Negative Authority
The reader might by now be left with the impression that the inhabitants of rural Imerina are simply anti-authoritarian. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First of all, the attitude described in the last section, however pervasive, is only that: an attitude. It is rarely formulated explicitly. No one ever told me “It is wrong to tell others what to do,” or “We Malagasy do not believe in giving orders.” That would have been palpably absurd, since people do in fact give each other orders all the time—particularly women, who in households are always sending children off on errands, assigning each other tasks, assigning tasks to their menfolk. It is mainly in public contexts that orders are considered inappropriate.
Second of all, the authority of elders and ancestors is considered—especially in public contexts—absolutely legitimate, indeed, as the very foundation of social order. Elders and ancestors are seen as legitimate, however, largely because they are not seen as operating like kings (or for that matter, bossy women.) Rather than telling others what to do, they are seen as properly intervening in human affairs in order to tell others what not to do. This is not to say that this sort of “negative authority,” as I call it, is not fraught with ambivalences of its own.[1] To understand why that is, however, and how these structures of legitimate authority operate more generally, one has to begin by understanding the Merina kinship system.
Descent Groups
Merina descent groups (which Bloch calls demes[2]) are structured around tombs.[3] Tombs—old earthen tombs or newer, concrete ones—are everywhere in the Merina countryside; they are the chief way history becomes inscribed on the landscape. Every deme has its ancestral territory, and its one most ancient tomb, that of its “great ancestor” or razambe, and a number of others that are seen as having spun off from it. All are within that deme’s ancestral territory. Members include anyone who is descended from that ancestor who also chooses to be buried in one of the tombs—they need never have actually lived on the deme’s territory, though to qualify for access to a tomb, one should at least hold on to a rice field or two in the territory, a piece of the ancestral land.
There are all sorts of rules as to who can and cannot be buried in what tomb, but most people have a very wide range of choices: at the very least, between their mother’s and father’s tomb, and usually, between four or five different tombs. The kinship system is thus cognatic, marital residence is flexible, everyone knows other places they could live, other families they could belong to, other communities where they might be able to stake some kind of claim. Most young people spend at least some time in the city, or moving about between different relatives. As a result, becoming a significant rural elder or ancestor is a matter of pulling people together: in practice, this above all means acquiring enough land and property to prevent one’s children and grandchildren from drifting away. Hence, in rhetoric, tombs are often represented as fixed centers, stones of memory from which children tend to drift away in all directions. At the most abstract, ancestral authority is a matter of constraint, binding, holding people in.
Again, space does not allow a detailed discussion, but there is a basic contradiction between the interests of fathers and sons. Even in the pre-colonial nineteenth century the typical fairy-tale success story featured a young man who abandoned his home to seek his fortunes, acquired wealth, translated it into land and tombs, and then prevented his own children from doing as he did, so that they would maintain his memory on death. If a father managed to become a famous razambe, the chief ancestor of an important tomb, it almost necessarily meant obscurity for his children. Yet at the same time, most of the important men in a given community derived much of their authority from the memory of a father or grandfather who was a prominent elder—one who would eventually have to be forgotten if their own names were to endure.[4]
The contradiction is played out, in part, by the dual representation of ancestors: alternately, as benevolent figures who give “blessings” to the living, or as terrifying ghosts that haunt the neighborhood of tombs and murder children. It is perhaps most clearly played out in famadihana: rituals in which the bodies of the ancestors are removed from their tombs in order to be given new silk shrouds (called lambamena). These are the principal occasions in which ancestors are remembered, and relations between the living and the dead reworked and reestablished. The ancestors, it is said, would come in a dream to a descendant, complaining of being cold and demanding to be wrapped in new shrouds.
Irina, a woman from Betafo told me that, some sixty years before, in 1931, her ancestor Andrianambololona had appeared in a dream to one of his descendants to demand they hold a famadihana. This, she said, had long been his custom: he would appear to announce he and the other occupants of the tomb were cold, and needed to be taken out and wrapped in new silk mantles (lambamena). As always, his descendants quickly got together and organized the ritual, but, in their hurry perhaps, forgot to exhume the bodies of the three “soldiers” buried at the foot of the tomb. “The afternoon after they’d finished,” she said, “the town suddenly caught fire and burned to the ground.” The next morning he appeared again “and said: ‘if you don’t wrap us all, next time I’ll kill you outright . . .’ So they got the tombs ready again and rewrapped them.”
Augustin, the former President Fokontany, told me an even more extreme version. In his, there had already been a fire, which had destroyed half the houses on tampon-tanana, in the center of Betafo, when the survivors organized the ceremony. Unfortunately, since the tomb was constructed in a very archaic way, with the bodies at the bottom of a deep tunnel, they never noticed the body of Andrianambololona’s daughter.
Augustin: When they were carrying out the famadihana they completely forgot about his daughter. They didn’t notice her when they were wrapping the bodies. So afterwards the fire came again; for a second time the houses burned. Afterwards, the woman’s father appeared to Razafindrazaka and said, “Why didn’t you wrap my child?” Right afterwards he appeared to give a sign to the inhabitants.
This Razafindrazaka is dead now, but at the time, he was the real elder in charge of taking care of that ancestor. So that’s who he appeared to: “We’re still cold,” said Andrianambololona, “because my daughter hasn’t been wrapped with cloth.”
He had already murdered some of them, and now he said, “There will be more disasters to come in the future, if you don’t wrap us.”
As we shall see, the fire of 1931 is seen to mark a decisive moment in the history of Betafo. It was the disaster which put a final end to Betafo’s ancient glory. The point here is that it illustrates the degree to which ancestral memories are seen as an imposition on the living, an imposition backed by the threat of terrible punishment. Most ancestors, perhaps, were not quite so arbitrary and violent (the woman herself remarked that Andrianambololona was unusually “arrogant and cruel”),[5] but in so far as ancestors intervened in the lives of their descendants, it was almost always to constrain or attack them.
In the countryside, at least, ancestral memories were the organizing principles of all significant local groups, and the basis of all authority within them. As the embodiments of the moral unity of the little communities made up of their descendants, they were the ultimate guarantors of moral good—though even here, people were a bit uneasy about the means by which they did so: largely, by imposing rules that were always framed as “taboos” (fady), and mercilessly punishing transgressors. But in so far as they were simply trying to preserve their own, individual, memories, this violence became even more difficult to justify—and, as we will see, it became very hard to maintain a patina of sanctity around ancestors at all.
In fact, the symbolism of constraint is played out even at the moment of the ritual rewrapping of corpses. I’ve argued (Graeber 1995) that what famadihana really do is to covertly reverse the direction of this constraint and violence, so that it is turned against ancestors. The word famadihana in fact means, among other things, “reversal” or even “betrayal.” While in theory such rituals are held to memorialize the dead, what they actually do is allow them to be forgotten. Over the course of the rituals the dead are danced with, manhandled, tied extremely forcefully with ropes or ties, and thus reduced to dust inside the hard silk mantles, then ritually “locked” inside their tombs— again, a form of constraint continuous with a form of violence. The destruction of the bodies of the dead also allows their names to be forgotten, which most ancestors are, as soon as those who knew them in life have also died; ancestors fading from memory are eventually consolidated in the same cloth with ones whose memories are more likely to endure.
Parents ana Elaers
Fathers, unlike mothers, rarely gave orders to children. Sometimes people would tell me that fathers could “command” (mibaiko) their children while the latter were still economically dependent—that is, before they married and received land of their own—but the implication always was that this was a simple recognition of reality, a matter of compulsion and not legitimate authority. Once a son was independent, “a father could give orders if he liked, but that didn’t mean the son would have to follow them.” A community’s most respected figures, its elders or Ray amandReny,[6] were of an age where their children were likely to be independent. Their authority, instead, was seen as drawing on that of ancestors, and it took two quintessential forms: admonition (anatra), and cursing (ozona).
Even a man whose children were independent could publicly “admonish” them. In fact it was felt that any respectable elder should be able to intervene with appropriate admonitions when confronted with unruly or stubbornly disobedient youth. Proper anatra should be couched in a highly conventionalized, proverbial language akin to formal oratory (kabary), which was felt to be intrinsically persuasive in itself. The ability to use such language was considered one of the defining features of an elder (cf. Bloch 1971; 1975; 1985), but most people I knew insisted that almost no one really knew how to do it any more. Every time there was a fight or public quarrel between kin I would hear people sighing that if this were any proper sort of community, there would be elders capable of straightening such things out. In fact, this is perhaps the archetypal occasion for such admonition: when young people, driven by selfish and individualistic motives, end up quarreling or even coming to blows, and a figure of authority appears to remind them that it is the duty of kin to show respect for their ancestors by behaving decently. And, in fact, on those occasions when I did see anatra unambiguously employed, this was more or less the situation. The imagery, I found, tended to emphasize containment in space: unruly youth were inevitably likened to birds (vorona manan’elatra) who fly off in all directions, ignoring their duty to God and the ancestors, abandoning their parents and ancestral lands, or at least, forgetting their ancestral responsibilities. Now, as Maurice Bloch (1975) has pointed out, this is not a form of speech that anyone would consider arguing with. When an older person—especially a parent—breaks into this mode of discourse, everyone falls silent and looks a little bit embarrassed and chastened; they at least make a show of accommodation. If they didn’t, it would be taken as a sign that they were not completely sane.
[...]
Notes
- ↑ I have written on much of this in more detail in “Dancing with Corpses Recon- sidered: An Interpretation of Famadihana (in Arivonimamo, Madagascar),” Graeber 1995.
- ↑ In the nineteenth century these were often referred to as foko or firenena. In con- temporary Imerina—or at least, around Arivonimamo—there is no generic word for such groups at all. Bloch chose the term because Merina descent groups tend to be largely endogamous—or at least to have a strong ideology of endogamy—as well as being closely identified with their ancestral territories (tanindrazana). The term “deme” does not seem to sit well with most other anthropologists, but since no one has suggested a viable alterna- tive, it seems best not to clutter the literature with new terminology and to use the words that already exist.
Roughly a third of demes claim andriana status; the rest are considered hova, or “commoners.” Black people, who comprise roughly a third of the Merina population, are not organized into demes per se, though in most other respects they share the same social organization as the fotsy, or “whites.” - ↑ Most existing ethnography of Imerina—as opposed to historical or folkloric works—is about the relation of descent, land, and tombs (Condominas 1960, Cabanes 1967, Bloch 1971, Augustins 1973, Razafintsalama 1981, Vogel 1982). The later work of Bloch is about the only exception.
- ↑ In fact, few people become elders during their own lifetimes: if one asked who were the most notable elders of a given community, one would almost invariably receive a list of the names of people who had recently died. For more details, and particularly about the difference between men’s and women’s attitudes toward ancestors, see Graeber 1995.
- ↑ Ohatra an’ny miavona masiaka be izy. Some older men, however, denied the ancestor had anything to do with the fire of ’31.
- ↑ Literally “fathers and mothers,” it is also the word for “parents.” It is much less likely to be applied to an elderly woman than it is to an elderly man. In fact, it is only very rarely applied to a living person at all.