Ancestors, Power, and History in Madagascar
Madagascar is often described as the 'island of ancestors'. But what exactly does this evocative turn of phrase mean? In a book to be published by Brill Academic Publishers in May 1999, eleven regional specialists draw on a range of ethnographic and historical data to reassess the significance of ancestors for changing relations of power and emerging identities in Madagascar.By Karen Middleton
Madagascar is an island of marked contrasts. Its landscapes range from the rainforests of the east coast to the arid ecologies of the deep south. Its political and cultural history also shows great diversity. Yet all the peoples of Madagascar are renowned for the prominence they give to the dead. Indeed, there are few monographs on this Southwest Indian Ocean island that do not emphasize the role ancestors have played and continue to play in Malagasy peoples' lives. Whether studying pre-colonial processes of state formation or describing life in a multicultural migrant town today, researchers are drawn to consider the relationship between the living and the dead.For anthropologists and historians, this common thread of Malagasy culture can only be the starting-point for analysis. They ask a number of questions. What local models of identity and personhood do ancestors embody? What kinds of agency are vested in living people on account of the powers that are vested in the dead? How does ritual around ancestors engage with history? What part do ancestors play in historical consciousness? What kinds of social and political contradictions might ancestors reveal?
In an edited volume of essays to be published in May, eleven regional specialists, ranging from well-established scholars to PhD students, explore some of these questions through empirical case-studies. Written from a variety of perspectives, they underscore the complexity and variability of Malagasy cultural practice around ancestors, and explore transformations within localized cultural practice over time.
Royal Ancestors
Three chapters explore the meaning of royal rituals past and present for historical agency. Pier Larson (Johns Hopkin University) reconsiders the Fandroana or Royal Bath that took place in the capital of the expanding Merina kingdom in 1817. Explicitly playing his historical approach against anthropologist Maurice Bloch's 'ideal' reading of the ritual, Larson shows how the 1817 performance can only be understood in the broader context of early nineteenth-century southwestern Indian Ocean politics.
One of the challenges for students of northwest Madagascar is to understand why royal ancestors from the precolonial period continue to play such an important role in contemporary identities and political life today. In her essay on succession in an urbanized Sakalava kingdom, Lesley Sharp (Columbia University) highlights some of the paradoxes faced by the Bemazava, a people otherwise renowned for their 'modernity', as they draw upon royal ancestors to situate themselves within the nation-state.
For the Antankaraña, a neighbouring people, 'tradition' is embodied in a ceremonial cycle that culminates in the raising of a mast over the royal capital. Michael Lambek and Andrew Walsh (University of Toronto) explore the key role this ritual cycle, and the historical narrative it enacts, plays in constituting the Antankaraña polity. Addressing contemporary debates around 'ethnicity' in Madagascar, they also argue that Antankaraña identity is constructed primarily through popular participation in this event.
Ancestors and Power
For many readers, the study of Madagascar will be synonymous with the work of Maurice Bloch (London School of Economics). His often controversial contributions to the anthropology of ideology, ritual, and power have made the Merina of the Highlands familiar to non-specialists. In his chapter in the present volume, Bloch turns his attention to the Zafimaniry. Noting the paradox that violence in young Zafimaniry men is both encouraged and punished, he suggests that their vitality is deliberately constructed so that it can 'eaten' by the elders and the ancestors.
The significance of sacrifice in Madagascar is often overshadowed by more exotic rituals such as the exhumation and reburial of corpses (famadihana) or possession by the spirits of dead monarchs (tromba). In her essay on the east coast, Jennifer Cole (Harvard University) shows just how important sacrifice, and especially the narratives that precede it, is to the Betsimisaraka social imaginary. She also highlights the ambivalence of ancestral power as it both enables and constrains the existence of the living.
It is important to ask how colonial experience in Madagascar was shaped by a culture in which ancestors are prominent and how this experience shaped ancestors in turn. Examining Karembola narratives relating to the decline of circumcision ritual, Karen Middleton points up the highly deceptive, multivocal role ancestors may play in Malagasy historical consciousness. Ostensibly a register of powerlessness at the hand of French colonizers, the uncircumcized body is also a idiom for reclaiming Karembola history and identity.
A similarly complex play between passivity and activity also preoccupies Karina Hested Skeie (University of Oslo) in her work on nineteenth-century Norwegian missionaries to Madagascar. Focusing on the mission-station and its symbolic contradictions, Skeie shows the difficulties the missionaries had in articulating visible embodied practice with invisible spiritual power, and openness with closure, as they sought to build 'God's kingdom' in the unfamiliar cultural landscapes of Madagascar.
Ancestors, Memory, and Slaves
Everyone today seems to be talking about memory, in Madagascar studies as in history and anthropology generally. In most parts of the island, 'history' or memory of the ancestors is closely linked to privilege; indeed, in many Malagasy dialects both are known by the same term. Not everyone can claim history, and history is often a matter for intense conflict, as three chapters on the cultural politics of ancestors in the Highlands make clear.
The chapter by Sandra Evers (Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam) is particularly poignant because it documents the re-construction of slavery in the southern Highlands, one century after manumission and four decades after Independence. It shows how established members of rural communities exploit cultural idioms of ancestors and tombs to further their own interests by turning later incomers into 'slaves'. It also charts the obstacles young 'slave' men encounter when they migrate to towns in the hope of escaping this ascribed identity and the social exclusion it brings.
The manipulation of seemingly enduring symbols of ancestors and tombs in the context of social competition also interests the historian Françoise Raison-Jourde (Université de Paris 7). Fieldwork in a village in rural Imerina over several decades has enabled her to chart on-going processes of 'historical bricolage' as local factions struggle to gain control of sacred places and to re-order their communities against the backdrop of a socialist revolution and economic reforms imposed by the World Bank/IMF.
The theme of painful memories is taken up by David Graeber (Yale University) in a chapter that looks at how descendants of former slaves in Imerina cope with the cultural legacy of the past. He documents the various ways in which people, who epitomize the condition of being 'lost to the ancestors', reconstruct their identities and reclaim their power to speak.
Ancestors, Power and History in Madagascar, edited by Karen Middleton, will be published in May 1999 by Brill Academic Publishers in the Studies of Religion in Africa Series, Leiden: Brill, 348 pp. + illust. ISBN 9004112898, Price: NGL 160,- US 94,50.