Some interesting responses to this weeks other post. It seems that the original Being Pākehā was an effort by King to rationalise his position as a commentator on things Māori, and that the 'seminal' blurb on the cover of the copy I have is probably the publisher trying to cash in on King's recent death.
The questions I raised about what it is to be Pākehā raised some good thinking among readers though. What most seemed to indicate is that when the original version of the book was published, it was read by persons who were genuinely interested in both the position of Māori in New Zealand, and of understanding inter-relations between the two groups in ways other than those espoused by contemporary mainstream conventional wisdom.
That's one of the great issues that constantly plague science and the acquisition of knowledge, in my humble opinion. All too often people draw bad conclusions because they ask the wrong kinds of questions. So if you believe that Māori are destined to be assimilated into the mainstream, then you seek justification for the outcome you want. All too often New Zealand history has been written in this way, and King was one of the first writers to try to shatter that conventional wisdom.
Other intellectual traditions do it as well, or that has been my experience of many writers looking at philosophical questions around ethnic conflict/warfare. Mostly this is, for example, because someone looking at ethnic conflict will often begin from the premise "ethnic conflict is bad, so how do we stop it?"
But, under the tutelage of VUW, I quickly learnt that a better beginning is to ask, "ethnic conflict is bad, but it is normal, so how do we minimise it, or at least direct it away from armed conflict towards non-violent interactions?". But I digress.
What I've noticed about Being Pākehā is that it exhibits a common method of beginning to talk about ethnicity and belonging, and that is to establish the point of view of the speaker through autobiography. Pat Snedden also does it in Pākehā and the Treaty, James Ritchies does it in Becoming Bicultural and John Pilger does it in A Secret Country. It seems that by talking about your own experience and history you can establish that you do indeed have a legitimate belonging to the nation you claim as your own. And that's fascinating, because in doing so you're kind of saying that holding citizenship isn't enough, and you're giving a kind of mainstream, non-family whakapapa to justify your legitimacy.
The premise of this process of establishing belonging is that the statement 'I belong' isn't enough, you have to actually run through your history and lineage to prove authenticity. And in this day and age of globalisation and high population flows, that's very important. It illustrates for instance that culture isn't something you can take off a shelf, you have to immerse yourself in it for long enough to build up a proper cultural 'coat'. And sometimes, you have to be a descendant of someone who wore the coat before you, which you develop in turn.
And this premise causes me problems. If King was indeed seeking to justify both his own place as a 'native' of New Zealand, and his right to speak both to and for Māori, then he has actively demonstrated how Māori society is separate and distinct from the mainstream. Granted, and as a reader pointed out, "[Being Pākehā] was a book for we Pākehā who think Māori to be cool. And was something actually acknowledging that Māori culture had an *impact* on our world." But in order to do so King had to demonstrate that he was conversant enough in the mores of Māori society, a society not his own, to legitimate any of his work or opinions.
What King and others have had to do is illustrate how they crossed over from a self-referential mainstream culture into a distinct Māori society, but if every social commentator in New Zealand has to do this we're all going to become very sick of autobiographies, very soon. And this annoys the crap out of me, because it seems to be so necessary in our still-evolving nation. You can't just use race or religion, because as a liberal, migrant nation we are a melange. Which really only kind of leaves language, but even that isn't a reliable marker of belonging, because half the freaking world speaks English.
On the other hand, it is a good premise because it strongly indicates that New Zealand culture has reached enough of a critical mass to allow an autobiography to stir nationalistic feeling. Once upon a time it was the Empire that raised that flag. It's a good thing that our own stories are all that is acceptable to define who we are.
But I still wonder if that means that we're likely to have to favour particular outcomes because of the need to establish authenticity? Ignoring whether you think it a good or bad thing, are we encouraging the continuing distinction of Māori? Are we reinforcing biculturalism as the 'between' place of Māori and mainstream culture?
Big questions people, big questions turned out of many little life stories.