ED ITORl A1 EAiE Geographer 6o (1) 2004: 1 -

Editorial: Understanding our place in the world In August this year, geographers from around the world

will gather in Glasgow for the four-yearly International Geographical Union (IGU) Congress. Constraints of distance, cost and timing mean that few geographers from New Zealand will attend. The occasion nonetheless has symbolic importance within the landscape of the discipline, reiterating the importance of commitment, community, and mutual understanding.

To mark the IGU year, we decided to craft a Special Issue celebrating newer voices in geography. Doctoral students - current, prospective or just completed - are the colleagues who are least likely to be attending Glasgow, yet arguably have the most to contribute to the ‘cutting edges’ of their fields. What better way, then, to include them in the Congress than gathering their work between the covers of our journal?

Our process of assembling this issue began in November 2003 when we broadcast an invitation addressed to doctoral or postdoctoral students at each of the seven New Zealand universities with Geography programmes. The result was 16 offers of papers, 10 of which were eventually submitted. After referees considered each paper (one ‘local’, one ‘international’), seven papers remained. To this we added a fortuitously submitted commentary on the state of the discipline by a senior colleague and regular visitor to New Zealand.

As Allen Curnow wrote in 1942, “Simply by sailing in a new direction / You could enlarge the world”. Curnow was commemorating Abel Tasman’s ‘discovery’ of Aotearoa in 1642, but in 2004, we can take these words as emblematic of different geographic journeys: the expanding and globalised subjectivities of New Zealanders, as well as the increasingly fluid boundaries of scholarship.

To extend the marine metaphor, a number of currents are at work within the papers. First, they are enriched by, and engage with, theory to a degree uncommon in ‘standard’ issues of the journal. Terms like ‘governance’, ‘sustainability’, ‘transnationalism’, and ‘landscape’ worry the authors in the most positive sense of the word. To them, language is as central as data to explanation and is the bedrock upon which the flow of ideas occurs.

Second, the papers are about edges. Pushing the proverbial ‘cutting edge’ of scholarship is just the cliched surface of the metaphor. At a deeper level, the papers speak of extended boundaries of our placement as a people. The southern continent, for instance, maybe a far frontier for most kiwis, but the processes Christine Elliott describes are brought closer by television and the chilled interior sites of ‘Antarctic experience’ in Auckland and Christchurch. Similarly Korea may be a foreign country to most of us, but -at least in principle - the young Koreans discussed by Francis Leo Collins are becoming less foreign in central Auckland. While our island nation is literally bounded by coast, we are increasingly accruing a globalised subjectivity and New Zealand Geography increasingly concerns itself with understanding our place in the world. At a deeper level still, Geography is surely knowledge crafted from within that edge that lies between experience and explanation.

Without exception, the authors look outward from our shores, acknowledging the utility, yet limits, of theory imported from abroad. Water, while not always saline, flows from our cover (by Caitlin Neuwelt Kearns, age 6) and through the papers. Christine Elliott opens her paper reiterating the provocative assertion that water is a peculiar mineral. This peculiarity creates fluid boundaries. It encircled the Maori world recounted by Ailsa Smith, and after contact delineated our nationhood through insularity. It also forms the unstable substrate of the shipboard communities Maria Borovnik considers, the declining clarity of Stephen McKenzie’s case study, and the contested commons harvested by companies considered by Edwin Massey and Eugene Rees. The coast, too, is a relative absence noted in Erena LE Heron’s analysis of New Zealand film. In all these papers, the authors position themselves within a metaphorical littoral zone: looking out over the water, employing theory to navigate towards explanation.

While highlighting the judicious use of theory, our collection also signals its limits. Ailsa Smith‘s paper questions whether there is indeed a Maori sense of place. From one perspective (a Maori one), this could be seen as a question not worth asking, so replete is te re0 with palpable links between people and place. But Smith is working in the borderlands of Maori and Pakeha worldviews and sets about amassing evidence that there is an a wori Maori sense of place akin to the western worldview. What is significant is not only that the construct she identifies deeply implicates land, sea and sky ‘scapes’. Nor is it only significant that the ideas are generations older than their western counterparts. Rather, within Geography, the significant aspect is that Smith achieves its articulation without referencing anything but her own thesis and in decidedly more lyrical terms than the writing of western geographers.

What message might this hold? First, the local/global dynamic must remain vibrant within New Zealand Geography. An internationalised Geography is important. However, if, after the IGU, more New Zealand geographers have been to Glasgow that a place like Parihaka, then something is amiss. Second, as we write, our university’s New Zealand Studies programme is undergoing a demise. Where else in the academy is New Zealand Studies, de facto, alive and well? The answer is surely in geography. In promoting the theme of ‘understanding out place in the world’, this Special Issue could surely pass as New Zealand Studies. Third, let us not theorise for the sake of it, or because it is fashionable to do so. None of this issue’s contributors do. Theory is a means to an end, and if understanding still remains over the horizon after the act of theorising, then it is time to remember that the roots of New Zealand geography are in the field. As feminist geographers valuably reminded us, we may now be always and everywhere in the field, but ‘the field’ is real, will keep us grounded, and in a fluid world, will always be what gives us the edge.

Robin Kearns and Scott Nichol