Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte by Michael Lambek (review)

Michael Lambek's latest book on Mayotte, one of the Comoros Islands, offers a fascinating depiction of what it is to struggle with time. It brings to mind the famous title of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, which Lambek uses as the title for Part 3 on how the Mahorais (the Mayotte people) have been dealing with profound changes since 1975. Lambek's challenge is in how to deal with 40 years of fieldwork comprising no less than 11 – longer and shorter – stays on the island. Not only has Mayotte undergone an extensive transformation, but so has Lambek, both through his confrontations with all the changes on the island but also through his exposure to the equally rapid succession of theoretical fashions in his discipline – maybe less vital, but at least as stormy.

Lambek's deep involvement and the impressive historical depth of his fieldwork on the island makes the question of how ethnographers deal with time a particularly urgent one. What to do with the idea of an "the ethnographic present," a subterfuge so dear to many ethnographers, when rich fieldwork notes from 1975 somehow need to be combined with notes written in 2015? Lambek's solution to this problem is an original one. He chooses to undertake an "ethnographic history" by selecting a series of cuts (or slices), which he presents in chronological order. Originally, the idea was to compose the book on the basis of a series of texts that he had already published at different moments in time. But while working on the book, he found himself partly rewriting these older texts. Moreover, Lambek added three new chapters to the beginning and three at the end. Thus, more than two thirds of the book were written after 2015.

The challenge is all the more fraught because of the tremendous change the island has undergone. In 1976, the Mahorais voted not for independence, as the other Comoros did, but for remaining with the French Republic. One can see this as one of the few successes of a colonial power that uses the classic divide et impera rule to block formal decolonisation. But Lambek emphasises, rather, the conscious choice of the Mahorais, afraid that independence would mean being overruled by elites from the other islands. The results were indeed spectacular. In less than 30 years, the island became integrated into France as a full-fledged department, the Mahorais making it from colonial subjects to citizens of the French Republic, and Mayotte, once the poorest of the Comoros group, changed into a prosperous hub and a gateway to Europe. Consequently, the island now attracts illegal and often quite desperate migrants from the other islands.

Lambek's ethnographic history tries to capture these deep changes as "living history." He does so by retaining some of the ethnographic present of his cuts, since it is precisely by juxtaposing cuts from different moments in time in their synchronic tenor that he hopes to grasp how Mahorais have lived their dynamic history. The result is a chronological chaos of sorts. Particularly in the recently rewritten parts of earlier cuts, one does not know who is speaking: the Lambek of then or the Lambek of now? This may shock some historians. But for the author, this is an innovative way of exploring Die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitlichen (the contemporaneity or the non-contemporaneous – a concept borrowed from Reinhart Koselleck). The main idea behind Lambek's ethnographic history project seems to be that of avoiding a linear history, which would serve to highlight one line perceived by an outsider through the dramatic changes his friends lived through. Rather, his cuts and their juxtaposition highlight how his friends perceived and tried to deal with these changes.

Lambek is clearly taken by the way Mahorians have succeeded in assuming their history. As in his other work, he is also deeply inspired by German philosophers in his struggle with time, notably Hans-Georg Gadamer. Lambek borrows Gadamer's motto to...