DR. ELIZABETH COLSON ended her first spell of field
research for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute among the
Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia in September 1947: four
months later, in January 1948, she read the first paper analysing
her data to a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the
paper on 'Rain-shrines' reproduced here. Her fascinated audience
immediately realized that they were listening to one of the
greatest anthropologists of the post-war generation, for this first
paper showed that Dr. Colson had an original insight, a vivid
and intuitive analytical ability, and great skill as a field worker.
These gifts are demonstrated throughout this series of essays: for
example, the essay on rain-shrines grasps magnificently the
manner in which ephemeral shrines, serving hundreds of small
communities, slow the drift of people through thousands of
apparently formless moves, while the essays on the linkages set up
by loans of cattle and by residential moves of people exhibit the
meticulous and comprehensive data which underly her analytic
vision.

Before Dr. Colson came to work in Africa, she had carried out
a year's study of The Makah Indians ¹ of Washington; and her book
reporting this study confirmed the reputation established by her
early papers on the Tonga. It analyses how a small community of
Red Indians continues to maintain its identity, and preserve some-
thing of its cultural heritage, despite external pressures and in-
ternal schisms. Many passages in it--I consider particularly the
section on scandal and gossip and slander--opened quite new
lines of interpretation in anthropology. When she published a
general account of the Tonga in Seven Tribes of British Central
Africa, ² and papers on several aspects of Tonga political life, we
realized that through her analyses we were learning about a quite

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