Posts by Chris Beer
-
The Kiwi Way stuff sounds like vintage Howard, or at least Howard when he's resting the wedge.
-
Certainly there has been talk in Australia of the strategic delaying of the release of developments by their developers to maintain price levels...
-
And while we are at it - the media in both parts of Australasia - having gone after town planners and immigrants - have conspicously failed to discuss the role of lenders in generating the housing price boom.
Obviously, money has become easier to come by (for some) for property investment but I also would be interested to see an analysis of the growth of advertising done by lenders and other property industry players over the last ten or so years. Sure it has always existed, but my hunch is that it has really got more intense of late...
-
Manukura: By "contemporary transnational indigenity discourse" I simply mean the way that indigineity is talked about in the present within and accross national boundries. I am suggesting that the way indigeneity is talked about in Aotearoa is not entirely a product of the space of Aoteroa - particuarly deliberation in Canada, Australia, the US, and UK have been particuarly salient to the construction of indigeneity in NZ, along with local deliberation and discourses such as whakapapa.
You miss my point entirely. I absolutely agree that it doesn't matter who was here first. My point is that many Non-Maori are of the space/ place of Aotearoa - this is not solely a Maori experience.
Your thesis sounds interesting.
-
Manakura: I wholeheatedly agree with most of your assessement of "indigenous" people were you to substitute that term with "Maori" or "First Nation" as appropriate. Yes - I wouldn't want to be Maori given that group's relative health experiences etc. However, that has no bearing on my claims for many Pakeha, Chinese New Zealanders, Samoan New Zealanders, etc. to indigineity.
In using your particuarly Aotearoan combination of Maori whakapapa and contemporary transnational indigeneity discourse you are implicitly denying all non-Maori indigeneity - in contradiction to your opening statement.
I agree that Pakeha and their relevant non-Maori fellow travllers cannot claim pre-historical origins linking us as a social group to the place of Aotearoa - whakapapa. However, we can claim indigneity in the sense that we are of the space of Aotearoa - this place has formed us in a way that others from outside of this place are not formed. In contemporary human geography lingo, we should "take space seriously". If you choose to not do this, then you are indeed denying non-Maori indigeneity.
As you noted, indigeneity is not a Maori concept - thus Maori cannot be its sole gatekeepers.
Non-Maori indigeneity need not undermine claims of Maori sovereignty or deny their unhappy group experience as a first nation.
-
Contra Anthony D. Smith, ethnic groups do not fundamentally pre-exist nationality - it can work the other way too, the imagination and practice of nationality can construct ethnicity.
Underlying most resistance to 'NZer' as a category in my mind (a la Tze Ming Mok) are ongoing projects to deny the indigeneity of many non-Maori within Aoteraoa who would otherwise have a strong claim to being of the space of the country, even if they are not a member of a
'first nation'. -
Where's Kenneth Wang in this debate?
-
Stephen: I fully agree about your comments on the NZ print media - although to be fair the situation is little better in Australia... I have simply stopped buying weekly or monthly printed news and current affairs publications.
Am I really hoping for too much in wanting to be able to buy a serious, widely-available current affairs magazine, with thoughtfully researched and written articles? With the exception of The Economist (and notwithstanding its editorial slant and general lack of Australasian coverage), it would seem that this format of media is almost dead in this part of the world.
-
Peter: I was suggesting that the paralells between Te Papa and the proposed waterfront stadium are in their scale and locations, not their design processes - While I thank you for your insight into the Te Papa process, I do think your assertion of "Wrong." is more at home at Kiwiblog rather than here, following what I understand the spirit of Public Address is aspiring to.
From your comments I do think we are agreed that the risk of banal architecture is very high and Te Papa is an empirical precedent. I do not want another piece of built banality on the Auckland waterfront.
-
Aiming for Mediocrity - Indeed.
The most obvious architectural precedent of the proposed waterfront stadium is Te Papa, which in spite of any of its other merits is truly uninspired in its external design. Invariably, a rushed time frame and the historical cultual cringe of NZ architecture will combine to mean that whatever is proposed will be a banal copy of somewhere else - a form of 'glocalisation' to use social theory jargon.
What we are going to get with the current proposals is yet another variation on the ' feature institution(s) plus hospitality for rich people' formula that has been reproduced ad nauseum around the English-speaking world since Baltimore pioneered the model in 70s. Think South Street Seaport, think Darling Harbour - highly commodified spaces for the well-dressed public and otherwise exclusionary for everyone else.