The River, The Road, and The Rural–Urban Divide: A Postcolonial Moral Geography from Southeast Madagascar

Abstract

In this article, I analyze how ideas of attachment to place and the experience of political and economic marginality combine to produce a particular moral geography for people of the Manambondro region of southeast Madagascar. Though the elements of this moral geography comprise an archive of sorts of the colonial encounter, they also speak of people's consciousness of their marginality within the postcolonial present. I argue that moral geography represents a structure of feeling, a form of social consciousness that captures something profound about people's senses of place and also, regarding their ambivalence toward modernity, their sense of who they are and who they might become, [colonialism, modernity, moral geography, place, postcolonialism, structure of feeling, Madagascar]On an overcast afternoon in mid-1992, I stood next to Kotozaka, watching the events held to commemorate and honor a deceased elder of the village of Manambondro in southeast Madagascar. At one point, Kotozaka turned to me and said, "Fomba gasy-ohatran'ne biby. Ratsy he fomba doboky. Misy depense be" [This is Malagasy custom-just like animals. Funerary customs are bad. There is great expense]. Did we vazaha (foreigners) do such things, he asked, did we kill cattle when an old man died? 1 "No/' I said, "We don't kill cattle, though we do spend a lot of money on a funeral," and I proceeded to elaborate on the nature of "our customs." When I had finished, Kotozaka turned to me and said, "Tsara-tsara nandroso" [Good-it is good to be developed].Kotozaka's remarks were not the only time I encountered debates over differences of custom and issues of what it is to be developed played out in relation to the dead. One day, news reached Manambondro that Neny, a woman from a nearby village who had lived for many years in the capital of Madagascar, had died and that her body was being returned to her ancestral homeland (tanin-drazana) for burial. The news prompted discussion between Neny's relatives on her father's and mother's side, and it was agreed that the funeral would be hosted by the mother's group. A couple of days later, a truck arrived bearing Neny's brother, several relatives on her father's side, and Neny's corpse in a casket. No sooner had the casket arrived than an argument broke out between Neny's brother and people of his (and Neny's) mother's group. The brother demanded that the funeral should be conducted in his own village (that of Neny's father's group) rather than in the mother's village, this despite the fact that the elders of the father's group had already agreed that the mother's group would host the funeral. The argument continued for much of the night, and early next morning senior members of Neny's father's group arrived to try and resolve the situation.American Ethnologist29 (2):366-391. Copyright©

Hybridity, Vacuity, and Blockage: Visions of Chaos from Anthropological Theory, Island Melanesia, and Central Africa

“…7 Concretizing this hybridity, anthropologists are privileging interstitial zones of migration, displacement, and deterritorialization-such as roads, borderlands, and contested spaces-not only as revelatory sites for ethnographic inquiry, but as emblematic of the liminality of the globalizing, postmodern, or postcolonial condition (Ballinger 2004:31;Gupta and Ferguson 1997:48;cf. Aggarwal 2001;Clifford 1997;Hernández 2001;Masquelier 2002;Thomas 2002). As the matrix of new formations, the chaotic hybridity that these tropes spatialize is deeply ambivalent, however.…”

Modernity as Marginality: The making and the experience of peripherality in the Bijagó islands (Guinea-Bissau)

“…The urban/rural divide created by the scattered Portuguese colonial presence in Guiné, proved to be one of the main conceptual frameworks for interpreting local reality long after the end of the colonial regime. The opposition that was to play an important role in the formulation of post-independence development policies was a "moral geography" (Thomas 2002) that started to be drawn on the territory and in the people's awareness of the discontinuous presence of colonial authority.…”

“…This also led to a growing disparity in access to education for many young people, with strong rural/urban asymmetries (Monteiro and Martins, 1996). 6 On cultural transformation brought about by colonial rule and on postcolonial continuities, see, among others, Mitchell, 1988;Mudimbe, 1988;Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991;Comaroff, 1992;Dirks, 1992;Cole, 1998;Werbner, 1998;Thomas, 2002. Specifically on the continuities of Portuguese colonialism, see Lopes, 1999: 238 et seq.…”

“…The villages and the town seemed to be opposite sites of their moral geography (Thomas, 2002) and had become spatial symbols of the binomials that made up the social myth of development: closeness and openness, backwardness and progress, tradition and cosmopolitanism.…”

Roads and Anthropology: Ethnographic Perspectives on Space, Time and (Im)Mobility

“…This regional focus provides the grounding of any ethnographic approach to roads since then and readers may find the following studies useful additions to the articles and related bibliographies presented in this collection: Regarding Africa there are works from the southern Niger (Masquelier 1992(Masquelier , 2002, Zaire (Fairhead 1994);Central African Republic (Giles-Vernick 1996) and Madagascar (Cole 1998, Thomas 2002. Latin American was the focus of one of the first book monographs written by an anthropologist on a highway, Moran's work (1981) on the Trans-Amazonian highway; and key European and Mediterranean examples include studies of Portugal (Pina-Cabral 1987), Spain (Roseman 1996), Palestine (Selwyn 2001), Yugoslavia (Coles 2002), Sweden and Denmark (Lofgren 2004).…”