1963 Fredericton Convocation
McIlwraith, Thomas Forsyth
Doctor of Laws (LL.D.)
Orator: Cattley, Robert E.D.
Citation:
CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1963
THOMAS FORSYTH MCILWRAITH
to be Doctor of Laws
Dr. McIlwraith is no stranger within our gates. Those of us who were here in 1951 will remember his Founders' Day address with its gentle riddling of our vaunted western civilization.
This quiet pipe-puffing Scot, with the Cambridge don's urbanity and the dry wit of a Sir James Frazer, has out-Englished the English school of anthropology that formed him. Unlike the author of The Golden Bough (who never stirred from his study), Mcllwraith lived for over two years as an adopted son among the tribe whose vanishing culture he has immortalized in his study of the Bella Coola Indians.
The Father, and by now the Grandfather, of Canadian Anthropology he is the Laird, reverenced and adored, of a swelling clan of pupils, old pupils, and staff. But the kindly professor, who with castor oil in the orange juice will doctor the sick fieldworker who shares his tent, can be ruthless with himself in his zest for material contactwith artifact and diet. He is given to testing the age of potsherds with his teeth, and once deemed his knowledge of Iroquois ceremonial masks incomplete until he had himself performed the ritual which keeps these fetishes benign, by smoking beneath them the poisonous mixture that passes with that tribe for tobacco.
If there is one lesson that this observer of human culture has to teach us, it is a generous tolerance of other men's beliefs. For instance, the crimson hood that is about to grace his neck may seem to him of no more merit than the roll of dyed cedar bark which constitutes the head-dress of a Kusiut initiate. On the other hand, the silk-robed President who will plant it there he may well equate with some venerable Bella Coola shaman, who has power to catch up ailing mortals to the land of Nusmat-a above and wash them in the great Alquntam's celestial wash-basin.
From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.
THOMAS FORSYTH MCILWRAITH
to be Doctor of Laws
Dr. McIlwraith is no stranger within our gates. Those of us who were here in 1951 will remember his Founders' Day address with its gentle riddling of our vaunted western civilization.
This quiet pipe-puffing Scot, with the Cambridge don's urbanity and the dry wit of a Sir James Frazer, has out-Englished the English school of anthropology that formed him. Unlike the author of The Golden Bough (who never stirred from his study), Mcllwraith lived for over two years as an adopted son among the tribe whose vanishing culture he has immortalized in his study of the Bella Coola Indians.
The Father, and by now the Grandfather, of Canadian Anthropology he is the Laird, reverenced and adored, of a swelling clan of pupils, old pupils, and staff. But the kindly professor, who with castor oil in the orange juice will doctor the sick fieldworker who shares his tent, can be ruthless with himself in his zest for material contactwith artifact and diet. He is given to testing the age of potsherds with his teeth, and once deemed his knowledge of Iroquois ceremonial masks incomplete until he had himself performed the ritual which keeps these fetishes benign, by smoking beneath them the poisonous mixture that passes with that tribe for tobacco.
If there is one lesson that this observer of human culture has to teach us, it is a generous tolerance of other men's beliefs. For instance, the crimson hood that is about to grace his neck may seem to him of no more merit than the roll of dyed cedar bark which constitutes the head-dress of a Kusiut initiate. On the other hand, the silk-robed President who will plant it there he may well equate with some venerable Bella Coola shaman, who has power to catch up ailing mortals to the land of Nusmat-a above and wash them in the great Alquntam's celestial wash-basin.
From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.
Citations may be reproduced for research purposes only. Publication in whole or in part requires written permission from the author.