Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar

Notes

1. Betafo, 1990 1. All Malagasy are of mixed Afro-Asian descent, but “white” Merina tend to make much of the fact they all have straight or wavy hair; mainty, or “black people” (who are assumed to be descended of slaves taken from the coast) do not. In fact, roughly half the black people I knew did have straight or wavy hair, so you can’t necessarily tell whether someone is black or white by looking. Armand’s family and friends, however, were unusually African in appearance, as certain of the snootier townspeople were fond of pointing out. 2. A f okontany was the smallest administrative division: this office would, in colonial times, been called “chef du village.” 3. All extensive quotes that are not from written texts are my translation from the original Malagasy. The original Malagasy texts are available in an appendix to my dissertation (Graeber, 1996). 4. Combined, according to other accounts, with a driving hailstorm. 5. The way she put it also provides a nice illustration of how ancestral character becomes fused with that of their living descendants. 6. The Arivonimamo airport was given to the military, which rarely, however, had the funds to use it. 7. There are other reasons too: the sheer number of Zanadrano, or mediums, who tend to collect in any town the size of Arivonimamo; the fact that mediumship is organized on a regional basis with pilgrimage sites that very much follow the road network; and so on. For most of the time I was in Arivonimamo I was also living with a household headed by a noted local curer, which provided obvious advantages. 8. Miadana ultimately became a kind of research assistant in her own right; not only did she find me all sorts of documents in chests and attics in Betafo and elsewhere, she tracked down obscure bits of lore or information. 9. Actually he says “a compulsory political organization with continuous operations” that does this. 10. The way was only clear to lynch Henri, for instance, after a delegation had consulted with his father, who washed his hands of the affair. 11. The practice had fallen into desuetude for most of this century; it was undergoing a widespread revival in the ’80s. I even heard rumors that some f okon’olona had secretly revived the use of tangena—the notorious poison-ordeal abandoned since the nineteenth century—though I wasn’t able to confirm them. 12. In Arivonimamo there was one man with a gendarme’s uniform who would occasionally rent himself out to moneylenders or merchants to intimidate people into paying 403 Notes Notes to pages 23–30 404 debts or surrendering collateral. An acquaintance of mine from Betafo was terrified one day when he showed up in the company of a notorious loan shark—even after his neighbors explained to him that the man could hardly be a real gendarme, because even if you could find an officer willing to trudge out into the country on such a trivial matter, lending money at interest was against the law and a real gendarme would have had more cause to arrest his creditor than he. The case only underlines how little the forces of order cared about economic affairs; usually, there is little that irritates police more than someone impersonating an officer. It strikes at the very essence of their authority. But this impostor confined his activities to a domain in which the gendarmes had no interest. After all, the gendarmes never did anything to protect shopkeepers from Henri—and that was in town. The counterfeit officer seems to have confined his activities almost exclusively to the countryside. 13. The gendarmes’ occasional zeal in pursuing bandits probably did have something to do with a perception that they were the only organized, armed group that had the capacity to form the nucleus of a rebellion—unlikely though that might have been. There had been times, mainly in the nineteenth century, when bandits actually had turned into rebels. But I suspect the concern was rooted in deeper understandings about what a state was all about: under the Merina kingdom, bandits (referred to in official documents simply as f ahavalo, “the enemy”) were, along with witches, the archetypal antistate , that which legitimate royal authority defined itself against. The connection with witches also helps explain the otherwise puzzling fact that, much though they were unconcerned with Henri’s depredations, Arivonimamo’s gendarmes...