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
Results 1-5 of 86
... population, estimated and projected, 1900-2025 5.3 World Bank and IMF structural adjustment lending for Malagasy stabilization 5.4 Production in Madagascar, 1985-1992 5.5 Madagascar's external trade, 1980-1992 5.6 Madagascar's direction ...
... population settled there only quite recently from points in Africa, South Asia, and the Indonesian archipelago. Madagascar's interchange with the Indian Ocean littoral is being belatedly documented, for the island lay far from the core ...
... population of humans. In most cases, they evolved their own new forms adapted to the hospitable, temperate insular continent. Madagascar thus became a kind of sea-secured museum. Despite this separate evolution, new species also crossed ...
... population is a blend of migrant people from Southeast and South Asia with East Africans; subsequently, Arabs, Europeans, and others joined the mix. The actual place of contact of these constituent peoples—and the degree of ...
... population in Madagascar as early as a.D. 400 and no later than A.D. 900.16 Given the antiquity of the trade system linking the Red Sea and the Indian east, these Indonesian peoples probably came with the monsoons in outrigger canoes ...
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 | |