Preface and Acknowkedgements

When I went to Madagascar, I took with me a lot of Dostoevsky: The Prince, The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground, and various collections (there was also some Gogol and Pynchon, but it was mostly Dostoevsky). I think this is one reason this book is so long. I didn’t really notice at the time, but much later, Dale Pesmen remarked to me that my portrait of Ratsizafy in chapter 9 bore a striking resemblance to Dostoevsky’s character studies. After some contemplation, I realized, yes, actually, what I’ve written here could be considered a kind of cross between an ethnography and a long Russian novel.

At the time I was writing, I just thought I was trying to write a dialogic ethnography. It had always irritated me in the 1980s and early ’90s that you saw so many monologues about why anthropologists should be more dialogic. “Why don’t they just shut up,” I’d ask, “and write a dialogic ethnography?” At the time, Bakhtin had just been rediscovered by the American academy. Dialogism was all the rage. I had read Rabelais and His World, and a host of books and essays by and about Bakhtin but for some reason I’d never actually read Bakhtin’s book about Dostoevsky, where he really lays down his pragmatic analysis of dialogic writing. Instead, I unconsciously cut back to the source.

The result is a book in large part about character. For one thing, it’s full of characters: both in the sense of eccentrics and oddballs, and also in the sense of protagonists of stories. This means it’s also about the edges between politics and history, places where the tacit horizons of everyday life are always being challenged and negotiated on a daily basis, and therefore, where new things can emerge. After all, stories about such anomalous characters are both the main way we define what we consider normal, and also a reservoir of possibilities during moments of change. But it’s also about character in the more conventional sense: what people are made of, their personal and moral qualities.

Of course there are many ways to be dialogic. Most ethnographies are at the very least in dialogue with other scholars in the discipline. Mine might be considered somewhat lacking in this regard. Certainly there is some of this, but I did not write as an intervention in any particular current debates, whether in anthropology, Malagasy studies, or anything else. The theory (except, arguably, at the end) is entirely idiosyncratic and follows my own concerns. Some thought this unwise. Here my thesis advisor, Marshall Sahlins, was quite understanding and supportive. “But of course,” he said, paraphrasing Thucydides. “You are writing a jewel for all times.” There was a bit of an irony, certainly, since he was in the middle of writing an essay making fun of Thucydides for saying this, but then, he also knew we were all still reading Thucydides 2500-odd years later, so it was hard to take it as anything but reassurance. At any rate I am certainly very glad I did not frame this book as an intervention in some current debate because had I done so, it would never have been published. As it was, it took several years to write, and about a decade to publish. In the intervening time, there have been some fascinating studies—Jennifer Cole’s on the Betsimisaraka that touches on related themes of memory and violence, Sandra Evers’ on slavery in southern Betsileo—that would have been quite exciting to bounce off of this one. But all that will have to wait. Instead I have simply added more recent references that I think the interested reader might wish to follow up and largely left it at that. It seemed more honest to leave the book as a dialogue with those with whom I was really in dialogue at the time I wrote it, rather than patching in occasional paragraphs pretending I had been in dialogue with someone else.

I did find myself a little disturbed, in the course of writing, with some of the imperatives of academic production. The standard, nowadays, is that a monograph should be both ethnographic and a work of theory, and at the same time, organized around a single major point or argument. I was continually being advised to reorganize the book in this way. Why don’t you broaden its appeal, colleagues told me, by making it a book about the crisis of the state in Africa? It should be a book about the weight of the past. It should be a book about slavery. The advice was nothing if not well-intended and made a great deal of sense considering the fact that most academic books sell copies largely when they are assigned in courses, but it always sat uneasily on me. It seemed somehow to do a kind of violence to the experience. It’s all a little reminiscent of arguments that, say, Balinese culture is “about” hierarchy or ritual or somesuch. Nonsense! A culture isn’t “about” anything. It’s about everything. People don’t live their lives to prove some academic’s point. The ambition of ethnography used to be—at least, I always thought it was—to describe or at least give access to a universe, a total way of life. While this might seem, in retrospect, to have been a bit overweening and simplistic, it seems at least more respectful than reducing the lives of one’s former friends to illustrations of a single theoretical argument. Obviously, the book is hardly lacking in theoretical arguments, but I like to think they arise in dialogue with my interlocutors in Madagascar. The only one that doesn’t, in fact, a theory about narrative I hatched while working in the archives in the capital, is there mainly to be shot down when I start listening to the stories people actually tell (though I do think it’s an interesting theory in itself.)

Let me turn to acknowledgments.

First of all, I must thank the editor, Rebecca Tolen, for being so patient with me, and for contributing so much to bringing this into being. Sometimes I think editors should be listed as co-authors. Instead, their names often do not appear anywhere in the book at all. Also Kristi Long who helped immeasurably in straightening the manuscript out.

Let me list some others, students, colleagues, and friends who have contributed in one way or another to its creation: Maureen Anderson, Nina Bhatt, Maurice Bloch, Richard Burger, Alain Caillé, Durba Chattaraj, Jennifer Cole, John Comaroff, Jean Comaroff, Jennifer Dragon, Sandra Evers, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Magnus Fiskesjö, Thomas Hansen, Laurie Hart, Joseph Hill, Jennifer Jackson, Ivan Karp, Pier Larson, Michael Lambek, Nhu Thi Le, Moon-Hee Lee, Lauren Leve, Enrique Mayer, Wyatt MacGaffey, Christina Moon, Dale Pesman, Ilona Raitsimring, Elie Rajaonarison, Jean-Aime Rakotoarisoa, Jacques Rakotonaivo, Curtis Renoe, Mieka Ritsema, Stuart Rockefeller, Marshall Sahlins, Ariane Schulz, Michael Silverstein, Raymond T. Smith, Terence Turner, David Watts, Hylton White, Zhen Zhang, everyone at the Arsivam-Pirenena, especially Nico, whom I miss enormously, Chantal and Patricia and Parson and all my other self-appointed research assistants, everyone mentioned in this book, especially of course the families of Armand and Miadana, but really everyone. The book itself is meant to stand as thanks, tribute, and testimonial: it was for you, to try to preserve something of the integrity of your perspectives, as I perceived it, that I was willing to fight so long to keep the book in its present form.