Ancestors Power And History In Madagascar

This collection of essays by regional specialists draws on a wide range of ethnographic and historical data to reassess the significance of the ancestors for changing relations of power and emerging identities in Madagascar.

This collection of essays by regional specialists draws on a wide range of ethnographic and historical data to reassess the significance of the ancestors for changing relations of power and emerging identities in Madagascar.

This book examines encounters between the living and the dead in nineteenth-century highland Madagascar, considering the challenges that ghostly actors pose for writing history.

Water into Bones explores the spiritual importance of water in Madagascar. Families in northern Madagascar conceptualize water as a spiritual realm where magical creatures and some ancestors live, and believe that infants are born with a special connection to the spirit world that makes them "still full of water" (mbola rano) and lacking bones. Over the course of their lives, the water is transformed into bone, and lives end as entombed bones, which symbolize their legacy as ancestors and become objects of their descendants' care and remembrance. Author Erin Nourse examines the ways that Malagasy women in the northern port city of Diégo Suarez actively enable their infants to acquire "bones" and establish belonging within their communities. Navigating diverse social environments that enable them to draw from various religious, ethnic, and familial traditions to welcome babies into their families, Malagasy mothers secure their children's status as distinctive individuals who are also firmly grounded in their ancestral legacies. Water into Bones reveals the vast possibilities for creating community, identity, and sacred power through the personal experiences of northern Malagasy women during pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood.

Anthropology today seems to shy away from the big, comparative questions that ordinary people in many societies find compelling. Questions of Anthropology brings these issues back to the centre of anthropological concerns.Individual essays explore birth, death and sexuality, puzzles about the relationship between science and religion, questions about the nature of ritual, work, political leadership and genocide, and our personal fears and desires, from the quest to control the future and to find one's 'true' identity to the fear of being alone. Each essay starts with a question posed by individual ethnographic experience and then goes on to frame this question in a broader, comparative context. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Questions of Anthropology presents an exciting introduction to the purpose and value of Anthropology today.

Time and History in Prehistory explores the many processes through which time and history are conceptualized and constructed, challenging the perception of prehistoric societies as ahistorical. Drawing equally on contemporary theory and illustrative case studies, and firmly rooted in material evidence, this book rearticulates concepts of time and history, questions the kind of narratives to be written about the past and underlines the fundamentally historical nature of prehistory. From a range of multi-disciplinary perspectives, the authors of this volume address the scales at which archaeological evidence and narrative are interwoven, from a single day to deep history and from a solitary pot to a complete city. In doing so, they argue the need for a multi-scalar approach to prehistoric data that allows for the interplay between short and long term, and for analytical units that encourage us to move continuously between scales. The growing interest in time and history in archaeology and across a wide range of disciplines concerned with human action and the human past highlights that these are exceptionally active fields. By juxtaposing varied viewpoints, this volume bridges gaps in narrative, finds a place for inclusive histories and makes clear the benefit of integrative and interdisciplinary approaches, including different disciplines and types of data.

Nineteenth-century highland Madagascar was a place inhabited by the dead as much as the living. Ghosts, ancestors and the possessed were important historical actors alongside local kings and queens, soldiers, traders and missionaries. This book considers the challenges that such actors pose for historical accounts of the past and for thinking about questions of presence and representation. How were the dead made present, and how were they recognized or not? In attending to these multifarious encounters of the nineteenth century, how might we reflect on the ways in which our own history-writing makes the dead present? To tackle these questions, Zoë Crossland tells an anthropological history of highland Madagascar from a perspective rooted in archaeology and Peircean semiotics, as well as in landscape study, oral history and textual sources.

This book examines how Westerners understood and processed Madagascar and its environment during the nineteenth century. Madagascar’s unique ecosystem crafted its reputation as a strange place full of unusual species. Westerners, however, often minimized Madagascar’s peculiar features to stress the commonality of its fauna and flora with the world. The attempt to understand the island through science led to a domestication of its environment that created the image of a tame and known world capable of being controlled and used by Western powers. At the heart of the exploration of Madagascar and its transformation in Western eyes from a strange world to a cash crop colony were missionaries and naturalists who relied upon global experiences to master the island by normalizing the peculiar qualities of Madagascar’s environment. This book reveals how the environment played a dominant role in understanding the island and its people, and how current environmental debates have evolved from earlier policies and discussions about the environment.