Book Review: Ethnohistory: Emerging Histories in Madagascar. Jeffrey C.
Kaufmann
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Ethnohistory: Emerging Histories in Madagascar. Jeffrey C. Kaufinann, ed.
Ethnohistory, special issue, vol. 48, nos. 1–2. Durham, N.C., Duke
University Press, 2001, 379 pp. $15.00, paper.



This volume is the latest avatar of a great tradition in the anthropology
of Madagascar, which has for many years regularly produced innovative,
theoretically insightful, even brilliant studies, which, however, in the
end have almost no influence on the rest of anthropology because hardly
anyone notices they exist.



I am not quite sure why this is. Perhaps it’s because the academics who
police disciplinary boundaries have never known quite what to do with
Madagascar, a place which seems at once terribly insular-it is, after all,
an island, and ecologically a universe all its own-and almost too
cosmopolitan; while located off the coast of Africa, its history is so
completely rooted in the Old World economies of the Indian Ocean that the
very Malagasy language comes from almost halfway around the world. Area
studies programs lump it with Africa and then largely ignore it, since it
doesn’t really fit; projects studying Indian Ocean history ignore it in
favor of mercantile cities; Austronesian studies (insofar as such a thing
exists) see it as one extreme comer of a vast diffusion; in France, an
emerging field of studies in the “Indian Ocean Island World” was
destroyed by bureaucratic fiat in the 1980s; and simply having been a
French colony renders Madagascar somewhat off the anglophone
anthropological map. Those who are not interested in culture or history
know it for its plants and animals and see it as a kind of ongoing
ecological disaster; the human population mainly exists as villains in the
plot.



This book, originally published as a special issue of the journal
Ethnohistory, consists of an introduction (by the editor, Jeffrey
Kaufmann), nine case studies, and all of four different “commentaries”:
by Maurice Bloch (from England), Michael Lambek (from Canada), Karl Eggert
(from the United States), and Manasse Esoavelomandroso (from Madagascar).
As one would expect, the essays all mix ethnographic and historical
research, but they could be grouped, very roughly, into three sets of
three.



The first set consists of three essays about plant life. Two involve the
surprisingly passionate reactions of foreigners to Malagasy plant life,
ranging from French hatred for, and campaigns to eradicate, the prickly
pear cactus, which among other things provided massive fortification for
local villages in the Malagasy southwest (Kaufmann), to the
nineteenth-century fascination with the ravinala, or “traveler’s
palm,” so called because it holds tappable reserves of water, imagined by
Christian commentators as a kind of bleeding plant which represented both
the body of Christ and the country’s Christian martyrs-an image which
lives on in contemporary rhetoric which represents Madagascar as a bleeding
ecological catastrophe, its eroded soil washing out to sea (Feeley-Harnik).
The third, by the Malagasy ethnographer Jeanne Dina, is actually about a
pole called the hazomanga (“blue wood” or “tree”), which becomes
the center around which ancestrality is created among the Masikoro.



A second set of essays focuses on rituals: Pier Larson provides a
meticulous reconstruction of the history of the highlands’ famous
famadihana rituals, involving the exhumation and rewrapping of the dead;
Andrew Walsh writes about the changing political meanings of a mast-raising
ceremony in the far north; and Leslie Sharp contributes “Youth, Land and
Liberty” on independence-day ceremonies in the western city of Ambanja.
The final set of essays centers on the construction of group identities
(Mansare Marikandia on the changing meaning of the term “Vezo,” applied
to a fishing people of the west coast; Karen Middleton on the Karembola;
Yount, Tsiazonera, and Tucker on the Mikea, renowned as a forest population
of “hunter-gatherers”



But really, identity-and even more, the problematic nature of this concept
is the common theme that runs through the entire collection. This is
another way that Malagasy scholarship has always been ahead of the
mainstream: terms like “tribe,” “ethnicity,” and now “identity”
have tended to crumble in the face of Malagasy ethnography long before
their philosophical underpinnings were challenged in the world as a whole.
Similarly, to lecture an Afro-Asian population that has been absorbing
people and ideas from India, France, China, Wales, and the Persian Gulf (to
name a few) from the beginnings of its history, with the colonial period
often seen locally as simply one interlude of intense foreign contact among
many, about the importance of “hybridity” is patently absurd. Hybridity
is assumed. The problem is how anyone ever manages to construct an image of
“identities” fixed in some timeless past in the first place. These
essays could be read together as one fascinating study of the different
ways that temporary group allegiances are patched together, using material
idioms of flesh, bone, wood, and soil, along with complex integration of
political loyalties (or the lack of them), ways of making a living, and
ancestral taboos. Ethnonymns that appear in scholarly articles often turn
out to be temporary markers pulled out of this incredibly complex mosaic in
certain contexts that mean nothing at all in other ones. One often seems to
encounter the kind of blood-and-soil imagery familiar from modern
ethnonationalism, but here organized around sex instead of death, and hence
with entirely different implications. Similarly, Malagasy have built a kind
historical art of creating imaginary centers of power so as to establish
pragmatic forms of autonomy in relation to them.



There is much to be learned here, about cosmopolitanism, the nature of
history, identity, human possibilities .... It would be nice to think that
anyone was paying attention.


(Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from www.journals.uchicago.edu.)


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     Book Review: Ethnohistory: Emerging Histories in Madagascar. Jeffrey
C. Kaufmann -- Added : January 09, 2022

     Book Review: Ethnohistory: Emerging Histories in Madagascar. Jeffrey
C. Kaufmann -- Updated : January 09, 2022

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