The View from the Veranda: Understanding Today’s Colonial Student

I n t r o d u c t i o n And so it was, for decade after decade, a steady stream of colonial families traveled great distances to join the ranks of countless others to take up residency in their country’s dominions abroad. In many ways their personal motives were similar. Whether it was to make money, to fi nd excitement, to improve their status, or to maintain family tradition, colonials found themselves on journeys to worlds very different from what they knew. Usually by steamship, their transition from a land of the familiar to a land full of new sounds, sights, and smells was more than a mere trip, a rite of passage. It was undoubtedly a strenuous but highly interesting life. Numerically few on the ground, colonial families in the British realm, for example, often assumed great responsibilities and administered vast territories. Although the work was demanding, diffi cult, and at times dangerous, many colonials were thought to be living lives of leisure — being waited on by servants, spending time in posh clubs, attending formal balls, and so forth (de Caro, 1996). Colonials generally occupied large bungalows or compounds and commonly employed numerous servants to run the household. The colonials, especially wives with no offi cial work, possibly no children at home, and only a staff of servants with whom to interact, might have felt very isolated. By the very fact that the colonials were by defi nition a ruling elite, the nature of relations between the colonials and the local population were often ceremonial and prescribed. Assuredly, some assimilated to local ways of life and even intermarried with the native people (de Caro, 1996). Some learned to speak local languages and might have interacted exclusively with the native community for weeks or months at a time. For the most part, however, the colonials maintained their distance, interacting only as needed and often in an objective and disassociated manner. In the early 1920s, a new generation of foreigners began to move onto the scene for whom sitting passively on the bungalow veranda observing the local culture going by was no longer suffi cient. For pioneering anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski and Ruth Benedict, it was important to step down from the colonial veranda to live and learn directly from the native people in an effort to describe and to understand another way