BECOMING a DRAGON Alan Macfarlane
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BECOMING A DRAGON Alan Macfarlane Digital Proofer Becoming a Dragon Authored by Prof Alan Macfarlane 7.0" x 10.0" (17.78 x 25.40 cm) Black & White on White paper 282 pages ISBN-13: 9781492188308 ISBN-10: 1492188301 Please carefully review your Digital Proof download for formatting, grammar, and design issues that may need to be corrected. We recommend that you review your book three times, with each time focusing on a different aspect. Check the format, including headers, footers, page 1 numbers, spacing, table of contents, and index. 2 Review any images or graphics and captions if applicable. 3 Read the book for grammatical errors and typos. Once you are satisfied with your review, you can approve your proof and move forward to the next step in the publishing process. To print this proof we recommend that you scale the PDF to fit the size of your printer paper. CONTENTS Introduction 5 Origins 1 Whence I came 13 Going to School 2 Landscapes 21 3 Material Live 26 4 Sickness and Health 33 © Alan Macfarlane 2013 5 Dormitory Life 39 Dragon Alchemy 6 Philosophy 42 7 Culture 49 8 Society 61 9 Ceremonial 75 Passing Through 10 Early Years 84 11 Paradise 95 Classwork 12 Learning 107 13 Knowledge 123 14 Geography 131 Oral Culture 15 Lectures 143 16 Speaking 151 Creating Meaning 17 Arts, Music and Performance 160 Games for Life 18 School Games and Sports 172 Private Worlds 19 Reading and Films 190 20 Entertainments and Clubs 197 2 3 Recreation 21 Autumn 203 22 Winter and All the Year Round 214 23 Crazes and Hobbies 220 INTRODUCTION Reflections 24 Reflections on Myself 224 There are several questions behind this account of my five years at the 25 Reflections on the School 239 Dragon School Oxford. One concerns who I was and how I came to be as 26 Afterwards 248 I am. So this is the autobiographical quest for personal roots and identity. A second question concerns my family and its history. It seems that I come from a well-documented and interesting family whose tentacles spread Bibliographic Note 251 across the world and can be traced in detail from the later seventeenth Visual Essay 253 century. A third question concerns England and Britain. I came back from India when I was six and encountered a new land. I needed to start to understand its distinctive history and culture. My final question concerns the British Empire. Britain was just the small hub of a great empire for more than a century. The British created this empire, but equally it created Britain. It has a very distinctive character which makes it different from other empires in the way it worked and imagined itself. I am particularly interested in what held it together and how the identity of those who were involved with it, such as my ancestors, was constructed. 1 Knitting all these questions together is an interest in how we are educated, in the broadest sense. So this book is part of a larger project to understand in a comparative way how education works around the world, and in particular in England and China. * I seem to have been interested in the evocation of memory from a relatively early period in my life. This partly explains why I have been reluctant to throw anything away. From my teens I had the idea that I would try to construct an ‘archive’ of my life and perhaps that of my relatives. So I hoarded toys, photographs, letters, writings, anything I could. This desire to hold on to the past is shown in an essay that I wrote when I was eighteen entitled ‘The past’. I shall just include the first paragraph to show my awareness, even then, of the importance of memory. ‘People often find tremendous pleasure in reliving the pleasures of past events, partly as I have already explained, because they are surveying it from a safe peak of knowledge. It is only when we are not fully conscious, however that we can be truly transported there again and feel every emotion that we once felt. We must not worship the past. It is dangerous to idealise it, and useless to live continually in it. It can be utilized as a 4 5 springboard to the future, and for those who have had an unhappy life it things differently; it is inhabited by half-familiar ghosts of one’s younger self may be the dim backcloth to the glorious future, but that is all.’ who seem disconnected strangers, yet are also part of oneself There is a comment by my teacher in red ink at the end: ‘One angle left This again emphasizes the good fortune of having the photographs, out – the aged. What does it feel like, I wonder when all the major letters and other documents. There are clearly some people who seem to experiences of one’s life lie in the past? The sole adventure left, death.’ As be able to remember their early years in vivid detail – Lord Berners, Roald I read this fifty years later it seems a pertinent remark. Dahl, W.H. Hudson, Naomi Mitchison, Muriel Spark to name but a few. I cannot do this and would never have felt it worth attempting this study of a * growing boy if it had not been for the chance survival of these documents, the ‘paper trail’ as it is now called in our audit-ridden culture. In constructing this book I first wrote down everything I thought I could Without the contemporary photographs, letters, diaries, school reports remember about this period when I was aged six to thirteen. I then and other materials, I would be like an anthropologist who had done checked this against the diaries, letters and school reports. This has thrown fieldwork in another society some sixty years ago and had destroyed all the some light on the way in which my memory works. It shows that for this fieldnotes. It would be an impossible task to write the ethnographic and period, or at least before I was ten, without supporting documentation anthropological account without the primary materials. almost everything would be irretrievable. There would be just a very few Yet even with these sources, one needs constantly to remember that lightning flashes of memory, usually moments of high excitement or pain each of them is biased. Just to take one example, an over-riding first or effort. A.C. Benson beautifully describes these isolated moments. impression is of how insular the letters were. While Indian Independence ‘Early impressions are like glimpses seen through the window by night and its aftermath rocked India, the Cold War and the Korean War when lightning is about. The flash leaps out without visible cause or rekindled fears of nuclear war in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These warning, and the blackness lifts for a second revealing the scene, the criss- events, let alone the two elections which took place in Britain, there is only cross of the rods of rain, the trees shining with moisture.... So it is with a small amount in the documents suggesting that they impinged on us. memory; my early blinks are exceedingly vivid, but they are sundered, and Yet I soon realized that, along with a slightly head-in-the-sand attitude though the passage of time does not dim them, as it dims the more fading which my mother admits to, there were also good reasons for this. Personal impressions of later life, they do not form part of a continuous picture.’2 letters and diaries are not usually where you will find discussion of A second thing I have found is how faulty memory is, not usually in the international or national politics or events – unless they directly impinge on experience itself, but in the surrounding details of when or where the event plans. This is worth remembering. The sources I have, like all historical occurred or who was involved. I have re-contextualized many memories, documents, create a bias - in this case away from the general to the when I caught my first fish at Oxford, when I learnt to cycle, when I stole particular. from my grandfather. I have also had to revise my whole assessment of the Another bias lies in the letters that I wrote to my parents and degree to which I was unhappy at the Dragon School. grandparents. Addressing an adult, especially when one is still learning to What I regret is that even with the detail in the documents, so little new control language, can lead into a kind of writing which conceals as much as memory has been triggered. I have sometimes managed to capture again it shows. How much of my own views and voice comes out of the letters, the ambient smells, sounds and feelings surrounding a photograph or a especially those written within the scrutiny of the Dragon School? I don’t letter. Yet very often I feel I may be forcing or imposing memories now notice much difference in my letters from home and from school to my that I know an event happened. For, on the whole, I can recall very little of parents. even major events of that time, like going to India for my eleventh birthday holiday, or singing in ‘Iolanthe’ when I was twelve. * Yet gazing at my past as it unrolls in photos and comments it seems mainly to be the life of a slightly familiar stranger. I feel a little affinity, The English preparatory school is a very unusual institution and it is some ghostly overlap.