Posts by Neil Morrison
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I don't see why Pakeha is necessarily the most appropriate term for the ethnicity of white NZers. And I don't see why it is racist for people to opt for New Zealander.
Ethnicity is about genetic relatedness. Ethnic groups are large extended families. Caucasian is a more accurate description than European. As Yanis points out there are many Europeans who aren't white.
The term Pakeha comes from our colonial history due to the need to distinguish between Maori and Others. It's more a political term than a description of ethnicity.
But people can opt out of narratives that load their identity with unwelcome political or ideological consequences.
I'm not sure that you mean this to be a good or bad thing but I can see it as postive - a refusal to have one's identity determined by past conflicts. Many ethnic conflicts around the world could do with just such a refusal of group/genetic identity.
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correction - second to lowest.
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The BMA study indicates that these methods are soundly based and even the 30 sec test can hardly be called junk science. The reults for this test were -
True postive 47
False postive 7
True negative 8
False negative 38It scored the lowest for accuracy but it does pick up drug use reasnonably well, it just underestimates this - which seems to be the case for FIT overall. But presumable any method should err that way.
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Isn't it possible that people are opting for "Other" rather than for "New Zealander"?
Given the choices in the graph I can see why many people would be a bit stumped and go just for Other.
But I can't see what the problemn with opting for New Zealander is. It's a personal choice no matter who's in charge of NZ. I doubt a lot of less well off whites feel they're in charge.
There may be a loss of usefull statistical info if more people opt for NZer but where it counts most - Maori ethnicity - I can't see that being a big problem as most Maori identify their ethnicity pretty strongly.
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Most people would categorise themselves according to the situation the are in. Take Maori, depending on the circumstance one could opt for Maori, tribe or hapu depending. Many non-Maori might call themselves a New Zealander at times and Pakeha at others (for sport it might be NZer for politics it might be Pakeha for example).
It's the surrounding narrative circumstance that will influence how one identifies and the choice of words used to describe that identification. One thing people find it very hard to do is not identify with a group - something I find more of a worry (look at the problem with soccer supporters in Glsagow).
A problem with something like the census is that it strips out the story.
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- unless you're talking of eggs then a "dozen" usually means a large but not too large number, not exactly 12. Must be all those years at the bank.
- six pakeha - plural sans "s", as in Maori
- he missed out the turtle doves
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I'm deeply impressed ...
I can thank, or blame, my partner who has to spend a lot of her time reading such things and had the patience to work thru my hostility to that sort of thing.
But once you get past what seems to be deliberate obscurity there is some interesting stuff about language, power and the mind. Funnily enough it starts to sound remarkably like evolutionary psychology.
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Is that the new Mel "but some of my best mates are Jewish" Gibson's new film?
yes Mel appears to have taken on the indigenous cause with his usual subtlety no doubt, but no it's a french film about how France made use of troops from the North African colonies, promising things like "freedom" and then, once the war was won of course, decided not to honour those promises. In particular, their military pensions were discontinued when those colonies became independent. Quelle irony. There's a bit of subtext about national identity.
the film's caused a bit of a stir and now Chirac is promising to remedy this.
I think there will always be aspects of experience that science will be unable to say much about which is why I've got time for the purely reflective reasoning of some of the post-structuralists such as Derrida and Baudrillard. But that area is getting smaller and smaller with the advent of brain scanning which can show the physiology of thought processes.
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I am less concerned with 'Truth' or scientific proof(if I was less lazy I would dig up some references to robust critiques on Positivist constructions such as those) than with what works for me and for the land.
I'm curious to know, if you aren't impressed with positivism and scientific proof (2 discourses amongst many I assume), how you go about working out
what works for me and for the land.
I imagine that what you see as "working" is something that works for a community, you therefore need to have a means of communicating knowledge about the physical world accurately to others. Is science not the only way of doing this?
I don't spend a lot of time worrying about identity and the meaning of "indigenous" but am interested in language. I see language as a house (rather than a prison).
Theres's a new French flim out called Indigène worth seeing.
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The past year-and-a-half's argument over Maori customary title to the foreshore and seabed would not have been so bitter and controversial had not both Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders sensed something defining about themselves in their access to and relationship with our long coastline.
Attachment to land is a double edged sword. The very bitter stife occuring in some parts of the world shows just how strong our emotional attacment to land can be. A pity it's all too easy for mother earth to morph into fatherland.