CONTEXTS
Photo: Fiona M. Stewart: Lilies in the Okavango Delta
'No Man is an Island'
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Donne
Donne’s sense of our innate solidarity with all humanity in face of death is also relevant to our inescapable rootedness in our shared human past.
We cannot isolate ourselves in a time capsule any more than we can survive alone on a private rock in the middle of the ocean. Collective memory is just as important to a community as is personal recollection to an individual.
This is why community storytellers and family searchers were and are so vital to the integration and continuity of tribal, social and familial identities across the world.
Social memory loss is just as disturbing to society as personal memory loss is to an individual.
In migration situations people respond differently to their sense of dislocation. Some cling to their resentment in their unresolved bereavement. Others become more self-centred and aggressive. Many, however, have the wit to discern those useful resources in their inherited identities that they can apply in a new situation.
Our involvement in the slave trade is, rightly, creating much heart-searching in Scotland at the moment. Seeing and accepting more clearly the terrible failures and the breathtaking successes of people in the past is the “giftie” that can also help us to see ourselves as others will perhaps see us in the future.
We will always live within multiple social and ideological contexts and share the accepted biases and prejudices of our own times just as people did in the past. Even the most admirable people (with whom we are, understandably, proud to be connected) are limited and fallible.
The following pages merely introduce very briefly a few historical contexts that are relevant to the mini-biographies that follow.
There are also just a few suggestions for further reading for each context topic but this is more to show you how I have reached my own conclusions than to set up any kind of required study course.
