Making sense of a small state The body of memory and the ritual of acknowledgement in Aotearoa - New Zealand. Monograph Four

66 Pages·2012·1.089 MB·English

by  Peter Cleave

 Campus Press Monograph 4
Making sense of a small state
The body of memory
and the ritual of acknowledgement
in Aotearoa - New Zealand
Peter Cleave
Cover Images:
‘Waitangi’ by Marcus King
‘Bell Jar’ by Liam Barr. 2012
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 Campus Press Monograph 4
Campus Press Monograph 4
ISBN 978-0-9941192-8-5
Campus Press
36 Parata Street
Palmerston North
He kitenga kanohi He hokinga whakaaro
A face seen, a thought returned
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The signing of the Treaty.
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Introduction
This Monograph is about memory, its mass and the way it moves. By ‘body
of memory’ it is meant that things are made sense of, things line up or
aggregate in some way to form an impression or to help make a sense
of belonging or ownership. Separate items like the signing of the Treaty
of Waitangi in 1840 or Gallipoli in the 1914-18 war or the All Blacks in
2015 are put together in a full and sometimes systematic, strong or even
powerful way in a shape, a corpus of feelings and cues, visual and aural. By
ritual of acknowledgement is meant the repetition of memorials or, after
Foote (1997) and Mazer(2011) memorialisations, of acknowledgments that
people, in a taken-for-granted way, make of past events that make sense of
their past, present and future, the way they acknowlege their identity on,
say, Anzac Day or Waitangi Day with attendance at dawn ceremonies that
follow a pattern of action in a ritual commemoration.
The Monograph, the fourth in a series from Campus Press, builds on
earlier papers such as Memory, Body and Dance in tekaharoa.com (2014).
Here though the emphasis is on memory and system more than memory
and event. In earlier work the systematic collection and reflection upon
memories has been discussed especially with reference to Mazer’s (2011)
work and that perspective is retained and developed below.
Many of the examples are to do with Aotearoa-New Zealand and the
finding of identity through memorialisation an a small, fairly new state.
Writing by Mazer (2011) on memorialisation and dance and Foote (1997)
on memorialisation are taken as reference points for the first section,
‘Dance Examples’ and then writings on identity doubt, the doubt of so
called shared social memories are featured in the second section. These
are drawn upon from earlier Campus Press publications such as Theories of
Art, Performance and Society (2012a) and Dance and Identity in Aotearoa
and the World (2012b) considering commentary on Aotearoa-New Zealand
from a number of writers such as West (2012), Wevers(2009) and others.
This, so far, is doubt about the ethnic identities found in the state rather
than doubts about the efficacy or the use of the state. Such questions as
whether the state in Aotearoa-New Zealand is the best arangement for its
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citizens or questions such as whether a state necessarily needs or meets an ethnic
identity are not addressed here in any length.
In the third section there is a questioning of Dalmatian identity and recent
memorialisations such as Tararaa Day in West Auckland (cf Cleave 2012a). As
with one or two earlier discussions there is a personal dimension here for me
as someone of Dalmatian descent. This section extends the discussion of doubt
and also looks at identity formation in a small state with strong educational and
communications sectors.
This Monograph differs from earlier ones in that it is discursive with some
sweeping assertions that cannot be fully explored in a work of this length. With
respect, for example, to the phrase, ‘rituals of acknowledgement’, such events
as Waitangi Day or Anzac Day are mentioned but nor analysed in any depth. That
is left for further work, perhaps a book of several hundred pages. At the same
time and without wanting to put a construction on her work , the attention to
Sharon Mazer’s writing in the first section, ‘Dance Examples’, might, in one or two
respects, go over comparable ground.
How do people make sense of a small state? There are many ways to do this with
any state, small or big. This is a study of a small state using the way of memory in
the first instance. Making sense of a state or situating a state, small or big, might
be a continuous process whereby people are constantly realising new senses
of or resituating their state. Sidaway and Mayall (2007) talk about resituating
a state with reference to the making of a monument to 9/11 in the USA. Here
there is the resituating, to steal their word, with Biculturalism in the last three
decades, say, of the twentieth century involving the locale, current or traditional
(cf Kawharu 2010), of Waitangi and in the twentieth century, most recently seen
in the Jackson Anzac exhibitions in Wellington in 2015 with the locales of Gallipoli
or Passchendale. Here, even though in a Monograph like this there are many more
questions and answers, the emphasis is on the memory of moment and place and
then the sequencing of these to give a fulfilling sense of meaningful history, of
story, of myth.
My thanks to all involved including people who have given feedback over the last
few years and before.
Peter Cleave
Hokowhitu. November 2015
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Contents
1 Dance examples
2 Writings on identity doubt
3 Making sense of the identities
we are given. Tararaatanga?
4 Conclusions for now
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The Dance Examples
How does memorialisation work? Recent commentary on dance might be
a place to start examining this question and writing by Sharon Mazer and
others is considered below drawing extensively from earlier published
work (Cleave 2014). Later some of the thinking described in this section
is applied to writings on identity, especially identity in the small state of
Aotearoa-New Zealand.
Distinguishing dance from movement may be a matter of state of mind, of
invested meaning. Dance in English seems easy to define but when we get
to phrases like ‘the dance of desire’ or ‘we were lead on a merry dance’
and when we try and untangle dance from stance or, in some cases, trance
and the dance of an eyebrow or a look we need to carefully describe what
is going on.
Maori dance might be translated as kanikani Maori. Kanikani means to
move back and forth and it is a general term for dance. Haka, taki, waiata
a ringa and various other forms of dance, strut and movement of the
hands and other parts of the body while singing are considered below
on their own terms as much as possible. Some terms have changed
remarkably over time. Haka itself may have, at an earlier time, meant to
crouch (Shennan 1975). Kapa means team or group. Kapa Haka, literally
a group involved in Haka, has come to be a carry-all term for activities in
performance on stage as well as displacing the terms of waiata a ringa or
action song and the English phrase, ‘concert party’.
One difference, traditionally speaking, between kanikani and the other
terms is that this term refers to dancing in the light sense as opposed to
serious action. Haka was, and is, an invitation and a precursor to war, to
actual violence. Haka is not only not quite dance it is not even dance in
certain respects. Haka is not quite war.
Memory seems easy to define but, as the discussion below shows, it
is not. The same is true of the body in certain respects. Body in Maori
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is translated as tinana. We are talking about kiko, flesh and matters
corporeal. Memory is something found in the mind or the seat of the
emotions, hinengaro, or in the viscera, ate, in the catching of a thought,
maumahara, it is a returning of thought, he hokinga whakaaro.
Memory need not happen in the mind and this may be true across
cultures. In the Maori case the word used for mind, hinengaro and
the word used for heart, ngakau may not, at least not necessarily, be
distinguished along the same lines as body and soul, body and mind as set
out in the maps of people found elsewhere.
Work by Sharon Mazer and others about Kapa Haka in general and the
performer Mika in particular talks about these three things, memory, body
and dance, Maori dance in particular with specific reference to Mika and
Kapa Haka. We might approach this work through three focal points set
out by Mazer (Mazer 2011). These are to do with the proscenium, the idea
of memorialisation and desire in the presentation of the body.
In the discussion of these points raised by Mazer other commentators such
as Hamilton (2006), Greenwood and Wilson (2006), Matthews (2004) and
Karetu (1993) are also considered. At the same time there is an attempt to
consider performance in traditional hui (Salmond 1975, Cleave 2009) and
in Kapa Haka (Shennan 1984) in order to provide a context.
The orientations of actor and spectator, audience and performer, real
time in the audience space and imagined time on stage, at a point beyond
the proscenium, are critical and yet, in a cross cultural situation such as a
consideration of Kapa Haka they may be misunderstood
In ‘Performing Māori: Kapa Haka on the Stage and on the Ground’,
published in Popular Entertainment Studies (Vol. 2, Issue 1, pp. 41 53
in 2011) Mazer establishes a link between past and present and pays
attention to the significance of history. The audience at Kapa Haka, says
Mazer, ‘acts back’. At the same time it might be suggested, following but
not directly quoting Mazer, that the Kapa Haka performance itself ‘acts
back’ to a past, it works to a script of memorialisation, of breaking up and
reformulating the past as a matter of sharp, clear and coherent identity.
Sharon Mazer says that Kapa Haka is a formal performance practice arising
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