Is it a very useful shorthand, though? Were these people and places exemplified by their "New Zealand-ness" as opposed to other contexts? I'm pretty sure if you'd been raised in the same circumstances, by the same people, with the same experiences in some other country, you'd be basically the same person.
That seems to be a contradiction in terms. You can perhaps find similar or equivalent circumstances, people and experiences in other countries, but they can't be the same.
Morbid's metaphor of landmarks is interesting, I think, because it captures something of the non-hierarchical and non-discrete nature of culture. I don't think you can point to a particular aspect of culture and say "that's not a New Zealand thing, it's a Maori thing", or "that's not a New Zealand thing because Australians have it too". But you can compare your landmarks with those of other people and see the similarities and differences.
Someone who grew up in the same era as me, in a similar country, with similar socioeconomic background and education and such may share many landmarks, but will still differ in others.
People from Britain have, on average, a different sense of the natural environment, because they don't distinguish between farmland and wilderness the way New Zealanders do. But New Zealanders, I think, share that distinction with Americans. On the other hand, Americans dont inherit a set of assumptions about what different types of British accent signify in terms of class: most don't have a strong instinct for the difference between a posh accent and a Cockney one. Australians and New Zealanders share an egalitarian ethic that's different from the US or UK, but Australians don't have any equivalent of the powhiri as a public ritual.
I think there are few New Zealand landmarks that are completely distinct from those in every other country, and not identified with a particular New Zealand ethnic group. But I do think we have a set of landmarks that's different from the set of any other country. It's the combination of things that delineates a culture, not each individual thing.
To me that means identifying the New Zealand element of your background about as crucial as the brown-haired part of it.
I find it useful whenever I'm talking to someone from overseas. Just as I find the mathematics part of my background worth keeping in mind when I'm talking to someone who studied mainly literature, or the Pakeha when I'm talking to my Maori-Chinese New Zealander brother-in-law. I'm not sure the cultures have much meaning except in their distinctions from each other. But they're crucial to understanding why I think differently, in a way that hair colour isn't.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 11:47 pm (UTC)That seems to be a contradiction in terms. You can perhaps find similar or equivalent circumstances, people and experiences in other countries, but they can't be the same.
Morbid's metaphor of landmarks is interesting, I think, because it captures something of the non-hierarchical and non-discrete nature of culture. I don't think you can point to a particular aspect of culture and say "that's not a New Zealand thing, it's a Maori thing", or "that's not a New Zealand thing because Australians have it too". But you can compare your landmarks with those of other people and see the similarities and differences.
Someone who grew up in the same era as me, in a similar country, with similar socioeconomic background and education and such may share many landmarks, but will still differ in others.
People from Britain have, on average, a different sense of the natural environment, because they don't distinguish between farmland and wilderness the way New Zealanders do. But New Zealanders, I think, share that distinction with Americans. On the other hand, Americans dont inherit a set of assumptions about what different types of British accent signify in terms of class: most don't have a strong instinct for the difference between a posh accent and a Cockney one. Australians and New Zealanders share an egalitarian ethic that's different from the US or UK, but Australians don't have any equivalent of the powhiri as a public ritual.
I think there are few New Zealand landmarks that are completely distinct from those in every other country, and not identified with a particular New Zealand ethnic group. But I do think we have a set of landmarks that's different from the set of any other country. It's the combination of things that delineates a culture, not each individual thing.
To me that means identifying the New Zealand element of your background about as crucial as the brown-haired part of it.
I find it useful whenever I'm talking to someone from overseas. Just as I find the mathematics part of my background worth keeping in mind when I'm talking to someone who studied mainly literature, or the Pakeha when I'm talking to my Maori-Chinese New Zealander brother-in-law. I'm not sure the cultures have much meaning except in their distinctions from each other. But they're crucial to understanding why I think differently, in a way that hair colour isn't.