scholarly journals Editorial

Author(s):  
Alan Cocker

It is a pleasure to be able to introduce the first issue of BackStory. The idea behind this journal is to provide a medium for those interested in ‘looking back’ at New Zealand’s art, media and design history. These are the stories that lie behind current media, art and design production and practice in this country. It is envisaged that this new journal will provide an opportunity to explore our rich heritage in these fields. In part the motivation to launch a new journal is to meet a perceived need. The country presently does not have a journal which has the focus envisaged for BackStory. The Journal of New Zealand Art History (JoNZAH) was last published in 2012/13 and its absence has meant that those interested in reading and writing about this aspect of our cultural history lost a valued publication. The editorial team has approached the Hocken Library who provided editorial and production input for the JoNZAH and gained their support for the BackStory initiative. It is acknowledged that the new journal is not a re-launch or continuation of the JoNZAH. Instead, BackStory: Journal of New Zealand Art, Media and Design History, seeks to broaden the scope of its predecessor to include media and design history. The editorial teamhope that those who valued the JoNZAH will find value in this journal as a worthy successor.The initial editorial team for BackStory is drawn from the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and an Editorial Advisory Board has been established. The establishing editorial team are Minna Pesonen (Designer), Rosemary Brewer, Alan Cocker and Peter Hoar from the School of Communication Studies, Peter Gilderdale from the School of Art & Design and Simon Mowatt from the Faculty of Business. It is the hope of this team that BackStory has an appeal beyond academia and will inspire contributions from those working in this country’s libraries, galleries and museums as well as others who have an interest in the history of New Zealand art, design, photography and media. We are pleased that this first issue contains contributions from curators at the Auckland Museum and Te Papa, and that there is a wide representation of different material drawn from across the target disciplines. Our hope is that the quality of the research and writing, and the common New Zealand focus will entice readers into crossdisciplinary explorations. All submissions except commentaries will be blind peer reviewed by two reviewers to conform to university research publication standards but we are seeking contributions that will have an appealbeyond the university. In the so-called online age the decision to publish a printed form is deliberate. The editorial team are seeking the highest print production standards conscious of the artifact value of this journal.

Author(s):  
Alan Cocker

As we stated in our first issue of BackStory in December 2016, the editorial team has sought to produce a journal with an appeal beyond the academy to those working in the broad field of New Zealand art, media and design history. We have reached out to those working in the country’s libraries, galleries and museums for contributions and we have also provided space for commentaries and personal reflections on particular aspects of our cultural history.


Author(s):  
Peter Hoar

Kia ora and welcome to the second issue of BackStory. The members of the Backstory Editorial Team were gratified by the encouraging response to the first issue of the journal. We hope that our currentreaders enjoy our new issue and that it will bring others to share our interest in and enjoyment of the surprisingly varied backstories of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. This issue takes in a wide variety of topics. Imogen Van Pierce explores the controversy around the Hundertwasser Art Centre and Wairau Māori Art Gallery to be developed in Whangarei. This project has generated debate about the role of the arts and civic architecture at both the local and national levels. This is about how much New Zealanders are prepared to invest in the arts. The value of the artist in New Zealand is also examined by Mark Stocker in his article about the sculptor Margaret Butler and the local reception of her work during the late 1930s. The cultural cringe has a long genealogy. New Zealand has been photographed since the 1840s. Alan Cocker analyses the many roles that photography played in the development of local tourism during the nineteenth century. These images challenged notions of the ‘real’ and the ‘artificial’ and how new technologies mediated the world of lived experience. Recorded sound was another such technology that changed how humans experienced the world. The rise of recorded sound from the 1890s affected lives in many ways and Lewis Tennant’s contribution captures a significant tipping point in this medium’s history in New Zealand as the transition from analogue to digital sound transformed social, commercial and acoustic worlds. The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly celebrates its 85th anniversary this year but when it was launched in 1932 it seemed tohave very little chance of success. Its rival, the Mirror, had dominated the local market since its launch in 1922. Gavin Ellis investigates the Depression-era context of the Woman’s Weekly and how its founders identified a gap in the market that the Mirror was failing to fill. The work of the photographer Marti Friedlander (1908-2016) is familiar to most New Zealanders. Friedlander’s 50 year career and huge range of subjects defy easy summary. She captured New Zealanders, their lives, and their surroundings across all social and cultural borders. In the journal’s profile commentary Linda Yang celebrates Freidlander’s remarkable life and work. Linda also discusses some recent images by Friedlander and connects these with themes present in the photographer’s work from the 1960s and 1970s. The Backstory editors hope that our readers enjoy this stimulating and varied collection of work that illuminate some not so well known aspects of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. There are many such stories yet to be told and we look forward to bringing them to you.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0310057X2110278
Author(s):  
Terence E Loughnan ◽  
Michael G Cooper ◽  
Pauline B Wake ◽  
Harry Aigeeleng

The most recent estimates, published in 2016, have indicated that around 70% of anaesthesia providers in Papua New Guinea are non-physician anaesthetic providers and that they administer over 90% of anaesthetics, with a significant number unsupervised by a physician anaesthetist. Papua New Guinea has a physician anaesthetist ratio estimated to be 0.25 per 100,000 population, while Australia and New Zealand have a ratio of 19 physician anaesthetists per 100,000, which is 75 times that of Papua New Guinea. To reach a ratio of seven per 100,000, recommended as the minimum acceptable by the Lancet Commission in 2016, there will need to be over 35 practitioners trained per annum until 2030, at a time when the average annual numbers of recent years are less than three physicians and less than five non-physician anaesthetic providers. We review the development of anaesthesia administered by non-physician indigenous staff and the stages of development from heil tultuls, dokta bois, liklik doktas, native medical assistants, aid post orderlies, and Anaesthetic Technical Officers up to the current Anaesthetic Scientific Officers having attained the Diploma in Anaesthetic Science from the University of Papua New Guinea.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Janine Ruth Cook

<p>Within the New Zealand poultry industry press between 1900 and 1960, scientific approaches were promoted and ‘sentimentality’ discouraged, yet comparative and anthropomorphic description suggesting similarities between chickens and humans persisted. Feathered Friends and Human Animals explores this phenomenon within poultry journals, newspapers, advice books and official publications. Four key themes of comparison are identified: ideas about the chicken mind, the chicken-as-worker, poultry ‘eugenics’, and health and hygiene.  It is argued that humanitarian, theological, and philosophical ideas, the ‘natural’ empathetic and humoured identification that arises through everyday contact with animals within relatively small systems, and the rationalisation of industry, were all significant factors contributing to sustained comparison. However, the public articulation of fundamental biological ideas – encapsulated in the modern, overarching concept of ‘general biology’ – validated and integrated these discourses.  General biology influenced new trends in education and in the popular and public articulation of research into the life sciences of this period. It encouraged the integration of sympathetic naturalist persepectives, including evolutionary based ideas about ‘natural laws’, with emerging new science that continued to establish many fundamental biological principles through extrapolation from experimental animals to human animals. This study demonstrates that poultry experts’ attended to this same blend of older naturalist science and new scientific knowledge.  Historians’ focus on emerging specialist science in the early twentieth century has tended to obfuscate the realities of science education within the applied sciences and amongst lay audiences, and the continued interest in fundamental aspects of biology within professional science. The findings of this study reveal that farming ideas did not develop within a bubble, determined only by animal husbandry traditions and industry-specific applied research. They also suggest that practitioners’ conceptions of biology within applied fields of this era were not as distinct as has been supposed.  As a ‘bottom-up’ cultural history of science, this study illustrates the articulation of general biology within an agricultural context. This is the key contribution offered to local and international historiography. However, other elements of the study expand existing scholarship. In exploring ideas about race and eugenics, it offers a broader framework for social historians, who, while cognisant of the eugenic mind-set of this period, have granted little attention to general biology as a professional trend. It offers insight into the agendas and tensions within school nature study and elementary science. It is also the first comprehensive history of the New Zealand poultry industry. Poultry-keeping engaged up to around 60 percent of the nation’s households in this period, including thousands of farmers who kept sideline flocks, but as a predominantly domestic (as opposed to export) industry it has been overlooked by social and agricultural historians.  The field of human animal studies, which has tended to gloss over both this era of transition prior to modern agribusiness and scientific discourses, is also advanced by this study, and this is the first New Zealand agricultural history to engage with this field and examine animal husbandry ideologically. It reveals how fundamental science knowledge, entwined with moral perspectives, continued to shape ideas about animals’ needs and behaviour well beyond the Victorian period. Assumptions of similarity however, were not always beneficial for the animal, and human-bird comparison was used to both justify and deny kind treatment.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 618-634
Author(s):  
Angela J. Linn ◽  
Joshua D. Reuther ◽  
Chris B. Wooley ◽  
Scott J. Shirar ◽  
Jason S. Rogers

Museums of natural and cultural history in the 21st century hold responsibilities that are vastly different from those of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the time of many of their inceptions. No longer conceived of as cabinets of curiosities, institutional priorities are in the process of undergoing dramatic changes. This article reviews the history of the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska, from its development in the early 1920s, describing the changing ways staff have worked with Indigenous individuals and communities. Projects like the Modern Alaska Native Material Culture and the Barter Island Project are highlighted as examples of how artifacts and the people who constructed them are no longer viewed as simply examples of material culture and Native informants but are considered partners in the acquisition, preservation, and perpetuation of traditional and scientific knowledge in Alaska.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania Lewis

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Stuart Hall’s writing began to take a biographical turn. For readers such as myself, then a mature undergraduate pursuing an American Studies degree in New Zealand, this was somewhat of a revelation. The surprise was not so much Hall’s shift from the somewhat dry prose of structural Marxism to the rather more vital style of a postcolonially inflected poststructuralism, but the fact of Hall’s Caribbean background when I, along with no doubt many other geographically distant readers, had assumed him to be exworking class, British and white. Some seven years later, while wrestling with a PhD on the history of cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, I found myself writing an essay for Arena using the question of Hall’s diasporic identity to explore ‘the relations between knowledge production and cultural identity/location.


AJS Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judah M. Cohen

In this essay, I explore the history of what has conventionally been described as “Jewish music” research in relation to parallel developments in both ethnomusicology and Jewish studies in the American academic world during the twentieth century. As a case study, I argue, the issues inherent in understanding Jewish music's historical trajectory offer a complex portrait of scholarship that spans the discourses of community, practice, identity, and ideology. Subject to the principles of Wissenschaft since the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish music study has constantly negotiated the lines between the scholar and practitioner; between the seminary, the conservatory, and the university; between the good of science, the assertion of a coherent Jewish narrative in history, and the perceived need to reconnect an attenuating Jewish populace with its reinvented traditions; and between the core questions of musicology, comparative musicology, theology, and modern ethnomusicology.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document