upton-on-line
11th March 2004
In this issue
After a sustained dose of Michael King, upton-on-line renews
his call for a reappraisal of the way history is taught in New Zealand;
and a note on whether France's system of Appellations Controllées
is a blow for quality, tradition and ecological sanctity or just a
restrictive trade practice made mysterious.
Dates versus debates
Among Santa Claus' flotsam and jetsam this Christmas, upton-on-line's
10 year old received an all-too-destructible combination lock. Before
its sudden and catastrophic dismemberment, its owner had to choose a
three figure code. There was little delay - 732. Any French child knows
that this is the year Charles Martel stopped the Islamic hordes
at Poitiers. It's one of a handful of key dates that are hammered into
the nascent identities of little republicans born to be heirs to French
greatness. When upton-on-line asked a French acquaintance to guess what
three figure combination young upton-in-the-pipeline had chosen, he
volunteered 732 without a moment's hesitation. Apparently, they never
forget it.
Young Geoffrey started a couple of years back with pre-history, then
Celtic Gaul followed by the Roman epoch. This academic year has seen
steady progress through the collapse of Rome, onwards (and in French
eyes unquestionably upwards) via Merovingians, Carolinians and Capetians
to the end of the first millennium and the Norman conquest of Europe's
western isle. Not every monarch is memorised at this stage but a
selection of the more illustrious (Clovis and Charlemagne)
or memorable (Pepin the Brief, Charles the Bald and Louis
the Stammerer) are used as scaffolding for the emerging national
epic.
Contrast this with the way history is (or more accurately is not)
taught in New Zealand. As upton-on-line was moved to comment at last
year's 'Knowledge Wave' conference,
"The social studies curriculum, containing as
it does the only compulsory brush with history prescribes no minimum
that every New Zealand child will encounter that puts him or her in
touch with their national roots and their national story. There is a
broad outline of the range of material they should encounter. But which
elements will be encountered, how they will be dealt with and how they
are stitched together is left to the ingenuity and tastes of
hard-working teachers who are assumed to be incredibly resourceful and,
implicitly, hugely well-read themselves.
"An exploration of some of the teaching units
that have been developed reveals a toothsome smorgasbord with plenty of
New Zealand content (how boats, trains, cars and planes have changed New
Zealand communities, the 1918 ‘flu epidemic, Tangata Whenua as early
innovators) plus a smattering of off-shore histories (the ancient
Egyptians seem to have a good advocate somewhere).
"But the pedagogical aim, developing citizens
who can participate responsibly in society, lies elsewhere. The fact is
that children can leave school without any comprehensive knowledge of
the basic narrative of our nation. The ‘elements’ are nowhere
stitched together – it’s like one of those re-arrangeable pieces of
art and you don’t even have to use all the bits."
France doesn't leave the acquisition of its national story to chance.
Needless to say, such stories are not without contention. Upton-on-line
has found French understanding of the truly bi-cultural fluency of the
Angevins monarchs who ruled England and half of France more than
sketchy. Never mind that Henry V of Agincourt fame was
legitimately the inheritor of the French Crown. He was English. On the
other hand, the fact that the conquering Normans were in fact Vikings
who happened to stop off for a few generations on the channel coast
before dispatching King Harold doesn't stop them being French.
But it's all part of a fabric on which is hung the progressive
development of language, literature, science and politics. Young French
children don't have a smorgasbord; they get the full menu.
The King Penguin
All of this was fermenting in upton-on-line's mind as he launched
2004 with a spate of New Zealand history - or, more accurately, a spate
of Michael King with some Angela Ballara thrown in for
good measure. King's Penguin History of New Zealand will no doubt
have occupied many a sleeping bag and bach bunk this last summer. It is
the work of one of New Zealand's most popular and respected historians.
And it has the cardinal virtue of being written in a flawlessly
accessible style. Its popularity is thoroughly deserved. Every
generation needs an up-to-date 'short' history. And with the Belichean
volcano only recently in eruption, there is more than one historical
lava field to choose from.
Upton-on-line especially liked King's geological, ecological and
anthropological opening. New Zealand is, physically and ecologically,
such a land apart and human settlement so incredibly recent that this
seems an inescapable part of the national story (even if the Haast Eagle
knew nothing of Homo sapiens let alone the German subspecies that
bestowed its name on the posthumously described species). King describes
Maori and European as arriving in the last 300ths of a second (if we
view the break-up of Gondwanaland as having commenced an hour earlier)
and, following Crosby, ruminates on the similarity of human
impact whether of the Polynesian or Anglo-Celtic variety. It was
precisely this reality that led upton-on-line to say, on farewelling
Parliament three years ago:
"We have, in 700 - 800 short years,
completely 'terraformed' this corner of our planet. A youthful (and
unstable) geological landscape and an ancient biota had somehow remained
intact but vulnerable. The land had no defences save isolation. First
Maori, then European invaders wreaked havoc. From this point of view,
the question of who arrived here ‘first’ becomes meaningless. We
arrived within a split second of one another and we live amidst the
ruins. It is true to say here – in a way that cannot be said anywhere
else – that, in one sense, humans do not belong here. We are
interlopers from another geological age and we have set in train a
pattern of extinctions and ecological upheaval that cannot be reversed.
"Neither Maori nor European settlers knew how
to live with the strange land they had encountered. The technologies of
exploitation they deployed were very different; the scale of their
ecological footprints very different. But in the innocence – and the
ignorance - of their respective encounters, some 500-600 years apart,
they came face to face with something unique that continues to trouble
us all to this day.
"Could it be that our shared national
identity might, for the first time in history, be rooted in a crusade to
save from annihilation, not a people or a culture, but a fragment of the
biosphere. The land we live in gnaws away at us, as we gnaw away at it.
I know of no New Zealanders who are indifferent about the landscapes,
the seascapes and skyscapes that dominate our lives.
"The way we wrestle with the forces we have
unleashed, could determine our national identity. If we let the slide
continue we remain just another colony of itinerant human grazers whose
appetites and motivations have – since the last Ice Age – caused
such profound changes to the planet. But if we turn the tide, we could
forge an identity built on a coming to terms with our land that would be
an act of human imagination without precedent."
What more could one wish for? Well quite a bit actually. It's not a
question of what King covers - it's what he doesn't. In the twelve crisp
chapters spanning a little over 150 pages that follow the ecological
backdrop, King deals with settlement. The arrival and settlement of
Maori is neatly and summarily dealt with, King judging that on the eve
of Maori isolation being 'perforated', "life would have been as
culturally rich and as physically pleasant as anywhere else on Earth in
comparably neolithic times". But the Europeans who appear one
morning from the mists come fully fledged with beliefs, technologies,
customs and political understandings that, it is assumed, will be fully
familiar to readers. Their story is picked up in the dying years of the
eighteenth century and told almost exclusively through antipodean eyes.
In his closing 'posthistory' King informs us of "a growing
conviction among Pakeha that their culture, like that of Maori, is no
longer the same as the cultures of origin from which it sprang - that it
has become, in fact, a second indigenous culture..." King takes it
for granted that the Anglo-Celtic diaspora is completely comprehensible.
His only interest is in its transmutation. It is an heroic assumption.
This, to upton-on-line's mind, is the fast disappearing link in the
capacity of New Zealanders to explain their country and its institutions
to themselves. While long overdue but truly welcome progress has been
made in making Maori comprehensible to a Pakeha population that had long
ignored them, the large Anglo-Celtic fraction of the population seems
oblivious to the fact that its ability to explain itself to Maori, to
the world at large and even to itself is in headlong decline. It is just
not enough to pick over the entrails of colonisation and
de-colonisation. There is a European historical and cultural backdrop
that pre-dates New Zealand which cannot be conveniently adopted as some
base-line 'given'.
None of this is a criticism of King's history. Authors and publishers
have to draw lines somewhere. But The Penguin History of New Zealand is
very much an extension of the author of Being Pakeha Now, King's
recently updated autobiography. And it is in this (most attractive and
often courageous) work that King talks of Pakeha culture as something
that was "transformed by interaction, history and experience into
something whose proportions and combinations bore only a distant
relationship to the original ingredients." This seems an extreme
interpretation. Has physical distance generated such cultural
attenuation despite all the electronic instantaneity of cultural
exchange not to mention burgeoning foreign travel?
James Belich in Paradise Reforged shrewdly notes that
one of the problems of contemporary historical scholarship is "a
persistent reluctance to accept the realities of recolonisation and a
tendency to focus instead on the more independent natural history we
would like to have happened." Certainly, King belongs to a
significant band of New Zealand academics who have self-consciously
asserted a national independence. But are we any better off accepting
Belich's diagnosis? Here he is in the closing pages of Paradise
Reforged:
"In culture, recolonisation has left us with
an acute case of the tall-poppy syndrome and a flawed capacity for
self-assessment. It is almost as though we still expect that the really
tall poppies should be in London, and that London will handle our
cultural quality control ...The failure to recognise recolonisation's
rise and fall has also left many New Zealanders insecure. They are
uncertain about their capacity to manage change, to reject the bad and
accept the good, or even tell the difference between them. They are
uneasy about burgeoning pluralism, partly because no-one has explained
to them that it was the old homogeneity and conformism that was
artificial, and not the new 'coming-out'of difference. They are
uncomfortable about their identity, unsure about whether they are
Pakeha, New Zealanders or Europeans, about how the three fit into each
other, and about what they actually mean."
Upton-on-line wonders how many Pakeha readers feel defined by either
of these views; robustly indigenous with only a distant relationship to
some north west European roots or disoriented by the lingering legacy of
an exploded colonial past? If he had to choose between King's
constructivism and Belich's revisionism, upton-on-line finds a great
deal more humanity and compassion in the former. But neither provides an
adequate way forward since both seem intent on resolutely scouring only
the last 200 odd years of Pakeha experience in Aotearoa-New Zealand for
sources of national understanding.
Going back to roots
To upton-on-line's way of thinking, New Zealanders should stop
assuming cultural and historical fluency with the more distant past and
take it up as a serious input into understanding the rucksack of hopes
and pathologies we lug into the future. That means systematically
exposing young New Zealanders to a much longer historical canvas than
one that starts sometime in the early nineteenth century. Advances in
anthropology, archaeology, palaeo-climatology and ecology give us a
wealth that is new and important to say about the radiation of people
across the globe since the end of the last Ice Age. The extraordinary
achievements of the Polynesian navigators and how New Zealand came to be
settled should be understood by everyone. Similarly, the development of
Maori settlement is accessible both through Maori and historical
sources.
On the Anglo-Celtic front, rather than lamenting an interest in
British history as being part of some cultural cringe, it might be worth
taking a deep breath and asking what elements of the pre-settlement
history of these people can shed valuable light on current debates and
institutions. How can we understand the mental furniture of the
nineteenth century arrivals (and, if King is right, their 'distant
relationship' with their descendants) if we don't understand some of the
following:
+ the development of the English language as a result of the
progressive colonisation and conquest of the British Isles (after all it
was English speakers who arrived in greatest numbers from Europe);
+ the influence of the classical world on the imagination of
Europeans from the fourteenth century through to (and beyond) the
renaissance (after all, the educated elite who oversaw the exploration
of the world named its plants in Latin and were acutely conscious of
measuring their achievements in relationship to the 'ancients');
+ the influence of Christianity in European civilisation, the great
schism of the reformation and what that meant for political and
individual rights (after all, the Anglican and Roman Catholics - both
great sources of evangelism - carried their respective world views and
frictions into the newly Christianised country);
+ the history of European global exploration from the fifteenth
century onwards and the decisive advances of the scientific (and
subsequent industrial) revolution (after all, James Cook wasn't
just sight-seeing: he was on a mission financed by the Royal Society
which had precise scientific goals in mind);
+ the development of representative government and its relationship
with the Crown (after all, something called the Crown signed the Treaty
at a time when nothing approaching universal franchise was in sight);
+ the broad outlines of the British Empire from its early expansion
in North America and Asia through to its eventual demise in the wake of
the second world war (after all, it did have something to do with which
northern hemisphere polity laid claim to Aotearoa).
One could go on. None of this has anything to do with some recolonial
hankering for past glories. It is simply about acknowledging that New
Zealand's intellectual, cultural and institutional history on the Pakeha
side didn't start with settlement here. Upton-on-line, along with many
fellow New Zealanders, is part of the Anglo-Celtic diaspora of the 19th
century. As such, he cannot help but bring to bear on contemporary
debates the impact of that cultural inheritance, however patchily he may
understand it. Pakeha New Zealanders had better decide whether it's
adequate to understand themselves in the context of the narrow canvas of
200 odd years of nation-building; or whether it mightn't be time to
relax a bit, embrace deeper, older roots and stop treating them as a
colonial atavism in need of exorcism.
A brief note on Taua
Testament to the contemporary productivity of New Zealand history
writing is Angela Ballara's Taua (Penguin 2003).
Upton-on-line will spare readers another book review. But this cool,
careful evaluation of the so-called 'Musket Wars' seems to upton-on-line
a must read for those interested in educating themselves on the fluid
pre-Treaty years. Ballara's essential thesis is that while muskets may
have changed Maori warfare qualitatively, the clashes that very early
European settlers observed were conducted largely on traditional terms.
In her words "[w]ars and migrations were endemic to Maori society
because they were its mechanisms for dissolving disputes and clashes
between descent groups." It is then intriguing to read her
dispassionate account of the gathering social and cultural impact of
European values:
"...the new ideas, concepts and institutions
which were creeping insidiously and sequentially into Maori use were
leading to an end to war. They were undermining the need for the
extremes of tapu, weakening the compulsion to seek utu, and presenting
gentler and therefore increasingly popular, alternatives to what had
been a harsh system."
If that was one cultural legacy of early settlement, it can only
underline the sense of betrayal that must have been experienced when
settler culture turned resorted to its own brand of violence in the land
wars. Ballara carries off the whole thing with a forensic care and a
sense of scholarly detachment that is admirable. Just the sort of thing
our elected representatives will make a beeline for in seeking to
further their understanding of early C19th New Zealand.
Talk to the Animals
If photos in the major French dailies were anything to go by these
last ten days, visitors could be forgiven for thinking that France had
given animals the vote. Scarcely a day has passed without a photo of
some French notable posing with a cuddly farm creature. It has been the
annual Salon d'Agriculture in Paris, a large jamboree which can
best be explained to New Zealanders as a cross between the Royal Easter
Show and a party political conference. Whereas innocent New Zealand
bumpkins just stare at prize bulls and jars of bottled carrots,
sophisticated French leaders stare at prize bulls and jars of
appellation controllée carrots and pronounce on the soul of France and
the essence of French identity.
The media seem dutifully to accept that for a week or more each year,
readers need to see their leaders in close communion with the soil (or
at least what passes for it in the sparkling exhibition centre at the
Porte de Versailles just beside the orbital motorway in deepest urban
Paris). A cynic might be tempted to read some significance into the
animals various leaders choose for their photo ops. President Chirac
chose a very pretty little calf this year. M. Raffarin, as befits
his ample and provincial status chose a very large, somnolent and French
looking bull. And Paris' popular gay socialist Mayor, Bertrand
Delanoe, chose a very perky looking goat. Even Bernadette Chirac,
the President's wife and a candidate in the regional elections was at it
down country in her cantonal stronghold cuddling a piglet and opining
that "pigs are the animals that most closely resemble humans".
Is there some deep point here? The reality is probably more mundane.
With at least 10 political parties plus all sorts of regional and
national functionaries, newspapers need to provide some variety for
readers so they vary the breed of animal.
All of this is very drole. But if the animals scrubbed up
uncomplainingly, their owners have been feeling distinctly grumpy.
French agriculture has never looked worse despite all those pats from
the political elite. In fact, the more politicians show solidarity and
sympathise with the peasantry, the worse it seems to get. Prices have
never been lower, the Americans have slapped a ban on imports of foie
gras, the bees are being killed by insecticides, Spanish pork is
flooding into the country and - to cap it all - the French are drinking
less wine because of anti-drink driving laws and, horror of horrors,
consumer tastes are switching in favour of quality at the expense of
quantity! The only point on which everyone seems agreed is the need for
more government support. Woe betide any politician who thinks he can
snuggle up to a goat or a pig without offering some pork as well!
Putting a label on the problem
With all this grumping down on the farm, fresh attention has been
focused on one of France's distinctive contributions to the world of
labelling and quality assurance - the system of Appellations d'Origine
Contrôlée (AOC) that was started back in 1935. Overseen by an official
commission (the INAO), there are now 600 products under an AOC label
covering some 140,000 of the 650,000 farms in France. Wine is the oldest
established product to be 'AOC-ed' and not surprisingly has the largest
percentage of its production covered - some 55% of output. This is
believed to be close to the limit of what can realistically be described
as meeting more demanding specifications. But there's plenty of room for
growth in other lines of business.
As befits any uniquely French institution, there is an elegant
philosophical rationale which links labels to specific products grown in
specific places: "If I am what I eat but I don't know what I'm
eating, I no longer know who I am." This fearsomely metaphysical
formulation chimes well with what INAO detects to be a widespread loss
of consumer confidence in the anonymity and mass production of the
industrialised foodchain. The AOC system enables farmers to detach
themselves from a production system in which they have become powerless
pawns and link up with counter-cultural consumers who are interested not
just in price but quality and traceability.
If that was all there was to it, the AOC system would itself be
standardisable and globalisable as well. But the AOC system doesn't stop
there. It places prime importance on linking quality with the specific
land to which the AOC is attached. Starting with the land, INAO spends
as much time as it takes - sometimes up to a decade - working with
producers to characterise the unique characteristics of the site and the
production methods. These then become one-off, inimitable conditions
that no-one else can copy. The AOC is effectively owned by its
registered producers. The product can be neither de-localised nor made
the subject of a public float. It's a tightly held business! As the
director of INAO, Philippe Maugin observed recently in an
interview with Le Monde (24th February) -
"The green Puy lentille or roquefort are
collectively owned property that cannot be expatriated unlike
mass-production labels that can represent themselves as being the same
while out-sourcing their production to Asia or Africa in search of lower
prices."
Demanding production requirements and higher input costs are rewarded
with higher market returns and correspondingly higher property values.
In the face of agriculture's woes, the AOC movement seems to be not only
a defensive bulwark for some on the land but also in tune with consumer
sentiment. A recent survey of consumer views reported in Le Figaro (28-29
February) revealed that 63% of the French consider that they eat less
well today than they did in the past. Blame for this didn't seem to be
attributed in any large measure to the farmers themselves (which no
doubt explains the continued healthy turn-out of politicians at the
Salon d'Agriculture). Rather, the blame was lumped heavily onto the big
agri-business and supermarket operators. Not for the first time a poll
has shown that many of the people pushing trolleys past the cornucopean
aisles of contemporary hypermarchés and buying more food at cheaper
prices than ever before are, deep down, unhappy about their plight. The
same poll identified environmental values as the most important values
to be secured in the agricultural production process (89% of all those
surveyed) closely followed by animal well-being and a fair income for
producers!
Shrewd marketing or a protectionist plot?
For New World producers the AOC system, linked as it is to specific
geographic locations, is easily dismissed as a road block to any
attempts to liberalise trade. Attempts to take back under protected
status place names that have been long used to describe products made
around the world are always going to ignite irreconcilable passions.
Upton-on-line confesses to having sympathies in both directions.
As for the AOC system itself, it is not devoid of subsidy. The
Institute that runs the system receives €14 million a year from French
taxpayers and operates under statute. But in the scheme of the CAP
subsidies this is a drop in the ocean. In truth, as French producers
acknowledge, to try to bring total French agricultural output under an
AOC label would be self-defeating since it is the uniqueness and
specificity of the requirements that provide the added value. The real
threat to world trade comes from the huge volumes of subsidised product
churned out by large agri-business units that would never qualify for
AOC status. Dismantling those subsidies should be no threat to AOC
producers if their niche is as secure as public opinion at least in
Europe would suggest it is. (Of course, it's another question whether
the movement could survive without that €14 million subsidy).
Needless to say, the AOC's supporters are keen to deny that France is
going it alone here. They point to countries as various as China,
Vietnam, Morocco, Bolivia, Brazil and a raft of francophone West African
states seeking advice on how to set up AOC systems. Off-shore cynics
would no doubt conclude that this is a nice way of seeding protectionist
sentiments around the world. But it's a game everybody can play at. And
as long as the standards are truly exacting, it would seem that tightly
focused geographic appellations are scarcely going to dent world supply
and demand.
Which raises the question of whether New Zealand producers in some
key product areas shouldn't at least inform themselves of the purchasing
proclivities of rich, worried consumers in decadent old Europe. Even if
no-one cares in Australia and North America, Europe remains a wealthy
market whose consumers can afford to be fussy. If the much wider use of
appellations was the price the world had to pay for the removal of
protectionist barriers from the unlabelled commodity trade, would the
world be worse off? As is usually the case in most debates surrounding
trade policy, there are no first best options on the table to play with.
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