The Ethnohistory of Madagascar

This collection makes clear one thing: the old distinction between anthropology and history has by now completely disappeared. The subject matter of the two disciplines is the same, although of course there traditionally has been a difference of focus: historians looking more at the past, anthropologists at the present. But this has never been an absolute contrast, and now this distinction has faded completely. There is still a degree of methodological differentiation between the two disciplines, but again this is relative. Anthropologists frequently use the methods of historians and vice versa. Moreover, within each discipline a great number of new, different methods are now used that relativize the dichotomy even further.

Such is the general situation in the social sciences, but Malagasy history and anthropology have not simply followed the trend; in many ways they have been ahead of their time. If we look at a number of relatively recent studies on Madagascar, we find that from quite early on several publications combined an anthropologized history and a historicized anthropology (e.g., Condominas 1959; Lavondès 1967; Ottino 1963; Bloch 1971 and 1986; Fanony 1975; Esoavelomandroso 1979; Baré 1979; Raison-Jourde 1983 and 1991; Lambek 1981; Beaujard 1983; Ellis 1985; Lombard 1988). As a result, we have been able to avoid the treacherous dichotomies that contemporary theorists rightly denounce, often forgetting that in the practice of actual studies they have largely been abandoned. Thus among scholars working in Madagascar the best work has long ago rejected the idea that there is, or ever was, such a thing as an unchanging "traditional society," which was fully coherent, uniform, autochthonous, and somehow only recently "threatened" by history in the form of the "modern world." We have always stressed that Malagasy history, culture, and society has been one undergoing radical change and transformation, that it has never been still. We have not forgotten that radical change and reconstruction has never been absent and that the island has never been insulated from world history, whether this manifested itself in such things as the complex intercontinental Indian Ocean trade, the Napoleonic wars, the transatlantic slave trade, the Second World War, the Indo-Chinese War, changes in world capitalism, the policy of the World Bank, the politics of the French socialist parties, or the policies and ideologies of different Malagasy governments.

As a result we have perhaps been more subtle than some of our colleagues in seeing such things as French colonization as one among several such political and military impositions and attempts at imposition. When we have turned our attention to isolated groups, we have refused to see this isolation as a sign that the people concerned have somehow been untouched by history, but rather, that their lack of communication with others is precisely the product of history. We have studied Christianity and Islam as Malagasy phenomena, no more or less so than the Sikidy or the Fandroana–all phenomena in the crucible of creolization, reinterpretation, creation, and growth. We have not ignored the effects of administrative action–whether Merina, French, or Malagasy–when studying such apparently "traditional" manifestations as royal rituals or beliefs in ancestors. Finally, when we have come across images of an apparently "timeless" order in the practices of people, often in ritual, we have seen these as creations of change and transformation rather than as indications of a static past. Overall, those of us who have been working in Madagascar have something to be proud of. We have historicized and therefore "de-exoticized" our anthropology long ago. It is difficult to say that we have led the way, since, as we know well, unfortunately not everybody is as well acquainted with the anthropology and history of Madagascar as they should be, but we have often got to where others tell us we should go long before they have. The essays gathered in this issue of Ethnohistory demonstrate the fruitfulness and continuing vivacity of such an approach.

The very fact that the anthropology of Madagascar has for so...