TANGATA WHENUA - THE LAND WHERE THE AFTERBIRTHS ARE BURIED
As I mentioned in my previous posting, the issue of motive in the pursuit of Family History raises another issue which touches on my commitment as an immigrant to New Zealand.
The relevant Wikipedia entry notes that the question of social identity lies at the core of identifying as Maori - the original and founding inhabitants.
While ‘European’ New Zealanders often mock the appearance of blond, blue-eyed children in Maori ceremonies and dance troupes (and the receipt of government compensation by like-complexioned adults) Maori are adamant that it is not the way you look that determines your affinity – it is your genealogy or ‘whakapapa’.
It follows that:
‘Family history needs little justification in such communitarian societies, where one's identity is defined as much by one's kin network as by individual achievement, and the question "Who are you?" would be answered by a description of father, mother, and tribe.
The recitation of whakapapa is a critical element in establishing identity - and the phrase 'Ko [enter name] au' (I am [enter name]') is in fact the personal statement that incorporates (by implication) over 25 generations of heritage.
Experts in whakapapa are able to trace and recite a lineage not only through the many generations in a linear sense, but also between such generations in a lateral sense.
Many physiological terms are also genealogical in 'nature'. For example the terms 'iwi', 'hapu', and 'whanau' (as noted above) can also be translated in order as 'bones', 'pregnant', and 'give birth'.
The prize winning Māori author, Keri Hulme, named her best known novel as The Bone People: a title linked directly to the dual meaning of the word 'iwi as both 'bone' and '[tribal] people'.
Most formal orations (or whaikorero) begin with the "nasal" expression - Tihei Mauriora! This is translated as the 'Sneeze of Life'. In effect, the orator (whose 'sneeze' reminds us of a newborn clearing his or her airways to take the first breath of life) is announcing that 'his' speech has now begun, and that his 'airways' are clear enough to give a suitable oration.
Hence, whakapapa also implies a deep connection to land and the roots of one’s ancestry. In order to trace one’s whakapapa, it is essential to identify the location where one’s ancestral heritage began, until "you can’t trace it back any further."
In this way "Whakapapa links all people back to the land and sea and sky and outer universe, therefore, the obligations of whanaungatanga extend to the physical world and all being in it."
Correspondingly, the Maori words for the lands of the people of this locality, ‘tangata whenua’, celebrate the fact that the afterbirth or placentas (whenua) of the children of the tribe are buried there – that is there is a complete identity between land and people.
IS THEIR AN ECOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS?
This raises the issue of what we can learn from Maori in respect of the seamlessness and continuity of people and landscape – an issue that bears on an emerging preoccupation with ‘solastalgia’.
Drawing on Daniel B. Smith’s article in the New York Times of January 27, 2010:
The term solastagia was coined nearly a decade ago by Canadian psychologist Glenn Albrecht who notes that “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.”
Australian aborigines, Navajos, Maori and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land.
And let us pause here to recognise the terrible challenges and dreadful losses that were experienced by indigenous people to the inroads of western colonisation. It is clear that, in accepting money for ‘land purchases’ the Maori chiefs had no concept of its subsequent alienation to individuals, or of the inexorable stream of immigrants that would follow, armed with more advanced technology and access to capital.
But Albrecht claims that “place pathology isn’t limited to native peoples. He has worked with the rural ‘settler’ communities of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Australia, who have reacted to widespread open cast coal mining and the destruction of a distinctive landscape by becoming anxious, unsettled, despairing, and depressed - just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them – they were suffering collectively from solastalgia.
In contrast, the communities of the Cape Region of South Western Australia have been judged to be in a state of idyllic ‘solastaphilia’ by Albrecht – at one both with their environment and themselves.
However, solastalgia in Albrecht’s estimation, is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment. As our environment continues to change around us, the question Albrecht would like answered is, how deeply are our minds suffering in return?
The basic question asked is ‘even if we can establish that as we move further into an urban, technological future, we move further away from the elemental forces that shaped our minds, how do we get back in touch with them?’
As Smith notes:
‘That question preoccupied Gregory Bateson, a major influence on eco¬-psychologists and something of a lost giant of 20th-century intellectual history who published a thought-provoking book “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” in 1972.
It was Bateson’s belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness. This “epistemological fallacy” led us to believe, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other.
Bateson went on to argue that nature was a recursive, mind-like system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.
So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness? Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We need to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.”
SANITY AND LANDSCAPE
But if I remember right, Bateson demonstrated very clearly from his work among different tribes in Papua New Guinea that there were extraordinarily wide variations in the cultures of different tribes in similar ecological settings.
He also postulated that the cultures, which ranged from compassionate and sane to brutal and indifferent, resulted from the influence of the personalities of dominant founding or leading individuals.
And some of the worst excesses of western societies were perpetrated during periods that we can only view in retrospect as eras of comparative social stability and ecological sustainability.
While the destruction of landscape and locality can drive people crazy, there are plenty of historical figures from unspoilt environments who were quite crazy enough to begin with (Genghis Khan is a case in point).
So it worries me that solastalgia may provide an excuse for selfishness and bigotry. And that it may be used to mask inherent conservatism that could in turn foster exclusivity and paranoia – a kind of global ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ movement which could easily lead on to an intolerance of outsiders.
And it is all too possible that the strengths of the Maori link between land and people – which have been so vital in preserving their identity – can also entrench cultural divisions and political separation – and hold back innovation and adaptation within Maori society itself.
As for me, I will always be a Cheshire Lad at heart – as they say ‘you can take the boy out of the country, you can’t take the country out of the boy’.
But I also feel affinities with a number of different landscapes, from the sugarcane fields of Cavite to the dusty plains of Outback Australia and the barren hills of central Otago. And maybe I have to become a bit more committed to safeguarding the sanity of my special 'pays'.
But perhaps there is room for a footnote: Nostalgia and Solastalgia are strange twin children.
The Cheshire of my boyhood no longer exists - except as a landscape lost to all but memory.
As Housman has it for the neighbouring county of Shropshire:
'That is the land of lost content'
I see it shining plain.
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again'.
The Past then is another Country that has its own place pathology.
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