Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar

10. It Must Have Gone Something Like This

The reader may well be wondering about my own effects on Betafo’s politics. Especially if one defines politics as mainly about the circulation of stories, the presence of a foreign researcher actively poking about trying to collect such accounts is ipso facto a political phenomenon. This is true, though it is not easy to document. It was especially difficult to know exactly what stories were circulating about me.There appeared to be many of these. Most seemed to center on my backpack. Around Arivonimamo, this backpack became, in its own right, a kind of icon of hidden power. It was a small greenish backpack and I used to carry it with me everywhere, slung over one shoulder. It mainly served to hold my tape recorder—though it would usually also contain notebooks and pens, an astrological almanac and a plastic bag containing my collection of beads in the outer pocket, and often, an extra sweater. Apparently there was endless speculation about its true contents: tools for gold prospecting, hightech surveillance equipment to monitor the nearby airfield, every imaginable kind of weapon. Almost everyone seemed to believe that I at least had a gun in there, and I suspect some of my best friends—who were constantly fretting and warning me about the dangers of bandits or drunken marauders on the roads at night—did not go out of their way to disabuse anyone of this impression. Opening the bag in front of strangers seemed to do nothing to dispel the rumors. Even more than becoming the subject of stories, though, I became a medium for spreading them. My style of conducting research often consisted of little more than telling people the most interesting facts or stories that I had most recently heard from their neighbors: e.g., “Someone told me that there used to be a Vazimba in that valley . . .” Chantal used to tease me about 309 IT MUST HAVE GONE SOMETHING LIKE THIS 10 this all the time—I was supposed to be eliciting stories, not telling them—but if nothing else it was a simple way to let people know what sort of things I was interested in without asking too many leading questions. Obviously, I didn’t recount personal gossip, but in Betafo, even knowledge of the distant past was political. It was also very unevenly distributed. Most people knew little of their neighbor’s family histories, so that I frequently found myself opening up what had been sequestered little pockets of tradition, often to the mild surprise of those I interviewed. This is particularly the case with stories that preserved a family grudge or tales of injustice, which, I found, were not the sort of thing normally bandied about to outsiders. Armand, for example, had had no idea that Norbert’s family also claimed their ancestor had once been tied up and thrown in a pig sty; neither did he know much about Ralaitsivery’s murder in 1903, except that it had happened, despite the fact that Ranaivo the Bolt had been telling the story to the village’s andriana for years, and that some of his mainty neighbors in Andrianony, descended from the murderer’s family, remembered the story very well indeed. Rarely, though, did such revelations alter anyone’s idea of what was really important about Betafo’s history.1 Neither I am aware of any overt conflicts that arose because of my presence, or because of what someone thought someone might have told me.2 On the other hand, people certainly did argue through me. And my style of reporting narratives back and forth would occasionally set off a kind of a dialogic process where certain people would take off from something their neighbor had said, or that they thought they had, and fly off into all sorts of unexpected hypotheses. What I want to do in this chapter is to present one brief sequence of encounters , partly to demonstrate some of the political play involved in researching history in Betafo, but also, in order to make a larger point about the active construction of history. Historical consciousness was not simply a matter of fixed narratives or half-remembered geographies. It was also the subject of constant speculation and invention. But before I develop this point, let me first tell a little story of my own. An Encounter with Norbert The closest I myself ever came to becoming an object of political dispute, in Betafo, came after I...