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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... institutions.10 By contrast, the Comoros extend Islamic and Swahili culture into the penumbra of southeastern Africa up to the portals of the Malagasy microcontinent. Two or Madagascar's own offshore islands have the size and carrying ...
... institutions have been thoroughly blended into a unique and variable culture on the island of Madagascar.31 Far from being predominantly African or Asian, says Paul Ottino, Madagascar represents an autonomous amalgam of its entire ...
... institutions , this " myth of the white king " ( as Kent calls it ) has proved inadequate to explain Malagasy history.45 By the mid - sixteenth century in at least three areas , the Malagasy had developed monarchical institutions of ...
... institutions from the early seventeenth century in their sorabe. Arriving a century earlier, probably from Islamic Africa, they diffused highly advanced technology into the island. Readily dominating the tompon'tany of the Matitana ...
... institutions, keeping cattle, and honoring the dead all penetrated Bara and lands farther south. Sakalava culture entered remote Tsimihety refuges and influenced even the hitherto unimpressive upland societies of central Imerina.52 ...
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 | |