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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... cultural significance of Nosy Be and Sainte Marie. These are virtually uninhabited, forlorn flecks—the îles éparses—that France persisted in retaining for its own scientific, strategic, and meteorological purposes until 1990. The islets ...
... cultural homogeneity, a phenomenon which places the great island very much on the margin of Black Africa."13. Enigmas. of. Malagasy. Settlement. Lacking direct evidence of the actual lines of immigration into the great island, scholars ...
... cultural influence can be found in East Africa to confirm the theories of George Murdock, Ralph Linton, and Hubert Deschamps (supported by Raymond Kent and Pascal Chaigneau) attributing the fusions to a sojourn on the continent.17 The ...
... cultural matrix. They also intermarried with and converted indigenous Malagasy to Islam, although without shattering the traditional culture of the islanders.22 Within 500 years, Muslim Malagasy—the Antalaotse, or sea people (the ...
... cultural sources into a civilization, innovating as well as recycling, challenging anthropologists and art historians to the utmost. The rectangular shape of virtually all Malagasy dwellings and the practice of divination and number ...
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 | |