Monica Wilson: Remembrance of Roots, Awareness of Persons

Extract

Whether or not beauty is in the eye of the beholder, history surely is. ‘We do not’, said A. J. P. Taylor somewhere, ‘understand the present by the past, but the past by the present.’ For an historian this is courageous, for an anthropologist it would be trite. Even at undergraduate level, social anthropology teaches one to see how often the appeal to history is just the excuse for, or the indictment of, the present; what Chesterton, I think, called ‘the democracy of the dead’, the influence of an acknowledged tradition on decisions, may prove to be the most rigged of ballots. Perhaps this way of seeing things is partially a result of the pre-selection of anthropologists; certainly a remarkably high proportion of us do seem to have undergone some sharp uprooting, whether of country, or faith, or family ties, between infancy and early maturity, and hence are especially sympathetic to rejections, or reshapings of the past, on the part of others. Clearly enough, there are continuities in our lives and our societies which, even though they need reshaping, also need to be honestly interpreted; and I think that what Professor Monica Wilson has given us in Religion and the Transformation of Society is such an honest interpretation of southern African society as a whole, and, more closely, of Nyakyusa society in particular, and also, impressively though unintentionally, of Monica Wilson’s own understanding of life. It seeks, to be sure, to interpret societies which, more than most, experience the torment of unrealized change; yet the impression of the author’s personality which remains after reading, as that of one whose very fulfilment has been through the conscious seeking of continuities and the willing acceptance of change, is stronger than that given by many garrulous autobiographies. Perhaps, therefore, it may be legitimate to sketch out her life and work a little more fully than this book does.