Character

“You should be careful when you go asking people about beads,” Chantal told me one day, early on in my researches. For weeks, I had been going to the market and buying beads, drawing colored pictures of each variety in the pocket-sized notebooks I always carried around, and then showing the pictures to anyone I thought might be able to tell me their names and purposes. “Because when you start talking about fanafody (medicine),” she said, “the first thing people are going to think is that you’re going to bewitch someone.”

“But there are good uses for medicine,” I insisted, since many others had told me that there were. Chantal, after all, was partly city-bred and a devout Catholic: she had almost become a nun. If anyone was going to be opposed to fanafody on principle, it was likely to be her.

“Maybe, yes,” she admitted, “but very little. The vast majority are evil.”

Even beads? I asked—since I had been under the impression that beads were almost universally benevolent—and she said yes, even beads.

I was dubious. A few days later, when Chantal and I were talking to an old man in a nearby village called Antanibe, I brought up the matter to him. I have been making this collection of beads, I explained (holding out a few) but I’m a little worried what people are likely to think.

Oh, there’s no need to worry about that, he told me. Beads are not used to harm anyone; they’re all just protection (fiarovana)—nothing anyone could conceivably object to. The man was a simple farmer, his manner was modest and unassuming, but Chantal was only twenty-five years old, and on such “Malagasy” topics at least, she could only to yield to the intrinsic authority of a rural elder. “Really?” she said meekly. “I hadn’t realized.” She never brought the matter up again.

Protection

I started with this story because it makes it clear that there were different frameworks by which one could assess another’s character. Chantal was worried that I might develop a bad reputation just by being associated with beads. According to Christian teaching, any such medicines were holdovers from heathen practices, fanompoana sampy. They are the very definition of darkness, ignorance, and evil. But she also knew very well that while all of her rural neighbors considered themselves Christians, and were familiar with this sort of rhetoric in sermons or Sunday-school lectures, they did not see them as in any way relevant to immediate practical concerns.

One might almost describe the result as a kind of split hegemony. To a certain degree, there was a “high culture” based in the church, which no one openly mocked, opposed, or contradicted. In plays and novels, sampy (“idols”), ody, and “heathen” practices were all represented as intrinsically evil. Witches were servants of Satan; they prayed to idols as a way of invoking demons. In my own experience, even those ordinary people who enjoyed such works as literature saw them as existing at a total remove from practical reality. Perhaps they could be imagined to express some ultimate moral truth, but no one thought real witches—ones who might really accost you if you stay out late at night—were anything like that. This was true even of the educated. When it came down to practical matters, or “Malagasy” forms of knowledge, even they deferred.

When it came to practical questions, everyone tended to fall back on what was generally referred to as the “Malagasy” perspective. This could be summarized quite simply. To use ody or other invisible means to harm others is witchcraft. Witchcraft in any form is absolutely wrong. It is wrong even if it is unintentional. But here is the problem. As Richard Andriamanjato points out (1957) Malagasy moral reasoning tends to set out from the assumption that, since one can never really be able to know the full ramifications of any action one might undertake, one must always act in the knowledge that one’s actions are almost certain to have some negative repercussions on others. Since the power of ody is so much greater than that of ordinary human action, this means that anyone employing such powers is in a special moral jeopardy: not only are they almost certain to harm others, they are almost certain to do so in very serious ways. It follows that the only way of using medicine that is entirely above suspicion is to use it to prevent others from carrying out even more harmful actions. This is what the elder was referring to when he talked about “protection.” Protection medicine intervened to prevent harm: whether it closed the jaws of crocodiles, forced enemies’ bullets to misfire, blunted the power of malicious witchcraft, or deflected hail from crops.

Thus, ethic of protection obviously paralleled the ethic of negative authority, the authority of elders themselves—which also held that the most legitimate way to act was to prevent others from acting in ways likely to damage others. Actually, one might well say both were exactly the same thing. Political authority was similar to medicine in that it enhanced one’s power; for that very reason, elders and those using medicines both had to take even more precautions than usual not to do anything for which others might justifiably blame them.

Actually, talk about medicine, speculation about who might have access to what sort of invisible power and what they might be inclined to do with that power, was one of the more common ways to discuss questions of personal morality. This made the weakness of Christian discourse all the more surprising. Once, when poking around bookstands in the capital, I happened on a Malagasy-language pamphlet about love medicine. On the cover, it promised to reveal all the secrets about a very famous kind of ody called Fanainga Lavitra, “summoning from afar,” often used to retrieve absconded lovers. I bought it and tried to read it when I got home, but after the first few pages put it aside: the author seemed more interested in showing off his knowledge of Egyptian and Babylonian numerology than discussing the ingredients of ody. A few days later one of Chantal’s many sisters shyly asked me if she could take a glance at it—shyly, because love medicine was considered morally dubious, though she did have a fairly legitimate cause: she had a two-year-old son whose father had recently run off to another city. The next day she returned the book with an expression of utter disgust. “It tells you to make prayers to Satan!” she said. Everyone in the room expressed shock and outrage (they all considered themselves devout Catholics). “That’s not Malagasy!” several said. The consensus was that this was obviously some urban intellectual’s nasty little fantasy about what magic should be like; the very fact he brought Satan into it was enough to show the man had no idea what he was talking about.

Hence Chantal’s deferential attitude, her willingness to accept that rural elders would really know about such “Malagasy” forms of know-how.

Chunks of Wooa as Tokens of Character

All this is not to say that church attitudes did not have their effects. While no one, even the most pious, was willing to see all forms of medicine as Satanic, the association with heathenism, with “serving the idols,” was enough to ensure that all were at least seen as morally problematic. This was true despite the fact that medicine was ubiquitous: anyone who went to a traditional curer, for example, had to do with the stuff in some capacity, and almost all significant figures in a community were assumed to at the very least have access to some powerful “Malagasy” knowledge. But at the same time, just about anyone could, if they saw fit, adopt an air of pious disdain or self-righteous condemnation of them for that very reason. It all contributed to a moral universe where rumors, stories, and judgments about medicine became one of the principle means of speculating about the troubles in society, as well as one of the main ways of assessing any man or woman’s character.

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