Papers of Contest

Papers of Contest

Third Edition









Peter Cleave







ISBN

978-1-877229-28-2


Campus Press
26 Sycamore Crescent
Palmerston North

Thanks to Micah and the team
at Warehouse Stationery
Palmerston North

Thanks to Julie Lyons for editorial work

Bound by New Life Bookbindings
28 Avenue Rd
Greenmeadows
Napier




Introduction

The theme of this collection of papers is contest. There is a challenge in each paper.

The first paper looks at literacy in the nineteenth century in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

In the next paper conventional research is challenged with an idea of indigenous modes of inquiry.

The following paper looks at confrontational theatre and film in the 1990s.

The discussion of Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow considers images, symbols and the art of a place, a country, I suppose.

The review of Martin Blythe's book involves several of the themes so far considered as well as others and tries to describe an exciting analysis.

The consideration of the native, the outlaw and the frontier widens the perspective of the collection.

The rest of the papers in the collection take the idea of contest into different areas.

The discussion of Suzie Cato takes the discussion into mainstream media in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

By contrast the next article looks at work with perhaps more limited but nonetheless highly critical audiences and the construction of or the playing with a notion of the Pakeha-Maori.

The final paper is a consideration of the grotesque. This raises a number of questions that are left hanging and that, I suppose, is what happens in a collection with the theme of contest,

Peter Cleave



Contents

1 Said and heard, written and read
Page 7

2 Wahi rangahau: places of inquiry
Page 17

3 Native voice: 1981 and all that
Page 57

4 Francis Pound: History, art and the semi colon
Page 67

5 A review of Martin Blythe
Page 79

6 Native, outlaw and frontier myth
Page 85

7 Suzie Cato says 'Kia ora...'
Page 97

8 Negotiating and constructing the Pakeha-Maori in 'The Piano', 'Monday's Warriors' and elsewhere
Page 105

9 The projection of the grotesque; Maori and Pakeha-Maori in 'The Piano' and the construction of the ignoble savage in Aotearoa
Page 117


1
Said, heard, written, read

What do we assume and what do we really know about literacy in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the nineteenth century? And what do we assume and know about oral expression in the same period?

In Aotearoa, the first culture of expression was oral. There was, as there is today, whaikorero done in terms of strict kawa, whakapapa recited to show genealogy and other relationships, kinds of speech for kinds of occasions. And then there was regular, everyday speech.

While Maori may have seen print in the hands of whlers and sealers print was introduced to the local population by the missionaries. Colenso was one of the main people involve in printing presses. Later came newpapers in Maori like Te Hokioi and Te Tiwaiwaka in the 1850s.

Letterwriting was itself something of an art with quills, copperplate styles and the like and Wiremu Tamehana and others applied themselves to letterwriting, especially letters to the government on behalf of iwi.

There are few records of love letters, novels, short stories or poems written by Maori in the nineteenth century. In the main the uses of literacy were religious and this involved reading, the reading of the Bible and political and this involved writing, the writing of letters to express the will of an iwi or hapu.

As well as these distinct uses of literacy there are other ways to look at literacy- as a help or as a hindrance. Moon (2000) sees literacy in the early nineteenth century as a matter of transition as this term is used in modernisation theory. Literacy is integral to modernisation.

Literacy is also part of colonisation and it involves a decrease or an alteration in the significance of orality. There is the image of a light going on when literacy is mastered so that people may see, may understand. This is pernicious when the idea is that the colonised will see and understand the point of view of the coloniser.

Moon (ibid) makes a critical appraisal of reading and writing and comes up with some interesting arguments about literacy. He draws on the work of Freidmann (1992) who suggests that education and literacy do not necessarily provide a strong causal link to improved socio-economic status.

One question to be asked is what form of literacy are we talking about? Using a classification from Yates (1992) of the Adult Reading and Literacy Association Moon talks about Improper Literacy amonst other kinds of literacy. Improper literacy is where people follow words to get a general sense but do not read properly. Moon also makes comparisons with the situation in England in the seventeenth century where people could sometimes read but not write.

Moon seems to be informed by an historical model of Maori society which he refers to in a footnote (Moon 2000:88).There is an archaic period from the ninth to the fourteenth century in which there is a strong likeness to the original Polynesian background the period following being characterised by a distinct identity which was broken up with the arrival of the European. In the two earlier periods Maori were non-literate and in the immediate post contact period most Maori were illiterate.

Following this various kinds of lteracy existed, proper and improper, functional and active and Freirean (cf Freirean)which is reflective and critical. Moon suggests that rather than helping Maori literacy might have been a hazard in some ways. The kinds of literacy that Maori were involved in were, to take the classification of Yates (ibid), functional and improper rather than active and Freirean.

Compounding the matter for Moon has been poor measurement of literacy of any kind by most commentators including anthropologists like Jackson (1967). The assumptions that the iwi became literate to a great extent and that this happened quickly are both challenged by Moon. As well as these qualifications or criticisms there are major queries about the kinds of literacy that came into being.

Also, as part and parcel of the literacy situation, the power and authority of the talking chief was eroded. Moon suggests a trade-off of orality for literacy. He goes on to talk about Maori English, the way Maori speak English.

Moon also asks whether iwi were interested in acquiring books as articles of magic or for trading purposes rather than to read them.

The idea, widespread at the time, that literacy was the panacea, the tool that would allow Maori to survive and prosper in the nineteenth century is also examined by Moon. And then there was the intention that Maori were to be educated for specific purposes and Moon mentions Nottingham's thesis on Marsden (Nottingham 1980). The kind of literacy involved is strictly task bound.

Literacy allowed entry to a new political elite in Aotearoa-New Zealand within which Maori were rarely found. Moon draws on Freire (1993) to suggest that missionary education including literacy education was a colonial tool. To be converted a person needed to be civilized and that meant being literate.

In an excellent discussion Moon suggests that in 1813 there is not a literate society but a hierarchy of literacy associated with a hierarchy of wealth and status. There are non-literate people who are not as yet exposed to the European and then there are illiterate people who work with others who know how to read and write and then there people with proper and improper and other kinds of literacies.

Moon also considers all this in terms of what he calls 'cultural contamination'. This is to do with the displacement of orality by literacy in, mostly, its lesser forms.

While there is a need for a much deeper treatment of the oral Moon makes a compelling case for the idea that literacy rather than the rum or the religion took away he power of leaders who once ruled with the spoken word. A number of questions ensue from this some of which take us outside the period. Can we now ask whether Maori radio in the latter twentieth century offered a return to the power of the oral?

Moon suggests that it was an irony that Maori were taught to read their history which they would formerly have spoken. With Maori television they now see as well as read and speak their history. What has film done to the literacy question? Do people understand films in different ways and are there parallels with the way people read books?

How does History work in or through different kinds of literacy anyway? Is it possible to suggest that literacy and the understanding of history are linked or is this, once again, to make too big a claim for literacy? Or for h/History?

What is orality and how do people deal with it? Do the ways in which Maori speak both Maori and English in everyday life show distinctive features of the orality to which Moon refers? Do the ways in which Maori speak Maori or English formally or informally hark back to a loss of language, a loss of speech beyond the grammar and the nuts and bolts of words making sense? Is this loss what people are talking about or implying when they talk about the reclamation of te reo me ona tikanga, the language and its customs? When they talk about language as a taonga, a gift?

What about historians and anthropologists of the country who do not speak Maori? Theirs is a world of the deaf into which they sign with writing.But what about anthropologists and historians who do speak Maori? They run the risks attendant on tripping through fields of loss, fields of pain.

Given the importance that the electronic media may come to have these may well be the source or at least the setting of new political systems. If the local state cannot offer significant resources, if it is grounded in a locality with limits the internet offers possibilities. On the one hand the limits of the local situation are to do with politics, political will if you like. On the other they are to do with resources some of which look increasingly doubtful. In the nineties fish looked good as a resource diverted by the state to iwi as a Treaty settlement but as a declining global resource in the 2000s the bounty of the Sealord Deal seems mixed. Giving iwi airwaves that are redundant in the age of internet radio might be another case in point.

To turn this question around; just as literacy was used as a tool in the conversion of Maori to Christianity are the electronic media, being used to bind Maori to a small local state? This might be said to be occurring through Treaty claims which give airwaves to iwi and then gives control to Te Mangai Paho and Te Puni Kokiri making funding subject to criteria set by those bodies? This is, again, outside the period of the nineteenth century but there are questions that seem to apply to both times, especially to periods of intense change such as the 1850s when English became the dominant language in the country and the 1990s when, especially on the radio, te reo Maori began to be heard again.

Moon is important as his literacy paper raises questions about the way sovereignty is understood. He is blowing up the equation of literacy with power. How does the electronic media, radio, tv and net, affect this understanding?

A central question is to do with the expectations of the missionaries in regard to literacy. Isla Nottingham's thesis (ibid) is important in that she talks about a controlled or a supposedly controlled effect; Marsden wanted students to be literate to a point. But there were others who thought that literacy would civilize in other ways. and this echoes or resonates with Jackson's anthropology and The critique of Jackson's anthropology by Moon is important i that it raises the question as to what kinds of literacy are involved.

The work of Yate, Resnick and Resnick (1977), Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987)and others suggest responses to literacy which vary considerably. For example, Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) take a thesis set out by Resnick and Resnick (1977) arguing that two traditions of literacy exist. To paraphrase Bereiter and Scardamalia, ‘high literacy’, a tradition in education of the elites in Europe and America, has been aimed at developing the linguistic and verbal reasoning abilities, the literacy standards and sophistication, and the moral values and precepts appropriate to leaders of society. Mass education grew out of a ‘low literacy’ tradition of efforts to promote the minimum levels needed for religious practice.

However this happened in Europe and elsewhere- and this seems to me a complex question to say the least – the way literacy came to exist in Aotearoa/New Zealand was just as complex and possibly more complicated by virtue of interaction with another culture.

Looking ahead at questions of orality and literacy we might say that talk beats print on most occasions. Radio will be more listened to than print media will be read in most groups of people. Where this might change is with voice recognition or speech ecognition by computers. Watch or listen to this space and read into it what you will...Campus Press Update

Review of: Works published in 2008 by Peter Cleave
Reviewer: Professor Paul Moon
Date: March 2008

In the past ten years, Peter Cleave, in conjunction with Campus Press, has been at the forefront of research into a range of topics relating to Maori in the modern world. This, in itself, may not be remarkable, but what makes Cleave’s works stand out are three things: the breadth of disciplines he draws on for his analyses; the range of subjects he explores; and his persistence in ensuring that the material he publishes is relevant to a wide spectrum of readers. At a time when much academic research is dominated either by drilling into obtuse areas, or by studying topics for which funding is provided, the latest collection of Cleave’s works to be issued by Campus Press provide a fresh and engaging perspective on issues affecting Maori.
This corpus of works covers topics as diverse as social work, Maori media, language, culture in the workplace, as well as Cleave’s groundbreaking work – now in a revised edition – ‘Rangahau pae iti kahurangi: Research in a small world of light and shade’. This wide-angle approach allows the reader to build up an impression of some of the thinking that either applies or ought to apply to current developments in these fields.

Some new titles from Campus Press (Est 1992) each priced at NZ 37.50 plus postage COD;
From the Depot Takirua, Second Edition
by Peter Cleave
Iwi Station: a discussion of print, radio and television in Aotearoa/New Zealand
by Peter Cleave
Papers on Language, Second Edition
Culture in the workplace: a book of exercises
by Peter Cleave
What do we know about the mark on the wall. A study of literacy
by Peter Cleave
Rangahau pae iti kahurangi: research in a small world of light and shade, Second Edition – most popular Campus Press book so far in 2008
by Peter Cleave
And from our back pages:
Papers to Conference- most popular Campus Press book in 2007
by Peter Cleave
Papers on Social Work - includes work on broadcasting
by Peter Cleave 
Papers of Contest, Second Edition
by Peter Cleave
 
And for a discussion on line of literacy in nineteenth century New Zealand by Peter Cleave go to;
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/01/said-heard-written-read.html
Find extended discussions of this in Iwi Station
And see the discussion of Brian Sibley's book on Peter Jackson in From the Depot Takirua, Second Edition

Forthcoming in puff books in April
Isis, the days of the voles
by
Benjamin Drum

Please order by email to puffmedia@yahoo.co.nz or Campus Press, 26, Sycamore Crescent, Palmerston North, New Zealand or telephone 0064 6 3537773


Title descriptions
Papers to Conference

Third Edition

A collection of mostly old but some new work

by Peter Cleave
ISBN

978-1-877229-17-6

The present collection starts with a paper on literacy in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the nineteenth century.This is the most recent paper. The collection finishes with a paper on literacy and there are one or two references to this subject throughout without literacy being a major theme.

In fact,the demand for his collection was largely to do with older work and this constitutes the rest of the collection. Some papers are so out of date as to be quaint. Others like the paper on Samoan and Maori may be old but they might have a current application.

One debate that may not be quaint or out of date may be the one discussed in the review of Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow from the early nineties about icons and symbols. We might well ask what happened to this discussion. We might well also ask what the conditions for a talk like this are in 2008.

The essay on the Pa Maori which is really just a review of Best's book may leave questions unanswered in the wider literature.

In the paper entitled Native Voice and in some of the journal work in Aotearoa, especially that found in Illusions in the nineties there is a discussion of new things happening in the arts in Aotearoa.

The discussion of o and a, the so-called case system in Maori is here through demand. It is also a discussion of commentators which is unusual in this area.

By contrast to the the work on literacy and the Pa Maori the social work papers won prizes and were published in international collections. In this sense the collection is a mix of the known and the obscure.

More on
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/papers-to-conference.html




Iwi Station. A discussion of print, radio and television
in Aotearoa/New Zealand

by Peter Cleave
ISBN
978-1-877229-27-5
This book is about communication and power from a tribal point of view in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the world at large. The tribe concerned is the iwi as distinct from the hapu, the sub-tribe or the whanau, the extended family.

The iwi is considered in several historical periods. In each there is a consideration of the communications environment of the iwi be that oral, to do with reading or writing or literacy or to do with electronic media including radio, television and the internet.

There are also two, at least, intense periods of change, the 1850s when Maori was displaced by English as the language of the majority and the period from the early 1990s until the present day characterised by the development of iwi radio and Maori television and the advent of the internet.

The discussion of the internet is really a series of questions. Does the internet allow increased specialisation as well as a greater internationalisation? Are Maori better able to identify common ground and communicate over more space and time than ever before? Is it now possible to find new ground? Does the internet offer freedom from the shackles of a small nation state?

All chapters are about the way that tribes manage communication in the context of a mainstream. Choosing the ground for communication is itself important in this context and there are recurrent issues of control and power.
For more go to
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/iwi-station.html


From the Depot-Takirua



Second Edition


by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-29-9

There was something of a moment in the late eighties and early nineties in Wellington theatre and over the years From the Depot Takirua has been there as an attempt to grapple with what happened.

This Second Edition of the book begins with an older essay containing reviews of work done at the Depot Takirua. Some of the original essays have been retained and new work on Peter Jackson and Maori Television has been included.

The moment at the Depot Takirua, if such it was, quickly became overtaken by other things. Matters were complicated and, it must be said, enriched by film. The workshopping of the warrior proceeded to the film Once were Warriors and elsewhere. Peter Jackson happened from the early nineties and there was a shift of attention and resources to film. A connection between the work of Peter Jackson and the kind of work work done at the Depot-Takirua is found in the writing of Harry and Stephen Sinclair.

With the advent of Maori Television it is possible to see people who were involved in theatre in the early nineties moving to film and then to television.

But there was a period in the early nineties at the Depot Theatre when things came together. The question now, nearly twenty years later, is how they might line up again in a comparable blaze of creativity or whatever. It might involve the same people. Stephen Sinclair features in the Depot-Takirua story as a writer just as he does in the Peter Jackson story.

The papers on Suzie Cato and on Maori Television are offered on the grounds that television, especially Maori Television, may be the place where things come together in a creative step like that which was made at the Depot Takirua all those years ago. The paper on the grotesque which features the piano is offered as a route taken, as it were, out of the kind of thing happening at the Depot Takirua in the early nineties but so far at least not taken further. Something similar seems to have happened with the warrior project, if that it might be called. These sit in the corners of our minds now like dead ends or cul de sacs. Will we come back to them and will new media like Maori Television be used to do so?

For more go to
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/from-depot-takirua-second-edition.html


Culture in the work place. A book of group exercises

by Peter Cleave

ISBN
978-1-877229-25-1

How do you work out how to work with other people?

This book is designed to help you do this. The first thing is to consider of culture in your workplace. Then to find better ways of working.

These are the things that matter no matter how removed they might seem from the job at hand. Religion, dress, diet, eye contact and body language. All of these things and more contribute to positive or negative work situations.

This book is not meant to be prescriptive or to tell people what to do in their own workspaces and with their own culture.

The exercises below are offered that they might allow readers to work out their own situations. The idea has been to keep it simple and to allow discussion to happen in a easy fashion.

For more
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/culture-in-workplace.html




Papers of Contest
Third Edition

by Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-28-2

The theme of this collection of papers is contest. There is a challenge in each paper.

The first paper looks at literacy in the nineteenth century in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

In the next paper conventional research is challenged with an idea of indigenous modes of inquiry.

The following paper looks at confrontational theatre and film in the 1990s.

The discussion of Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow considers images, symbols and the art of a place, a country, I suppose.

The review of Martin Blythe's book involves several of the themes so far considered as well as others and tries to describe an exciting analysis.

The consideration of the native, the outlaw and the frontier widens the perspective of the collection.

The rest of the papers in the collection take the idea of contest into different areas.

The discussion of Suzie Cato takes the discussion into mainstream media in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

By contrast the next article looks at work with perhaps more limited but nonetheless highly critical audiences and the construction of or the playing with a notion of the Pakeha-Maori.

The final paper is a consideration of the grotesque. This raises a number of questions that are left hanging and that, perhaps, is what happens in a collection with the theme of contest.







What do we know about the mark on the wall?
Images, rules and prior knowledge

by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-26-8

There is a sense in which the work here is dated referring as it does to work done in TESOL in the early nineties. That literature could be updated. There is a question though as to which direction to take from here and there is also the fact that whatever the argument is attached to it will eventually date. The advantage, I think, of the work referred to is that it is of a very high calibre.

Other applications for the argument might well be found. Work on memory from the early childhood area is one possibility but there are others such as developments in educational theory and practice over the last half century.

It may be though that no one major kind of example emerges. The book as it is or in any revision may just use examples from here and there. The theme may be a matter of constant return, going back again and again to questions of cognition and literacy.







Papers on Social Work
Second Edition
by
Peter Cleave
ISBN

978-1-877229-21-3

These papers venture into several areas of social work but there may be some features that set the collection aside.

The first is an emphasis throughout on social work education. This interest is set out in in the first chapter where there is a comparison between local and European traditions. Work by Carola Khulmann and Peter Cleave appears early in the collection and is then taken further in subsequent papers.

One emphasis or theme which keeps coming up is to do with a ethic. This is touched in the comparison of social work in Germany and Aotearoa/New Zealand, looked at in the article, An ethic of empathy, and touched on again in the article on iwi social services.

Another theme is to do with indigenous ways of research. The paper on rangahau is the most discursive in the collection and the intention here is to take the arguments as far as they might go without necessarily coming to fixed conclusions.

Yet another pertains to the dynamics of small group work in social work learning and teaching. This work is perhaps the most widely published while some of the other papers are offered to a broader readership for the first time.

The consideration of broadcasting and social work is different from the other papers in many respects and, along with the paper on iwi social services, a little tentative in its conclusions These are both new areas of work for me and it shows. In later editions the intention is to refine and develop the arguments involved.






Papers on Language

by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-19-0

This collection of papers takes work from a variety of sources. The intention is to draw a fairly long bow.

There is some work on literacy which is nor about any language in particular. There is work on Maori grammar. And a paper on strategies for language retention. And there is recent work on literacy and oral communication in Aotearoa.

The transmission of an ethic through language and song is considered in another paper.

The Note on the two or three verb classes in Maori applies to the o an a categories and to the use of i and ki. They are short but hopefully important links which make sense, I think, of a range of questions that might come up.

There are also papers about voice and tone. There is even a paper about a song. These are offered in the hope that language might be considered in the broadest possible terms.










Rangahau pae iti kahurangi
Research in a small world of light and shade




Second Edition

Peter Cleave

ISBN
978-1-877229-23-7

Contents

1 Wahi Rangahau; Places of Inquiry 5
2 And on to the question... 11
3 Image and text 17
4 The critical scholars 34
5 Back to the house 41
6 Drama 47
7 What is being pursued? 51
8 Back to the image 56
9 Background to rangahau 63
10 Back to the whare again 75
11 Rangahau, ethics and social work education 78
12 Light, shade, action 88
Concluding remarks 102
Bibliography 106
Glossary 117