in the years 1940-1960.

2007 is the centenary year of the School Journal, and this has been marked by a range of celebrations including the publication of A Nest of Singing Birds, a history of the journal by Greg O'Brien. This paper takes a scholarly approach to some aspects of one period of this history.

Abstract Many people claim to identify with more than one nation. For example, a New Zealander who migrated from Wales may identify both with New Zealand and Wales and possibly even the United Kingdom. Yet it goes without saying that such nations (and perhaps all nations) are in some way linked to specific earth-bound territory (i.e. you can sift the dirt of a nation through your fingertips). But what about virtual territory-might there be a form of national identity that could be said to involve nations that do not exist in the real world (i.e. dirt-less, fingerless nations)?
The paper interrogates the nature of online virtual worlds through a discussion of real world nationhood. Specifically, I will apply Benedict Anderson's theory of the nation to the online virtual world, Second Life. In so doing, I will consider the theoretical and practical implications of such an association. Ultimately, I will interrogate what is potentially a new form of nationhood, that is, online virtual world nationhood. The paper presents the theoretical basis for a major project on the interrelationship of virtual world national identity and its real world counterpart.

Philippa K Smith
Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication, Auckland University of Technology
From Heartland to Here to Stay: the role of charismatic documentary presenters in national identity construction

Abstract Broadcast documentary in New Zealand has a history of focusing on nation building which derives from the British film producer and writer John Grierson's belief in the 1930s that documentary should be functional, instrumental, and have "an optimistic exposition of faith in the ability of the nation to surmount its problems" (Goldson, 2004). Heartland - a locally produced television documentary series broadcast in the mid 1990s - was foremost the product of New Zealand's very commercially-driven television broadcast environment and its format, structure and style reflects this along with a Griersonian tone. It sought to address insecurities about New Zealand's national identity in response to social, cultural and political changes the country was undergoing at that time, and used a popular New Zealand personality, Gary McCormick, as presenter which made the programme more appealing to viewers.

In 2007, a documentary series with a similar theme Here to Stay was broadcast on New Zealand television with each episode involving a different New Zealand personality as its presenter and highlighting their own ethnic origins as an important element in the construction of the nation. Using critical discourse analysis this paper compares the two documentaries and their use of familiar charismatic personalities as their presenters in building a national identity for New Zealanders through television. Included in the analysis is an examination of the socio-cultural environment surrounding each programme separated by a period of more than ten years, with the latter falling under the requirement of the TVNZ Charter to "provide shared experiences that contribute to a sense of citizenship and national identity."

Charlotte Steel
College of Art, University of Canterbury
The Problem of Landscape

Abstract This paper argues for recognition that the New Zealand obsession with the iconic national landscape is detrimental to the development of a balanced and fully functioning national society. It specifically critiques the way these landscapes are created, presented and received as a form of visual piety in contemporary New Zealand, because without engaging with and understanding what surrounds us as New Zealanders we cannot understand what "we" are if anything. Such landscapes appear to be national because they are literally perceived to be common ground, the national landscape is presented to New Zealanders and received by New Zealanders as a unified Ã¢â‚¬Ëœface of the nation. This paper argues that national icons in actuality serve to hide the underlying fragmentation of 'New Zealand' culture and society and that it is only through critiquing the landscape that we can be freed from the tyranny of the image that presents a post-'religious' 'opiate of the masses'.The underlying focus of this paper is that whilst 'our' national landscape was propagated to nullify the voice of the dissenter and those different to 'us' in the latter half of the twentieth century that in actuality the forced acceleration of national culture and identity has in fact created an identity paradoxically entrenched in nihilism.

Whilst acknowledging that the development of the New Zealand landscape precedes the latter half of the Twentieth Century this paper suggests that the current obsession with the national landscape as the 'face of the nation' dramatically accelerated to its maturity as what is essentially a patriot's canon aiming to unite all through a devoted sense of identity related to a common place within this period. This occurred notably in response to white unease associated with increasing Maori activism and pacific immigration, and changing government economic policy. Furthermore, using the works of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach and Jean Baudrillard I will argue that such a canon is destined to fail in its attempt to unite because the belief propagated reflects nothing other than what it 'is' which is a strained attempt at national identity and not anything outside/beyond/behind this attempted unity. The problem with critiquing, deconstructing and revealing the emptiness of the national (identifying) landscape is that its erasure reveals the reality of the absence of identity and culture. We thus believe in the landscape because without belief in the landscape we are confronted with an underlying nihilism.

Abstract Our national identity is part of our society, and our society is strengthened "by the social identity transmitted from person to person and generation to generation." The 20th century ended with Ã¢â‚¬Å“recently arrived but strong new migrant cultures "and a growing cross-cultural sense" (Statistics New Zealand http://www.stats.govt.nz/analytical-reports/looking-past-20th-century/culture-national-identity/default.htm). Yet we need to ask how well these new migrants, particularly those who do not speak English as a first language, are integrated into this national identity. For them becoming part of New Zealand society is indeed a challenging process. As one student noted sadly, "Outside is no friendly."
This paper discusses a research study that was one of the exploratory projects of the government's "Learning for Living" programme. The study focused on the pathways provided for EAL (English as an additional language) students at our university to help them integrate into New Zealand society. 234 students from a wide range of ethnicities and national groups as well as the 28 staff members involved in their education participated in the study. A number of key challenges faced by these students and their educators were highlighted. This paper identifies these challenges and suggests possible changes in both government and institutional policy that could facilitate the integration of these students into the wider New Zealand society in a way that will foster a sense of shared identity and community.

Dr Luke Strongman
Lecturer in Humanities, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand
The Best of Men Declines: post-nationalism in the poetry of Vincent O'Sullivan

Abstract Talking in interview with Alan Riach in 1992, Vincent O'Sullivan would claim:
"It is very difficult for anyone to consider him or herself as 'purely' a New Zealand writer. Whether for racial reasons or matters of choice or because of where you've lived, you must have made yourself accessible to other influences. I'm convinced that there is no such thing as a fully formed, totally integrated conception of what being a New Zealander is. It was an obsession, almost, with writers and thinkers in the thirties and forties and fifties and then it went out of fashion. But the point is we're no closer to really knowing what New Zealand culture is now than we were then."

A decade-and-a-half has passed since Professor O'Sullivan's interview with Alan Riach. It is timely for an assessment of O'Sullivan's questioning of the validity of essentialisms with regard to national identity in literature and his evasion of a relativism which would recapitulate his pluralist notions of identity with a wholly neoliberalist interpretation of culture. More in particular, it is also timely to explore how O'Sullivan's tableau is reflected in aspects of his poetry in the sequence of volumes beginning with the Montana winner, Seeing You Asked (1998), continued with Lucky Table (2001, a Montana runner-up) and recently capped by the Montana winning Nice Morning For It Adam (2004). Such an undertaking will inevitably reflect continuities and discontinuities.

The main continuities are a reaffirmation that as K. O. Arvidson claimed in 1983: "His [O'Sullivan's] is a poetry of ideas" and O'Sullivan's use of irony as a poetic and teleological device. The discontinuities reflect a shift, which is largely that of context, from O'Sullivan's depiction of the minutiae of small-town institutions in his poetry to a poetical lexicon that, for a decade at least, has been more overtly compatible with theory. In this respect O'Sullivan's poetry since the 1990s articulates a form of post-nationalism which problematises the concept of unity in order to avoid the twin charges of essentialism or post-modern relativism. Through his poetry, O'Sullivan seeks on the one hand to resist a hegemony that derives from unselfreflexive examinations of situatedness in place that might otherwise revise and critique the unified subject, and on the other hand a linguistic relativism that is politically ineffective in conveying the particularities of relatedness, which might imagine difference from the ideologies of late-capitalism, which seek to contain it.

Abstract Digital technologies offer humanists new ways to find and analyse resources, conduct research, build relationships, present their scholarship to wider audiences, and share their knowledge with students.

The New Zealand government has placed national identity at the centre of its Digital Strategy, which hopes to bring about social and economic transformation through ubiquitous high speed connectivity, content creation and confidence-building initiatives. In each of these areas, there is the potential for humanists to be active agents - setting the terms of engagement, shaping the technologies and putting them to use as part of new research and new ways of working.

This panel will describe some New Zealand initiatives in the areas of digitisation, collaboration using the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN), and digital research repositories, and will describe their value to, and impact on, humanities researchers. We also hope to draw out discussion on a number of issues:

New Zealand's place in global research networks: what are some of the benefits and risks?
a national framework: what is the impact of government strategies, policy and funding?
capability building: what is required for us to make the most of digital technologies, and not just be transformed by them?

Dr Derek Wallace

School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
Unity and/or Identity?

Abstract Appeals to 'national identity' appear to be a way of invoking 'national unity' while avoiding the negative connotations of the latter term. This covers over the difficult question of how some semblance of unity or consensus might be achieved in a heterogeneous society. The argument in this paper is that unity can at best only be achieved historically, and is always incomplete at a given moment. Reference is made to a concept of 'double national imaging' which could help to mediate the ongoing search for unity.

Dr Patricia Te Arapo Wallace
Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury
Exploring the Interface of Science and Matauranga Maori

Abstract Whatever happened to the indigenous science of Aotearoa and how do we define knowledge? It is impossible to support the development of cultural knowledge in Aotearoa New Zealand without acknowledging the science and technologies which enabled our Maori tipuna to survive in the world they knew. Yet despite New Zealand's official endorsement of biculturalism and acknowledgement of Maori as Treaty partners, we still know comparatively little about many of the skills and expertise that were once traditional knowledge. Western notions of science and scientific methodologies are still privileged in comparison to the weight (e.g. funding) given to research of indigenous and local knowledge that might employ different modes of investigation from those within the western scientific paradigm. In terms of matauranga Maori, only the tip of an iceberg is being addressed. In order to research and understand the depth of unwritten history of Maori science, different approaches are needed: substantial integrated multi-disciplinary research of resources found predominantly in the domain of the humanities is required to retrieve the profundity of traditional knowledge that will help lead us to a deeper understanding of our cultural identity

Professor Mark Williams
English Programme, University of Canterbury
The Other from Elsewhere: Arrested Encounters in Bicultural New Zealand

Abstract In this paper I explore a particular recurring concentration in New Zealand writing about racial otherness and its effects upon the way Chinese people as immigrants are seen, or not seen: that is the predilection in both Maori and Pakeha writing for seeing cultural difference in terms only of the local other. I see this as the result of a dualistic interpretation of colonial contact (one that excludes those who fall between or outside the polar definitions) and the mutual reinforcements of symbiotic forms of culturalism and nationalism. The effect of this concentration is that kinds of difference that introduce complexity into the binary of Maori and Pakeha, especially the difference of Asia, have been ignored, side-stepped or treated antagonistically. I wish to pursue these ideas by looking at two periods of New Zealand literary culture: late-colonial and postcolonial, Maoriland and Aotearoa. I wish to use as my point of entry into these periods not the presence but the absence of Chinese characters and of interest in Chineseness in New Zealand literature by comparison with the prodigious display of interest in Maoriness in both colonial and postcolonial writing. This disproportion is, I believe, more telling than the overt expressions of antagonism towards Chinese encount-ered in colonial writing. My reason for this focus on relative absence is in part motivated by anxiety about how to write about that which does not much exist. But the plan also allows me to focus on two periods in New Zealand literary and cultural history which are generally seen as being at odds, but which I see as having much in common and which seem to me to delineate crucial points of blindness and repetition in cultural understanding in this country: Maoriland when Maori appeared in decorative and often dying form in settler literature; and the bicultural 1980s when Pakeha again developed a possessive interest in Maori culture while Maori writers like Ihimaera, Grace and Hulme captured the national imaginary with narratives designed to end the ghostliness of Maori presence, to make Maori culture real, immediate and present in a literature which had both advertised and 'disappeared' them.

In seeing these periods as connected - in conceiving of the postcolonial as a continuation of the colonial - I am claiming that the emphasis on Maori over other cultural identities, especially Asian, in both settler and bicultural white writing indicates that the Pakeha demand for identity cannot tolerate multiple or porous alternatives. By preserving a binary relationship with an Other conceived in romantic terms that reflects positively on themselves Pakeha have sought to grant distinctiveness to their culture and protect the homogeneity of their notion of nation. I also assert that at the point when Maori writers, politicians and intellectuals embrace an idea of nationalism as the total assertion of a culture defined and made complete by its dualistic relation to settlerdom and its sentimental relation to place, they risk entering into the realm of Maoriland - a Maoriland in which they now have greater control over the imageries and discourses which represent their culture but which still turns on the colonial moment. Maoriland writing imprisoned Maori in a heritage version of their past; in Maori Renaissance writing the past serves Maori not settler culturalism, but the effects are still self-limiting. Where Maoriland writing swallows the other so that it becomes an external sign of the essential virtue of the self, Maori Renaissance writing ejects the other but also retains it as a necessary orienting point of self-differentiation. By embracing a culturalist explanation of history and identity the Maori Renaissance sense of otherness replicates that of the settlers but inverts its system of value. In both cases third parties are unwelcome: hence the uneasy and truncated discourses about immigration and multiculturalism in New Zealand. Identities grounded in place and continuity cannot easily contemplate the disconnections of migrancy, and neither Pakeha nor Maori see themselves as migrants.

My concern, then, is with encounters within the imaginary. In these encounters each party wants the other exclusively to themselves. Both need to assure themselves that their relation to the other guarantees continuous belonging in the place and thus authentic cultural being. Introduced into this joint struggle for indigenous status, the migrant figure is deeply unsettling. In Maoriland, Maori as an extension of the settler enterprise lend their claim to indigenous belonging to the settler. Even the break of bicultural Pakeha writing with its colonial sources leaves no room for third parties because the desire is still to render the immigrant as at home, not really an immigrant at all - not like the Chinese. The anxious theme of voyaging and distance in so much modernist New Zealand writing is not recognition of immigrant status but a means of attaching white voyages to the new home to precursive and justifying Polynesian ones. It is the Chinese who, for colonials and postcolonials, represent migrancy, a perilous and noxious condition of unsettlement which, unchecked, threatens to reduce all the inhabitants of New Zealand to the same unfixed and insecure status. And this fear of drift, of not being able to claim authentic standing, is countered by forms of culture produced in opposition to each other that actually support the other - but not the other from elsewhere.

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OUR WORK

Achieving the Objective

Examples of this work include:

The Humanities Research Network Te Whatunga Rangahau Aronui

Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand

Submissions on Policy Issues

Projects to increase research funding to the arts and humanities-aronui and their contribution to government policy development

Projects to increase recognition of distinguished and innovative work in the arts and humanities-aronui

Maintaining and developing relations with like organisations

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Transformations 2007