Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Southeast Madagascar
Author(s): Philip Thomas
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 29, No. 2 (May, 2002), pp. 366-391
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3095172
Accessed: 14-02-2017 04:56 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
American Anthropological Association, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to American Ethnologist
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide:
a postcolonial moral geography from
southeast Madagascar
PHILIP THOMAS
University of Kent at Canterbury
In this article, I analyze how ideas of attachment to place and the experience
of political and economic marginality combine to produce a particular moral
geography for people of the Manambondro region of southeast Madagascar.
Though the elements of this moral geography comprise an archive of sorts of
the colonial encounter, they also speak of people's consciousness of their
marginality within the postcolonial present. I argue that moral geography rep-
resents a structure of feeling, a form of social consciousness that captures
something profound about people's senses of place and also, regarding their
ambivalence toward modernity, their sense of who they are and who they
might become. [colonialism, modernity, moral geography, place, postcolo-
nialism, structure of feeling, Madagascar]
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 367
But Neny's brother was adamant and additionally insisted that the funeral would not
follow ancestral custom (fomban-drazana); instead of a teza (a carved wooden post)
being erected for his dead sister, and on which would be placed the horns of cattle
slaughtered in her honor, a wooden cross was to be raised and the horns thrown
away. The response of elders from the mother's group was equally uncompromising.
If that is what he wanted to do, then the brother was free to take the body, they said,
but they wanted nothing to do with it; a cross is "not custom" (tsy fomba) they pointed
out. The argument simmered for two days and resulted in Neny's brother being fined
three oxen, one of which was given to Neny's mother's group as a fine of the tomb
(sazy kibory).2 When the fine was presented, Neny's brother also gave 25,000 Mala-
gasy francs in recognition of the fact that he had spoilt relations between Neny's fa-
ther's and mother's group, but the money was promptly returned-a "fine of the
tomb" is an ox, not money, it was explained.
Both these anecdotes concern funerals, but rites for the dead are not my interest
here. Rather, I want to ask what these events indicate about people's senses of them-
selves and their experiences of changes in their lives and their world. On the face of it,
these two events are part of ongoing debates about custom. Neny's funeral prompted
an argument between residents of a rural ancestral homeland who insist on following
ancestral custom and an urbanite migrant intent on the adoption of practices that his
rural relatives deem "not custom." But as Kotozaka's remarks imply, the argument
over Neny's funeral also is an argument about being "developed" and, by implica-
tion, about claims to being modern through the adoption of other people's ways of
doing things; in short, this argument is about identity, about who people are and who
they are not.
These vignettes introduce the analytic focus of my article on the moral geogra-
phy of a postcolonial modernity in the Manambondro region of southeast Madagas-
car. They allude to the complex intertwinings of ideas about the "Malagasy" and the
"foreign," ancestral custom and other ways of doing things, the rural and the urban,
development and progress, and what might most easily be glossed as tradition and
modernity. To speak of the rural and the urban, and tradition and modernity, is to re-
fer to sedimented deposits of modernist narratives of development and progress that
colonialism bequeathed to much of the postcolonial world (Gupta 1998). To some
extent, then, I address in this article Stoler and Cooper's call for further investigation
of some of the ways in which "the categories of colonialism . . . have shaped post-
colonial contexts and have been reworked by them" (1997:34). With this aim in
mind, I analyze these categories as constitutive elements of a moral geography that in-
forms local people's senses of themselves, as well as their relations with one another
and the wider world. Yet, although these categories may be traceable to the period of
colonial rule, they continue to have relevance because they express something funda-
mental about the geography of a postcolonial modernity that exhibits marked conti-
nuities with the asymmetries of the colonial era. In short, they capture the complexi-
ties of contemporary experience in the Manambondro region and the social, cultural,
political, and economic processes that have shaped people's lives over 100 years of
colonial and postcolonial history.3
of moral geography
As Akhil Gupta (1998:8-9, 179-180) notes, the opposition between tradition
and modernity is one of the most productive and enduring dichotomies that colonial-
ism bequeathed to colonial and postcolonial subjects (cf. Pels 1997:176-1 77), an ob-
servation that might equally be applied to such oppositions as the rural and the urban
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
368 american ethnologist
(Williams 1973:279-288) and the indigenous self and the colonial Other (Taussig
1993). But as much recent work has shown, none of these ideologically loaded terms
can be taken at face value, as if their meanings were transparently obvious or inher-
ently stable. The terms tradition and modernity, for example, are cornerstones of
modernist narratives of development and progress, even in contexts where these nar-
ratives are disrupted, and as such they live plural existences, configured in a variety of
ways in different settings (e.g., Gupta 1998; Kaspin 1993; Morris 2000; Thomas
1992). Similarly, notions of indigenous self and foreign Other (e.g., Keesing 1992;
Thornton 1995), and representations of the rural and the urban (e.g., Comaroff and
Comaroff 1987; Ferguson 1992, 1999; Gupta 1998:79-101) comprise more than sim-
ple afterimages of colonialism, for the meanings of such terms are invariably reconfig-
ured by the complexities of postcolonial contexts, their semantic fields and valences
shifting in response to newly emergent differences, hierarchies, and exclusions.
Moreover, these categories and oppositions often speak to and speak of one an-
other. For people in the Manambondro region, the urban often is associated with the
modern and "developed" and contrasted with rural traditional customs of various
kinds. Although the rural-urban contrast contributes a crucial spatial element to the
geography of postcolonial modernity, its moral dimension takes the form of an ethical
contrast between doing for oneself and doing for others. This ethical contrast is itself
mapped on to the rural-urban divide and intertwined with the opposition between
"Malagasy" and "foreign." Thus, the elements of moral geography are interwoven in a
complex field of structuring and structured categories, each of which is implicated in
others. It is the complex interdigitation of ideas about progress and backwardness,
identity and difference, place and morality that has produced a particular postcolo-
nial moral geography-a spatial imaginary through which people locate themselves
and others as moral persons, ethical subjects of a postcolonial moment that exhibits
stark continuities with the colonial past.
A product of historical and personal experience, moral geography is both consti-
tuted by and constitutive of people's senses of place, their understanding of who and
where they are. As Walter puts it, places are "location[s] of experience" (1988:21)
that evoke and organize ideas and images, passions and sentiments; above all, they
are "work[s] of imagination" (1988:21). Just how significant place is in the lives of
people in a variety of locales is testified to by an impressive range of anthropological
works that reveal the manifold ways in which persons, practices, and identities are
implicated in cultural landscapes (e.g., Basso 1996; Feld and Basso 1996; Gray 1999;
Hirsch and O'Hanlon 1995; Kahn 2000; Morphy 1993; Santos-Granero 1998). As
much of this work demonstrates, places are locales of intense emotional attachment,
thick with meaning and memory, shaped by both local and translocal phenomena;
they possess the "power to direct and stabilize us, to memorialize and identify us, to
tell us who and what we are in terms of where we are (as well as where we are not)"
(Casey 1993:xv).
In my own attempt to make sense of place during fieldwork in the Manambondro
region, I explored the set of spatial images contained in ritual and everyday contexts
that located persons and collectivities in the landscape, and I noted instances when
people voiced the largely tacit set of feelings they held about their situation, in the
sense of both a specific place and a particular set of circumstances. In time, I came to
realize that people's senses of place were tied up with a historically constituted iden-
tity defined in relation to the sharing of custom and place. I explore the cultural land-
scape of this sited identity and the notions of centeredness at its heart, along with the
imagery of "ancestral homeland," "roots," and the river. But, as Margaret Rodman
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 369
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
370 american ethnologist
The Manambondro region lies a little south of the Tropic of Capricorn on the
southern reaches of the east coast of Madagascar. The region's inhabitants, who refer
to themselves as Temanambondro, comprise part of a polity spread out over the lower
reaches and interjacent lands of the Manambondro, Isandra, and lavibola river val-
leys.4 These rivers descend eastward from the fringes of Madagascar's southern high
plateau and are prominent landmarks in a region where the vast majority of people
are subsistence farmers whose livelihoods combine the cultivation of wet and dry
rice, cassava, sweet potato, fruits, and legumes, with the herding of cattle and the
small-scale production of cash crops, principally coffee. Most villages in the region of
the Manambondro River are located along its banks or those of its tributaries, and
these waterways serve as routes for travel and sources of water for drinking, cooking,
and washing. The river is thus a significant aspect of everyday lived space, but its sig-
nificance is not confined to the practicalities of quotidian life; it also is an important
element of identity and history.
In common with other peoples of southeast Madagascar (see Deschamps and Vi-
anes 1959), Temanambondro comprise a collection of named ancestries (karazana),
each composed of one or more great houses (trahobe). Occasionally found in differ-
ent villages and river valleys, ancestries are not territorial groupings, though they are
spatially anchored through the one tomb (kibory raiky) they are said to share; great
houses, by contrast, are spatially discrete groupings residing in a particular village.
With one exception, Temanambondro ancestries are immigrants who trace their ori-
gins to other polities in southeast Madagascar, and stories of migration and settlement
that I collected reveal the landscape to be a prominent feature of the historical imagi-
nation among Temanambondro. Through reference to such things as toponyms, vil-
lage sites, and land cleared for cultivation, people literally emplace the past in a land-
scape both constituted by human history and a way of speaking about history (cf.
Rosaldo 1980).
When I asked people how ancestries of different origin had become Temanam-
bondro, people commonly mentioned the importance of shared customs or ways of
doing things (fomba) and shared place (faritra, toerana). Although the term fomba
covers a range of habitual practices, such as the way one cooks rice or constructs a
house, when discussing Temanambondro identity, people invariably use the term to
refer to rituals-such as marriages and funerals-which are seen to typify the ways of
the ancestors (fomban-drazana). Talking with those people who were pointed out to
me as authorities on the past, it became clear that Temanambondro identity was an
outcome of political agency, forged through the imposition of a common set of ritual
practices on immigrant ancestries. But another way of representing things was to at-
tribute an agentive role to place in the process of identity formation. People in the
Manambondro region often speak of fomba as practices associated with particular
places, such as when Voro explained that "samby hafa ne fomba n'olo arakaraka ne
faritra misy anazy" [people have different customs according to the place they live], a
point that he illustrated in terms of burial practices and planting cassava. Through the
siting of "custom," place becomes an element of identity, a point that Aban'i Ramose
made explicit when I asked him what made people from diverse historical and geo-
graphical origins Temanambondro: "Samby mana ne viany aby n'olo fa he faritra
nampitambatra anazy" [Everyone comes from somewhere different but the place
brought them together]. And of the places that were said to have brought people to-
gether, one in particular appeared as a recurring motif: the Manambondro River.
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 371
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
372 american ethnologist
from the practices that serve to objectify the memory of symbolic domination and
have established new tombs close to their villages. Although they no longer take their
dead downriver for burial, they assert their Temanambondro identity by pointing out
that they still have a tomb at the embouchure, albeit no longer in use, and (as do peo-
ple on the Isandra and lavibola valleys) they say they are Temanambondro because
they passed (nandalo) the Manambondro River, either to settle elsewhere or move
their tomb from its embouchure.
Implicated in a multitude of contexts, the Manambondro River is a multivocal
image that connects people of the region to their past and to one another. And al-
though the river signals division within the polity, it also represents the unity of Te-
manambondro in opposition to other polities around them. In local terms, people are
"rooted" in the river, a spatiotemporal center in the web of connections between peo-
ple, and between people and places. To be centered for Temanambondro, then, is to
have roots in places, or more particularly, in the landscape of their ancestral home-
land-roots that draw together and unify diverse social, spatial, and temporal rela-
tions.6 People's attachments to this landscape-at once practical, sentimental, and
experiential-are part of their sense of who they are, and even those people who at
one time or another leave the area to live in other parts of Madagascar speak of its
continuing hold over their lives. Some of these emigrants told me that they often saw
the river in their dreams, even sensing the taste of its water. They also live their lives
inside its symbolic ambit. Migrants invariably return to their ancestral homeland for
the birth of their first child and ensure that those children born subsequently have
their umbilical cords returned for disposal in the river. At other times, migrants return
to sanctify their marriages, or to hold rites using the river's water, which cleanse
(madio) transgressed taboos. And even the dead cannot escape the river's calling, re-
turning like Neny for burial in their ancestral tombs, sometimes years after death
when their bones are brought back, enclosed in a casket, as one man observed wryly,
"like sardines." For those people who remain in the ancestral homeland and those
who venture from it, the river remains a constant center, a place to which they remain
connected even when they live far away.
This complex of associations among ideas of person, people, place, and history
combines to produce a sited identity, a sense of collective self located within a spe-
cific landscape. Several Temanambondro I spoke with gave place and custom agen-
tive roles in their accounts of history and polity formation, emphasizing that they had
been made by place as much as the place had been made by them: By a variety of rit-
ual and everyday actions, they had made their ancestral homeland a place to which
they were attached by roots. Although a key trope of the "sedentarist metaphysics"
identified by Malkki (1992), Temanambondro botanical imagery involves not just
ideas of fixity (rootedness) but also growth, proliferation, and movement. Making
place for people of the Manambondro region is likened in many respects to setting
down roots, which both attach people to place and represent the nurturant source of
growth manifest in branches, fruits, and cuttings-these metaphors also being used in
a variety of contexts in the Mandambondro region to refer to people.7 And from
places where they have roots, people have spread out across the landscape "akao mit-
siry voankazo ne olombelona, mizarazara" [growing like fruit trees, spreading out
and dividing], for though people have roots in places, roots may be cut (fira)-like
shoots of cassava and sweet potato-and transplanted. Roots, then, summon up ideas
about attachment to places and others in those places, as well as the possibility of
movement away from them.
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 373
Place making, however, needs to be understood not just in terms of the practices
and representations that contribute to the production of a sited identity, but also in re-
lation to the siting of difference (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). For people of the
Manambondro region being centered through roots coexists with feelings of peripher-
ality, a sense of being becalmed beyond the pull of modernity's current. To explore
these feelings, I must move to a larger spatial scale and investigate the contrast be-
tween town and country and the significance of the road. In doing so, I move away
from idioms and images of centeredness, identity, and the ancestral past to concen-
trate on representations of peripherality, difference, and the history of the colonial
past and postcolonial present. Colonialism has undoubtedly influenced people's
senses of place. By this I do not mean that Temanambondro identity is a colonial in-
vention, produced through the entextualization of custom and tradition, or that peo-
ple's experience and representation of their relationships with their ancestral home-
land has been formed as a response to land alienation or the demarcation of tribal
territory.8 In fact, neither of these events occurred. Rather, colonialism bequeathed a
set of signs that, although they describe certain aspects of the colonial encounter, re-
main symbolically productive in the postcolonial present because in certain respects
the present does not mark a radical departure from the past. For many people of the
Manambondro region, parts of the archive of the colonial era-roads, towns, and the
opposition between Malagasy and foreigners-retain interpretive power as signs that
capture something about continuities in their political impotence and economic mar-
ginality, as well as charting contemporary moral fault lines and people's ambivalent
relationships with modernity.
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
374 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 375
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
376 american ethnologist
A widely noted form of resistance to colonial rule has been the fashioning of a
"grammar of difference" (Stoler and Cooper 1997:9), whereby the colonized have
created a space-physically and imaginatively-apart from a foreign cultural order
operating in tandem with forms of political and economic domination. In the Manam-
bondro region this process has yielded a discourse in which the country is figured as
the locus of tradition, and tradition itself is constituted in mutual antithesis to urban
modernity. Town and country are topoi in a complex moral geography in which cor-
ruption and virtue, altruism and anomic disorder are mapped onto the rural-urban di-
vide.15 The result is a landscape that has come to embody different ways of living and
being through people's identifications of its features with different elements of these
oppositions. The terms am-positra (town) and ambanivolo (country) are "partial inter-
preters" (Williams 1973:296), tropes by means of which people formulate their un-
derstandings of time and place as having been transformed by processes that have
fragmented the very landscape of people's lived world.
As I have already noted, the opposition between town and country, and the tradi-
tional and the modern, speak of other contrasts-between gasy and vazaha, and "lik-
ing oneself" and "liking others." These oppositions are often represented by people in
the Manambondro region as being as clear as the spatial separation of town and
country. But these contrasts are wrapped in ambiguity. Many people I know in the
Manambondro region envied vazaha for the wealth they command and the secure
life it gives them; in people's eyes, it enables easier access to such things as formal
education, long-term employment, vastly superior health care, a huge range of com-
modities, and the benefits of technological modernity that they themselves are denied
because of their powerlessness and poverty. But, though envied, vazaha also repre-
sent in people's views a perverted self-oriented sociality and morality that, taken to its
most nightmarish extreme, has given rise to the fear (still real for some) that they are
pangalak'aty (liver thieves).16 The semantic and ideational domain of vazaha is thus a
terrain of shifting valences, for things associated with vazaha display a Janus-like
quality, provoking both awe and fear, desire and repulsion.'7 This kind of ambiguity
also extends to people's equivocal relationship with the urban milieu.
Many people in the Manambondro region desire access to the kinds of infrastruc-
ture, amenities, and entertainment to be found in towns. Yet, although they recognize
towns as modern progressive places, they also perceive them as morally corrupt and
corrupting. To leave one's ancestral homeland is a fraught affair for people of the
Manambondro region, for there is always a risk that they will become lost (very) by
dying and their body not being returned for burial, by marrying among other kinds of
people (karaza'hafa), or by adopting the customs of another place. Long-term urban
migrants (rerelava) are especially susceptible to becoming "lost" and are often spoken
of as people who have "become vazaha" (lasa vazaha). In a striking inversion of
French ideas about the civilizing influence of towns, many people of the Manambon-
dro region see towns as places that foster self-interest and in which it is difficult to trust
people, one of the reasons given for the prevalence of courtyard fences (lakoro)
around urban houses. Similarly, they point to townspeople's continual search for
money (mitady vola), not only evinced by wage labor, but also linked to such phe-
nomena as burglary and prostitution.
If these ambivalences undermine any neat hierarchical ordering of town and
country, the polarization of spaces, moralities, and ways of living associated with the
rural-urban divide also sit awkwardly with people's experiences of rural life. Not only
does the money scale of value pervade a great deal of rural economic life, there also is
an almost daily search for cash to buy the basic commodities of household provisioning.
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 377
To this end, many sell some of their produce in Manambondro village market and
combine subsistence agriculture with occasional agricultural wage labor and other
cash-earning occupations. Money is also a significant element in intimate relations,
and, I was told, it is common for a man to approach a potential lover (sakeza) by bran-
dishing a banknote. But this, I was told, was not the same as prostitution; it was just
"Temanambondro custom." Yet I also heard some women refer to their sexuality as
their lova (inheritance) and fanaka (household furnishings), with the clear implication
that these all had potential exchange value, realizable in a time of need. Finally,
money is an important component of ritual. As Neny's brother found out, cattle, not
cash, are the means of payment for fines of the tomb, but in other contexts cash can
substitute for cattle in funerals, and gifts of money during funerals and circumcisions
amply demonstrate that money and the ways of the ancestors are not necessarily in-
compatible.
Other aspects of life associated in popular rhetoric with the urban milieu are also
present in the countryside. Burglaries occur, and as a result many people lock their
houses, including those people (mainly returned migrants) who have built what are
called "vazaha houses" surrounded by courtyard fences (see Thomas 1998). Mean-
while, many people in Manambondro village talked about a tendency toward house-
hold atomism in patterns of production and consumption in terms of people being
motivated by a "liking for themselves." People's concerns about this shift frequently
manifested themselves in their conversations about mealtimes, especially the use of
traditional large wooden plates (atova). In the past, I was told, people from several
households would gather together for the evening meal, men eating from one atova
and women from another. But nowadays, people would add, everyone eats sepa-
rately (manokana), each household to itself, each person served on a separate plate.
No longer called atova, the store-bought plates are known by the French assiette. Re-
iterating their interstitial position in the moral geography of modernity, people in
Manambondro village told me that if I visited more remote settlements, where people
more closely followed the ways of the past, then I would see people eating together
from atova. Implicit in such remarks, occasionally tinged with nostalgia, was an ac-
knowledgment that people in Manambondro village were in a small way becoming
vazaha; yet, at the same time, people's remarks contained a certain amount of pride,
for eating in this way also signaled that in their eyes they had become developed.'8
Incidents of urban life could also be cited to show that just as practices associ-
ated with towns are present in the countryside, so, too, is the opposite the case. What
is most striking about this "rhetoric of contrasts" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1 987:201) is
that it continues to operate as a dominant set of framing images in speech and
thought, even though people experience instances to the contrary. Williams (1973)
writes about English constructions of the country and the city but in terms that are
equally applicable in the present context. He notes that these oppositions and their
associations
at times ... express, not only in disguise and displacement but in effective mediation
or in offered and sometimes effective transcendence, human interests and purposes
for which there is no other immediately available vocabulary. It is not only an absence
or distance of more specific terms and concepts; it is that in country and city, physi-
cally present and substantial, the experience finds material which gives body to the
thoughts. [Williams 1973:291]
Towns, vazaha, "liking oneself": These are not only the causes of the changes that peo
of the Manambondro region have experienced over the past century, they also a
the outcomes. They represent the categories of a social system that has transformed-
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
378 american ethnologist
Though colonial policy and practice shifted in various ways after the period of
Gallieni's rule, perhaps most markedly during the governorship of Marcel Olivier
(1924-30), people of the Manambondro region endured demands for corvee labor
during both administrations, deployed, among other things, for the construction of
roads. In late-1 9th-century France, a road system that had earlier facilitated the lim-
ited diffusion of state power was enormously expanded, for the first time creating
something approaching national unity and a high degree of political and economic
integration (Weber 1976:195-220). This instrumental approach to communications
was shared by Gallieni and others (see Conklin 1997:38-72; Murray 1980:168-1 77)
who used roads and railways as technologies of empire, and as he had in his previous
postings, Gallieni made road building central to his colonial program in Madagascar
(Gallieni 1908:59-60; Rabinow 1989:144, 149, 157). In the southeast part of the is-
land, except for a vehicular road between the high plateau and the coast, these routes
initially comprised paths and tracks that linked together the posts established during
the period of pacification, making possible surveillance and administration, troop
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 379
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
380 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 381
road that passes through the ancestral village and on to the large farm of a former
member of Ratsiraka's cabinet. When the bridge on the RN12 closed, it became nec-
essary to make a lengthy detour via the new bridge, and in places cut a new road to
rejoin the main highway. That a new bridge was constructed along a side road that
led to the ancestral village and private farm of a former government minister, rather
than along the route nationale, was seen by those who talked about it as symptomatic
of their own peripherality and powerlessness.
Without anyone to support their cause in government, people in Manambondro
village expect the state to ignore their requests for an improved road. Others-such as
local merchants-have a more vested interest in a functioning RN12 and, along with
representatives of the Catholic Church, sporadically attempt to plug the potholes of
state neglect. In 1993, things began to look up when a number of local merchants
who used the road privately financed the re-leveling of some stretches of the RN12 by
purchasing fuel for a state-owned tractor. News of the project reached Manambondro
long before the tractor, raising hopes that prospects for commerce would indeed open
up.
As well as mediating local-state relations, the road also figures in people's expe-
riences of and ideas about wealth. Those who regularly travel the road to Vangain-
drano are commonly said to be "seeking money" (mitady vola), "making a profit"
(manao profite) from "doing traffic" (manao trafic); for, as a neighbor pointed out to
me, why else would they go there so often? Among those involved are merchants
(mostly ethnic Chinese) who run rural trade stores, stocked with industrially produced
commodities brought in from towns, and control the market in cash crops, purchased
from rural producers and shipped out along the road. Like other people with money
(olo manambola), they invest some of their wealth in motor vehicles, seen as objects
of phenomenal value and the apogee of vazaha technological cunning. Those people
who control transport and frequently journey along the road make tangible in their
persons and possessions the links between towns, roads, and wealth.
Though I only knew two Temanambondro who ran rural stores, there were many
who envisioned the possibility of using the road to profit from urban markets through
the sale of rural produce. Long- and short-term fluctuations in the prices of cash crops
and store-bought commodities are a brute reality of life in the Manambondro region,
and people are keenly aware of price differentials between different places at any
given time. During visits to towns such as Vangaindrano, I often heard people from
Manambondro talk about how much cheaper commodities in general stores there
were and, more significantly, how much more expensive rural products were in the
market. Yet, with no access to affordable and regular public transport-due, people
pointed out, to the state of the road-those people who attempted to take advantage
of price imbalances were few and far between.21
The re-leveling project was one reason why people in Manambondro village be-
gan to give voice to their sense of peripherality, but talk of the road also was prompted
by a sense of mild optimism generated by the political climate of 1992-93. Though
distrustful of the party officials that visited them, people in Manambondro village re-
acted to proposed changes to regional political boundaries made by the Federalists
(associated with Ratsiraka) by reassessing their own position within the national po-
litical-economic order of things, a topic that I heard discussed on a number of occa-
sions. A few people remarked that being part of the province (faritany) of Fianarantsoa
and the district (fivondronana) of Vangaindrano had brought them no benefits, a point
some people illustrated with reference to the road. Some wondered if it would be bet-
ter to be part of a region centered on Faradafay, where market prices for the kinds of
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
382 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 383
they appear unwilling to let it pollute the quintessential place of the ways of the an-
cestors-hence the rejection of the money that accompanied the oxen given as
Neny's brother's fine of the tomb. Here the contrast between gasy and vazaha, the
ancestral and the modern, is played out as symbolic practice. Precipitated by the col-
lision between two radically different ways of acting and being, in the form of the
tabooed forest, people are struggling to separate in space what has come to coexist in
time.
closing remarks
The river, the road, and the rural-urban divide-these are some of the elements
of the moral geography I have detailed here, a spatial imaginary constituted from the
interweaving of ideas, idioms, and images of practice and identity, morality and so-
ciality, memory and history, experience and imagination. Moral geography encom-
passes a multilocal sense of place the horizons of which extend outward from the
ancestral homeland to the towns beyond it, the region in which it lies, and the nation-
state and world of which it is seen as a marginal part. But moral geography is not just a
concatenation of places and spaces, for it is also imbued with the vestiges of history.
Many of its elements are categories that chart the front line of the colonial encoun-
ter-gasy and vazaha, "liking oneself" and "liking others," town and country, the an-
cestral and the developed. These categories are implicated in the practices of colonial
modernization and its practitioners' dreams about the "moral and material conquest
of the natives" (Lyautey 1935:256) and of their "voluntary and directed evolution ...
toward . . . civilization" (Deschamps 1936:219). But these categories do not speak of
the success of this modernist project. Instead, they speak of the experience of margin-
ality and privation, and of what the Comaroffs identify as a key feature of the post-
colonial predicament throughout much of Africa, the disruption of "grand narratives
of progress and development" (1999:289; cf. Ferguson 1999).
Moral geography can thus be seen as a map of the present that is distinctively
postcolonial, a present that, to paraphrase Nicholas Dirks (1992:23), comes after co-
lonialism but not without it. But if some of the elements of moral geography have a
colonial genealogy, it should not be assumed that they speak only of the burden of
colonization on contemporary lives, as if they "impl[ied] that colonialism was the
only thing of importance to people who live in what were once colonies" (Stoler and
Cooper 1997:33). Indeed, although these elements reveal that there is a continuation
of sorts of colonial asymmetries and hierarchies, the elements themselves have been
conspicuously refashioned to speak meaningfully of experience in the postcolonial
present. One of the most striking things about the road is that a space that I assumed
might figure in local historical consciousness as one of the "keepers of memory"
(Casey 1987:213) of colonial rule was implicated more significantly in people's pre-
sent and future. A significant site of colonial memory for some, it also is a site of be-
coming, a space for imagining modernity's possibilities. Or take the opposition be-
tween gasy and vazaha. This opposition is one of shifting significance; it no longer
refers simply to differences between Malagasy and French but has become a site of se-
mantic ambiguity where people play out ideas of identity, morality and sociality, and
their ambivalent relationships with modernity. In effect, it has become part of an on-
going existential debate in which people are frequently engaged, how to become
modern while remaining themselves. In short, moral geography draws on the past to
make sense of the present, but that past is not "unambiguously determining" (Stoler
and Cooper 1997:20) of the present and has been reconfigured as a means for imagin-
ing the future.
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
384 american ethnologist
notes
Acknowledgments. This research has been funded by an Economic and Social Resear
Council (U.K.) Postgraduate Research Studentship and a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fello
ship. In Madagascar, field research was facilitated by the Mus6e d'Art et d'Archeologie/lnst
de Civilisations of the University of Antananarivo in conjunction with the Ministere des Aff
Etrangeres and the Ministere de I'Enseignement Superieur. I am grateful to these institution
enabling me to carry out my work. Earlier versions of this article were presented at a work
on "Mythical Lands and Legal Boundaries" held at the Department of Anthropology, Univer
College London, in October 1997; at the University of Sussex social anthropology semina
February 1999; and at a conference entitled "Rural-urban Relations and Representations: Co
parative Perspectives" held at University College London in April 2000 and funded by the E
nomic and Social Research Council (U.K.) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My thanks g
participants at each of these events for their comments and questions. I also am gratef
Cecilia Busby, Jennifer Cole, Eric Hirsch, Pier Larson, Karen Middleton and American Ethn
gist's anonymous reviewers for their careful readings of earlier drafts. Needless to say, my gre
est debt of gratitude is to my Temanambondro hosts; I hope that one day the future they d
will materialize to their satisfaction. Finally, responsibility for any errors of fact or interpret
remain mine alone.
1. Although I have here chosen to translate the word vazaha as "foreigner," the reader
should note this definition is offered as a provisional gloss pending a more detailed discussion
below.
2. Fines (sazy) are meted out to people held responsible for contravening customs or ta-
boos. Fines for relatively minor infractions are payable in money or alcohol whereas more seri-
ous offences (such as transgressing customs and taboos regarding tombs) require the killing of
oxen.
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 385
so settlements (tanana) ranging in size from 200 or 300 persons, to the largest, Manambondro
village itself (the principal fieldwork site), home to just under 3,000 people according to local
census takers (personal communication).
5. This view of the relationship between geography and polity is not unique to Temanam-
bondro; it is widespread with some variation up and down the east coast of the island (Thomas
1997:22-25).
6. It is worth noting here the etymological connection between a number of the terms
mentioned: root (fototra), trunk (fotora), umbilical cord (foitra), and center (foibe)all derive from
the root fo. For a fuller comparative discussion of "roots" in relation to the conceptualization of
place, see Thomas (1997:35-37).
7. This imagery is part of a more general botanical metaphysic in the Manambondro re-
gion in which people are likened to plants (see Thomas 1996); similar parallels have also been
noted in other parts of Madagascar (Bloch 1993; Feeley-Harnik 1991). That arboreal imagery
has the potential to symbolize both rootedness and movement can also be seen in the ethno-
graphic cases discussed by de Boeck (1998) and Lovell (1998).
8. My point here is that, unlike the situations described by Pels (1996) and Steedly (1996),
Temanambondro were not subjects of colonial attempts at producing definitive textual ac-
counts of their language, customs, and traditions; nor can the whole of people's attachments to
their ancestral homeland be attributed to the kind of political, economic, and legal processes
that led to them being associated with a particular territory (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991;
Kaplan 1995). In fact, Temanambondro appear not to have been recognized as a distinctive
tribe (tribu) in any significant sense by the French. Deschamps, for example, calls them an "as-
similated" group of a larger "tribe" (1936:77-80). In addition, they largely escaped the gaze of
the missionaries and colonial officials who produced numerous detailed ethnological accounts
of Malagasy peoples. Furthermore, although the French sought to establish administrative divi-
sions along the lines of ethnic boundaries (Gallieni 1908:141; Lyautey 1903:381-387), for rea-
sons as yet obscure, the region occupied by Temanambondro came to fall within two different
provinces. In short, a sited identity is something Temanambondro have shaped themselves
rather than something they have had foisted on them.
9. Much work remains to be done on the uprising of 1904-05, one of the first major anti-
colonial revolts of the postpacification period. For summary accounts from the French perspec-
tive, see, for example, Gallieni 1908:267-270 and Deschamps 1936:178-182; compare Jacob
1981. Deschamps comments that "the rapid suppression of the uprising left a profound impres-
sion on the rebel tribes and their neighbours" (1936:181). Perhaps no evidence of this impres-
sion is more telling than the fact that people from Manambondro did not participate in the better
known and larger revolt of 1947 because, as one man told me, they "had already seen what
guns can do." The sentiment is strikingly similar to that expressed by one of Cole's informants in
explaining why the experience of 1947 made people of the village of Ambodiharina in east
Madagascar fearful of the 1992-93 national elections (1998:618).
10. Fear that the French would expropriate land appears to have been well established
prior to the outcome of the revolt. When a French merchant proposed establishing a trading
post on the lower Manambondro river in the late 1820s, he reports being asked by the ruler of
the region "if the project has not the aim of one day seizing [the ruler's] land as [the merchant's]
compatriots had already done [i.e., some two centuries beforehand at the short-lived French
colony] at Fort Dauphin" (Leguevel de Lacombe 1840:230). Such fears also persisted during the
period of my fieldwork.
11. This system of pacification and administration is detailed in the numerous accounts
and reports gathered in Hellot 1900, especially Gallieni's "Instructions du 22 mai 1898" (Hellot
1900:332-344), and at numerous points in Gallieni's memoir of his period as Governor Gen-
eral (Gallieni 1908). For a useful discussion of Gallieni's colonial policy, situating it within its
intellectual and historical milieu, see Rabinow 1989:126-167.
12. As Green (1990), Weber (1976), Williams (1982:354-356), and Wright (1991) note, in
late-1 9th- and early-20th-century France the urban milieu was viewed by many as the heart of
French culture and civilization, an idea of great importance in the internal colonization of
France's own provincial subjects (Weber 1976:485-496). Indeed, in both metropole and colonies,
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
386 american ethnologist
towns and cities were occasionally referred to, as indeed were colonies themselves, as "labora-
tories" (Rabinow 1989:289; Weber 1976:232; Wright 1991:73, 85, 300), a metaphor that is viv-
idly suggestive of the idea that the urban milieu was involved in the forging of new
subjectivities, one manifestation of more general ideas, which Rabinow (1989) shows to have
influenced Gallieni among others, about changing people through transforming their environ-
ment.
13. The verb nandroso (past tense) derives from the root roso, which takes on a number of
forms, all of which involve the notion of moving upward or advancing. For example, one uses
the imperative mandrosoa to invite someone into one's house, an action requiring a step up
from the ground, whereas the substantive fandrosoana has been adopted by the Church and
both the colonial and postcolonial state in a modernist discourse of progress, civilization, and
development. By contrast, ambanivolo (the term for countryside) derives from ambany (be-
neath, below). In Temanambondro "quality space" (Fernandez 1982:410-412), things "above"
are accorded greater symbolic value than things "below" (Thomas 1995:344-346), so the idea
that towns are oriented upward and above the countryside makes sense within a more encom-
passing cultural logic that interweaves notions of spatial and cultural hierarchy.
14. The opposition between gasy and vazaha and its various associations has been widely
described throughout Madagascar. See, for example, Bloch 1971:12-32; Cole and Middleton
2001; Feeley-Harnik 1991:267-271; Graeber 1996; Middleton 1997; and Sharp
1993:1 58-159. Due to the ambiguity of the terms, I hereafter leave them untranslated.
15. For comparative material on representations of the urban milieu in Madagascar, see
Bloch 1971:12-13; Feeley-Harnik 1991:231-301; and Sharp 1993. The kind of oppositions be-
tween town and country identified here are a refracted image of the form they have taken in co-
lonial metropoles, described in different ways by Green 1990; Weber 1976; and Williams
1973.
16. Representations of vazaha as thieves of body parts and bodily fluids (liver, heart,
blood) are widespread throughout Madagascar (e.g., Althabe 1969:38, 308; Bloch 1971:31;
Jarosz 1994; Sharp 1993:215) and appear to date back in some parts of the island to the late
19th century (Jarosz 1994:427). Such representations bear a striking resemblance to reports of
vampires and the theft of body parts in Africa (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Weiss 1998;
White 2000). The imagery of liver thieves and their counterparts in other parts of Madagascar is
certainly highly suggestive: the theft of body parts can be read as a powerful metaphor of the
violence of extraction (of labor, taxes, resources), and the relations of oppression and domina-
tion between colonizers and colonized. Following the Comaroffs (1999), it also may be read as
a representation of the particularly postcolonial experience of the iniquities of contemporary
global capitalism. But before making these kinds of claim, more detailed ethnography of these
phenomena is required, for although there are obvious parallels between the Malagasy case
and the examples discussed by the Comaroffs (1999), there are also significant differences. For
example, in the Manambondro region liver thieves are not viewed as witches (mpamosavy).
Moreover, witchcraft is seen as a prototypically Malagasy ability, usually practiced by commu-
nity insiders; liver thieves, on the other hand, are vazaha, outsiders par excellence. Further-
more, neither witchcraft nor the theft of body parts is viewed as an occult means of capital
accumulation; like liver thieves, witches' deadly actions are seen as an end in themselves rather
than means to other ends. Finally, and more broadly, none of the Malagasy ethnography sug-
gests the existence (either real or imagined) of a market in body parts; nor do rumors and reports
of liver thieves and other such beings appear to be on the increase (but see Sharp 2001). All of
this is to say that it is important to remember that accounts of beliefs and rumors about those
who steal body parts and so forth are configured in relation to specific political and economic
contexts and local cosmologies of occult powers, the body, and human life.
17. A similar ambivalence toward vazaha and aspects of modernity is noted by Bloch
1971:12-13, 30-31; and Cole and Middleton 2001.
18. It is significant that in Manambondro village the use of atova is confined to ritual occa-
sions, events that embody ancestral custom. Also striking is the fact that on days of Christian and
national festivals (Christmas, New Year's Day, Independence Day), domestic meals are often
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 387
served up in individual portions using the local equivalent of "the best china," store-bought ce-
ramic or glassware that is recognized as vazaha in style.
19. The prominence of food in this man's memories of the corvee is notable given that the
ethics of Temanambondro sociality require hosts to feed guests. That the French did not feed la-
borers and fed prisoners on what was not seen to constitute a meal illustrates the gulf between
the French and their subjects and, as Tenanambondro see it, the contempt held by the former for
the latter.
20. Ratsiraka's presidency ground to a halt as a result of widespread protest in 1991-92.
Afterward, a new constitution was drawn up, inaugurating the Third Republic under President
Zafy Albert, elected in early 1993. In 1996, Zafy was impeached and Ratsiraka subsequently re-
turned to power. It is important to note that my period of fieldwork (1991-93) coincided with
the transition from the Second to Third Republic. The significance of this time frame will be-
come clearer below.
21. Limitations on entrepreneurial activity are due primarily to transportation costs and
the disinclination of those who control transport (which they use to realize profits in their own
trade activities) to carry bulky rural produce. It is notable that I only knew of one enterprising in-
dividual from Manambondro who went to Vangaindrano to sell foodstuffs. His exploit was un-
usual enough that he became known, after what he sold, as Dried Cassava Koto. After three trips
with a product whose price to bulk ratio was relatively high, Koto ceased his activities when his
labor was needed in his rice fields.
22. It is interesting to contrast representations of roads in Manambondro village with the
case described by Sharp (1993:30, 79) for the town of Ambanja in northwest Madagascar: Here
improvements to the national highway are resented by the region's indigenous inhabitants be-
cause they have led to increased immigration, a higher crime rate, and other urban ills.
23. In other parts of Madagascar, ritual practices and spaces have been objectified in simi-
lar ways. See, for example, Feeley-Harnik 1991 on Sakalava royal funerals and tombs, and Mid-
dleton 1997 on Karembola circumcision.
references cited
Althabe, Gerard
1969 Oppression et liberation dans I'imaginaire: Les communautes villageoises de la cote
orientale de Madagascar. Paris: Maspero.
Auslander, Mark
1993 "Open the Wombs!": The Symbolic Politics of Modern Ngoni Witchfinding. In Mod
ernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Jean Comaroff an
John L. Comaroff, eds. Pp. 167-192. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barthes, Roland
1970 Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Basso, Keith H.
1996 Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press.
Bloch, Maurice
1971 Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagas-
car. London: Seminar Press.
1993 Domain Specificity, Living Kinds, and Symbolism. In Cognitive Aspects of Religious
Symbolism. Pascal Boyer, ed. Pp. 111-120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Casey, Edward S.
1987 Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
1993 Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cole, Jennifer
1998 The Work of Memory in Madagascar. American Ethnologist 25(4):610-633.
Cole, Jennifer, and Karen Middleton
2001 Rethinking Ancestors and Colonial Power in Madagascar. Africa 71(1):1-37.
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
388 american ethnologist
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 389
Gupta, Akhil
1998 Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson
1997 Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era. In Culture, Power, Place: Ex-
plorations in Critical Anthropology. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds. Pp. 1-29. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hellot, F., ed.
1900 La pacification de Madagascar (operations d'octobre 1896 a mars 1899). Paris: Li-
brairie Militaire Chapelot.
Hirsch, Eric
1994 Between Mission and Market: Events and Images in a Melanesian Society. Man, n.s.,
29(3):689-711.
Hirsch, Eric, and Michael O'Hanlon, eds.
1995 The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Space and Place. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Jackson, Michael
1996 Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique. In
Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Michael Jack-
son, ed. Pp. 1-50. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jacob, Guy
1981 Sur les origines de I'insurrection du Sud-Est de Madagascar (novembre-decembre
1904). Omaly sy Anio 13-14:249-261.
Jarosz, Lucy
1994 Agents of Power, Landscapes of Fear: The Vampires and Heart Thieves of Madagas-
car. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12(4):421-436.
Kahn, Miriam
2000 Tahiti Intertwined: Ancestral Land, Tourist Postcard, and Nuclear Test Site. American
Anthropologist 102(1 ):7-26
Kaplan, Martha
1995 Neither Cargo nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Kaspin, Deborah
1993 Chewa Visions and Revisions of Power: Transformations of the Nyau Dance in Central
Malawi. In Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Jean
Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds. Pp. 34-57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Keesing, Roger M.
1992 Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Leguevel de Lacombe, B.-F.
1840 Voyage a Madagascar et aux lies Comores (1823 a 1830), vol. 2. Paris: Louis Deses-
sart.
Lovell, Nadia
1998 Wild Gods, Containing Wombs and Moving Pots: Emplacement and Transience in
Watchi Belonging. In Locality and Belonging. Nadia Lovell, ed. Pp. 53-77. London: Rout-
ledge.
Lyautey, Louis Hubert Gonsalve
1903 Dans le Sud de Madagascar: Penetration militaire, situation politique et economique,
1900-1902. Paris: Henri Charles-Lavauzelle.
1935 Lettres du Sud de Madagascar, 1900-1902. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin.
Malkki, Liisa
1992 National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National
Identity among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7(1 ):24- 44.
Middleton, Karen
1997 Circumcision, Death and Strangers. Journal of Religion in Africa 27(4):341-373.
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
390 american ethnologist
1999 Who Killed "Malagasy Cactus"? Science, Environment and Colonialism in Southern
Madagascar, 1924-1930. Journal of Southern African Studies 25(2):215-248.
Morphy, Howard
1993 Colonialism, History and the Construction of Place: The Politics of Landscape in
Northern Australia. In Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Barbara Bender, ed. Pp.
205-243. Oxford: Berg.
Morris, Rosalind C.
2000 In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Murray, Martin J.
1980 The Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina (1870-1940). Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Pels, Peter
1996 The Pidginization of Luguru Politics: Administrative Ethnography and the Paradoxes
of Indirect Rule. American Ethnologist 23(4):738-762.
1997 The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western
Governmentality. Annual Review of Anthropology 26:163-183.
Rabinow, Paul
1989 French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Rodman, Margaret C.
1992 Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality. American Anthropologist
94(3):640-656.
Rosaldo, Renato
1980 llongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Roseman, Sharon R.
1996 "How We Built the Road": The Politics of Memory in Rural Galicia. American Eth-
nologist 23(4):836-860.
Santos-Granero, Fernando
1998 Writing History into the Landscape: Space, Myth, and Ritual in Contemporary Ama-
zonia. American Ethnologist 25(2):128-148.
Sharp, Lesley
1993 The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits and Identity in a Madagascar Migrant
Town. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2001 Wayward Pastoral Ghosts and Regional Xenophobia in a Northern Madagascar
Town. Africa 71(1):38-81.
Steedly, Mary Margaret
1996 The Importance of Proper Names: Language and "National" Identity in Colonial Karo-
land. American Ethnologist 23(3):447-475.
Stoler, Ann Laura, and Frederick Cooper
1997 Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda. In Tensions of Em-
pire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds.
Pp. 1-56. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Taussig, Michael
1993 Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge.
Thomas, Nicholas
1992 The Inversion of Tradition. American Ethnologist 19(2):21 3-232.
Thomas, Philip
1995 Of Houses, Hearths and Granaries: Some Aspects of Gender among the Temanam-
bondro of Southeast Madagascar. Indonesia Circle 67:340-358.
1996 Place, Person and Ancestry among the Temanambondro of Southeast Madagascar.
Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics.
1997 The Water that Blesses, the River that Flows: Place and the Ritual Imagination among
the Temanambondro of Southeast Madagascar. In The Poetic Power of Place: Comparative
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
the river, the road, and the rural-urban divide 391
Perspectives on Austronesian Ideas of Locality. James J. Fox, ed. Pp. 21-42. Canberra: Re-
search School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University.
1998 Conspicuous Construction: Houses, Consumption and "Relocalization" in Manam-
bondro, Southeast Madagascar. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s.,
4(3):425-446.
Thornton, Robert
1995 The Colonial, the Imperial, and the Creation of the "European" in Southern Africa. In
Occidentalism: Images of the West. James G. Carrier, ed. Pp. 192-21 7. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Philip Thomas
Department of Anthropology
Eliot College
University of Kent
Canterbury, CT2 7NS
United Kingdom
p.thomas@ukc.ac. uk
This content downloaded from 103.37.49.215 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 04:56:05 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms