Epilogue

In purely formal terms, this is a rather unusual ethnography. Its style is at times almost novelistic; at others, it shifts into much more conventional modes of ethnographic writing. The same characters who appear in one part of the text as actors often reappear in others as narrators or analysts, providing (often critical) commentary about customs, local issues, and each other. When I began writing, I had not entirely worked out most of the theoretical ideas about politics and narrative that now appear in it, so I cannot really say that I wrote it the way I did because of them. But I did want to convey the sense I had of the people I knew in Betafo as both actors in history, and as themselves historians. According to the very broad set of definitions I did work out in the course of writing, to represent them in this way is also to represent them as political beings. It is, I have argued, in so far as we all act in, recount, interpret, and criticize our social worlds that we are all political beings of one sort or another.

Throughout the book, I have tried, whenever possible, to emphasize such areas of common ground. In fact, if there was one impulse—one might even say one moral imperative—that drove me from the very beginning, it was a desire to explode some of the sense of artificial distance that so many ethnographies create between author, audience, and the people who are being studied. I wanted the reader to be able to think of the inhabitants of Betafo as people they could at least imagine meeting and even, under the right set of circumstances, getting to know. If nothing else, I have tried at least in small ways to always emphasize how—cultural differences notwithstanding—we do inhabit the same world, and ultimately the same history and the same moral universe; or, if one wants to define history in a more culturally specific fashion, then at the very least, that we all could be sharing one.

Perhaps one way anthropologists might begin to undermine this sense of distance would be to look at what we’re doing as more akin to history—which just about every culture has some way of thinking about—than to what we are used to thinking of as science. I’m not saying this in order to weigh in to the sporadic debate in anthropology about whether the discipline should define itself as a science or a humanity. To me at least, it seems a pointless argument: after all, people who are mainly interested in, say, problems of nutrition or verb structure are obviously going to be relying on a different set of methods than people who are mainly interested in understanding shamanic performance; as long as we all happen to have ended up in the same departments, it seems only reasonable to allow that our discipline is a hodgepodge and leave it at that. But the debate does raise some interesting issues. Why exactly is it, for instance, that history is considered one of the humanities, and not a social science? Obviously there are historical reasons—there were people who considered themselves historians long before there were ones who considered themselves social scientists (or for that matter natural scientists). But if it has remained among the humanities, in the company of the study of literature, art, and philosophy and not that of sociology or political science, I suspect it is ultimately because of some sense that science deals with regularities—if not with “laws,” then at the very least with things that are to some degree predictable— and that history tends to focus on the very opposite, on the irregular and the unpredictable, on events that could no more be predicted, before they happened, than the production of a novel or a work of art.

For some, I will allow, this might seem a rather old-fashioned view of history. Certainly, not all modern historians feel their discipline should even be among the humanities; there are many proponents of a “science of history”— one which can make predictions. In ways the debate within history parallels the one in anthropology. Much of the literature about the nature of narrative which I made use of in the introduction to chapter 6, in fact, emerges from just such a debate (Rosaldo 1989:127–143 provides a useful summary), in which a set of historians and philosophers of history, having been told that no one had any reason to take them seriously as long as they were simply telling stories and not coming up with any generalizable laws, ended up formulating a defense of “narrative understanding” as an alternate, and perfectly legitimate, way of knowing. I am, as the reader might imagine, sympathetic to their position. In fact, I would take the argument much further. It seems to me that, at least in anthropology, it is this very concern with science, laws, and regularities that has been responsible for creating the sense of distance I have been trying so hard to efface; it is, paradoxically enough, the desire to seem objective that has been largely responsible for creating the impression that the people we study are some exotic, alien, ultimately unknowable Other.

Let me provide a few examples of what I mean by this.

European documents concerning Madagascar written before the French conquest are remarkably different in tone than those written afterward. I remember being quite struck by this while doing research in the Malagasy archives. It seemed as if in 1895, the whole character of the country changed. The Madagascar one reads about in nineteenth-century documents was a place crowded with individuals: politicians, princesses, humble rural pastors or wandering sorcerers, bandits, generals, Christian martyrs. Documents by missionaries, European agents, and travelers were all the same in this respect, even political dispatches tended to taken up with speculation about the motivations, affinities, and likely plans of government ministers or potential revolutionaries. The authors were full of all sorts of biases, and most of the portraits are pretty two-dimensional, but at least they were usually making a sincere effort to understand the motives of the people about whom they were writing, for the simple reason that they had to. After all, they were visitors in an independent country, and these were people with some power to affect their lives. Almost the moment Madagascar lost its independence, the individuals vanish. Documents from the colonial period consist either of vague, descriptive generalities, or (even more) of tedious accounts of administration, along with scientific dispatches and reports.

Margaret Weiner (1995) notes much the same transformation in comparing records from before the Dutch conquest of southern Bali in 1908 to those which came after it; after conquest, accounts of personalities and dramatic events are immediately replaced by bureaucratic “discussions of finance, agricultural production, construction, and public health. It was,” she writes, “as if once a region was brought under colonial domination, nothing happened there any longer The colonial state produced knowledge mainly in the form of statistics and regularities” (Weiner 1995:90).

One reason why individuals disappear from colonial documents is, clearly, because the authors were no longer obliged to take account of them; one of the first things a colonial regime tends to do is to create a political climate in which no single inhabitant of the country is in a position to do anything which could have much of an effect on them. But it was also because they conceived of what they were doing, their mode of rule, in very scientific terms. Hence the “statistics and regularities.” Colonial governments saw themselves as applying techniques of scientific administration, which could bring the country’s economy and society as much as possible under complete, predictable control, and in doing so establish the very parameters within which meaningful action was possible.

But—at least in Madagascar—there was another side to this story. It was also precisely at the moment when the country had been conquered, and these rational-bureaucratic techniques of administration were being put in place, that the new administrators began waxing poetic (in their unofficial writings) about something they called the “Malagasy soul.” This “Malagasy soul” soon became a stock theme of French writing on the island. It was represented as the sign of a profoundly alien mentality, full of quirky passions and dreamy fantasies, ultimately beyond the grasp of the understanding of a simple Westerner. As Antoine Bouillon (1981) points out, no one had ever talked this way when Madagascar was independent, and foreign visitors still had to deal with individual Malagasy actors on anything like equal terms.

This is a useful example, I think, because it’s so obvious what’s going on here. The “Malagasy soul”—in so far as it was anything more than projection— was a mere byproduct, a confused amalgam of everything that fell outside the extremely narrow parameters set by the authors’ own bureaucratic machinery or the rationalistic regimes which they now had the power to impose.

Modern anthropology, of course, took shape mainly within the British and French colonial empires as well. And it too considered itself a scientific enterprise.

This was the age of Structural Functionalism, and one of the main things that made Structural Functionalist anthropology scientific, in the eyes of its practitioners, was the fact that it was concerned primarily with “norms,” or regularities. What this meant in practice was that what ethnographers described, and theorists discussed, was almost exclusively those aspects of social life which were predictable, repetitive: the human life cycle, with its age grades and rites of passage, the domestic cycle, ritual cycles, yearly rounds . . . Even succession to political office was always treated this way. In so far as individuals and unique events appeared in ethnographies written at this time, they would usually take the form of case studies meant to illustrate more general processes. Here and there, there were efforts to try to find some way of talking about individual projects and intentions (names like Max Gluckman and Victor Turner come most immediately to mind) but it was with the underlying assumption, one could almost call it faith, that individual actors were ultimately irrelevant, that whatever their immediately intentions, they would somehow end up reproducing the same cyclic structure over and over again.

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