Madagascar: Conflicts Of Authority In The Great IslandThe world's fourth largest island, with a unique biological and physical endowment, Madagascar is home to an extraordinary insular civilization that has struggled for more than a century against external domination. In this sensitive introduction to the Indian Ocean's "great island," Philip Allen shows how family affinities and community loyalties at the foundation of Madagascar's culture have influenced Malagasy nationalism and forged islandwide traditions. These same principles have nonetheless engendered social cleavages and resistance to economic and political change. In chapters on modern Madagascar, Allen analyzes the inability of a series of regimes to maintain authority among a people deeply bound to rituals of communication with their spiritual environment. He demonstrates how the first Malagasy Republic became stigmatized by its lingering identification with French colonialism and how the nationalist revolution in 1972 soon hardened into autocratic radicalism. Allen explores the complex challenges facing Madagascar's resurgent democratic forces–including a need to conserve the island's irreplaceable biodiversity and to facilitate authentic participation in public affairs without offending ancestral customs and local precedents. Finally, he discusses efforts to end Madagascar's economic and political dependence and to improve living conditions for its tragically impoverished population. |
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... Chaigneau) attributing the fusions to a sojourn on the continent.17 The blending of continents occurred either on the island or in the Comoros, or in both places.18 Vérin and others thus posit two waves of arrivals between the fifth and ...
... Chaigneau, Madagascar, de la première république à l'orientation socialiste: Processus et conséquences d'une évolution politique (Thèse Illème cycle en sociologie politique, Univ. de Paris X, 1981), p. 67; see also Jean-Pierre Raison ...
... Chaigneau and other French scholars push the origins of settlement to earlier dates: Chaigneau, Première république, p. 2, η. 3; Jean Poirier, "Problèmes de la mise en place des couches ethniques et des couches culturelles à Madagascar ...
... Chaigneau, Première république, pp. 73-75; Nigel Heseltine, Madagascar (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 2-3. 44. Raison, Les hautes terres, p. 12. 45. See Kent, Early Kingdoms, ch. 1. 46. Ibid., esp. chs. 1, 2, 4. 47. See Deschamps, Les ...
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Contents
From Paternalism to Revolution | |
Revolution as Myth | |
Society in Modern Madagascar | |
Flight from Reality | |
Continuity as Revolution | |
Revolution and Continuity in International Relations | |
Notes | |
Selected Bibliography | |
Index | |