Chris Finlayson and the end of history

Minister of Culture and Heritage Chris Finlayson has announced that thirteen of the seventeen scholars who have been labouring on Te Ara, New Zealand’s internet-based encyclopaedia, will shortly lose their jobs. After thanking Te Ara’s employees for researching and writing thousands of entries over the past few years, Finlayson explained that the website had now been successfully built, and that only a skeleton staff of four will be required to maintain it.

In a press release issued after Finlayson’s announcement, Public Services Association National Secretary Brenda Pilott lamented the job losses at Te Ara,  pointing out that ‘history does not finish, but rather is constantly being made’. Te Ara’s employees should be kept on, Pilott suggested, so that they can write about new events in Kiwi history.

Pilott’s point is reasonable, but it doesn’t address the most serious misunderstanding of history implicit in Finlayson’s treatment of Te Ara.  Finlayson sees the past as a large pile of facts, and believes the task of historians is to gather and describe the most important of these facts. Now that Te Ara’s staff have created entries on a large number of significant events and personalities in New Zealand history, from the Treaty of Waitangi to the Christchurch earthquake and Te Kooti to John Key, they have, as far as Finlayson is concerned, completed their task. The facts they have collected are like bricks in a building which can stand indefinitely, with the help of a little low-cost maintenance.

What Finlayson’s plan for Te Ara ignores is the importance of interpretation to the study of the past. Every historical fact, no matter how insignificant or portentous, comes to us wrapped in interpretation. Just as actors and theatre directors reinterpret old plays, excising or emphasising certain scenes and lines and promoting and relegating different characters, so historians decide which events and characters from the past must be emphasised, and which can be downplayed or passed over.

Historians select the facts that fill their essays and books on the basis of their interpretation of the past. The Rubicon River has been crossed millions of times, but it is Julius Ceasar’s crossing in 49 BC that attracts the attentions of historians. The labels that historians give to the facts are also unavoidably interpretive. When a scholar describes the eastward movement of some German tanks across a few hundred metres of waste ground into Poland on the morning of September the 1^st, 1939 as the beginning of World War Two, he or she is offering an interpretation of history, as well as a fact.

Because they are partly subjective – because they are made partly from our preoccupations, as well as from the material of the past – historical interpretations are always open to challenge and revision. Some historians, for instance, argue that the fascist uprising against Spain’s democratic government in 1936 should be considered the real starting point of World War Two, while others question the value of searching for a starting date, and suggest that World Wars One and Two would be better treated as a single conflict, separated by a fragile peace.

Sometimes events which were regarded as insignificant by one generation of historians are emphasised by the next. The establishment of a Maori community at Parihaka, and the destruction of this community by colonial forces in 1881, were for a long time treated by historians as curious but insignificant parts of the aftermath of the New Zealand Wars.

James Cowan, the author of a massive, meticulous, and melancholy history of the conflict between Maori and Pakeha, regarded Parihaka as a late, doomed act of defiance by nationalist Maori – one of the last embers of the fire that had been lit by men like Wiremu Tamihana and Te Kooti in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Cowan was working at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Maori had been greatly reduced in numbers and influence. In the second half of the century, when Maori nationalism reemerged as a political force, the peaceful occupation of disputed land at Parihaka began to seem less like an ending and more like a precursor of epic land rights battles at places like Bastion Point/Takaparawhau and Raglan/Whaingaroa. It is not surprising that Parihaka is given careful attention by contemporary historians.

Because the past comes to us wrapped in interpretations, and interpretations are open to change, any thorough account of an historical event should include a record of the various explanations that event has received over decades or centuries. Many of the longer entries at Te Ara possess this sort of historical sophistication. The entry on Maori canoe traditions, for example, acknowledges that nineteenth century scholars bowdlerised many old stories about canoe journeys to and around Aotearoa to create a myth of a ‘Great Fleet’ of seven waka, then explains the gradual debunking of that myth in the twentieth century, and the development of new speculations about the early pattern of Maori arrival in Aotearoa.

The four surviving employees of Te Ara will struggle to do much more than keep the vast website online and free of viruses. They may be able to add a few entries on important new events, but they are very unlikely to have the time to give old entries the benefit of new scholarship about the past. With just a handful of curators, Te Ara will not be able to reflect twenty-first century thinking about events like New Zealand Wars or the Treaty of Waitangi or the Great Depression. The encyclopaedia will quickly become dated.  

Chris Finlayson is Treaty Negotiations Minister as well as Minister for Culture and Heritage, and he has talked of his desire to make Te Ara representative of New Zealand’s Polynesian as well as Pakeha cultures. But Finlayson’s view of the past as a set of self-evident facts is acutely Eurocentric, and finds no echo in Polynesian culture.

Because they saw history as a one-way road towards apocalypse and judgement, early and medieval Christian scholars wrote histories filled with lists of noble and ignoble people and events. History was the working out of God’s plan for humanity, and that plan needed to be known in as much dry detail as possible. Older religious and intellectual traditions, which had imagined history as cyclical and the details of the past as mutable, were marginalised.

The Western attachment to fact-hunting and linear, predictive narrative acquired a new ferocity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when generations of scholars inspired by the Industrial Revolution and advances in the natural sciences tried to make history as precisely rigorous as physics. They hoarded facts and figures, and attempted to formulate general laws that would explain the past and predict the future.

By the middle of the twentieth century scientific history was in decline, and in the early ‘60s EH Carr’s book What is History? reminded the English-speaking world of the necessity of interpretation and subjectivity to any study of the past. Today the notion that historical research consists of the accumulation of self-evidently significant facts is not taken seriously inside the academy, but retains a strong popular appeal amongst Pakeha New Zealanders.

Our society suffers from the widespread view of the past as a collection of dead facts. History is too often seen as something remote and irrelevant, except as a source of picturesque backdrops and exotic costumes for films and TV dramas.

When I lived in Tonga last year I was impressed by the ways that history suffused everyday life, informing the simplest everyday decisions of individuals and communities. Tongans share songs and stories about both distant and recent ancestors at kava circles, feasts, and church services. Often the characters of the songs and stories are archetypal, and their feats are apocryphal. The details of a song or story may be altered according to the context and purpose of the singer or storyteller.

The traditional mode of Tongan history-telling is not ideal for all purposes – it is not necessarily a reliable guide to historical chronology, for example – but it does succeed brilliantly in bringing the past into the present, and emphasising the connections between the living and the dead. And, because it encourages the living to appropriate and creatively interpret the details of the past, Tongan historical discourse is a good deal more sophisticated, and a good deal more in line with contemporary academic practice, than the piling up of dead facts that Chris Finlayson equates with the study of the past.

 [Posted by Scott Hamilton]