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. |
From inside the book
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... European capital, a very senior Foreign Service officer handed to a very junior subordinate an incoming dispatch from American Embassy Tananarive (now Antananarivo). The dispatch complained about our Foreign Service's habitual misuse of ...
... Europeans had rounded the Cape of Good Hope to defeat that system and link the Indian Ocean with the Eurafrican west. And even that distinction evolved slowly. Madagascar's insularity is more than a geographical platitude. A hundred ...
... European and UN development assistance. Strewn across the northern mouth of the Mozambique Channel, the four Comoro Islands have bridged that space for warfare, civilized trade, and piracy during a millennium. From Zanzibar or the ...
... European, American, and (a few) Malagasy archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and linguists have debated lustily over the importance of Asian sources (Alfred Grandidier and more recently Jean Poirier and Paul Ottino) versus ...
... Europeans, these so-called Karana (people of the Koran) represent the least assimilated ingredient in the great Malagasy melting pot. The Comoreans came through Mahajanga (Majunga) as small tradespeople, domestic servants and guardians ...
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 | |