The Work of Memory in Madagascar

Abstract

This article examines the practices through which the Betsimisaraka of Madagascar attempt to recode, assimilate, and contain the influences of the outside world. The Betsimisaraka endured colonization by the Merina and the French for 130 years. They rarely refer to this colonial past except on certain occasions when it is powerfully evoked. They prefer instead to commemorate ancestors. A processual view of remembering and forgetting productively complicates anthropological understandings of the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonization, revealing how local cultural autonomy can be partially maintained through the work of memory. [Madagascar, memory, forgetting, colonization, Bartlett]

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

“…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.…”

Loving and forgetting: moments of inarticulacy in tribal India*

“…Casey 2000; Hacking 1995) generally speak little about forgetting (apart from the clinical concept of amnesia). In anthropology, too, remembering has often been ‘privileged over forgetting, and retention and stability are privileged over loss and change’ (Cole 1998: 626), but authors have also pointed to the integral role of forgetting in social remembering (e.g. Battaglia 1993; Carsten 1996).…”

The Geography of Things That May Become Memories: The 2001 Earthquake in Kachchh-Gujarat and the Politics of Rehabilitation in the Prememorial Era

“…Such reworkings of memory are also apparent in the struggles of the nationalist community in Ireland, as well as in the testimonies and countermemorial practices of people who have suffered violently at the hands of states in places as diverse as Argentina, Madagascar, and Palestine-Israel (Cole 1998;Feitlowitz 1998;Slyomovics 1998). It is important to understand, too, that countermemorial practices-attempts to refuse, modify or subvert the efforts of more powerful (usually state) actors to fix memories and thus history-have taken shape in ways that sometimes challenge our understanding of the nature of social memory and memorialization.…”