scholarly journals Staging the Past: The Period Room in New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kimberley Jane Stephenson

<p>Before 1940, few of the nation’s museums actively collected or displayed artefacts associated with the history of European settlement in New Zealand. Over the following three decades, an interest in ‘colonial history’ blossomed and collections grew rapidly. Faced with the challenge of displaying material associated with the homes of early settlers, museums adopted the period room as a strategy of display. The period room subsequently remained popular with museum professionals until the 1980s, when the type of history that it had traditionally been used to represent was increasingly brought into question. Filling a gap in the literature that surrounds museums and their practices in New Zealand, this thesis attempts to chart the meteoric rise and fall of the period room in New Zealand. Taking the two period rooms that were created for the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition in 1939 as its starting point, the thesis begins by considering the role that the centennials, jubilees and other milestones celebrated around New Zealand in the 1940s and 1950s played in the development of period rooms in this country, unpacking the factors that fuelled the popularity of this display mode among exhibition organisers and museum professionals. The thesis then charts the history of the period room in the context of three metropolitan museums – the Otago Early Settlers Museum, the Canterbury Museum, and the Dominion Museum – looking at the physical changes that were made to these displays over time, the attitudes that informed these changes, and the role that period rooms play in these institutions today.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kimberley Jane Stephenson

<p>Before 1940, few of the nation’s museums actively collected or displayed artefacts associated with the history of European settlement in New Zealand. Over the following three decades, an interest in ‘colonial history’ blossomed and collections grew rapidly. Faced with the challenge of displaying material associated with the homes of early settlers, museums adopted the period room as a strategy of display. The period room subsequently remained popular with museum professionals until the 1980s, when the type of history that it had traditionally been used to represent was increasingly brought into question. Filling a gap in the literature that surrounds museums and their practices in New Zealand, this thesis attempts to chart the meteoric rise and fall of the period room in New Zealand. Taking the two period rooms that were created for the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition in 1939 as its starting point, the thesis begins by considering the role that the centennials, jubilees and other milestones celebrated around New Zealand in the 1940s and 1950s played in the development of period rooms in this country, unpacking the factors that fuelled the popularity of this display mode among exhibition organisers and museum professionals. The thesis then charts the history of the period room in the context of three metropolitan museums – the Otago Early Settlers Museum, the Canterbury Museum, and the Dominion Museum – looking at the physical changes that were made to these displays over time, the attitudes that informed these changes, and the role that period rooms play in these institutions today.</p>


Author(s):  
Mike Grimshaw

In his 1941 centennial survey of New Zealand, Oliver Duff observed, 'We are not Puritan enough to take our pleasures sadly, but we take them very seriously'. Duff's comments offer a useful starting point for the investigation of cartoons in New Zealand history. Cartoons - that is, editorial cartoons - are a serious pleasure, a type of puritanical corruption of a Protestant sensibility. They are an act of protest, commonplace in the main, but expressed in such a manner as to make the commonplace interesting. Ingvild Saelifd Gilhus, in her study on laughter in the history of religion, refers to Bakhtin's description of carnival laughter as virtually an alternative to religion. Carnival laughter is 'cathartic and salvific, an expression of rebellion aimed at the religious authorities and their institutions, past and present'. This essay seeks to explore the ways that the carnivalistic humour of the cartoon has represented religion in New Zealand over the past 150 years, aiming to lay the ground work for developing a cartoon history of religion in our society.


Author(s):  
James Meffan

This chapter discusses the history of multicultural and transnational novels in New Zealand. A novel set in New Zealand will have to deal with questions about cultural access rights on the one hand and cultural coverage on the other. The term ‘transnational novel’ gains its relevance from questions about cultural and national identity, questions that have particularly exercised nations formed from colonial history. The chapter considers novels that demonstrate and respond to perceived deficiencies in wider discourses of cultural and national identity by way of comparison between New Zealand and somewhere else. These include Amelia Batistich's Another Mountain, Another Song (1981), Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home (1973) and Black Rainbow (1992), James McNeish's Penelope's Island (1990), Stephanie Johnson's The Heart's Wild Surf (2003), and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006).


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Milofsky

AbstractThis article argues the position that the symbolic sense of community is a product of action by associations and larger community-based organizations. It draws on a theory from urban sociology called “the community of limited liability.” In the past this theory, first articulated by Morris Janowitz, has mostly been used to argue that residents living in a local neighborhood feel a sense of identification with that area to the extent that the symbolism of that neighborhood has been developed. This article extends Janowitz’s theory to apply to local associations and their efforts to create activities, movements, and products that encourage residents to expand their sense of symbolic attachment to a place. We argue that this organizational method has long been used by local associations but it has not been recognized as an organizational theory. Because associations have used this approach over time, communities have a historical legacy of organizing and symbol creating efforts by many local associations. Over time they have competed, collaborated, and together developed a collective vision of place. They also have created a local interorganizational field and this field of interacting associations and organizations is dense with what we call associational social capital. Not all communities have this history of associational activity and associational social capital. Where it does exist, the field becomes an institutionalized feature of the community. This is what we mean by an institutional theory of community.


Author(s):  
Kyungmee Lee

This article reports eight distance teachers’ stories about teaching at two open universities over the past two decades with a focus on their perceptions and feelings about the changes in their teaching practice. This qualitative study employed a methodological approach called the autoethnographic interview, aiming to document more realistic histories of the open universities and to imagine a better future for those universities. As a result, the paper presents autobiographical narratives of distance teachers that dissent from the general historical accounts of open universities. These narratives are categorized into three interrelated themes: a) openness: excessive openness and a lost sense of mission; b) technological innovation: moving online and long-lasting resistance, and c) teaching: transactional interactions and feelings of loneliness. The paper then presents a discussion of useful implications for open universities, which can serve as a starting point for more meaningful discussions among distance educators in a time of change.


Author(s):  
Edwin G. Pulleyblank

My starting point is the theory of CV phonology as developed by Clements and Keyser (1981, 1983) which, in turn, is one of a number of theories of syllable structure that have been proposed during the past decade to replace the earlier linear concept of generative phonology. These theories have in common that the syllable is recognized as a hierarchical unit in phonological representation and not just a concatenation of segments. Kahn (1976), whose dissertation on English first persuaded generative linguists of the need to depart from the linear model, proposed a tier of syllable nodes (here symbolized as $) linked directly to the segments — consonants and vowels — of the traditional analysis, as in the representation of the word Jennifer in (1) (taken from Clements and Keyser 1983:3).


Author(s):  
Sheila S. Blair

This chapter discusses how an oral revelation was transformed into a written document and how the form of that written document changed to meet the varying needs of the expanding Muslim community. It also considers the methodologies appropriate to study these diverse documents, the questions raised by them, and the ways that this information has been and can be used. It opens with some general considerations about scope, methodology, and the like. Given the vast nature of the material, the many changes to it over time, and the goal of placing these physical changes in their historical and social contexts, the chapter then adopts a chronological framework, dividing the past millennium and a half of production into four major blocks.


1998 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 423-425
Author(s):  
Irma Taddia

During the past few years of researching in Eritrea I had the chance to discover an important but little known source for the history of colonial Eritrea that the government that came to power in 1991 is evaluating: the regional archive of Addi Qäyyeh. This archive is in the main town of an area of the Eritrean highlands, Akkälä Guzay, and comprises a large number of documents on Italian colonialism. This documentation is exceptional; indeed, the great bulk of such documents remain in Italy, conserved in the unexploited Archivio Eritrea within the Ministerio degli Affari Esteri in Rome. To my knowledge the regional archive at Addi Qäyyeh is the only remaining colonial source in Eritrea, if we exclude some minor religious archives, and its interest is unquestionable.As noted, the main sources for colonial Eritrea are in Italy. The documents in the Archivio Eritrea amply testify to the importance of this material. This deals with colonial papers, inquiries, historical and geographical documentation, anthropological materials, and adminstrative papers—altogether, a large amount of material as yet little utilized by scholars. The colonial history of Eritrea remains in many respects a very poor field of study, and recent work has considered only a few documents in this rich collection. However, the Archivio Eritrea is not exhaustive—a complementary source offers a different set of materials amenable to historical study.Many documents preserved at Addi Qäyyeh have the same importance and share many subjects with those in Rome, while others are unique. Here I would just like to mention briefly some of the latter, and offer general information to intending historians of colonial Eritrea.


1987 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 363-368
Author(s):  
Mwelwa C. Musambachime

It is well known that historians studying preliterate societies, in which oral traditions are the main sources of data used in reconstructing the past, have experienced problems in ‘arranging’ events in their order of occurrence. To establish chronology, historians have used a number of aids such as mnemonic devices and occurrences of eclipses and droughts which are then correlated to the western calendar. This paper discusses an aid which, used together with oral traditions, can be very useful in reconstructing the early colonial history of Northern Rhodesia between 1910 and 1927. This aid is the tax stamp given to all tax payers during this period. To understand the importance of the tax stamps to chronology, perhaps it is best to begin with a description as to how events were recorded in the precolonial period.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kay Hancock

<p>Ready to Read is a graded instructional reading series that has been provided free-of-charge since 1963 by the New Zealand government for students in the first three years of school. It has therefore been a key part of the reading experiences of New Zealand children for over fifty years. There is a commonly held belief that there is a distinction between instructional reading materials (the materials that are used to help children learn to read) and children’s literature – that the manipulation of text involved in developing instructional materials necessarily detracts from their literary appeal. The Ready to Read instructional reading series, however, was developed with the dual aims of helping children learn to read and want to read.  The series also reflects the vision of the Department of Education of “New Zealand materials for New Zealand students.” The Ready to Read materials were (and are) written and illustrated by New Zealanders, and trialled in New Zealand schools before publication, meaning that teachers and children have input into the materials. The materials include contributions by some of New Zealand’s leading writers for children, including Margaret Mahy and Joy Cowley. They have a unique status in the history of New Zealand children’s books as being among the first picture books for young New Zealand readers, and the very first that acknowledged Māori children as part of the reading audience. Moreover, as a “home-grown” reading series, seeking to reflect the interests and experiences of New Zealand children, the materials provide a unique insight into New Zealand society and changes in social attitudes, in particular the emergence of biculturalism.  While there is a significant body of research into the New Zealand School Journal, little attention has been paid to the Ready to Read materials (which are for younger readers). Price (2004) has written a short history of the early years of the Ready to Read series and McLachlan (1996) has investigated the visual representation of Māori in Ready to Read and the School Journal. This research seeks to fill this significant gap. This thesis explores how and why the series developed as it did from 1963-1988. It investigates the cultural and educational contexts, the literary aspects of the materials, and the beliefs about children as readers that underpinned its development.  The “home-grown” nature of the Ready to Read materials, their literary qualities, their depiction of children’s lives, and the place of the series in the early reading experiences of New Zealand children make it indisputably a significant aspect of New Zealand children’s literature. It is hoped that this examination of the first twenty-five years of the Ready to Read series will be of interest to a wide audience, including educators, publishers, and researchers, and that it may serve as a starting point for further investigation. While this research is of immediate significance to a New Zealand audience, it also has international relevance in its description of an approach to the development of meaningful, engaging instructional texts for beginning readers that is unparalleled in the world.</p>


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