The Politics of the Past

Peter Gathercole, David Lowenthal, P. Gathercole, D. Lowenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134866427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

'History is written by the winners' is the received wisdom. This book explains why historical interpretation has to incorporate perspectives from those other than 'winners', and demonstrates archaeology's crucial role in this wide-ranging approach. The book draws more on Africa, Afro-America, Australasia and Oceania than on Europe, the source of the traditionally dominant perspective in archaeology. The four organizing themes of The Politics of the Past are the forms and consequences of the Eurocentric heritage, the conflicting perspectives of rulers and ruled, the significance of administrative and institutional rivalries, and the cleavages that divide professional from popular views of archaeology.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and other scholars will find The Politics of the Past illuminating and provocative. It will enrich historical and archaeological inquiry and interpretation, and ramify their relevance for public policy.

RULERS AND RULED

Introduction

It is not only in a Eurocentric context that one finds unequal access to resources and unequal awareness of, and control over, heritage. The benefits derived from or denied by the relics of the past distinguish the few from the many, rich from poor, mainstream from minority, male from female. Archaeology, which is now called upon to understand and even to mediate such differences, plays a role as significant for shaping the present as for understanding the past. Archaeological responses to these distinctions, and to the confrontations they generate, are discussed in the chapters in this section.

Often schooled, funded, and explicitly directed by national agencies, archaeologists—especially those outside Europe and North America—now face serious dilemmas. The colonized and the dispossessed manifest mounting bitterness against scholarly inquiries into sites and artefacts sacred to them as embodiments of ancestral spirits, and they increasingly press to prohibit such invasive desecration. Conflicts over site control generate much antipathy. In this emotional climate, each archaeologist must come to terms with pressures from rulers and ruled that may affect funding, access, and partisan loyalties.

Chapters 7 to 10 deal with intensifying conflicts in New Zealand, Hawaii, and Australia, where, over the past 200 years, European conquest has overwhelmed aboriginal cultures. The earlier inhabitants have been thrust aside by expansionist, technologically advanced, and materialistic Westerners (including, in the case of Hawaii, Japanese and Chinese as well), with the Eurocentric consequences discussed in the first part of this book. Descendants of Europeans and of autochthonous peoples continue to differ fundamentally in their attitudes towards land and property and in their ideas about the nature and significance of heritage—differences of major political import.

These four chapters share a concern with efforts by native minorities to secure or confirm control over sacred sites and artefacts, to recover relics and skeletal materials taken from them by collectors and museums, and to safeguard the sanctity of their heritage against further violations. In these efforts, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maoris, and Hawaiians resemble many other Fourth World peoples—notably Native Americans—with whom they now seek common cause.

Several related circumstances make issues of heritage control exceptionally difficult to resolve. First, native concepts of heritage go well beyond specific, isolated sites; they include entire territories, for sacredness may inhere not simply in localities but in the movements of nomadic peoples over vast tracts, exemplified in Australian Aborigine ‘Dreamtime’ peregrinations discussed by Creamer (Ch. 10). Secondly, archaeological findings about such peoples are apt to conflict with their own highly elaborated and socially significant oral histories. The affirmation of these narratives of origin, migration, and genealogical interconnection owes less to analytical scholarship than to continuing tribal involvement in recollecting, commemorating, and re-enacting such histories.

Thirdly, diverse majority concerns also conflict with one another. Land developers’ interests may clash with those of tourist entrepreneurs, those of homesteaders with guardians of culture, those who treat aborigines as enemies to be denigrated or despoiled with those who seek to support, adapt to, or adopt native modes of valuing environment and history. This is especially striking in New Zealand, where O’Regan (Ch. 7) and Butts (Ch. 8) show how the reassertion of traditional Maori values, discrediting an intervening self-image more tolerant of Pakeha dominance, both challenges and serves to refashion contemporary Pakeha identity.

Implications for archaeological understanding and practice of all these themes are illumined here. Attempts to reassert and reaffirm native heritage interests have generated quarrels that show how intensely political a calling archaeology now is. O’Regan, a Ngai Tahu Maori, surveys from an indigenous standpoint Maori moves, often explicitly political, to gain control of the organs that represent their own history in New Zealand. In the local New Zealand setting, Butts discusses the significance of the lead the Ngati Kahungunu tribe has taken in shaping displays of their own heritage at the Hawke’s Bay Art Gallery and Museum. The impact of archaeology on Aboriginal Australian attitudes toward their own past, and how such interactions might affect control over and access to archaeological sites, are examined by Creamer. Dealing with another part of the Pacific, Spriggs (Ch. 9) reviews how the archaeological discipline and its practitioners have been characterized in the Honolulu media, in the light of archaeologists’ own disputes over the troubled future of sacred Hawaiian sites.

The other chapters elaborate on different views of the past held by rulers and ruled in national, international, and professional contexts. Seeden (Ch. 11) outlines the appalling consequences of differential recognition of, access to, and uses of the archaeological heritage among elites and others in war-torn Lebanon. The heritage of the Lebanese upper class is largely biblical, Eurocentric, art-historical. The general populace, mainly sub-consciously connected with its own roots, and now totally deprived of access to displays even of the elite heritage, views the past in terms of metal detectors and export commodities: it deploys archaeological expertise not to develop or cherish a cultural identity but to sell it off.

The exploitation of women by men, whether deliberate or unconscious, is addressed in Jones and Pay’s discussion (Ch. 12) of gender-linked roles among archaeologists themselves, still preponderantly male. Moreover, male-oriented constructions of knowledge have overwhelmingly shaped contemporary archaeological theory, museum presentations, and public attitudes.

Surveying the roles of museums in Scotland and Nigeria, Willett (Ch. 13) provocatively compares these two lands, one anciently, the other recently, subjected to English hegemony. One case involves a people long unified by culture but for several centuries now deprived of autonomy; the other a congeries of tribal groupings brought together willy-nilly into a new nation by the exigencies of imperial boundary-making. In both, rival national, regional, and local interests assert competing identities through museum displays of polemicized pasts. The issues Willett explores here underline the institutional and administrative problems discussed later in this book.

7 Maori control of the Maori
heritage
STEPHEN O’REGAN

The presence of Maori culture, history, and language in New Zealand’s cultural life has been enormously enhanced over the past few decades, fuelled by a burgeoning Maori population increasingly confident of itself and its direction. Maori affairs in one form or another feature in school and university curricula and are slowly but surely becoming more prominent on radio and television; traditional and contemporary Maori arts are flourishing.

Teachers and broadcasters are not the only professional communities affected by this surge of Maori cultural identity and assertion. Ethnologists, curators, anthropologists, and archaeologists have found themselves under increasingly critical Maori scrutiny. People who have devoted their professional and scholarly careers to Maori culture, history, and prehistory are being challenged by a growing determination that Maoris should define and interpret Maori culture. The view that Maori people and tribal communities are the primary proprietors of the Maori heritage, to which Pakeha (New Zealanders of Caucasian descent) have only a secondary claim, is gaining widespread acceptance among Maori people. Some hold the position that Pakeha and the larger New Zealand society should have no role at all in managing or making decisions about Maori culture. Maori sovereignty and cultural autonomy are being asserted as goals.

The idea that primary proprietorship of Maori culture should lie with ethnic Maoris is not in itself particularly startling. Indeed, it is implicitly accepted throughout New Zealand and is reflected in legislation dealing with Maori land and language, historical places and national parks, and in the administration of arts and heritage.

But if the idea is implicitly accepted, its explicit assertion seems less welcome. Many New Zealanders perceive it as separatist and divisive. It is considered an assault on national canons of race relations. Put forward as bicultural and multicultural, these canons enthrone the idea of ‘two cultures, one nation’ or ‘two peoples, one nation’. Under these vague umbrellas Pakeha people are exhorted and encouraged towards bilingualism, cultural competence, and cultural sensitivity.

Ironically, much of the thrust towards greater Pakeha competence in Maori culture has come from Maoris themselves. Pakeha professional and educational courses are now commonly held at Maori marae (see glossary). In a wide range of ways Maoridom has become welcoming to and inclusive of non-Maori people.

A significant proportion of Pakeha New Zealanders are interested in and supportive of Maori cultural and political aspirations. Some measure of competence in Maori language and a general familiarity with Maori perceptions of New Zealand history are now considered necessary ingredients in the cultural kit of the educated New Zealander. Competence in things Maori is becoming part of New Zealandness—one of the main marks that distinguish Pakeha from other peoples of European descent throughout the world.

As the Pakeha move, however hesitant, towards bicultural competence, Maori claims to primary proprietorship of Maori culture and heritage cast a cloud on prospects of bicultural amity. The insistent questions arising among both Maori and Pakeha are: To whom does Maori culture belong? Who has the right to control and manage the Maori heritage? Who can speak authentically for it?

The immediate response is ‘Why, Maori, of course’, but then comes the qualifier ‘but this rich heritage surely belongs to all New Zealanders. Increased awareness and respect by us all enlarges and enriches our bicultural society. It strengthens the quality of our life together and enlarges the cultural potential of our common future. That’s why Pakeha people are learning to speak Maori, visiting marae, buying books on Maori, going to Maori courses and so on.’

Many, especially younger, Maori are uneasy about this response and the vision it represents. They fear that the increasing status of things Maori in the larger New Zealand society merely portends the further removal of their heritage into those white hands with status and power. They see increasing Pakeha interest and competence in Taha Maori as a portent of greater Pakeha control over Maori education, resources, and decision-making. Growing Maori concern over massive and worsening disparity in educational achievement and its relationship to social and economic opportunity is a feature of social debate in New Zealand.

Disastrous Maori education statistics support those fears. Access to knowledge about Maori language, history, and art is increasingly confined to those whose education and economic position enable them to take advantage of it. While more and more Maori achieve such knowledge, far more are distanced from it by the widening social and economic gap between Maori and Pakeha. Resentment at the Pakeha takeover of things Maori is increasing in a community of which 85 per cent are under 25 and whose access to mainstream status is diminishing. As access to the Maori heritage is increasingly mediated through mainstream culture, that heritage is seen to be passing inexorably into Pakeha hands.

Few Maoris who are actually disadvantaged in terms of wealth, education, and employment are conscious of their disinheritance, however, or realize their distance from their Maori heritage. They are aware only of a general sense of resentment. The articulation of resentment on their behalf is undertaken by a small number of younger educated Maori. It is they who react with hostility to being taught Maori language by Pakeha, who rail against Pakeha authors on Maori topics. It is they who talk of Maori sovereignty and Maori command over Maori culture and would limit Pakeha participation in things Maori. They give voice to the wider sense of dispossession and loss of control over what should be part of oneself.

Thus a genuine and deeply felt will to share Maori culture with the wider New Zealand society exists side by side with resentment at Pakeha occupation of Maori heritage. The less secure culturally a Maori feels the greater the sense of personal inadequacy and potential for resentment; feelings far more potent than any bicultural logic.

Yet although resentment at cultural takeover is most outspoken among the young and the culturally inadequate, a more substantial body of concern is emerging among informed elders and the essentially conservative Maori leadership, the culturally confident, mild-mannered paepae Maori who dominate official relationships with the Pakeha establishment. This group is also the best informed in the heritage realm that especially involves museums, art galleries, and academe. The enormous attention focused on Maori heritage by the Te Maori Exhibition has been most troubling for this group in particular, as detailed below.

Scholarship and the Maori

Conflict and change in Maori attitudes towards Pakeha scholarship on their culture and h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Heritage of Eurocentricity
• Rulers and Ruled
• Politics and Administration
• Archaeology and the People
• Conclusion: Archaeologists and Others